Neither Vickie Brown nor her daughter planned to build their careers around a cavernous warehouse on Savannah's westside.

Sometimes success just finds you where you least expect it.

Especially for Stephanie Wagner, a Georgia Tech-trained engineer who left a prestigious job at General Electric to join forces with her mom and start Accellatrans Warehousing and Logistics Inc.

The full-service transportation and distribution company sits a little more than a mile from Georgia Ports Authority's Garden City Terminal gates.

"Mom has always been the independent, hard-working, non-traditional-career type," Wagner said. "She's the risk-taker, the envelope-pusher, where I'm definitely the more conservative, analytical, 'let's slow down and think about this' type."

Together, the two make a formidable team.

Brown started out as a truck driver some 30 years ago, quickly working her way up to dispatcher, then terminal manager. She eventually founded her own company, which acts as the Savannah terminal for Pennsylvania-based Falcon Transport.

Wagner, meanwhile, was trying to juggle duties at GE, which required a good bit of travel, with raising her young daughter.

"Mom kept saying, 'Don't you want to come work with me and be home more?' Finally, she made me an offer I couldn't refuse," Wagner said, laughing.

Shortly after she joined her mother in 2007, Wagner noticed rising fuel prices were spurring an increased demand for warehousing and transloading services.

"One of our Falcon clients was looking for a warehouse to do transloading in Savannah," she said. "They suggested that we do it."

So, in May of 2008, they rented a 50,000-square-foot warehouse and Accellatrans was born. The timing couldn't have been worse.

A few months later, the bottom dropped out of the economy, and the company that originally spurred their investment no longer needed their services.

Undeterred, the two began calling on other Falcon customers and cold-calling to get their new company up and running, building on the relationships Brown had developed within the trucking community.

"I've always worked hard on the trucking side to provide great customer service, and we knew that's what we wanted to base our warehousing business on as well," Brown said.

That proved to be the ticket, as the young business began to grow in spite of a soured economy, doubling its revenues each year.

"We really do bank on our word-of-mouth reputation for being dependable and trustworthy," Wagner said. "Even though there is a trucking component to our business, other trucking companies know they can use our services without having to worry that we will try to take their business."

And they've grown space-wise, moving across the railroad tracks to Commerce Boulevard, where they rent 175,000 square feet in a 390,000-square-foot warehouse.

"We have plenty of room to grow, but we aren't really interested in getting huge," Wagner said. "We want to maintain that one-on-one customer service that has helped us get this far."

The company is in the process of becoming a bonded warehouse, which will allow it to store, under bond and in the joint custody of the importer and U.S. Customs agents, goods on which the duties are not yet paid.

And last year, Accellatrans was certified as a Women's Business Enterprise. Indeed, 16 of the company's 20 employees are female.

"We're really proud of that certification," Wagner said. "Does it get us more business? Not really. But it does send a message that you don't have to be part of the boys' club to be successful."

"We can do it, too."