LTL, Carrier Onboarding, and Multi-Stop Lanes | Final Mile 61

Nate Cross & Ben Kowalski answer your freight brokering questions and discuss:

• Reefer LTL
• Carrier Onboarding Tools
• Pricing Multi-Stop Loads
• Volume LTL Shipments

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Chapters

• 0:00 Carrier Onboarding and Reefer LTL
• 12:59 Pricing Multi-Stop Shipments With Driver Assist

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome back for another edition of the Final Mile. This is our series where we answer all of your Q&A, your listener questions here. So whether it's a comment on YouTube, an email directly to us, it could be, you know, facebook group Anywhere you guys are sending questions. We're trying to answer as many as we can. If you're not part of the Facebook group, click the link in the show notes or description box to join there. We've got almost 100,000 folks in there, a lot of good questions and please like, subscribe, share with your friends. You can go to our website, freight360.net for all of our other content, including the Freight Broker Basics course, and take a moment to check out the sponsors in the description box to help support the channel. That's quick scope, levity, blue book services and dat. All right, ben.

Speaker 1: 1:11

We've got four questions today. Our first one how can I source reefer ltl carriers man? This is a question that I have gotten for years from people and there's no perfect solution to find an LTV reefer LTV carrier directly. I have only had success doing it through co-brokerage agreements. So I'll give you my answer and if you have any other ideas on it, I found a regional reefer LTL co-brokerage company out of the Northeast that we partnered with on a few loads, and then really more recently the Expedite Alliance, expedite All, if you've heard of them. We're actually going to have them on our show, I think in the next month or so, but they've got a really good network of the smaller equipment types your box, sprinter, vans, etc. And they've, they've got I want to say it's like six, six hundred or so, um, refrigerated options in that network. Right, we talked with alex like last week about it. I think he said he's got like six or seven hundred temp controlled ones. Yeah, um, what, what's your take or approach on the temp controlled smaller shipments?

Speaker 2: 2:26

Hard work, just like everything else, a lot of manual work. Honestly, like if I'm going to build this up and I got the customers like this is where this stuff comes from. Like when you go to these big companies and you ask them like, oh well, how did you end up with, like this huge carrier base that handles your LTL reefer? They're like a lot of time, a lot of phone calls and a lot of loads and it starts very small, like anything else, right. So I would ask my customer I'm doing this now, I literally because we have lots of produce customers that all want a pallet or two moved last minute, all LTL reefer or partial, and it is very time consuming, right, for one major reason is like the temps don't match up. Like dry LTL, like you can throw whatever with whatever most of the time and it doesn't matter. But if you've got even a full size reefer and you want to get a pallet moved and your temp is 32, but everything else they're moving is at 38, like that doesn't fit. So it's that third variable that makes this more complicated, which again makes it harder, which again makes it more likely your customers asking for help, because it is hard, right, but that's where the opportunity is.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So what I do is like I literally post. I have guys post our loads up every day and call out to carriers and say, hey, do you guys ever do LTL? Do you ever do reefer LTL? Where in the lanes that you run, what days of the week, and create a spreadsheet or put them in your TMS and organize them and day by day you add a couple more, you add a couple more and then hopefully after a couple of weeks or a couple of months you've got a few dozen. You can see which days of the week, which temperatures they're looking for, on which areas. And when you match all these variables up now, you can start to have a carrier base that you can use to service your customer. Right, like you need one before the other, but like it just takes a lot of time and work. That's what we get paid for. Right, like there is no just easy button and you got LTL network, because then your customer wouldn't need you, they would just be using the service right, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:22

So I'm thinking back to my ltl days when I literally, like, was on a dock, um, and I would see this at times. Have you ever seen or heard of reefer pallets?

Speaker 2: 4:34

I have recently somebody told me we were doing something I think it was dry ice and the customer has, like temp controlled pallets. Yeah, it sits in, it doesn't need to be moved on a reefer, but it's literally ice.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Yeah, so like the same way that you'll have like reefer containers that'll go on a ship. They do have refrigerated pallets, so it's like your standard 48 by 40 pallet. I think they're like five feet tall. I mean the heights can vary depending on them. They're not super common, but if you have a customer that does a lot of that stuff it's worth a conversation to talk about it. I can't imagine they're very cheap and then you've got to somehow get that pallet back. So but yeah, I mean those are all things to think about.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Next question what are some carrier onboarding recommendations other than RMIS onboarding recommendations other than RMIS? There's a bunch of them out there. We're clearly fans of Highway. Highway has done a really good job in the last couple of years with their onboarding and monitoring. It's as simple as you send a link out. My carrier packets is another common one that's been around for a while.

Speaker 1: 5:41

The takeaway on onboarding, in my opinion, is you want to make it as easy as possible for everybody involved and you're going to pay a price for that, but you should be able to take the time out of onboarding that you would otherwise spend if it was a manual process, and that's what makes it worth the money. So if I can onboard a carrier in one minute or two minutes versus I got to spend 30 minutes to email over a contract They've got to, you know, sign it, scan it, send it back and then I've got to manually go pull their insurance and, you know, check them out on FMCSA and all those other things. No, I'd rather pay for a service that'll do all that for me. It'll house my carrier contract, it'll do all my vetting, it'll check their authority, it'll pull their insurance, et cetera. But yeah, like you've used my carrier packets right?

Speaker 2: 6:26

I've used both recently. In fact, I do use both. I use my carrier packets for a lot of the agencies and then in our brokerage we use RMIS. So I check them in both. But I've Good things to say about both of them. No real drawbacks.

Speaker 2: 6:40

The only drawback, I would say is I still used highway to vet them in addition, because, again, they are meant to do that. They do it to some degree, but they don't catch everything and as prevalent as fraud is, like that's the biggest risk. So to me, I definitely want to use highway on top of one of these and I use, like mostly RMS right now, just because we do more on that side of things. And it's pretty good. Like I mean, it gives me some warnings, it tells me when you know a carrier hasn't vetted their identity correctly. It says, hey, warning, do a couple extra steps to make sure this is who you're talking to, right? Yeah, highway also doesn't catch everything either. Like I've seen a couple slip through here. There were, like they were caught recently and it was like within 24 hours before it's been reported. So, like you still need to do the things.

Speaker 2: 7:29

Like, and this is one I feel like is the biggest help is if I, if a carrier calls me and books the load before I'm sending the rate tender, I'm literally going to pick the phone back up, look for some verified phone numbers and RMIS or highway, and I look for the number that didn't call me. I don't care if it's the accounting phone number, I'm calling some other phone number to see if that carrier answers. And I'm going hey, I'm asking like hey, I was just booking a load with you. I wanted to confirm we were talking to the right company. They'll usually tell you very quickly like oh no, that guy doesn't work here. Or oh yeah, that was Paul, he's working on our reefers up in the Northeast.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Like again, it doesn't catch all of them, but like that is a really good step to do. Beyond this and to your point, it's really the speed and the ease of doing it because, like to get all the insurance, get the certificates in your name, like it is a time consuming process to do this manually. Like I've been working in the industry long enough that I used to do it manually, so like to me there's a huge upside to doing this. I would say, if you're new and you're not really moving any loads yet, manually is not the worst thing in the world If you still need to vet them, like if you're not using the carrier onboarding software, you still should be using carrier vetting software and I think you should use two like at least carrier 411 and maybe Highway are the two that I would probably pick right now.

Speaker 1: 8:50

Yeah, dat onboard is another one from DAT, if you're in their ecosystem and you made a good point and I go through this. So if we have someone new at our brokerage that hasn't used Highway before, either for vetting or for onboarding, I walk them through a deep dive and I'm like, and this will apply to any system you're using, right, just because it automates it for you doesn't mean you don't have to understand what it's doing. I always take everybody through like for 15, 20 minutes. I'm like, hey, here's every single thing we're looking at and it's doing it all for you, so you don't have to scroll through this stuff. You need to know.

Speaker 1: 9:25

You should understand. Here's what we're looking at. It's looking at X, y and Z on the authenticity of the individual, x, y and Z on the verification of their assets. It's looking at these items on safety, compliance, authority, insurance, etc. But it does it all for you and it tells you if they're good to go or not and if they're not good to go and there's maybe an override situation. Now we're going to take a deeper dive and I show them through all that stuff and I think it helps because whether you're brand new or you're seasoned, you should understand what it is like, what the actual manual steps are that are being automated to get your job done.

Speaker 2: 10:04

So because and I think just to simplify that right, like I think people need to use the tool, but they need to know what the tool's doing to your point. And I think the third thing I always go through is here's why we're doing that. Because here's how people are trying to impersonate people and steal freight. So if they're a criminal, this is what they're doing. This is why we're looking at these things to prevent those, so that we know who we're doing business with and it's their truck and the insurance is good and all of those things. Right, because you get the why, the what and the how. Now, all of a sudden, they can start to remember it and use it.

Speaker 2: 10:38

The other analogy I always use and everyone's kind of laughs like you learn to do long division in what, like second or third grade, and everyone remembers back and kind of thinks in their own head like why do I need to learn how to put this little bracket and to carry the zero and to do long division manually, which takes forever. Like there's calculators everywhere, there's one every kid's pocket, probably, like in most schools. But the thing is, yeah, if you don't learn how to do it manually, what you don't realize is if you fat finger the calculator and you just run with that answer, you don't have the understanding to know like that's probably not the right one. So when you use the tool and it doesn't give you something right, you get this feeling right away like oh, let me do that again because like that doesn't seem right. Like to me that's how you use tools effectively is also understanding how, what and why.

Speaker 1: 11:31

You know you just made. This is a little off topic, but it's kind of like remember we did an episode with Tamir Dove from from DAT on like where the rate view data comes from, yeah, and somebody commented on that video like recently and they're like wow, they're like like I had no idea, they're like I thought the rates came from what people were posting the loads for and it's like no, 0% of that is incorporated in there. So it's good to understand where you know where the data comes from. But in this case, to onboarding, what the steps, what steps are being automated to help you make a decision? But hopefully that helps. Here's the other one.

Speaker 2: 12:04

I wanted to piggyback on that just as like a small segue, because I was talking to somebody about this this week.

Speaker 2: 12:08

They're like why does some of the rates I get from DAT really like seem like accurate to what I'm paying and some seem very different, right, it's what we were talking about in the podcast is like how many trucks are there? If in the podcast is like, how many trucks are there, if it's an area where there's like four trucks a day, there's a very wide variation on what you pay, if it's LA to Chicago and there's a thousand trucks that run that every day, you have more data sets so your average is more likely, right? And if you look at the DAT multi-lane, it'll give you this. It'll literally say number of reports. So, like the busier, high traffic lanes have higher numbers. The ones that have lower numbers, like three reports, that rate isn't even close to what you're going to pay. Like you really just don't know because, like nobody really moves it, so there's not a lot of information about it, right? So, like, understanding what's behind this I think makes it far easier to use these things.

Speaker 1: 12:57

Totally, it's a good point, all right. Our next question how do you price a load that is multi-stop with driver assist? All right, we've we've touched on multi-stop in the past. Um driver assist, there's a. This depends on how how much driver assist, but I would say floor loaded tires, probably a lot of money, a couple pallets, a little bit different.

Speaker 1: 13:23

You could usually like categorize as, like you know, a light assist, a moderate assist or like a really intense driver's assist where they're breaking their back and that so we I mean we'll give you a generalized answer here. But multi-stop and actually I think Steven gave a pretty good breakdown with he had like an exponential thing that he did with some of his customers I've always kept it like rule of thumb. You're usually paying like 50 to 100 bucks extra per stop, depending on how much time it's taking up. You're basically compensating this driver for their time is really what it comes down to. If it's a quick couple pallets getting offloaded, you're not adding that much time onto it. But the driver assist, that's what really matters, because now you're using their time and physical labor.

Speaker 1: 14:14

I've seen a driver assist that pays $50 because it's seriously very little. Then I've seen it where you're adding in $400 because it's hours and hours and a lot of intense work. What is your? Let's see, stephen said, especially if the intermediate stops are not defined or variable. Yeah, okay, ben, what's your take on this one the thing.

Speaker 2: 14:37

I was going to add is like to just an overview on how I just price multi-stops, like the important piece, right is. It's pretty straightforward, it's where's it coming from and where's it finishing. Why does where it's finishing matter? The most we were talking about in the last episode is what's the market like over there. You're sending them to the middle of nowhere where the next load is 300 miles away. You're going to have to price it higher. If it's going to a major market, you're probably closer to the median.

Speaker 2: 15:00

You take that rate per mile, right, and then you run all of the stops. Like I use Google, like cause it literally just let you add the stops and then you can see it like traffic wise. Take the total mileage with all the stops, multiply that times the rate per mile from the beginning to the end. That's close to your line haul. Then I add 75 to a hundred bucks for each stop. That gets you pretty close to what you're going to end up quoting without a margin.

Speaker 2: 15:27

And the other thing is, again I look back at where I'm sending them, because if it's to the middle of nowhere, where there's no other freight to pick up, I'm going to probably add another five or 10% because, think about it, when you go to cover that load and you talk to that driver, they do not want one pick, four drops. So you're going to have to pay a premium usually to get them to take that load. And are they by appointments? Like that's a big one. If they're first come, first serve appointments and they can get there whenever, okay, that's not as big of a deal. If they're going to grocery stores that have very strict appointments and if they miss one, they're a work in that takes six hours, you've got to pay them more on the higher end, right? Like those little things do factor into this.

Speaker 1: 16:03

I'm glad you. I'm glad you broke that down, because I skipped that part. It does matter where it's starting and where it's finishing, cause what I've had the mistake I've seen a lot of people make is they're like, let's say, it's one extra stop, right, maybe it's one pick to drop. I'll make it up Buffalo to Nashville, to Orlando, right? You're not going to run Buffalo to Nashville and then Nashville to Orlando and add the two together. Right, because what matters is where are they starting and where are they finishing. Right, because just because they're dropping in Nashville doesn't mean that they're able to Accessing the market.

Speaker 2: 16:38

Yeah, they're not in Nashville doesn't mean that they're able to Accessing the market. Yeah, they're not Driving through it their target doesn't impact them at all.

Speaker 1: 16:43

But you're absolutely right. Origin to destination rate per mile and then times your total mileage including your other stops, and then you add in your accessorials. And to clarify what Stephen said, he said some customers will give you an origin and a destination but average four to five stops. They don't know where the stops are but they will be within the route, tier the stops to account for time and if the stops receiving hours don't line up, add additional time. Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 1: 17:12

I personally haven't dealt with ambiguity like that where you don't know where and when they are. But to your point, ben, like where the timing of it like I had one a few years ago where, like I think it was three drops along the way and the times for the drops if we didn't clarify to the driver just because they're open during those times doesn't mean that if they drop late at one of them they're going to make all the all their stops. Like we had one where it's like, yeah, they're, they're open from, uh, midnight to 4 am but you need to be there at midnight because if you're not there at midnight you're not going to make the next stop and that's kind of like we're just because your customer is giving you information. You need to like synthesize all that and clearly communicate that to your driver to prevent service failures.

Speaker 2: 17:58

And here's one other addition, right. So one is, I think, like what I say is like to guys I'm teaching this. I'm like put your carrier hat on. Like I want you to think like a driver when you're looking at this right, think about, when you have to get there, what issues you could have, because, like I've had those where the reschedule is through a system and sometimes takes 24 hours to even get a response. Like so if you miss the second stop because of maybe it's not the driver's fault, like maybe it was just too long to load and that was the shipper's issue they get to the first stop a little late and they've got to wait a few hours to the next appointment and the whole rest of the schedule is now needs readjusted and reset. And then you go to their systems. You're like no appointments available. So now this driver right ends up in this scenario where they're just waiting and waiting and there's like literal layovers in the middle of these stops because you can't get appointments fast enough. Not every receiver is like super accommodating and will help. Like they might just go like Walmart, like hey, just throw the email in the system and then just wait to get a response, or go into this TMS and maybe you get it in a few hours. Maybe you don't Like that driver is losing money in these scenarios.

Speaker 2: 19:05

So, like you want to ask these questions hey, how are the receiving? Are they a little flexible? If the guy's a little bit late or a little early, do they work them in? Do you guys comp layover if they can't get them unloaded and he's there on time? What do we do about the rest of the appointments? Do they work with you or do I need to handle those? How easy are they to schedule appointments? If something does happen, like a delay in loading at your receiver, can I get these adjusted quickly? Right, because those are the problems you're going to run into and it's better to ask first than to experience them and then learn from the problem Exactly.

Speaker 1: 19:39

That's a really good point, all right. Last question Can I ship long non-palatized freight on an LTL carrier? Yes, I dealt with this quite a bit back in the day with like floor loaded, really small, gauged, like steel beams or like steel rods. Typically with LTL if you're over a certain pallet count or over a certain weight for the shipment, it's not considered a true LTL shipment anymore and their LTL pricing goes out the window and it becomes what's called a volume quote. So if you exceed the size, the weight, pallet count et cetera, you're going to do a volume quote, which is you're typically just going to email or call your sales rep at that LTL company and they can price that out for you have both size and weight available in each lane.

Speaker 1: 20:38

Um, because sometimes your volume shipment might get you a better price than, um what you would pay for if you just priced at standard ltl, because they might be like yeah, like I remember the steel being still like rods we used to do. We're like, yeah, we can shove those on the side of the trailer and then another bundle on the other side of the trailer balances the weight out and we can still fit our pallets the proper way and it's like basically like free extra shipments to throw out there, doesn't take up any more space, it's great. But then you have other stuff, like we would do some floor loaded um steel plates and that stuff would suck because you're taking up weight with very little volume and now you've wasted a whole trailer floor loading um big pieces of um steel like that. So it just all depends, you can do it. It's just you're not going to run up to your standard ltl pricing calculator. It's going to go through a uh one of the rep pricing reps at the company, whether it's through a co-brokerage or directly with the ltl carrier. They will price it out for you.

Speaker 1: 21:35

Um, keep in mind, ltl pricing is dependent on if you have it shipped up within a certain amount of time. They might say, hey, this pricing is valid for 24 hours or 48 hours. So make sure you're aware of that before you go and quote your customer and the pricing might change. But yeah, any other thoughts on that one? It's pretty straightforward.

Speaker 2: 21:57

I have no personal experience or but everything you said made sense and I agree, nothing bad good deal, roger.

Speaker 1: 22:05

That all right. Good episode, good questions, keep sending them our way. Hey, if you guys have any um topic requests for our regular podcasts, send them our way. We've got a pretty awesome fall lined up with some guests coming out to talk about different um topics that they're experts in and we're not necessarily so, but thanks for listening and sending us your questions. Any final thoughts here, ben?

Speaker 2: 22:28

Whether you believe you can believe, you can't you're right, and until next time, go Bills.