Coming Full-Circle To Where People Matter Most
Coming to work at Bestway International is coming home for Rick Belk – the ideal bow on the package that’s been his career. And as a customer service professional with a specialty in air export, Belk touts the biggest factor that brought him back to the company where he started his career in 1990:
Actually caring about people.
“I’m more customer service-oriented,” Rick says. “I focus on what it means to form relationships with customers, and to care about your clients and their accounts – and become friends.”
With that genuine care for customer service in his heart, Rick closed the longest of career loops in October 2025, when he returned to his roots and rejoined Bestway International.
His career originated at Bestway in 1990, when it was a much smaller company, and he continued in the same role until 2004.
“During my initial foray into the freight forwarding business, I learned everything about customer service and work ethic,” Rick says. “It was a much smaller company in those days. We only had five or six of us.”
He eventually left to pursue attractive opportunities with a competitor before leaving the logistics field entirely and becoming a police dispatch supervisor – a role he maintained for 11 years. While that experience was very different from logistics, Rick nevertheless says it stood out to him for the opportunity it provided, knowing he had purpose and was making a difference.
But logistics kept calling, and eventually he returned to the field and rejoined the competitor that had hired him in 2004. That experience, he acknowledges, was not what he hoped it would be.
“I spent another three years over there,” Rick recalls. “But they are a big corporation, and they were more about the bottom-line dollar and all their processes. It was very impersonal. It didn’t align with what I felt customer service should be.”
The word that Rick was frustrated reached Bestway President and Managing Partner Jay Devers, as well as Linda Reynolds, who had been Rick’s supervisor during his Bestway years and is still with the company today. They reached out to him with a simple message:
“Bestway is still Bestway.”
Now in his late 50s and wanting any job he took to be his last, Rick relished the opportunity to come home. Bestway is bigger now – with exponentially more employees compared to the five or six during his first stint with the company – but he quickly recognized the culture hasn’t changed at all.
“I’m in my third month back, and the way the company is run – both for the internal employees and for the customer externally – is so caring and warm, and about relationships,” Rick says. “I’m 100 percent confirmed in my heart that I’m at the right place with Bestway.”
His day-to-day duties involve making sure customers’ air freight gets from Point A to Point B, which of course is often more complicated than that description makes it sound. But Rick is always on top of the details.
“I’m the one they deal with,” he says. “It’s not farmed out here with different people to talk to. If there’s something to be done, I’m the one to talk to.”
Even so, he values the support of the internal team that is so responsive in helping him meet the customers’ needs.
“If I was doing it myself in a cubicle, it would be a real challenge to manage,” Rick says. “But the fact that we have such great people and a great team, that to me is what makes us successful.”
The people connection between Rick and Bestway is a longstanding one – even predating his first go-round with the company that started in 1990. That’s because Rick and Jay were co-workers as teenagers at one of the hottest concepts of the day – now extinct – the neighborhood video store. Back in the 1980s, their employer’s local chain of video stores was one of Kansas City’s biggest competitors of, and ultimately acquired by, Blockbuster Video.
“You tend to remember those managers from those early high-school jobs, usually for very good and bad reasons,” Jay says. “Rick showed me by daily example how to put the customer first, work hard, do things right, and also have fun doing it. To be working together again after all these years is both a blessing to me and a great benefit for our clients.”
That connection helped Rick land his first job at Bestway. It was his heart for customers and people that led him to what he expects will be his last.
“My happiness comes from providing something of value,” Rick says. “I get satisfaction out of knowing I have a purpose and I’m making a difference.”
He couldn’t have picked a better place to do it.