#5 Fastest Growing Private Company: SVT

From left: Jim Wedge, vice president and co-owner, and Brandon Stover, president and co-owner (Courtesy of SVT)

Three-Year Average Annual Growth: 60%
Rank on Private 100: 97
Headquarters: 1 Merrill Industrial Dr., Hampton
Product/Service: Third-party logistics, inventory management and supply
chain services
President and Co-Owner: Brandon Stover
Vice President and Co-Owner: Jim Wedge
Founded: 1997
Total Number of Employees: 53

After working in logistics for more than 25 years, Brandon Stover and Jim Wedge were ready to take the reins of SVT, where they had worked for years. They presented a proposal to the owner and purchased the company in 2015, eager to bring SVT to the next level of success.

Little did they suspect a global pandemic would launch the company forward. “When COVID hit, there was a series of factors going on at same time—people were working from home creating demand and straining supply, leading to shortages,” says Wedge. “We were able to fulfill gaps that a lot of companies were not able to do at the time.”

Leaning into their experience, Wedge and Stover “understood customers’ pain points and gaps,” Stover says. They had spent five years building the company’s warehouse, distribution and order fulfillment capabilities. “When the pandemic hit, we had that infrastructure to support those areas that were struggling,” Stover says, adding when the economy “turned back on” companies needed help managing inventory that had been stranded in ports.

Wedge says the early days of the pandemic were just as frightening for SVT as it was for its customers, but the company quickly began communicating with clients to create programs to support them. “The more conversations we had, the more comfortable Brandon and I became as to how we could succeed in this marketplace,” he says.

Stover says SVT is seeing demand to assist companies with managing returns as consumer habits changed during the pandemic and online shopping markedly increased. “The returns piece is a $30 billion industry now,” Stover says, so SVT launched a new ecommerce platform last year to manage consumer returns for companies. Adds Wedge, “Our fastest area of growth this year is managing reverse inventory as customers send it back, and we find new life for it.”

SVT has five distribution and warehouse facilities in the U.S, and Stover says they intend to open one or two more in the west coast. “We want to continue to drive new solutions to meet our clients’ needs,” Stover says.