How Erin Mitchell Grows a People-First Powerhouse
Erin Mitchell is building a company from scratch in a time of supply chain uncertainty, leveraging technology and a unique leadership style to drive growth and keep her team motivated.
Erin Mitchell, COO, YMX Logistics
Erin Mitchell is chief operating officer with YMX Logistics, which provides integrated yard logistics for enterprise shippers. She joined the company in early 2024, after more than 20 years with Kraft Heinz, where she had risen to vice president, logistics, and head of network transformation.
“I was ready for something different, and this was about as different as I could get,” Mitchell says, noting that she was the second employee at YMX. “You go from a large enterprise at the top of the food chain to a company that you’re building from scratch.”
In her current role, Mitchell oversees yard and trucking operations, human resources, IT, customer success, engineering, and fleet safety and maintenance. Here’s how she approaches her leadership role in a company that’s growing quickly amidst an uncertain business environment.
IL: When you were named a 2025 Top Women to Watch in Transportation by the Women in Trucking Association, you said transportation and logistics are at an inflection point. Can you expand on this?
Much of this is driven by decision fatigue. Manufacturers, shippers, and warehousing and transportation providers have numerous macroeconomic challenges with tariffs and supply chain unpredictability. To meet these challenges, they’re looking to technology. And that means making often significant investment decisions in an environment where the number of technology and automation options available can get overwhelming.
Many people just need something simple that works and that they can execute quickly. We provide turnkey solutions to our customers, so they can focus on the bigger challenges in their supply chains.
IL: How is the uncertainty in the current business environment impacting how you approach your leadership role with YMX?
We need to be nimble and flexible. We need to listen and engage with our customers, at all levels, so we understand their needs and challenges. We train our frontline workforce and drivers so they’re engaged in and observant of all that’s going on at their sites.
We provide feedback mechanisms so workers and drivers can let us know what they see happening at the sites.
When we combine that with data, it becomes easier to engage in continuous improvement discussions. Drivers often notice changes in yard volume or mix and will let us know how they can make a change to improve the flow of an operation.
Rather than waiting for the customer to come to us with a problem—or worse, never hearing about the problem—we engage and let customers know how we can enhance operations.
IL: How do you keep your team motivated?
It’s easy to keep people motivated and challenged in a high-growth organization. We go out of our way to look for drivers who are motivated professionals and take pride in what they do. Then, we try to ensure we provide opportunities to keep them engaged and growing.
We place quite a few drivers on training or deployment teams and give them the chance to be part of continuous improvement initiatives. We use their feedback as we develop our training, as well as our operating and technology systems.
Our focus on customer satisfaction and employee engagement is different than some competitors. While we do face challenges getting candidates in some markets and do a lot of work in driver recruitment in those areas, our retention numbers are higher than the industry average.
IL: How would you describe your leadership style?
I’ve been blessed with some good managers and mentors. The most impactful ones followed the servant leadership model. I’ve tried to replicate the way I lead, and even the way I parent, from this model.
I aim to be transparent and candid with employees, making sure that I communicate the vision and strategy of the organization. Then, I build capable and confident teams, give them the tools they need, and work together to remove any barriers that could prevent us from getting to our goals. It’s a simplified way of leading, but it’s effective in this high-growth environment.
IL: What challenges keep you up at night?
Safety, especially in the trucking industry, is always huge. We want everyone to get home every night in the same condition in which they went to work that morning.
Many pieces go into enabling this. We place a big focus on the overall health and wellness of our employee population. We want to know that we’re providing the right benefit plans, the right support, the right employee assistance programs, and the right tools. Within the leadership team, we’ve had a lot of conversations about these issues. We’re translating them into action plans that we’re executing as we head into 2026.
We also have robust and ever-evolving training programs, safety monitoring systems, and high levels of supervisor and trainer engagement.
IL: What new skills are you learning?
In my previous life, I was on the operations side of a food manufacturer, where you’re always looking at cutting costs. You look at what you’re buying, who you’re buying it from, and ways to drive efficiency. I was good at that and it would have been easy to continue that path, but I wanted more.
At YMX, we’re building a logistics company. Everyone in the organization is driving the top line, interacting with customers and asking, ‘How do we attract new potential business?’ A big part of what we do today is designed to impact the top line as much as the bottom line. It has been an exciting change.
IL: What’s a typical day like?
There’s no typical day, but there are two activities that are some of the favorite parts of my job. One is visiting customer operations. I see a variety of industries and facility types, from those that are heavily automated to those that are incredibly manual. I see a huge variety in how things are made and different applications of technology, and I love every bit of it.
I also love interacting with our drivers, especially when we do operations startups. I love that rush of energy and introducing new drivers to YMX, while also letting them know how excited we are that they’re part of this.
Breaking the Rules
“The pandemic was horrible for most of us,” says Erin Mitchell, COO of YMX Logistics. “But the transportation and logistics sectors also learned some important lessons.
“We had to compromise on different ways of shipping or managing supplier relationships. We broke ‘rules’ and we were fine. The pandemic made us challenge those barriers in a good way.
“We also learned to leverage technology better and faster. Again, it was rule breaking, but for the greater good; and we found out most of those rules really didn’t matter.
“While the pandemic did have some positive outcomes, it wasn’t worth the cost of admission,” Mitchell adds.