#18 - Ben Emmrich

Ben Emmrich, founder and CEO of Tusk Logistics, discusses how using alternative carriers and zone-skipping tactics can cut parcel shipping costs by 30-40%.

https://warehouserepublic.com/
https://www.supplychainsaga.com/

Transcript

All right. Mr. Ben Emrick. 

Hello, Mr. Mark. 

How's it going? 

I'm good dude. 

So here we are at the BGSA 2026 conference in Lovely West Palm Beach, 

Fanciest place in America. I think 

So. I mean, probably because 

You and I are here, I think we, no offense to you, but I definitely bring down the average in the fancy department. 

I'm right there with 

You. 

What have you thought about the conference so far? 

Honestly, I love it. I'm a natural extrovert and my wife gives me a lot of shit for it. But I love being surrounded by folks that are beyond where my business is at, and I can pick their brain 

Quite 

Honestly, and I like the morning session, all the macro data that they share. I thought that that stuff is super helpful. 

I completely agree. The first session, getting to hear from the gentleman with CCO Penske, GXO, I know there was one other one in there too. 

I also really like Ben's presentation. 

His presentation was very good. 

I think he does it every year, but the one graph where he has the big circles, I find that so, so helpful to see a relative mix of revenue by supply chain category by profitability. It's like, oh, it makes sense why when I call on this type of potential customer that I always get shown the door or the screws get turned on me hard on margin. 

It's 

Like, oh, well, they're a low zero on the revenue line. It's like, okay, well, it's just a nice validation of what I'm actually seeing in the market. 

Yeah. I also think, I mean, AI has been a huge focus of this show so far. And I mean, which is 

Not 

Surprising, but I do like the tie. I think they showed that Stanford graph that showed the belief by sector how much cost would be saved and then how much revenue would be added as a result of deploying ai. And just seeing that supply chain from the cost perspective is one of the top benefactors of ai. I mean, it certainly feels that way, but nice to see that. I think that was a Stanford report. Anyway, it was pretty interesting. So we met last night. 

Yeah. 

And tell me a little bit about Tusk. 

Yeah, well, if it's okay, I will tell you about Tusk, but it is helpful to first describe how I found my way to this industry. 

I would love that. 

So I started at Google in 2008. I was a Latin major. I was lucky to get the job. I was a pre-recession hire, so I snuck in. 

Do you remember any of the weird questions that they asked you during your hiring process? 

Oh dude. Yes. Well, sorry. I remember the ones that I prepared for 

How many marbles in a 7 47? 

Yeah, how many ping pong balls in a school bus? And you're supposed to ask, well, are the seats in the school bus or are the seats out of the school bus? Is this a shorter bus, a longer bus, but flat front or long front? No. So I started at Google and I did a lot of very low level support roles, but then I found my way to the Google shopping team and at the Google shopping team, I was responsible for managing really bureaucratic, big retailers, Walmart, target, Costco. And what I found was I was really good at navigating bureaucracy. And my manager came to me one day and he's like, Hey, Emrick, you're doing good with these big retailers. You are now responsible for managing parcel carriers. So I inherited responsibility for FedEx s and the postal service. And so that was my first foray into negotiating rate cards 

I made. So mark so many mistakes. I had no idea what a GRI was. And one January I got an email from my account manager and he's like, yep, the GRI is in place. FYI, you have 4% higher. I was like, what is this 4%? You kidding me? And I stepped on a lot of landmines just not knowing what I was doing, but I came up to speed quick and more importantly, I realized I really like small parcel. This is cool because my brain is a tactical brain and I love that there is a physical item being moved in the real world between point A and point B. It is not theoretical. It has to get from Chattanooga to Newark and how are you going to get it there? Is it going to go on the truck? Is it go on a plane? This is also like 20 14, 20 15, 20 16 when e-comm has really, really obviously hit its stride, but all of the systems weren't in place and everything was in its early infancy from a tech perspective. 

And definitely on the parcel carrier side, they hadn't figured out a lot of this stuff. And so I was just really enamored with this whole ecosystem of e-commerce, small parcel warehousing and logistics, the opportunities that you could squeeze not just the operational benefit, but also the customer experience, the retention. So long story short, I spent 10 years at Google, and then I was recruited to Shippo. So I led carrier partnerships at Shippo for four years. Also sold Shippo's API into the O-M-S-T-M-S-I-M-S ecosystem within e-commerce warehouses and really learned that space. Did a lot of deals with carriers, though that was my core, really, really deep in the carrier ecosystem. And what I found was there is a ton of value hidden within what we now call alternative carriers. But back then we only called them regional carriers. So like GLS, we used to be called Golden State Overnight, GSO before they were bought by GLS contract, LaserShip, 

Lone Star Overnight, 

Lone Star Overnight, CDL. These are long standing often family businesses still to this day, many of them are family businesses. To get a deal done with UDS in Chicago or in Lombard right outside of Chicago, you got to call Ron, Ron Castaldo, and it's Ron and his brother and his son Ronnie is now coming up in the business. It's awesome. It's longstanding, profitable, dependable businesses that can do deliveries for 30 to 40% less expensive than a UPS or a FedEx. And so I'm at Shippo and I'm doing all these deals and I'm like, I feel like I've found Noah's Ark. I'm like, oh my God, there's all this savings here. What are we doing? Why are we so focused on these national guys? And it's then that I saw the very first images of the problems that I would then build Tusk to solve, which is why can't shippers access these alternative carriers at scale? And the answer is just so many reasons. 

They don't know they exist. They don't know who to call. Literally they can't find the phone number, they don't list the phone number on their website. You're right, you're right. When they call, they don't know what that carrier excels at. Some of these guys are really good at big, bulky, some of these guys are really good between one pound and 15. Some of them are really good below a pound. Some of them are really good in the southeast, but you got to know they're not live in tier two metros in the southeast. There are only tier one metrics. There's so much nuance. And so at Shippo, I found out the hard way why shippers aren't using these carriers. And I went deep trying to convince people to use them, trying to convince that organization Shippo to invest in them. 

And quite honestly, for the right reasons, they said, we can really focus on our core, which is the national carriers, and we can really make more money that way for us or for me. It was a really interesting moment in my career where I had to kind of decide, put up or shut up. If you think this is a good idea, Ben, you think you can do it, pony up and go fucking do it. And I should acknowledge too, my wife at the time was working at Google still. We had met at Google, so we had a bit of a breathing room as a family for me to take a real swing and I'm so thankful for it. And so yeah, in 2021, I left Shippo and later started Tusk that year. 

Wow. 

Yeah. And so what Tusk is so long way of saying what Tusk is, is we are shipping infrastructure and we make alternative carriers universally accessible and useful and visible. So if you're a shipper in the United States and you do small parcel, you will be able to save money with the carriers that Tusk has in its network and where the infrastructure you use to connect to carriers like DoorDash, G-L-S-U-D-S, better trucks, CDL. We have 17 carriers live today, 14 of which we have pre-negotiated rates with, but we also support shippers rates as well. So we are not a reseller, we don't aggregate volume and hold volume hostage. We can use a shipper's rates, they could use our own, the North Star is value to the shipper. 

Okay. Let's pause there and we're going to come back to all of that because I want to talk about one of the, I don't want to say the boogeyman or anything like that. 

There's a lot of boogeyman. 

Oh, there really are. There truly are. And I heard probably 15 years ago that boogeyman chuck, it's like when the boogieman goes to bed, he checks underneath his bed for Chuck Norris. 

Yeah, 

I haven't thought about Chuck Norris jokes in a long time, but alright, China is making big inroads into the United States and into our parcel, not only the parcel network, parcel delivery, but also in the three PL side of things. 

Well, and I think we should also just acknowledge Chinese merchants and Chinese economic engines of all different way shapes or form are making their way into the United States. 

Correct. 

If you just look at Amazon, if you do a search for iPhone charger on Amazon, or if you do a search for literally anything on Amazon, how many of those marketplace merchants are, first of all, from outside the United States and secondly from China or a similar market? The majority. The majority. And so I just want to position the inroads in the small parcel space reflect the trends that are happening within the economy writ large. And it is natural that these forces would find their way to small parcel. 

Yeah, exactly. And so you've got, just to be specific, I'll avoid any names or anything like that, but you've got some Chinese three pls coming to town highly automated. 

And one of the strategies I see being used is they'll effectively, they'll work with the Chinese sellers and there's that language understanding, cultural fit, all that kind of good stuff. And they say, okay, we've got a beach head here in the United States, and you don't have to sell through Amazon. Maybe you still want to do through Amazon's fulfillment system, but now your Sheen and Temu TikTok shop and all these sorts of things, they've got an outlet to move a lot of volume for very, very cheap. And they're taking effectively from time of order, they'll go the order. And because they do such volume in these facilities, let's just say a hundred thousand, 200,000 orders out of a singular fertility just in normal day, they now have a truckload worth of stuff going from Southern California to Kentucky 

To a spot in Kentucky. And they've got a truckload or three or four, whatever it is, going to Dallas and the surrounding metro areas. And so what they're doing is they're handling that first mile and middle mile and then they get it to Dallas and they use the regional carrier that they do. And so it's like, let's say that last mile delivery fee is 90 cents and then they've just now taken, let's say you can get 10,000 orders on a truck, even if it costs you $4,000 to move it across the country, that's 40 cents a package. 

Oh yeah. 

So in that scenario, it's a dollar 30 for shipping. 

Well, I think that that dynamic is not unique to new entrants into the United States three PL ecosystem. Like we've been seeing Amazon do this for decades, Walmart decades, the big buildings, the big facilities with significant throughput have always had their head on a swivel to squeeze out cost. What is the easiest way and final mile to squeeze out cost. Number one, pick up the phone and call your rep and ask for a discount. That's the easiest way. But after that zone skipping becomes, because that's what we're describing here. That's 

Exactly right. 

Zone skipping becomes a very visceral, clear kind of black and white way for you to lower the effective rate for final mile parcel delivery. So any building that has significant throughput that can fill up an asset, and now that asset could be a Gaylord or a pallet that you LTL across the country. 

It could be a box truck that you drive. It could be a cargo van that you drive. It could be a 53 footer that you drop every day. You do a drop trailer service and you have enough volume to 26 pallets that fit in the 53 footer. But zone skipping is an incredible lever to find value. And if the building has the throughput, they should absolutely be doing it. And when they drive it, the beauty is they have control over where they drop it. So what we see a lot of value is when we run zone skips, we don't just inject into one option, one carrier option. So when we do a zone skip from Kansas City to Chicago, we often are making like three to four stops and we back load the trailer. So the last stop gets loaded first, and we train the teams to do this, but we can make multiple stops because at point of origin at the PAC station, we've already determined who can deliver that parcel of for the least amount of money on the final mile. We then run it from KC to Chicago, we make those stops, we inject it into the parcel carriers throughout the whole process, we've linked the tracking, so the freight tracking links to the final mile tracking across all those carriers because when you run the zone, skip, you're in control. Take advantage of the control, maximize the value. If you're going to pay for the truck, use the truck. 

That's the power. 

And so the common thread I keep hearing is volume. If you have the volume, well, not everybody's running a hundred thousand orders a day out of their facility and have the volume to fill up a few trucks with going to these regional hubs. So then, 

Yeah, no, this is absolutely the way. This is a great question. So the answer is, zone skipping makes a lot of sense. On average, when you're doing roughly 10,000 pieces a day or more, I guarantee you, for someone doing that level of volume, there is a single lane or a single carrier where a zone skip is likely to make sense. But on your way to 10,000 parcels per day out of a single facility, you should first ask yourself, what are the local alternatives to my facility that don't require the complexity of a zone? Skip that I could, they're local to me. So they have drivers in my neighborhood and I could reach out to a GLS on the west coast and I could do a deal with them to cut my FedEx rates by 30% for any West coast bound parcel. Okay, you start local, that's savings and that margin you then throw back into your business helps you grow faster. Then when you get to call it 10,000 pieces a day, that's when, okay, now it makes sense to run something from LA to Chicago or LA to Dallas. 

We do pooled volume in certain areas, so we can combine customers volume. So a tusk shipper can actually have access to more line hauls than if they were doing it on their own. But even independent of Tusk, the first question is, well, one of my advice is always call your rep to ask for a discount. Just do it. Do it tomorrow. Do it today. Call your rep, ask for a discount. The second thing is look at your data and ask yourself, okay, even locally to my facility, what alternative carriers could I use? And you could learn, you can just search for alternative personal carriers. In Miami, the answer is career express, DoorDash, gofo, uni, uni. But any market, just do a little bit of research and then ask yourself like, okay, is it worth my time to call these people, get rates, do it myself? The answer will often be no. Or maybe one of them can give you a good enough rate that it makes sense to go direct. And then once you're at real throughput, 10,000 pieces or more per day on average, that's when you could have your ops team start to really look at line hauls. 

Nice. So what we've talked about is, excuse me, we've actually talked about going the zone skipping and then really contracting with the regionals. What are the big players doing? Is there a possibility to do zone skipping with the larger players? I spoke, there's another pod that I've done recently with, it's forthcoming, it'll drop after this one. But one of his strategies was saying, well, I mean if you're in a huge market that has crazy holiday peak volumes, then what you can end up doing is you can just talk to 'em and you can say, Hey, what if we move instead of Ontario where we know you're going to be overloaded? What if we just send all of our UPS volume down to or over to Tucson or Phoenix or whatever it may be, and then would that help? Or Yuma, whatever it may be. Are you seeing those kinds of scenarios with the larger players, 

That level of nuance? To be blunt, no. That level of nuance happens at the worldwide sales team. For UPS who has five to 10 people managing an Amazon, that's when they are probably sitting down and saying the Amazon team would say to the UPS team like, Hey, we project a ton of volume into your Chicago hub. We know that the amount of volume we have bound for your Chicago hub is likely to push you beyond your limits. 

Therefore as close partners with more bandwidth than most operational teams, where should we put a portion of this volume other than that hub because we know that one will be at capacity. But that is a level of sophistication. To be clear, mark, that even the largest three pls, they don't get to that level of nuance and planning. Most really good, really big pls are doing their own zone skips to a degree. In my experience, what they miss out on is the tracking. So if they run it themselves, it's not tracked. Oftentimes they also, as they should, they just prioritize the lanes and they do the easy ones and often that's enough bang for their buck and they kind of activate the lanes that make sense to activate. Or they'll say, Hey, we're going to run zone skips, but we're only going to do it for lanes that we can get a full trailer on when they might have other lanes that they could run a box truck, but they just don't want to do the complexity of having to broker a box truck and full trailers. So the answer to your question is the big three pls are doing zone skips, but that level of hub inject optimization that's very unique and for the biggest shippers in the United States only today. 

And what's interesting, I mean I'm sure that there are probably at least four or five companies at this situation that could give that tracking visibility just because with all the new technological improvements that are happening faster than anybody can keep up with, I would imagine that they're, oh yeah, just give them this tracking number at this website and they'll be able to track it. 

I mean, it's not rocket science. So the way we do it is we just went out and integrated with trucker tools like all of the freight tracking platforms so that no matter which driver got a load via our broker, we can track that load or our broker will manually track it in the very rare case that they don't have one of the ones we're integrated on. And then we just built the ecosystem and the technology to basically link the freight tracking to the final mile tracking and we just link them as the same record. So a customer gets consistent updates. The worst is when they don't see their parcel move, that's when they're calling the merchant saying, where's my piece? I bought it on Monday, I expected it to be processed by Tuesday. It's Thursday. I haven't had an update. Meanwhile, it's been zone skipped. So it's in the middle of the desert on its way to la, 

But you brought up even the largest three pls don't have the nuance and you lose out on the tracking. And that is kind of where you're sitting in between is what I'm hearing. 

And we are infrastructure. We are not the carrier. So this is why people pay us to be the infrastructure that when we sometimes they broker that zone, skip themselves and sometimes we broker it for them, but regardless is our tech that can link the tracking of the freight lane to the final mile. And it's the visibility on the tracking mark. But it's also things like tracking performance by alternative carrier hub. So knowing like, hey, this alternative carrier has seven hubs, six of them are performing wonderfully, one of them is horrible, turn down or turn off the horrible one and reroute the parcel volume to a different alternative that still beats your FedEx rate but might be more expensive slightly than you get what you pay for. You get what you pay for. 

We're still going to save money, but not as much. 

And also to be clear, some shippers don't care about on-time performance, like the items, for whatever reason, the proper expectation has been set that as long as they're delivered within 10 days, they don't care. It's up to the shipper. You empower the shipper to make the call. 

Here's a question for you. Have you thought about and far be it for me? I think you probably think about this all the time. So you're going to be like, yeah, I thought about that. Week two, adding an insurance layer on there. 

Here's my approach to insurance. I negotiate, sorry, tusk negotiates with every alternative carrier to cover every parcel with a hundred dollars of insurance. So similar beyond that, it is up to the shipper to ensure via their own insurance mechanism, there's opportunities. Quite honestly, we could go do a deal with Cover Genius or ship insurance or whatever ship insurance got bought I think, but we could go do a deal and then sell insurance to our shippers. It's not at our scale. It just doesn't make sense to focus on, be quite 

Honest. So at a certain point it may be, and especially as you offer more white glove type stuff. So I like this, there's this knife brand out of San Diego, a former SEAL team guy and his band of merry men 

Make 

These custom knives and they all find that they've all got a blueprint. Maybe there's 10 styles or 20 styles, whatever it may be, but they've got these really ornate, beautiful handles and cool etchings and stuff like that, half face blades. But I've bought a couple knives from there and every time they ship to me, it's not an option. You have to insure it for a 7 99, 8 99. 

Oh yeah, there's a lot of Shopify apps like a route where you can for 99 cents, they basically say like, Hey, listen, pay 99 cents now and we will make this right if something goes bad or we could use the insurance or if you forego this 99 cents, no matter what happens, it's on you customer. And that that's fair quite honestly. 

So I think it's an interesting thing though because if you think you've got a whole truckload full of these orders and let's say you're selling high volume stuff or high value stuff, you could eventually get this. I mean God forbid the whole truck burns up. 

It 

Happens. But there seems to be a really interesting potential insurance kind of arbitrage situation. There 

Totally is. There 

Totally is just not the current focus 

I have learned as an entrepreneur. I'm sure you've learned the same thing. There is as much power in saying no to opportunities as there is saying. Yes. 

Yes. 

And if my team ever hears me say that out loud, they will laugh because I'm the one that's always chasing the bright shiny thing. But for me, insurance is a compelling thing we could do in the future if we choose to. 

Fair 

Enough. Yeah. 

Let's play and we can talk in general terms. I'm not going to hold your feet to the fire on any of this, but 

You can hold my feet to the fire. 

Let's start at $10 and just say $10 represents me going into a FedEx and saying, I have this 10 by 10, 10 inch package that's four or five pounds, whatever it may be, and they're going to charge me $10 for it. 

Okay, well I love this. I think about this all the time. Okay, so what they'll say to you is, Hey Mark, thank you so much for coming in. It's $10 this ship, this you say, okay, great. And then when they ring you up, it's actually going to be like 1420 and you're going to be like, what the hell? I'm in Texas sales tax is not 42%. Oh, sorry, mark. That's actually the fuel surcharge and that's the resi surcharge. That's us doing business. So say it's 1420 retail loaded. So you go back to your office, you call the UPS rep, so you call the one 800 number, you get a rep on the phone, they give you a standard commercial discount. Your base rate would likely go from $10 to call it $8, and the surcharges would go from four 20 to maybe call it three bucks. You get call it 25% discount on the surcharges. So you're paying $11 loaded with a regional carrier for that piece. You should expect to pay roughly six 50 to $7 loaded. There's just a massive amount of savings, especially over a pound. Over a pound, there is between 30 and 40% effective savings. And by the way, that six 50 to seven, that includes fuel rezi. Now if you give them a piece that's 60 pounds instead of six, they're going to catch that and they'll charge you an overage and stuff like that. These are sophisticated operations. 

So will FedEx. 

So the next question that you should ask is like, well, how do these carriers do it? What's the magic? The magic is they only run operations in zip codes, delivery zip codes where they have the density to be profitable. They don't have a universal service obligation that the postal service has by law. And UPS and FedEx have by kind of tradition, FedEx, UPS postal. They have to make more on DAS and EDAS or rural deliveries and their urban deliveries where they can make more margin, have to pay for the ones where they lose money. So these alternative carriers could be much more surgical. Their operation can run at a much more efficient opex and they pass the savings along in the form of lower prices. The challenge is just there's a lot of alternative carriers and you got to know which one to use and how to use them and unify the tracking. And if you call 'em and do a deal direct, you have to commit volume or it's just, it's difficult and complex. And our platform's the first one that has built it to operate at scale. 

So is this making a case for more consolidation or less consolidation with the regionals? 

Great question. To be blunt, I think that there, and we just saw this so recently, about a week and a half ago, one alternative carrier, a longstanding alternative carrier, they went out of business. They were called the Fast Group. So in August, three alternative carriers had been brought under the same umbrella of the Fast group. So those carriers were a CI logistics, sendal and First Mile, and they went out of business. So this isn't consolidation per se, but this ecosystem is super dynamic. 

It was an m and a play that did not go well, 

Correct the bet. So they had a PE sponsor that brought 'em together. The bet was that they could recapitalize the business or raise funds to keep operations going, that they would see efficiencies from combining teams. And for whatever reason, I have no insight into it other than to know the realities that it didn't work. And the alternative care ecosystem is more dynamic. Like UPS and FedEx make billions and billions and billions of dollars. Even the biggest alternative carriers make single digit billions. And really that's like one or maybe two depending on how much of door Dash's meal delivery credit you give to 'em, their parcel alarm. But 

I mean, this dynamic's interesting because it's like you look at, I don't know exactly how I would really compare. I mean, it's the same kind of story where it's like Coca-Cola got their core, and in order for them to continue to grow, they try to grow Coke into more markets. They do Coke Zero, they've got Diet Coke, they've got variations, and then they try to get more people to just drink Coke, but they're also, 

Or they put Coke in different form factors like restaurants 

And Slurpees. 

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. 

Anyway, so that's one way they grow. But then the way that you've seen a lot of their meaningful growth is that they grow or they purchase, I don't know, I think Dasani might be Coca-Cola, but they purchased a lot of, I know Pepsi purchased, they purchased STE chips. They've purchased, I believe Yerba Madre I think is what it's called, which used to be called KU YY mate. And maybe they did. Maybe they did and I thought they did. But anyway, in the warehousing space, you see the really large public players and each of those guys have got five to 10% net profits. And this is on billions dollars. So I think I looked, I think it was GXO had something like 3 billion, and of that they had like 500 million, 57 million, I think it was in net profits. But if you look at a really, really solid regional three PL single location, you can find people that are out there doing 15% net market. And so it's interesting because on the one side, the regional carriers are far more right-sized with the assets that they have, what they're running, their sortation facilities are more, they stay much better within a band 

And they're able to control their costs better, whereas sometimes, sometimes whereas. But you've got FedEx and UPS have got these huge fleets, and in the last couple of years, Amazon took all that volume away from UPS and now they've got all this. 

Well, yeah, and you're seeing 'em report out UPS is turning facilities off, correct. They've been publicly reporting this as anything inside. It's like they are right sizing their operation to match where they believe, not the volume, but where the margin will come from. And so you're seeing really compelling moves that Carol Tome and her team are making at UPS that really prioritizes higher margin parcels, not more low margin parcels. And this isn't rocket science, but healthcare, healthcare is a huge focus for the carriers. 

They just did that large acquisition 

A hundred percent SMB, right? SMB shippers. So a lot of the channel partner strategy that all carriers, but especially really forward thinking, bigger ones like UPS, they have the DAP program, the digital access program that puts UPS accounts into the hands of SMBs that probably wouldn't have gotten a call from a UPS rep. And it's a really compelling way to start the relationship earlier than they would've via digital channel at a high margin. It's super compelling, super smart, but it's the margin focus, not the volume focus. And it used to always be volume. I want more, want more 

Volume, 

I want to cube out my building. And now it's like, I'm not going to give you that discount when you had five tiers. Now it's three. They're optimizing for margin, not volume. 

Isn't it interesting if you see when you have somebody that's got a small fiefdom, you're able to operate it far, not always, but in a lot of cases far more efficiently and profitably than when you've got this giant country. If you just want to look at the two things. And it also, it kind of hearkens back to that, I think it was Nasem tale black swan guy, anti-fragile guy who said that the small villages in, I think he used Switzerland as an example where he said, look, when you have regulation and basically government so localized, and the person who's doing the most impactful writing, the most impactful laws is going to run into you at the grocery store, you have a much more benevolent, tailored society. And people are a lot happier because they can go look at him and they can be like, 

Well, yeah, I mean, listen, I live in Chicago and in Chicago we have Alderman, and there's been arguments like, oh, we have 50 aldermen in the city. And you think Chicago, that's not a lot. It's actually, I know my alderman 

And 

I can go to the office and yeah, I can talk to Daniel the spot of my alderman, but yeah, I get it a hundred percent. It's like the familiarity of that, the level of nuance that an ops manager at a smaller op can see and feel. It leads to often a more efficient operation that can do the work for less. The challenge is you got to go op by op market by market. The scale of a UPS and a FedEx in our ecosystem is like, it's unparalleled, man. It's awesome. 

So then here's the question. Do you think putting the effort in and establishing it market by market by market by market is more or less fragile than going just with a UPS? 

Yeah. Well, I think it is less fragile. AKA better to have more optionality, but every organization and every operation will have a different threshold of what optionality means. And for some carriers that'll mean, or sorry, for some shippers, that'll mean I actually only add FedEx and UPS. It won't even be alts, right? It won't even be alternatives. For some, it'll be like, I'm going to add one alternative. For some it'll be, I'm going to add 10 alternatives. The right line depends on the operation, depends on the nuance of their network. It depends on what they need, what they want. But I can assure you, and the best example is not this past summer, but the summer before when the teamsters almost went on strike, any single source UPS shipper was literally shitting bricks in July of 2024. Because what are they going to do if the teamsters went out? Which thankfully they didn't. I'm really thankful they didn't. That would've been 

Horrendous. Are you sure you're from Chicago? 

No, but listen, man, I think anti-fragile in this era of small parcel shipping means you have the team, the data and the tools to add more than for most meaningful shippers, more than two parcel carriers. 

Okay, so here's a question for you. Let's say, okay, how many nodes, how many relationships are you basically connecting for your most complex accounts? 

For our most complex accounts, what we do for them is, I would say for each facility. So putting aside their relationship with the National parcel carriers, which we intentionally do not operate or manage, they'll have a relationship with either a FedEx or UPS. They'll often have a relationship with some kind of a parcel select provider. So like an O-S-M-A-D-H-L E-commerce, U-P-S-M-I, et cetera. And then it's the alternatives that we manage for our biggest shippers, we manage between four and six, seven. One building has seven. I'd say call it five on average for a big enterprise shipper. Now, which five we look at every single week. Now, we don't make changes every single week, but we do the diligence. So our system is looking at performance in real time all the time, but we sit down in our weekly call, my ops team and their ops team, and we review performance weekly, and we might make small adjustments week to week. And what we'll see though in those cadences is like, okay, well carrier a's performance has decremented by 2%, okay, that's not horrible, but let's keep an eye on it. Sure, next week it decremented another 2%. Okay, this is bad. Now we've escalated. If they can't fix it, we'll take action third week, it's still bad. Boom, we're going to make a change. 

And it's like at that point, okay, well then it went from four to five or maybe we slotted a new carrier in and we booted that carrier. That's the level of nuance and control and visibility that does not exist at scale. 

So one of the biggest headaches I hear, especially if you're evaluating it week to week to week, is the billing perspective. Because now you go from 

Having you speak like a three pl, it has to unify PDFs and CSVs and the dates don't match. Oh, dude, this is such a pain. And people don't realize it. 

No, they 

Don't. People don't realize it. 

But so how are your clients approaching it 

Painfully 

Be 

Quite honest. And thankfully what we've done is, so we unify the invoices. So we take in all the invoices from the carriers, no matter the format, no matter the dates, and we unify them on a standardized weekly date range. We then invoice our shippers with a standard invoice. It's really consistent when it comes from us, but they still have the burden of matching my invoices to their FedEx invoices or their UPS invoice. So the way people solve for this is they just throw humans at it. Today, there are a lot of emerging solutions that are getting, there's some good startups that are building invoicing features for three pls and unified invoicing and some TMS are like waking up to the pain of this. 

Some WMSs are doing really compelling things of building a really helpful billing layer for small parcel, but then also doing the other part, which really well, which is all of my WMS billing, all my pick and pack building, all of my, oh, yeah, I did a marketing insert for this guy. It took an extra two people eight hours. I got to build an hourly rate for that. I mean this, it's so painful. And anytime you wait a day to do the billing, you're extending your days' cash outstanding. It hurts your business. So the way we solve it is we solve it within our sandbox, which is the alternative carriers that shipper used. That's what is in our control today. 

And then you're giving basically an invoice of all those carriers conglomerated into a single, 

Yeah. 

You're giving a single unified invoice. 

Yeah, we're giving a single unified invoice for the carriers that they access through Tusk today. 

And then you're effectively, so on the backend, if you say, wow, you're at five, but it makes sense to add these other two, all I see is just the increase on the invoice line. 

Exactly. Yeah. So you would see more parcel rows where the carrier is listed that you used. So carrier number six, it just shows up on that unified invoice as carrier number six, but you get one bill from Tusk, and so you have one account payable to us, which is, it's a big help. And then you have me hounding you and you're late on paying, so you pay on time. But yeah, the billing thing is actually really, you were asking about insurance earlier. That's a really cool space too, especially three PL billing and brand or client level markups that three pls could maximize and take more advantage of. And this is a really cool space base. 

I don't know if I share your enthusiasm. I've spent the last year trying to streamline our billing automation. 

What did you find? What did you find? 

I mean, did you solve it? It's better, but it's not ideal 

By the way that you're already above average. 

Well, 

Right there, you're above average. 

I think I'm above average in the negative categories. So inherently negative, no. We've thrown a lot of manpower at doing it. And the way I characterize all WMSs is somebody had a problem. Nobody could fix it, nobody could fix it. They had an entrepreneurial seizure and said, I'm going to do it myself because the way I view what goes on in the four walls is the best way to possibly do it. And so they built all this logic and then they were like, oh, we created this thing that's so cool. Everybody else is going to want to buy it now. And then they go and they start selling it. And then it's like, you're, you invariably, because you weren't there working with that customer, you're like, why in the world did they do it this way? And why can't we just do it this way? And so if the way you bill doesn't exactly match the logic of the way the system is set up in the first place, you're either going to go through a process of retooling the way you bill or you're going to go through the process of creating fixes. You're going to put duct tape on the outside of the boat. 

Yeah, no, I would say that above all else, the pain point we hear the most is shipping is too expensive, right? That's cost is too high. Right after that, the pain points that we hear are billing or difficulty selling 

Because every three pl, so one of my three pls, they literally call it the smart Zac file. They have an analyst named Zach, and he built a big Excel file with tons of macros, tons of tabs. Each tab is a carrier. So when they get a PLD from an inbound prospect, they throw the PLD into the smart Zack file. But the smart Zack file doesn't automatically update when a carrier changes fees, coverage or DA zips, and it's out of date as soon as it's updated, basically. And that is another, it's related to billing if you squint a little bit. But that's another really cool area that we have heard from our three PL partners that they would really help with is on the sales side. 

Well, it's really interesting because each individual carrier does a good job of communicating the data the way they like to communicate it, or at least they try to seemingly, 

And a lot of the resellers and software things out there. I'm trying to think of the one that sends a great little email that just says, Hey, these are the cutoff dates for these services during the holiday peak season. This is what surcharges look like. And it just lines it out and you're like, okay, I can thank you. Critical dates, critical increases, that kind of thing. It feels like in the rate card space, I mean, because I think the number is 60% is what shipping costs, 60% of your supply chain costs are the actual movement of the box itself or the poly mailer, whatever it may be. I might be off on that, but I think that's what I'm remembering. Anyway, all of that data is ripe. The ripe use case for AI or predictive analytics to just dump your contract into a file and dump their zone, I mean their zip code 

List 

Into a file. And then that way it just says, okay, well these are the rule areas, so this is where this surcharge is going to apply. And then as long as on your contract when that rate goes up, you get the new rate card. It seems like that would be one of the easiest things. And then also when it comes to comparing shipping data or yeah, just give me your order report. Give me your order history for the last month, you should be able to upload it and it spits out, we can save you 15%. You should stay where you're at, whatever it may be. 

Yeah, the industry is moving in this direction and fast. 

It's 

Like that last piece you just said. We call that an impact analysis. So we take a PLD file, we run it as if tusk were live in that facility or facilities, and we spit out, not just, Hey Mark, you can save X amount of dollars. It's like, Hey Mark, you can save X and here's how. Here are the carriers. Here's from each of your facilities, here's the speed you should expect the average price. We give it all. The previous thing you were talking about with uploading. And basically as I understand it, you're describing a dynamic parcel environment. 

Yes. 

And we are not there yet. Our industry is not there yet to be clear. It's in pieces, in pieces, but it's moving in that direction. When it comes though to, and you're an operator, this is a question for you. When we talk to operators and we have these bigger conversations about the future of dynamic parcel and automatic Boolean of if this falls below this service level then or service quality, then kick it to this. What I have found to be quite honest, is the director of operations who is responsible for the unit cost of doing pick, pack and ship, they get worried and they do not trust an automated system yet. And there's a certain level of a release of control that in general, most operators are not down for, 

In my experience, we haven't grown to the scale where I've got an operator that feels that kind of ownership and that much onus on them that it's that. I mean, all of my guys feel like they are an extension of our customer. And that's the way I say, look, our customers don't succeed if we don't. Our customers do not succeed unless we do exactly what we say we're going to for them. And then in turn, we don't succeed because they'll go somewhere else. And so I tell all of my guys, I say, you must treat this as if you're doing this and your mother's life depends on it. And then in the same week, I'll also say, it's not heart surgery. Don't rush to the, 

Nobody's 

Going to die. But so 

Both things can be true. Both things can be true. 

It's the scenario that matters when I want them paying attention to that level of detail, they absolutely need to treat it with great importance and getting it right. And we say safety first, accuracy over speed always, but I still want 'em to be fast. Yeah. Oh yeah. And right and correct. Yeah. Yeah. Accuracy over speed. 

Yeah. 

I think my guys in particular have looked at the things that automate and it just works. They're happy to adopt it because if it leads to the places where we are looking at automation are focused around improving accuracy, improving throughput, and if a guy is able to do packing faster and at a more accurate rate, then they get we're not on 'em quite as much. And so I think that's a benefit. I mean, they look at it typically the automations we've deployed at this point as benefits, but when I say automations, I mean we do have some machines that do that, make things a lot faster and a lot more consistent. They've loved those changes. But then we also have some of the data accuracy stuff. And then you can have used somebody just fill out a forklift checklist so you could have it for osha. And then fortunately, we've got a program on our forklift that they can't even start the things unless they go and they answer all the pre-checked questions. And so those sorts of things, once they're used to doing them, it's great. 

Well, I think, so back to what this means in practice for something like dynamic parcel pricing is an operation will agree with a carrier to a maximum price. This is my personal opinion. When they negotiate on rate cards, what they're going to be negotiating for is the top, and then the carrier at the carrier's discretion will be able to dynamically lower price. And now they might in the contract say, Hey, I'm the carrier. You're my shipper, mark, I'm going to negotiate with you so that we set the cap at $10, but I'm going to negotiate to actually go up to 11 if I need to. But in exchange, I'm going to give you X, Y, and Z. And all of a sudden then you can see, okay, now prices could go up under certain circumstances, but in general, I think people are going to negotiate for a cap and then the carrier will be able to flex down when that carrier wants to cube out a truck on a certain lane, or they just opened a new market and they want to fill it up. So that's the way I think it will happen. And in that use case, then it's a lot easier for the operator to say yes, 

Because 

Prices are only going to go down. Absolutely. 

I think the thing that we run into, because we rate shop and fortunately our team, how do 

You do it? What's your TMS? 

So we use iDrive, TMS. 

Oh, yeah, 

It's homegrown. And what's nice is because they own the contracts, they are able to, their rate shopping landed cost is what, and that's huge. But what I will say is my guys' trust that they put into that rate shop. Sometimes I've noticed that doll's the critical eye. And so if one out of every a hundred things gets like ships way up here, who knows what it is? Maybe there's a data integrity issue. Maybe my customer, when they gave me over the, 

Yeah, they shipped it express instead of ground, 

Right? They catch a few less of those, and that is kind, that can be frustrating, but it's like, oh, I mean the technology just needs to get better and this is one. And on the whole, we're saving money. This is just opportunity and for improvement. So that's one of the ways we look at it. 

Can I ask you a question? 

Yeah, please. 

As an operator of a three pl, what is the biggest pain point in your business today? What keeps you up at night? 

I have the benefit of having two guys. I have a person in each location that operates the business. And so that allows me, so I live in Texas. I moved back to be close to family, lived in California, went into the operation every day for the first four and a half years, and then spent a lot of time out in North Carolina. While we were getting that up, my operator in Southern California was on, everything he learned was on the job and everything, and I knew him outside of the industry. So we both figured out three PL ing on the fly, on the fly OTJ. And then the guy in my operator in North Carolina was just a blessing. He was an absolute stud at this other three pl, and that three PL was just shutting down. And he led main shift. He crushed it. I looked at his resume and I was like, there's no way this guy's available. And talked to him. 

Every once in a while, man, stars aligned. 

Stars aligned. So I'm very fortunate to be able to focus on much more strategic things as opposed to being really in depth in the operation. And sometimes I overly on that and I need to get back. I feel that it kind of keeps me up. It's like, am I spending enough time in the individual shops? That's one. And two is you come to an event like this and you see everything that's going on in the world, and you're like, man, I don't know enough to, I mean, I just know so little. It's like you come here and it's like you think you're on solid footing, and then you hear somebody say, it's like, well, we're testing humanoid robots and our cost per hour to operate them is $5 per hour. And you're like, oh. Now there's a whole, obviously as we were talking about it earlier, there's a whole, that person also said, yeah, but it's not a one-to-one hour for hour 

Humanoid robot versus an hour of human labor. But it just goes to kind of show where the scale of the problems you're focused on. And I think what keeps me up is what am I doing to shout from the rooftops? How am I really good? Where am I going to serve my customers the best? And actually, you think of things, there are a lot of people that don't know the differences of a pallet. They're just like, they don't know that a pallet's five inches. They don't know that it weighs, if it's a grade B four way pallet, 

Weighs 30 by 48, 30 

To 35 pounds, sorry, 35 to 40 pounds depending on the material and everything. Wood palette though, don't know the difference between grade heat treat, non heat treat, and there's all these sorts of things. Why won't Amazon take this kind of palette or that kind of palette? So it's like there are things so simple that just are up in my head that we and every operator's head for that matter. And we forget that there's this whole group of people starting businesses and selling products. And somebody, we just onboarded a customer, and the woman worked at Google 

And she started importing these super high-end things from India that you just don't see on the shelves that often. And she's like, yeah, we can do this slow. I want to do it right. And you forget that those people need that education. Well, this is why we do this and this is why we do this. And oh, if you set up this connection or you use this on your website, this will help us here, here, and here. So there's a whole education conveyor, I guess you could kind of think of it that will attract these, and I don't want to call 'em unsophisticated, but not yet learned people starting and needing three pls. 

Well, I think of the downstream benefit too, when, first of all, when they grow, when their business grows, 

Certainly we've had many customers, 

But also when they give you cleaner data, when they add the correct shipping options to their shopping cart that match with the options you can provide in the building, just the basics. 

So when we were very early on, I mean, I would get on a sales call and we'd do onboarding. That'd be like, okay, what do you need from us? I was like, well, just make sure the data's good because garbage in, garbage out. And I mean, they're like, okay, nobody's going to be like, well, what do you, very few people are like, what do you mean by that? 

Can you give me the format? Exactly. 

No, we would give them the format, but then it was, we use extensive as our WMS. And if you look at how many columns of information you can put into a single SKU, at first you look at it and you're like, oh, we only fill out five of these. And then as we got down the pathway, we started figuring out, oh, in order to do billing the way we need to do billing, well, we need all the carton data. We need this. We need, yeah, 

The lot number, 

And why do you carry this? And so there's all this stuff where we've just gotten better over the years. We figured out school of hard knocks. So I really think, and I mean I've talked about this with other founder led operations where I'm playing sales, I'm playing making sure C-O-O-C-E-O and CFO. And so it's like one of those things at the scale that I'm operating at where it's like I look around and I'm like, okay. I think that I could do a much better job of yelling from the rooftops why we are good and why we are a good fit for customers. Because the customers, we've had customers since day one that are still with us, and I'm very proud of those relationships, but not rocket science. It's generally doing what you say you're going to do and being consistent and owning it when you step in it. 

Another way of saying that is just being honest. 

Yeah, absolutely. So to tie it up, it's a very long-winded way of saying what keeps me up is am I giving investor relations? Am I giving all the buckets enough of my effort and time, and then am I doing the right by our customers to really show how we're going to crush it for 'em and attract them? Because I mean, ultimately, if you don't continue, if you don't grow, you die. 

Yeah. Tell me about it. 

I think this is a nice little segue because it's like a year or two ago, I looked at it and I mean, I had the realization. I was like, okay, if you're just UPS, if you're just FedEx's a hard road, you're hoeing 'em. It's a hard road to hoe. And so I said, okay, well you definitely need, you have to have, because FedEx is going to be better in these lanes and with this product, UPS will be better here. But then if you've got this small and light, okay, well, if you can get an Amazon parcel, then that's another great option. And then, okay, well USPS. And then now if any one of 'em goes down, you can switch over and vice versa. You can educate your customers on what you're doing. But as I've dug more into the coming back to how the Chinese companies, and not just China, but as you said, Amazon fulfillment network ship with Walmart, here's a great example. We had a customers doing great volume with this pick and pack, and they come back and they're like, Hey, can you give us better rates getting offered the ship with Walmart rate? 

Oh, so wait, I know we're building towards the end here, mark. But this is a super interesting dynamic. 

Listen, we doesn't have to be the end. 

So what is happening often is, especially in the alternative carrier ecosystem, the alternative carriers are growing, 

Which means they are having bigger sales teams and alternative carriers have ever had. They're also better sales teams, to be clear. So the traditional regional carrier 10 years ago had max of 10 people max. Usually it was like two, it was the founder and maybe one other sales guy or two sales guys or gals. And now your clients are being pitched by a carrier and they're seeing really the base rate, the unmarked up three PL rate. And so then they come to you and say, Hey, mark. Yeah, exactly. I got these rates. Why are you charging me so much more? And I think our industry needs to, just back to honesty. I think that the good operators can tell the client, Hey, the reason I mark up shipping is because I keep your pick and pack low, and I only charge you 10 bucks a pallet per month for storage and my final mile revenue, that's my revenue. And by the way, that revenue is tied to your success. It grows in line with the number of sales you have. And by the way, remember when we started that, I was able to lower your effective final mile. So yeah, yeah, you're getting cherrypicked by a vendor. But to be honest with you, if you go do a deal with them and I support that deal, I'm going to need to increase your pack rate. 

So I really like the way you're selling it more than the way I think. 

Because also I should caveat that if the customer's going to leave you, you should keep the customer. 

Yeah, 

Well, so do what you need to do. 

One of my other professors once I said, well, it was MBA program. And I said, well, the customer's always right. He's like, the customer's always right. If the customer's right for you. Yes, 

Yes. 

Preach, preach. It was a great thing. It stuck with me. But see, the way I sell our rates, and to be clear, ship with Walmart was all in six bucks, and our base rate, base contract rate was nine 

For how heavy? 

This was a 10 by 10 by 12 at six pounds or something. Going to zone four. Insane. I mean, it was like we looked at that. I mean, and my client, this particular client still with us, they love us. They're awesome, but their e-comm person was like, I mean, look, we want to ship with you 

Because 

We like you, but there's a delta. And then once the AC accessorials get loaded on there, you're at 15 bucks versus I think, I literally think it was $6 and 90 cents all in. 

So for those listening, I'm now pulling up my rate card and just to quote some examples, like zone four, you said it was six pounds? 

Yeah, something like that. Six, four, whatever it would've been 

With the alternatives. It's like 6 71 loaded. It's 6 93 loaded. Lemme one. That a really good one. Yeah, 6 46 

Loaded. So the point is, and I think this is with the Chinese carriers, Amazon as a fulfillment network, targets fulfillment network, Walmart, their ship with Walmart, all that sort of stuff. I don't think we, as I always say, there are two things certain in this industry over the next decade or two 

That's 

Consolidation and automation and the longer you want to stay afloat. We operators have to constantly be looking for options and adapting and things that we just look at and we're like, well, I don't want to do that. It just sounds like a lot of work partner, the person that wins is the one that solves the most problems. And I think just this is so critical. Figuring out these alternative ways of shipping and being competitive with ship, with Walmart and all that sort of stuff, or Amazon, whatever it may be. 

One thing, just as a final piece of advice that I'm seeing more and more that I think is super smart for three pls in particular is when you sign a new client, you give them a generic parcel delivery rate card. And by generic, what I mean is I've seen it in all kinds of way shapes and forms, but it might be one ounce to eight ounce, eight ounce to 15.99, and then one pound to five pounds, five pounds, 10, 10 to 15, et cetera by zone. And you build a generic rate card for the client so they can plan it, they know what it's going to be. But then you have the decision control as the operator to do all the optimization on your end, and you can then control your level and tolerance for risk. You can cut to the bone on ounce based and you can make more on above a pound for a certain client. It gives you a lot of control and it helps you to maximize margin on final mile while keeping the control in your hands. 

Right. Something I also mean, I'm really excited about all the potential options for technology and the way that people are going to, and I almost, I don't like saying AI as much as I like calling what it is, predictive analytics, 

Machine learning, 

Machine learning, but with the way that, I mean in our industry, in the supply chain, there's just everything is metric based. How long is it? I mean, I decided the reason why we get along so well immediately is because you described exactly why I love supply chain because, and what I always say, it's a little bit different, but it's like if it comes into the building, it's got to leave the building or it's there. 

Oh, yeah. 

There's no question. 

Oh, yeah. Or it's paying rent while it's here. 

Yeah, exactly. I mean, no, it may go out on a truck and it may go out in some guy's pocket, but we have things in place to avoid that too. But I'm just saying it's like it has to leave somehow or it's in the corner somewhere. Anyway, so I love that visceral nature of this industry as well. But everything, whether the dimensions, the weights, how much the box cost, how much tape did you use, how much everything. Everything is measurable. And because all of that exists, I look forward to times when it's like we have a running tally of like, okay, today we're January 21, 22, whatever it is. And so far, in 2026, if you were with your old provider just on shipping, we've already saved you $30,000. And those benchmarking metrics, it's like, Hey, like he said, what we said we were going to do with this, and this is how we're performing on it, but the ability to hold yourself accountable, the ability to, I envision a 

Track value accurately, 

Track value accurately. I envision a future in the not so distant where my customers can log into their customer portal and they see, based on this month, here's where your charges are. It's just a running ticker. And so if they have a big sale or whatever, it's like, okay, here you saw it for the last progressive days. And so it's like on the first, that bill should not be a surprise to you or whoever's going to pay it. And so I really look forward to a lot of those things and I look forward to just really seeing what the next several years leads for us. But 

Just another way of being honest with people, by the way, 

Honesty and transparency. And I think we always say, one of my philosophies in running the business is effectively, and I tell all my guys, you're, your customer should never be contacting you to receive bad news. 

No. 

So I said, do everything you can to take the bullets out of their gun. 

Oh yeah. 

Hey Ben, I know we said we were going to do this. This is why we tried. This is why we messed up. Or, Hey, I told you I was going to do this. Here you go. We did it. So a couple things. First, let's start to wrap up unless you want to. Is there 

Anything No, no, no. All my good advice is gone. 

Okay. So how can people, okay, so when did it start to make sense to work with Tusk? 

Yeah, so I would say when you're spending more than a million dollars a year, domestically is when you should call Tusk. So tusk logistics.com, if folks are coming to manifest, we'll be at Manifest. We have a book that manifest. So find us. Yeah. The best way to analyze if alternative carriers are for you is to give us a PLD file. So parcel level data, roughly a month. We need like five fields. So origin, zip, destination, zip, weight, dim and price paid. And we can tell you exactly the margin you'd unlock with alternative carriers nationwide. 

And so what is a statistically relevant? So I mean, I guess a month is going to be a couple. 

Yeah, a month is a good proxy. 

And if they're doing a million a year, 

Yeah, if a million a year, if you're doing call it 5 million or more, then you should rush to the phone and call us because the savings will be significant because that's about the range that you start to do some zone skipping too, so that unlocks additional value. 

Outstanding. Last question. How do people connect with you, follow you, that kind of thing? 

Well, the best way is via email, so B-E-M-M-R-I-C h@tusklogistics.com. And then I love joshing with folks on LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn. So it's Ben Emrich, E-M-M-R-I-C-H on LinkedIn every Monday, sometimes on Tuesday if I'm lazy, I post alternative carrier performance reports so that for the previous week, how all the alternative carriers are doing. We highlight interesting nuance in the ecosystem, tell you who's doing really good so you can get a pulse of the alternative carrier quality before you give us your data. And we run numbers for your op. 

You put that on substack or is that just 

On LinkedIn? And then we publish it on our website too. So tus logistics.com. If you click the top under resources, there's an alternative carrier data section we publish. 

Nice. You have a little stock ticker that's showing 

I wish. Eventually. Eventually we will. But this is just like yours, truly like you founder doing it all. 

All right, man. Well, hey, one super interesting conversation. Thank you very much. 

Well, thank you. Great meet. Thank you for having me. 

Absolutely, man. Great to meet you and really enjoyed the conversation and thank you to anybody who's made it this far. 

Amen. Shippers first. Shippers first. That's right. Alright, bye everybody. See you.