We’re excited to announce the completion of our Roush Delivery Service, Inc. project. The new space includes 25,000 square-feet of warehouse space, 5,000 square-feet of office space, 12 overhead garage doors and is dock-high all the way around. Completing this project is testament to the relationships we maintain while enriching our community, one build at a time. It’s such a great feeling to have done this project for folks that are not only clients, but friends.
From serving as a personal delivery company for downtown Savannah merchants and department stores, to providing expedited less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping and logistics services, and experiencing 400% growth over the past four years, Savannah-based Roush’s Delivery Service has come a long way since its founding.
“We got started in 1973 with a van, working out of my dad’s bedroom at a desk and grew from there,” said Mike Roush Jr., who serves as general manager.
In 1976, the company got into the air freight business and later into linehaul service, running trucks to Atlanta five nights a week dropping and recovering freight from different inner city linehaul carriers.
Eventually the company built a small 5,000 square foot warehouse in Garden City, and after Roush Jr. took over the business from his father in the early 2000s, he set his sights on growing the business even more.
It wasn’t long before the company started to outgrow the space, he said.
“We’d grown to the point where we’d sorely outgrown that warehouse and it made it very difficult for us to do business because there was work that I had to turn away because we didn’t have the capacity to handle it.”
The company landed on a piece of property near their original warehouse location and teamed up with Savannah’s Dewitt Tilton Group to expand to a new 30,000 sqaure-foot home. The new space includes 25,000 square-feet of warehouse space, 5,000 square-feet of office space, 12 overhead garage doors and is dock-high all the way around.
“When you go in the office, you really don’t feel like you’re in a warehouse environment because it feels like a Class A office space. It’s just a nice finish to it,” said Chris Tilton, one of two principals at the Dewitt Tilton Group.
Roush Jr. said the new building has definitely given the company some breathing room and the opportunity to take on special projects requested by customers.
Recently the company was able to strip and redistribute nearly 30 ocean containers full of holiday products for a partner who works with Jo-Ann Stores.
“We were able to turn 28 containers in the span of about six days. Those served most of the Jo-Ann Stores in southeastern United States,” Roush Jr. said.
“So those types of projects that we get asked to do are the types of things that we were having to hold kind of at arm’s distance until we could get into a facility that can properly accommodate it.”
Aside from their business relationship, Roush Jr. and Tilton also grew up together and both men said it was nice to reconnect on a professional level though the project. “Even today, when we talk to them, business is the second thing that we talk about. Growing in Savannah and being here for over 40 years and having a relationship with these guys for that long was just an added touch,” Tilton said. “And to see their dream grow from a 5,000 square foot space to a 30,000 square foot space... to know that we’re part of that is just a very good feeling.”