Isaac Hernandez didn’t set out to work in logistics. He studied sociology and criminal justice in college with law enforcement in mind, but life redirected him. Marriage, a spouse recovering from multiple knee surgeries, and the need for a steady paycheck led him to a junkyard job before he ever set foot in freight.
Nine years later, he’s built a career in freight sales as a National Account Manager at FWF, and the path there says a lot about how competitive instincts translate across very different arenas.
Basketball background applied somewhere new.
Isaac played basketball from childhood through one season as a walk-on at Grand Valley State. When asked whether the freight industry or a college locker room is more competitive today, he didn’t hesitate to pick freight, not because the stakes are higher, but because of scale. A team roster only has room for a dozen or so players. The freight market, by contrast, has thousands of people all competing for the same business.
That competitive edge didn’t show up right away on the job, though. Isaac initially read the workplace as buttoned-up and corporate, and figured his competitive streak had no place there. It took real conversations with customers (the kind who bluntly implied “I get calls like this all day, so what’s different about you?”) before the instinct clicked back on.
Learning to handle “No.”
If there’s one thing sports prepared him for, Isaac says it’s rejection. Games don’t always go your way, injuries derail plans, and how you respond to those setbacks matters more than avoiding them. That mindset carried directly into sales, where hearing “no” is closer to the norm than the exception.
He put it plainly:
"You gotta figure out a way to separate yourself from the others."
That idea of separation, like figuring out what makes a call worth answering among dozens a prospect gets every day became a staple in how he approaches the job.
Adaptability over one-size-fits-all.
Not every athlete succeeds in sales, and Isaac’s take on why comes down to adaptability. A pitch or approach that works for one customer can fall flat with the next, and the reps who struggle are often the ones who can’t adjust on the fly. He also pointed to today’s expectation of constant visibility (the same instinct that makes people track an Amazon package block by block) as something he’s tried to bring into his own communication style with customers.
Isaac’s advice for athletes considering sales.
Asked what he’d tell a room of athletes weighing a sales career, Isaac’s answer was direct: look in the mirror and ask whether you can handle being told no the vast majority of the time. Beyond that, he emphasized staying curious. In his words:
"Be a sponge as well. Soak up as much information as possible, ask questions, be curious."
Quick-fire takeaways.
- He’d take pre-game jitters over a first cold call any day.
- Being yelled at beats being ghosted, because at least it’s something to work with.
- Lane details matter more to him than home-court advantage.
- Given the choice, he’d rather be top commission earner than team captain (no surprise for someone who’s spent nine years building a sales career one relationship at a time).
