Freight 360

Tech in Freight Brokerage | Episode 298

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Benjamin and Stephen dive into how technology is changing freight brokerage in this episode of Freight 360:

  • Using TMS and automation to boost efficiency
  • Helping small brokerages adopt and improve tech
  • Avoiding the hype and making sure systems actually work

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to this week's episode of Freight 360. Nate is out on military leave this week, so Stephen will be joining me as we discuss mostly technology tools, things we're doing on the automation side, some stuff with AI, things we're demoing, things we're using to make things more efficient, more effective, and just chatting a little bit about what we're demoing, things we're using to make things more efficient, more effective, and just chatting a little bit about what we're seeing in the industry. So stick with us as we discuss pretty much everything we're working on and stuff that we're seeing available, stuff that's just coming out, where we think things are going. Before we jump into it, a little bit of sports. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I know you're probably not a big tennis fan but did you watch any of the US Open or see any?

Speaker 1:

of the news related to it. No, I didn't. I've been pretty uh, head down on the computer. It was wild. So like I really just started watching tennis this year. I played in like high school but other than that I didn't really follow much tennis. But my daughter started taking lessons and I started playing, mostly just for cardio.

Speaker 1:

But this is the first time like I actually like watch the tournament to the French Open and I didn't know this either. Like it's two weeks long, so it's on just like every day, which is also one fun and just pretty interesting. It is a very long tournament but it came to the finale, or the final, and the finals were number one and number two. So it's a guy named Skinner, um Yannick Skinner from Italy versus Carlos Alcarez. Um Skinner's number one. Alcarez is number two and the last five um grand slams were won by one of the two of them. Right, and this is, I think, the only or the first time they've played in the finals is one versus two. They played in like the semi-finals just the way the brackets broke down before, but like this was the first time it might have been in a very long time where one played number two but um one. It was one of the best tennis matches I've ever watched.

Speaker 1:

Now again, I haven't watched a ton, but for anyone out there, like, like for men's, it's best of five. So you basically play games right. So it's 15, 30 to 40 to 45. You win one game, then you win a set, and then you've got to win six sets. Without going super deep into it, you got to win by two. So if you get, if it's six and six, there's a tiebreaker. But you basically need to win best of five sets and each game is one point into the set Right, and Alcarez was down two sets. So at any point in time if Skinner won one more right, it was over, and I don't think Alcarez ever came back and then he not only won the next two, so it goes to the fifth one, but then it went to a tiebreaker in the fifth one. So it would be like the equivalent of football, like double, double overtime in like the super bowl of like the two best teams all year and both of them had like crazy, crazy instances where, like you absolutely thought it was over and you thought like there's no way the other guy can come back and wins like four points and then he's winning and then you think there's no way the other guy's going to come back and then does, and then it ends up in a tiebreaker like it was one of the best sporting events I've seen in a long time.

Speaker 1:

And then this week got the us open at oakmont. So super excited to watch that for father's day and for anyone that doesn't follow golf that much. Right, like Oakmont is considered, if not the one of like the hardest courses in the world with the fastest greens and normally you'll see a pro shoot. You know anywhere from like a handful under to like a really good score of like you know six or seven under on 18. Right, rory I think played on Monday and he shot like an 81, which for anyone out there is pretty much like what Nate or I would maybe shoot on like a good day Right. So this course is playing crazy difficult. Could see like the highest scores we've ever seen. If it doesn't rain it's going to a wild us open watch. And it's in pittsburgh. I was there in like the early 2000s, so like super excited to just watch it. Plus I got to play that course. So like it's super cool watching the us open at a course like I've actually walked and played and yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 1:

There was a. In fact, I saw a video I was telling my buddy this morning. Guys, 122 yards out, which is normally like a wedge, maybe a nine iron for some people that don't hit that far. This guy hit a putt A putt Normally you would hit the ball for anyone that's not a fan of golf like 20 foot, which is about the stroke this guy took to roll the ball. This ball rolled 122 yards next to the pin. That's how fast the fairways and greens are like. It is going to be nuts, so super excited for that. Um, anything else in sports oh, aaron rogers signed with the steelers this week too, so all kinds of shit going on in pittsburgh.

Speaker 2:

Aaron rogers and uh, nick chubb was released from the Browns, which I mean. It's fun for me as a Bengals fan and every so every year one of my customers is up in Cleveland and they're Browns fans, so we take them to the Browns Bengals game, and it was. I had some fun getting some digs in with Nick Chubb leaving, yeah. Speaking of golf have you looked at the golf simulators for your?

Speaker 1:

house. Yeah, I was going to put one in my house. I used to practice on them all the time down here.

Speaker 2:

I started getting a bunch of ads for the golf simulators and I looked them up like two years ago. They're like $20,000, $30,000. You can get a good one now for like $5,000 in your house.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a really big difference. My cousin has one. Oh yeah, my cousin Darren Kowalski. He won the tri-state open as an amateur last week, which is a professional event. He won as an amateur by like four strokes so he was in the news in Pittsburgh, but he has one in his garage. So there's basically two or three different ways. There's Doppler, which is kind of like how your car actually uses, think like cruise control, where it knows how far away the car is in front of you. So there's Doppler ones. Those are the.

Speaker 1:

I think oh, my mind's going blank, it's not SkyTrack. Skytrack is one that uses, I think, light or infrared, the Doppler one TrackMan, the ones I use on tour, like those ones like are the most accurate right with ball spin speed, where the ball is going to go. I still think those just the monitor that reads the ball. I still think those are like around 10. But to your point, like you can get like a decent setup in your house for like 2500 bucks, maybe even less.

Speaker 1:

You could probably get one for 1500, I've seen. I mean basically need a mat. That's the piece you really want, because like you can get now a projector, throw a screen up in your garage and a net Like it's not a huge expense anymore. The problem I had is like I don't have space to swing a driver on my patio because I wanted to put one right outside my office when we moved in and I can swing an iron back there, but I don't have enough room to swing a driver. Otherwise it would have been the first thing I did in this house. Yeah, yeah those things are awesome.

Speaker 2:

So much fun too. Yeah, yeah, cause you can play real courses on it too, which is fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, play real courses and they're really good.

Speaker 1:

I mean the ones that I, when I learned to golf again when I first moved down here, cause I really wanted to work on it I took lessons at golf tech and you do them inside and the coolest part about it, which I think helped me learn the fastest, is there's cameras on you at golf tech, so like if I put one in my house, I would probably put a camera on me and then when you hit the ball you see it, just like you do like on TV or video game, like you watch where the ball goes, but then you press a button with your foot and it shows you swinging the golf club.

Speaker 1:

Cause it's really hard when you're learning to swing with a coach and he's like no, you're all your elbows coming out, you're leaning over and like you hear the words, but you can't really see what you're doing and being able to see a recording of yourself. Right after you hit the ball, you see yourself slice it and then you see a video and he goes look your arm's doing this. It just helps you learn so much faster.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, there was one I was looking at. It's's got three cameras plus like a sensor or whatever and it was. I think it was like in the five grand ballpark for like the whole setup screen, that everything. But it also stores like a billion swings and like a database and the AI it'll tell you where you need to fix things. But you can take it to the golf course with you and it'll record your swings as you're on the golf course yeah, they put.

Speaker 1:

I think that you put them in the back of your golf clubs. They there's like a little plug at least something a little.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, this one was just all cameras and sensors in the little box and you just carry it with you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, oh that is pretty wild. Yeah, yeah, they're really pretty cool. And the news Trump and Elon apparently going at it. What I'm really curious about, like I mean clearly there's a back and forth I mean both of them talking smack to each other. But like the thing that I think is interesting is that, like I think Elon is right.

Speaker 1:

First of all, I think he went into government believing that Trump was going to cut spending. I do think that is the biggest risk for our society long term. Like you keep spending more than you bring in. That is how every society in the history of the globe for everyone that has ever lived has collapsed. So like it's not a little thing. And I think he really believed Trump was going to do that. And then all of a sudden we are spending more money than we spent last year, increasing the deficit when he was elected to cut spending. And the funniest quote I saw on there was Elon said big, beautiful bill. I don't think in the history of all legislation that has ever been true. It can be big or it can be beautiful, but it can't be both Right. Like it's counterintuitive. You can't have a large bill that is beautiful.

Speaker 2:

I was listening to uh, so JD Vance was on uh, uh, theo Vaughn's podcast and they were kind of discussing like the bill. And it was interesting to like hear because Theo had asked him like why are these bills always like have so many things in them, why can't we just do one at a time? And JD Vance made a pretty good point, because the government, you know, is that you have to put those things, you have to put it all on the one bill, otherwise it would take you 10, 15 years to get every single issue through on separate bills.

Speaker 1:

Well, do you hear how past though? This is the horse shit, right? They're supposed to have, I think, by law, 72 hours to review the bill before they vote on it. They basically had an hour or two. Then they waive some clause that when they change the bill before they vote on it they basically had like an hour or two. Then they waive some like clause that when they changed the bill, they were supposed to be able to read it again and they gave it to them like minutes before they had to vote on it.

Speaker 1:

So nobody actually read it. Nobody had time to read it. They stuffed a bunch in there just to push this thing through and, like everybody's been disingenuous about it, saying like, oh no, everyone knew what was in it. Literally, nobody knew what was in it because they didn't have time to read it. And then I think the good that's coming out of this is like Elon blowing the situation up. You're seeing lots of Republicans that voted for it now going. Yeah, I didn't even get a chance to read it, Even like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's like, in my opinion, kind of out there on the right like was like yeah if I knew that was in there I wouldn't have voted for it.

Speaker 1:

There is something in there. I heard somebody say there is in that bill a restriction on states ability to regulate AI for a decade is actually in there.

Speaker 2:

Like that's kind of nuts. So JD vance talked about that and uh, and he said, you know, when it was presented to them what that the the premise was like they didn't want the state's ability like you know, california or whatever to regulate the use of ai where it'd be very restrictive and then impact the rest of the country. So like that was their original thought pattern. And then, as they dug into the question a little further, he's like you know, I can see both sides and I can see where this would get at it.

Speaker 1:

Like it's not good. Yeah, it's a bunch of.

Speaker 2:

It's a bunch of BS, cause I can. I can see like, um, so, like one of the things when we're in the military, right, like you can't relax the laws but you can make them stricter within your unit, right, and so you bounce around from unit to unit and they would restrict things down.

Speaker 1:

And I can see where you would want to put something like that, whether it's ai or anything else. We're like. This is a party that is literally the banner of this party is states rights, where they have pushed abortion back to states rights after 50 years. They have done every single thing on this platform to push things from the federal government to states and then they pull this horse shit like how are you going to make that argument with a straight face?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't know. That's why I'm not in politics, hey.

Speaker 1:

Well, hey, it's just frustrating. Well, apparently they have a deal between Trump and China, so that's a thing, but that'll probably change by the time this is released, so I wouldn't hold your breath. But as of this morning, I guess, in Free Caviar they posted that apparently it's supposed to go to 55% and 10% out of China.

Speaker 2:

Who knows. Yeah, there was actually. There's a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day and he talked about trying to manufacture this thing that he was making in the United States, this thing that he was making in the United States. It's like 45 minutes long, but it was actually really cool to listen to like his process with trying to source everything from the United States and like not use China Cause like one of the things that he had talked about which I didn't even realize is like the, the manufacturing process in the United States. One of the things that we have lost as a country is the ability to like tool and die, to make tools and repeatable processes in manufacturing, and that's something that China does really well.

Speaker 1:

So, like a lot of issues in the United States, like we literally can't make them, we have stopped manufacturing things a very long time ago and no longer have the ability to Right.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and so it was interesting to hear like that part of it where it's like it's not so much a quality issue getting stuff from China, it's more of this. We don't have the process here anymore to do those kinds of things. But then he talked about like the Amazon side of, because one of the one of the people he was talking to was an amazon retailer and he had sent his cad drawings for this product to china and then uh, and he had a patent for it and everything. It was some kind of like grill thing, uh, and what the people at the warehouse china would do after they'd make his product, they'd sell the plans to other competing companies and then they would make dirt cheap versions of it to then sell against him on amazon later. So, like he was, he had just a stack of uh uh legal documents from lawyers where he'd sent like cease and desist to all these amazon retailers. But yeah, it was interesting to learn a little bit about that agreed, um, but yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 1:

I I don't know. We could have an entire day's conversation about how, what I think about this scenario, so let's jump into some freight tech. So catch me up, man. What are you working on?

Speaker 2:

so, um, so I just took over the brokerage a few months ago. Uh, and a lot of the things that that definitely in the beginning that I worked on was just like process improvement how can I make the process of getting a load covering a load, closing a load billing easier and a lot of that process really dealt with understanding our know, understanding our TMS, understanding what features we have and don't have, and then making sure we're using them properly. Because one of the biggest issues I've noticed, not just here but industry-wide you get people who want to start a brokerage or a trucking company and they're usually not tech savvy. They're not going to hire someone who's tech savvy to do like tech stuff because it's it's a thin margin business, so there's not a lot of room in the profits to pay a tech person a hundred thousand dollars salary, um, and so a lot of these people really don't understand, like, what the TMS is used for and the TMS is and our defense TMS is used for and the TMS is and our defense.

Speaker 2:

They're not designed and built by people who are freight experts. So the fields and things that we use don't like, while they might mean something to us, they don't mean the same thing to the engineer that designed the software. So if you're not using it the way it was designed, then your reporting is off and your certain things aren't working correctly. So like digging into that, those aspects and cleaning up the process. So, for example, from start to finish the cover load I'd unlocked a couple things that we had had but didn't know, and per load I reduced across the whole process 30 minutes per load through entry, through billing, removed manual processes that could be automated.

Speaker 1:

I don't know. You have to. You said 30 minutes, on average 30 minutes. Why would it take 30 minutes to build a load dispatch?

Speaker 2:

Not just build.

Speaker 1:

I just want to understand the scenario you're working on.

Speaker 2:

I'm a little confused. So what I did was I looked at how we enter a load, how we cover that load, what information needs to be put in, what do we have to do with the carrier onboarding that carrier and then tracking that load, putting in notes, closing it, putting in times and then the settlement, pushing it out to accounting, putting in the paperwork. Yeah, so here's what I want to do.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to break down for everybody what that looks like too. I'm just going to reiterate what you just said for anyone that's kind of new to the industry, right? So this is the life cycle of a load, right? So Steven's my customer. Steven sends me over the information for a truckload order he wants me to pick up and that order is going to have where it's going to pick up, when it's going to pick up what I'm going to pick up, how much it's going to weigh, what, when and where it's going right. It's going to usually have a number associated with his company, like a purchase order number a PO number is going to be on there and the number or dollar amount that he's going to pay me for it. So it's going to pick up this load of widgets today, deliver it Friday here. It's going to have the time either first come, first serve or by appointment, and it's going to say I will pay you $2,000 for this load. He sends me that over, usually in a document or an email. I take that information. Then I have to enter all of that into my transportation management system. So I'm literally going to look at that document on one screen and then retype that information in my TMS. There's two reasons for that. One is I need a record of that, so I know I'm working on that shipment for Steven. And two, that system is going to do a few other things that we'll get into.

Speaker 1:

So now that information is in my system, the next step is for newer brokers. You're going to take that information, everything but the rate. You're going to put that into like DAT. You're going to post that load up for a trucking company. That trucking company calls you and says, hey, I will take that load for $1,900. I go, okay. So then my TMS I'm going to press rate confirmation and all the rate rate confirmation is is it's the same document basically Steve and my customer sent to me, except I'm sending it to the trucking company with what I'm going to pay them to do that work, with all of that information, except the rate that Stephen's going to pay me and maybe some customer information that I don't need my customers to see for whatever reason, right? So then the trucking company gets that document, they sign it, that trucking company sends it back to me, I upload it into my TMS.

Speaker 1:

Then the next thing that Steven said is the trucking company I'm going to get that driver information what's the dispatcher name, what's the dispatcher email, what's the truck number, the trailer number, the driver phone number. That goes into my TMS. Then most TMSs I am going to send the tracking link from my TMS to the driver's phone so that it can see where he is when he picks up and when he delivers. Once he delivers that load, the driver is then going to usually send me the proof of delivery, which I'm going to upload, usually a picture of the BOL that was given him at the shipper at Stephen's location, signed at the receiver, that says I got this product, there's nothing wrong with it. Driver sends that to me. I upload that in the TMS.

Speaker 1:

Then the trucking company is going to send me an invoice with the POD and confirming the amount they're charging me, that there was no difference in what we agreed to, no detention, no other charges. That gets uploaded in the TMS. And then the final step is most TMSs are integrated with a factoring company, meaning I will push a button and send all that information to my factoring company. My factoring company is then going to invoice Stephen and pay the trucking company. If there is no factoring company, my TMS will send or create an invoice that I'll email to Stephen and then I will mark pay carrier and then I will manually either send a check to the trucking company or push an ACH or pay them some way. Like that is the whole life cycle of a load.

Speaker 2:

So let's talk through which steps in that whole process you're automating, why and kind of what's going on for you, and so one of the first things, um which I already knew about, it was more just educating some of the other uh brokers was you know, we can create these things called reoccurring orders in our system.

Speaker 2:

So we had some brokers that they ran the same lane two or three times. But it's not an EDI process with the customer, where the customer hits a button and then it sends information to our TMS and all of a sudden it loads there. They were getting these by email, so what they could do is they just build a load once. What they could do is they just build a load once and then, when that customer sent over the load, they could just hit a button and that load would populate, kind of like an EDI, but still like there's that manual trigger, but you know, cutting out that order entry piece where it's a repeatable thing, and then they just go in and change dates, times, po information, and so that was the first piece that we cut out. How are you?

Speaker 1:

doing that? Which service are you using Levity to do that, or how are you automating that?

Speaker 2:

So the broker is still getting the email. It's still the manual process. The automated process is that those loads are a repeated load every week, so they're just hitting a button in our TMS. Oh, you created a template for the load.

Speaker 1:

Right Most TMSes will have that ability, right. If I run this load for Steven three days a week, usually once I build the load the first time, I can click save, create template. So tomorrow, when he sends me the same load, I don't have to enter all that information in. Most of it will auto-populate the location. The only things that don't auto-populate are the PO number, usually, and the days and the times, because clearly those are going to change. But all the rest of the information stays in there. So it saves me because building a load is time consuming, right, and even if you're running like 20 loads a day or even five loads a day, like it takes time because you have to make sure everything is correct.

Speaker 2:

So it's a huge time saver, Yep. And then one of the other pieces that we learned was that in the individual customer file. So each customer is going to have different requirements for the loads. So maybe this customer is all reefer freight and they require that the driver sends a picture of the set temp or something like that, or it's a flatbed load and they always need to be tarped right. This, these loads, always need to be tarped In those customer files. There's places where you can just set those comments so that anytime that customer's attached to a load, like those things will just auto populate on the rate confirmation. So more pieces of that order entry just being taken out through an automated process.

Speaker 1:

So and that's really important. So for anybody, that is most TMSs you can do this with. In fact very few can't. And there's two things that he's saying. So one is you can save a template for a load meaning like your pickup and delivery. That's one template. You can also usually most and most TMSs save locations. So when I pick up at Stevens, even if it's going somewhere else, when I go to put in the location, it'll auto-populate his address, the contact information for Stevens Warehouse, the person that works at the warehouse for the driver to contact if he has issues. All that will auto-populate so we don't have to retype it.

Speaker 1:

And the second added benefit isn't just the saving time, it's less opportunity for an error. Somebody fat fingers a phone number and it's wrong, right. So like that's another reason you do that right. And then the third thing I was thinking of is customer notes. Most TMSs have the ability to save notes specific to a whole customer and to a location. So let's say, stephen's my customer and one of his warehouses in Cleveland. Every truck there needs to have e-tracks or every flatbed needs to have pipe stakes and a headache rack. To have pipe stakes and a headache rack. Well, you don't want to forget that and accidentally book a truck that doesn't get that information. So you can usually save that to a location, meaning that that location right every time I build a load it will include that equipment type right.

Speaker 2:

And and then, one of the biggest things, because this was an issue the the previous, uh, because this was an issue that the previous person had set up some things and it was causing issues, because not every location is going to have one customer right. So if you're going to a cold storage, that cold storage, you may have two or three customers that go there.

Speaker 1:

So if you say AmeriCold is a good example of that. They don't tender their own freight. They have probably hundreds of different customers that you pick up for out of one facility. So the customer changes, but the physical location is the same.

Speaker 2:

Right, and so one of the issues was they were saving customer requirements to a location and when you assign that location those comments would come up, but it only applied to a single customer. So being able to again, that's one of those things where, unless you understand how the engineer designed the software, you're going to make silly mistakes like that Because, I mean, it made sense on paper, because that's what it looks like, but when you dig into the documents and how the system was designed, then you realize, oh, this needs to be in this section, and so when this customer picks up at this location, then that stuff gets attached. Yeah, so a lot of just more a deep understanding of what software you're actually using.

Speaker 1:

And it brings up a really good point. Right, you said at the beginning of this conversation, like most companies in our industry like don't have an on-staff IT person. Right, like the larger companies have it departments and they build their own software in a lot of cases. Right, but like most brokerages even up to like like 50 or 75 million. Like you don't see full-time it people. Like I've seen a hundred million dollar companies that don't have full-time it people. Like they outsource that and they use those people when they need to. Like our company has that, but like I'm the full-time IT person. And like I don't code. But, to your point, like I have a really good understanding of how these systems function, how they're built on the backend, so like I know what it can and can't do, where things are going and where they aren't going to go Right now, just because because you don't or can't afford someone that does this Right.

Speaker 1:

Here's the thing that I think is a hack, if you will, or a thing that I just think most companies should do is, yes, it sucks because there's never enough time to do everything you want to. Right, and like it takes time to invest in learning these things, like hours and days to really understand how these tools work, right, but I will tell you that, like that, investment in time pays huge dividends forever, right, if you learn how your system works. Even let's say, you have a five person company and you own it and you own it, right, you spending I don't know 15% of a week right For the next month to really learn your technology systems. One, you get so much more out of it because most people only use five 10% of what this tool can do. So in just that example, right, what I see companies doing is like they'll just keep hiring more people, right, like, oh, we got to build 30 loads a day, hire one or two more people, and they don't even realize that the program they're already paying for has simple things like templates that allow you to build them faster. Like I did this with our company like a year ago, where I went through it and I'm like I sat with the person building a load. We have like literally load planners two of them and I was like let me just watch you all morning and I was like, oh, you guys are building that load again for that same customer. And I'm like I know we run like 30 loads a day sometimes with this customer and I watched them manually enter it every time and I the same thing you just said is I was like you guys know, there's a template feature in here. Like click that little button over here, click save template, save it to this. Now go to build the next load, and it cut their time down right From like four or five minutes to 30 seconds to build those loads, right. Well, that doesn't seem like a lot, but when that is all you're doing all day to take a task and reduce it by like 90% of the time it takes, you freeze that person up to do other things and it eventually saves you money because you're just not throwing people every time your business grows.

Speaker 1:

Most tools have that in there and most companies don't do this, and I'd say like it's super prevalent in the brokerage space and very prevalent on the trucking side. Like I've gone into trucking clients that have 250 trucks and have $150,000 McLeod package and the dispatchers don't use it. They're literally using Google. They're building loads and they're putting them in Google sheets, right. And then I'm talking to the owners or the executives and they want to be able to talk about like how do you make better decisions about how your company's running. Well, you can't make better decisions if you don't know how your company is running these systems. You've got to put the information in it to get it back out. To see where your money is going is an expense and where your money is coming in Right so, when you're not using them even at a minimum to the way they're supposed to be used, your reporting is absolutely garbage.

Speaker 1:

Like, it's just not correct, right so, like, in order to be able to really oversee and manage a business, even if you're working in it, right Like? Being able to see reports requires you to use the tool correctly. And most companies like they're like, oh, we just got too much to do. They never put on their calendar. Like, I need to block out two hours at least a week to start learning what this can do and what it can't do. And then, even if they learn it, they rarely ever book time with their employees and go hey, I need to sit with them because they're like well, if it's not broken, they're moving loads. Like, hey, why should I spend time and take them away from things that make money? But these are the things that help you keep more of the money you're actually working so hard to make, because the tools have lots of things to make your job easier, faster and allow you to hire less people as you get bigger.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, and it's. I mean, just speaking to the McLeod piece, we use McLeod right. Speaking to the mcleod piece, we use mcleod right. Um, and it's I. I, up until I came into this position, they gave me full access to the system. Like I did not like mcleod. It was frustrating, it was just a glorified excel sheet, um. But when I got access to the whole thing and I could see, like all these things that we're not using, I, literally I made the comment to somebody that I've been just freight brokering on expert mode the whole time because we had all these capabilities and we just weren't using them. So, like to go to the load creation thing, like the templates and all that stuff, like that's cool. But this whole time we've been connected to DAT and I've had people manually entering loads on DAT when all they had to do is hit a button and it would be posted. So there's another two minutes just cut out because nobody knew how. Nobody knew that was a feature or how to use it.

Speaker 1:

And here's where that costs you money, right? Just that example. Right? Somebody listening to this is going oh well, two minutes, what does that really matter, right? Ok? Well, here's what it actually looks like when you're doing your job. You got 10 quotes that came in in the past five minutes. You got six loads to post, your phone's ringing from the other post that you're talking to these carriers, that customer's waiting on a quote as you're typing this into DAT to get your next load posted, which takes you two to three minutes. You just missed three quotes. Could have emailed your customer back, got two more loads and made some more money.

Speaker 1:

There is money being made or lost in inefficiency all day long. Every one of these little things adds up, right, like there's a saying, like in business. But it's like making money on the margins, right, all margin is right. That little line around a piece of paper right, it's the edge cases. It's the very small things that don't seem like a lot, but when you do all of them, they add up to a ton, right? Like? All these little things that save you time, allow you to get so much more done with less mistakes, and allow you to do the things that you need to do to grow your business, like talking to customers more right. Picking up the phone and spending time talking to your customers, talking to your carriers, building relationships. When you're spending all day long doing redundant data entry, you're not doing the things that really create value for your business, right? Getting information from one screen and one program to the next does not really add value. It's required, it's a necessity, but it's not earning you or creating value for your company, right.

Speaker 2:

Right, I don't know if you listened to, um, oh, what's his name? Greg Eisenberg, the startup podcast. Uh, heard of him, but so he's been. He's been doing a lot of like AI automation stuff and like one of the things that he mentioned I think it was in the next post, next post um, that is like something I've been laser focused on the last couple weeks is, if there is something that you're doing that is copy paste, like that can be automated, you just got to figure out how to automate it.

Speaker 2:

So find the systems fine and, to your point, like there's a very high likelihood that at a freight brokerage or a carrier you don't have somebody who's IT savvy, but with all the AI models out there and the podcasts and stuff, you can find the information and learn it yourself and figure out how to improve these processes for a couple hours a day, and that's what's critical. And then the other thing is, like you know, you don't start a freight brokerage just to make money on the side, like you want to grow it and scale it, and that's what's what's critical. And then the other thing is, like you know, you don't start a freight broker, it's just to make money on the side, like you want to grow it and scale it and that kind of stuff. But you have to look at what are you doing all day, what takes the most time, what is just data entry, copy paste, that kind of stuff, because those are going to be limitations and how you scale.

Speaker 2:

And so you have to look at the process like, is this scalable? Can I scale this? To say you're doing 20 loads. Now here's my pain points. Well, what if it's 200 loads? What if it's a thousand loads? Are those pain points going to go away? Or are you going to multiply your work every time you're getting more freight and then dampen your ability to continue to grow and continue to serve the customers? Because anytime you're stuck in a manual process that is not generating revenue, you're taking away from that revenue activity, whether it's prospecting or tracking or whatever.

Speaker 1:

It's really simple, right. What are the things that create value in a freight brokerage? Adding new customers or increasing the business you do with existing customers? Those are really the only two things that add and increase the value of a business. Anytime you're not doing one of those two things, it's basically administrative. Now I would argue in our industry, like as intermediaries, the same two things are true for carriers. So, adding carriers and building relationships with carriers and getting more dedicated and consistent lanes with repetitive, or they call carrier utilization that's how you create value in your business long term. Right.

Speaker 1:

If you aren't doing one of those four things, most of which are automatable Right. Like I don't think we're getting rid of people, not anytime soon, but like the way I see it is like our company's got 25 people. We run like two 300 loads a week. Right, I think by the end of this year we could probably have a few more people and double the volume. Right. If it takes us 20 people to run just for round numbers, 200 loads. Right, 10 loads per person. I think I can get that number to like 30 loads per person by automation and being able to streamline processes. Like. I work with TLO almost every day automating things and like just to throw out a few like here's another very cumbersome task that really delays getting money and making money cumbersome task that really delays getting money and making money Getting proof of delivery from carriers after a load's delivered.

Speaker 1:

Right, talk to a carrier. Carrier's already in a hurry, they're trying to make money. They got to get to their next pickup. So a lot of times they'll forget to send the POD. Then they send it to the dispatcher, who sometimes forgets to send it, or maybe they send it to the accounting person and they forget. Now a week goes by, now it's two weeks. Well, if you're factoring, you usually can't invoice your customer until that carrier sends that invoice. So even though you earned that money on Monday, you aren't even able to invoice your customer for a week or two weeks because the carrier hasn't sent it.

Speaker 1:

So what do most brokerages do? Pay people literally to just call trucking companies and send them emails all day requesting proof of delivery. Right, that is an automatable task. Right, levity's got voice in email. So guess what we do? We plug it into our TMS. So the day a load is going to deliver, it sends an email to the dispatcher and says hey, just a heads up please send the POD today. And we have in our agreements that, like, we can do a rate deduction for a late POD If they don't get us to us in three days. We can deduct some money. We don't want to and we don't really ever enforce it, but having that in there allows us to send that email the day it loads.

Speaker 1:

I'm just going, hey, reminder, like there is a processing fee if you don't get the paperwork in the next couple of days. We want to make sure you get paid for everything you did for us. Just please send it to us as soon as you get it from the driver. That way we don't delay paying you and you guys don't have to worry about deductions. That's a service. Now, right, like seems like a penalty, but now it's a service because we're reminding them that we don't want to see them have a deduction that increases it.

Speaker 1:

Then a second email goes out automatically after the load's delivered and a text message goes to the driver hey, load, looks like it's delivered. Do me a favor, please just take a picture of the POD. And here's the second value we want to make sure the load's delivered clean, with no claim or detention. If there's a claim, we need to notify the customer right away. If there's detention, we need to request the detention approval from the customer right away, because the sooner we request it, the sooner we can approve it and pay's automated, it's AI and it's just a phone call to the dispatcher saying, hey, looks like that load delivered.

Speaker 1:

Yesterday Shot you a couple emails. Can you just take a minute and just email us over that POD and invoice so we can make sure you don't have any deductions? Right, that just took. When you're running 250 loads a week, right, you got loads from last week that we didn't get PODs, plus the ones that are getting run every day. Like that is a one or two person job all day. Right, now we can just automate that.

Speaker 1:

And not only do we. Who wants to do that job? Nobody wants to get paid all day to send emails and call carriers and request paperwork, like nobody enjoys that. We're not taking a job away from somebody. But not only is it a job people don't want to do, they would rather do things that create value. But it happens now at a hundred percent of the time, so none of them are missed. Right, there's not. Oh, I had a load come up at the end of the day, I forgot to request our PODs. Now it's the next day. Loads come in and they miss a whole day. Then three days go past and now you find out from accounting you got a whole day's worth of freight that you didn't get the PODs for because the team got too busy to keep up with it. Those are some very low hanging fruit, I think, for automation that creates a ton of value for a freight brokerage.

Speaker 2:

Right, and not only that, but I mean, if you think about it, you've got to hire a person to do that job. It's an entry levellevel job. You got to train them and they take vacation, they get sick, they have families, uh, and these automation tools I mean some of them are because the way ai is being subsidized, like, some of them are free. If you can, it'll take a lot of legwork and you got to do some learning. Yep, some, some of them are free, some 50, a hundred dollars a month. Or you can pay someone what minimum wage eight, 10, $11 an hour, yeah, while they're in the office, like it's just, it makes sense, but it's a lift right, you have to.

Speaker 2:

it's something you have to learn and people are very resistant to change. I have come to learn the last few months.

Speaker 1:

It's the behavioral human change. Human behavioral change is much slower than the adoption of tech Well, not adoption, but like the speed of technology, right, like, and they proved that. I think there was an interesting thing I read. They were talking about, like when ai really started becoming useful, quite like a year ago. Right, large companies were spending massive amounts of money to plug in like ai into just work tools, right, and they were finding it like a very few small, very small percentage of employees at large companies were using these tools to make their jobs easier. But the small companies were using it very quickly and they were growing much faster. Like, now you're seeing startups being able to generate millions of dollars with a handful of people, right, where before you just couldn't do that. The big companies weren't getting the value. And it was exactly what you said Like they boil down to.

Speaker 1:

The reason is just like it's the psychology of the person. I've been doing this job for 20 years this way. I don't want to do it differently and I don't want to use a tool. Why? Because that takes mental effort and energy and once you've learned something and we talk about this in the show all the time you've got to have it, you can do it really quickly without much thought and you don't really have to think, so you can kind of go on autopilot.

Speaker 1:

Well, to take yourself off autopilot, to learn a new way to do something, is difficult, requires mental friction, requires effort and, to be honest, most people are out of job and I think a lot of cases to get a paycheck and they're like you know what? Like, why am I going to do that? Like, at the end of the day, me getting faster at my job doesn't make me any more money. Why do I care if my company makes more money? Right, but in our world, doing things more efficiently and effectively usually means a bigger paycheck. Like, you actually get the rewards for these things, whether you're an employee most of them are on commission or you own the company. That's more money in your pocket and less that's going to expenses that you don't need to spend. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

And it's I kind of attributed to like it's very similar to like when an employee gets promoted from like their job to then managing people. Like some people have an issue with delegating tasks, especially in the beginning, Like oh, I just know how to do it Because it takes that same investment to delegate something for me to you.

Speaker 1:

If you're new, I could do it very quickly, but for me to teach you, I got to do it four times as slow for a whole week for you to learn it. That is hard for me because I'm like I got other stuff to do. I got this mental need of wanting to get the next thing done. It's frustrating. You feel like antsy. You're like, oh my God, I just want to get this done. Like you know what, steven, let me just do it myself and then I'll get back to you. And then I never do so.

Speaker 1:

I never actually delegate it and like that is one of the biggest issues with leadership is getting people to delegate things. Most people don't want to because emotionally it's really hard to slow yourself down enough because you've got to then reprioritize and reschedule all the other stuff you would have done today until next week in order to do that. But it's an investment, right, and we used to model this out when I was just in coaching and consulting. Like we would put this on like a financial model and show you that if you invested three hours a day for two weeks to delegate a task, what is your return on your time, right, yeah, three hours a day, 15 hours a week, 30 hours over two weeks right. But that investment would give you back like 150% return on your time forever, because once you're good at it, I never have to do it again. Right, and that's really what should be happening.

Speaker 2:

Yeah and um and kind of. One of the other things I wanted to get to is, uh, just the data itself. Right, a lot of people like this industry, we're very like protective of our data. You know the lanes, the rates. It's especially for, like a freight broker that that's proprietary stuff. Right, and your TMS is good at reporting on certain things. But one of the downfall and one of the issues that I've had with like CRMs, because they're not necessarily tied to our TMS, is we're not, we're not seeing our data compared to, like prospecting or lead generation. So then, like you get onto a conversation with a shipper and they say, well, how often are you in this area? And I mean, you might have it off the top of your head, but wouldn't it be nice to just hit a button and see or be able to compare?

Speaker 1:

normally you got to go into your tms to go look at that right, and you got to do a bunch of look at it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a bunch of reports and you got to make sure and TMS to go look at that Right, and you've got to do a bunch of reports and even on then, if you're not using your TMS correctly, do you know that your reports are good? Are you cleaning the data? Are you making sure that's good? So that's one of the other things Now that I've done the process improvement side I've been looking at. Okay, where can I take this data? How can I clean it, put it into like a database, a table, and then make it usable for you know, targeting specifically good leads or qualifying leads, or making sure that it matches with what we're trying to do?

Speaker 1:

That's really pretty cool. I'll tell you something I'm working on now, actually with Garrett is it's possible? We're trying to map out how long it would take, but I want to be able to feed all of my TMS data into a large language model to talk to it. Because, to your point, I don't want to go and have to click reports, I don't want to have to model Excel to see these things. I want to just ask it in a prompt and say how often are we shipping out of Memphis? How many days of the week? What are days of the week that we're shipping out of there the most often? What are the most common places that we deliver to out of Memphis? When was the last time we shipped there? Right, I want to be able to talk to my TMS the way I would talk to a person looking at it. Right Now.

Speaker 1:

The problem is when I've tried to do this out of the box the it right now.

Speaker 1:

The problem is, when I've tried to do this out of the box, the math isn't good enough in the large language models, so you need to kind of run it through an sql table or in some ways.

Speaker 1:

Being able to basically have the tool lean on a tool that's better with math and then bring the information back out.

Speaker 1:

But I just met with him yesterday. I'm meeting with him this afternoon to try to model out how we can do this, because I want to be able to talk to the data and have it give me the things I want it to, not me try to just use what it gives me, and I know it's possible. It's just getting that built so that I can do similar use cases and from like an owner's point of view, like hey, which of our account managers are doing the best this week? Which customers are increasing? Which ones have gone down? Who's got the best average margin increase over the past two weeks? Whose has gone down? Right, we have any customers that we used to ship a lot with that we're shipping not much at all or haven't talked to in a while. Right, I want to feed all of our data into an LLM so like I can use it to just give me the information I need to make better decisions, to manage things day to day.

Speaker 2:

It's funny you mention that because I literally I just had the same conversation with Garrett yesterday.

Speaker 1:

We probably talked to him after I talked to him. I talked to him like around lunchtime, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we were probably 20, 30 minutes apart, because that's what I spent all night last night working on. I'm using this. I've been bouncing back and forth between a company called Airtable and Supabase, which are Airtables like an Excel sheet, but there's a bunch of formulas and stuff in there. You can build a database. Supabase is a SQL database, so there's a little bit more of a learning curve on like the tech side because you have to format it. Yep, um, but yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing is because then you can attach them to.

Speaker 2:

Like adio has some ai features in it. Uh, lindy ai is another. It's zappier but more of like a, an ai thing where you can set triggers and it'll look at it. So, like in Adio, it's a native feature where you can set up a field and then it will classify or research that prospect. Well, with the database and using load information and stuff like that, I can then create a trigger with Lindy where I would go hey, here's, here's what you did for the month. Here's the locations for this prospect, here's what they're moving the month. Here's the locations for this prospect, here's what they're moving. This is what matches up and then we're going to create like it's still a work in progress. It's like a best fit, so score each lead out of a hundred, based on locations, commodity, equipment type.

Speaker 1:

So if you want a tool to start digging around and I'm setting this up today I've spent the past like two weeks on this. Have you ever heard of claycom? I haven't. It is wild. It allows you to sort massive amounts of data, to score them and do AI tasks along that. So think like Excel. Imagine, in your first column you have every shipper. You pull off a list, call it like 500 of them, right?

Speaker 1:

What I can do in the second column is queue an AI prompt and say research, every one of these companies. Go to their websites and every article and find any time they've referenced one of their customers. Then I can go to the next one and go okay, search all of these against LinkedIn and pull me every human being that has a logistics title, transportation or any of those titles. Then it'll find the people. Then I can go run this against Zoom Info, rocket Reacher, apollo AI and pull all of the work emails. Then I can go next step run these against Zero Bounce to make sure all these people still work there. Then I can go to the last column and go OK, run these against zero bounce to make sure all these people still work there.

Speaker 1:

Then I can go to the last column and go, okay, run this against gen logs, look for their most common and least frequent lanes.

Speaker 1:

Then I can run that against my TMS and say, look at all of those lanes and see which ones match up with the places we pick up from the most. Then I can have it go okay, write an email for every one of those. And then I plug it into a tool like SuperSend that has like 25 different email addresses and then in the background it just starts emailing all of those people about their lane, referencing their customer from their website, any news articles that have ever referenced them. It literally can go step by step and do what I used to do in sales. Step and do what I used to do in sales reading someone's LinkedIn profile, reading the company's website, looking up news articles, writing very unique, specific emails to them about their company, their job and then I can do that at scale with like 30 email addresses just myself. Like it's, the capabilities and the things that it's going to be, it's able to do now are just absolutely wild yeah.

Speaker 2:

So lindy, uh, lindyai, it sounds like it's probably a competitor. Um, it does something very similar. So, like, they just came out with this thing called ai swarms. So, like in a normal crm like hubspot or adio, you'll have like an email sequence, right, or mailchimp a lot of people use mailchimp where, like, you'll create a list in your crm and you group them together by likeness, whether it's region or commodity or you know whatever, um, and then you haven't contacted them for before. So this list is maybe you know these shippers in, uh, the midwest. They're temp controlled and they've never been contacted. So you've whittled that list down to like 200 and then that sequence would go through and it would pull little details and it would send like a first touch email and then go out.

Speaker 2:

Well, what Lindy and probably this Clay does, what they call AI swarms is, instead of it running down the list where things can break, because it's it's a code that's hitting each one, the swarm is. The way he attributed was like in the matrix, where the one guy multiplies himself and it's the same thing. So, instead of one ai going through each thing, it just duplicates itself and it's one ai per line and it customizes it and sends it all at once so that the thing doesn't break. And the one thing that I like, especially when it comes to emails and stuff like I. I'm very much the personal person. I don't want ai just to send that first touch. I want it to come to me, so it comes to me in a draft and then I get. I get to hit send so I can look at it first and then hit send. But that's just a me thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's for sure wild. I mean, like the ability to do more in less time for sure, is getting better and better every day and every week, and I think what's helpful for anyone out there is, like you don't need to use the things that we're using, but I do think it's worth starting to familiarize yourself with what's out there, what you can do, because the reality is is your competitors are like, I mean, in any business, if you can get more done with less expenses, you have an advantage. Like if one company has got to hire 10 people and I got to hire two to do the same amount of work, I don't need to charge my customers the same amount, right, like now I have an advantage and I can take your customers because I operate more efficiently, and like that's in any business anywhere. Right, if you need 15 people to build a house and I can build one for five, I don't got to charge the homeowner the same amount of money you do. Right, I can be more competitive, right, and I think that is the thing that is coming, whether we want it to or not. I think it honestly kind of terrifies me in a lot of contexts and how these things are able to do these things and where they will be, but I mean it's just getting better and better every day. So I mean, if you're interested, I suggest anyone reach out to Levity. Take a look at their website, reach out to them on LinkedIn, shoot them an email, because they are really good at working with you step-by-step to build this stuff out. I think Garrett over at LoadPartner is great.

Speaker 1:

I'm looking at their TMS now to be able to do some really specific use cases that no one's able to do yet, and there's just a lot of companies that are out there now probably more. I mean, it's probably a crowded space and it's like, well, who do you pick out there? Now, probably more. I mean it's probably a crowded space and it's like, well, who do you pick? Like my opinion, like those are who I would reach out to because I've worked with them, I know their quality of work, I know they're going to be honest when you reach out to them, but where? Because the other thing that I'd say and this is where I want to kind of wrap this up is there's way more hype, though, than there is some substance.

Speaker 1:

We talked about all these things that are possible now, and these tools are absolutely mind blowing and a lot of use cases. But I will tell you, in most scenarios where I talk to a salesperson in any of these companies but then I talk to the tech team about what it can do, there's a giant gap between where their marketing material what they say they can do, and what they actually still can do today. And that doesn't mean they won't get there two months from now, a month from now or next week, but like there is a difference between what you're actually able to use today and what marketing material and companies are saying Like our TMS was supposed to have automated load building when we bought it a year ago. It still doesn't function like and it's nowhere close to being usable.

Speaker 1:

So you really want to be careful that when you're going to choose any of these new tools and things, you really ask a lot of questions to understand not just how it's supposed to work, but think of scenarios where you as a person need to think and do something differently and ask them how that software would handle those scenarios, because those are the things that are going to give you the headaches. Like it can do things nine out of 10, right All day long, but in shipping. If I miss one out of 10 loads my customer sends me, I'm not going to have a customer very long Like you need to get them all right all the time. So really knowing how these things work is going to be really important before you press go and automate anything.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, important, before you press, go and automate anything, yeah, and not only that, but like, uh, when you do, like, institute new things, whether it's, you know, it's an ai process or an automation or whatever um, the the best advice I can give is, you know, make sure there's some kind of like error reporting or whatever within that system, and that that you actually, once you implement it and get it in, like you schedule time on your calendar 10, 15 minutes a week just to go back through that process, go through the error logs and make sure, like, hey, this thing is still working the way it's intended.

Speaker 2:

Or, you know, create a form for your the people who are using it every day to send you back, back feedback on like, hey, I like this, I don't like this. You know ways that you can tweak it and make it better, because the worst thing you can do is set up a new process and then never revisit it and it's breaking and you don't know why Exactly, because then you get two months down the road and now you're sitting on a pile of work that's going to take six hours, when you could have handled it. 10 minutes every week agreed any final thoughts no, not yet.

Speaker 2:

Um, I'm sure I'll have more on the automation piece and like be deep in that right now, but uh, no that's all I got whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're probably right.

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Benjamin Kowalski

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Stephen Ruhe

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