Sidecar built a composite US forwarder, Acme, doing $50M a year with 25 ops staff, and traced what its inbox costs over a full operating year. Of the 33,000 RFQs Acme receives, close to a third never get a reply, and the desk rarely knows which ones slipped. The brief puts the total drain near $3.7M a year, about the same as a typical forwarder's entire annual net profit, and walks through where it comes from: bids that go unanswered, quotes that land too late to win, and deals that die waiting in a Promotions folder.

Even at conservative assumptions, the drain adds up to roughly a full year of profit, and it stays invisible because email is how freight forwarding gets done today and almost nobody measures how it actually performs. The brief is a first estimate of what that silence costs, traced line by line.

You can download the full report at the top of this page.