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In this episode of Supply Chain Connections, Brian Glick sits down with Margie Shapiro, CEO of Shapiro, a family-owned customs brokerage and freight forwarder founded in 1915, to talk about what it takes to lead a century-old company through constant change. From building a remote culture to navigating one of the most turbulent tariff environments in recent memory, Margie brings a grounded, people-first perspective to the challenges facing the industry today.
Key topics discussed include:
- How Shapiro maintained its culture through the shift to fully remote work
- Why Margie sees AI as a tool for elevating people, not replacing them
- The unresolved compliance questions customs brokers are still working through around AI tools
- What it took to finally replace a legacy platform, and what she'd tell other leaders holding on too long
- How the pace of tariff change is affecting the people doing day-to-day compliance work
- What customers really need from their logistics partners right now
Margie Shapiro is the CEO of Shapiro, a family-owned global logistics company specializing in international freight forwarding, customs brokerage, and compliance consulting. She has spent her career helping businesses navigate the complexities of international trade and has led the company through significant modernization while keeping its relationship-first culture intact.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Brian Glick: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. Today we're gonna talk to Margie Shapiro. Margie is the leader at a company that shares her name, Shapiro, and while normally I try to come up with my own creative introduction for everybody, for the first time ever, I'm just gonna read the description on the website, because I think the culture of Shapiro comes out really wonderfully in her introduction on their own website.
[00:00:34] So Margie is the quirky queen bee. She loves to travel, foreign films, loves to laugh, and loves to list her lists of lists. While no one can quite keep up with her, she finds a way to help us and inspire us with her warm intelligence and boundless energies. So we're gonna talk a lot about culture today.
[00:00:53] We're gonna talk about customs stuff and its impact on people's mental health and how all of that comes together. So I really hope you enjoy the episode.
[00:01:09] Margie, welcome to the show
[00:01:10] Margie Shapiro: Thanks for having me
[00:01:12] Brian Glick: So let's dive right in. There's a couple of canned answers to this question. I think I know which one you're gonna use, but how did you get into this industry?
[00:01:20] Margie Shapiro: I'm pretty sure I didn't consciously choose it, but it was always part of my life. My grandfather started the business in 1915, and my dad got involved when he was, I guess, around twenty.
[00:01:33] So it's, it's just been part and parcel of our family. I grew up hearing conversations around the dinner table about customs and ships and things that fell off the ship and airplanes and customers, and actually, one activity back in the day used to be putting canceled checks in order, so it's just part of my blood.
[00:01:52] But then I tried to resist. I went into study marketing in college, and I went into advertising for a little bit, and my father lured me back in, so I became the branch manager of our new Philadelphia operation. So I worked on the operations side. I got my license pretty quickly. I worked closely with entries, with compliance, and with the customers.
[00:02:14] And I guess despite my quest to stay out of the business, it pulled me, and there's something really satisfying about solving the puzzles, and international trade is just one big puzzle where the rules change every day and are really changing every day now. The more I learn, the more I realize that the industry isn't just about moving freight.
[00:02:34] It's helping businesses grow, helping products reach people, helping companies navigate this ridiculously complicated regulatory world. So I fell in love with the challenge, never really looked back, and here we are.
[00:02:47] Brian Glick: So you - I'm sure you've had opportunities to step away if you really wanted to. Like, in that kind of vein of those, that kind of constant challenge, is, is it kind of that stimulation that you think drives you that sort of gets you going, the like, every day it's broken?
[00:03:05] I always say for me it's every day the business is broken all over again, and you have to go fix it, and that I couldn't do it otherwise. Is it kind of that same, same energy for you?
[00:03:14] Margie Shapiro: I think it's two things. I think it's that I love making order out of chaos, but I also love the people. You know, global trade connects every culture and every country and every industry, so I could be talking to anybody under the sun.
[00:03:27] Every day is so different. But just to navigate the new tariffs and to help our employees try to figure out problems, to come up for the solutions with our customers, that is so fulfilling for me. Yeah, and now you add the changes in technology and the geopolitical changes, it keeps you on your toes, it keeps you challenged, and it keeps you engaged.
[00:03:47] Brian Glick: So one of the generic pieces of advice that I hear all the time is that you shouldn't be too in the weeds as an executive, but it sounds like you love the weeds. How do you balance being a boss, an owner, and also doing the fun part?
[00:04:04] Margie Shapiro: That's a really good question. I do love being in the weeds, but I also so appreciate I work with the smartest and the best people in the industry, so I love being challenged by them.
[00:04:14] And I love when they say to me, We got it, Margie. We got it. That's fine. It's the kinda culture that we've established where it is all about collaborating together and all of us getting our hands dirty, and I think that's why we've been successful. With all of these challenges that we've experienced over these decades, and we've experienced a lot of them, the reason we've excelled is that we're just all in it together, all trusting one another.
[00:04:39] Brian Glick: How much of that culture is conscious, and how much of it evolves on its own? Like, is culture a thing you decide on and then build, or is it a thing that happens? How do you approach it?
[00:04:51] Margie Shapiro: It is so important to me. I'm... It's just, like, I want people to feel good. I want people to feel trusted. And it became particularly relevant, I guess, when COVID hit, and we had to figure out how we were gonna operate.
[00:05:07] And we went to work remotely, and that could've been a challenge to our culture, but it wasn't. We've come up with solutions of staying connected and ensuring that we continue to have fun together and support one another, but also have life outside of work. So now we are fully remote. We have employees all over the country, and I wanna continue to create that environment where people can do that meaningful work and continue to learn and continue to have fun together and continue to support one another.
[00:05:38] Brian Glick: Besides PDFs getting emailed instead of, uh, throwing paper across the desk, kind of what's something specific that you had to do, like, to get through that transition with the culture intact?
[00:05:49] Margie Shapiro: They call me the queen bee. I can't explain that. But there's a beehive, this group that comes up with things just to keep us together.
[00:05:56] So we have book groups, and we have the team channel play. We just try to deliberately engage with one another. We did wine tastings during COVID time... just to make sure that we just all had fun, and we remembered each other and stayed connected.
[00:06:10] Brian Glick: And there's a lot of people kind of scared out there with all this new technology, and it's, you know, we're going through yet another round of a lot of change.
[00:06:18] You and I both saw typewriters come off of people's desks and people saying, "Oh, that's gonna be the end of me," right? Like - Right ... how am I gonna survive in this business without a typewriter? How are you managing your team through kind of embracing some of these new technologies and... Or how do you feel about it?
[00:06:36] Margie Shapiro: I happen to think we're entering one of the most exciting periods our industry has ever seen, and we've seen a lot. I know that people hear AI and assume it's gonna replace people. I don't see it that way. I think AI's gonna eliminate that repetitive work so that our staff can spend more time thinking and advising and solving what really matters, the complex problems.
[00:06:57] And there are complex problems that algorithms can't answer yet. Trade regulations, as you know, are becoming more complicated. Last week, a whole bunch of stuff was released that suggests that's not gonna change. So our importers and exporters, they need partners who understand compliance and risk and technology and strategy.
[00:07:16] So to be able to move away from processing the repetitive work is helpful so that we can focus on what really matters. I'm also excited about the connectivity systems. Ones operated independently are finally starting to talk to each other. We always had that dream, but that will create visibility and transparency that just didn't exist before.
[00:07:35] Very interesting and fun times ahead.
[00:07:37] Brian Glick: What are your customers asking for? Like, what's top of mind for them?
[00:07:40] Margie Shapiro: I think relationships. We target customers, like, my sales team jokes with me about this, but I say, "Go find customers that share our values." It's really all about relationships. So I think customers want visibility, they want analytics, but they wanna be heard.
[00:07:56] So it's a question of how we achieve that with a balance. So no matter what happens or how we evolve with technology, we're never gonna lose that relationship component. That's who we are. That's our core.
[00:08:08] Brian Glick: What's the most fun for you right now?
[00:08:10] Margie Shapiro: Hmm. I love the variety. I love being able to, when a new challenge comes out from the government trying to figure out, first of all, understand what they're saying
[00:08:21] Brian Glick: Think you must be very excited right now.
[00:08:23] Margie Shapiro: Oh my God, am I excited. But we put the material together. We try to gauge from our customers what they want. We try to turn it into layman's terms so that it's not overly complicated or corporate. And then we try to, to build the platform to
[00:08:36] make it so that it's easy to understand, and we are there to answer the questions, 'cause there's always questions. Customs can make things very, very complicated, and we're here to kind of unravel what they're trying to say.
[00:08:49] Brian Glick: So one of the things I remember from working inside a brokerage was, you know, you have to speak kind of several languages at once, right?
[00:08:58] 'Cause you're, you know, the direct day-to-day contact has this very mechanical kind of, "Okay, we need to get the HS code straight," or, "We have to get the duty rates straight," and what have you. And then there's sort of this other relationship you have with your customer, which is, you know, the import manager has to explain to the CFO what's going on or why, or they're mad about something that you can't do anything about.
[00:09:21] Like, do you guys think about how to talk to the customers at those different levels, or is that all day, every day? I'm almost, I feel like I'm trying to explain the, just the water we live in, but is that something that's been harder lately? And it's obviously I, I got out of this before a lot of this new change, but, like, are you able to distill this down simply, but still get it to those right audiences?
[00:09:47] Margie Shapiro: I think my answer's gonna be, I think maybe we're approaching it a little bit differently. We're trying to look at communications more proactively so that when we see something come out, we wanna anticipate what the customer's questions are gonna be, and then we have the answers almost canned. So it's helpful that there's something that you can refer to that really spells out what's going on.
[00:10:09] So the questions are fewer, but we become more available. We are always available to answer those questions. We also are really focused on proactively conducting webinars, and again, in anticipation of those questions, but there's a Q&A at the end of it where we're very engaging. We collect those questions, we purpose those questions with the material back to the customers.
[00:10:35] We post those questions on our website. We try to keep our website very current and very detailed and also very fun. I guess so it's more of a continual dialogue than it is getting a call saying, "Where's my freight?"
[00:10:49] Brian Glick: Where would you want to take - if there was a little bit less of this noise, let's say.
[00:10:54] Margie Shapiro: Yeah.
[00:10:54] Brian Glick: Where's the real opportunities for them? Like, what would you be doing if we weren't changing the tariffs every twenty-four hours?
[00:11:01] Margie Shapiro: I think I would be more involved in just going out to the importing/exporting community and trying to explain to them how there are companies out there that really wanna partner with them.
[00:11:13] We are a company that's focused mostly on the mid-sized importer and exporter side that I feel like over time has not gotten the attention that they should because of all the consolidation. And there's so much opportunity for these companies, and there's so much nuance in what's going on in the government right now that I think they could benefit from being heard, and the collaboration on how we can help improve their supply chain.
[00:11:38] Brian Glick: What do you think the role is in getting those things heard of, like, the brokers associations and, like, the apparel and footwear associations and, like, all of these different groups that we participate in? Are they helpful? Are they less able to be helpful with the, you know, the way that things are now?
[00:11:57] Are they more helpful? Just I'm curious 'cause I love all the people there, but...
[00:12:02] Margie Shapiro: I would say that the associations with whom we are engaged are helpful, especially when it comes to all of these releases, these new regulatory orders. They help to outline what's going on. There's a lot of regurgitation of what we get from customers' messages, but it's restated in a little different way.
[00:12:22] And they also serve as they're available to lobby the government if something doesn't make sense. As an example, I just approached them, and I hope that they will come through with this, but when you talk about Chapter 111, the brokerage regulations, and you talk about AI, the question is, are we protecting our customers' confidential information by using Claude?
[00:12:44] Is there any model of Claude or any subscription of Claude that is in compliance, and is there any that's not? I don't think that they've addressed that yet. Like, I do think it begs a lot of questions with AI and the regula- you know, what's appropriate.
[00:12:59] Brian Glick: It's something interesting as a tech company, especially coming out of the brokerage side, because I can go to two different customers and hear 180-degree different interpretations, mainly to serve whatever purpose the person who I'm talking to usually wants to serve with them.
[00:13:15] But you're right, there isn't a very clear picture there of like, "Oh, well, if I'm on a corporate license, does that mean I'm okay? Or, you know, do I need every importer to sign off that, you know, they're using the tool, or can I not use it at all?" Right? So like- Right ... there's, you know, and that doesn't even get into whether it's doing customs business or not, which is a whole nother can of worms, so with tech.
[00:13:35] Margie Shapiro: Actually- Yeah ... there is a ruling out there about the customs business line in the sand. Yeah. But that is nothing- Oh ... about-
[00:13:42] Brian Glick: I read every word of that one- Yeah ... and I'm still not sure. But that's-
[00:13:45] Margie Shapiro: Well, yeah.
[00:13:47] Brian Glick: So on the tech side, you got a bunch of tech people who listen to this. You got me here, and I'm one of your vendors.
[00:13:54] What do you wish the tech companies would do better to help you?
[00:13:58] Margie Shapiro: Oh, wow
[00:13:59] Brian Glick: Now's your chance
[00:14:01] Margie Shapiro: I know, I know. Maybe stay current with, like, as an example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has changed their regulations. Just to be proactive with solutions before being presented with the puzzle.
[00:14:16] Brian Glick: So-
[00:14:18] Margie Shapiro: That would be one
[00:14:18] Brian Glick: you shouldn't have to ask is, I guess, is the-
[00:14:21] Margie Shapiro: I would like them to be ahead of it. I also think that there is a tendency, and I'll speak just tech in general, that sometimes people think everybody speaks the same language, and I do feel like the same, in the vein of how you're suggesting that we try to, to drill down for our customers and translate what customs is saying, it'd be great if tech people understood that everybody doesn't speak tech
[00:14:43] Brian Glick: I'd say, uh, those of us who do both, I can fill a room with acronyms faster than maybe anyone in the world.
[00:14:49] Margie Shapiro: Right.
[00:14:49] Brian Glick: You put an INCOTERM next to an XML tag, and all hell breaks loose, so. No, that's really insightful, so. You guys have gone on kind of a tech journey.
[00:15:02] Margie Shapiro: Oh, have we?
[00:15:02] Brian Glick: What have you learned over the last, you know, uh, kind of the several generations of tech that you've had through your career?
[00:15:09] Margie Shapiro: We had a system, we'll call it a platform.
[00:15:12] We loved it. It was built in, I think in 2000, and it served us really, really well until Liberation Day. And I think despite the fact that we were trying to get off of that system prior to Liberation Day, so I think we recognized that loving something isn't always the reason to keep it, making that decision to modernize was tremendous.
[00:15:35] It required an incredible amount of trust and effort from the team and from our customers, and we survived it. Not only survived it, we came out stronger as a result of it. So it was a big lesson. Tech moves very quickly. It moved so less quickly back in the day. And I think that I will take the blinders were on, and we, I had to look up a little bit and say, "Wait a minute, there's tools out there that could serve our customers, our employees, and our whole product a lot better."
[00:16:04] Brian Glick: I talked to our forwarding customers about every customer that they visit tells them how unique their supply chain is, and at the end of the day, they usually are putting boxes on boats, and the boats move across the ocean- and then it gets delivered to a warehouse, and it's, the details are sort of really, in the grand scheme of things, it's 1%.
[00:16:24] Do you think it was kind of a similar thing, where you overestimated how much of it you had to do yourself?
[00:16:31] Margie Shapiro: No I think it was pride, and I think that when we built it back in 2000, I mean, it had bells and whistles that nobody ever thought of, and I think we lost sight of what everyone else was thinking or how we could do things a lot easier.
[00:16:46] And it was a very expensive lesson, but I regret the pain and the suffering. I mean, this was through COVID, and then we finally launched right when, uh, Liberation Day struck. So there's a lot of healing as a result of this. It was a big lesson that I will never revisit.
[00:17:02] Brian Glick: Well, sorry for making you revisit it then.
[00:17:05] Margie Shapiro: No, I mean, you know, and it was lesson learned. Yeah,
[00:17:07] Brian Glick: yeah.
[00:17:07] Margie Shapiro: I can laugh about it now.
[00:17:08] Brian Glick: You know, there is a thing there that we see all the time, right, which is... I don't know that it's always that our customers, it's that, that they don't want their baby called ugly so much as, like, there's a real sunk cost fallacy sometimes.
[00:17:22] Margie Shapiro: Absolutely.
[00:17:22] Brian Glick: In, like, you know, we've put so much into this. If we just put a little bit more into it, it'll be right where we need it, and then it's always like, one step out of reach.
[00:17:31] Margie Shapiro: Yeah. All it took was that functionality of the stacking tariffs where it said, "Okay, you win. You win. We're moving. We're moving."
[00:17:38] Brian Glick: Sometimes the future is, uh, comes up slowly, and sometimes it walks up and slaps you in the face, right?
[00:17:42] Margie Shapiro: There you go.
[00:17:44] Brian Glick: So what are you guys investing in now? What's exciting you on your customers' behalf?
[00:17:49] Margie Shapiro: The next generation is what's exciting me right now. I'm just really thrilled about the people that are, are joining the company that...
[00:17:57] You know, as I said, we're fully remote, so we now have people available to join the company from all over the country. So they're asking different questions, and they're challenging those long-held assumptions like those automation systems. So I'm excited by them. I also have a lot of boomerangs, employees that leave and come back.
[00:18:13] I mean, like, a lot of boomerangs, maybe 25 to 30 boomerangs. So it's exciting what they've learned and they're bringing back home. So I don't know. That's really exciting to me. I'm excited this little family-owned company that's 111 years old can still reinvent itself.
[00:18:30] Brian Glick: If there's one metric of, of how good is a culture, it's how many boomerangs you have, right?
[00:18:34] Margie Shapiro: Yeah.
[00:18:35] Brian Glick: So.
[00:18:35] Margie Shapiro: I'm so fortunate. I work with the best people in the industry.
[00:18:38] Brian Glick: That's wonderful to hear. Give me one prediction about something that you think is gonna be different in a year.
[00:18:45] Margie Shapiro: I think that the whole tariff regime is going to get particularly, I wanna use the word ugly. It's just gonna be different.
[00:18:54] We've gone through a lot of iterations of IEPA Section 122. Now this Section 301 is gonna be directed at 60 countries. It's going to be a very challenging year for importers.
[00:19:07] Brian Glick: What can they do to be a better customer to you?
[00:19:10] Margie Shapiro: Pay attention, and we will be as over-communicative as we possibly can, and as timely as we possibly can with correct information, with a lot of webinars.
[00:19:20] But pay attention and take it seriously, 'cause I do feel like this... It's an environment of enforcement, and it's gonna be an environment of a lot of complicated regulations.
[00:19:29] Brian Glick: I would imagine that there's quite a few people out there in your customer base who just, at some point, they just get exhausted, right?
[00:19:37] And they say, "Whatever happens will happen. I can't deal with this today," kind of vibe. Is that-
[00:19:42] Margie Shapiro: Yeah, I'm surprised that as many customers stayed around during, you know, the reciprocal tariff era where those tariff rates were so high. I mean, I just... I'm surprised that they hung around. I don't know. It's really getting challenging to make sure you do things correctly.
[00:19:56] Brian Glick: I kind of get the impression, when I think about the, like, the actual humans at the importer, right?
[00:20:01] Margie Shapiro: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:02] Brian Glick: That there's kind of two different people who are affected in different ways. Like there's... If the tariff was going from 3% to 3.1% to 3% every day, it changed. Right. There's a group of people where the number doesn't matter, and then there's another group of people where it goes from 3% to 63%, and it matters a lot, right?
[00:20:21] Even if it only ha- Like, I'm guessing at, like, the desk level, at the day to day, like, the people who are getting ground down, it's the quantity of change, not the size of the change. Is that a thing? Like...
[00:20:34] Margie Shapiro: I think it's the quantity and the pace.
[00:20:37] Brian Glick: Yeah.
[00:20:38] Margie Shapiro: The pace was a killer. Now, because of 301, it has to be a more timed pace because you need approval.
[00:20:45] But with the reciprocal tariffs turned on with the stacking and the rules and the degree of, of tariffs, that was brutal. I don't know that it'll be that brutal because there is that time that you can at least plan a little bit. But even now and from a supply chain standpoint, you're seeing front loading to try to beat the Section 301 tariffs.
[00:21:05] Brian Glick: Are you sending your employees to courses on how to become therapists yet?
[00:21:11] Margie Shapiro: Or- I, I plan on that role too ... 'cause I always felt that was a big part of the job.
[00:21:14] Margie Shapiro: That's what that, the, the wine tasting, uh, online wine tasting is all about.
[00:21:18] Brian Glick: That's a reasonable way to adjust to the regulatory environment.
[00:21:21] Margie Shapiro: There you go.
[00:21:23] Brian Glick: Well, Margie, it's been so great chatting, and I really appreciate you, uh, coming on. I'm gonna ask you one last question just if you're talking to someone who's starting a company today, what advice around culture or around, you know, kind of how to think about building a team is this ... kind of rule number one for you?
[00:21:46] Margie Shapiro: I would say go for spirit. Attitude is everything. Attitude and curiosity and commitment and quirk. Embrace the quirk. We all need to have fun, but to me, attitude is number one. Realness is, I guess, number two.
[00:22:03] Brian Glick: Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for being on. I... It was a pleasure chatting as always.
[00:22:08] Margie Shapiro: It was great chatting with you too, Brian.
[00:22:10] Thanks for convincing me.
[00:22:15] Brian Glick: Thanks so much to Margie for that chat. You know, it's great to me when you can talk to a leader who really lives the culture that they're trying to bring, and you can really see the sincerity in everything Margie had to say. On the Chain.io front, just a couple of quick updates. Really encourage everyone to take a look at what we're doing at checks.chain.io, which is our new product that is really helping a lot of our customers understand how to take complex SOPs and really difficult compliance and customer-specific rules and tie those back to their TMS in a way that not just reduces labor, but especially improves the customer satisfaction by really keeping a coach next to your employees to help them improve their quality and really meet your brand promise to the customers.
[00:23:10] So check that out at checks.chain.io. And as always, I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io, and I will speak with you next time.