the story of fedex A s the sun set on April 17 1973 a parade of airplanes began to touch down at the headquarters of Federal Express in Memphis Tennessee The 14 planes were greeted by many of the company’s almost 400 employees in cluding founder Fred Smith As soon as the planes came to a stop the employees unloaded and processed the 186 packages that had been collected from 25 cities across the country that day the first packages ever handled by the company Before the sun came up all of the packages were loaded back onto the airplanes ready to be delivered to their intended recipi ents the next day Smith was tired at daybreak but he was ready to do it again the next night and his company would keep doing it for more than 40 years to come built for success
b u i l t f o r s u c c e s s 6 p a g e the story of fedex chapter one In the mid-1960s when Fred Smith was a sopho more economics major at Yale University he wrote a paper for a class describing an overnight courier service that was built around a hub-and-spoke con cept of collecting and delivering packages in America He envisioned a fleet of airplanes picking up packages bringing them to a central hub location and then branching out like spokes to rapidly deliver them all over the country Smith’s professor wasn’t impressed by the premise but the idea lin gered in Smith’s mind After graduating in 1966 and serving in the Marines during the Vietnam War Smith took control of his stepfather’s Little Rock Arkansas-based business which sold fuel to pilots of small planes and rented out hangar space Smith started re pairing corporate jets and developed a reputation for quick response times and low costs But he was frustrated by delays in the shipping of necessary parts a rush delivery might take seven days That frustration was on Smith’s mind when he decided to start a new busi ness He wanted to develop a flight courier service to transport time-sensitive checks and financial documents between the Federal Reserve the central bank ing system in the United States and the banks that it oversaw The Federal Getting off the Ground
Fred Smith personally directed the growth of FedEx throughout its first four decades of existence fedex
