Speaker 1: Hello everybody and welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: We are late summer 2025.
Speaker 1: It's been a dynamic year in the logistics industry.
Speaker 1: If you've been around for a minute, you know conditions are challenging and yet there's always seemingly hope just around the corner.
Speaker 1: I've heard from a lot of folks in the entrepreneurial space that this has been some of the most challenging times they've ever experienced.
Speaker 1: But on the flip side, there's a number of folks that are saying this has been the most opportunity they've seen in a long time also, and everybody has their own experience and perspective on it, and if you're in that trough yourself right now, I encourage you to reach out to somebody that you can talk to about it.
Speaker 1: Don't go through that difficult part alone.
Speaker 1: That's part of what we try to do here on the show is connect founders with other founders to be able to have some of those tough conversations.
Speaker 1: And if you're on the high end of that and things are going great, chances are you're being really quiet about it.
Speaker 1: That's the observation I've made.
Speaker 1: The folks that are really loud on social media lately generally aren't the ones doing the best.
Speaker 1: The ones who are doing the best are keeping their head down while the sun is out there making hay.
Speaker 1: So, wherever you might be on that spectrum today, we're glad that you're here.
Speaker 1: We're going to hear another founder perspective from somebody that I'm going to just call right off the bat a great character.
Speaker 1: Vin Carano is the president and owner of Finice Freight Brokerage on the East Coast.
Speaker 1: Vin, good morning, how are you today?
Speaker 2: Hey Nate, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1: I'm doing quite well.
Speaker 1: When we first got introduced through our mutual friend, trey Griggs, he goes I got somebody you've got to meet and whenever I hear something like that, I'm like there's always a story behind it and I love telling stories and sharing them.
Speaker 1: So we were five minutes into our first conversation and I was like, all right, we might need to do more than just a podcast episode.
Speaker 1: We might need to do one of those in-depth investigative journalism feature length stories.
Speaker 1: Why don't we start?
Speaker 1: Well, we'll unpack all of it, I'm sure, today, but why don't we just start with a basic introduction and your entry into the logistics world?
Speaker 2: Oh goodness, my name is Vin Carano.
Speaker 2: My grandma called me Vinny and so some people call me Vin Vinny still, and I like that a lot because it's different Than what you get in a lot of places.
Speaker 2: But my grandfather Was a trucking company owner and he passed away At a very young age.
Speaker 2: He was only 49 and my dad and my uncle basically Dropped out of school, came home from the military and started driving the trucks, cause the only thing they knew is how to support their family.
Speaker 2: It's what they learned from their father, who learned it from his father, who came over through Ellis Island and was on a boat with a bunch of other, just laborers and, um, you know, we we have these records that trace all the way back, which is really cool, but I digress.
Speaker 2: So Grandpa was a truck driver, trucking company owner, my father was with his brother and they did really, really well.
Speaker 2: They got up to about 125 trucks running an LTL operation with terminals in Rhode Island and New Haven Connecticut was the base of operations Allentown, camden, new Jersey and they had a nice little operation running Fast forward to 1989, little Vinny was getting out of college.
Speaker 2: I went to Bentley it was Bentley College at the time Bentley University now and I thought I was going to take this management degree and run daddy's trucking company and well as the logistics world does to people.
Speaker 2: It sort of twisted things around on us and they closed that company about three months before I got out of college due to some union issues.
Speaker 2: There was some underfunded pensions, it was just there was a real mess going on.
Speaker 2: My dad took a warehousing company and said I'm going to try to keep doing this but I don't really have a place for you right now.
Speaker 2: I said that's okay, and during my summers I had worked for their trucking company.
Speaker 2: I learned how to do things like claims and customer service and some real kind of basic OS&D and this kind of thing from a great man.
Speaker 2: Their office manager at the time was Joe Valentino and we're still friends today.
Speaker 2: So I love this man a lot.
Speaker 2: He's just really been good to me.
Speaker 2: He's taught me so much.
Speaker 2: But I didn't have a job and I didn't have a place to go and I had this great management degree and so I started looking for something to do and I took a couple sales jobs selling copy machines and plumbing parts and all just whatever I could take and I saw an ad in paper for New England Motor Freight.
Speaker 2: They're looking for an OSND supervisor and I knew OSND so I was like, well, I don't know what supervisor means, but I'll go down there.
Speaker 2: So I went down to the terminal and I filled out a job application and a man named John Weber said I know your dad and I'm going to give you a shot.
Speaker 2: I said, well, what's the supervisor mean?
Speaker 2: First, because I don't really know about supervising.
Speaker 2: And he goes.
Speaker 2: There's three guys on the doctor in the day for three hours a day.
Speaker 2: He goes.
Speaker 2: You could do it.
Speaker 2: I said okay, and he had a lot of faith and I worked OS&D there and I worked dispatch and I worked inbound supervisor, outbound supervisor.
Speaker 2: I worked my way up.
Speaker 2: I became the terminal manager at some point and about 10 years later dad called and he says well, this warehousing company is a little beyond me and I really want to buy your uncle out, but I need help.
Speaker 2: I said, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2: You're my father and family is family, so let's go.
Speaker 2: And so he did and we ran the warehouse for 14 years.
Speaker 2: It was a mess.
Speaker 2: It was uh, it was very, very hard.
Speaker 2: It was too small to make enough money to be to make a difference, and it was too big to not have all the things you need.
Speaker 2: As a warehouse man, I mean, if it was just me in the warehouse, I probably would have waived workers comp, but it wasn't just me, it was a whole bunch of people.
Speaker 2: So you know crazy things like $40,000 insurance bills and $60,000 electric bills to heat the place, and so these things got out of hand really quickly and finally, a few years after that, I had gone to my dad and I said, dad, this is not why I'm killing myself, I'm working 20 hours a day and we're not getting anywhere.
Speaker 2: He says, well, what's working?
Speaker 2: Telling myself I'm working 20 hours a day and we're not getting anywhere.
Speaker 2: He says, well, what's working?
Speaker 2: And I said, well, here's the weird thing.
Speaker 2: We got a couple of customers in the warehouse who keep asking us for how to, how to get these shipments to where they have to go, and I just keep giving them to my friends at the LTL companies and bumping up the price a little bit and making a little money on broker in this freight.
Speaker 2: He goes.
Speaker 2: So why don't we broker freight?
Speaker 2: I said, okay.
Speaker 2: So we started really getting active in the broker world and um in 2010,.
Speaker 2: We closed the warehouse and just went full into brokering.
Speaker 2: I tell people the story all the time I was, I was laying under a truck our last winter owning trucks, I was laying under a truck and I had a torch in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other and I was pounding the brakes trying to get him to free up.
Speaker 2: It's a January night, like three o'clock in the morning, and the driver's in the truck.
Speaker 2: He gets down out of the truck and God rest his soul.
Speaker 2: Joe Tripp was.
Speaker 2: He became a very good friend of mine, but he had a great truck driver attitude.
Speaker 2: And he comes down out of the truck and he goes hey, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: Like this.
Speaker 2: And I'm under the wheels and I look up through between the rear tandems and I go what does it look like I'm doing?
Speaker 2: He goes well, I'm freezing, I'm getting back in the truck.
Speaker 2: I said that's it and that was it.
Speaker 2: I said that I'm done, I don't care if it's working or not, this part is over.
Speaker 2: And so I really worked hard, hard, hard to uh, to start brokering a lot of freight, and what I realized is we didn't have the tools, we didn't have the, the uh, the um financial uh ability that it takes to pay these carriers in 15 or 20 days and wait 30 or 40 for the for the customers to pay us.
Speaker 2: And so I said, you know what?
Speaker 2: I'm going to find a big brokerage to help me out here.
Speaker 2: And so I went to work for a guy who owned an Echo Global brokerage.
Speaker 2: It was a great lesson I mean a fantastic lesson on how not to do your work.
Speaker 2: This guy this guy, nate, it gets great.
Speaker 2: This guy started a second company in a different name and he made him a customer of his Echo agency and then he was billing his customer who was him, and then rebilling all the clients for a higher price.
Speaker 2: So he was basically stealing margin off of the revenue split.
Speaker 1: Double brokering, but in disguise.
Speaker 2: He completely, completely violated the agreement, and when they figured it out, he was out of business and it left me and my customers with I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2: And so I had been working on going solo and I had our authority and I was really.
Speaker 2: I was in a position where I really didn't need them anymore anyway.
Speaker 2: So one of the girls in the office looked at me and said, why don't we just do this on our own?
Speaker 2: And I said okay, let's go.
Speaker 2: So Angela and I sat in my basement for about a year with two laptops, two desks facing each other and cell phones, and we just, we just worked our butts off to get this thing going.
Speaker 2: We went from $200,000 or $300,000 the first year and barely making enough to survive to really ramping it up.
Speaker 2: Angela was here at Finiche until about a year and a half ago or two years ago.
Speaker 2: At that point we were around $8 million, $9 million brokerage.
Speaker 2: You were talking earlier about how the economy is hurting some people and my foot's on the throttle and my sons work here now.
Speaker 2: My sons are fourth generation in the logistics business and their foot's on the throttle too my sons work here now.
Speaker 2: My sons are fourth generation in the logistics business and they're here now and their foot's on the throttle too, and so we're bringing in new agents and we're talking to new customers and we're really doubling down on everything we do.
Speaker 2: We're probably going to be close to 15 million this year, which is, you know, it's tiny in the brokerage world, but our growth is, you know, in double digit growth at a time when most people are struggling to stay at least even and worse, the truckload rates are just down so much.
Speaker 2: Over the last four or five years.
Speaker 2: You know, the COVID level was an aberration and it was just something that happened once in a lifetime moment where these rates were super sky high, but people who went out and and got two and a half or 3% money based on 60% margins that's not.
Speaker 2: That's not where we are.
Speaker 2: We have no money from anybody the, you know we're entirely bootstrapped.
Speaker 2: We have no loans.
Speaker 2: We have no equity sold off.
Speaker 2: We have.
Speaker 2: We don't factor.
Speaker 2: And so, you know, everything we do has to be slow and steady and it has to be right.
Speaker 2: Every customer has to be a good fit, every agent has to be a good fit, and so we work really, really hard to make sure that everything we do has you know, like a, that we're working with quality individuals who care about the company, who care about the industry, care about the drivers, care about the drivers, care about the customers.
Speaker 2: It's it's really important that, like I said, we're on our fourth generation.
Speaker 1: And you don't, you don't get there through four generations without some disappointments and some failures and lessons learned along the way, we've had them all.
Speaker 1: And but that's, I think, where the greatest learning opportunities come from is is failure.
Speaker 1: I saw someone explained it this way.
Speaker 1: They said you know it's great to get the book learning, that's the theory, but then you get more learning when you're able to apply the theory in practice and you have a management degree and then you get to practice being a manager and you learn more.
Speaker 1: But your greatest learnings actually come from the failures, and then you learn what not to do and how that shapes your next phase of leadership or entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1: So when you look back at what your the difficult decision to shut down a trucking company, for example, or to shut down assets, whether it's a warehouse or otherwise, and fundamentally shift what my conversation with them would be, if we're recording this and with them in 25 years and they'll say here's what my dad did right and here's the big mistake that I learned from.
Speaker 1: That I'm not going to repeat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope and I pray every day that they absorb some of my negative experiences and understand how I got to those negative and how my dad and my uncle got to their negative experiences, because it doesn't always listen.
Speaker 2: You're going to fail and you're going to have problems and you're going to have ways to overcome them.
Speaker 2: I think what makes a good entrepreneur or in our business we call them co-preneurs right, our agents are co-preneurs.
Speaker 2: They're in business for themselves but not by themselves.
Speaker 2: But what makes a good entrepreneur is someone who can overcome that resistance or overcome those objections or overcome those issues and find new ways and be creative.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, jobs and Wozniak invented a computer in Wozniak's garage because they just had a feeling they had something good and they were out and they tried something different and they staked their entire lives on this one trial and I mean, look what Apple did.
Speaker 1: I mean it's insane.
Speaker 1: One of the questions that I've been asked and have been asking other entrepreneurs is when do you know it's the right time to quit?
Speaker 2: No, idea Never have.
Speaker 1: So you're all throttle all the time, no matter what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think breaks.
Speaker 2: Just slow you down.
Speaker 1: And I asked that because there's a handful of folks that I've chatted with in the last couple of months.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, I've been working on this idea Maybe it's a tech product, maybe it's a service for the industry and I've not been able to get traction.
Speaker 1: And now expenses are getting higher than revenue and we have one side that says it's all throttle all the time and there's another side that says maybe it's time to pivot or try something different, and letting go is tough.
Speaker 1: So, if we can go back to the conversation with your dad and your uncle of, hey, it's time to quit this side of the business, do you remember that tension between all throttle and hey, maybe this isn't the right thing, because somehow you have to resolve that tension.
Speaker 1: See, I think that is all throttle and hey, maybe this isn't the right thing because somehow you have to resolve that tension.
Speaker 2: See, I think that is all throttle.
Speaker 2: I think that is all throttle, I think, when you're looking at your business and you're looking at what you're doing.
Speaker 2: For example, I'm looking at 150,000, 200,000 square feet of warehouse space and 40% of it is empty.
Speaker 2: We had a very, very large customer, like a Fortune 500, that my grandfather started doing business with, and they moved their logistics, um admin to this company who was going to just be the admin for all of their operations at all their warehouses.
Speaker 2: And um, the guy's name was Carl and he came to my office one day and he says, vin, I got news for you.
Speaker 2: He says we're going to be moving out of your warehouse.
Speaker 2: I'm like, whoa, we've been doing this for 30 years.
Speaker 2: And he goes yeah, he goes.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sorry, we've been building a warehouse in Bethlehem, pennsylvania, so we're going to move out.
Speaker 2: I go oh well, when did you start building it?
Speaker 2: He goes well, that's what I want to talk.
Speaker 2: You have 100,000 square feet of space.
Speaker 2: I just signed a five-year lease for you, based on the fact that we did business for 30 years with my family, and you're going to come in and tell me I have 30 days.
Speaker 2: That's not cool.
Speaker 2: And so I'm looking at 40% of our space is empty and I'm thinking we have to pivot.
Speaker 2: We either have to sell this space or sublet the space or void the lease or, I don't know, do something else.
Speaker 2: And so we did something else.
Speaker 2: We did a number of things actually.
Speaker 2: I unfortunately at that point had to.
Speaker 2: We filed a chapter 13 to void the lease.
Speaker 2: At that point, we filed a Chapter 13 to void the lease.
Speaker 2: We moved out of one of the buildings.
Speaker 2: Everybody got paid except the landlord lost his tenant, which was not cool, but it is what it is.
Speaker 2: It's an ugly fact in business, and if that doesn't make I was going to say give you gray hairs, but if that't make them, fall out.
Speaker 1: I don't have any hair left.
Speaker 2: Nothing does.
Speaker 2: But you know, we learned a lot from that moment and, yes, there was a pivot.
Speaker 2: But I don't look at that as a failure.
Speaker 2: I look at that as an opportunity to do something either a little different, or to maybe not get into that situation in the future.
Speaker 2: Maybe next time you don't trust the fortune 500 company to just be there, maybe you get something in writing.
Speaker 2: And so you know, um, we, we.
Speaker 2: At that point we brought in a couple of new customers who didn't use as much space but they needed peer support.
Speaker 2: So we leased a bunch of trucks and started running down to, running down to uh, to the terminals in New York and New Jersey and bringing containers back up.
Speaker 2: And you know, we did okay with it, but it was never really where I wanted to be.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the space I wanted to be in.
Speaker 2: So I was always looking for the next thing.
Speaker 2: We're survivors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, entrepreneurs, I'm picking up on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, entrepreneurs we're just.
Speaker 2: I think we're just survivors.
Speaker 2: I look at myself as like a serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 2: I just keep trying new things until something sticks, and this thing we're doing now at Fenice.
Speaker 2: It's sticking pretty good and I don't have any plans to pivot off of this.
Speaker 2: But, god forbid, the market tanks or something goes really bad our market, because obviously the market in general did tank.
Speaker 2: But when our world falls apart, or if it does, I'm sure there'll be something else that we're going to be able to pivot to and we're diversified in the kind of work we're doing at this point.
Speaker 2: So I don't see anything other than what we're doing now, possibly with some refinements that would.
Speaker 2: That would change things, should there be a drastic change.
Speaker 2: But look Q2, they just refined the numbers right.
Speaker 2: Their economy was up 3.3%.
Speaker 2: Hiring is.
Speaker 2: I mean it looks like.
Speaker 2: It looks like interest rates are going to come down.
Speaker 2: I think there's a very bright future.
Speaker 2: I it looks like interest rates are going to come down.
Speaker 2: I think there's a very bright future.
Speaker 1: I think there's a very, very bright future and if you didn't believe that you shouldn't, or don't believe that you shouldn't be an entrepreneur, because if you can't wake up and see the glass half full every single day, you probably shouldn't be owning a company, because you're going to need that just to get through coffee on Tuesday morning in any given week you were talking about earlier not taking on any debt, not giving up any equity and bootstrapping the whole thing.
Speaker 1: I have always thought of our show as kind of like the dirty jobs show of the logistics industry, like we want to celebrate the people that are doing the hard work without a lot of attention.
Speaker 1: I admire that approach, obviously, and named the show after it, but it comes with limitations.
Speaker 1: And you said growth.
Speaker 1: So for someone who's got stars in their eyes about starting a freight brokerage and becoming a $100 million business, for example, what are the trade-offs and the tough choices you have to make about growing steadily versus quickly?
Speaker 2: So we've looked at different ways to grow this much faster than we've grown it, and all of it comes with loss of control one way or the other, and for me it's always been about doing it the way I want to do it.
Speaker 2: It's always been about being a tech first broker with a human connection.
Speaker 2: I always want my agents to talk to my customers, but to leverage a huge tech stack that we have to make their jobs so much easier that they could deal with more customers, right, and so I feel like the money that we could be spending on interest payments or sharing profits with an investor or whatever, we could put into tech, we could put into agent opportunities, we could put into different things that make people's lives better.
Speaker 2: Who work here that I have direct contact with.
Speaker 2: We don't have a broker here that I don't have a relationship with.
Speaker 2: Every single person who works here I know they know my kids.
Speaker 2: Uh, we have a.
Speaker 2: We have a manager of agent development.
Speaker 2: Her name is leslie.
Speaker 2: She's amazing, um, and and they, you know they talk to her first, but before we bring them in, they talk to me too.
Speaker 2: What's the pitfalls to starting a new brokerage and getting to 100 million?
Speaker 2: There's 10 million pitfalls and any of them could hurt you really really badly.
Speaker 2: But the worst thing you could do, I think, is to give up the small profit margins that you actually end up with and sacrifice those to a factor, for example, and have to lose either your ability to have those relationships with your people or, again, it's loss of control more than anything else, it's loss of control.
Speaker 2: I don't want someone telling me what to do.
Speaker 2: I've had enough.
Speaker 2: I'm 58 years old.
Speaker 2: I've been doing this a long time.
Speaker 2: I don't need anybody to tell me what to do.
Speaker 2: I know how to do it.
Speaker 2: My grandfather did it, my father did it, my kids are doing it.
Speaker 1: I noticed a trend, by the way, when you're describing somebody um favorably, you use their name.
Speaker 1: When you described someone that you didn't maybe not quite so favorable, it was this guy, um I don't want to say you're not going to name somebody but you, you are such a family first guy and yet there are all these realities of business and sometimes you have to make really tough choices.
Speaker 1: So how have you, or how would you describe your overall philosophy of leadership at this point in your journey?
Speaker 2: um, I'm a god.
Speaker 2: I sound like a 17 year old at an interview at mcdonald's or something right, but I'm a people person.
Speaker 2: I am a people person.
Speaker 2: I love meeting new people.
Speaker 2: I love talking to people.
Speaker 2: I love getting to know people.
Speaker 2: We have we have, um, such a great team and I know every single person here and I care about people.
Speaker 2: So it's not like you know, it's not like I'm sitting here going growth, growth, growth.
Speaker 2: I'm not standing over anybody.
Speaker 2: I'm not telling anybody what to do and when to do it.
Speaker 2: For the most part, I mean, we have some staff people who are in task oriented jobs where you have to sort of give them a list of.
Speaker 2: This is what I expect.
Speaker 2: But we don't have anybody here who punches a clock.
Speaker 2: We don't have anybody here who is on like a piece work kind of thing.
Speaker 2: I guess I don't really know how to describe it.
Speaker 2: But basically, I like to give people a job and tell them this is what I expect you to do.
Speaker 2: I don't care how you do it, I don't care when you do it.
Speaker 2: I don't care where you're sitting when you do it.
Speaker 2: If you want to take your laptop and go to the Caribbean and sit on a beach in St Thomas.
Speaker 2: I don't care, I hope you can and I hope you do, because I know when I can, I do.
Speaker 2: And so I feel like the job for me is to empower people to be their best and to allow the entrepreneurial spirit to flow through.
Speaker 2: And again, that's why we call our agents co-preneurs, right, we want them to go.
Speaker 2: Hey, I could work for three hours a day and make enough to get by.
Speaker 2: Or I could work for five hours a day and put my kid through college, or I could work for 10 hours a day and whatever.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: And so I feel like if we empower people to do really good things and just do them in our pipeline, then we all benefit.
Speaker 2: And so is that a leadership style?
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe it is, I don't know benefit, and so is that a leadership style.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe it is, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think there's elements of just who you are that naturally lend itself to that.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be, and that's what I picked up when we first met too.
Speaker 1: Was I just I want to have a beer with you, I want to have a coffee with you.
Speaker 1: I just want to sit around and chop it up and talk about anything that comes to mind, because I can clearly tell that you're a people person.
Speaker 1: If you weren't doing what you're doing now, what would you have done?
Speaker 2: No idea, I told you in the beginning I sold copy machines.
Speaker 2: I hated every moment of my life, what that sounds like so much fun.
Speaker 2: Here's what it was.
Speaker 2: I walk in the door, there's 80 or 90 sales reps in this building and my boss was a guy named Bruce Manley who said to me Vin, we've got a new product for you to sell.
Speaker 2: You're going to be in the typewriter division, but we've got a new product and it's going to be a hit.
Speaker 2: When you see these things, they're called fax machines.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's what I had to do.
Speaker 2: I had to take two fax machines and these were big.
Speaker 2: These were 30 pound machines at the time.
Speaker 2: I had to take two of them and put them in my car and this little black box that you put in between them, and you would have to prove to people that you could stick the paper on one side and have it come out the other, and so you'd bring log these two machines for demos into people's conference rooms.
Speaker 2: You'd set up two machines and you put.
Speaker 2: People didn't believe that you could.
Speaker 2: You could transmit paper, and so maybe that was the tech thing that made me realize that I don't know, it probably wasn't.
Speaker 2: My first computer was a TRS 80 model, one level one with 4k of Ram, so I I think, um, so I think I was into tech in the beginning and maybe that's why they threw me into the fact side.
Speaker 2: But that company had two black and white copier reps in three little towns in Connecticut New Haven, west Haven and Hamden.
Speaker 2: They had one who did the odd side of the street and one who did the even numbered places.
Speaker 2: Then they had two fax and typewriter reps in the same area and a color rep.
Speaker 2: We had five reps in three towns.
Speaker 2: Total population in those three towns is probably 200,000 people, so it's not like there was any room to really do the work.
Speaker 2: And so what I hated was I hated knocking on doors, I hated being just another copier rep walking in the door and I found it difficult to differentiate myself in that.
Speaker 2: So I know I wouldn't be selling copiers.
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed the plumbing place that I worked at.
Speaker 2: We had a great time.
Speaker 2: I learned so much about a trade I knew nothing about.
Speaker 2: I forged some friendships that I still have today, 30 years later.
Speaker 2: So that probably would have been somewhere where I ended up.
Speaker 2: But I think the logistics space is sort of baked into my family.
Speaker 2: I really do.
Speaker 2: My grandparents my grandfather on my dad's side, who died very young his family was into transportation they all had some version of it.
Speaker 2: On the other side, my mother's mother, who was a daughter of the American Revolution.
Speaker 2: She was born to a sharecropper in Colorado.
Speaker 2: They migrated up to Iowa where her father ended up with tuberculosis and died at a young age.
Speaker 2: But my grandmother was one of nine kids.
Speaker 2: They were very lucky.
Speaker 2: They rented a farm and had a three-hole outhouse no power.
Speaker 2: Wow, wow, yeah, but they were very lucky in 1935 or whatever it was.
Speaker 2: She met my grandfather in 1939, and he had a friend who had a job making guns in Hamden, connecticut, and they drove from Iowa to Connecticut with their kid and settled there and they were married for 65 years until he passed away.
Speaker 2: But during World War II he always says he was drafted I don't know if they draft people with four kids and don't let them leave the United States but he might've volunteered.
Speaker 2: Anyway, they put him in the Navy, they sent him out to Brooklyn and taught him refrigeration repair and when he got out he was doing what he knew.
Speaker 2: He was repairing refrigerators and small appliances and big appliances and started selling parts as a side gig and at one point became GE and Westinghouse's largest parts distributor for large appliance parts in New England.
Speaker 2: So that was washers, dryers, refrigerators and they had a really nice appliance parts business until those products became dispensable and basically your washer breaks, you probably don't have it fixed.
Speaker 2: Today they buy a new one that's probably made overseas somewhere and, um, it's just cheaper than having it fixed.
Speaker 2: So their business was really really good.
Speaker 2: My grandfather was very successful.
Speaker 2: He had a little four-seater single engine cessna.
Speaker 2: He had property in new hampshire or not late, you know he he did really well, um.
Speaker 2: So I feel like I feel like the entrepreneurial spirit is baked in, I feel like the logistics thing is baked in.
Speaker 2: And I feel like the logistics thing is baked in and I don't know that I had a choice.
Speaker 2: I think it's just where I was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: I would imagine, then, that your sons also feel like it's a choice for them.
Speaker 1: They don't have to do it, they choose to do it.
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 2: James is my oldest.
Speaker 2: James got a degree in history.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be a teacher.
Speaker 2: He loves history.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be a teacher.
Speaker 2: He got a degree.
Speaker 2: He did his student teaching and went oh these kids are nuts, I don't want to do this Teaching is hard.
Speaker 2: Teaching is hard.
Speaker 2: And so he said while I'm looking for a job, is there anything you have for me?
Speaker 2: So I said, yeah, I'm going to have you.
Speaker 2: We were doing a freight payment audit program at the time.
Speaker 2: I said, yeah, you teach these.
Speaker 2: And so James started by typing bills, which is ironic because I started at Kronos Express doing things like OS&D and customer service, and so his start was very similar to mine.
Speaker 2: And I think James, I think he's got the bug, I think it's in him and I don't think it's going anywhere.
Speaker 2: My other son, stephen, is two years younger.
Speaker 2: Stephen wanted to be in law enforcement.
Speaker 2: His mother is a police officer in our town in Connecticut and Stephen went to the academy for Connecticut State Police and it was right around the time of a lot of bad things happening and police officers getting blamed for things that probably were okay a few years before and then they weren't.
Speaker 2: And then there was in Connecticut.
Speaker 2: There was not just fault as an officer for things that happened, but they could hold you personally responsible for things your partner did.
Speaker 2: And so he came to me and said Dad, I can't, I'm not doing this, I'm dropping out.
Speaker 2: I said, well, what do you plan to do?
Speaker 2: He goes, I have a job as a security guard at the local hospital.
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, is that going to be enough to make ends meet?
Speaker 2: And he says, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2: He had just gotten married to this wonderful young lady Her name is Liz, and they he just I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think he had kind of enough, like he was doing okay, but just okay, and I finally said to him why are you working nights and weekends?
Speaker 2: We need help here.
Speaker 2: You're a smart kid, you have a degree.
Speaker 2: I know it's criminal justice, but you have a degree.
Speaker 2: Why don't we teach you how to do some side of this business that maybe your brother's not doing?
Speaker 2: And so Stephen now handles payroll.
Speaker 2: He handles payments, accounts, payable, and he has a handful of accounts that he's managing.
Speaker 2: And James handles customer relationship type stuff Accounts, receivable, customer relationships, relationships and, um, yeah.
Speaker 2: And so I think we found positions for each of them that are really uniquely suited to fit kind of who they are james, james's, james's role is something like director of operations, uh, customer relationships.
Speaker 2: And steven is director of operations uh, network network payments, and so, uh, those two roles I expect to get bigger and bigger as we build departments under them, and so, yeah, that's where I think that what would they be doing otherwise?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think they both have the bug.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's fun to get to watch, from my perspective, the impact of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurs families.
Speaker 1: I always like to ask those kinds of questions because anybody who has a career.
Speaker 1: It still impacts your family as well, myself included, but the I can bring work home with me.
Speaker 1: For sure, that's part of life sometimes, but I can leave work If you're an entrepreneur, you're on vacation, maybe your company is doing well enough and it affords you a certain lifestyle to be able to travel and to have great experiences.
Speaker 1: But for most you are still connected and the family is benefiting from the entrepreneurial success.
Speaker 1: But the family has also had to make a ton of sacrifices simultaneously, and so it is a whole family experience on some level for most not for everybody, but that's a theme that I've identified more and more over the years, and I had the thought one time of doing a spouse's version of, maybe a mini series of, what is it like being married to a bootstrapped logistics entrepreneur?
Speaker 2: I am not calling her from the next one Okay.
Speaker 2: I'm not bringing her in because Too much truth.
Speaker 2: Well, there's plenty of days where she's like do you have to be working all the time, for example?
Speaker 2: So we live in North Carolina, the company is in Connecticut, james and Steve live in Connecticut, their wives and their kids are in Connecticut.
Speaker 2: My mother is in Connecticut, so we do a lot of back and forth and when we drive together she drives because I have the laptop.
Speaker 1: You have a text and email.
Speaker 2: yeah, I'm working and we we have uh, we have a time share in the caribbean and we go once a year and guess what, every morning I'm sitting outside by the pool with my laptop putting out whatever fires I have to put out.
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody knows that vin's on vacation, so he's only available for four or five hours a day.
Speaker 2: I don't know any other way to live.
Speaker 1: And there's joy in that for a lot of us too.
Speaker 1: I love being busy.
Speaker 1: I love feeling like I'm having an impact.
Speaker 1: It's not a drain.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the work is the work and it's not awesome, but in general, if you love the work itself, it's easy to work 8, 10, 12, 15 hours not forever, but in periods where you're, the adrenaline is just a blast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I totally agree.
Speaker 2: I, you know it's funny.
Speaker 2: I, um, I love what I do and I love who I do it with.
Speaker 2: I love what I do it.
Speaker 2: 4, right.
Speaker 2: And so that 4 is for the people who work here, for our family, for my family that's not in the business and so my wife has a great job.
Speaker 2: She's a latent print examiner for the city of Durham.
Speaker 2: She absolutely loves working in forensics.
Speaker 2: She's smart as hell and so sometimes she comes home and she's like I have to vent and I'm like I've got to book a truck.
Speaker 2: So you know, you know, we, we have a great time with this back and forth, but we both understand the other's role.
Speaker 2: You know, and uh, and we do, we do really really well together in that I joke around that she gives me grief about it, but at the end of the day she's very patient and she's very kind and she knows that this is one of the big things that bring me joy, besides those three little grandkids I have.
Speaker 2: But this is one of the things that brings me joy.
Speaker 2: And I get out of bed every morning and my feet hit the floor and I'm running.
Speaker 2: Um, I, in fact I've sent a newsletter to all of our agents every week.
Speaker 2: I call it the happy Monday newsletter.
Speaker 2: It never goes out on a Monday.
Speaker 2: If it does, it's just pretty long.
Speaker 2: And I call it happy Monday because I feel like Mondays are one of these days where people get up, who work regular jobs and they go.
Speaker 2: Oh, I got to go to work.
Speaker 2: I hate this job Weekend's over.
Speaker 2: And I get up on Monday and I go.
Speaker 2: I love Mondays.
Speaker 2: Monday's a day to reset.
Speaker 2: Monday's a day to forgive what the bad things that happened last week or fix those problems from last week.
Speaker 2: Monday's a day for a fresh start.
Speaker 2: And I just I try to give everybody here and everybody around us that same kind of feeling in that don't dread your job.
Speaker 2: If you dread your job, you're doing the wrong job.
Speaker 2: If you don't, if you don't love your job, if you don't love what you do, you're going to work every day in your life and I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't feel like what I do is work.
Speaker 2: I, I.
Speaker 2: There's plenty of days with stress and there's plenty of days when I sit on my butt all day long pounding the keys and I am exhausted at the end of the day, but I'm happy to do it.
Speaker 1: That is.
Speaker 1: That is a joy to find your spot yeah.
Speaker 1: To find your joy.
Speaker 1: I like that a lot.
Speaker 2: Your happy place.
Speaker 1: Who would you like to give a shout out to for either their support along the way or their support right now, their influence on you, over your career?
Speaker 1: Who is somebody that you want to celebrate today?
Speaker 2: Can I give you a list?
Speaker 1: Yeah, by all means All right.
Speaker 2: First, joe Valentino.
Speaker 2: Joe Valentino was the office manager at Carano's Express.
Speaker 2: Joe taught me how to balance the cash box.
Speaker 2: The drivers would come back with toll receipts and money and at the time we used to have to give them dimes so they could go out and make phone calls and call dispatch.
Speaker 2: And so Joe taught me how to balance the cash box.
Speaker 2: He taught me how to handle OS&D and he might have done some funny things with claims, because if a claim didn't come in certified mail because there was no faxes at the time, remember didn't come in certified mail, it went in the trash.
Speaker 2: But Joe taught me some of the real basics of business and that was really cool.
Speaker 2: John Weber, new England Motor Freight Manager, became the regional manager, was my boss for the whole 10 years.
Speaker 2: I was there.
Speaker 2: Love this guy.
Speaker 2: He taught me so much.
Speaker 2: But one of the biggest lessons in my life was we had I'll tell you what the account was.
Speaker 2: The account was Russell Stover Candy and they shipped out of Somersworth, new Hampshire, and they would put 3,000 or 4,000 little boxes in a trailer on the floor and those boxes were mixed.
Speaker 2: They had like a black stamp on them with the different I think there were pharmacies they all went to at the time and so they would have three or four orders mixed in the trailer and we would have to separate them all and we would have to put them on pallets and then go deliver them.
Speaker 2: That day and one night we got four loads with 4,000 cartons, each unexpected.
Speaker 2: That showed up at midnight and they were all supposed to be out for delivery the next day and I had four guys on my dock and so it didn't happen and I got a call from the regional manager.
Speaker 2: John was sitting in his office and the regional manager was a guy named Rich I don't remember his last name and he said Vin, what's going on?
Speaker 2: I said you don't understand.
Speaker 2: This place is really effed up.
Speaker 2: There's no way to do this.
Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2: I kind of complained to him.
Speaker 2: He said I don't care what you have to do, get the job done.
Speaker 2: I hung up with Rich.
Speaker 2: John goes in his office and he goes Carano, get in here, damn.
Speaker 2: I walk in his office, he goes.
Speaker 2: No matter how effed up you are, you never tell the boss that you're effed up.
Speaker 2: That's a huge lesson.
Speaker 2: The lesson was handle it, figure out what's wrong and fix it.
Speaker 2: So that was huge.
Speaker 2: That was, um something that I still remember to this day and it's 25 years ago.
Speaker 2: You know um the who else, the the people here.
Speaker 2: I just want to talk about two people here Steve and Leslie.
Speaker 2: Leslie, uh, came to us with a different agency.
Speaker 2: Um, they didn't like some of the things that she was doing.
Speaker 2: I saw a glimmer in her eye and I knew that she would be really, really good in the recruiting position.
Speaker 2: She's in that position and she's just on fire.
Speaker 2: She's so good, so I'm really happy about that.
Speaker 2: She's leading our recruiting team and the first agent we put on, steve, believed in us during COVID.
Speaker 2: I think his big thing was you don't have a vaccine mandate at your company.
Speaker 2: And I said, no, he goes.
Speaker 2: When can I start?
Speaker 2: But he trusted me.
Speaker 2: It was me, he trusted it.
Speaker 2: It wasn't.
Speaker 2: There was no group.
Speaker 2: We were doing 5 million bucks a year when Steve showed up, um, and he's been one of our best.
Speaker 2: He's one of our higher margin um agents.
Speaker 2: Uh, he's got, he's got people working for him now in his agency.
Speaker 2: He's just a great success story.
Speaker 2: So there's that, but honestly, at the end of the day, the one, the big one, the only one really is my dad.
Speaker 2: My father was not college educated, in fact he wasn't even high school educated.
Speaker 2: He barely finished, in fact I don't think he did finish.
Speaker 2: He drove a truck.
Speaker 2: He fueled the trucks, he greased the trucks, he unloaded the freight, he loaded the freight, he learned how to write manifest and customer invoices, and when Coke would drop off was um.
Speaker 2: He was personality wise.
Speaker 2: He was the opposite of my uncle.
Speaker 2: My uncle was fiery and hard to work with and demanding, and people respected him, but they weren't friendly with him Like the workers would.
Speaker 2: Would.
Speaker 2: Um, they'd sort of be afraid of him.
Speaker 2: They'd steer clear.
Speaker 2: If he was in the hallway they'd use the other hallway.
Speaker 2: My dad was friends with everybody and my dad got things done, not by yelling and not by demeaning people or whatever.
Speaker 2: My dad put his arm around somebody and said let me show you how this has got to be done.
Speaker 2: He understood people.
Speaker 2: In 1978, my dad was diagnosed with MS.
Speaker 2: He was 35 years old, I think 34.
Speaker 2: And he was very, very scared.
Speaker 2: There was three young kids at home, wife trying to take care of her.
Speaker 2: She barely worked.
Speaker 2: She had a part-time job.
Speaker 2: He had a part-time job and so he went his entire career and his entire life not knowing what the end was going to bring.
Speaker 2: His aunt died with MS and it was an awful time.
Speaker 2: And so my dad, he did everything the doctors told him to do.
Speaker 2: It was all experimental stuff and crazy things that didn't work, and the timeshare that I told you about in the Caribbean.
Speaker 2: They bought it so he could go and they did, and he did everything and at the end it was the last 10 years were scooters and canes and walkers and eventually a wheelchair.
Speaker 2: And you know he didn't really let anything stop him.
Speaker 2: He loved, loved his great-grandkids.
Speaker 2: He couldn't wait for them.
Speaker 2: My dad passed in May but in April I had two grandkids and about two weeks old Stephen's son, cooper, came to visit and I've got a great picture of my dad holding Cooper, making sure he wasn't going to drop him but holding him, and he just had the.
Speaker 2: It was like might be the last smile I ever saw him.
Speaker 2: And so my dad inspired me, not because he was a hard-nosed businessman who could grow a big company and make things work.
Speaker 2: He was businessman who could grow a big company and make things work.
Speaker 2: He was, but he did it a different way and I hope and pray that just a little bit of that comes through, comes through me.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be the guy yelling at people.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be the guy making people do things.
Speaker 2: I want them to want to do them because it's right for them, it's right for us, it's right for our customers.
Speaker 1: Well, I would venture to say, then, that he would be proud of you, not for what you're doing but for how you're doing it.
Speaker 2: I hope so, I hope so.
Speaker 2: I mean I told him about this stuff every chance I got there was.
Speaker 2: So MS affects people different ways ways.
Speaker 2: But part of his um decline was the dementia aspect and there was a moment he was in the hospital with like a mercer infection.
Speaker 2: It was, you know, just a lot of bad times.
Speaker 2: But he's in the hospital and we're in downtown new haven I'm like I don't know the eighth or ninth floor and he says to me then, vin, you got to move the truck.
Speaker 2: I said what truck?
Speaker 2: He goes the F8.
Speaker 2: I parked it here and I came inside.
Speaker 2: They won't let me leave.
Speaker 2: And so I know where he's going.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 2: I said that's all right, dad, I'll bring it back to the terminal.
Speaker 2: He goes no, no, no, bring it back to mommy's house, okay.
Speaker 2: I said, um, could I just, could I just have one of the guys bring it?
Speaker 2: He goes, yeah, tell Bobby to come and get it.
Speaker 2: Now there were two Bobbies there.
Speaker 2: There was a guy uh, they called cigars, cause he smoked, and there was a guy named Bobby Toro.
Speaker 2: They called Bobby Toro.
Speaker 2: So, um, they called Toro.
Speaker 2: So I said who do you?
Speaker 2: Who cigars are Toro.
Speaker 2: He goes, cigars dropped dead a year ago.
Speaker 2: He goes tell Toro to come and get it.
Speaker 2: Bobby Cigars had died a year before.
Speaker 2: And there was that moment of clarity, you know, and Bobby Toro is still with us and he saw my dad and my mom right up until the end.
Speaker 2: So I said, okay, I'll call him.
Speaker 2: A short time later my dad had passed and we had planned services or whatever.
Speaker 2: And there was a line.
Speaker 2: I mean, there was a lot of people, there was a couple hundred people who showed up for the wake and at one point I looked over and there were 13 of his former drivers at his wake standing around in a circle.
Speaker 2: This company closed in 1989.
Speaker 2: Wow, and they showed up.
Speaker 2: So if I could be that guy, I'd be happy to be that guy.
Speaker 1: Wow, what a tribute.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep 35 years after the company closed.
Speaker 2: Wakes and funerals.
Speaker 2: You always make these picture boards, you know.
Speaker 2: And so there's a picture on the board of me and my two sisters I must have been 12.
Speaker 2: And we're standing in front of an R model Mac, and it was super clean.
Speaker 2: Their trucks were usually pretty clean, but it was super clean.
Speaker 2: And so four or five of these drivers who are in their 80s are huddled around the picture going whose truck is that?
Speaker 2: How come it's so clean?
Speaker 2: Did they clean his and not mine?
Speaker 2: And they're arguing.
Speaker 1: Still arguing yeah, like it's 1986, all over again.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: It's a fantastic moment.
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1: I can picture these things as you describe them.
Speaker 1: You have such a vivid way of explaining and you're a good storyteller.
Speaker 1: Maybe you should have a podcast.
Speaker 2: Oh God.
Speaker 1: Of your own with all the free time that you have.
Speaker 1: Vin, that is genuinely a wonderful tribute.
Speaker 1: A multi-generational family in the industry.
Speaker 1: You have done and seen a lot and I hope you have a moment, maybe today, if you can take five minutes after this, or sometime this evening maybe, and just pause to reflect on all of that for the next phase of your journey and the journey with your own family and the generations to come Sure, to internalize what you want that to be and how you want to continue showing up so that you can have that same kind of legacy and the way that you've shared it with me.
Speaker 1: I have no doubt that you will, but I just want to offer that to you as a a 90 second opportunity in your in your journey to just pause and and spend a few moments there.
Speaker 1: Thank you also for just opening up.
Speaker 1: I know it's sometimes easy to talk about the business side of things and it's not always easy to talk about the personal side, and so thanks for being so open and willing to share your family's story with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm an open book.
Speaker 2: I am, yes, I'm an open book.
Speaker 2: Um, if somebody asked me a question, I I try to answer as honestly and as passionately as I can, because I feel like that's that's that's who I am.
Speaker 1: And that's live life to the fullest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that, but that's, that's how we built the things we built, and it's not just business, it's.
Speaker 2: It's, it's totally personal, it's totally personal, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not married to the woman I'm married to because of me being anybody other than who you see today.
Speaker 1: Yeah well, I, I love all of it.
Speaker 1: Uh, last question, then, vin, is um, where should somebody find you if they want to reach out to you, um, and connect?
Speaker 2: yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: Um, linkedin is probably the best, of course.
Speaker 2: Just look.
Speaker 2: Just look me up, Vin Carano.
Speaker 2: It's LinkedIn slash V-C-A-R-A-N-O.
Speaker 2: Or you can email me at V-C-A-R-A-N-O.
Speaker 2: At Finicecom, you could actually email anything at Finice.
Speaker 2: Somebody wants to to?
Speaker 2: To reach out to one of the Finiche agents.
Speaker 2: If someone was interested in what the Copernic model is all about, I'd love to talk about it and you know, and just spend a little time.
Speaker 2: Leslie's out there like crazy doing the same thing.
Speaker 2: She's.
Speaker 2: She's all over LinkedIn as well.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, reach out to us, whether it be shipping needs, business advice, logistics advice that has nothing to do with what we do I'm happy to talk about it.
Speaker 2: I love my business, I love that people work for me and I'm happy to talk about any of this stuff with just about anybody.
Speaker 1: We appreciate it, Vin, and we are all rooting for you.
Speaker 1: Awesome Thanks, Nate Appreciate it Thanks.
Speaker 1: Vin.