One year ago, I launched The JR Moore Group.

Not as a soft landing between roles. Not as a holding pattern with a logo. I had spent thirty-eight years in logistics and supply chain, twenty-eight of them at DHL Global Forwarding, where I scaled the Global Service Center for the Americas and developed global frameworks adopted across a network of nearly six thousand employees worldwide. It was the kind of run where the next title is supposed to be the reward. I walked away from it, on my own terms, to build the firm I had come to believe the market was missing.

The supply chain and logistics world is crowded with providers who will gladly tell you to move your work to their location, their delivery center, their model. What it lacked was a firm that sits above that decision instead of inside it. Not another BPO. Not a generalist firm with a hand in everything and a specialty in nothing. A small, deliberately boutique firm built for one thing: strategic advisory on how a supply chain or logistics organization decides where its work should live, who should do it, and how it should be organized.

I had been developing that discipline for a while before I had a name for it. The name is Bestshoring.

Let me be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the distinction matters. I did not invent a word. The advisory work already existed, scattered in fragments across the industry, handled piecemeal by people who never connected the pieces. What did not exist was the unifying discipline: a single framework, defined deliberately, aimed squarely at freight forwarders, 3PLs, 4PLs, and supply chain and logistics operators. That is the work I set out to do. To take something every organization was already doing by accident and turn it into something they could do by design.

Because here is the thing I kept coming back to. Every organization is already engaged in Bestshoring. They just don’t know it. The moment a company decided where to locate, who to hire, what to outsource, and how to organize the work, it made Bestshoring decisions, implicitly, through accumulated choices rather than deliberate design. The discipline does not ask anyone to do something new. It asks them to make explicit what has been implicit, and to design deliberately what previously evolved by default.

I first called the framework The Bestshoring Hierarchy. I renamed it The Bestshoring Architecture, because “hierarchy” implied a rigid top-down order and the truth is more nuanced. Strategic clarity comes first. Location and delivery model are peer decisions that constrain each other, not a sequence. The operating model is built last, to fit the choices above it. Technology and AI sit across all of it as enablers, never a fourth place to send work. Bestshoring is architecture, not geography. A year of real engagements only sharpened that. Every situation that went sideways had the same root cause: someone started with where before they were clear on why. Every one that worked had run the sequence in the right order.

Here is what gets missed, and it is the reason I built the firm around this and not around cost. When the decision about where work lives is made well, the return is not a cheaper invoice. It is a better operation. It shows up as value, as accuracy, as consistency, as flexibility, as agility, and those compound into the one thing most cost models never price: resilience. The organizations that designed their distributed model deliberately are the ones that hold steady when the ground moves under them, when a lane closes, when a currency swings, when the geopolitical or economic climate turns against them. A model built only to be cheap breaks under that pressure. A model built to be right absorbs it.

And the opportunity is not what it was even a few years ago. The work that can be done this way has climbed. What began as back-office processing matured into mid-office, and it did not stop there. Front-office and senior work once considered too close to the customer to move, key account management, program management, control tower operations, now runs from distributed centers, and runs well. The discipline is expanding in two directions at once, deeper into higher-value work and wider across more functions. That is a large and still growing opening, and most organizations are looking at a version of it that is already out of date.

And that gap runs down both sides of the market. The organizations buying these services often do not know how to design what they are actually buying. The providers delivering them are built to execute, not to advise on the strategy that should come first. So the most important question in the room frequently has no owner. The buyer often cannot specify what they need, and the provider is paid to deliver what was specified. Everyone executes the brief flawlessly and the wrong thing gets built beautifully. That is the space I built the firm to stand in.

The conviction was never the question. I was certain about the idea. What I could not be certain of was the market: whether it would understand and accept strategic advisory as its own discipline, and specifically Bestshoring consulting, as something to value rather than a line item to question. Selling the value of strategic advisory to a market trained to buy bodies and rates is a little like selling blueprints to people who have only ever paid for bricks. The bricks feel realer. They are also how the building comes down. I went in knowing that understanding has to be built, not assumed, and I chose to build through that stretch rather than wait for certainty first.

The doubt, when it came, was never about the idea. It was about whether companies would see the value. Not how long acceptance would take, but whether the market would recognize what strategic advisory around Bestshoring actually delivers. Strategic advisory has the inconvenient quality of being invisible when it works. Nobody throws a parade for the disaster that never happened.

I have built these teams, and I have seen what the best looks like because I molded it. The people who do this work bring an ownership and a hunger I have rarely seen matched, because for many of them the work carries a weight that is hard to see from a corner office. That weight shows up in the output, as accuracy, as consistency, as a refusal to let a customer down. That is not a cost story. It is the reason a well-designed distributed model delivers more value than a cheaper one ever could.

I have also seen where this breaks, and it is almost never the talent. It is the leadership. Too many leaders do not yet know how to lead a team they cannot walk past in the hallway. They have never had to carry the culture of their organization across to people who now sit at the center of it, in another city or another country, doing work the business depends on every day. That gap is real, it is widening, and closing it is some of the most important work this firm does.

And there is a personal truth under all of it. I have always taken the work as my own. Across thirty-eight years and every role I held, I never treated the business as a job to be carried out. I treated it as mine to grow, to expand, to lead, to build people inside of, to push toward results that many of my peers were content to leave on the table. That was never a posture I put on to start a firm. It is the reason the firm had to exist. At some point, taking it as my own had to mean that it actually was.

That same conviction showed up most clearly in the work I refused.

The JR Moore Group is agnostic and fiduciary, and those are not a slogan. They are the structure of the firm. We work for the company that hires us and for no one else. We do not own BPOs. We do not stand up our own offshore centers. We hold no downstream commercial relationship that could bias a recommendation. More than once this year I was offered partnerships that would have been lucrative and easy, arrangements with providers who wanted an advisor steering clients toward their delivery centers. Every one of them would have broken the only thing that makes our advice worth anything: that we have no stake in the answer except the client’s. I turned them down. The moment a strategy firm has a placement to sell, the fiduciary promise is already broken.

The alliances I did fight for are a different kind entirely. They are technology and implementation capability, not provider relationships that bias advice. The design is deliberate: keep the advisory brain independent, and build an ecosystem around it that can answer the client’s “now what.” Those partnerships give clients a real path to execution without the firm ever owning the delivery it recommends. They strengthen the independence rather than threaten it.

What tells me the idea is not mine alone is who else stepped into the rooms. This year put me on the SSON stage in Orlando, the flagship event of the largest shared services and outsourcing community in the world, where I had the chance to put this language into the industry’s vocabulary from the podium. I led sessions on The Great Scope Expansion, the question of what work global business services should own next, and on Governance as Optionality in the Age of AI. And I was asked to join the board of the CSCMP South Florida Roundtable as Vice President of Membership, the regional chapter of one of the largest supply chain associations in the world. I did not ask for those rooms. The industry opened them to me.

Alongside that, a year produced a real body of proprietary work: the Bestshoring Architecture as the public guide, the Six Dimensions of Bestshoring Readiness as the dimensional model, the Bestshoring Readiness Health Check™ as the diagnostic, and an internal operating system that governs how the firm itself runs.

We don’t move freight. We build the operational backbone that lets you move more of it. That is the firm in one line, and a year of work has only made me more certain of it.

None of this is theory. The case studies on this site are the same argument made concrete.

To the clients who handed a one-year-old firm decisions that mattered, the leaders who gave an unproven idea their time and their trust, and the partners who chose to build alongside us rather than around us: thank you. You did not simply confirm the gap was real. You trusted someone to stand in it.

One year says the idea holds. Year two is where it compounds.

Johnnie Moore
Founder & CEO, The JR Moore Group