GEORGETOWN — It took nearly six months, but Reliable Transportation Solutions is fully operational in their sleak new Georgetown office.
RTS celebrated the opening of their new location at 642 East State St. in Georgetown with a ceremony hosted by the Brown County Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Sept. 14.
“The idea came because we were just packed,” RTS President Lucas Brown said about deciding to change locations. “I had first, second, and third shift all working out of the same desk at the office. They were rotating through. We wanted to expand. We’re not who we want to be yet, and the only way to do that is to look for some space.”
Brown said that they considered adding on to their old location on Mt. Orab Pike but it proved to be too cost prohibitave. After considering some other sites temporarily, Brown heard of an offer from Brown County Commissioner Tony Applegate, who owns the property at 642 East State St.
(Tony) was a big part of us coming here,” Brown said. “He gave us a very favorable lease and one of the things in the process was “stay in Brown County.” It was a good thing, he was a big part of us staying here. We were looking at some other spots temporarily because our long term goal is to establish headquarters somewhere. We were out of room and we needed some seats for (future employees).”
The Georgetown office isn’t the only RTS location expanding. Brown confirmed that RTS’ Cincinnati office is expanding over the next two years, and will eventually have 41 employees to Georgetown’s 43 employees.
For Brown’s growing third-party logistics business, the move to a new, bigger, and more technologically equipped location was necessary for his company.
“We’re in growth mode, we’re hiring,” Brown said. “Our whole company believes that success breeds success. So it’s the hard work of the individuals now that create opportunities for people that aren’t here yet. Those people, when they’re hired and they come in and they make the company more successful as a whole, then it creates opportunities for people that are already here.
“By hiring and getting more and more successful employees and becoming a more successful company, that creates additional opportunities through tech warehousing, the asset side of things that were doing. We want a good environment, a good culture, that can be good for our people to grow and develop professionally.”
One of the areas that Brown hopes RTS can grow in the next 12 months is in in-house software development. Brown said that he and his business partner Ben Bird have spoken with Northern Kentucky University’s information technology department, with Brown stating that NKU graduates supply 80 percent of the IT talent in the tri-state region.
“I’m not very techy but apparently NKU in this region is an absolute hotbed for good IT development, software, and software developers,” Brown said, adding his younger brother was in the program. “They have a very neat virtual co-op where you can do some one-off projects with them, the students will develop it and do the work. What we hope to do out of that is we can give them some of these one-offs and test them but we also want to build a relationship with them.
“We’re hoping to open some doors there to help draw some of that talent. We want to draw some talent from them because we want to bring it 100 percent in house. Hopefully next year we have a full time developer on staff.”
RTS has also been working on business intelligence software that can help RTS’ customers see even more data from the supply chain of how their product is made, delivered, and used.
“One of our biggest focuses of our technology is giving our customers good, strong, accurate data and allow them to take that data and make their business decisions based on it,” Brown said. “As a supply-chain partner, that’s our job, to manage all that. When we’re touching all these different pieces of their supply chain, we can record and document and suck all that data up and display it.”
