How Kristofer Lopez, Daniel Shirazi, & Giovanni Ciaccio Built Forefront Global Logistics on Relationships, Discipline & Market Experience

The American freight industry moves approximately 11 billion tons of goods every year. The brokers who sit in the middle of that system, connecting shippers who need capacity with carriers who have it,  operate in one of the most competitive and unforgiving corners of commerce. Freight brokerage firms live and die on margin, speed, and trust. The barriers to entry are low, which means the market is crowded, and crowded markets have little tolerance for firms that cannot differentiate on execution. The ones that grow are the ones that get the relationship right before they get anything else right.

Forefront Global Logistics has spent the last several years getting it right. According to the company, they now operate three offices across Elk Grove Village, Chicago, and Miami, with a combined team of more than 60 people and a client base built on the kind of service that is intended to generate referrals before it generates press. Behind it are Kristofer Lopez, Daniel Shirazi, and Giovanni Ciaccio, three co-founders who grew up together outside Chicago, attended Lake Park High School, and eventually found themselves building a significant business together. 

The idea came from Kristofer Lopez. He had spent years working inside logistics brokerage before Forefront existed, absorbing the operational and revenue-driving sides of the business from the ground up. He studied finance and economics at Indiana University, with a minor in supply chain management, and left school with a detailed understanding of how freight brokerage works end to end. He also learned where it consistently fell short. Lopez saw a market that was under-serving clients who needed a more responsive, relationship-driven partner, and he believed a leaner operation built around execution and accountability could fill that gap. 

Lopez leads Forefront’s strategy, growth, hiring, and key client relationships, serving as the company’s CEO and driving its long-term vision. According to Forefront Global Logistics, he led the opening of the company’s third office in downtown Chicago, which grew to a 30-person team, and has focused on building an internal culture defined by ownership and long-term alignment. He grew up in Bloomingdale, Illinois, in a household where both parents worked and resilience was practiced rather than preached. That upbringing shaped his approach to leadership: competitive by nature, accountable by standard, and focused on the kind of team-building that compounds over time rather than produces short-term results.

Daniel Shirazi co-founded Forefront with a specific and well-developed foundation: a track record of building companies from the ground up. By the time he co-founded Forefront, he had already founded multiple ventures across different industries, a pattern that traces directly to his father, a serial entrepreneur who ran several successful companies and taught his son the mechanics of building a business by making him work through them firsthand. Shirazi studied finance and real estate at Marquette University, combining that academic grounding with hands-on experience across sales, operations, and new venture development. When he was working in sales before Forefront, he was not simply performing. He was among the top producers. That combination of financial fluency, entrepreneurial experience, and sales leadership is what he brought to the co-founding table.

At Forefront, Shirazi’s role has been key to the company’s physical expansion. He was on the ground at the original Elk Grove Village office from day one, helping establish the operation and build the client base that gave the company its footing. He then relocated to Miami to open and lead the company’s second office, growing it from a two-person outpost on Biscayne Boulevard into a 30-person team, according to Forefront Global Logistics. His involvement extended to the third office as well, contributing to the Chicago expansion that Lopez pioneered. The three-city footprint Forefront operates today reflects Shirazi's capacity to enter a market and build something that lasts.

Giovanni Ciaccio completes the team. He studied finance and real estate at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and went on to complete a graduate program in real estate finance and investment at DePaul University. Before co-founding Forefront, he served as acting CFO for a full-scale industrial real estate development firm, overseeing financial strategy across land acquisition, development, property management, and leasing. His family’s deep roots in industrial real estate along the O’Hare corridor gave Forefront a strong foundation in the market they targeted launch. Ciaccio already knew these types of clients along with the ecosystem they operated in.

As CFO, he manages the financial architecture of the business: cash flow strategy, capital allocation, and the structural and legal framework designed to support expansion without sacrificing stability. He approaches company-building the way he approaches balance sheets, with attention to the foundation.

Together, the three co-founders run a business that operates as the connective tissue of the supply chain. When a manufacturer in the Midwest needs to move a full truckload of product to a distribution center in the Southeast, or when a retailer needs a freight partner who can coordinate multi-stop Less Than Truckload shipments across several states, Forefront is the firm handling the sourcing, negotiation, and execution of that movement. The company works with a network of carriers across the country, vetting capacity, managing rates, and helping ensure freight arrives on time and within budget. In an industry where delays, miscommunication, and poor carrier relationships cost clients real money, the quality of a broker’s network and the reliability of their execution is the entire value proposition.

Forefront has built that value proposition on the foundation of relationships with carriers, with shippers, and within the team itself. The company’s growth across three markets reflects a model that scales without losing the responsiveness that defines the client experience at the firm level. As the freight industry continues to consolidate around larger players and technology-driven platforms, Forefront’s approach emphasizing senior relationships, financial discipline, and a team culture built around accountability positions it as the kind of mid-market operator that clients can choose when the stakes are high enough to matter.

For three co-founders who grew up in the same town and found their way back to the same table, Forefront is the product of timing, complementary expertise, and a shared conviction about how a business should be built. The result is a company still in the early stages of what it intends to become, and well on its way.