This episode of the VOE Podcast features Daniels alumna Megan Smith (BSBA 2006), CEO of Symbia Logistics, for a conversation about the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on labor and employment--especially for women in the workforce. She comments on the findings from the National Women's Law Center that 2.3 million women left the workplace since February 2020 and that women's participation in the workforce fell to 57%--the lowest it's been since 1988. Smith also shares what it means to be an ethical employer and a responsible business, as Symbia was named one of the top green supply chain partners in 2021 by Inbound Logistics Magazine.
The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Transcript
 
Kristal Griffith:             
Hello, and welcome to the VOE Podcast.
Jake Jensen:                 
An extension of Voices of Experience.
Amber D'Angelo:          
The signature speaker series at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. We're your hosts.
Kristal Griffith:             
Kristal Griffith.
Jake Jensen:                 
Jake Jensen.
Amber D'Angelo:          
And I'm Amber D'Angelo from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing. We'll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community. Let's dive in.
Welcome to our first episode of the VOE Podcast. Today, we're speaking with Megan Smith, a Daniels alumna who graduated with her BSBA in management in 2006. Megan is the CEO and majority owner of Symbia Logistics, a supply chain management and warehousing provider and Certified Women's Business Enterprise. Symbia is a competitor to Amazon and is based out of Edwards, Colorado.
Hi, Megan. Thanks for joining us today.
Megan Smith:              
Thanks for having me, Amber.
Amber D'Angelo:          
Absolutely. Can you give us a brief overview of what Symbia offers and who are some of your clients?
Megan Smith:              
Yeah, Symbia Logistics is a third-party logistics company. We're a warehousing provider, and specifically and most notably moving into the e-commerce, e-fulfillment space. And we do distribution and fulfillment for companies of global proportion all the way down to your Colorado startup. Some of our most notable clients are Canopy. Canopy Growth is a CBD company, and we do small parcel fulfillment for them. So we ship out their Martha Stewart gummies and anything fun like that. And then we do fulfillment for a company called Tone It Up, and they're kind of a big influencer on Instagram, workout gear, apparel, and all kinds of fun, little things for your health and beauty.
We've got 22 warehouses from coast to coast, so we're a national company. We have one up in Canada in Calgary. And we kind of run the gamut of services in terms of fulfillment and distribution, going everywhere from the end consumer to a business like I had said. So we call that omni-channel fulfillment and that's kind of our bread and butter and that's what we're great at.
Amber D'Angelo:          
So things like the epic toilet paper shortage of 2020 come to mind. Can you give us a sense of what the last two years have been like in your industry?
Megan Smith:              
Yeah. The supply chain industry in general has just been blossoming and exploding over the last two years in terms of new entrants into this space,