Dave Gulas of EZDC 3PL shares lessons from 20+ years in sales and building a customer-first logistics company
Host: Jeremy Rivera | Unscripted SEO Podcast | Sponsored by Cookeville Sunroom Company
About the Guest
Dave Gulas — President & Co-Founder of EZDC 3PL
Warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services for manufacturers and e-commerce brands. Dave brings 20 years of pharmaceutical sales experience to the logistics industry, where he’s built a reputation for responsiveness and genuine customer care.
Connect: LinkedIn | Beyond Fulfillment Podcast
Best Quotes from This Episode
On market opportunity:
“We saw a vast amount of complacency within the market to where legacy big box 3PLs were just not providing the proper service to e-commerce brands.”
On customer service philosophy:
“Our guiding principle is we want to treat our customers as if it’s our business in terms of we’re gonna operate with urgency.”
On entrepreneurship reality:
“Entrepreneurship has been glamorized so much in recent years… But let’s be real about what it’s really like to be an entrepreneur.”
On personal branding:
“Having a personal brand is more important than ever. People do business with people and faceless nameless brands are really losing ground.”
On resilience:
“Struggle creates strength… It’s really nature’s way of making you stronger. Certainly entrepreneurs can relate to that.”
Introduction: Building Expertise Through Service
Jeremy Rivera
Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I’m here with Dave Gulas, who’s going to introduce himself. As is customary with this podcast, I like to focus on what is your experience, either professionally or personally, that’s giving you the expertise that makes us actually want to listen and trust what you say.
Dave Gulas
Thanks so much for the intro, Jeremy. My name is Dave Gulas and I am the president and co-founder of EZDC 3PL. We provide warehousing, fulfillment and transportation services for manufacturers and e-commerce brands.
In terms of what makes me an expert — I’ve been in sales my entire adult life. That’s 20 years in medical and pharmaceuticals and then over three years in logistics. Really that entire time, I would say my expertise is in making customers happy.
Particularly with the sales process, what I was involved in was a lot of continuous repeat business. Often the sales was involved in making sure the orders got from A to B. If there was anything going wrong, following up on issues, dealing with that.
That’s really where myself and my partner got the idea to start the logistics company because we saw a vast amount of complacency within the market to where legacy big box 3PLs were just not providing the proper service to e-commerce brands. We knew several of them that were complaining about this. So we saw a gap in the market and we thought our brand of customer service from the pharmaceutical world would be a great fit.
Three plus years later, we’ve got a stable full of happy customers and we’re helping them continue to outsource the headache for most people that is logistics. We handle that for them so they can continue to operate in their zone of genius and grow their business.
The Friction Points in E-commerce Logistics
Jeremy Rivera
What happens with the logistics industry? What is it that’s challenging? Where’s the friction point that invited that deeper scrutiny?
Dave Gulas
When you think about e-commerce companies, which is really the specific niche that we serve, most of them start off self-fulfilling, whether it’s out of their home or a small office, a small warehouse. They sell their products online, grow their business, and handle the fulfillment themselves.
Usually at some point in their life cycle, every one of them reaches a graduation point where they see that if they’ve grown and scaled properly, they have way too many orders to ship and way too many other problems to deal with to continue handling it themselves.
It only makes sense to outsource that to a company that specializes in it. A company that can negotiate the carrier rates so they can maximize their scale of spending. They can rent the bigger building, manage the staff, handle all the inbound, connect them with the right solution, and have the right size packaging option for every different type of order.
Technology Dependencies in E-commerce
Jeremy Rivera
I’ve consulted with a number of different e-commerce companies and it’s interesting because as a business model it seems very dependent on technology. If you’re an e-commerce you’re living and dying by the technology you’re working with — whether that’s the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing or whether it’s the delivery systems on the back end. What are some of the best practices? This reminds me of conversations we’ve had on the show about how technical foundations impact business success.
Dave Gulas
Some are just basics. We have one of the top commercial WMSs that we use — for those that may not know, it’s a warehouse management system. It’s software that basically allows us to track every customer’s inventory and then connects to a variety of platforms such as Shopify, Amazon, Walmart.com, and a host of others.
For us, that’s just automatic. When we first got into this business and we were researching everything, we were told we couldn’t even launch without a credible WMS — not even feasible. But then as we get out there in the market, we see that there’s many 3PLs currently operating without a WMS to where they track inventory on spreadsheets.
If a brand is doing a good part of their business on Shopify, you want all those orders to flow through directly to the warehouse where it’s all automated. If you don’t automate that in the very beginning, you’re not going to be able to scale.
The Role of AI in Logistics
Jeremy Rivera
Is there any growing role for AI, either within these platforms or as an augmenting tool to help businesses tackle technical challenges? We’ve explored this topic extensively in our interview with Danny Richman on AI and problem-solving.
Dave Gulas
I think ultimately AI has got a lot of potential and it’s only going to continue to get better. At this point right now, at least from what I see — and I’m not a software expert by any means — but from what I see, at least the problems and the challenges that we encounter, it definitely requires a human to come in and fix it.
With logistics, so many things can potentially go wrong when you have all different types of businesses and all different types of software and all different types of platforms, all trying to connect and run efficiently. You have to have a good team of qualified people with you.
Our guiding principle is we want to treat our customers as if it’s our business in terms of we’re going to operate with urgency and if they have a problem, we’re on it right away. If we made a mistake, we own it. That’s really the thing I think our customers appreciate about us most — just our sense of urgency.
Scaling Challenges: Learning from Early Mistakes
Jeremy Rivera
From the outset of your company, what’s been some of the challenges that you’ve had to face trying to scale?
Dave Gulas
Probably one of the first things that comes to mind is in the very early days, we were saying yes to too many of the wrong customers in terms of trying to be everything to everybody and chase every type of deal and not really niching down hard enough, soon enough.
You’re a new company, you’re excited, you want the revenue, you want the volume. Hindsight 2020, you certainly learned some valuable lessons from your biggest mistakes. We’ve had to ask many customers to leave just as a result of realizing that wasn’t the proper type of customer for us.
Another one was saying yes to too big of a customer too soon — where we just weren’t equipped to handle the volume. You see the revenue, you think “we can make this work” — and then in hindsight, you realize that wasn’t the right decision.
Marketing a 3PL: Content Marketing & Visibility
Jeremy Rivera
Being choosy about who your clients are is as important as doing the marketing to get the clients in the first place. What paths have you found to put your message out there?
Dave Gulas
When we first started, coming from pharma, it’s a much different type of selling environment where it’s traditional B2B and phone sales. Within logistics, you never know where the customers are going to come from. They have to be able to find you when they’re ready.
It’s so much more about being visible and content marketing and putting out consistent posts on social media, guesting on podcasts like this. I have my own podcast as well, which I started a couple of years ago. All those things together have created a nice flywheel of just inbound leads. This aligns with what Jason Barnard discussed about building your digital footprint and entity optimization.
We’re in Kentucky, which is an excellent location if you want to reach the vast majority of the country within two days ground. We focus on smaller items for direct to consumer e-commerce brands — things like beauty, supplements, books, home goods.
Advice for New E-commerce Entrepreneurs
Jeremy Rivera
What’s some groundwork advice for somebody considering starting their own e-commerce business?
Dave Gulas
This sounds like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised. Just basic market research — does the market want this product and are they willing to pay for it?
The number one threat I see to the companies we deal with is just a lack of sales. We’ve had startups go out of business just because they don’t sell enough product. We’ve had to liquidate inventory from people that couldn’t move product and couldn’t pay us.
What’s your acquisition cost going to be? Sometimes people have a good product in an extremely competitive space. If they don’t have enough ad revenue or the ability to organically market and create sales, they don’t have the runway to succeed.
Bootstrap vs. Funded: What Actually Works
Jeremy Rivera
Have you seen a difference in success rates between bootstrap companies versus funded ones? This mirrors what James Dooley shared about building his nine-figure business through patient, systematic growth.
Dave Gulas
We’ve certainly seen more success with the bootstrap companies. With funding, there’s a much greater sense of urgency from investors to turn a profit quickly. But it’s a double-edged sword — if you don’t, it can be a wrap pretty quick.
We’ve seen more success from people that have the proper amount of patience to know that it’s a journey and it really is a marathon. Some of the best companies operate more conservatively with patience, but they consistently do the actions day in and day out that incrementally grow their business.
The Importance of Employee Wellbeing
Jeremy Rivera
In my 18 years of digital marketing, I’ve seen more companies succeed where management builds a lifestyle type company — equally concerned about employee quality of life. Would you say that’s true?
Dave Gulas
I think it’s true. It’s a sign of the times. People can work from anywhere in the world. Remote work is prevalent. Employees have options.
Bottom line is you got to take care of your people. That’s not just high compensation, but really understanding who they are, giving flexibility, making sure they’re in a role that uses their skill set where they can enjoy it and grow and flourish.
Lessons from the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast
Jeremy Rivera
Are there any recurring themes from conversations on your own show?
Dave Gulas
For those that don’t know, we’re talking about the Beyond Fulfillment podcast — stories of real entrepreneurs. The messy, real story of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, not the Instagram highlight reel.
A recurring theme I keep hearing is the importance of taking care of your mental health.
Part of the genesis of the show was exposing what it’s really like because entrepreneurship has been glamorized so much. But let’s be real about what it’s really like. For most people, even when they reach those highlights, it’s not without a lot of pain and suffering.
The Reality of Failure in Entrepreneurship
Jeremy Rivera
There are a lot of shiny hustle-culture bros making it seem glamorous 24/7. But the consistent theme through every entrepreneur I’ve interviewed is they have all failed at some point. Similar to what Cyrus Shepard shared about his journey building ZyppySEO — the path is never linear.
Dave Gulas
I’ve never met an entrepreneur that hasn’t failed. Sometimes spectacularly, but at least repeatedly. There’s failure on top of failure, on top of failure.
That reminds me of the fable of the premature butterfly. A man saw a butterfly struggling to get out of a cocoon so he helped it out. But the butterfly stayed stagnant, never flew, and died.
The whole point is that struggle creates strength. The person you’re meant to be and what you need to go through to reach those goals oftentimes involves failure and struggle and the ability to develop resilience.
Learning Through Struggle
Jeremy Rivera
My friend, Michael McDougall at Right Thing Agency — I helped consult on his door business. I’d seen him fail at iterations for developing his own delivery software. At times I thought “I can help you do that so much faster.” But it was like “No, I really just have to figure this out.”
It was better for him long term because he did manage to successfully exit that company. There are certain things where you have to struggle.
Dave Gulas
100%.
Final Advice: Personal Branding and Customer Service
Jeremy Rivera
What are some low hanging fruit to help small businesses succeed?
Dave Gulas
I’ll give you one of each. From the entrepreneurial angle — particularly in 2026 and beyond, having a personal brand is more important than ever.
People do business with people and faceless nameless brands are really losing ground to founder-led companies with a visible founder that gets out there and speaks and lets people get to know them. This is something Joe Davies of FATJOE emphasized when discussing how he built his brand.
It doesn’t have to be glamorous — just getting your thoughts out there and posting content is more important than ever. With the rise of AI and so much fake stuff, people are craving real human connection.
And specifically with e-commerce fulfillment — the complacency of legacy big box companies matters more than ever. Customers are quick to leave them for companies that operate with a real customer service approach and people that care.
Founder-led up-and-coming companies that focus on treating customers right are winning against legacy giants.
Jeremy Rivera
Absolutely love it. Thanks so much for your time Dave.
Dave Gulas
Hey, thank you, Jeremy.
Key Takeaways
- Customer service is a competitive advantage. In industries plagued by complacency from legacy providers, responsiveness and genuine care can differentiate your business. Dave built EZDC 3PL specifically because big box 3PLs weren’t serving growing e-commerce brands well.
- Know when to say no to customers. Chasing every deal and trying to be everything to everybody hurt EZDC early on. Being selective about clients and niching down leads to better outcomes for both parties. Sometimes you need to fire customers who aren’t a good fit.
- Content marketing creates inbound lead flywheels. Podcasting, blogging, LinkedIn posting, and appearing on other shows creates compounding visibility. When potential customers are ready to make a move, they can find you organically instead of you having to chase them down.
- Bootstrap companies often outperform funded ones. Patience and consistent daily actions beat rushing to scale before you’re ready. The pressure from investors to show quick returns can force premature decisions that hurt long-term sustainability.
- Personal branding matters more than ever in the AI age. With so much AI-generated content flooding the market, people crave authentic human connection. Founder-led companies with visible leaders who share their real thoughts are winning against faceless corporate brands.
- Struggle creates strength — don’t shortcut the process. Like the fable of the premature butterfly, entrepreneurs need to go through challenges to develop the resilience required for success. The pain of failure is often what creates the wisdom and character needed to eventually win.
- Mental health matters in entrepreneurship. The glamorized Instagram version of entrepreneurship hides the real pain and suffering that comes with building a business. Taking care of your mental health and being honest about the struggles is essential for long-term sustainability.
Related Episodes You’ll Enjoy
- Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard — Deep dive into building your digital footprint
- James Dooley on Building a Nine-Figure Business — Lessons from a digital landlord
- Local SEO for Health & Wellness with Darcy Sullivan — Strategies for service-based businesses
- Danny Richman on AI and Problem-Solving — How AI is changing digital marketing
- Cyrus Shepard on Building ZyppySEO — The entrepreneurial journey in SEO
Subscribe to the Unscripted SEO Podcast | Learn more about EZDC 3PL | Connect with Dave on LinkedIn
