One of the nation’s leading logistics companies will soon have a sales team operating out of Downtown Sarasota. Total Quality Logistics announced plans to open an office in the BB&T building on Second Street with a team of 10 people on June 6, and plans to create 100 jobs in the next four years. “We look for two things when we open an office,” said Mark Motz, TQL communications specialist. “One is access to professional talent; it’s key to our growth to put people in positions to achieve success. And the other is to look for places where our people want to be.”

The company, one of the largest freight brokerage firms in the nation, connects companies with goods to ship through a network of thousands of carriers. Motz offered the example of a farm in the Sarasota area that needed to ship a truckload of oranges to Kentucky but didn’t have its own fleet of trucks to do so. That farm could call TQL, which works with companies that have access to specialized equipment. “We are primarily a full truckload brokerage company, though we do less-than-a-truckload shipping and some other sorts of shipping as well,” he said.

The company will open its office with a team of six veteran TQL employees and four new hires, and has plans to grow this office to 100 employees by 2020. This office marks the seventh for TQL in the state of Florida, the largest single-state presence of any state of the union for the company besides its home state of Ohio, where there are five offices in Cincinnati alone. Other TQL offices can be found in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville.

The arrival was welcomed by a broad array of business and community leaders. Sarasota County Commission chairman Alan Maio said TQL’s arrival was a “testament to our friendly business environment and quality labor pool.” Sarasota Mayor Willie Shaw said the corporate citizen’s arrival would bring “a welcome boost to our local economy.” And Bill Johnson, president and CEO of Enterprise Florida, said the TQL expansion showed Florida was “the ideal location for logistics and distribution companies.”