Business Women Awards 2019 | INDUSTRY LEADER, PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Elizabeth Robson, JF Moran Inc.
Sometimes, younger generations have little interest in following footsteps into their family’s business. Elizabeth Robson was the exact opposite when she started at JF Moran Inc. as a teen nearly 40 years ago.
“I loved working there from the first minute I started,” said Robson, who is now president of the Smithfield-based customs brokerage and freight-forwarding company owned by her family since the early 1970s. “I was about 15, looking for a part-time job. They needed help in their export operations.”
She worked there after school for a year in the early 1980s with her sister Victoria Black, who is now senior vice president of human resources. In 1982, when another family company, JF Moran Trucking Co., was formed, Robson performed the weekly billing. “I sat there with my IBM Selectric [typewriter], and typed delivery orders as the drivers were bringing them back, issuing statements to the clients.”
Even as she attended Boston College, where she majored in political science and economics, she spent her summers at JF Moran. By her junior year, she was working at the company’s Logan Airport office in Boston. When she graduated from BC in 1987, she started full time at JF Moran as an ocean traffic clerk while she studied for a year to get her customs-broker license. She climbed the company ladder, eventually managing the Boston office, and then the New York office.
After moving to Chicago and then to Florida, she followed a “natural progression” and earned a law degree at Stetson University in 1996.
“So much of what we do on the import/export side is subject to regulation,” she said. “I had been a licensed customs broker since 1988 and was very aware of how important our role is with our clients to make sure they’re getting accurate information and good advice. We had been working closely with attorneys who specialize in customs-related matters. It just seemed like a natural progression for me to push through a law degree and get better experience and to expand the level of expertise within the company.”
She and her husband, George Robson, also a licensed customs broker and now JF Moran senior vice president of operations, settled in Rhode Island after living in Florida and Boston. She was installed as company president in 2015, after serving as senior vice president of legal affairs.
Now she is also president of JF Moran Trucking, managing a total of 74 employees between the two companies. Robson also teaches full time for Johnson & Wales University’s MBA program. “My weeks are very busy, but there’s a lot of synergy among all the roles, so it’s actually really good,” she said.
At JWU, she teaches classes on global economic environments –“It’s like teaching exactly what I do in my professional life.” – and international business negotiations, which she performs professionally on a regular basis.
“So the two really feed into one another. I believe that by teaching at Johnson & Wales, it makes me stronger professionally, and through my role at JF Moran and Trucking, it makes me a much stronger professor because I can bring industry experience directly into the classroom.”
She enjoys all aspects of working at a family-run business. “We speak our own language. We understand the stresses that one another are experiencing; we experience similar highs and lows; and are able to bring our family values into our organization,” she said.
In the 1980s, Robson was one of a few women in the logistics industry. She saw it as an opportunity to stand out from the competition.
Things have changed. “My sister and I were just at a conference two weeks ago in Newport,” Robson said. “At one point we looked around the room and noticed two notable things: We are clearly no longer the young people in the room, but secondly, look how many women are here, and that’s a really cool thing to be watching.”
