I recently went one-on-one with Courtney Folk, co-founder and CEO of Renewal Logistics
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Courtney: I’ve been building businesses for more than twenty years, and Renewal Logistics is the one that finally pulled all of our prior ones together. My husband Bryan and I started in dry cleaning, moved into insurance restoration, then into returns and reverse logistics, and eventually into outbound DTC and B2B fulfillment for fashion brands. People sometimes assume that was one clean plan from the start; it wasn’t. Each step taught us something we carried into the next one: how to handle product other people were afraid to touch, how to build a team that actually cares, and how to run lean when there’s no outside money coming to save you.
We bootstrapped the whole thing. That shapes how you think about every decision. Early on, we took every customer we could get, and that included some challenging clients too. For a long time, we needed them to cover our costs, so we carried them. It took us years to get to a place where we could be selective, and honestly, that’s the biggest shift happening in the business right now. Having no safety net is what made us disciplined, and I wouldn’t trade it. Bryan and I split it the way we always have: I get the business, and he keeps the business.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Courtney: It really started with Calvin Klein. When we first began working with them, they told us they could never find a 3PL that would actually meet their needs. Every provider wanted to put them in a box and make them fit the system that already existed. So we just kept saying yes. They’d hand us a problem, we’d solve it, and they’d hand us another one. At some point we realized they weren’t unique. There was a whole set of fashion brands with the same complaint and nowhere to go.
There was an opportunity in the market, and we were already standing in it. Eventually, big names started to rely on us; they told their friends, and their friends told their friends. Around that same time, a friend of mine in the same competitive space that I talk to on a regular basis said, “Why don’t you get into the fulfillment business? I’d do it if I had the resources.” That was the moment it clicked. We already had the same customers and the same skills. We just decided to do more for them. My advice is to stop trying to think up a great idea. Go be genuinely useful to someone with a real problem, pay close attention to what they keep asking you for, and follow the demand. The idea finds you.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to test a business idea best?
Courtney: I never sat down and tested it on paper; the market tested it for me. The proof was that serious brands started relying on us and then referred us; their friends told their friends, and it kept compounding before we’d spent a single dollar on marketing. When people are sending you business on their own, that’s your answer. Demand that shows up unprompted is worth more than a hundred business plans.
The other filter I use is scale. I’m not interested in a good idea without growth potential. Before we commit to anything, I ask whether it’s essential, something every household or every brand genuinely needs, and whether there’s a real path to a national, billion-dollar business. I’m never going to build bracelets or cut grass. There’s nothing wrong with those; they’re just not what I’m here to do, because the ceiling is too low. So if you want to test an idea, keep it simple: get it in front of real customers quickly and watch what they do, not what they say. If they keep coming back and bringing other people with them, you have something. And make sure the thing you’re proving out can actually scale before you pour years of your life into it.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Courtney: The pattern that has grown this business is the same every time: take the skills, the people, and the equipment you already have, and find a way to do 100x, 1,000x, even 100,000x more units per customer. We went from dry cleaning to restoration to returns to fulfillment using the same core capability and just pointing it at a bigger opportunity each time. Growth for us has never been about chasing something shiny. It’s about compounding what we’re already good at.
The second step is being deliberate about who we say yes to. Once we could comfortably cover our costs, we stopped taking any and all business. Now we work with clients we like and respect, and we hire people with integrity. That can sound soft, but it’s actually the most practical growth decision we’ve made. When your customers and your team share the same values, you’re not spending all your energy bridging a disconnect. You’re not constantly managing friction, so you can actually move.
For anyone trying to reach the next level: protect your standards as you scale. It’s tempting to grow on volume alone and say yes to everyone. But the wrong customer or the wrong hire costs you far more than the revenue is ever worth.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Courtney: My mom taught me early: if you put all your focus on the customer, the money will come. I honestly believe that’s the single biggest reason we’ve succeeded. We’ve never been a hard-sell company. We grew almost entirely on referrals, because we made ourselves genuinely useful and people wanted to tell others about us.
The thing most of my industry gets wrong is automation. The 3PL business has automated so aggressively that a lot of companies have automated the customer right out of the experience. They strip out the relationship, and then they’re surprised when accounts leave. We went the other way. When a client hands us their product, we treat it like it’s their baby, because to them it is. That personal touch is the whole pitch. We recently had a brand fly in from Australia – a company anyone in our space would want to win – and the reason they chose us over everyone else was simply that we felt like people who would take real care of them and their product. So my tip is unglamorous: be so good, and so easy to work with, that your customers do your marketing for you. Reputation compounds faster than any campaign you could buy.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Courtney: The best leaders I know stay calm when everything around them isn’t. In our world, the customer’s problem never shows up on a convenient schedule, so how you carry yourself under pressure sets the tone for the entire team. If I panic, everyone panics. If I’m steady, we solve it. That composure is something people underrate.
The second quality is what I’d call an editor’s mindset. You’re never finished. You look at how things are running, you find the friction, you make one small adjustment, and then you do it again next week. Good leaders are constantly refining instead of waiting around for one big dramatic fix.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Courtney: I think of a great team like a Formula One pit crew. Everybody has a job, everybody knows it cold, and the whole thing works because the friction has been engineered out. When something’s slow, we don’t just push the team to grind more. We look at the process and remove whatever’s in the way.
It starts with hiring. We hire for integrity and culture fit first. That harmony, across our people, our processes, and our customers, is what lets us scale without everything breaking along the way. The other piece is that people have to know the work means something. I’m proud that this company has put employees in a position to do things like send their kids to college. When your team understands that doing the job well changes real lives, including their own, you get an effort out of people that you could never demand from them. My job as a leader is to protect that: to keep giving good people stability and opportunity, and then get out of their way and let them do the work.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Courtney: First, chase scale, not novelty. Spend your time on things that are essential to everyday life and can genuinely grow big. Don’t lose years on a clever idea with a low ceiling.
Second, only work with people who have integrity: customers and employees alike. Working with people whom we share mutual respect and appreciate the work that gets done is the key to happiness in life. The right partners make everything downstream easier.
Third, be a good partner, especially to the people who supply you. You only get a good deal once. If you squeeze a vendor until they’re losing money on you, they won’t be there when you really need them. Fair relationships are what keep the whole thing standing.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Courtney: You only get a good deal once. Oftentimes as a service provider, you want to give people really good deals to get the business in the door. But there is a floor to your costs, and if you go below that, a client with a lot of volume becomes a major liability.
It’s the same when you’re hiring a service business. If you push a vendor into a phenomenal deal that costs them money, they’ll do it for you once. But they are not going to keep supporting you at a loss. Factories, distribution, all of it – there’s a real cost to servicing your business, and if you’re not willing to pay it, you won’t stay a customer for long. So when I’m the one buying, I make sure I’m being a good partner, not just chasing the lowest possible number. The cheap deal that blows up the relationship was never actually cheap. There is so much work to find another great vendor partner or employee, time to train them up, spending the time to align on the operations, account management, billing, etc. It’s much better to find a great partner, be it an employee or a vendor, and treat them well. Not let them take advantage of you, but treat them well enough that they’re motivated to get up and go to work for you each day. There is a harmony there that is really magical when you finally find it.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Courtney: Only that none of this works without the mission underneath it. We exist to bring relief, to take the operational weight off a founder so they can go build their brand, and to create stability and opportunity for the people who work here. We are all about stewardship and building a sustainable institution that yields value for everyone it touches. I care a great deal about female founders in particular. Half of our leadership team is women, in an industry where I still get on sales calls that are otherwise entirely men. I want to be the resource for other women that I didn’t have when I started out. If Renewal Logistics is known for anything, I hope it’s that we took genuine care of people and their product, and that we built it our own way.
