Focus on Freight

Welcome Melissa Platt

We are pleased to welcome Melissa Platt to our Atlanta sales team. Melissa is a native of Atlanta, GA. She earned a B.A. in Marketing from the University of Georgia and is a huge fan of Georgia football. Melissa has extensive sales experience in the healthcare and tradeshow industries. She is relatively new to transportation sales, but we are sure that she will prove to be a valuable asset to PEI. We expect great things!

Festival of Carols

PEI was the proud sponsor of the 2009 Fayette Festival of Carols which featured the Atlanta Young Singers of Callanwolde, the Fayette Festival Orchestra, and The Southern Nights Chorale (starring our own Ken Paraiso singing baritone). All of the ensembles were fabulous and the production itself was excellent. It was a great way to get into the Christmas Spirit! I hope to have some video to upload soon. Stay tuned…

The Season of Giving

Paradise Empowers, the charity organization funded by the PEI companies, recently made a $10,000.00 donation to Living Water for Girls. Living Water is a therapeutic residential program developed to meet the specific needs of girls, 12-17 years of age who have been victimized by commercial sexual exploitation.

Lisa Williams, the founder of Living Water and a member of McDonough Christian Church, presented to a Sunday school class which was attended by PEI employee Gayle Smith. The presentation spoke about the young girls who were being forced into prostitution in the Atlanta metro area. Gayle was so moved by the presentation that she facilitated a meeting between the founders of Paradise Empowers and Living Water. Since both organizations were founded and operated by women who care strongly about the empowerment of women, a natural kinship was formed.

A federal credit union close by agreed to match every dollar raised by Living Water and at last count the total amount was $86,000.00.

We are so glad that we could help.

http://www.livingwaterforgirls.org/

http://www.paradiseempowers.org/

Zen and the Art of Logistics Marketing

I recently received an e-mail from my Uncle Fred which simply asked “do you know what shippei means?” Knowing that he must be familiar with our web address www.shippei.com I thought I would humor him by searching shippei on Wikipedia and was surprised by what I found. A shippei is actually a curved bamboo staff which is used as a symbol of a master’s authority in Zen Buddhism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippei. I just found this to be extremely interesting. I have always been fascinated by Buddhism and the other eastern “religions” so I was excited to learn something new regarding the subject. Anyway this article triggered my interest so I surfed a bit more and ended up spending an hour or so reading about Zen and Buddhism. The article stated that the aspects of Zen training include: “a life of humility; a life of labor; a life of service; a life of prayer and gratitude; and a life of meditation.” Wow! It was truly inspiring to me how these attributes aligned with what we value here at PEI. It was like a sign that no matter what, we need to stay humble, to serve well, to work hard, to be grateful, and to be still and experience this moment…