MoLo Solutions opens Nashville office

MoLo chose Nashville for a number of reasons, Richards said, including its strategic location in the Southeast, a high number of residents fitting MoLo’s typical employee profile and the fact that MoLo already had key team members with deep roots in the Music City.

The office is laid out with a circular open floor plan that surrounds a central conference and meeting area. Richards said the furnishings were selected and arranged to conform to CDC guidelines around social distancing — including the 6 feet of separation — but with an eye to those restrictions being lifted at some point in the future. 

Anticipating rapid growth, MoLo signed a two-and-a-half-year sublease for the space. Richards said that if MoLo needs to expand the Nashville office’s physical footprint, it could either secure more space in the same building or look elsewhere.

“One thing we’ve all learned is that we don’t necessarily know what’s coming,” Richards said. “We’re setting ourselves up to pivot when the time comes, and we applied the same approach to the bigger capital decisions as well as the actual location.”

MoLo prides itself on its people-centric culture, and Richards said that meeting the team’s expectations after a difficult year working from home was part of her mandate in designing a great work experience. There’s a terrace for MoLo’s brokers to catch a quick break and speakers installed throughout the floor so that teams stay energized by listening to their favorite music (as long as it’s on a MoLo-approved playlist). 

“Getting the team back together after the year they’ve been through is a central part of the mission,” Richards said. 

MoLo does not require or encourage employees to get a COVID-19 vaccination, Richards explained, but said that MoLo had different procedures in place — around COVID testing and quarantining after travel, for example — that would come into effect if an employee was vaccinated or not. But MoLo’s executives have been vocal about how they’ve chosen to take care of their physical and mental health during the pandemic, choosing to lead by example rather than diktat. 

“Our leadership team prizes vulnerability and we take a people-first approach to the work we do, with carriers, shippers and absolutely our employees,” Richards said. “One of the ways we live around our values around ‘family,’ one of our core values, is strengthening and supporting each other, especially in times like this.”