Everything is Logistics

Why Logistics Tech Rollouts Fail (and How to Fix Them) | Nate Johnson, GLCS

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Everyone loves a shiny demo. Nobody wants to talk about the messy middle: implementation. That’s where budgets blow up, timelines slip, and teams quietly blame the software.

Nate Johnson (CEO of GLCS) joins Blythe Milligan to break down what actually makes logistics tech rollouts work.

  • The first question teams skip: “Why are you buying this?”
  • Why “go-live” is not the same thing as success
  • The hidden costs that show up after the subscription fee
  • Why training and documentation decide adoption
  • Integrations, EDI, and why “it should connect” is usually a lie
  • AI in logistics: what’s real, what’s marketing, and what buyers should demand


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Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Blythe, welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and today we're doing the part of logistics tech that nobody puts on a booth banner implementation, the messy middle where budgets get weird, timelines slip, and everyone suddenly discovers how much tribal knowledge is trapped in one dispatcher's head. My guest today is Nate Johnson. He is the CEO of GLCs. Nate lived the industry from multiple angles, and now he spends his time helping teams pick the right tools, integrate them without lighting money on fire and actually get value after go live. We're going to be talking about why rollouts fail, how to budget beyond the subscription fee, what to demand, and onboarding and support, what data and integrations really require, and where AI fits in to all of it. So Nate, I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for a long time about where logistics, tech implementation goes right and where it goes wrong. So welcome to the show, especially on such a short notice, where I asked you yesterday and you said yes to today.

Nathan Johnson:

Sure today works. So that's not always the case. I've been out traveling. I got home last late last night, and this just fit. So it was, it was perfect. It was meant to be Blythe. And I appreciate you having Absolutely.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

I'm happy to have this conversation too, right before one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, industry event in for logistics, and that is manifest. It's going to be a lot of tech players there, and it's going to be a lot to sort of decipher through. But first question right off the jump, where does logistics tech implementation go right and where does it go wrong?

Nathan Johnson:

So I'm going to answer something that you said before. Nobody puts implementation on their booth, except for us, it is on our booth. You when you look at our booth and our banners, we list that we assist in implementation, and we've done hundreds and hundreds, if not closer to 1000 projects related to implementation. So where, where we see things go wrong is, it's, there's many areas where they can go wrong, but the the ultimate issue is, are you buying the right solution that you need, and do you even need it? So we've seen freight tech go wild over the last 10 or 15 years, and even now today, you know, there are so many vendors that are dealing with one prescriptive use case, and so you end up, you know, running down that road, you as a carrier or broker, run down that road, find the solution, think it's going to work, and then find out, hey, this doesn't do exactly what we wanted it to do. So first and foremost, why are you buying this? Documenting what sort of processes you have that are going to be impacted with that, and understanding that when you go to market to try to find a vendor that that vendor is reviewing your very detailed requirements document that says, This is what we do today, and this is what we're looking to replace, and these are our requirements that we have to move forward. Anyone can do that themselves. The more robust of a solution you're looking at, it becomes much more complicated. If you're looking at replacing your TMS, you have a lot of requirements associated with that. If you have, if you're looking to do automated order entry using an AI solution that's a component of a TMS, or a small, not a component of a TMS, with a bolt on to a TMS, so it's much smaller requirements. So our approach with all of our customers is when they ask us to help in a vendor selection that's pre implementation, is, why do you want this? And prove to us that you need this solution, and that can be a short conversation or a long conversation, but we are going to take the position that you don't need it and then decide that you do. And it doesn't mean that you don't need it, it just means that we want to go through the process of proving out that this is going to have value for your organization. So I'd say that's the first place that we start on an implementation where we see things lots of times go wrong because you don't have your requirements set. How is the vendor supposed to know that their solution is actually going to work for you?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

And so is it more like just reading a document from the vendor, or if you're kind of playing like matchmaker, in that sense, for your clients versus the solution that you're recommending.

Nathan Johnson:

So on our side, once we have that requirements set, we've built a whole requirements document, more of an RFP, and it's in depth. It really depends upon the engagement. And this, this gets very, very complicated in a multi month, if not a year. Long engagement in the larger discussions for a larger enterprise organization could take quite a while, but a smaller organization, we might have that done in a matter of a few hours. And so it really depends on what you're looking for. And then once we have that document, we're partnered with pretty much every freight tech organization out there, or we have a relationship, especially if they're established. We have a relationship with them in some way, shape or form. So we have people in our organization that are just studying freight tech, and that's pretty much all they do is interact with with freight technology, ensure that we stay up on top of that, because over our 400 customers, they all have different needs, so we're always looking to see what, what new thing that they might be interested in, etc, etc. So on our side, we have a unique point of view. But if you're coming at it from a carrier or broker, and you only have your view of what time you've invested into it. You gather that, you take it to the vendor. The vendor then has to come back and prove that they can check all the boxes on that requirements document, so or the RFP, whatever you wanted to define it as, but, but if they check all the boxes, or if they check 90% of the boxes, and they're potentially a viable solution. You go through, this is a complicated scenario there. I mean, if you're asking for AI automation in some area of your business, there's probably 1015, 20 vendors that you might have to walk through to go see that if you're not to go review their solutions, unless you have a previous relationship with them, and you already kind of know which vendors you want to work with. So that vendor then would come forward and check those boxes say, Yes, we can do this, and hopefully be able to do an actual demo, which is something that we typically require from vendors, is you have to show us that your solution will actually work, not a PowerPoint presentation.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Oh, that's interesting. So you kind of put like the feet to the fire for your clients. And so during that demo, what are you looking for? You look, are there like green flags or red flags that you're looking for to make that decision?

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah, all kinds. So first and foremost, can it do what we need it to do? Second, we're actually looking beyond that at how well put together the organization is. Is this an actual demo? Is this somebody who's grabbing at things to make it happen? So that's going to tell us a little bit about the organization that we're working with, or the vendor that we're prospecting. So we're going to look at that, ensure that the demo is seamless and right, and that, you know, it's not something that the company has experience, I think, is the best way of stating that. So ultimately, we're going to look at that, then we're going to then we're going to aggregate costs and see all the costs across the vendors as well help the clients make their determination based on that and potential return on investment, which typically return on investment. We're going to look at their numbers. So we're not going to make up numbers for them. We're going to sit down and actually apply their numbers. Once again, there's different levels of this type of an engagement, but if it's anything moderate, we're absolutely going to put some sort of cost model together that will will be able to take against the cost of the new solution and then develop some sort of ROI.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So I remember when I worked in house at a brokerage, and at, I think a couple years in, we switched TMS providers, and it was a shit show, to say the least. And it was just one of those things where we had a previous TMS that was deeply integrated into our accounting system and the leadership, the IT leadership internally, made the decision to switch TMS providers without really engaging any of the staff, without engaging the accounting department. And after we had already made this investment, it wasn't fully realized what the mistake was until later on, is that, do you see that a lot is that common for the internal decision makers just to go ahead and just buy software without engaging the employees that are actually going to

Nathan Johnson:

use it? We're aware of that our clients don't do that because they're engaging us so they don't have to. You know, making a mistake on a large piece of technology can be catastrophic in a variety of ways to your business. It can cause a significant amount of damage internally through personnel and all the pain that happens. You know, not being able to settle orders, not being able to have the integrations that you once had. Or having to wait a year or two to get those done can be very, very frustrating and taxing for your existing employees. Now, a trucking company has a issue with that, even more so because they are working with a substantial number of drivers, and so if it's something that bleeds into drivers and causes trucks to sit or drivers to be frustrated. Now you have retention turnover issues or and you have costs that that you know are accumulated and delayed trucks. So so we want to make sure that any sort of major investment is done right. But we hear all the time about companies that that select a piece of technology implemented and it fails or it doesn't get them to where they want it to go. That being said, you know, this is a complex industry, even with a fully robust requirements document, you're going to be in the middle of an implementation, and somebody is going to say, oh, yeah, you know, we forgot about this. So so once you go alive, you're still going to have problems with that. And those requirements that we gather early on actually turn into testing scripts. So we will take each requirement and turn it into testing and then eventually turn that into training documentation. So that's very important, that those requirements are correct early on. Obviously you don't want to buy a new piece of tech to just replace your old tech. So those requirements will also include, they'll include, this is what we do today, and this is what we want to do tomorrow, and the reason why we're moving to a new technology platform. So it's absolutely you know, plenty of failures are happening. The smaller of the tech organizations, I'd say there's probably more failures. We're actually getting scenarios where clients are wanting to buy 234, solutions that all do the same thing, test them all out and and run with one that I've never seen before. So, but they're smaller solutions.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So I am curious, sort of like the I guess, the overall landscape, obviously, freight Tech has exploded in adoption rates over the last decade, especially, you know, over the last five, six years. And I'm curious, how are the legacy players versus the newer players? Are they? Do you find that they're starting to talk to each other more software wise, or are they still kind of siloed off? So the

Nathan Johnson:

legacy players, and that's not a derogative term by any means, some of the legacy players are doing quite well, and they have an image issue, so they need to get away from being considered legacy. Microsoft is one of the oldest tech companies out there, and nobody thinks of them as legacy. So you know, the challenge there is, if you are defined as a legacy organization, we work with every one of them is, how do you create a scenario where you're not legacy, where you are innovative, and many of them are very innovative, and have very interesting things, and are cutting edge, actually, in many cases, but they are having to fight through that legacy problem. So to the point of freight tax advanced so much over the last 15 years, 10 to 15 years, I go back to 2010 2011 on, on being employed in on the freight tech side. Prior to that, I ran, ran fleets. But we see, you know, I look back just a few years further than that, and just go how many trucking companies actually had yell or mobile com, to use that term, back in 2005 and I would say 25% so 20 years ago, maybe 20 or maybe maybe 75% of Our companies out there today were operating without satellite tracking, probably without a cell phone too. Well, maybe the driver had a cell phone. Maybe they weren't, maybe they didn't, but I would say the vast majority of the drivers had cell phones, but they weren't smartphones. You didn't have apps that you could track your driver on. So, you know, in 20 years, we've gone from, you know, even when I go back 10 years previous to that, when I was entering the industry, everything I did was on paper. There were systems, you know, we had Westinghouse as our solution back there, which eventually ended up becoming innovative or acquiring through that. Anyway, the the data points that we would track in the mid 90s were 30, maybe 30 total data points. And today you have potentially hundreds that are being tracked daily, if not 1000s that are being tracked daily as an asset based carrier. So you know this. This is all evolved, really, since 2005 2006 but, but it certainly took off much faster in the last 10 years. I think a lot of that stems from the ELD mandates. So now, all of a sudden, we are tracking every truck, and we now have ECM data rolling out of every truck, and you can now manage every data point that that ECM is producing, if you want to, which includes driver, behavior, fuel, etc. So that's launched into, you know, that immediately created the visibility market the way that we know it today. Your project, 44 your four kites, those. They actually existed before, but it strengthened them, because now every, every class a truck is now being tracked. So that's, that's truly where you know, if you go back and kind of look at the inflection point of when we started the launch, it matches up with the ELD mandate, yeah.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

I mean, it makes sense like that. Maybe that that was the first domino to fall. And then now that has led to, you know, the modern freight ecosystem that we are, freight tech ecosystem that we find ourselves in. And I just as you were talking, I mean going from, you know, 30 data points to hundreds. How are you helping teams, especially during the implementation process, understand that they're going to have so much more data to deal with. How do they not have data overload? How do they make sure that their data is is clean, is usable? What are maybe some of the those steps that you discover during implementation, or maybe even before you can start implementation?

Nathan Johnson:

Well, it's just, I mean, whether it's before, after or or during or mostly it's after but, but carries brokers are swimming and data we don't even know what to do with it all. You have behavior data that we're starting to come forward on. You have all kinds of data points that are, frankly, just sitting there. Many cases, they're not being used at all. We don't know how to use them. You know, we used to say trucking isn't rocket science. Well, guess who's being employed in trucking now, rocket scientists. So because we have so much data and we want so many complicated things to save a penny mile, we've now had to reach out to people that work for NASA to help us out. And that's cool. That's great. That's That's wonderful. But it wasn't that long ago that trucking wasn't rocket science and it was just moving a load. We, in a lot of ways, through administer, through various administrations have caused compliance requirements that have created technology and whatnot. So the how do you manage all of this and how do you keep it clean? Well, processes define everything, right? So if you do not have a solid process to run your organization from order to cash, then your data is and you're not you're not enforcing that process, then your data is going to start to slip. You're going to have some messy data. Going back to those requirements, which become test scripts, which become training documentations. Training is everything you know. Lots of times, people will adopt a solution, implement it and never touch it again. As far as a training standpoint, never create that documentation. Never never touch it again. You degrade on your, what we call tribal knowledge, on every user that's that's touching that software that leaves the company. So you know, Billy had it originally then, then Lisa was the primary user after that, and Lisa was only 80% of Billy because she didn't get direct training. So refreshing that training, keeping them engaged, ensuring that you're working with the vendors to to meet that, that requirement of keeping them up to speed, I think, is extremely important, as far as keeping data cleanly beyond that, because sometimes this is a lot of data, right? If you think, in some cases, you could get a data feed from a truck and get, let's say you have 1000 trucks, and every five seconds you're getting a red crumb trail with ECM data. Do you want that? Does it make a need for you. If you suddenly have a need for that, what are you going to do with it all? And then you actually contain quite a bit of data, generally, that you're storing. So it continues to become larger and larger. So AI is certainly a component of the of keeping data clean. I think as we move on further, we'll see that fixing some of these scenarios where if you have unclean data, AI that was one of the first use cases we wanted to use it for, was keeping data clean or identifying that's a problem, but ultimately you're reflecting that AI bot. Or automation around a specific process that you've developed. So you're just replacing that process with a with an automation,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

with your with your processes. Because I'm big on on and I don't know if I'm doing this right or I say I'm big on, you know, documenting your processes, but I frankly, don't. I know that there's ways that I could improve the documentation of it and following through. What are maybe some just high level tips for folks who are like, I know that this is something I should be doing, but what's maybe a quick way to start documenting my processes in a way that won't, you know, drive me crazy?

Nathan Johnson:

So there's a few products that will record your screen, right? But videos, we like videos. And unfortunately, with a video, if you change your process, you have to redo your video. But doing a two or three minute clip is really not that big of a deal. So when you when you build out and you create these requirements, which become test scripts, which become trading documentation, adding a video on to that today is really not that big of a deal. And there's lots of products, you know, script, I think, is one that we see kind of the most because it's it's attached to Google, and there's a freemium version on Google, so you can use it within Google Chrome at basically no cost. It's not as efficient as if you pay for it, but it'll do screen captures every time you click on something, and then it'll, it'll, it'll create a area where you can go in and expand upon those screen captures. It's not the best documentation of it. It's certainly not the way we would do training documentations 15 years ago. But you don't necessarily need it to be extremely pretty, and what you do need it to not be so what you want to avoid is a training documentation that is so large that it can't possibly be consumed, or a video that's so long that no one's going to watch it. So there's those pieces of it too. Also, you know, the AI side on training is emerging more and more every day, so we're kind of excited. It's one of the areas of AI I'm excited for how to apply that into software training. You know, I don't think anyone's really capitalized on that to a level, but you look at some some products that are out there that are more human training. It's like sales training and customer interaction, that kind of stuff. It's not going to be too, too long until those type of products are going to start moving into here's how we train our software.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So it almost sounds like it's it could be as simple as, you know, starting a Google Doc and taking screenshots of every click you make and maybe the why behind those clicks, or the video of just a quick overview. But don't make it too long to where the other people will avoid it, right?

Nathan Johnson:

You want the users to actually go find it and then putting the metadata behind it about what you're actually doing so they can search it, creating a medium for that. You can't necessarily drop it all on YouTube, because you're putting in secret sauce to your organization. So it's got to be private, or should be private. This, although typically stems from that initial requirement document that we go back to. So that's why I started out with that, because you know your requirements define your process, your process defines your testing, and then ultimately, your testing and your processes define your your your your training so and your training materials. So, yeah, you can start out. You might start out with a Vizio process, flow, whatever. It doesn't matter. You put it as long as it's digital. You can you can advance it. If it's an Excel, whatever it doesn't, it really doesn't matter if you're doing nothing today. The fact is, tomorrow you need to do something and it needs to be able to be understood by more than just the person that created it.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Yeah, because if you do all of those steps properly, because my next question was going to be around, how do you avoid some of the hidden costs and hidden fees? But it sounds like if you do those first few steps properly, then you avoid some of those hidden fees, or maybe, you know, creep and things like that, that you wouldn't have anticipated, maybe not have budgeted for. And then you know, before you know it, you're, the project has ballooned, and you're you're way over budget than what you anticipated,

Nathan Johnson:

or you can predict where you may go. And you know, I tell every customer of ours, do not buy a solution based upon a technology roadmap or a development roadmap. So we're going to have this feature out in six months a year, whatever the case may be. And I cannot. Say how many times we've had customers not heed that advice and then end up having cost overruns because that feature was now stricken or it's not going to be out for another year, but it's a go live requirement. It's something that that customer needs to be able to use the product to move forward. So you are putting yourself at risk when you go, I mean, you should buy the solution that meets 90% of your requirements or more. 80% is debatable. If you have no other solution above and beyond that, 80% is debatable, and then can and then build something on the side to meet and meet the remaining 10 to 20% but you absolutely should not buy something that is go live requirement without knowing that that's in a sales or in a development roadmap of some kind. If you do it's because everyone ends up doing it anyway. You need to lock in your contract around that can't overrun. That has to be a defined date and potentially release you of your contract if that doesn't get you know if that, if that development item does not get released at the right time, usually, there's a lot more than one. Usually, when you get into this, there's going to be dozens, potentially when you start looking at that. So that's you should not have many cost overruns. If your vendor is 100% honest, and they didn't, they didn't create a scenario where they're showing vaporware, which still happens when you get away from the PowerPoints, it's still, I mean, you still end up in a scenario where, yes, we can do that, yes we can do that, they don't fully understand the requirement, and they didn't ask enough questions. That can still happen. It's limited. But the biggest issue is buying something that doesn't exist.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

And I would think that the vendor selection part is probably the most difficult, because it sounds like not not your firm, but maybe other firms, or maybe companies just aren't engaging a firm to help them through this process. And they see the bells and whistles of all of the new technology that's entered the market, and they think it's a great idea, and then they just spend money on it, instead of doing their due diligence, I am curious when maybe some of your clients have seen some of you know these, or maybe just leads you've talked to, or people you've talked to in general, if they see the new shiny toy, how do you figure out, or how do you sort of work through them, or work with them to figure out if that solution is actually write for their tech stack, right?

Nathan Johnson:

So you know that I'm going to talk about a couple of things because you brought up, you sort of open the door to something, which is, you know, they see the new shiny thing and and they, some people, don't wait. They just go out and they do a demo, and they they purchase it. In some cases, it's not even a demo. It's just a discussion or a PowerPoint slide deck of, hey, we can do all this. And you know, you look at at an automation, for example, how do you how do you demo an automation when it doesn't exist in your system yet? So those, those organizations need to figure that component out because it ends up failing, or the adoption rate can be, can be difficult because they're not getting to the specific need of the customer. But yeah, you do see a lot of them run out and buy stuff, and it doesn't, doesn't work out right? And we do hear that, and we do see vendors exiting the market or just simply not not being around anymore, especially on the startup side, you know, they they're not very noisy. Somebody catches on that they're around. But we've had a number of vendors that have entered the market, and then they are no longer in the market anymore at all. So, you know, they find out that that they just can't manage this. So Trucking is trucking brokerage, logistics in general, is something that never forgets. So you have to be extremely clean on those first few moves, or be very honest on the fact that you are as a vendor, are trying to deploy something that you really don't have widely deployed, so that that should be reflective in the cost. So I don't know if I entirely answered your question there, but I think I maybe jumped in before it.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So no, I think it's just trying to set, sort of the base level, baseline level of when companies decide to engage with a new technology or new technology partner, and if that's actually going to make sense for the company's investment, not just money wise, but but time wise too. Because imagine that that some you know to hint at what you were just speaking to you best a lot of time. Energy and money into onboarding a new tool, only to find out that they've exited the market because they were technically a startup. That's got to be incredibly frustrating and maybe crippling to some businesses out there.

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah, depending upon the size of the solution, it could be crippling. It could be just it can also have a customer impact. A lot of these tools are customer facing, or are assisting with, you know, reduction in people that are customer facing, which we debate with a little bit that you shouldn't necessarily reduce and count, but double down your effort towards customer facing, but, but without going down that route Road, plenty of them see things. You know, social media is a tough one. There's lots of people that'll come out there. They'll do podcasts, they'll they'll broadcast their tool, whatever the case may be. It looks nice, shiny, all great. There's VC investments, so they have some capital. They can build a big booth, they can show up, they can do some interesting things, or it appears that they can do some interesting things, and they do have an ICP that probably fits them most of the time, or they did have a customer base that that they started out with. So so I think it's important that you ask the right questions upfront, which could be, how many customers do you actually have in production, not in testing. You know, in production, what's your what is your roadmap? What are you working on? You know, how many employees do you have? I think is another, you know, sometimes you'll find out there's two employees. So even though there's very noisy social media behind it, there's two employees, and maybe there's 15 developers and XYZ location across the world or more, but there's really only two people that are championing the product, and that's those are all they're not bad things. By all means, they're not bad things, but you need to be aware of the risks that you're taking by walking down the road. In addition, you know, all the AI and automation solutions that are out there, you know, at our enterprise and larger mid market customers, they don't want the they're frustrated at this point. There's too many solutions in market. They're only addressing one to three use cases. Lots of them are in competition with one another. Or, if you look at roadmap, they're planning on competing with one another. And vendor management is huge, you know, especially right now where the footprint of this looks like, you may have 20 or 30 bot solutions out there. So there's a few companies that are trying to, you know, deploy many of them, instead of just one or two or three, so that the usual free tech side is get some capital, get an idea, get to the point where you're going to create, create a solution, get some capital support that do one thing really, really well, and then sell it, and then figure out how to add on a few more. And there's nothing wrong with that, but these are small solutions that are extremely efficient, but I don't if I'm a CIO of a company, I don't want 30 vendors as my I don't want to have to manage 30 vendors to run my automations. Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

I mean, especially with and I definitely want to dive more into the AI agent side of things, because I think that there's still a lot of questions around, you know, sort of the success rate. But I am curious as a side note, you know, there's, there's a lot of tribal knowledge when it comes to logistics and fleet operations and brokerage operate, you know, all of those different silos within logistics, with a lot of these, you know, sort of VC backed firms, technology providers that have entered the space within the last handful of years. Do you think that that concept still exists, that, Oh, they're an outsider. They don't know our industry. So that solution can't be good. Or is the tide kind of shifting a little bit where, you know, we are as an industry starting to get more attention from outsiders, from venture capital firms and things like that, where they are looking at some of the glaring problems. Is it good to have that outsider perspective? Or do you still need to pair the tribal knowledge with the with the solutions that are being presented on the market?

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah, I look at it from both sides, right? You are going to have someone championing idea that's coming from market or potentially from outside of the market, but if they're coming from outside of the market, then that's why you ask that question around, who's your who's your staff, who's who's working with you, and what's their their tenure? Because they do. We're complicated industry, more complicated than anyone. Any outsider thinks that we are, and I've had plenty of those conversations with outsiders, and you know when they're going to be problematic. Attic versus when they're not and and some of the more successful solutions are folks that are coming from outside of the industry, that surround themselves with with industry experts. In the beginning, it may be an advisory capacity, but eventually you're bringing them on staff to help drive product. And you may, you may have a whole bunch of really, really smart people building it that are not from industry, but you have architected out this, this solution, using people that understand the day to day needs of whatever ICP you have.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

And so, as you know, we've talked about, you know, the what a company should do beforehand, and then it may be some of the questions that they should be, you know, paying attention to, or some of the demo information that they should be paying attention to. And, you know, a little bit around implementation. But after you get the software implemented, what happens afterwards? What should companies, you know, as from a support perspective, what should companies be aware of? What are some red flags, green flags on the support side of things, after the product is implemented? Yeah.

Nathan Johnson:

So, you know, this also varies based upon the size of the solution that you're purchasing. So, you know, let's go down the road of a SAS, TMS, you know, you would have already defined who owns the data, but those are the more complicated sides. And you know, how do I access the data? How do I go from you're never coming out of an implementation at 100% utilization of a software, or you're probably never going to achieve 100% utilization of software anyway. But if you can get to 80, you know, 80% lots of times you're you're doing really well, and you're probably one of the stronger organizations of that, that particular vendor. So I think what's continued training I already talked about that, that's first and foremost, vendor relations, you're continuing to manage that vendor, work with that vendor, you know, quarterly, biannual, whatever, updates with that vendor if they're a major component, so like a TMS, if they are a major component of your of your company and companies, brokerages, trucking companies, whatever, If you have a TMS, your entire business circles around that if it shuts off, tell me what happens if it's just gone tomorrow and it won't turn back on? Tell me what happens you're having problems and so maintaining that vendor relation. Be involved with that vendor go to their conferences, even if you just send one or two people, I usually recommend, the larger the organization that you have, the more often you want to send two people because of redundancy scenarios. But you know, this business is all about relationships as well, and that does not just include customers, that includes your your vendors. So you know the continued training and continued relationship understanding what they're going to do. We are moving fast. Rate. Tech is moving fast. What is here last year is not what's here this year they they've made a significant, significant advancement dependent upon who they are. They their product might even not look the same as what it was, and you might not know that if you don't have that continued relationship, that is a two way street. It's not always on the vendor. It is on the customer as well, to show the effort that they want to maintain that creating your super users so the users that know the products, regardless of size, those that understand that if you can't create a super user, or you don't want to create a super user, you know, give us a call. We're already that. So we support everyone on a monthly basis that way, or can support you on a monthly basis that way. So you know you want to make sure that that you're if you have a list of 50 different tech vendors that you're working with, or 20, or whatever the number is, who owns that vendor relationship, and how often are they interacting with them?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

And I imagine there's probably some opportunities for consolidation. If you're looking at the relationships of all of the vendors that you're working with, and some of those vendors might add some features in the future or maybe remove some features that you really liked, I would imagine that that's maybe like a yearly pruning process to see, depending on your contract, of course, to see which of these vendors can you maybe not work with anymore, versus vendors that maybe you want to invest a little bit more in, because they're developing those capabilities that you need for the future.

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah, or the selection of a new vendor to replace multiple existing vendors so that. Can happen too, and your contract management is important. You brought up the contract. So when you're signing a subscription or SAS agreement, there's usually a period of time that's going to run it. It's going to be a year to five years, something like that. You shouldn't decide that you're going to look at the renewal of that six months before you should be looking at it depending upon the size of your organization, potentially two years before, 18 months before, 12 months before, it depends upon the complexity of solution. The last thing you want to do is six months prior, start looking for a way that's faster, better, cheaper, stronger, and not have the time to get it done when that contract renews. Sometimes you can go month to month, sometimes you can't. So you can have that conversation, but certainly, you know our target is by all means, and we track most of our customers contracts, so we're reminding them, hey, this is coming up. But you know, if this is something, we typically know what they don't want and what they do want. And so you know, if it's a TMS coming up, you have a year left on the contract, we'll we'll definitely bring it up to them, but you can do that on your own quite easily. So that's that's important. Many of these contracts just auto renew. That's probably less than what it used to be. It used to be across the board, but many of them will auto renew it may. I think you need to get a reminder these days about that, but it's a reminder. It's not a I mean, if you let it go, in many cases, it's going to auto renew for, potentially for three to five years, and then you're locked in. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with keeping the existing vendor. But to your point, not only do you have that happening, you have acquisitions happening with other areas and and then you have the TMS is which, historically, with the TMS, when freight tech goes wild, the TMS is going to start and there's a subject matter that makes sense for them, they're going to start looking to build that in their base solution, or as an offering in addition to their solution. And that's going to create pain for those individual solutions that were out there that bolted on to the TMS So, but that is historically. I mean, going back my entire career, that's historically what we've seen happen with TMS.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So, you know, with all of your experience in this industry, I'm curious as to you know, you mentioned two years that you should be looking out on some of these contracts with the speed of how freight tech is evolving. I'm curious as to what is the longest as I guess, what type of software takes the longest to implement, and then what is surprisingly like, easier to implement and takes a shorter amount of time? Sure?

Nathan Johnson:

Sure. Well, one thing to add on there, too is the term future proof. There's no, I don't believe in that term at all. We have no idea what's going to happen in 2345, years. We can guess maybe two years. We know five years. We have no idea. We have no clue this. I mean, who would have thought that llms and AI would have had the impact that it did. I mean, we all maybe kind of thought that it would, but we're still figuring out how to even deploy it. And so what is this going to look like in five years? No one knows. What's your hardware requirements. Who would have thought that RAM random access memory on machines would have went nuts and cost. So you can't even get it anymore. It's almost championed the whole idea of moving off premise, on any sort of hosted solution, into a cloud, because it allows it to be much more managed and a cheaper cost. So we could not have predicted that five years ago. I anyone who did, I think you can predict components of it, but anyone that did is wrong, or is it wrong? But anyone who did, I guess I don't know. I don't know them. No one came up and said, hey, you know we're gonna they're retired on a beach somewhere. Right, right, exactly. So, you know, the more complex ones. I'm just going to put it simple as this, the more expensive it is, the harder it is to implement. It's it's very simple when it comes to that your your freight network optimization tools, those are pretty heavy, or can be the moment someone says, Hey, I have a product that should take six months or 12 months to implement and says, hey, we'll do this in two to four weeks. You should be asking a lot more questions than just accepting that. So it is possible that we've seen some products start to implement extremely fast. A lot of that is driven on the fact that you know they're they're pushing more on to the customer than what they've ever pushed before. They're not aware of it so, but your TMS is, is one of the, the heaviest. Obviously, you know you have some document workflow, Edi or customer customer visibility. Is, well, sometimes customer visibility is not, but to use the term EDI and encompass all API and customer interaction with it, I think that that can be heavy because there's, you know, many people, many mid sized customers, may have 100 trading partners, and you have to work through all of that. So that can be a long pull in an implementation that you're not expecting. And you know, those are the primary ones, easy ones. You know, we've seen some email automation, back office, billing automation, order or freight out of pay. Those things, we see substantial impact in an organization very, very quickly. In some cases, you're up and running in 3060, 90 days or less. If you have an accounting department of 60 people, there's 30 people. You need to figure out what to do with maybe 20 on the low end. But it is that much of a substantial deployment, and it's not that hard to implement, assuming that the product is already integrated, already has their requirements all figured out, and they're a bolt on that typically those have, you know, one use case to them. So this is an example of you're going to have one vendor, but the impact of this to your organization is so big that it's okay to have that one vendor right now, somewhere down the road, the ecosystem will probably look, look a little different, but, you know it there's, there's a few that are out there that encompass freight out of pay and many, many other solutions, but there's a lot that are targeting freight out of Pay, that have one solution or three or less, are

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Is there still a big I would imagine that this debate has, is still existing, but the build versus buy debate, how is that happening internally and then related, what does, I guess, sort of a modern freight IT department look like

Nathan Johnson:

two different ways, either very robust or very lean. You know, it's very rare you see one kind of in the middle. And if they are in the middle, they're looking to go one way or the other, and they're, they're scoping that out. That's very robust, very robust, meaning many people, there's, there's no ratio that necessarily hits that. But we have customers that have, you know, 150 people in their IT department, wow, or more in some cases. And then we and they're not in the top 25 so they might, they might be in the top 100 and then we have, we have 1000 truck fleets that have one or two people in it. So, and, you know, they outsource a lot of things so, so it, but in the middle, you typically will have, we're going to handle all the processes that we need an FTE for, and then we're going to outsource everything that's fractional. So for example, if you don't need a full time DBA, hiring a full time DBA and then asking that full time DBA to do vendor management,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

DBA, meaning

Nathan Johnson:

database administrator. Yeah, so asking them to manage vendor relationships or something else is not an effective use of their time, typically, and they may not be the best person at that. So you want to make sure that you can do that. Or there's fractional organizations out there, you know, we do that across all of the IT ecosystem for a trucking company, a brokerage, a shipper, we can handle kind of any component of that and there, but you can outsource it to anyone else too. There's plenty of managed service providers out there that have those type of roles. So we've seen that. So that's kind of the middle ground on it, on what it looks like. And then the builder, by discussion, I think we see our build more often on the non asset side, it's and that's because it's easier to build a non asset TMS than an asset TMS, and it's easier by a long shot. Doesn't mean that the non asset TMS is out there aren't amazing, but it is. Anyone that's done it before knows exactly what I'm talking about. You have all the contiguous problems with the assets and the driver pay and where are the trailers? Where are the trucks, the ELD integrations, driver workflow, all of these other things that come in. So it's fairly rare that we have a discussion around a complete new build for an asset company, although it can happen most of the time, it's us pulling them off of some sort of proprietary build that they had 1015, 2030, years ago and moving them to a more modern solution. And what you do end up having is the augment or build to build to you buy a solution, and then you customize it to meet the final need.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Yeah, I think you hinted at it earlier when, because it reminds me of this Reddit thread that I was going through about, you know, buying or, you know, just analyzing a TMS and which one to invest in. And one of the Reddit comments, it said something to the effect of, you know, for a lot of the legacy systems, you know, that's been built through the blood, sweat and tears of developers over the last 20 years, and there's a reason why these legacy systems are still around, versus some of the newer players that might disrupt, you know, some different segments and some different market, but, you know, players are there.

Nathan Johnson:

I just, I just spent the whole week at at at McLeod, visiting with their team. And that's, that's an exact one. I just, I just unboxed that on my show a minute ago. So, you know, they're not bad solutions. There's optics, and there's history, and trucking companies don't forget, and brokerages don't forget. So it's the same thing with any competing product to the truck that I just picked up. You know, they there's a lot that those products do, and to think that a new product is going to come in the market, there are very few that are even in the realm of handling 70% of what one of the legacy products does. And when you know that's our TMS philosophy, just like with any other other product, is the best TMS that you have is the one that you own. Prove us wrong, and we'll help you prove it wrong. But many people are just mad because something that happened in the past, and we can assist with that too. You know, fixing the relationships is is a big deal. But many times it's this thing can't be done this way. A lot of times it's integration oriented along a legacy TMS and a modern a more modern deployment. But even the modern companies have problems with integrations. They're not really what you think they are. In a lot of cases, they're not as advanced. They haven't hit every use case yet. When enterprise level fleets start going on a modern TMS and that pushes all the way down to mid and small market processes, I think we'll see things clean up. But there's no doubt that the market is different than what it was 10 years ago. It is absolutely different. There are more players, and there's viable options if you're on a legacy TMS today, but it is expensive, as you alluded to earlier on the brokerage you're at where you switch the TMS. It's not a fun process switching your TMS or your ERP, which really redefine the TMS as an ERP for the most part, for your mid market fleets, larger organizations may have an actual ERP. So, and that's a whole nother discussion around you know your finance and accounting packages and whatnot, those are also very complicated and difficult, and many companies are making switches right now, on that side too

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Well, speaking of sort of the, you know, making switches and investments and all of that, let's get into the AI portion of this discussion. What is hype and what is actual utility that businesses are being able to use today?

Nathan Johnson:

So, you know any I think I walked down that road a little bit before, and I'll tap on it again before I say the next thing. So anything that, well, I'll state it this way. 15 years ago, there was a lot of optimization that was running everything, everything was about the best choice. And I kept calling out that trucking companies and brokerages don't need best choices. That's tribal knowledge that's up here before we can get to talking about the best choice. Why don't we reduce workload through automations? And that's most of the areas that we see right now, and some are far more complicated than others. Some are are automations that are very simple. You know, this thing happens over here, and 10 other things happen over here, and it's pretty linear, where others are extremely complicated, like going out to websites or interacting with customer portals and scheduling appointments or whatever the case. Yeah, the agents or the automations, I put that all together into one box so it's not all AI to me. It could be rpa, it could be anything, but they all are in the same box. Primarily, it's not because of the tech behind them. It's because. The solution that they provide to the customer. We're making things go faster with less work, with with less labor, and so that that all falls kind of in one bucket, and we've evolved to that thinking over the last two years, you know. And I can't wait until AI as a better term to it, because right now, it's all encompassing, and that's not accurate either. So the hype that we see isn't necessarily hype, it's Moreover, vetting out use cases. And I say the industry has to go two steps forward and one step back on this scenario, and we have to be willing to take that step back as fast as possible. So if something's not working, we don't need to grind it in and figure out a way to make it work. We can just let it go and move on to the next thing. And there's so many different solutions that are popping out. A great area that this is being discussed and tried out and deployed is your agents that are answering phone calls, and there's areas that or that are managing the phone calls. Many cases, it works out. In other cases, it's questionable. You know, companies have had significant pushback on it. We don't know where that's going. We in some cases, people are fine with it. In other cases, they are not. So I think it'll be interesting to see how that develops. And that's so from a hype standpoint. You know, when that first came out, which was two plus years ago, that it started hitting market, everyone was jumping on that. And then came the email automations, which I don't believe that is hype, that's, that's, that's a great way of managing your day. I was just on a customer call today that they manage one 50 million emails a year. And yeah. So how do you manage that. So, so the how do you manage that without some form of automation? They they're, for the most part, doing it today, and we're going to help them try to solve it. But that being said, you know, I you have to question everything out there, and a lot of it is, how many customers do you have in deployment? Can I talk to one of them that's using it? Are they of significant size? Are they of similar size? Are they a competitor of yours and discovering kind of where you're at? But you know, there is a lot of hype that surrounds it, but the question is, is it hype that's going to work out and be something applicable, or is it not another one that's that's out is, you know, from a driver standpoint, is mirrorless trucks, so they don't have mirrors on them, they have cameras. So in there, there's part of the industry says these are bad idea. The other part of the industry is saying they're good idea. Every driver I've ever talked to actually likes them. But, you know, there's things about mirrorless trucks. This is not AI, but the data you can collect from it could be processed by AI. You have cameras around a truck which creates a environment that identifies safety issues, and those cameras have night vision to them, so, so when you're looking out on a camera, you can see down the back of the truck and way back at night time where you can't see that during the day. So someone without without lights on, could come up beside you and be behind you on the trailer, and you would not see them without a camera, or, unlikely, wouldn't see them without a camera. So, but that's, that's a great debate on is that hyper? Is that not real? I'm in the I'm in the it's a real application. It's part of the part of the argument is, in an accident, you take the mirror out, what are you going to do? But that same, same that's the biggest argument I've heard, and my point to that is, if you take the mirror out on a truck, that's a physical mirror, not a camera, you're still in the same spot. So so it's all about repair and how that thing goes. But so there's, there's lots of areas where hype is questionable. You know, in the cab, out of the cab, with the brokers, with the carriers, maintenance wise, you know, we've seen AI deployed there for years, and that seems great. But as it continues to go on, I think every new use case is going to be, is this real, or is this something that we have to vet out.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

You mentioned some pushback earlier. What kind of pushback Are you hearing or or seeing when it comes to

Nathan Johnson:

it's lots of times driver oriented so, and you have to ask yourself, do you want your drivers talking to agents? And if so, when? Um. If it's something that you know they're calling in to schedule a maintenance event you possibly could but every time you talk to a driver, is a chance to build a relationship and build retention so or find out something that you didn't necessarily know. So the question is, is, do you want to lose that or are you okay with it? You know, that's, that's the main question. And is the driver even going to allow that adoption? They already didn't like track and trace solutions that were that were offshore. You know, this is not even a human and, you know, whatever the case might be, there, there, there is some pushback there. Now, there's also areas that it may work. So it's, I think it's something that has to be vetted out over time. You'd think that we've put enough time into this already, but I think we're actually just now getting it deployed at enough fleets where we're going to get that that feedback. Additionally, do you want to negotiate a load with an agent? I don't. I know. I wouldn't, so I that's a, there's a, there's a algorithmic rule set around what I can do with that agent or not. So give me the person who can actually make the point or make the decision. What's interesting is, on the inverse of that, I could digitally negotiate with that agent. Have no idea. We could fire emails back and forth and you'd have no idea, but it's the same rule set, right? So you have those sides appointment scheduling, you know, let them make the phone calls and sit on hold with Publix for two hours. So there's nothing wrong with that. You know, when I first started talking with happy robot, right, when they were I think they had just come on a Y Combinator. They, they, the first question I asked them is, what happens when you have an AI solution, a bot talking with another bot, and what do you call that? And they said, we've, we've coined that as soft EDI So, but now that's happening. You know, you have AI solutions potentially talking to AI solutions. And, you know, I've heard of a few of them getting in loops, but I really haven't heard of it being an issue. So I

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

remember when I was listening to a conversation about robotics in a warehouse, and how there has to be a level of whenever a warehouse decides to add robotics, at any point, they have to have sort of a psychological, psychological level of onboarding for the humans that are going to be working alongside the robot to kind of reassure them that this is this robot's not going to take your job. It's here to help you. Do you find that some of that same sort of psychological training is also being deployed on the agent side of things?

Nathan Johnson:

I don't think that we're deploying it. I think it's being talked about in some instances. But truly, if you have a front office organization and you are reducing headcount and replacing it by AI, you know, AI does take jobs. Anyone that you know, we came up with this thing where AI is not coming for your job, right? If you're not going to learn how to use the solutions and work with the solutions and make yourself valuable, you are probably going to have a problem so, or you may have a problem at the very least, so it can replace you in a certain role, right? But it doesn't have to. It most certainly doesn't have to. Or you suddenly, if you learn the solution quite well now, now there's people that need to manage those solutions, and that's hard stuff, right? That can be complicated, at least in initial deployment. So from a logistic service provider standpoint, so trucking company, brokerage, whatever. I don't think there's a maybe at the enterprise level, you're seeing some people come in and deal with it from a psychological standpoint. But at other points, at other other markets, or down market, from the enterprise side, mid, mid and small, they're just slapping these things in. And either they recognize the return or they reapply the user to something else. So we challenge all of that and say, you know, this is still a relationship business. It's not going to change. And if you have front office people that no longer are required to do the job that you had, it defined point them towards customer facing interactions that that they do need to work with and help grow the business. Same thing with the back office folks that that may find that they're they're not needed anymore. Many of them have been around a long time. Your back office turnover is usually much lower than front office. Office turnover at a asset based carrier, for sure. So apply them towards revenue generating potential opportunities, you know, have them check in with with customers, have them do things that you weren't doing before. They're not in sales, right? But if they are, have the aptitude deploy them to areas like that, and pull back, if you look back, when I 2003 2004 I had plenty of time working in operations to be able to reach out to customers or verify things or whatnot. Now you're managing all these data points, and we've effectively made the business much more complex. So So I but I do know where you're coming from on the warehouse side, and that's been interesting. But on the same hand, there's still headcount reduction at the warehouse too. Once, once that's fully deployed, they're not putting them into place to let the warehouse worker work less. So you know, they are experiencing the same thing.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So it's like a stop gap where they have to they can't fully replace the human yet, and so they still need to force that collaboration. And maybe, you know, the psychological aspect of it is part of that long term plan for them on the, I guess maybe, like a AI positive or maybe like a tech positive note, if someone is working at, you know, a logistics company and they want to start using some of these tools, are there? Are there are there any ones that you would kind of maybe point them to, maybe not, you know, vendor specific, but maybe task oriented or goal oriented, of that they can start experimenting with to because we are still so very new to this. And I think for folks outside of technology, it's, it's intimidating for them to jump into these things. So what would maybe be some advice to folks out there who who maybe want to dabble a little bit, right?

Nathan Johnson:

So pick one or two use cases that are going to have. And I, almost the last couple months, I've been signing off on my podcast on with this kind of statement, which is, pick, pick something and fix it. You know, it's much more detailed than that, but effectively, find the area of your business that you have a significant pain point in, and find the solution that you want to deploy. And if you keep it small, then you're not looking for a large, impactful deployment of it. You just are looking at one thing. So you know, if you want to automate some of your email order entry that's that's a relatively easy one. So we've been at carriers that that have 60, 70% of their orders are coming in via email, and you know, they're manually entering that today. And you know, within 60 days, you could probably have that completely automated, if not faster. So you know, you really pick where your largest pain point is and what the value add. It's not always about workload reduction. Sometimes it could be visibility. Sometimes it could be customer interactions. The ease of use of a solution, I think, is extremely important. And I challenge everyone, if you hand a tablet to a three year old, they're going to figure it out, whatever, whatever game or whatever you give them, you know, come back to them in an hour, and they're going to have it figured out. There's absolutely no reason, as we go forward that we can't produce products that are in a similar fashion. It's It's obviously the setup and the configuration and the brain power to produce that solution requires very, very, very smart people. But being able to sit down in front of a solution and say, This is how I'm going to use it is, is going to be the empowerment of the future, right? I don't need training anymore. I don't need processes anymore. This is the only way I can use this product. So from a carrier standpoint or a broker standpoint, that's looking to dabble in or even warehousing, shipper or whatever, find if I just find an easy use case and and go hunting for they all exist order to cash. You know, we went on a mission probably four or five years ago to automate a trucking company from order to cash, 100% right? And that was not our development of the solutions. That was finding vendor partners. And if you actually scroll through GLCs, vendor page, vendor partner page, or partnership page. A lot of the if you start looking at how those and we partner with many, many more companies than that, but those are our closer ones. If you look at those providers that are in there, you can find pretty much in order to cash automation in some way, shape or form, we have. Had to see a carrier completely automate or a broker completely automate themselves. In theory, it could be done, but it all starts with finding the first thing that you need to do that you want to tackle. Don't try to hit the home run, just get out first base so, you know, and work it that way. Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

I used to tell people, just keep an extra tab open on chat, GPT or Gemini, and start going there instead of Google and just seeing it, how it answers your questions, how it would push I use it a lot of times for interview prep, where I'll say these are the questions I was thinking of asking based on everything you know, based on their LinkedIn profile, what am I missing? Push back against some of these questions. And I think it just helps to kind of, you know, maybe have a second brain there that that's helping you along that thought process,

Nathan Johnson:

what you end up with. And I use chat GBT all the time and for similar processes, right? So every guest that's on I'm loading up a profile that's around them and I've built over many years now. And not only that, but I also run a lot of other things through it. So chat, GPT is almost another brain of my own. It's just a lot faster at doing research, and I don't ever just copy paste anything out of there. I'm reading to ensure that it's what I want, but it's enhanced my productivity, you know, by a long shot, and my writing, when I do that, is typically me, but it's it's certainly got a component of verification and whatnot, through some solution, and I'll actually pick the solution based upon the need. So I pay for a premium on pretty much every major platform. I do default the general day to day to chat GPT, and then when, if I need a good graphic, I'm going to Gemini or a video, I'll go to Gemini. And you know, if it has to have correct writing on it, I'm going to take that Gemini image and put it back to chat GPT and tell it to put the writing on, because chat GPT will get that right. But Gemini can't spell so on a video, on a picture or video. So so it's understanding the solutions that you have available to you and how to exploit them. But certainly if you're not using you know, chat, GBT, or some LLM solution to enhance your day to day productivity, you're doing something wrong. We actually pay for every employee at GLCs to have access to to an LLM So, and that can typically, we're going to have copilot injected with with chat, GPT, and then we've connected that to suppliers, so other vendors and their documentation, and so that allows us to go much, much faster when we're trying to research something. It may not be right, we need to verify it, but I actually had a scenario where I did that and I solved the problem for a customer that I had no business solving. I ended up pushing it back to our support team and had them verify. But, I mean, I was sitting there talking to a CIO, and I said, Have you guys tried this? And it ended up being a problem that that they've been fighting with for years. So so it was, but that's because we have these huge libraries that we've built out and made available to us, and have refined and trained the products since we've been able to

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

are you utilizing any agents, and what kind of I guess I'm just now starting to dabble in agents. I've used Zapier for forever. And so I've struggled with, you know, what's the difference between a zap and creating an agent? And I don't exactly know quite yet if there is a difference there yet.

Nathan Johnson:

So we use a peer as well. We also have a large integrations team that will so we are using agents on the development side, by all means, that's probably sped up development quite a bit, but I don't know of any one that has a developer on staff that's not using some form of clod or whatever. So the outside of that. You know, from a customer facing standpoint, we do not use agents. Everything is interacted at a human level, and I don't see us changing that based on our customer base. It doesn't we're too complicated at this moment that, once again, we can't predict what's going to happen in five years. We may not, but we haven't that extremely trained product that we've opened up to everybody that that allows answers to be found, or at least directions to be found, you know, so if they have a use case that they need to figure out, they're going to go there first. And then they're going to potentially expand within our organization to ask questions to humans. But as far as you know, specific agents on our end, outside of development, you know, not really, and outside of some integrations, not really, not yet. So, so

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

no podcast agents, because we haven't gotten to that, you know, part of the conversation yet. I know I want to be respectful of your time. Talk about the Okay, okay, we got some time then. But on the podcast side of things, how do you what inspired you to get started? Because I was listening to you on another show earlier today, and I think you said that you had had recorded over the summer, like 90 pieces of content or something that effect it was like a year ago, so I

Nathan Johnson:

don't know, I went through and started trying to put out. So what started me doing it was I introduced, I introduced someone at the Minnesota Trucking Association Annual Conference. Many years, I used to do a lot of public speaking, and then for five, six years, I didn't do, do any public speaking. And so I eventually ended up doing this introduction, and I frankly, bombed it. And I said, after that, I said, you know, lots of people have been challenging me to come forward and start talking about the industry. There's virtually no topic that I can't sit down and talk about in some way, shape or form. And you know, whether I'm not an authority in it or whether I'm close to an authority in it, you know, order to cash at a trucking company or a brokerage, I can usually talk about anything there and be fine. So that being said, I decided to start the podcast to clean up my speech. That was it had nothing to do with anything else. I was just, I want to actually, when you and I met that next day was my first episode was because we met at we met at f3 years ago, and and then my first episode was I actually did it in Chattanooga at a podcast studio, and so so that was the driving factor of of why I started the podcast. I did not care about viewers. I did not care i They're either coming or they're not. I just needed to clean up the way I speak, and that's worked out very well. And on top of that, I was, so then you go to the moon. Shot of it, of you know, what do I What would I like to achieve? After a little while, it was, I'd like to get some speaking engagements. I'd like to, you know, learn more. I've met more people through the podcast that I normally wouldn't meet than any, any other medium, I'd say. And so it served this, this tool going forward, that that I just, I continue to do it two years. And, you know, I think there's several 100 pieces of content not including that, that those videos I was talking about where it was, I went through our implementation process, and I don't even think I finished it. I took it through maybe halfway, and then I realized this was a bad way of doing it. I should have done it a different way. I'll get back to it. I've never gotten back to it. So at some point we will get back to sharing that out. But I was doing screen shares of here's every point that we have through vendor selection all the way through go live and then actually support following go live. So that's all on YouTube and is available in some fashion. I tried to do it like two to three minute clips, and then, not knowing how to do things back then, I actually recorded them and edited them in two to three minute clips, instead of recording the whole shebang and slicing it up. And that was my error. That was massive amounts of work so but, but that's really why I started and where it's gone from there. Since then, it's just been a great tool. In general. We're looking at launching a few other podcasts, potentially two more. You know, we don't take sponsors on driving forward. It's meant to do what I want to do with it, and I don't, if I don't want to do it, then I don't have to do it. But I don't think I've ever outside of vacation and a conference here and there. I don't think we've ever missed a week.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So wow, do you have a favorite episode

Nathan Johnson:

I had? So there's two episodes that come to mind, maybe three. My first one that I ever had, which I can't even watch anymore because I just, I'm horrible, was, was Chris Thomas? And Chris Thomas is, you know, Chris? Okay, so yeah, and and Chris and I have become friends, right? He's going to be at manifesting. He's been there the last three years, including this year. So I got to know Chris at the same place that I met you. So but autumn transport, I know people that work there, and I saw autumn transport coming to f3 so I reached out. Them. I said, Who's this? It's an owner operator. So I made it. Made it my point to find Chris at f3 so he was actually the first episode, technically the second episode, because the first episode was me talking about who I am following that I enjoyed. So I enjoy any episode that has a senior leader and a trucking or brokerage operation that we go into market discussion, I always like talking about that. While I'm a tech guy, I ran trucking companies for years, and I love the industry, and I love the that type of business, so I study it still today. I need to understand what our customers are dealing with. So that that's a good portion of my time is staying on top of market, staying on top of, you know, processes to run your company. And I used to be well, GLCs still has a small component of management consulting. So those generally are my favorite, but the two most favorite. First one is when I had Tom McLeod on. He's, I think he's only done two podcasts, and ours is the second one. The other one was, was, was with Cassandra. And then I had Nick Darman on at manifest last year, and Nick just released. Nick Darman is the CEO of Elvis, and Nick just really surprised me, and I've got to spend some time with him since then, a few times at dinners and whatnot, he is a very energetic person and fun to understand. And just He surprised me. It was not the person I thought it was going to be when I met him at manifest last year. So year.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So, and I imagine that, if you're you're like me, that you use the podcast to learn from smart people. I mean, this is just, you know, a recorded conversation that's a little bit more structured. Of me picking your brain right logistics tech implementation goes wrong because I'm just curious about the topic, and so I would imagine that the podcast serves as a similar function for you, where you just get to learn from people you you like, or maybe don't even know you like yet, right?

Nathan Johnson:

In many cases, you know, I'm talking with people on a network, but in some cases, I know them really well. In some cases, I don't, you know, I would like to use it for more of those on the same end, I'm running a GLCs has become significantly larger and more complex. So it's, how do I fit in the time for the podcast every week? And so it's a challenge to do that sometimes, but and doing that, you know, like, I've learned that I like working with with groups of people on it, and so we started to change the format that way, and that's one of the reasons why no sponsors know anything like that. We're just doing what we want to do because we want to do it. And viewership has gone up, gone down, gone up. You know, it's all over the place. It's certainly stronger in the winter and summer, but we also keep it a live show. So, you know, that's one that's a love hate thing too. So every Thursday, at one o'clock central time, I have to be somewhere to do the podcast, whether that's in, you know, whatever state that whatever that means I gotta, if I'm traveling, I travel a lot. I gotta carry a mic with me. I gotta carry a camera with me. You know, I like doing in person podcast too, so we do a lot of those. I know you, you guys do that too. So, so it's, it's, it's, it's been a good thing. It's certain I learned from everyone that I sit down in front of so or with, whether I think I'm going through or not. And sometimes you are absolutely surprised by what you find out.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So are there any topics that you haven't covered yet that you want to cover?

Nathan Johnson:

Typically, if I want to cover a topic, it's going to going to get covered. So you know, yeah, what I actually try to stay away from technology as episodes, and try to talk more market and a few other things, and we'll bring tech. So we found that that will bring tech forward along with customers. So it's not just a discussion about what your solution does, it's a discussion about what your solution does and your customer base with with them, discussing how you've been impactful to their organization, which then typically will get into some sort of industry discussion about the solve and I enjoy that more. I talk technology all day long, from morning till night. And so doing a podcast on technology is not something I really I mean, I will include it, but I'm not super excited most of the time to do it.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Yeah, and I. You have to be excited about the topic, otherwise, the audience feels it and they'll do

Nathan Johnson:

now, yeah, absolutely. Which is why, if I'm talking to the providers, the list of logistics service providers, along with their solution provider, it's a different conversation. It's much more engaging for me. And it's not that I don't want to talk to the technology platform. It's you can just tell that there's, you know, very few times we have the technology platform be an energetic episode on my side, which is not knocking any guys, because I love you all, but

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

no, I see that on my own data, where the the executives from the tech solution will come on the show, and it does decent, but if they have their customer come on and talk about everything that they were going through, what did they Google Search before they even knew that they had a problem, or when they did discover a problem, who, what were the vendors that they were searching? You know, those kinds of discussions just are resonate with my audience so much more than, you know, a vendor coming on, and I try to balance it, especially with the vendor conversations where I want to kind of dig a little bit deeper and understand their onboarding and pricing and all of that, but the audience just, I think, resonates more with the customer story, and then I've seen it where it's almost like the reverse, where they listen to the customer story and then they're like, Okay, I think I'll give the executive interview a shot now,

Nathan Johnson:

yeah, unless that executive is a rock star, you know, like the Tom McLeod thing that that's our most watched episode by a long shot, and so that and we have an extremely niche audience. So I know everybody says you see us everywhere, but we have you are typically involved in trucking or brokerage, and you're typically an executive or close there to or you're interested in becoming an influencer, or you're just active on LinkedIn, and we do have a following on x and on Facebook as well. But you know, we've never optimized any other other platform like YouTube has all of our content is great and organized there, but I have no views there, but, but if you go, your target audience is executives and transportation, logistics, you have a pretty small audience. I mean, your total addressable market there is not a lot.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So you have a couple 1000, couple

Nathan Johnson:

Well, couple 1000. Well, if I actually kind of know the number, so there's 20,000 customers in our market, rough, roughly. So if you figure, you know one to three there, you're somewhere around 30 to 35,000 potential, and we'll get as many as 1000 watching a week.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So Well, I mean, this was a really insightful conversation to me, especially because I work more on the website management, so the front end marketing, you know, what you know, customers and potential employees see before they engage with a logistics company. But I've always been fascinated by, you know, the, I guess, sort of the real it that goes on in logistics. And that's, you know, exactly what you're you and your company are providing over at GLCs. And I'm curious, you know, last couple questions here, is there anything that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about?

Nathan Johnson:

You know, generally speaking, we didn't really talk touch on cyber Yes. So lots of lots of trucking companies, brokerages, whatnot, they're very aware of freight fraud. We're very aware of freight fraud. We're right in the middle of that battle, because a lot of the activities that happen in freight fraud are actually cyber crimes. Cyber Crimes are a $12.4 trillion issue globally. It is the third largest GDP in theory, if you put it up, it's the US, China and and. Or is it China us now or whatever, China and the US are the top two, and this actually sits as the third. So when we talk freight fraud, that's a number that continues to go up in dollar amount. And yes, there are hijackings that happen, and that's not that's almost not preventable, unless you're going to change your your operating policies. So, but a lot of these, these scenarios in cyber are people gaining access to your information and exploiting it in some way, shape or form, and so if you don't as an organization, have fundamentals in place. A partner that is putting those fundamentals in place, and that partner actually knows what they're doing. There's a lot of people who tout that they're cyber but they don't really understand. So, you know, we're in that unique spot of we understand the freight fraud. We actually do freight fraud assessments and then, but those are becoming less because I think everybody's kind of got their grasp on it themselves. Insurance companies have taken it over on the cyber, cyber security side, it's extremely important. And we've seen some wild and crazy things happen over the last, well, 10 years, but really in the last three or four years, we've seen them exploited even further. So so definitely ensure you know we're talking about all these ways to optimize companies, but one stolen load can crippling. Could be extremely crippling. Could be the difference of your business, or you're not. You obviously have insurance, but one stolen load, or typically, you know, if you're a brokerage and you get hit once. You're probably being attempted to get hit multiple more times, all at the same time. We've had scenarios where someone's listening in on email, and the moment that you transfer your payment information to them, to to a new customer, they grab it and they go clean out your account or attempt to so do you have the right processes with your bank to ensure that that can't happen? You know, those type of things. So those are all areas. So as as your IT, as your managed IT provider, they need to be all encompassing, not only looking at your typical structure of your your Microsoft products and your users, and setting up new users and and whatnot. But they also need to be very aware of the software that matters to you, your TMS, your accounting package, how that all interacts, and be able to look for anomalies within it. When you're being attacked and you are being attacked every day, I had 1.2 million hits against our router last week. So you know that if you're not measuring that, and you can't go to it and ask that question, you go something wrong.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So when you're when you talk about, I think it was an episode that I was listening to you or listening to you on earlier, when it was, I think you said a stat that was like 85% of cybersecurity crime happens because at the user level,

Nathan Johnson:

correct just miss training. You clicked on the wrong thing. So we offer a service that we do. So that's a great spot. It's not AI, but it's an automation. We offer training on a monthly basis. We measure that training, and we'll, we'll perform kind of mock trials for users and hit them with generated phishing attempts and see if we can get them to click on things or provide a stat or whatever the case might be internally. And then we get that back to the customer, and then they can, they can. We typically want them to work with the employee about things you know. So if they've had a bad behavior that they shouldn't do, then you know they're going to have to handle that. But ultimately, 85% of all cyber events, that number floats between 85 and 93 depending upon what data set you're looking at, come from user user error. Another user error is someone calling you. You know, I'll call you Blythe and say, hey, it's Nate, but it's not me. It's some dude in Uzbekistan or whatever, and he just sounds like me, because my voice is all over the internet, and it wasn't hard to replicate. So we have policies. You know, we're a remote company. We have an office, but it's small, considering our size, and if I want something cash moved, or whatever the case might be, it's a it's a multiple authentication on our side, we're not going to just move cash to somebody spend, especially to something weird or outside of the organization, without having a process completed. We've had customers. A good story. There we have, we have customers that we're we're going to wire information to areas and or to to vendors. I think they were buying trucks and the organization had locked that down. You could no longer wire cash. You had to actually send the check. Well, when you go through the process of that, does that actually make sense? Because someone can intercept the check too. So why not pick up the phone? Call the location? There's processes that fix all of these things, and lots of times, the human interaction is what's required to verify you pick up the phone, you call the number of the person that you've called for the last 10 years because you've had that relationship with them, you give it to them digital. Give it to them verbally instead of digitally. When you're going to wire somebody a half a million dollars so,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

or buy a bunch of ways, what's that said? Or buy a bunch of gift cards I had fell for that one.

Nathan Johnson:

Well, I you know the reality of it is, is everything can be exploited. So trust but verify is extremely important. And, yeah, cyber is massive, and it's not just attacking, you know, for millions of dollars. Right now, it could be five it could be you personally, and they want $500 and that's $1 figure you're probably going to pay, because by the time you go to law enforcement and figure out they're not going to pay attention to you anyway, for 500 bucks on the law enforcement side, if you want whatever data back, you're going to take that risk for 500 bucks and they're going to get it. Then what do you do? You clean your stuff up, or do you go, okay, I'm okay. Now until the next time you get hit. So it is on a personal level. It's on a business level. The dollar figures can be, you know, small to very large.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Are there any? Maybe a couple of the most common ways that you see that these attackers are kind of getting in, or these scammers, yeah,

Nathan Johnson:

certainly phishing attempts. You know, email is going to be the largest So, and I imagine if you looked at your email, you may be filtering it out. There are solutions that well, there are a, okay, so that's an agent we are using. Is that email filter on on the cyber side. So we are looking for phishing. You know, massive amounts of emails will come in and and you'll scrape it out. Lots of people might have an old product called a barracuda, or something like that, that's doing that for you. Those work fine, too. But fishing is absolutely, you know, one of the I think, is the largest, because all you have to do is click on the wrong thing and they get access that can happen on your phone too. So be aware of that phones are not safe.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So I had a another girlfriend that was working at an office, and she they were doing a test to the phishing email test, and they sent her a company wide email, and it said, you know, oh, you've been rewarded, you know, with the we're bringing catering lunch into the office, and here, click here to pick out what you want to eat. And she fell for it. Instead of getting the lunch, she had to sit through training basics.

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah. Well, you know, a great one is, how many times do you see a post come over on email that says it's from LinkedIn?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Those, those are a couple little letters off, or one letter off, or

Nathan Johnson:

you're it could look exactly the way you expected, or from from whatever, from Delta, if you're a traveler, or whatever the case might be, if it's a if it's so I generally do not click on on any link, like a LinkedIn link or a social media link, because that's a big target. I do not click on my email. I'll go to the app and go find what I'm looking for. So it might be a reminder, but, yeah, I certainly don't click on those links on my email. You never

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

know all of the marketers, you have to be aware of this that you know. I guess that the cyber security training is telling people not to click on any social links or email links. So what's the marketer to do? Right?

Nathan Johnson:

So I as a general role. I hate email marketing. I am sorry to say that being a marketer, you know, I also work with a lot of marketing companies, but I generally don't if we are sending out a email that's going to have a lot of people attached to it. It's going to be a very unique email, and it's going to make a lot of sense so, but we do not generally email market much, so, which is a limiter. But I'll also tell you this, I work with a lot of CEOs. They're paying people to not read your emails, to move them out of their inbox. I actually do the same thing. You know, I have someone that monitors my email and moves everything out that that I don't want to see, which is any solicit. If you solicit me in any way, shape or form, most especially on LinkedIn or or email or whatever, I'm probably not responding to you unless you have something amazing to say, and that's because it's nothing against you. I am a salesperson at heart, but I get so many. I get so many. I probably get 100 plus messages a day on LinkedIn, wow. I can't even maintain them. It's off the charts. It's off the charts. So I look for people I know on the LinkedIn messenger. And if you're not someone I've ever discussed with before, you better have the first line be something interesting, or I'm not going to respond to it. And otherwise, I just look for people I know. So some people will be like, hey, it's been four days since you got back to me on this LinkedIn message. You want to get a hold of me. You need to. Need to text me or or email me and, and, you know, have it be a real, real thing. So, so marketing, to me, you know, on that side, if you're wanting to hit a CEO, in my opinion, you need to put social media messages out in the market, in the tools that they're using, cuz they will eventually come across them,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

and then they'll reach out to you, and then you don't have to worry about your your emails and your links getting ignored,

Nathan Johnson:

yeah, or the in person discussion. You know, that's one of the reasons you go to conferences, but that's the C level approach, right? I mean, not everybody's that way, but the C levels that we work with are primarily trying not to engage in any way, shape or form, and you know they're they're looking to slim down all those interactions. So, but if you, if you're a known person, and they know who you are, you're probably going to have a discussion with them, so you can engage them in any medium then.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So that makes sense. I'll take the personal tips, and I'll try to adjust my messaging.

Nathan Johnson:

You know, what's tried and true is blasting out a bazillion emails and hoping that somebody responds back to it. And, you know, people do that, that every which way, and it still functions. So it really depends upon who you're wanting to respond to. But that's just my two cents on it, I'm probably wrong in some fashion, but I know what what I don't like, and I'm not going to have the company do something I don't like.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So yeah, that's very true, and I would imagine that more and more companies are going to take on that mindset where, if you want to reach someone to try not to try to be where they're at, but also in a way that doesn't take them off platform in a suspicious way, because their IT team is going to yell at them.

Nathan Johnson:

It's pretty risky. So, and you never know these days. So, so you just kind of, you know, the manifest app is a great app because you have that messaging thing, and then you can take them off of that messaging piece, you know, but you reach out far before you get there, and you get all your meetings started, started up. And then, although the only problem with manifest now is it's gotten so huge that that app has like 7000 people on it, or something. So it's like, how do you, how do you navigate your way through that? You can search things. You can do it outside, you know, search trucking, search logistics, search CEO, and see who I want to talk to that way, and then. But it still takes a bit.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So, yeah, I did on my side of things, on the media side of things, it's so many PR emails, it's a lot, and it's a I'm finding it difficult to manage, even before we were started recording for this conversation, I'm looking up how to label emails within my my workspace, within Gmail, and trying to figure out different labeling mechanisms so I can just contact the people I genuinely want to contact with. And then, you know, some of the pitches that don't make a whole heck of a lot of sense that go into another folder, it's a lot, but, yeah, all of this is a lot, and I appreciate, deeply appreciate, because we're running up, I think, oh, close to two hours. This might be my longest podcast here in a couple years. Now, you can tell, because, you know, this has been such an interesting topic, I think, to explore in a variety of different ways. And thank you so much for bringing up the cybersecurity angle. I you know, obviously I did not have that in my notes, and I should have, so that was a great, great additional bonus there. So Nate, you're doing so many things you're going to be at manifest, this episode is going to publish before manifest. So if folks are interested in you and GLCs talking, you know, checking out your podcast, even checking out, you know, another line of business, which we haven't gotten into, your freight movement events, I'll put all of those links in the show notes to make it easy for folks, but where can folks engage with you the most that maybe not LinkedIn and maybe don't include a link if they're going to reach out?

Nathan Johnson:

Right? So don't, don't. If you're new to me, don't, don't, hit me up on LinkedIn. You can. I mean, maybe I'll, maybe I'll respond. But if you do, put in Blythe, if you're on this and you want to hit me on LinkedIn, put, put Blythe at the top, but, but that being said, it's and johnson@glcs.net if you send me a human email, I'm probably going to catch it. And I am on LinkedIn. A comment will typically catch me. In at on LinkedIn will typically catch me. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to respond, but social media is pretty wild, but absolutely, email every Thursday, driving forward at one o'clock central time, and every freight movement of rent out there. For the most part, I try to make them all and then I'm at every major industry event for the most part, at least through May. So.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

All. So get in contact. You better do it in person at one of these events.

Nathan Johnson:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're a customer, I'll work with any medium.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

So Nate, this was, this was awesome. Thank you so much, and can't wait to catch up with you again here. And yeah,

Nathan Johnson:

we'll we'll see in a few weeks. If you get in Sunday, we're throwing a Super Bowl thing up in our suite, so let me know. But otherwise, looking forward to seeing you there and safe travels.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan:

Yes, likewise, you as well. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain. For the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything as logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing. Check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode, in go Jags, you you.

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Blythe Brumleve

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