Mallory Alexander created $18M in enterprise value by automating import workflows with Pallet

Summary

Mallory Alexander automated its most labor-intensive import workflows with Pallet, achieving the operational capacity to scale without expanding headcount.

About the company

Mallory Alexander is a global logistics provider headquartered in Memphis with more than 140 years of operating history. The company traces its roots to the cotton export business, where it operated as the largest cotton exporter in the country, storing and transporting cotton to ports across North America. Today it delivers services across freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing, domestic transportation, and managed logistics.

Paul Svindland joined Mallory Alexander as CEO to modernize the business and drive aggressive growth. He brings deep experience leading transportation and logistics organizations at scale. Under his leadership, Mallory Alexander is executing a strategy to grow from $250M to $1B through a combination of organic expansion and acquisitions, with a core thesis that the mid-market logistics segment is underserved and positioned for significant value creation.

Challenges

Mallory Alexander's growth plan required scaling from $250M to $1B through acquisitions and organic expansion. Every shipment required processing documents including commercial invoices, letters of credit, and arrival notices. Each operation required manual processing and careful validation. As volume grew, these operations became expensive bottlenecks.

The regulatory dimension made the stakes higher. Importer security filings and letters of credit are bank and government mandated. Accuracy was a compliance requirement, not an internal benchmark. “Letters of credit have to be perfect,” Paul said. “99.5% isn’t good enough. It’s got to be a 100% perfect.”

Letters of credit have to be perfect. 99.5% isn’t good enough. It’s got to be a 100% perfect.

Paul SvindlandCEO

Scaling volume historically meant increasing operational costs proportionately. Mallory Alexander needed a vendor that could complete all these workflows accurately, and decouple volume from operational costs through automation.

Solution

Paul stepped into the role aware that Mallory Alexander already had an AI initiative in progress with another vendor. He paused that effort, assessed the market, and made an independent decision. Ultimately, he chose Pallet for its deep expertise in freight forwarding and its strong capability to integrate with CargoWise.

The initial deployment focused on three core import workflows: importer security filings, letters of credit, and arrival notices. These were the most labor-intensive and redundant workflows in the import operation. Pallet's agents processed and validated documents across thousands of shipments, removing the manual work that had previously consumed operator time and actually reduced the error rate across every workflow.

The Pallet platform also established the foundation for extending AI into additional workflows as the business grew.

Impact

Within months, Mallory Alexander's import operation looked fundamentally different. Operators were handling three times more files per person, and import filings had reached 100% accuracy, meeting the compliance standards that had previously required significant manual oversight to maintain.

The productivity gains flowed directly into the enterprise value of Mallory Alexander.

Pallet created $18 million of enterprise value.

Paul SvindlandCEO

The automation opportunities extend beyond import operations. Mallory Alexander is already extending Pallet’s platform into accounts payable and receivable.

The broader company ambition is to quadruple revenue over the next 5 years. With Pallet, Mallory Alexander has built the foundation for efficient scaling that decouples revenue growth and operational costs.