Supply Chain Saga

Welcome to Supply Chain Saga, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the interconnected world of supply chain and logistics. Join us as we unravel fascinating stories and engage with thought leaders, innovators, and operators who are revolutionizing this dynamic industry. Each episode brings you fresh insights, explores cutting-edge trends, and uncovers the technologies that are shaping the way we move goods and ideas across the globe. Whether you're a seasoned professional or simply intrigued by the complex networks that power our modern lives, Supply Chain Saga offers an enriching and enlightening exploration into the ever-evolving realm of supply chain management. Tune in, and let's embark on this epic adventure together!

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Supply Chain Saga

21 Years Inside UPS: Glenn Gooding on Small Parcel Strategy, Zone Skipping, and How 3PLs Should Partner with Carriers | Supply Chain Saga Ep. 019

April 13, 2026 • Mark Taylor

0:00 | 1:44:50

Glenn Gooding spent 21 years at UPS — from package handler to driver to corporate revenue management for Dell, IBM, and Apple. He then spent nearly two decades in third-party parcel negotiation. Glenn shares how carriers price, how they view 3PLs, and what operators must do to compete.

TOPICS COVERED: 
- 21 years at UPS: package handler to corporate Special Pricing for enterprise clients 
- The Nintendo story: zone skipping 900,000 Game Boys for Black Friday delivery 
- UPS vs FedEx DNA: Teamster drivers vs contracted operators and the RLA 
- COVID's impact on the carrier market and the residential volume hangover 
- USPS losing $9.1B per year and the Delivering for America plan 
- Amazon, Walmart, and Target building their own delivery networks 
- How carriers view 3PLs as resellers and why that must change 
- Zone skipping for 3PLs: peak season strategies and carrier collaboration 
- Volume thresholds: $2M+ for one carrier, $10M+ to multi-source 
- Custom corrugated, returns, and inventory positioning as value props

CHAPTERS: 
0:00 Introduction 
0:19 Glenn's UPS Career: Package Handler to Revenue Management 
3:50 The Nintendo Story: Zone Skipping for Black Friday 
7:09 UPS vs FedEx: Ground DNA, Air DNA, and the 1997 Strike 
12:10 The UPS Driver as Brand Ambassador 
17:30 Bird Dog Solutions and Third-Party Negotiation 
23:10 Enterprise Pricing: 10% Out of Dell's Costs Year Over Year 
28:10 COVID and the Small Parcel Market 
33:44 USPS Crisis: Delivering for America 
37:03 Amazon, Walmart, Target: Building Their Own Networks 
43:01 Multi-Sourcing: Why No Single Carrier Works 
48:43 The 3PL Margin Problem and the Carrier Perspective 
56:29 Proving Value: Average Zone, Corrugated, Network Efficiency 
1:09:03 Zone Skipping for 3PLs: When and How 
1:18:05 Returns as a Differentiator 
1:29:20 The Fragmented Marketplace and What's Next 
1:40:27 Who's Innovating in Small Parcel 
1:43:29 Closing Thoughts

ABOUT THE GUEST: 
Glenn Gooding spent 21 years at UPS and nearly two decades in parcel negotiation at Bird Dog Solutions and iDrive Logistics.

KEY TERMS: 
Glenn Gooding, UPS, FedEx, USPS, small parcel, zone skipping, carrier negotiation, 3PL, Bird Dog Solutions, iDrive Logistics, Delivering for America, gig economy, residential delivery, demand surcharges, returns, multi-sourcing

Supply Chain Saga is produced by Mark Taylor, CEO of Warehouse Republic, a 3PL serving omni-channel e-commerce brands that sell through marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify, as well as retail partners like Nordstrom, Scheels, and Bass Pro Shops.

Website: warehouserepublic.com
Podcast: supplychainsaga.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/warehouse-republic
Host: linkedin.com/in/marktaylor

Have a logistics question? Email mark@warehouserepublic.com

— Introduction

— Glenn's UPS Career: Package Handler to Driver to Corporate Revenue Management

— The Nintendo Story: Zone Skipping 900,000 Game Boys for Black Friday

— UPS vs FedEx: Ground DNA, Air DNA, RPS Acquisition, and the 1997 Strike

— UPS Driver as Brand Ambassador vs FedEx Contracted Operators

— Post-UPS: Bird Dog Solutions and the Art of Third-Party Negotiation

— iDrive Logistics: Professional Services and TMS

— Enterprise Pricing: Taking 10% Out of Dell's Shipping Costs Year Over Year

— COVID and the Small Parcel Market: Surge, Hangover, and Fragmentation

— USPS Financial Crisis: Delivering for America and the Postal Aggregator Shakeup

— Amazon, Walmart, and Target: Retailers Building Their Own Delivery Networks

— Multi-Sourcing: Why No Single Carrier Solves the Equation

— The 3PL Margin Problem: Cash Flow, Financing Costs, and the Carrier Perspective

— Proving Your Value: Average Zone, Custom Corrugated, and Network Efficiency

— Zone Skipping for 3PLs: Peak Season Strategy and Carrier Collaboration

— Returns as a Differentiator and Parcel Protection Programs

— The Fragmented Marketplace: Gig Economy, AI Shopping, and What's Next

— Who's Innovating and Where's the Biggest Hole in Small Parcel

— Closing Thoughts

Mark Taylor (00:00:01):
Glenn Gooding. Good morning.

Glenn Gooding (00:00:03):
Thanks, Mark. Good morning. Good to have you out here.

Mark Taylor (00:00:05):
Yeah, I really appreciate you hosting me. So here we are and let's start with just how did we get here? A big question is a big question I know.

Glenn Gooding (00:00:19):
No, I stumbled into the supply chain. I was an overperforming high school student, no good study habits, and I was scared to death with how was I going to pay to go to college and who was I going to be when I grew up? Right. And I found out that UPS hires college students, 18 year olds. And so I got a phone number, made a phone call and day after my 18th birthday, headed down and I applied to UPS and the rest was kind of history. Dating myself, I got hired October 1st, 1985. Wow. And that was the start of the holiday season. So I was a peak season hire. I wasn't a permanent hire. Went through my first Christmas as a package handler and then in January was commensurately laid off and then rehired for a permanent hire and then just ground my way through.

(00:01:21):
UPS was a company that had a legacy of promote from within. And so everybody that was in management had started the way I had started it. And I quickly saw an opportunity for a long, rewarding career at UPS. So I really dedicated myself to that while I was going to school. Over half of UPS's workforce was part-time. And so I ground through as a part-timer, went into part-time supervision, worked in the hub. I did that for a good three and a half years and then identified myself as someone who wanted to go into full-time career path there. And so the next step was being a driver. I was a UPS driver for a year and a half. Covered 16, 17 different routes, really learned the job. And then was lucky enough to get promoted back into management, into operations. And I ended up 21 years at UPS.

(00:02:21):
I was an operator. I've managed every operation UPS has to manage directly. Did all the jobs. I supported those all through industrial engineering roles as well. So it was really great from a planning and forecasting and work measurement standpoint.

(00:02:37):
I would tell you that I found myself in a really cool spot out in Seattle where I started my UPS career. I was now managing the air network. And as managing the air network, you started having a lot of dialogue with the big shippers up there that drove aircraft lift. So I began finding myself in front of clients like Amazon, Starbucks, Nintendo, Microsoft. And I remember Nintendo came to UPS with a new Game Boy launch for the Christmas and they said, "Hey, we're bringing in 900,000 units and they need to be on every retail shelf on Black Friday. Can't be there a day early, can't be there a day late. What could you do for us?" And brunch of the numbers came back and said, "Well, we're going to have to land an additional 747. And by the way, here's the additional landing fee just to put that thing on the tarmac." And they grabbed their hearts and said, "Hey, what if we get it into the port earlier?

(00:03:39):
What can you do? " And so I created a really cool intermodal induction plan, if you will, kind of zone skipping. We'll get into zone skipping, I'm sure at some point in this conversation.

Mark Taylor (00:03:50):
Absolutely. Yeah.

Glenn Gooding (00:03:51):
And moved product intermodally to every location in the US with only volume that's had a one day time and transit footprint from it. Wow. Aged it all, controlled it all through the organization. It was all processed day before Thanksgiving, everything was delivered. The day after, it was a resounding success and Nintendo was thrilled. UPS was thrilled because UPS charged an air rate for an intermodal service. And that's where my career changed dramatically. So here I am, a good operator, a good industrial engineer, and Atlanta corporate headquarters reaches out and says, "Hey, send us that operating plan." So they took the operating plan, looked at it, and lo and behold, they offered me a position in corporate headquarters. It was called Special Pricing at the time. It was a unique group of folks they recruited that had real strong industrial engineering and operations backgrounds to do some kind of out of the box revenue management activities with the big, complex, gnarly global brands.

(00:05:07):
And so I relocated the family in the late '90s from Seattle to Atlanta. Atlanta's home now. And that's really where I really rounded out my knowledge of the small parcel market, the competitive landscape, the revenue management practices. I worked in an environment where I didn't have any parameters. I wasn't pricing to a threshold. It was, "Hey, Dell. Dell is yours and it's $83 million a year and Michael Dell wants 10% savings year over year. Are you going to get it for them?" Or IBM or Apple or you name it. It was just really, really fun, really helped UPS build out their costing models specific. So UPS is, from a legacy perspective, very, very good analytically with regard to understanding what the profit margin is for a specific client based off of its exact shipping characteristic, where it shipped from, where it's going, the lanes that flows through, the operations that touch it.

(00:06:16):
And so I got really involved in that. As UPS in the early 2000s started making fores into other aspects of the supply chain, they started acquiring Brits Freight Forwarding. They acquired RMX and they rebranded it as UPS Mail Innovations, right? A variety of things like that. Overnight, motor cargo became UPS Freight. I began getting tasked as an enterprise guy to say, "What could we do contractually to leverage small parcel spend and grow profitably in these other segments?" And so I really got involved in touching other aspects of the UPS supply chain solutions business, and it really rounded me out. And that was really 21 years of my life right there that really kind of built the foundation of who I am today.

Mark Taylor (00:07:09):
So 85 to 2006.

Glenn Gooding (00:07:12):
Actually, so my technical hire date's January of 86 to 2007.

Mark Taylor (00:07:15):
Okay. So in just that 21 years, what did the kind of network design change from? Because now the way there weren't UPS stores back then, I don't believe ...

Glenn Gooding (00:07:30):
They did become mailboxes, et cetera, got acquired and branded as a UPS store. That was in the 2000s, so that did happen. I think the big thing that happened from a network perspective is there was this regional operator called RPS out there, roadway package systems. And they were offering, they were out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they were offering some very competitive ground offerings. They were taking market share away from UPS. UPS had a labor strike in 97. That's a story in and of itself. That event made RPS more relevant in the marketplace because shippers had to go somewhere. And so RPS became a more formidable competitor to UPS on the ground product. And then afterward got the attention and then became acquired by FedEx and got branded as FedEx around at that point. And so that all happened in my tenure in revenue management at UPS corporate.

(00:08:44):
Additionally, at that time, DHL, the DHL Express that everybody would know as the global operator out there, had gone out and they'd acquired Airborne. And so they, in one fell swoop, tried to enter as the third market competitor, national competitor at that time to UPS and FedEx, and it didn't go well for them. They led with price. They lured a lot of large accounts away, and inevitably they fell on their face and those large accounts went back to their old legacy relationships on that front.

(00:09:31):
I think as FedEx became a more formidable competitor in the marketplace at that time, they're non-union and they operate under a protective status under the RLA Railway Labor Act because their ground network and their air network are separate networks. They were bifurcated. And as a result, Fred Smith was able to have them designated as an airline. And so the RLA provides some protection against strikes and unionization and things like that. And so FedEx in their unique ground model began doing things to differentiate from UPS. And this is what kind of evolved in the marketplace. They began putting up expedited sleeper team truckload moves and marketing specific improvements in time and transit in key lanes, ground lanes. Whereas UPS, from a legacy perspective, they were operating ... They were excellent operators and they were a Teamster environment, much higher labor expense, as you might imagine. And so they were heavy users of TOFC, trailer on freight car.

(00:10:43):
And so when you're talking about any sort of a intermediate or long haul move of a trailer into a country, it went on a rail. And with that comes the arrival and departure times of the trains and the things that happen with that, that kind of dictate the time of transit requirements. And then you have FedEx putting up a sleeper team, a contracted driver team that can outperform what would happen on the rail by a day or by two days. And so it became a game of cat and mouse a bit between UPS and FedEx, and UPS began taking the at-risk lanes and putting up Teamster sleeper teams to counteract that. And so even to this day, you get ahold of the right sales rep and they'll tout certain advantages, time and transit to UPS on that front. So all that kind of happened during that timeframe.

(00:11:47):
You had the dot-com bust, but I would tell you back then, the dominant product was ground commercial. It wasn't ground residential and residential is really the conundrum of the marketplace today with regard to how you rationalize that and how you make money in that environment, which is something I'm sure we'll spend some time on.

Mark Taylor (00:12:10):
Yeah. So I'm sure that the way I'm going to simplify the comparison is going to be cringey for a lot of people, but I've been under the impression that UPS was started in ground and then Ford integrated into air.

Glenn Gooding (00:12:26):
It did.

Mark Taylor (00:12:26):
Whereas FedEx cut their teeth in air

Glenn Gooding (00:12:30):
And

Mark Taylor (00:12:30):
Express and

Glenn Gooding (00:12:31):
Then

Mark Taylor (00:12:31):
Integrated in ground.

Glenn Gooding (00:12:32):
They did. They did through acquisition.

Mark Taylor (00:12:34):
And so when you look at that, UPS has typically got their ground game generally better, or at least that's where their DNA comes from.

Glenn Gooding (00:12:47):
It is their DNA.

Mark Taylor (00:12:48):
And then FedEx is just the opposite. And so it kind of depends. And of course, they've all made so many changes over the years, but I've always said, well, I think the two websites that often get compared are Shopify versus Squarespace. Squarespace started off as someplace that was pretty, that Ford integrated into e-comm. And then Shopify started as e-com and then has moved into trying to be more pretty.

Glenn Gooding (00:13:17):
And even in today's market, I think the carriers sometimes underestimate this, but the UPS driver is a very powerful brand ambassador for UPS. These are folks that are highly tenured. It's their career. It's not unusual to see a driver who's got 20, 25 years seniority. They know their customers, they know their customers' families. They go to their prisonings, they go to the picnics, they know each other. They become friends, right? Yep. And that means something to those folks on those loading docks or in those offices. Absolutely. And UPS makes good hires on that front. So you're talking about top tier employees, good men and women out there, wholesome, folks that you have that trust level with. And then you contrast that to a FedEx contracted operator where a little wilder, little less accountability. You may have one driver one day, another one another day. There's a lot more volatility on that front and appearance standards historically weren't the same.

(00:14:45):
They couldn't hold them to those types of standards. And so there was a real contrast out there. And to this day in the commercial environment, I would say the UPS driver really is kind of the gold standard of that customer connection and that relationship.

Mark Taylor (00:15:05):
Yeah. I think that's been our experience. The service levels kind of are sine waves. I mean, they go up, they go down and typically very few, very, very rarely, I mean, COVID was certainly an exception, but just all service levels across everything go down. But typically one's doing better than the other, and then you kind of float between the two of them depending on your contract and everything like that. But on the dock, we would find that our FedEx drivers, when we'd have trucks come pick up, we would know the operator that had that contractor that had that lane and we would make friends with whoever the main guy was. And then that would ... And as soon as you'd get a great relationship built up there, they'd lose that lane and then somebody else would come in and you'd have to rebuild the relationship.

(00:16:05):
The drivers on the dock also are a great example. You just did not get the level of caring and the level of ... Camaraderie, I guess, is a way of saying

Glenn Gooding (00:16:15):
It. 100%.

Mark Taylor (00:16:16):
That you would with some of the FedEx drivers that you would a lot of the UPS drivers. But we did have some FedEx drivers that crushed it, but-

Glenn Gooding (00:16:24):
Absolutely. There's good people out there.

Mark Taylor (00:16:26):
But they would rotate in and then rotate out and we'd have a couple weeks of mourning.

Glenn Gooding (00:16:32):
100%. You just have stability on the UPS side. That's a route that driver bid on, right? And oftentimes, as you get longer in the tooth as a driver, it's a physically demanding job. You think about the number of times you just get in and out of that vehicle and the wear and tear on the knees alone, let alone carrying packages. Routes are bid by seniority in the UPS environment. And so there is an overlying strong appeal toward these rural residential routes where you have fewer stops and lighter workload. The challenge becomes for a lot of these drivers is that's a lonelier environment. And so you have a lot of these drivers that say, "You know what? I could bid a physically easier job, but I believe in my friends."

Mark Taylor (00:17:23):
Yeah, makes sense. So from 2000, you said seven is when-

Glenn Gooding (00:17:30):
When I chose to leave, yes.

Mark Taylor (00:17:31):
Yep. And then where did your career take you at that point?

Glenn Gooding (00:17:36):
I went to a firm called Bird Dog Solutions, and it really offered third party negotiating services. So I had been on the other side of the desk now for a long time, and I was constantly trying to placate a skilled negotiator, and I'm talking about big, complex, worldwide brands and the level of horsepower and procurement that you might expect from a brand like that, trying to hold onto margin, placate skilled negotiators and lock down long-term relationships. And I opted for trying to sit on the other side of the desk and seeing what that side was like. So I worked for Bird Dog, which was a great firm for about nine years and really I would say honed my craft as a third party negotiator.

(00:18:41):
So much noise in this space about firms that purport to perform a service like that and they fall back on things like benchmarking surveys or some sort of sexy analytic capability. What's grossly missing is just that practical knowledge and having been the person that held the purse strings on the other side of the desk and understand how carriers use a negotiation and what their sensitivities are and having a deep understanding of how a package moves through a carrier network, right? Moving a two pound package through a carrier network is a lot different than moving a set of skis through a carrier network. And it's one thing to say, "Yeah, I get it. I get it. " It's another, if you were a hub manager and you had to process 20,000 packages an hour through a building and figure out a way to get this stuff done.

(00:19:38):
It's entirely different, right? You're there. So I worked real hard to perfect that craft and do it in a, I would say, in an intellectually honest and fair way that gave the market, gave the carriers every opportunity to secure long-term meaningful partnerships with the brands that I might have represented at that time. And I'm really proud of that. Learned a lot there, learned a lot from who I worked for there and the colleagues, and then opted for another change at that point. That's where I went to iDrive, very thankful for IDrive, great firm, great ownership, great people.

(00:20:32):
And I worked hard to build out a more sophisticated offering than they currently had, leveraging what I kind of learned at Bird Dog. And I did that very effectively and went out and helped grow the business. And then the founder, the owner of iDrive is very visionary, very, very much an entrepreneur. And so he always had his eye on what the next thing was in the supply chain. And so he was working really hard on a TMS solution out there for many, many years and did it the good old fashioned way bootstrap and internally grinding through, learning a lot of valuable lessons along the way. And that evolved into, I think, a refined vision of the marketplace. And so when you look at iDrive Logistics today, they have a phenomenal third party negotiating optimization or contract engineering offering, we call it professional services. And that knowledge base, that approach is kind of the center of the hub now that allows iDrive to do some other very powerful things in the marketplace through the fulfillment side of things, right?

(00:21:55):
And helping fulfillment operators get the most competitive offerings available and give them a diverse carrier offering so that they can really offer the most, let's say, flexible SLAs possible out there to their brands to retain them on that front. So really, really thankful for the time that I spent at iDrive there about 10 years or so.

Mark Taylor (00:22:23):
Yeah. And they've, I mean, full disclosure iDrive is where we met.

Glenn Gooding (00:22:30):
100%.

Mark Taylor (00:22:30):
You have your podcast parcel perspectives?

Glenn Gooding (00:22:33):
I did have it, yeah.

Mark Taylor (00:22:34):
And that's where we met. You have me on graciously.

Glenn Gooding (00:22:40):
I was happy to have you on. We had a great time. I

Mark Taylor (00:22:42):
Appreciate that. But no, I mean, our experience with exactly kind of what you're talking about has been great, working with iDrive. One of the things I want to focus on for a few though is you brought up a really interesting point earlier about how we've got, you were tasked while still at UPS with taking 10% per year out of Dell's cost, for

Glenn Gooding (00:23:10):
Instance. Correct. Yeah.

Mark Taylor (00:23:12):
At a time when that's not the way inflation goes.

Glenn Gooding (00:23:16):
No.

Mark Taylor (00:23:17):
And so what was the attitude at the time and how does that differ? How do you think that differs amongst, let's just call it the modern environment of carriers, not just UPS, but FedEx, UPS, Amazon, DHL Ecom, all kind of the big players, even USPS in this case. How did they approach investment in technology to continue taking that stuff out? Was it primarily opening physical locations or was it an actual technology thing, investments in robotics? How did they view, okay, we're going to take costs out in an environment where fuel, materials, everything to do the thing we do is going up in price.

Glenn Gooding (00:24:01):
You bet. You bet. There's a ton of things happening in the space on that front. So automation's a big one. If you have the pleasure of ever being able to tour, I'm an operation today, I would really jump on that. It's come so far. It was an eye-opening to me as a guy that grew up in that environment where everything was done by a package handler to now in the right automated facilities, all the skilled positions, all the knowledge units, all the things where you had to take tests on what zip code goes to what conveyor belt type of scenario are out of the equation. It's all automation. So heavy, heavy, heavy investments in automation. And I would say you're going to continue to see heavy investments on that front, even to a point of trying to push toward in the right environments, autonomous deliveries, I think there's continued push on internal package handling around how do you solve for the equation of automated loading of packages as an example.

(00:25:16):
And there's so many variables, that's a tough one to do.

(00:25:22):
They're always looking at ways of strategically positioning operations, taking others down, doing things like that. Technology is another huge one, and each operator is probably in a different place in their continuum on where they're at there. I would say UPS has done a fantastic job, I think, of looking for ways to leverage technology to do that. I think a great example that is hardly a secret out there is UPS leverages their delivery information acquisition devices called a dyad, right? That handheld electronic delivery device that you see a UPS driver have. And at the point of every day, you'd have the legacy UPS SurePost product that was destined for final mile delivery by the post office. But if on a given day, a package that was going to Glen Gooding's house via SurePost was planned that day and it was on that vehicle, but there was a second package that was UPS Ground Residential destined for Glen Gooding's house.

(00:26:40):
Well, that delivery information acquisition device would say, no, you're not going to drop that SurePost package off at the post office today. You're going to have it accompany the other packaging. The driver's going to make a two-package delivery stop at the house on that front. And that's huge. That's massive from an operational efficiency perspective.

Mark Taylor (00:27:01):
Certainly.You're

Glenn Gooding (00:27:03):
Now moving, you're solving the biggest problem in the e-commerce market from a carrier perspective, and that is how do you make lightweight residential deliveries profitable? That's the biggest challenge. It always has been. And in that exact example, it's a huge move. You move from one to two packages. You effectively double the revenue on that fixed expense for that stock.

Mark Taylor (00:27:31):
Right. Two vehicles still show up at your property, but at least UPS isn't paying for that package to come off the UPS truck of 90 cents a dollar, whatever it may be for the last mile service versus ... It's a negligible increment to have the two packages. You're talking seconds to identify both of them and then drop them both off.

Glenn Gooding (00:27:56):
Seconds is probably a big number in that environment, right? It's already there. They're right next to each other at this point, and you're walking two boxes to the doorstep instead of one.

Mark Taylor (00:28:09):
Correct.

Glenn Gooding (00:28:10):
Yeah. It's a smart move on that front, and it moves the needle in some ways. So you have that happening. Amazon has been a disruptor in the marketplace, big time. And that opens up the conversation. You talk about gig economy and regional carriers and couriers, and maybe it's important to talk about the effect of COVID on the US market and what that did, how that impacted the USPS as well, what they're doing to kind of get us to, I think, the current environment of where we're at today. COVID was a black swan event, as we all know. And literally overnight, everybody was ordering product, toilet paper, toothpaste.

Mark Taylor (00:29:00):
The anecdote I've said before is, my grandfather went from asking me to order him Amazon packages to saying, "I just got my own account."

Glenn Gooding (00:29:09):
Exactly. And that's a massive move for that demographic.

Mark Taylor (00:29:13):
Oh yeah. He was 79 years old, got his Amazon account.

Glenn Gooding (00:29:16):
So overnight, you had this massive influx of residential volume into the carrier networks, and that did a couple things. One, it really tested the capacity of the carriers in a big way, and every carrier had different exposure to it, different sensitivities. It exacerbated the issue I talked about, the Achilles heel of e-commerce, and that is, how do you make lightweight residential deliveries profitable? They took a bunch of that, let's call it unprofitable business and shoved it into the networks. And it's The spoiler alert, adding volume to that equation doesn't solve the problem.

Mark Taylor (00:30:06):
No. Well, I mean, if you lose a few cents on each thing, now you're just losing a whole lot more money.

Glenn Gooding (00:30:12):
Well, you're right. And I've even been privy to running some simulations back in my days, working at UPS where you'd run simulations and you'd say, "Okay, let's test the theory. Let's run a simulation where every piece of priority mail was now a ground residential delivery. What would happen to the delivery density of that product nationwide, network wide?" And there were some real epiphanies and the epiphany was, yikes, you can't solve this equation with volume. The delivery density doesn't meaningfully move with volume. So it presented a problem. And so it also presented opportunities. So what I would tell you, the legacy carriers really got choked up on this volume. It was hard on them. Very hard. They did a variety of things. Some of them, some of the legacy carriers went out and fired certain enterprise clients they didn't feel were making a meaningful contribution financially and they just didn't have the capacity for it.

(00:31:24):
So those decisions were made.

(00:31:28):
But it also accelerated the trajectory of the e-commerce channel as a percentage of retail sales, about a decade in a year. And so the market took note. Private equity dollars took note. And so innovation began to look at that. And so you have the bubble up of these gig economy providers that are out there. It was a boom time for regional carriers as well, like an on track and laser ship, which are now one company. And private equity began to throw a lot of money into these gig economy operators, not maybe having the deep knowledge of the residential market and understanding that there may not be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with regard to volume and solving for that equation, but you had a lot of new entrants come in there. So it's fragmented the market. The fastest growing segment within the small parcel marketplace is the regional and gig economy delivery providers at this point.

(00:32:42):
And it's being funded by investment dollars. And now we're in 2026, we're well past the effect of COVID.

(00:32:53):
Volume has dipped back down. Now everybody's hungry for volume. Now there's not enough volume in the network to support some things. Now there's a challenge out there. So you've got a heavily fragmented market. Technology and predictive analytics and AI have come a long way. Route optimizations, different types of technology based apps for these gig delivery service providers to offer a kind of a mindless technology solution that a college student tomorrow could go take 50 packages into their Honda and go out and get those delivered, stop or stop pretty effectively now. Competing with the legacy brands out there, it's tough. You kind of cram all that together and we haven't even talked about the post office yet.

Mark Taylor (00:33:44):
Right.

Glenn Gooding (00:33:45):
And so the post office was really financially viable when first class mail was a thing. When your grandmother and grandfather were writing a check to the utility company every single month and putting a stamp on it. And the same to the credit card and to the bank and to mortgage. And that's all gone away as we know. And so USPS is really, really financially hurting from a viability perspective. I think the last fiscal year they lost $9.1 billion and we're several years into this delivering for America plan that Louis DeJoy put together, a 10-year plan to get the USPS to profitability.

(00:34:35):
So the USPS is going all in on e-commerce as well. They're trying to figure out what that looks like and how that happens. They've vacillated back and forth between being a final mile delivery solution provider to saying, no, we don't want to do that anymore. We want to handle it as direct relationships with brands and have it move from pickup to delivery through the USPS network in total. And as a result of a lot of those maneuvers, they've really changed the lightweight residential market. So in the last couple years, the postal aggregators of the day were really stressed by USPS's positioning on postal aggregators. They kind of pulled those relationships or severely modified them, putting a lot of strain on that and kind of eliminating a less than a pound low cost solution. That provided more opportunity for the gig economy type of solutions out there to go out and get that.

(00:35:48):
And now in 2026, you've got the USPS still trying to figure out exactly what they want to do there, right? They deal with 3PLs differently than brand direct.

Mark Taylor (00:35:59):
Sure. I mean, we experience it in Southern California. The local Ontario USPS doesn't, or maybe they do now, but as of a few months ago, they didn't have a rep that they could assign to us. And so we could not get consistent pickup. And then what they wanted us to do is, if we had any kind of significant volume that would to give them, they would require it be put into Gaylords. They would require that we provide the Gaylord and then they wouldn't.

Glenn Gooding (00:36:32):
You weren't even guaranteed to get the Gaylord back and they're expensive.

Mark Taylor (00:36:35):
And they wouldn't give you a Gaylord back. Exactly right. They wouldn't guarantee it. They wouldn't say they would do it. And then even if you had them and you had it stationed, they wouldn't guarantee that they were going to pick up on a daily basis. They said they would, but the option was to get on the phone and say, "Hey, we've got X number of Gaylords ready for you guys to pick up this. Okay, we'll get it tomorrow or the next

Glenn Gooding (00:37:03):
Day." So we have that happening. And then simultaneously, you've got the largest three retailers in the US taking matters into their own hands, Amazon. Amazon's financial viability is driven solely on the prime channel. They've done a fabulous job with that and they need to continue to grow that prime membership and the prime benefits that go with that. And they knew at the time that there was limited capacity in the existing legacy carrier networks. So in order to ensure a path of continued growth for the prime channel, they began building out their own delivery network, purely solely for the purpose of facilitating prime growth. Well, as you do that, as you grind through COVID and the surge and now the hangover, the adjustment, you have this network built up now, and not every day is Amazon Prime Day. Not every day is Cyber Monday.

Mark Taylor (00:38:15):
Although there are many more Prime Days it feels like now than there used to be.

Glenn Gooding (00:38:19):
You bet there are. So you now have this very sophisticated jar of marbles that I would call the Amazon delivery network. And with that jar of marbles, there's a lot of air in that jar. And so now Amazon looks at that and says, "Wow, how do we offset our operational expense that we've dedicated to this prime channel?" So now they've gone into the private market and they're sourcing directly to offer their delivery services brand direct to pour, let's say proverbially that sand in the jar full of marbles, fill in the gaps. And so they're doing that and that's a disruptor in the marketplace. They're very, very good as an operator out there. You've got Walmart, you've got Target, the other top two competitors out there that will not be left behind by Amazon. So they're building out their own direct delivery solutions. So when you look at the 2026 marketplace, you say, wow, all right.

(00:39:28):
So the top three retailers which are driving the majority of the e-commerce growth in the US market are now bringing more and more of that in- house so it's not even available. It's not even part of the total available market for the other operators. That puts the remainder of the market into a definitely a stagnant position, if not slightly declining at times.

(00:39:56):
Based off of the delivering for America agenda and some of the revenue management practices that USPS has and is employing, that has opened up opportunities in the lightweight residential market for gig economy providers. And so now you have a lot more players in the space competing for a stagnant total available marketplace because the growth is happening with those three major retailers, Amazon, Walmart, Target, right?

Mark Taylor (00:40:32):
It's very interesting because if you look at what the retooling that has to happen for the legacy guys to do it the way they've done it, it's the constant investment in airplanes, in trucks and USPS's case, if you're going to service more parcel e-com packages and try to be more of an e-com provider, you have to have more large vans, you have to have less of the small little guys.

Glenn Gooding (00:41:03):
You're right.

Mark Taylor (00:41:04):
And if you're already losing close to $10 billion, how do you go and ask the taxpayer for all these other assets that you're going to have to ... We have to modernize the fleet. We have to do this. When your Amazon's Targets and Walmarts can go out there and utilize people that already have their own asset. It's interesting where I'm starting to see these giant legacy asset networks being outperformed simply because the way what's now we're capable of doing is it's completely different. It's like a different phasing out of technology because the truck still works. They're just not optimized to pick up and deliver the packages in the way that they need to be able to compete in today's world.

Glenn Gooding (00:41:54):
You're 100% right. And I think if we were to distill it down to, let's say, a common equation, from a legacy perspective, the legacy carriers wanted to be all things to the brand, and they would construct commercial agreements to protect that volume commitments, spend requirements to say if you have a million dollar spend, we want the million bucks. And so they're being forced to look at this fragmented market now. And when I think you very articulately pointed out some of the challenges as an example, USPS even has, here's the harsh reality. If you want to do things economically with cost as a priority here, there is no single sourcing solution that's going to solve your problem. You have to multi-source.

Mark Taylor (00:43:01):
And that's kind of the appeal of like an iDrive, for instance,

Glenn Gooding (00:43:05):
Who

Mark Taylor (00:43:05):
Has helped with, it may not be the single best UPS contract I could go get, but there's no way I could get that one and a FedEx and an Amazon and a DHL e-com as long as I've got volume to support enough of the carriers.

Glenn Gooding (00:43:18):
You're right. You're right. And so I think what a good pragmatic operator needs to do in today's world, if they're managing their small parcel supply chain, is they have to have the right type of discussion with their carriers and say, "Hey, look, we have to have a real conversation around what a partnership looks like in today's market." Sure. And let's be honest, USPS, FedEx, UPS, it's a real challenge. I don't think you want my whole portfolio. If you were to peek behind the curtain here and see my volume, I think there's a segment of it that you wouldn't even want because it just wouldn't be profitable in your network. And that's okay.

Mark Taylor (00:44:09):
I have a friend who operates an outdoors company that really caters to the overlanding market. Shout out to Rome Adventure Company, Nick Mazanti, but their tents are four feet by 18 inches by five, six, or sometimes eight feet. And so almost everyone has to go freight and they've got a great situation worked out with FedEx who wants to take the freight, but that doesn't mean when somebody orders a sticker that they also want the sticker business or all the little knickknacks that go in their boxes or that sort of thing. And so to your point, I mean, it's two very different kind of scenarios.

Glenn Gooding (00:44:55):
It 100% is. And so you have to be a more skilled procureer. You have to have a much stronger business acumen and you have to bring that business acumen to your carriers. I don't mean that in any sort of a combative type of a way. What I mean is you have to force your carriers to bring their proportionate business acumen to the equation as well. And that in itself is, I think, the challenge in today's market.

Mark Taylor (00:45:35):
So I mean, you would think that FedEx and UPS and Amazon, they would prefer to work with 3PLs because it's a freight aggregator. I mean, you're getting a lot of people's different little parcels and they want to serve the guy that sells a hundred things a day as much as they want to ... Well, maybe not as much, but they also want to serve the guy that's doing 5,000 units a day.

Glenn Gooding (00:45:59):
Yeah. It's a great point and worthy of some, I think, some deeper discussion. The legacy, I think, general opinion of 3PLs from a carrier perspective is they kind of hold their nose dealing with a 3PL operator because they've viewed them from a legacy perspective, as a reseller of their rates. Who are you, Mr. And Mrs. Operator, to add 10%, 20% margin on top of my rates where you're not offering any value in the equation? That has been the legacy perspective, and that's been the challenge. And so universally, the market is reconsidering how they want to approach the 3PL market, and each one is kind of going through, let's say, a different learning journey on that front, and so much of it's probably driven by market pressures for them. What are they doing for average daily volume and what do they commit to in the investing community or their private equity ownership or things like that that'll drive some of those decisions?

(00:47:17):
But from a historic perspective, 3PLs were seen as resellers. What has to happen, and I think what is happening with some of the legacies, is they're beginning to try to challenge themselves internally to say, "How do we view the 3PL operator as a partner rather than a reseller?" But there's still an elephant in the room that needs to be talked about, still some real challenges on that front. I'll give you a classic example. You own a 3PL, you're an operator, you have a margin strategy where you're making margin on transportation, the solution you're providing your brands. And that margin probably varies based off of the mode and the carrier and the weight and all those other things, it's out there. But if a legacy carrier, if a FedEx gives you market leading rates, they've taken the plunge and then they find out, well, you're marking up those rates.

(00:48:26):
And so the volume that FedEx wanted to compete for and win with their base rates, they're not seeing the business because you've tacked on a 15% margin. That elephant needs to be discussed in the room and it has to be overcome.

Mark Taylor (00:48:43):
Well, what I would say to that is there's a huge difference when you're UPS and you have a banking relationship. And then when you're an independent operator and you're, let's say you've got a line of credit with your bank

(00:48:58):
And that line of credit may be 100 to $250,000. So very, very kind of an entry level line of credit, but you know what? You don't feel comfortable taking more and the bank wouldn't give it to you if you ask. And so now you've got a guy that figures out the algorithm on TikTok shop or on whatever Facebook market ... Now, Facebook Marketplace wouldn't be one, but TikTok shop would be a good one or they go viral doing some kind of one sales channel, Instagram might be a good one. And all of a sudden this guy's doing $150,000 worth of shipping. Well, now you have to call that customer who may have had ... And let me back up a little bit. If you're a smaller operator, the likelihood that you're going to be billing people on a weekly basis and then enforcing that within seven day terms, you typically don't have the financial capability to do that.

Glenn Gooding (00:49:59):
Or the headcount.

Mark Taylor (00:49:59):
Well, and that's a better way of saying it. You don't have the finance department when you're a small operator, you

Glenn Gooding (00:50:05):
Have

Mark Taylor (00:50:06):
To do that. So you want to bill once a month or-

Glenn Gooding (00:50:08):
Which means you're on the hook.

Mark Taylor (00:50:11):
So now there's a financing cost to you getting that. And based on, let's say the delay, let's say all this happens the last week of the month, and then so you don't get that FedEx bill until the next week, the first week after you've invoiced your customer the once. So you've got an amount of float or you have to go back to your customer and break, not a tradition, but break a cycle with them that says, "Hey, I need you to really pay some of this. And we only typically bill you once a month, but I need you to pay the next as soon as these bills come out. " And you can do that. And as an operator, you are required, you have to manage your customer. I'm not whining. It's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem.

Glenn Gooding (00:50:54):
It is.

Mark Taylor (00:50:55):
And if you, let's say you already have your credit line drawn down and you're accruing interest on that credit line, well, now you're getting six, seven, eight, 9% interest, whatever it may be on your credit line on your customer's bills that are coming through. So you have to either hire somebody or reallocate resources to now focus on getting those bills taken care of in a timely manner so you don't go insolvent, start upsetting all of your other vendors. A

Glenn Gooding (00:51:26):
Hundred percent.

Mark Taylor (00:51:27):
So there is a ... I understand where they're coming from, but I also, it's like they're approaching this because they're flying a giant Hercules, a fleet of Hercules planes up in the air, and I'm flying a Cessna.

Glenn Gooding (00:51:45):
You're right. You're right. The economic models are different. Let's say the incurred risk is a little different. Having a conversation, as you just described to me, with a carrier is a healthy discussion. It would help. I promise you, they don't see your perspective.

Mark Taylor (00:52:11):
They do not. No. And that's okay. I mean, they might have a better customer relationship and they might be able to approach a lot more small operator 3PLs, independent 3PLs in a much more constructive fashion if they did, but those are the general operating concepts. I didn't get into the business wanting to make all my money on shipping.

Glenn Gooding (00:52:36):
No. And I think as a 3PL operator, given a lot of thought to this, I think there are some things many 3PL operators don't pay attention to or don't give the priority that it should have. Ultimately, you need to be able to sit down with a carrier and you need to articulate the value that you're bringing to them.

Mark Taylor (00:53:14):
Yep. Well, yes. And the other piece of it, I absolutely agree with you. This is a yes and this is not an either, or this is not me rebutting in any form or fashion, but I don't know ... You run a Mac, I run a Mac. WorldShip doesn't run on a Mac. We are in 2026 and you can't ... When I started this in 2018, I was shocked that you could not run their shipping software, FedEx and UPS on Mac. Wild to me. So the other thing you have to do as a small operator is you have to be nimble and you have to be on the front edge of everything, whether it's how are we going to split shipments to multiple warehouses? How are we going to partner with another warehouse? And so there is also a technology gap that we are required to fill that FedEx and UPS just aren't keeping up with.

(00:54:16):
And there's a real cost to that.

Glenn Gooding (00:54:19):
100%.

Mark Taylor (00:54:21):
So there are a lot of components of this, not just the initial cash management component, but also the investment in technology that I have to do-

Glenn Gooding (00:54:31):
Which is part of your value prop you can bring to the carrier and say, look what I'm doing. You wouldn't even have a seat at the table here to be able to take a piece of the pie if I hadn't made this investment.

Mark Taylor (00:54:42):
Correct.

Glenn Gooding (00:54:43):
Right? Yep. Which is a very valid point, right? And there's more obvious ones as well, Mark. Are you offering custom kidding? Are you doing something custom embroidery type of work? Have you invested in equipment to accomplish that so that when somebody orders a blank golf shirt and they want their golf club logo on it, you can execute on that front?

Mark Taylor (00:55:14):
Exactly.

Glenn Gooding (00:55:15):
Are you doing custom type of hem work and things like that? So when a guy orders and says, "Well, I'm a 34 and a half in seam," and you can get that done. Those are tangible value adds that you're bringing to the equation that the brand doesn't do and a carrier will recognize and understand. Right. And then there's even network type of things as well. So as we've talked about, the lightweight residential delivery is the conundrum to solve for all the carriers, right? It's just, it's hard to make money in that environment. It's hard to offer a $4 rate and be sustainable, unless you're being funded by venture capital and you're just trying to chase top line revenue and win the day until somebody buys your app and hope you get out before the music stops, right? Right, right. Which is a possibility. So you have to think from an operator's perspective, say, "Okay, I'll give you another example.

(00:56:29):
I had a client, a very large 3PL operator, 22 operations, 22 facilities in the US, 22, and their average zone across all the volume, 4.7."

Mark Taylor (00:56:46):
That's wild. I mean, we're all 22 of them located in California?

Glenn Gooding (00:56:50):
No, but your head's going exactly the point I'm making. So it can be very easy for a carrier to come in and say, "Gosh guys, you want these market leading rates, market leading rates that if I give them to you, you're more than likely going to cannibalize my existing volume base by poaching brands and bringing them under your roof when I had a higher margin on them as a brand direct client, and you're doing nothing to make these packages more efficient in my network." So it's something that has to ... It's a lens, it's a perspective that a 3PL operator needs to consider and look at.

Mark Taylor (00:57:37):
But when capacity's tight, that's exactly when they need to think about it. When it's not tight and there's a glut of it, they're happy for it to be a 4.7.

Glenn Gooding (00:57:45):
It can be. Yep. But imagine as an operator too, if you give time thinking about that and you do some things and you have your inventory intelligently placed, and let's just talk about two facilities, one in California and one in North Carolina. I promise you, if you have the inventory positioned appropriately, you're not a zone 4.7. Right. And so does that potentially give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace to offer a superior SLA to a brand?

Mark Taylor (00:58:24):
And that's an interesting perspective because it's my job to handle and build a specification and ship out. Yeah, that's the way I look at it. I mean, basically it's like if you think about the 3PL as an operating or as a manufacturing operation, boxes off a container or off pallets are your raw materials in sortation and is your work in process and then kitting is also the final process of working process and then shipping out becomes your finished product. So that's the way I equate it to manufacturing. And it's not my job to know what SKU is going to sell where or look at the heat maps that I feel like my customer should be looking at and saying, "Oh, SKU one is really popular in these markets. And so we're going to station 80% Southern California, 20% in North Carolina." And SKU two is that needs to be 65% North Carolina.

Glenn Gooding (00:59:28):
It's an interesting point, and I want to have a little fun with you on this. Well,

Mark Taylor (00:59:31):
So before I get roasted on this, it is not your initial job to do it, but it is one of the ways that you can differentiate your service.

Glenn Gooding (00:59:40):
You just got yourself out of jail with me.

Mark Taylor (00:59:41):
Yeah.

Glenn Gooding (00:59:42):
So my question back to you was, why isn't it your job?

Mark Taylor (00:59:46):
Correct. And I see that. And I do think that is where the exciting stuff with, I think, predictive analytics and just the compute power that now we have to take data sets And analyze it and basically say, well, I mean, provide those readouts to your customer and say, "Hey, look, and you know we could actually, if we were to take this product and move just a few pallets of it here, this is what we think it would save you in shipping." That and then this would make the UPS market or FedEx or it'd make your carrier that much more efficient.

Glenn Gooding (01:00:28):
Correct. Correct. It's a lot of moving parts.

Mark Taylor (01:00:34):
It is.

Glenn Gooding (01:00:35):
Quite literally, not figuratively in this. Absolutely it is. You could go a step further too. What about shopping cart analytics at that point?

Mark Taylor (01:00:45):
The shopping cart analytics is an interesting one because Shopify offers the tools. In fact, Shopify is one of the only marketplace options that allows split inventory. It allows you to plug in multiple warehouses and it will do order routing to the various warehouses based on logic.

Glenn Gooding (01:01:07):
From a predictive analytics perspective, imagine an environment where you could model and test in a test environment what the impact to your shopping cart analytics cart abandonment based off of a subsidized shipping strategy. And so you play through a scenario and say, "Okay, if everything's coming in the Port of Long Beach and I have an operation in Ontario, California, and that's it, 70% of my stuff is hidden east." Okay. What could my brand do from a subsidized shipping strategy and still make money? Right. And now run a scenario and say, "Okay, what if we did move 70% of that east? We positioned it in Lexington, Kentucky, or we positioned in North Carolina or wherever you're going. " And now it changes your transportation delivery expense. It changes the potential mode you would have to offer to meet certain SLAs. And you say, "Okay, what would happen to card abandonment fees if it went from $10 flat shipping to $5 flat shipping?" And then you balance that with client acquisition cost from a brand.

(01:02:32):
If you're an operator like that and you're providing those types of analytics, or at least have a seat at the table in those discussions, again, a function of headcount, a function of business acumen, a function of technology investment, I get all that. But if you are, those brands are going to value you as a provider. You're not just a warehouse that's receiving volume, picking, packing, shipping.

Mark Taylor (01:02:57):
You're a partner that's trying to optimize their business.

Glenn Gooding (01:03:00):
You are, and you're helping to facilitate their growth and the likelihood of you retaining them as they grow goes up.

Mark Taylor (01:03:09):
Exactly. That's a great point. I think this also hits on a question that's been kind of popping up as we've been having this conversation is what are the things that ... We've talked about what my grievance is with the carriers, but other than the, why am I giving them a great rate? And then they're marking it up and they're not adding any value, but what can the operators be doing? Because I mean, one of the things that we all look at chargebacks and we sit there and we think, this is a profit center for them.

Glenn Gooding (01:03:51):
Well, chargebacks for you too, it just goes straight. It just eats your margin. I would shudder to think of your success rate of what you're able to build back to the brand on chargebacks.

Mark Taylor (01:04:06):
Not high.

Glenn Gooding (01:04:07):
I wouldn't think so.

Mark Taylor (01:04:08):
Nope.

Glenn Gooding (01:04:09):
You're right. You're right. And every carrier handles chargebacks a little differently, right? Some carriers are a little more robust with the chargebacks than others, of course. So I think the question you've asked now is what other types of things can operator do? So I think there's a variety of things, and I think also there's some real potentially innovative things on the horizon that I think are exciting, that I have a mind for, that I think will evolve here. But basic blocking and tackling. As a 3PL operator, do you have a robust corrugated solution? Are you an operator that has five box sizes and those are the options? And hey, you just ran out of inventory on one of the box sizes and now you got to go up a size and next thing you know, you're getting with a bunch of chargebacks because you build it at five pounds and it's dimming at seven, that type of thing.

(01:05:19):
Sure. That's a big one. There's some really cool customized corrugated solutions out there. Again, it's a function of money and revenue and a variety of things, but there are some really cool solutions where you can get custom corrugated solution built to every set of SKUs in an order and your obligation as the operator is to buy the corrugated from the provider who put the equipment in the operation.

Mark Taylor (01:05:47):
And there's pack size, pacurate,

Glenn Gooding (01:05:49):
There's

Mark Taylor (01:05:50):
A bunch of those. Yep.

Glenn Gooding (01:05:51):
Correct. That's cool. And these brands that you're attracting into the space probably wouldn't be doing that on their own. So you're offering inherent value there to a carrier, right?

Mark Taylor (01:06:03):
It's true. There are a couple of question marks with that, one of which is, I like redundancy in an operation, especially if you're going to rely on any kind of automation because the last thing you want is your operation to go down and you now don't have a way to go get a customer's product because it's in the middle of a bin system that you can't access if the robots aren't working. Or you don't carry like, "Oh shit, corrugate, because you've got this automated machine, but what happens when that machine goes down?"

Glenn Gooding (01:06:46):
You're right.

Mark Taylor (01:06:48):
Yeah. So I mean, there are considerations with that and it doesn't negate your point because it's like if you can give them perfect dimensions every single time, of course it's something that you're going to sing praises to the customer and you're going to say, "Look, you're going to get dimmed right every single time." And there's some other products out there. Cubiscan's a great example

(01:07:15):
Where they have not only a dimensioner, but a dimensioner with a scale. And so it's like you're making sure that to the 10th of a pound, you're getting the exact dimension weight read back into the label software or TMS or whatever it is and it spits out the right label. Yeah, I think those are some great practical things. The more precise you can be, the better. And it's kind of interesting because I almost feel like there's, with the amount of data that you can, it's becoming easier and easier to analyze, it can become almost like your shipping report card, like when people go back to you to negotiate rates or it's like your carriers say, "Okay, well, this is a client that's got their ... They didn't get very many chargebacks, everything, they were pre-communicating demand spikes and this and that. " It's like they've got great communication, no driver complaints with how they're treated at the dock, et cetera, et

Glenn Gooding (01:08:20):
Cetera. Yep, yep. The obvious one when we talked about this, I imagine you're at an induction point with your operation that more efficiently aligns with the carrier you're sourcing with than if they were brand direct.

Mark Taylor (01:08:36):
Right.

Glenn Gooding (01:08:37):
So you could come back to them and say, "Look, I've worked hard here and I'm giving you a zonal distribution that's coming back at a 3.5." And if it weren't for me doing this, you'd be staring at volume that's a zone 4.8 average, right? And you could accomplish that a number of ways. Zone skipping is another

Mark Taylor (01:08:59):
Potential way. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. It was one of the things I wanted to talk about. Yeah,

Glenn Gooding (01:09:03):
Zone sip or sometimes called dropship. And dropship has multiple meanings in the e-commerce space. I'm talking about sorting and building direct loads to induct into a carrier network and to bypass handles, right? Right. That has a place. Again, it's a function of technology, door space, staffing count, volume, right? There's a lot of things going on there.

Mark Taylor (01:09:32):
Yeah. I've got a great example of a company I know that was doing, and these numbers are secondhand, so maybe they're accurate, maybe they're not. Company across their seven or eight, maybe nine locations is doing three million orders a day. And as such, they're able to say, "Okay, well, we've got two truckloads going to North Carolina. We've got worth of these products." And so their last mile rate's 90 cents a package. And then so then their shipping rate for every single one of those packages ends up being whatever it costs to truck those things across the country.

Glenn Gooding (01:10:06):
Correct. And you have to manage that as well and then ...

Mark Taylor (01:10:10):
But if you're doing three million packages a day-

Glenn Gooding (01:10:12):
You've got the volume.

Mark Taylor (01:10:12):
You've got the volume.

Glenn Gooding (01:10:13):
You've got the volume to play.

Mark Taylor (01:10:14):
Yep. And so other than that scenario, are there other scenarios that make sense for you with zone skipping or is it just you have to have the volume otherwise you're dead in the water from the get go?

Glenn Gooding (01:10:29):
Volume is a common denominator. Time of year can dictate. Yeah. You may be in operation where 90% of the time zone skipping makes zero sense. Right. But you sit down and you look and you say, "Okay, Mr. And Mrs. Legacy carrier, we're really going to see a spike. It's going to start traditional holiday type of season. I'm going to get my butt kicked on Black Friday. I'm really going to get pounded on Cyber Monday and I see a real spike the following week, whatever that is. Here's what I'm willing to do. " Number one, you're staring down the barrel more than likely of demand surcharges that they push into the marketplace. You say, "Look, what if I put up an extra operation on Saturday or on Sunday?" You can pull it Sunday afternoon. You can run it through your Sunday night sort of operation, advance volume.

(01:11:30):
Will that do something for you? I have this peak volume and no, I'm not dealing with three million packages a day, but does it make sense? Is it helpful for you, Mr. And Mrs. Carrier, if I build a Lenexa, Kansas load on these given days, these zip codes per your approval so that you don't have to process it here in Ontario.

Mark Taylor (01:11:59):
That's smart.

Glenn Gooding (01:12:00):
Right? And then what it's doing again is it's forcing a good business partnership discussion with your carrier as you're collaborating, you're planning together, you're saying, "Okay, look, these demand surcharges are untenable for me. " Matter of fact, a lot of my brands wouldn't see these demand surcharges if they were on their own and now you're penalizing me because I'm taking on all the risk that we talked about to aggregate this volume and give you better opportunity and now you expect my brands to be able to pay that. They can't pay it. I can't pay it. How do we work together so that I mitigate your concern around the capacity side?

Mark Taylor (01:12:36):
So when people are negotiating contracts, what kind of the typical representative, what kind of power do they have to say, "You know what? You're going to get demand surcharges and if we have to pick up direct from you to Ontario, but if you're willing to move, and let's say you've got a truckload today, unsorted or whatever, but if you're willing to move to Palm Desert or Yuma, which doesn't make much sense,

Glenn Gooding (01:13:06):
But-

Mark Taylor (01:13:07):
For the sake of discussion, we're going to go to one of your lower ... I'm going to get that truckload inducted to help you smooth out your labor in this other location."

Glenn Gooding (01:13:16):
Well, you're not going to get any ... The bottom line is the sales rep that you work with, they're probably very, very, very good people. Sure. By and large, they're head spinning. They're chasing market rates all day long. They're hitting their head up against the gig economy providers and their competitors and the Amazons and the Walmart directs and everything else. So everything's about a rate to them. And frankly, I think by and large, the average carrier sales rep has lost the ability to bring critical thinking or business acumen into a discussion. It's always a discussion around rates. Number two, they're not given the autonomy to make a business decision like that. So as an operator, you have to move upstream. You have to get strategically aligned with the carrier carriers you're working with to have the kind of folks that do have the autonomy, that do get it, that sit and say this, right?

Mark Taylor (01:14:25):
Yep. All right. So I think this hits another question I had was, how do your ... You've got the behemoths, then you've got the really large 3PLs, like the NFIs, the XPOs, those folks, the GXO, Geodas, that kind of thing. And then you've got, let's say, the guys that are running over a million square feet, but then you've got some operators that are sub million square feet. And I mean, of course, as you go down, you get exponentially more. So how do the people that are operating 100, 200, 300, how do they stay competitive? How do they reach out? Who are the people they should be reaching out to, to have these conversations? And frankly, they may not have the volume. The conversation may be a moot point, but there's a certain point when it will become a thing. Who are you seeking out to say, how can I be a better partner and in exchange, get better rates?

Glenn Gooding (01:15:25):
They've got a couple angles. One is they can lean on technology providers and take advantage of whatever type of platform rates are available to them.

Mark Taylor (01:15:34):
Which would be iDrive, Worldwide Express.

Glenn Gooding (01:15:37):
I'm talking like ... Yeah, or any of the Octane products, right? ShipStation, that kind of stuff, right? Sure.

Mark Taylor (01:15:42):
Okay.

Glenn Gooding (01:15:43):
The challenge becomes those are market available rates brand directs can't do, so you're not bringing anything else to the equation. The other piece is to go to an operator like an iDrive Logistics who has a 3PL partnership network that can bring

(01:15:59):
A more robust solution to you and help you get there as a smaller operator quickly, right? That's really it right now, unless you hitch your ride to one carrier, right? And your brother-in-law is a director of sales at one of the carriers and he owes you a solid and you come and say, "Hey man, I need this. " And somehow by the grace of God, you get these market leading rates, but you're now hitched to one horse. And that may solve an equation for you right now as a small operator and you're thrilled to be in the black and make it some money, but you'll never be able to effectively grow or compete under that. You're going to have to bust out of that at some point.

Mark Taylor (01:16:42):
Well, it's like the mileage game where you go, you get the rates, you've got the status, and then American upsets you. And so you know what? Delta does 90% of what American does. And so you go to Delta and you say, "Hey, can I do a mileage challenge?" And then they offer you the same equivalent status as long as you hit a certain rate within a certain day. And then so you just keep on bouncing back. And then your hope is that these inverse relationships when FedEx is doing great, UPS is doing poorly and so you can kind of like switch off that way and then in order to get back, UPS wants your business back. And so it's like you start playing this game, if you will.

Glenn Gooding (01:17:28):
It's a game and it's a game if you don't play it right, you can really erode your own credibility in the marketplace as well.

Mark Taylor (01:17:33):
Yeah, just like the transfer portal.

Glenn Gooding (01:17:36):
Yes. Just like the transfer portal. Man,

Mark Taylor (01:17:39):
That's a mess.That's not why we're here to talk, but that is a mess.

Glenn Gooding (01:17:43):
That is a mess and that is why I was so happy to see Indiana do well.

Mark Taylor (01:17:48):
Yeah. Yeah.

Glenn Gooding (01:17:49):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:17:49):
Indiana game was fantastic.

Glenn Gooding (01:17:51):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:17:53):
So we've covered zone skipping. So I want to hone back in. I don't know, what are some other things?

Glenn Gooding (01:18:05):
A robust return solution.

Mark Taylor (01:18:07):
Yeah.

Glenn Gooding (01:18:09):
That can be a real differentiator. That can be a value prop. Most 3PL operators don't have the return game dialed in. Correct. So if you were able to offer your brands a really buttoned up return solution, and ideally where you can show them, "Hey, 70% of the stuff that's coming back, we're able to repurpose, resell for you. " I mean, that's a big deal. That can buy you some real grace on other commercial terms if you articulate that properly. The other is some sort of parcel protection program, a good robust parcel protection program, either constantly driven at the shopping cart, which I'm not a huge proponent for, or something where with analytics, predictive analytics, you can start to say, "Okay, claim issues seem to be higher in this lane to this zip code. So let's turn on parcel protection in this particular lane. Let's allow you brand to offer a return and re-ship option that is comparable to a Zappos buying experience."

Mark Taylor (01:19:32):
Sure. Another one I think is there's some of the best brands out there that I've purchased from have the return label already in the box and if you don't use it, it doesn't get charged, but just the ability to just be like, "Ah, it doesn't fit." And then pop that label on there and just the reduction in friction makes me want to buy from that brand again.

Glenn Gooding (01:19:59):
100%. Also, you need some analytics on the other side too to say, "Okay, is this particular client a chronic, a serial bracketer?"

Mark Taylor (01:20:11):
Sure.

Glenn Gooding (01:20:12):
And if so, should you be offering free returns to that customer?

Mark Taylor (01:20:17):
Exactly right. It's funny because it's like you've got all these things to make this experience, I mean to rate your customer, you want to be rated as a 3PL with your partners and your customers, and then it's like the more you zone into it or hone into it, it's kind of like, or zoom into it, I should say. You're getting close to social credit score.

Glenn Gooding (01:20:43):
True, which is a real black mirror type of stuff, right?

Mark Taylor (01:20:46):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you look at that and I'm like, "Ooh, I don't know if I wanted to get there."

Glenn Gooding (01:20:50):
No, but true, true. But remember, the conundrum here is how do you make money in the lightweight residential delivery space? How do you do that? What's sustainable?

Mark Taylor (01:21:01):
Yeah. At a time when social contract is, a lot of people look at it and just say, "Eh."

Glenn Gooding (01:21:07):
And returns, big deal, the profitability for a brand.

Mark Taylor (01:21:13):
Sure.

Glenn Gooding (01:21:14):
Big deal. And client acquisition cost and keeping a client, return business, meaning coming back to buy again, not that piece. Those are big deals. And is it possible too? Maybe you tweak some things with regard to how you're positioning whatever it is that has a bracketing probably. Well, I would say imagine someone, a lady buying a bathing suit for a trip on a cruise and she knows she's going to be on the boat next Friday and she loves that bathing suit, but she's got to look good in it. Well, any smart lady I know is going to order three sizes, three cuts, right? She's going to try them on and say, "Okay, this one is the one looks good. The other two are going back." Okay. Is there something that can be done in the online buying experience to help that serial bracket or make a more informed, more fine-tuned buying decision?

Mark Taylor (01:22:29):
Sure. Right?

Glenn Gooding (01:22:29):
There

Mark Taylor (01:22:30):
Are a lot of people trying to attack that. I think it was, and I'm going to butcher it, but it was something like neck size plus risk size predicts the correct sizing for a man shirt, some incredibly high percentage.

Glenn Gooding (01:22:45):
By the way, I break that algorithm, but that's okay.

Mark Taylor (01:22:48):
Right, right. But there are a lot of those kind of technologies out there

Glenn Gooding (01:22:51):
Trying to exist.

Mark Taylor (01:22:52):
It's like, "Hey, measure this, this, and this, and then this is what we recommend." And that's a great tool for a lot of the apparel people. You kind of get to a point where I understand woman's going to purchase three bathing suits and send back two, but at a certain point, there needs to be a, "Okay, we understand what you're doing and this is what it's going to cost you to return these items."

Glenn Gooding (01:23:26):
Exactly.

Mark Taylor (01:23:27):
And so I mean, making it to where we've always just been able to go back out to Kmart. Well, Kmart, not so much anymore, but take something back to the store and then present your receipt and go through the returns process and then you just have to take it and look at it and then put it back on the shelf.

Glenn Gooding (01:23:46):
Yeah. But let's point it at guys for a minute because we're picking on ladies for a minute and I want to stay equal here. Imagine you and I like sporting goods. Yep. Imagine now. First of all, get your head around. How many potential skews does Best Bro Shops have?

Mark Taylor (01:24:06):
Yep. Hundreds of thousands.

Glenn Gooding (01:24:08):
Oh my goodness gracious. I can lose myself in that store

(01:24:13):
And it doesn't have to just be just fishing. It could be hunting. It could be specifically archery or what. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Now imagine that Bass Pro Shops institutes a large language model, a learning model that learns my ... Sees what I like to do, what I've had a tendency to buy. I have a registered boat type of boat where I live in the country, everything else. And now when I go to bassproshops.com, I have a customized, curated buying experience and they say, "Hey, bastard spawning pretty soon. Hey, these are the hot baits in Lake Lanier." And imagine now it's hitting me right in the wheelhouse of where I'm probably looking or I'm looking at September. "Hey, archery season starts October one. Check out these broadheads.

Mark Taylor (01:25:16):
"Oh yeah.

Glenn Gooding (01:25:17):
Right? I think there's something to be said on that front too. Now, does that equate to you as a 3PL operator offering value to the brand? No, but there's other ways, I think, to solve that. And for example, I'm a big guy. I'm hard to fit in clothes, so I have a lot of my nicer clothes custom made. And that habitasher, when he comes over, he knows my taste, he knows what I've ordered and everything else, and he hits me in the wheelhouse. "Hey, what are you looking for right now? It's winter's coming up. Do you want a sweater? Whatever else." Imagine doing that through AI online. That could be very, very, very powerful.

Mark Taylor (01:25:55):
Sure. Well, and your Bass Pro example is interesting because it can curate a cart and say, "Hey, these are the things we think you want. "

Glenn Gooding (01:26:08):
Just point you that direction, lead you down a path and then learn and modify after every buying experience, right? Right. "Hey, welcome back, Mark. We notice, hey, it's fall. The rut's about to start. What are you looking for today? Are you looking for hunting or are you planning a fishing trip?" Sure. "Hey, last year you did that trip down to the Keys. Are you going back down there?" "Hey, here's what's hot for Mutt and Snapper right now." Sure. Boom. There's something to that, I think. And as a buyer, I would love that.

Mark Taylor (01:26:44):
Right. But I will point out, and this is going back to the returns thing and how do you mitigate that? Most purchases like that, I'm not going to order three rifles.

Glenn Gooding (01:27:00):
True.

Mark Taylor (01:27:01):
I'm going to go in and I'm going to put my cheek on the stock. I'm going to look through the optics or I'm going to work with it through a buddy. I'm going to do pretty extensive research and then go in there. And then a lot of the sporting goods stuff, for instance, it's not stuff that you're going to be able to return, but the apparel piece is I think where if I buy ... Here is a good example. I bought a pair of sneeze hunting boots and they didn't fit. And they only do, at the time, I don't know if they still do, but they only do whole sizes. So they recommended, "Okay, well, I mean, we recommend you do this because it shouldn't feel tight." And so I got them and that was an unfortunate thing because I did have to send it back, but I certainly wasn't going to order two or three options and then send it back.

(01:27:53):
But if I were, now you're talking about ... I've got a friend that runs a very high quality boot company, Chisos Boots out of Austin. And he has a process with his customers where he says, "Look, if you're going to try them on and they don't fit, we will do right by you. These are high end products. We want you to wear them, but please don't wear them on concrete until you're sure." And then that way, it's like, so somebody, they don't-

Glenn Gooding (01:28:30):
You don't scuff the tread.

Mark Taylor (01:28:31):
Yeah. You don't put any scratches on the soul, which is a very thing ... I think what I'm getting to, this whole thing, I think I've been rambling a little bit, so apologies there. But we as consumers, I think there is an impetus on the consumer and an expectation that we need to be willing to change our behavior a little bit with e-comm, which I know everybody says, "Well, yeah, of course that would be great, probably not going to happen, or we need to be prepared to pay for it. " And I think we're seeing the ... And I don't mean pay for it as a society. I mean, just actually shell out a dollar or a couple dollars, whatever it is. And it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Glenn Gooding (01:29:20):
It will be. In the meantime, there's going to be a lot of noise in the marketplace, everything we talked about with regard to the fragmented marketplace, the different types of service providers innovating, some are trying to land and expand with price. Others are trying to bolster their client base and protect it and improve margin and do that. Where it all lands, we're going to find out. But I think we're getting forced into an environment where you're going to see more rationality pushed into the e-commerce market.

Mark Taylor (01:29:58):
Yeah, it's

Glenn Gooding (01:29:59):
Still very- But it's It's going to be a slow methodical evolution and there's going to be blips and dips and things like that that happen along the way.

Mark Taylor (01:30:09):
One of the most exciting things I think is you don't really see Amazon taking much more market share of e-comm than what they have. They've been in the 40 to 44%, 45% by all charts I ever see. I might be looking at the wrong charts. I'm willing to be wrong on that. But you see the annual growth rate of e-comm still expanding. And so it's exciting because that means so many more players are continuing to grow their presence.

Glenn Gooding (01:30:42):
Agreed.

Mark Taylor (01:30:43):
And so it's nice that you have somebody big that's really setting the tone for everything, but you have all these other options. And I think as e-comm continues to mature, you're going to see people buying on a lot more different sites. And then you're going to see ... I mean, a great example is as an alternative buying experience that's kind of new to me, is if you go to Facebook Marketplace, there's this very robust used market just being done. And there's another group that's all over different cities and it's like it geo limits you to like two miles or whatever it is, whatever the radius is around your neighborhood. It's called buy nothing. And it's friends within a two mile radius just saying, "Hey, I've got this fire pit that I haven't used. Everything still works. I'm going to leave it on the curb, whoever wants it.

(01:31:40):
" And I mean, so it's a lot more like a barter kind of situation, but local communities are starting to really focus in on purchasing and trade, looking to trade, looking to buy used, and then going to the new.

Glenn Gooding (01:31:54):
I think you're going to see a lot more geo-specific social media marketing as well. Yeah. And that's where I think a 3PL operator needs to be very nimble and offer a lot of custom kitting and things like that to allow for or to facilitate that type of angle. Like for example, venture to guess day after the national championship game. I bet there's a lot of folks buying Indiana National Champion T-shirts right now.

Mark Taylor (01:32:25):
Yeah. And there's probably a lot of containers heading to a third world country that didn't get to watch the game to show the-

Glenn Gooding (01:32:31):
There may be a lot of folks in Senegal wearing Miami.

Mark Taylor (01:32:35):
National

Glenn Gooding (01:32:36):
Titles. National title shirts. Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:32:38):
Sure. I mean, you saw them after the game last night they were wearing them. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. A couple quick little things as we start to wrap up here.

Glenn Gooding (01:32:51):
Sure.

Mark Taylor (01:32:52):
What's generally the number, like the parcel volume before an operator or 3PL is going to start getting good rates without the brother-in-law that owes a favor?

Glenn Gooding (01:33:03):
It's an excellent, excellent question. And the answer's a little different now than it would have been five, six years ago because of the fragmentation of the market, Mark. Okay. If you're going to hitch your ride to one horse, to one pony, then the reality is you have to be reliant on one of the legacies, the USPS, FedEx, or UPS. And USPS is probably a tertiary environment there because their real wheelhouse is one to nine pounds. But if that's all you're pedaling, great. If that is the angle you want to go, you need to begin to get a spend of, I would say, $2 million per year plus to start really moving the needle. The challenge becomes then you've wed yourself to one and they're going to do everything they can to capture that entire portfolio and make it hard for you to diversify in the future.

(01:34:11):
Okay. If you have a wide array of product coming out of your operation and you have things like 13 ounce t-shirts and at the same time, kettlebells across the board, it's going to be harder to find a single carrier that is going to allow you to compete in the marketplace and win business. So you're going to have to multi-source. And in that environment, the spend level, the volume level goes up commensurately, Mark. If you're talking about a 13 ounce t-shirt going in a poly bag, great. Who do you bring in now? DHLE commerce, USPS with an NSA, even though USPS doesn't really want to do NSAs with 3PL operators right now. Do you bring in an unioni or a VHO? Well, guess what? They only offer partial national coverage, so you got to have somebody else. If you do bring them in, you have to be in a geography where they offer pickup.

(01:35:13):
You better be giving them at least four, 450 pieces per day, Monday to Friday. So it becomes much more challenging. So your spend level goes up significantly on that front. And I would say you're in the range of 10 million plus before you can even begin to contemplate doing something like that.

Mark Taylor (01:35:33):
Okay. Now, and then so until you get to those levels, and that's just in parcels in spend, shipping spend.

Glenn Gooding (01:35:45):
That's it just in shipping spend, bud.

Mark Taylor (01:35:47):
Right.

Glenn Gooding (01:35:48):
Yeah. And so the smart way to do it, I think iDrive offers a real compelling solution out there for the folks that are grinding and out, trying to grow and win and do that. And in a company like that or a service like that, they should have a bench of professionals that have a resume that allow them to go out and continually push the edge and continue to innovate and continue to drive more competitive pricing or more solutions for you. One thing you should expect from an IDrive as an operator, Mark, is what are they doing for you in 2026 versus 2025? What did the market do versus what are they doing and does that position you more competitively or place you at a disadvantage? Are they bringing more players to the game? Can you begin to move more and more to a carrier agnostic SLA?

Mark Taylor (01:36:46):
Right.

Glenn Gooding (01:36:47):
That's important.

Mark Taylor (01:36:48):
It is. It certainly is. And I mean, even you see, they're one of the few I feel like that offer a multitude of carriers, whereas even like you see the ship stations tend to hitch their wagon to one or two. And

Glenn Gooding (01:37:02):
The challenge with the ship station is it's a platform rate.

Mark Taylor (01:37:05):
Right.

Glenn Gooding (01:37:06):
So everybody has access to that with the ShipStation account. So you as an operator, what are you doing? You better have one heck of a business model where you're making a little lot of money on the pick, pack and ship and the kidding because you're not going to make it on the transportation.

Mark Taylor (01:37:19):
Right. Exactly. And then the last thing is kind of more of an oddity. And probably when Amazon announced that they were decoupling from UPS, and I mean, they'll probably always have some amount of UPS spend, but I mean, that really giant bulk contract that have counted for what, 50% of their volume or something along those lines.

(01:37:45):
My initial thought was, man, this is like a best case scenario for UPS because now they just opened up 50% of their capacity at the most bottom of the barrel rates that they could possibly operate at. They're going to be able to outcompete all of their customers out there because they can now go renegotiate contracts, reduce prices to all their current customers if they wanted to, and they'll make more on the whole than they would have by just continuing to serve those bottom of the barrel rates. So I thought that it was going to be this amazing opportunity for them, and it has seemed to be, at least for the last year or two, anything but that. Was that a missed opportunity or am I just completely looking at it backwards?

Glenn Gooding (01:38:31):
No, no. I don't even know if I'd categorize it as a missed opportunity. I think there's a dynamic in the 3PL space in particular there that I think UPS really wants to better understand the 3PL vertical. I think they want a better partner there. And I think they're willing to do some things. The challenge becomes if they pull a pricing lever, they want to see volume flow as a result of that move. And if the 3PL operator is in the middle brokering that deal and marking it up by 20%, then the UPS in that scenario isn't getting the business they thought they would with the base rates they're offering that 3PL. So there needs to be a new way of partnering between a legacy carrier and the 3PL operator that breaks the tradition of I bill you a million dollars, you tack on your 20% and you bill your brands a million two.

Mark Taylor (01:39:36):
And we all feel good about it.

Glenn Gooding (01:39:37):
And we all feel good about it. There needs to be a new way of doing that, and that hasn't been solved for yet. And that's not at all a UPS specific issue. That's a 3PL market issue.

Mark Taylor (01:39:49):
Got it. Yeah, I think that makes sense. All right. Last question and just kind of a fun one. Who in this parcel space, actually two part question, who in the parcel space that maybe we haven't heard of yet is like doing something really unique or novel? That's the first part. And if anybody comes to mind, I'd love to hear about them. I'm sure anybody listening would like to hear about them. And then the other, and then the final question is, where is the big hole that if you could snap your fingers and plug it, what would that be?

Glenn Gooding (01:40:27):
Who's killing it? Who's bringing in something particularly novel?

Mark Taylor (01:40:30):
Or interesting. Maybe they're not killing it yet, but you heard you're like, "Oh, that's

Glenn Gooding (01:40:38):
Interesting." What's really interesting to me, the 3PL market is growing rapidly. E-commerce is growing rapidly. I think what's really going to kill it there is when a robust billing solution enters that marketplace, allows a 3PL operator to in a much more sophisticated way, make margin on the transportation and win business in a competitive environment while at the same time allowing the carriers to win in the lanes they want to win in from a pricing perspective. I think there's some things going on there that is really going to have some potential on that front. I love the innovative idea of the gig economy, final mile delivery provider, but I take a fairly cynical view of that piece. There's a race to the bottom and investment dollars have no problem funding that as long as there's top line growth to pursue it. But these non-asset based solutions, they can leave the market as quickly as they enter.

(01:41:47):
And so wade into those waters carefully on that front.

Mark Taylor (01:41:52):
Have you ever heard the joke where it's like one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the ultra wealthy to the middle income? It was Uber.

Glenn Gooding (01:42:07):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:42:08):
And

(01:42:09):
It's true. I think it's only in the ... I think if you look at their cumulative, every single dollar that was ever invested, lost, funded to make Uber what it is today, only in the last year, and maybe it's even this year, will they break even? Will they be net negative or net neutral? But I mean, now, to be fair, if you look at their earnings over the last couple of years, they've just exponentially grown. So I mean, it was a 20 year payoff, an 18 year, whenever it is, I'm trying to think. The first year I ever heard of it was probably 2009 or 10, somewhere in there. So it took them 16 years, whatever, but it's going to work out. It worked out. But then now it's interesting because it's like you see the assets they're investing in now and now are like the Waymos and the massive, massive ... It's just this constant innovation costs a lot of money.

Glenn Gooding (01:43:09):
For the longest time, everybody was wondering if Jeff Bezos was going to run Amazon out of business.

Mark Taylor (01:43:13):
Yeah, exactly.

Glenn Gooding (01:43:15):
He figured it out.

Mark Taylor (01:43:16):
He did. He absolutely did. So for anybody wanting to keep in contact or hear anything, just how do people keep up with what you're doing?

Glenn Gooding (01:43:29):
No, I really appreciate that. The best way right now, and LinkedIn is the best way to get ahold of me. Drop me a line, send a connection request. I monitor that regularly. I promise I'll get back to you. And

Mark Taylor (01:43:42):
That's Glen with two Ns.

Glenn Gooding (01:43:44):
Glenn with two Ns, Gooding, Metro Atlanta. You'll see my big ugly mug there. You'll see my resume, but there's not a lot of Glen Goodies out there in the world. I am connected with another Glenn Gooding who is a consultant, but he resides in the UK. It's kind of cool.

Mark Taylor (01:43:58):
That's fun.

Glenn Gooding (01:43:59):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:43:59):
Very fun.

Glenn Gooding (01:44:00):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (01:44:01):
All right. Any website? And I know you said you're not hosting it anymore, but you have a lot of great episodes, a lot of great content.

Glenn Gooding (01:44:11):
I have plans to get my voice back out in the marketplace. Okay. I'm looking forward to it. I really enjoyed you allowing me to get my voice out there again, and I want to do that. And I want to stay focused on substantive commentary, not rabble rousing or salacious remarks against carriers. I want to keep it fact based and educational. So I'm looking for ways to do that and be on the lookout. I will get my voice and my face back out there sooner than you realize.

Mark Taylor (01:44:40):
Outstanding. And yeah, I look forward to seeing what's next for Mr. Glenn Gooding.

Glenn Gooding (01:44:45):
Thank you, Mark. It's been a pleasure.

Mark Taylor (01:44:47):
Absolutely. You, bye-bye.

Mark Taylor

Host