About Us

From Waste Industry Salesman to Budding Entrepreneur

Bill Lowther has invested his entire career in the waste and recycling industry. After graduating college, he went directly into sales for one of the most respected independent waste service companies in the industry at the time, Ace Service Corporation in Philadelphia, PA. Ace Service was a multi-generational company run by Bill Eels, who became a mentor to Lowther, ingraining an extraordinary level of attention to customer service into every future endeavor he would pursue. Ace Service was subsequently sold to a major waste service conglomerate.

Soon thereafter, Bill became quite disillusioned by the lack of attention to the level of customer service he had become accustomed to at Ace Service and decided to change directions and focus on his own entrepreneurial venture. That venture became a very successful equipment rental company called GEAC, which stands for General Equipment Acceptance Corporation. GEAC provides compactors, bailers and recycling equipment to commercial customers all across the United States to this day.

It All Started With a Random Phone Call

CMS Logistics was born out of an unplanned opportunity in February of 2006. Bill received a phone call from a college student in Vermont who needed someone to come and clean out his father’s garage and asked if GEAC provided dumpster rental services. He found GEAC from an ad Bill had placed in the Yellow Pages for compactor repair work, back when Yellow Pages were the go-to for finding just about anything, and online was just beginning to really take off.

On a whim, Bill took the order and worked his way through it. Between that moment and the day that container was set to arrive in the driveway of that garage, Bill quickly realized there was pent up demand in the marketplace for that type of service, and it wasn’t readily available online. The waste industry in particular was not tech savvy, and customers weren’t thrilled with the services they were getting.

Bill saw the great business model opportunity in front of him. It would require building a team that could get really good at generating and capturing online leads coupled with the outstanding customer service that was ingrained in him since college. But in order to do all this it would take technology… technology that wasn’t readily available through shopping carts and off the shelf ERP systems like they are today. It would have to be built from scratch from the ground up.

From Whiteboard Idea to Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise

Bill immediately diverted a large portion of his attention from the compactor rental business and began to whiteboard ideas for making waste hauling and recycling available online through websites and landing pages, making them instantly and affordably accessible for anyone in need, anywhere in the country.

Those whiteboard brainstorming sessions became the business plan for CMS Logistics, evolving over years of long days, sleepless nights and heavy financial investments into a crack team of dedicated people, leveraging systems and processes using advanced business rules coupled with millions of lines of code, all driven by CMS’s core value of obsession with the customers’ needs. That obsession continues to drive the hiring of committed team members and ongoing improvement of the technology, processes and systems that sit at the center of CMS’s operations. CMS Logistics became one of the first movers in the space and the sites that were built back then still dominate most of the US.

Where Do We Go From Here?

CMS Logistics has only just begun. There is a void in the marketplace for scaling a company that can perform anywhere in the country and take the hassle out of our customers’ hands, while retaining a core focus on their needs. And it is recognized by our customers when that is actually practiced. They instinctively know there is something different about working with CMS, from the project managers who handle every single detail of the process with a “no excuses” attitude, to the accounting department that goes beyond the call of duty every day with customized billing solutions and streamlining of complex invoices for national customers. The list goes on. Technology and systems continue to improve, people continue to develop, and it is looking like the sky’s the limit.