Premier Pallets is a pallet brokerage business headquartered in Riverview, Florida. It was founded by Michele Shaw in 1993. The company was acquired in 2023 by Canadian Wood Products, a subsidiary of McGill St. Laurent, based out of Montreal. A member of both the NWPCA and WPA, the company works with recyclers and new pallet manufacturers throughout the United States.
Premier Pallet has a staff of 10 plus three remote sales personnel throughout the U.S. Scott Shaw joined the company in 1994 and currently is chief operating officer.
Pallet Enterprise: What is the best piece of business advice that you have ever received?
Shaw: Do what you say you’re going to do. If you tell a customer or vendor you’ll get back to them, actually following through establishes your credibility even if it’s bad news. I stress that advice to all of our staff so that we can be counted on by our customers and vendors.
Pallet Enterprise: Have you recently started pursuing any new markets/product lines?
Shaw: Although we have customers spread throughout the U.S., we’ve been primarily active in the Southeast. We added a sales force in Texas and are expanding out West to California and up to Washington state.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one thing you do at your company that is different from other pallet companies?
Shaw: We were one of the first pallet companies to have a website back in 1995 and have always invested in technology. We’re able to provide our customers substantive and meaningful data, and we started using our first ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform back in 2001. We’ve always leveraged technology to help us better serve our customers and vendors.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one of the hardest business decisions you have ever made?
Shaw: During COVID we made the decision to support our customers no matter what to make sure none ran out of pallets. We’re proud to say that not one of our customers ever ran dry on pallets during the pandemic. We did that without gouging our customers on price, and we turned away business that had far greater profit margins. However, that came at a cost as we had to ship pallets across the country, something I thought I’d never see.
Pallet Enterprise: What performance indicators do you track to measure how your company is doing?
Shaw: We use our ERP platform to analyze customer trends, profit margins, and on-time delivery rate success. Aside from financial key performance indicators, I encourage all of our sales staff to routinely survey their customers for honest feedback as to how we’re performing. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen a customer keep a complaint to themselves and not tell their salesperson about it. We treasure that feedback as it helps us fix little things before they become big issues.
Pallet Enterprise: Have you ever had what you thought was a great business idea completely flop?
Shaw: Because of our success in the pallet industry, we thought we’d branch out into freight brokering. That was an idea that made sense on paper, but at the end of the day we never got that venture off the ground. Thankfully, we realized the mistake before sinking too much time and effort into it.
Pallet Enterprise: What is one thing you wish the government would do right now to improve business conditions?
Shaw: I’d like to see our trade policy finalized. I won’t debate the pros and cons of tariffs, but the uncertainty today is creating a wait and see approach I think with many companies that are reluctant to make any investments or changes until the policy is settled. I see it being a drag on growth not only for the U.S. but also globally.
