JUSSI TOIKKA’S CAREER FROM TRUCK DRIVER TO DIRECTOR OF A LOGISTICS COMPANY
Jussi Toikka (48 yrs) is the CEO of Cargo Handling Group. Jussi’s career path has been colorful. He has worked in the early stages of his career, e.g. as a driver and warehouse worker and later progressed to the position of Managing Director of a logistics company. Jussi is still closely involved in Cargo Handling Group’s everyday work. We interviewed Jussi and he tells about his childhood years, the early stages of his working career and the most memorable events of Cargo Handling Group.
CHILDHOOD YEARS IN HAMINA: TOIKKA FAMILY WAS UNITED BY BASEBALL
Cargo Handling Group’s CEO Jussi Toikka (48 years) has lived in Hamina, South-Eastern Finland, all his life. His childhood family includes mother Kyllikki, father Reijo and three years older brother Sami. The whole family was united by baseball, and Jussi started playing baseball at the age of 7 at the local baseball team Haminan Palloilijat.
FROM THE ARMY STRAIGHT TO BEHIND THE WHEEL AND TO MOSCOW
It was already clear to Jussi during his school days that he would continue in his father’s footsteps in logistics as an adult. Jussi’s grandfather, Jorma Toikka, had founded a transport company (Toikan Kuljetus) in 1952. Jussi’s father, Reijo Toikka, had later taken over the company. Jussi Toikka started as a truck driver right after the army in 1996. Mostly he did trucking in Finland, but a few times he also went to Russia. He remembers still clearly his first trip when he delivered a container load of shoes to Moscow. Russian customs bureaucracy seemed complicating and driving in a foreign country was different than in Finland. As you can imagine, the young boy was nervous when he had to manage the customs and border formalities on his own for the first time without knowing any Russian language.
HANDLING VOLUMES EXPOLODED
Jussi has experience in warehouse work since 2001, when he started working in his own family’s warehousing company in Hamina. In 2003, the families of Toikka and Peltola founded together Kouvola Cargo Handling Oy, and Jussi started commuting daily between Hamina and Kouvola and working as a terminal manager. In the early years, Cargo Handling mainly handled electronics goods. The early years of the company can be described as fast-paced. The handling volumes exploded: a couple of years after the founding of the company, Cargo Handling’s own 15,000 m2 warehouse was completed, and the company managed warehouse space of 70,000 m2 in total. The company had almost 200 employees. “Working with our Korean client was interesting. Every day was fast-paced and situations changed daily,” Jussi recalls.
CARGO HANDLING’S HARD YEARS
The handling of transit electronics goods relocated from Finland to Russia quickly starting from 2008. This was the beginning of Cargo Handling’s hard years, when the warehouses were almost completely emptied almost overnight. What does the CEO say about these times? Would you do something differently? “During the years of rapid growth, the company should have been able to develop and expand to other industries so that this quick end of work would not have been such a big shock to us,” Jussi replies. However, during Cargo Handling’s growth years, all the time was spent on managing the growth and there was no time for other development of the company.
NEW GROWTH: FOREST INDUSTRY AND START OF GLASS BUSINESS
When transit electronics handling ended in Kouvola, we immediately started looking for a new work. South-Eastern Finland already had a long tradition of handling products of the forest industry, and Cargo Handling Group wanted to join the market. The period of new growth began in 2009 when we got a chance to start collaboration with Metsä Group with a small volume, one customer at a time. Later, a small collaboration grew into a long-term and still ongoing partnership.
In 2009, we also went to glass business and made an agreement with an Belgian glass manufacturer for the construction of a new glass warehouse, flat glass handling and distribution to Finnish window factories and glass wholesalers. Jussi remembers the beginning of the project well: it was a top-secret construction project and before the first negotiation with the new potential customer, we didn’t know anything about our meeting partner and we imagined that we would discuss about handling of drinking glasses. Only at the meeting did it become clear that it was about a big project on handling flat glass in Kouvola.
Container handling and storage also began in Kouvola during this same time. Railway tracks enabled train traffic in the container terminal. Kouvola container yard is a good temporary storage location for tank containers and bulk containers still today.
CONTACTS FROM THE TRANSRUSSIA EXHIBITION
After the end of transit electronics handling, we started looking for new contacts at the TransRussia exhibition in Russia. We were were the first of the so called transit handling companies to go to Russia to market our services, because transit handling in the Kotka and Hamina area continued a little longer than in Kouvola. Jussi remembers Cargo Handling’s first TransRussia exhibition in Moscow in 2009 like this: “We left for the trade fair with a small budget by train at short notice with marketing roll ups in our hands”. However, everything was in order at our exhibition stand and we were able to find good new contacts and partners at the exhibition.
Jussi also remembers that many Finnish companies that had been attending Moscow fairs for a long time laughed a little at Cargo Handling’s modest stand and we were not immediately welcomed to join the group of other Finnish exhibitors. “Credibility had to be acquired through our own actions and merits”, Jussi says.
RUSSIAN TRAFFIC ENDS, NEW DIRECTION TOWARDS PORTS
Russian transport was big business for Cargo Handling Group for more than 10 years. We loaded dozens of trucks every day to Russia. Sometimes we loaded container trains to Russia and sometimes to China from our own Kouvola container yard. After the end of the Russian traffic, our new direction was towards ports. We established an office and a warehouse in the port of Hamina right after the start of the war in Ukraine in the spring of 2022. “The end of the Russian business was of course unexpected, but in the end, it was not as big a shock to us as the end of transit business in 2008. Our company had already a steady position in South-Eastern Finland and we had contacts to many customers. Situation was very different than in the early years of the company”, says Jussi.
HAMINA OFFICE STRENGTHENED US
Cargo Handling Group’s Hamina office has strengthened us during the past two and a half years. Currently, Cargo Handling Group offers terminal services in port: mainly we handle various bulk cargoes in Hamina, and this is where our company wants to further grow our business. In Hamina, the company also has all the same forwarding services as in Kouvola.
CEO’S WORK DAYS FULL OF ACTION
The CEO’s working days are full of action and changing situations. In a small organization, you often have to deal with things that come unexpectedly and every day we learn something new. Over the years, a group of reliable people has formed around Jussi, to whom it has been easy to share responsibility. Jussi highlights Cargo Handling’s Terminal Manager Kari Miettinen, who has worked at the company since the beginning, as well as other foremen with whom Jussi works on a daily basis. “We do e.g. advance planning and we go through what projects are coming up and how the staff is distributed to different warehouses,” says Jussi.
Jussi’s working days also include several meetings every day. After covid times, the big change has been that a large part of meetings are now Teams-meetings, and the number of meetings has increased. Fortunately, there are still face to face meetings with many customers.
COACH AT WORK AND ON THE BASEBALL FIELD
At work, Jussi currently manages the Cargo Handlin Group’s staff of around 100 people. It can be said that he is a team leader and a coach at work and at the baseball field, because Jussi spends pretty much all his free time entirely with baseball. His playing career that started as a child continued until 2004. In 2009 Jussi became interested in coaching. First, Jussi coached the junior teams of Hamina’s baseball team and later he became the head coach of the women’s baseball team. Jussi says that his biggest achievements in baseball has been the Hamina’s women’s team’s rise to baseball’s major league and getting the chance to work as a head coach at the major league level.
Jussi Toikka, CEO
Lives in Hamina, Finland
Family: wife and 2 daughters, a dog and a 19-year-old cat
Hobby: coaching baseball
Favorite food and drink: pizza and beer
Connect with Jussi in LinkedIn
