WEBVTT 00:00:00.959 --> 00:00:03.302 Hello everybody and welcome back to the show. 00:00:03.302 --> 00:00:06.524 We are late summer 2025. 00:00:06.524 --> 00:00:09.865 It's been a dynamic year in the logistics industry. 00:00:09.865 --> 00:00:17.551 If you've been around for a minute, you know conditions are challenging and yet there's always seemingly hope just around the corner. 00:00:17.551 --> 00:00:26.797 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. 00:00:26.797 --> 00:00:46.034 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. 00:00:46.600 --> 00:00:48.765 Don't go through that difficult part alone. 00:00:48.765 --> 00:00:55.070 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. 00:00:55.070 --> 00:01:00.661 And if you're on the high end of that and things are going great, chances are you're being really quiet about it. 00:01:00.661 --> 00:01:02.847 That's the observation I've made. 00:01:02.847 --> 00:01:08.968 The folks that are really loud on social media lately generally aren't the ones doing the best. 00:01:08.968 --> 00:01:15.950 The ones who are doing the best are keeping their head down while the sun is out there making hay. 00:01:15.950 --> 00:01:20.590 So, wherever you might be on that spectrum today, we're glad that you're here. 00:01:20.590 --> 00:01:27.191 We're going to hear another founder perspective from somebody that I'm going to just call right off the bat a great character. 00:01:27.191 --> 00:01:33.545 Vin Carano is the president and owner of Finice Freight Brokerage on the East Coast. 00:01:33.545 --> 00:01:35.790 Vin, good morning, how are you today? 00:01:36.230 --> 00:01:37.212 Hey Nate, how are you doing today? 00:01:37.879 --> 00:01:38.822 I'm doing quite well. 00:01:38.822 --> 00:01:51.703 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. 00:01:51.703 --> 00:01:58.510 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. 00:01:58.510 --> 00:02:06.150 We might need to do one of those in-depth investigative journalism feature length stories. 00:02:06.150 --> 00:02:08.354 Why don't we start? 00:02:08.354 --> 00:02:16.727 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? 00:02:17.508 --> 00:02:20.175 Oh goodness, my name is Vin Carano. 00:02:20.175 --> 00:02:28.960 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. 00:02:28.960 --> 00:02:36.915 But my grandfather Was a trucking company owner and he passed away At a very young age. 00:02:36.915 --> 00:02:47.447 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. 00:02:47.447 --> 00:03:02.064 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. 00:03:02.064 --> 00:03:13.006 So Grandpa was a truck driver, trucking company owner, my father was with his brother and they did really, really well. 00:03:13.006 --> 00:03:29.383 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. 00:03:29.745 --> 00:03:40.409 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. 00:03:40.409 --> 00:03:49.388 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. 00:03:49.388 --> 00:03:53.925 There was some underfunded pensions, it was just there was a real mess going on. 00:03:53.925 --> 00:04:01.610 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. 00:04:01.610 --> 00:04:08.493 I said that's okay, and during my summers I had worked for their trucking company. 00:04:08.493 --> 00:04:19.975 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. 00:04:19.975 --> 00:04:22.829 Their office manager at the time was Joe Valentino and we're still friends today. 00:04:22.829 --> 00:04:24.245 So I love this man a lot. 00:04:24.245 --> 00:04:25.665 He's just really been good to me. 00:04:25.665 --> 00:04:26.805 He's taught me so much. 00:04:27.720 --> 00:04:48.244 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. 00:04:48.244 --> 00:04:54.725 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. 00:04:54.725 --> 00:05:02.961 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. 00:05:02.961 --> 00:05:04.505 I said, well, what's the supervisor mean? 00:05:04.505 --> 00:05:06.932 First, because I don't really know about supervising. 00:05:06.932 --> 00:05:07.360 And he goes. 00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:10.949 There's three guys on the doctor in the day for three hours a day. 00:05:10.949 --> 00:05:11.249 He goes. 00:05:11.249 --> 00:05:11.730 You could do it. 00:05:11.730 --> 00:05:20.343 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. 00:05:20.343 --> 00:05:21.564 I worked my way up. 00:05:21.824 --> 00:05:33.413 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. 00:05:33.413 --> 00:05:35.415 I said, all right, let's do it. 00:05:35.415 --> 00:05:38.377 You're my father and family is family, so let's go. 00:05:38.377 --> 00:05:44.072 And so he did and we ran the warehouse for 14 years. 00:05:45.100 --> 00:05:45.600 It was a mess. 00:05:45.600 --> 00:05:47.461 It was uh, it was very, very hard. 00:05:47.461 --> 00:05:55.449 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. 00:05:55.449 --> 00:06:00.752 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. 00:06:00.752 --> 00:06:23.461 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. 00:06:23.461 --> 00:06:24.754 He says, well, what's working? 00:06:24.754 --> 00:06:26.514 Telling myself I'm working 20 hours a day and we're not getting anywhere. 00:06:26.514 --> 00:06:27.576 He says, well, what's working? 00:06:27.576 --> 00:06:28.576 And I said, well, here's the weird thing. 00:06:28.576 --> 00:06:41.781 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. 00:06:41.781 --> 00:06:42.041 He goes. 00:06:42.041 --> 00:06:43.084 So why don't we broker freight? 00:06:43.084 --> 00:06:45.086 I said, okay. 00:06:45.086 --> 00:06:51.276 So we started really getting active in the broker world and um in 2010,. 00:06:51.276 --> 00:06:55.369 We closed the warehouse and just went full into brokering. 00:06:55.850 --> 00:07:07.367 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. 00:07:07.367 --> 00:07:13.009 It's a January night, like three o'clock in the morning, and the driver's in the truck. 00:07:13.009 --> 00:07:16.124 He gets down out of the truck and God rest his soul. 00:07:16.124 --> 00:07:17.406 Joe Tripp was. 00:07:17.406 --> 00:07:20.903 He became a very good friend of mine, but he had a great truck driver attitude. 00:07:20.903 --> 00:07:25.012 And he comes down out of the truck and he goes hey, what are you doing? 00:07:25.012 --> 00:07:26.141 Like this. 00:07:26.141 --> 00:07:32.862 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? 00:07:32.862 --> 00:07:34.949 He goes well, I'm freezing, I'm getting back in the truck. 00:07:34.949 --> 00:07:38.163 I said that's it and that was it. 00:07:38.163 --> 00:07:42.269 I said that I'm done, I don't care if it's working or not, this part is over. 00:07:42.850 --> 00:08:02.185 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. 00:08:02.185 --> 00:08:03.889 And so I said, you know what? 00:08:03.889 --> 00:08:06.394 I'm going to find a big brokerage to help me out here. 00:08:06.394 --> 00:08:11.992 And so I went to work for a guy who owned an Echo Global brokerage. 00:08:11.992 --> 00:08:17.911 It was a great lesson I mean a fantastic lesson on how not to do your work. 00:08:20.084 --> 00:08:22.350 This guy this guy, nate, it gets great. 00:08:22.350 --> 00:08:39.375 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. 00:08:39.375 --> 00:08:41.836 So he was basically stealing margin off of the revenue split. 00:08:42.100 --> 00:08:43.883 Double brokering, but in disguise. 00:08:44.124 --> 00:08:55.173 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. 00:08:55.173 --> 00:09:01.812 And so I had been working on going solo and I had our authority and I was really. 00:09:01.812 --> 00:09:04.784 I was in a position where I really didn't need them anymore anyway. 00:09:04.784 --> 00:09:10.094 So one of the girls in the office looked at me and said, why don't we just do this on our own? 00:09:10.094 --> 00:09:11.846 And I said okay, let's go. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:22.403 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. 00:09:22.403 --> 00:09:35.136 We went from $200,000 or $300,000 the first year and barely making enough to survive to really ramping it up. 00:09:35.136 --> 00:09:41.894 Angela was here at Finiche until about a year and a half ago or two years ago. 00:09:41.894 --> 00:09:49.761 At that point we were around $8 million, $9 million brokerage. 00:09:49.761 --> 00:10:02.889 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. 00:10:02.889 --> 00:10:06.086 My sons are fourth generation in the logistics business and their foot's on the throttle too my sons work here now. 00:10:06.106 --> 00:10:14.081 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. 00:10:14.081 --> 00:10:33.990 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. 00:10:33.990 --> 00:10:35.354 Over the last four or five years. 00:10:35.354 --> 00:10:52.993 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. 00:10:53.212 --> 00:10:53.854 That's not where we are. 00:10:53.854 --> 00:10:57.067 We have no money from anybody the, you know we're entirely bootstrapped. 00:10:57.067 --> 00:10:58.731 We have no loans. 00:10:58.731 --> 00:11:00.544 We have no equity sold off. 00:11:00.544 --> 00:11:01.005 We have. 00:11:01.005 --> 00:11:01.947 We don't factor. 00:11:01.947 --> 00:11:07.682 And so, you know, everything we do has to be slow and steady and it has to be right. 00:11:07.682 --> 00:11:26.224 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. 00:11:26.224 --> 00:11:30.984 It's it's really important that, like I said, we're on our fourth generation. 00:11:32.107 --> 00:11:39.966 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. 00:11:41.772 --> 00:11:48.479 And but that's, I think, where the greatest learning opportunities come from is is failure. 00:11:48.479 --> 00:11:51.145 I saw someone explained it this way. 00:11:51.145 --> 00:12:05.956 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. 00:12:05.956 --> 00:12:20.190 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. 00:12:20.190 --> 00:12:56.368 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. 00:12:56.368 --> 00:12:57.451 That I'm not going to repeat. 00:12:57.740 --> 00:13:15.924 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. 00:13:15.924 --> 00:13:20.594 You're going to fail and you're going to have problems and you're going to have ways to overcome them. 00:13:20.594 --> 00:13:27.085 I think what makes a good entrepreneur or in our business we call them co-preneurs right, our agents are co-preneurs. 00:13:27.085 --> 00:13:29.280 They're in business for themselves but not by themselves. 00:13:29.280 --> 00:13:39.671 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. 00:13:39.671 --> 00:13:56.565 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. 00:13:57.321 --> 00:13:59.884 I mean it's insane. 00:13:59.884 --> 00:14:10.890 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? 00:14:12.880 --> 00:14:13.946 No, idea Never have. 00:14:15.441 --> 00:14:19.412 So you're all throttle all the time, no matter what. 00:14:20.559 --> 00:14:21.222 Yeah, I think breaks. 00:14:21.222 --> 00:14:21.946 Just slow you down. 00:14:23.600 --> 00:14:28.243 And I asked that because there's a handful of folks that I've chatted with in the last couple of months. 00:14:28.243 --> 00:14:36.067 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. 00:14:36.067 --> 00:14:47.596 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. 00:14:47.596 --> 00:15:04.308 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. 00:15:04.308 --> 00:15:05.424 See, I think that is all throttle and hey, maybe this isn't the right thing because somehow you have to resolve that tension. 00:15:06.779 --> 00:15:08.768 See, I think that is all throttle. 00:15:08.768 --> 00:15:15.006 I think that is all throttle, I think, when you're looking at your business and you're looking at what you're doing. 00:15:15.006 --> 00:15:18.759 For example, I'm looking at 150,000, 200,000 square feet of warehouse space and 40% of it is empty. 00:15:18.759 --> 00:15:38.427 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. 00:15:38.447 --> 00:15:42.988 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. 00:15:42.988 --> 00:15:44.681 He says we're going to be moving out of your warehouse. 00:15:44.681 --> 00:15:46.947 I'm like, whoa, we've been doing this for 30 years. 00:15:46.947 --> 00:15:49.152 And he goes yeah, he goes. 00:15:49.152 --> 00:15:52.549 Oh, I'm sorry, we've been building a warehouse in Bethlehem, pennsylvania, so we're going to move out. 00:15:52.549 --> 00:15:54.407 I go oh well, when did you start building it? 00:15:54.407 --> 00:16:07.850 He goes well, that's what I want to talk. 00:16:07.850 --> 00:16:09.196 You have 100,000 square feet of space. 00:16:09.196 --> 00:16:15.226 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. 00:16:15.226 --> 00:16:15.567 That's not cool. 00:16:15.587 --> 00:16:21.964 And so I'm looking at 40% of our space is empty and I'm thinking we have to pivot. 00:16:21.964 --> 00:16:33.005 We either have to sell this space or sublet the space or void the lease or, I don't know, do something else. 00:16:33.005 --> 00:16:37.133 And so we did something else. 00:16:37.133 --> 00:16:38.360 We did a number of things actually. 00:16:38.360 --> 00:16:41.547 I unfortunately at that point had to. 00:16:41.547 --> 00:16:44.494 We filed a chapter 13 to void the lease. 00:16:44.494 --> 00:16:47.936 At that point, we filed a Chapter 13 to void the lease. 00:16:47.936 --> 00:16:49.421 We moved out of one of the buildings. 00:16:49.421 --> 00:16:56.626 Everybody got paid except the landlord lost his tenant, which was not cool, but it is what it is. 00:16:56.626 --> 00:17:03.131 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. 00:17:03.152 --> 00:17:04.492 I don't have any hair left. 00:17:05.213 --> 00:17:05.814 Nothing does. 00:17:05.814 --> 00:17:16.000 But you know, we learned a lot from that moment and, yes, there was a pivot. 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:16.882 But I don't look at that as a failure. 00:17:16.882 --> 00:17:24.994 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. 00:17:24.994 --> 00:17:30.092 Maybe next time you don't trust the fortune 500 company to just be there, maybe you get something in writing. 00:17:30.092 --> 00:17:34.685 And so you know, um, we, we. 00:17:34.685 --> 00:17:42.606 At that point we brought in a couple of new customers who didn't use as much space but they needed peer support. 00:17:42.606 --> 00:17:50.252 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. 00:17:50.252 --> 00:17:57.953 And you know, we did okay with it, but it was never really where I wanted to be. 00:17:57.953 --> 00:17:59.506 It wasn't the space I wanted to be in. 00:17:59.506 --> 00:18:00.962 So I was always looking for the next thing. 00:18:00.962 --> 00:18:01.805 We're survivors. 00:18:02.547 --> 00:18:04.250 Yeah, entrepreneurs, I'm picking up on that. 00:18:04.592 --> 00:18:10.682 Yeah, entrepreneurs we're just. 00:18:10.682 --> 00:18:11.445 I think we're just survivors. 00:18:11.445 --> 00:18:12.450 I look at myself as like a serial entrepreneur. 00:18:12.450 --> 00:18:15.320 I just keep trying new things until something sticks, and this thing we're doing now at Fenice. 00:18:15.320 --> 00:18:19.652 It's sticking pretty good and I don't have any plans to pivot off of this. 00:18:19.652 --> 00:18:27.193 But, god forbid, the market tanks or something goes really bad our market, because obviously the market in general did tank. 00:18:27.193 --> 00:18:42.369 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. 00:18:42.369 --> 00:18:49.229 So I don't see anything other than what we're doing now, possibly with some refinements that would. 00:18:49.229 --> 00:18:52.005 That would change things, should there be a drastic change. 00:18:52.005 --> 00:18:55.145 But look Q2, they just refined the numbers right. 00:18:55.145 --> 00:18:57.568 Their economy was up 3.3%. 00:18:57.568 --> 00:18:59.263 Hiring is. 00:18:59.263 --> 00:19:00.367 I mean it looks like. 00:19:00.367 --> 00:19:02.728 It looks like interest rates are going to come down. 00:19:02.728 --> 00:19:04.748 I think there's a very bright future. 00:19:04.748 --> 00:19:06.102 I it looks like interest rates are going to come down. 00:19:06.102 --> 00:19:06.486 I think there's a very bright future. 00:19:06.412 --> 00:19:34.086 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. 00:19:34.086 --> 00:19:45.160 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. 00:19:45.160 --> 00:19:53.329 I admire that approach, obviously, and named the show after it, but it comes with limitations. 00:19:54.020 --> 00:19:55.266 And you said growth. 00:19:55.266 --> 00:20:12.544 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? 00:20:15.931 --> 00:20:33.522 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. 00:20:33.522 --> 00:20:39.219 It's always been about being a tech first broker with a human connection. 00:20:39.219 --> 00:21:08.277 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. 00:21:08.277 --> 00:21:11.373 Who work here that I have direct contact with. 00:21:11.373 --> 00:21:14.080 We don't have a broker here that I don't have a relationship with. 00:21:14.080 --> 00:21:18.077 Every single person who works here I know they know my kids. 00:21:18.077 --> 00:21:19.460 Uh, we have a. 00:21:19.460 --> 00:21:22.152 We have a manager of agent development. 00:21:22.152 --> 00:21:22.873 Her name is leslie. 00:21:22.873 --> 00:21:30.633 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. 00:21:35.657 --> 00:21:38.601 What's the pitfalls to starting a new brokerage and getting to 100 million? 00:21:38.601 --> 00:21:45.047 There's 10 million pitfalls and any of them could hurt you really really badly. 00:21:45.047 --> 00:22:14.580 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. 00:22:15.451 --> 00:22:16.694 I don't want someone telling me what to do. 00:22:16.694 --> 00:22:17.296 I've had enough. 00:22:17.296 --> 00:22:18.318 I'm 58 years old. 00:22:18.318 --> 00:22:19.181 I've been doing this a long time. 00:22:19.181 --> 00:22:23.176 I don't need anybody to tell me what to do. 00:22:23.176 --> 00:22:23.798 I know how to do it. 00:22:23.798 --> 00:22:26.958 My grandfather did it, my father did it, my kids are doing it. 00:22:28.270 --> 00:22:35.651 I noticed a trend, by the way, when you're describing somebody um favorably, you use their name. 00:22:35.651 --> 00:22:56.896 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. 00:22:56.896 --> 00:23:04.523 So how have you, or how would you describe your overall philosophy of leadership at this point in your journey? 00:23:07.934 --> 00:23:11.500 um, I'm a god. 00:23:11.500 --> 00:23:15.771 I sound like a 17 year old at an interview at mcdonald's or something right, but I'm a people person. 00:23:15.771 --> 00:23:18.176 I am a people person. 00:23:18.176 --> 00:23:19.780 I love meeting new people. 00:23:19.780 --> 00:23:20.843 I love talking to people. 00:23:20.843 --> 00:23:22.112 I love getting to know people. 00:23:22.112 --> 00:23:31.483 We have we have, um, such a great team and I know every single person here and I care about people. 00:23:31.565 --> 00:23:37.300 So it's not like you know, it's not like I'm sitting here going growth, growth, growth. 00:23:37.300 --> 00:23:38.590 I'm not standing over anybody. 00:23:38.590 --> 00:23:40.998 I'm not telling anybody what to do and when to do it. 00:23:40.998 --> 00:23:49.311 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. 00:23:49.311 --> 00:23:50.214 This is what I expect. 00:23:50.214 --> 00:24:01.075 But we don't have anybody here who punches a clock. 00:24:01.075 --> 00:24:04.961 We don't have anybody here who is on like a piece work kind of thing. 00:24:04.961 --> 00:24:06.884 I guess I don't really know how to describe it. 00:24:06.944 --> 00:24:11.778 But basically, I like to give people a job and tell them this is what I expect you to do. 00:24:11.778 --> 00:24:14.384 I don't care how you do it, I don't care when you do it. 00:24:14.384 --> 00:24:16.094 I don't care where you're sitting when you do it. 00:24:16.094 --> 00:24:21.673 If you want to take your laptop and go to the Caribbean and sit on a beach in St Thomas. 00:24:21.673 --> 00:24:28.401 I don't care, I hope you can and I hope you do, because I know when I can, I do. 00:24:29.102 --> 00:24:42.061 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. 00:24:42.061 --> 00:24:46.036 And again, that's why we call our agents co-preneurs, right, we want them to go. 00:24:46.036 --> 00:24:50.212 Hey, I could work for three hours a day and make enough to get by. 00:24:50.212 --> 00:24:57.961 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. 00:24:57.961 --> 00:24:58.461 You know what I mean. 00:24:58.461 --> 00:25:06.265 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. 00:25:06.265 --> 00:25:09.092 And so is that a leadership style? 00:25:09.092 --> 00:25:11.556 I don't know, maybe it is, I don't know benefit, and so is that a leadership style. 00:25:11.576 --> 00:25:12.357 I don't know, maybe it is, I don't know. 00:25:12.357 --> 00:25:16.284 I think there's elements of just who you are that naturally lend itself to that. 00:25:16.284 --> 00:25:23.571 I don't want to be, and that's what I picked up when we first met too. 00:25:23.571 --> 00:25:25.654 Was I just I want to have a beer with you, I want to have a coffee with you. 00:25:25.654 --> 00:25:32.144 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. 00:25:32.144 --> 00:25:36.657 If you weren't doing what you're doing now, what would you have done? 00:25:39.723 --> 00:25:43.980 No idea, I told you in the beginning I sold copy machines. 00:25:43.980 --> 00:25:49.011 I hated every moment of my life, what that sounds like so much fun. 00:25:49.833 --> 00:25:50.473 Here's what it was. 00:25:50.473 --> 00:26:05.912 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. 00:26:05.912 --> 00:26:08.214 You're going to be in the typewriter division, but we've got a new product and it's going to be a hit. 00:26:08.214 --> 00:26:10.477 When you see these things, they're called fax machines. 00:26:10.477 --> 00:26:13.942 Okay, here's what I had to do. 00:26:13.942 --> 00:26:17.385 I had to take two fax machines and these were big. 00:26:17.385 --> 00:26:20.112 These were 30 pound machines at the time. 00:26:20.112 --> 00:26:31.861 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. 00:26:32.162 --> 00:26:33.923 You'd set up two machines and you put. 00:26:33.923 --> 00:26:35.150 People didn't believe that you could. 00:26:35.150 --> 00:26:44.094 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. 00:26:44.094 --> 00:26:53.470 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. 00:26:54.753 --> 00:27:03.616 But that company had two black and white copier reps in three little towns in Connecticut New Haven, west Haven and Hamden. 00:27:03.616 --> 00:27:08.278 They had one who did the odd side of the street and one who did the even numbered places. 00:27:08.278 --> 00:27:12.196 Then they had two fax and typewriter reps in the same area and a color rep. 00:27:12.196 --> 00:27:14.438 We had five reps in three towns. 00:27:14.438 --> 00:27:23.318 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. 00:27:23.318 --> 00:27:36.940 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. 00:27:36.940 --> 00:27:39.157 So I know I wouldn't be selling copiers. 00:27:39.951 --> 00:27:42.680 I really enjoyed the plumbing place that I worked at. 00:27:42.680 --> 00:27:43.955 We had a great time. 00:27:43.955 --> 00:27:47.349 I learned so much about a trade I knew nothing about. 00:27:47.349 --> 00:27:51.662 I forged some friendships that I still have today, 30 years later. 00:27:51.662 --> 00:27:56.240 So that probably would have been somewhere where I ended up. 00:27:56.240 --> 00:28:01.361 But I think the logistics space is sort of baked into my family. 00:28:01.361 --> 00:28:02.482 I really do. 00:28:02.482 --> 00:28:14.330 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. 00:28:14.330 --> 00:28:19.682 On the other side, my mother's mother, who was a daughter of the American Revolution. 00:28:19.682 --> 00:28:22.496 She was born to a sharecropper in Colorado. 00:28:22.496 --> 00:28:28.432 They migrated up to Iowa where her father ended up with tuberculosis and died at a young age. 00:28:28.432 --> 00:28:30.875 But my grandmother was one of nine kids. 00:28:30.875 --> 00:28:32.999 They were very lucky. 00:28:32.999 --> 00:28:36.865 They rented a farm and had a three-hole outhouse no power. 00:28:36.884 --> 00:28:41.101 Wow, wow, yeah, but they were very lucky in 1935 or whatever it was. 00:28:41.101 --> 00:28:56.258 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. 00:28:56.258 --> 00:29:06.712 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. 00:29:06.712 --> 00:29:16.441 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. 00:29:16.441 --> 00:29:30.003 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. 00:29:30.003 --> 00:29:44.778 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. 00:29:44.778 --> 00:29:53.051 Today they buy a new one that's probably made overseas somewhere and, um, it's just cheaper than having it fixed. 00:29:53.051 --> 00:29:55.617 So their business was really really good. 00:29:55.657 --> 00:29:57.342 My grandfather was very successful. 00:29:57.342 --> 00:30:00.037 He had a little four-seater single engine cessna. 00:30:00.037 --> 00:30:04.795 He had property in new hampshire or not late, you know he he did really well, um. 00:30:04.795 --> 00:30:10.195 So I feel like I feel like the entrepreneurial spirit is baked in, I feel like the logistics thing is baked in. 00:30:10.195 --> 00:30:15.419 And I feel like the logistics thing is baked in and I don't know that I had a choice. 00:30:15.419 --> 00:30:19.480 I think it's just where I was supposed to be. 00:30:20.470 --> 00:30:24.596 I would imagine, then, that your sons also feel like it's a choice for them. 00:30:24.596 --> 00:30:26.179 They don't have to do it, they choose to do it. 00:30:28.643 --> 00:30:29.144 I think so. 00:30:29.144 --> 00:30:30.286 James is my oldest. 00:30:30.286 --> 00:30:32.817 James got a degree in history. 00:30:32.817 --> 00:30:33.619 He wanted to be a teacher. 00:30:33.619 --> 00:30:34.451 He loves history. 00:30:34.451 --> 00:30:35.414 He wanted to be a teacher. 00:30:35.414 --> 00:30:36.176 He got a degree. 00:30:36.176 --> 00:30:42.040 He did his student teaching and went oh these kids are nuts, I don't want to do this Teaching is hard. 00:30:42.549 --> 00:30:43.152 Teaching is hard. 00:30:43.152 --> 00:30:47.971 And so he said while I'm looking for a job, is there anything you have for me? 00:30:47.971 --> 00:30:49.034 So I said, yeah, I'm going to have you. 00:30:49.034 --> 00:30:52.604 We were doing a freight payment audit program at the time. 00:30:52.604 --> 00:30:53.968 I said, yeah, you teach these. 00:30:53.968 --> 00:31:05.136 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. 00:31:05.136 --> 00:31:11.566 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. 00:31:11.566 --> 00:31:14.537 My other son, stephen, is two years younger. 00:31:15.529 --> 00:31:16.957 Stephen wanted to be in law enforcement. 00:31:16.957 --> 00:31:37.311 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. 00:31:37.311 --> 00:31:39.719 And then there was in Connecticut. 00:31:39.719 --> 00:31:48.192 There was not just fault as an officer for things that happened, but they could hold you personally responsible for things your partner did. 00:31:48.192 --> 00:31:54.463 And so he came to me and said Dad, I can't, I'm not doing this, I'm dropping out. 00:31:54.463 --> 00:31:55.714 I said, well, what do you plan to do? 00:31:55.714 --> 00:31:58.170 He goes, I have a job as a security guard at the local hospital. 00:31:58.170 --> 00:32:00.659 I'm like, okay, is that going to be enough to make ends meet? 00:32:00.659 --> 00:32:01.775 And he says, yeah, I think so. 00:32:01.775 --> 00:32:14.657 He had just gotten married to this wonderful young lady Her name is Liz, and they he just I don't. 00:32:14.657 --> 00:32:23.383 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? 00:32:23.383 --> 00:32:24.486 We need help here. 00:32:24.486 --> 00:32:26.279 You're a smart kid, you have a degree. 00:32:26.279 --> 00:32:28.125 I know it's criminal justice, but you have a degree. 00:32:28.125 --> 00:32:34.307 Why don't we teach you how to do some side of this business that maybe your brother's not doing? 00:32:35.155 --> 00:32:38.566 And so Stephen now handles payroll. 00:32:38.566 --> 00:32:44.904 He handles payments, accounts, payable, and he has a handful of accounts that he's managing. 00:32:44.904 --> 00:33:00.317 And James handles customer relationship type stuff Accounts, receivable, customer relationships, relationships and, um, yeah. 00:33:00.317 --> 00:33:09.564 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. 00:33:09.564 --> 00:33:26.794 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? 00:33:26.794 --> 00:33:29.298 I don't know. 00:33:29.298 --> 00:33:31.242 I think they both have the bug. 00:33:31.242 --> 00:33:31.583 I think. 00:33:32.345 --> 00:33:40.015 Well, and it's fun to get to watch, from my perspective, the impact of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurs families. 00:33:40.015 --> 00:33:45.872 I always like to ask those kinds of questions because anybody who has a career. 00:33:45.872 --> 00:33:52.385 It still impacts your family as well, myself included, but the I can bring work home with me. 00:33:52.385 --> 00:34:07.923 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. 00:34:07.923 --> 00:34:16.090 But for most you are still connected and the family is benefiting from the entrepreneurial success. 00:34:16.090 --> 00:34:45.472 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? 00:34:46.775 --> 00:34:48.503 I am not calling her from the next one Okay. 00:34:48.503 --> 00:34:53.527 I'm not bringing her in because Too much truth. 00:34:53.527 --> 00:35:00.538 Well, there's plenty of days where she's like do you have to be working all the time, for example? 00:35:00.538 --> 00:35:07.521 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. 00:35:07.521 --> 00:35:15.574 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. 00:35:15.715 --> 00:35:17.222 You have a text and email. 00:35:17.262 --> 00:35:30.532 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. 00:35:30.532 --> 00:35:34.902 I mean, everybody knows that vin's on vacation, so he's only available for four or five hours a day. 00:35:34.902 --> 00:35:38.068 I don't know any other way to live. 00:35:40.155 --> 00:35:43.065 And there's joy in that for a lot of us too. 00:35:43.065 --> 00:35:44.349 I love being busy. 00:35:44.349 --> 00:35:46.536 I love feeling like I'm having an impact. 00:35:46.536 --> 00:35:48.101 It's not a drain. 00:35:48.101 --> 00:36:04.702 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. 00:36:04.963 --> 00:36:06.766 Yeah, no, I totally agree. 00:36:06.766 --> 00:36:08.375 I, you know it's funny. 00:36:08.375 --> 00:36:13.219 I, um, I love what I do and I love who I do it with. 00:36:13.219 --> 00:36:14.081 I love what I do it. 00:36:14.081 --> 00:36:15.141 4, right. 00:36:15.282 --> 00:36:27.663 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. 00:36:27.663 --> 00:36:30.844 She's a latent print examiner for the city of Durham. 00:36:30.844 --> 00:36:34.065 She absolutely loves working in forensics. 00:36:34.065 --> 00:36:41.920 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. 00:36:41.920 --> 00:36:51.385 So you know, you know, we, we have a great time with this back and forth, but we both understand the other's role. 00:36:51.385 --> 00:37:10.989 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. 00:37:10.989 --> 00:37:13.844 But this is one of the things that brings me joy. 00:37:15.737 --> 00:37:19.023 And I get out of bed every morning and my feet hit the floor and I'm running. 00:37:19.023 --> 00:37:24.938 Um, I, in fact I've sent a newsletter to all of our agents every week. 00:37:24.938 --> 00:37:26.362 I call it the happy Monday newsletter. 00:37:26.362 --> 00:37:27.605 It never goes out on a Monday. 00:37:27.605 --> 00:37:30.498 If it does, it's just pretty long. 00:37:30.498 --> 00:37:36.907 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. 00:37:37.128 --> 00:37:38.090 Oh, I got to go to work. 00:37:38.090 --> 00:37:40.583 I hate this job Weekend's over. 00:37:40.583 --> 00:37:42.619 And I get up on Monday and I go. 00:37:42.619 --> 00:37:44.144 I love Mondays. 00:37:44.144 --> 00:37:46.061 Monday's a day to reset. 00:37:46.061 --> 00:37:51.246 Monday's a day to forgive what the bad things that happened last week or fix those problems from last week. 00:37:51.246 --> 00:37:53.422 Monday's a day for a fresh start. 00:37:53.422 --> 00:38:04.143 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. 00:38:04.143 --> 00:38:05.768 If you dread your job, you're doing the wrong job. 00:38:05.768 --> 00:38:11.217 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. 00:38:11.217 --> 00:38:13.000 I don't feel like what I do is work. 00:38:13.000 --> 00:38:13.820 I, I. 00:38:13.820 --> 00:38:26.548 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. 00:38:28.114 --> 00:38:28.396 That is. 00:38:28.396 --> 00:38:33.666 That is a joy to find your spot yeah. 00:38:33.666 --> 00:38:34.306 To find your joy. 00:38:34.306 --> 00:38:35.007 I like that a lot. 00:38:35.027 --> 00:38:35.588