The Freight Pod
The Freight Pod is a deep dive into the journeys of the transportation and logistics industry’s brightest minds and innovators. The show is hosted by Andrew Silver, former founder and CEO of MoLo Solutions, one of the fastest-growing freight brokerages in the industry. His guests will be CEOs, founders, executives, and leaders from some of the most successful freight brokerages, trucking companies, manufacturers, and technology companies that support this great industry. Andrew will interview his guests with a focus on their life and how they got to where they are today, unlocking the key ingredients that helped them develop into the leaders they are now. He will also bring to light the fascinating stories that helped mold and shape his experiences.
The Freight Pod
Ep. #17: Jordan Graft
When life throws a curveball, some craft an entire new ballpark—meet Jordan Graft, CEO of Highway, who sits with us today to reflect on the indelible marks of entrepreneurship and personal growth. Hear how he harnessed his experiences as a three-time CEO before the age of 40 to carve out success amidst the bustling freight industry. Our exchange offers a glimpse into Jordan's transformative journey: from embracing unexpected fatherhood and pioneering a grocery delivery venture, to influencing the freight brokerage sector as a Batman of freight fraud.
Navigating the freight industry's high seas, Jordan joins me to unravel the fabric of his entrepreneurial endeavors, marked with stories of resilience, patience, and the unwavering support of family. Our heartfelt conversation sails through the evolution of personal relationships in challenging times, the rise and fall of business ventures, and the milestones along the path to leadership. Jordan's narrative is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit—coding out of necessity, pivoting from ventures that no longer serve, and the pursuit of innovation that meets the freight industry's pressing needs.
Tune in as we dissect the intricacies of the freight world, from combating sophisticated freight scams to crafting responsive customer service with a team that's as vigilant as they are dedicated. Jordan's insights on hiring with integrity, fostering workplace loyalty, and improving industry communication shine a light on the core values that drive success. Whether you're an industry veteran or a curious newcomer, this episode is brimming with tales of perseverance, the joy of translating ideas into action, and the relentless dedication to creating value in a complex yet rewarding field.
Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.
*** This episode is brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services. Visit gorapido.com to learn more. ***
A special thanks to our additional sponsors:
- Cargado – Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies that move freight into and out of Mexico. Visit cargado.com to learn more.
- Greenscreens.ai – Greenscreens.ai is the AI-powered pricing and market intelligence tool transforming how freight brokers price freight. Visit greenscreens.ai/freightpod today!
- Metafora – Metafora is a technology consulting firm that has delivered value for over a decade to brokers, shippers, carriers, private equity firms, and freight tech companies. Check them out at metafora.net. ***
Alright, welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. This is our second episode of the new year. I have been struggling to get you the episodes as often as I want. It's been a busy couple of weeks with the holidays. I also am recovering again. Last time I was recovering from a Michigan National Championship. This time it's my own bachelor party, which I just got home from about 30 hours ago, which was obviously just a couple of guys playing golf. It was nice and easy, so there's nothing much to recover from. I'm fine. I'm telling myself that as I get dialed in here. Welcome to the show, though. I got Jordan Graf today CEO of Highway. How are we doing today, Jordan?
Speaker 1:Good, good. It's great to see you.
Speaker 2:It's great to see you as well. This is actually our first time interacting with one another, which is a bit of a surprise to me, but I kind of like the surprise action because we come in blind and just figure it out and I think we're going to have a good time here today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, I know, I think you know, I know your brother and some other people, but you and I've never actually talked face to face. So this is really cool. I know a lot about you, your story. I followed you from afar. I watched your debate with Dan Lewis, you know, a couple of years ago, which you know. It's kind of funny looking back on that now. But, man, yeah, I got a ton of respect for you and what you built and it's just great. Thanks for thinking of me and inviting me.
Speaker 2:Of course. Well, you're a builder yourself, and that's a big reason why we're here today. So let's start, let's take it back. So you know, today you're the CEO of Highway. This is your third act as a CEO, is that correct?
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah, yeah, how old are you? I'm 36.
Speaker 2:36, third time CEO, let's, let's before your CEO days. I mean, you went to school, you went to Baylor, graduated from there and went into the investment world, private equity world, like what. Walk me through that path.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I went to. I was a group in the small town of West Point, oklahoma. We were really good Southern Baptist. So my mother made my older brother go to Baylor and because it's a it's a Baptist university and so I went to Baylor because my brother and sister went there. I was the youngest of five. Baylor is awesome.
Speaker 1:I met my wife there in Brittany and we we both went to work for JPMorgan right out of college and we did about a year and a half here in Dallas and then transferred to New York and we were two young married, no kids, double income, people living in Manhattan and it was. It was awesome. I didn't realize how much time I had in my life back then, but it was like it was a great experience, so did that. And then we, then we got married and then we we moved to Boston. We hated Boston. I'm sorry Like I shouldn't generalize the entire cities, but like Boston was not great for us.
Speaker 1:We were, we were pregnant and trying to have a baby in the middle of February. We didn't know anyone and it was like I was from Oklahoma. I didn't even know Boston was north of New York when I took the job. To go to Boston and like we get on a plane and I'm like, wait, we're going north, that's not. That's not the direction I want to go. But yeah, we were. So that was. That was a really fun time of our lives and we got to see new cities, do new things, how to got pregnant unexpectedly at 25, which turned out to be an amazing blessing. But I thought my world was over whenever my when she came in and she's like I'm pregnant, I was like that doesn't make sense. You know I want to refund on our birth control bills. I'm just going to love that. I said that on this podcast. I said that to the OB and like they were like get out of our office, you're an idiot. So I was a pretty big idiot at 25.
Speaker 2:I was right there with you. I mean I, where do I go from here? So, 25 years old, you're going to become a father, you're working as in private equity, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a grunt, an analyst, like the bottom of the, the bottom of the tree.
Speaker 2:And was this at all related to transportation, or didn't even know a thing about it at the time?
Speaker 1:Oh no, no, I was covering grocery stores. So I worked a lot with grocery stores, like I worked on the sale of hairs teetered at Kroger. But I worked on like HBB did a lot of stuff with Walmart, publix, safeway, rouse, like all those grocery stores. I was the analyst. We had a. There was a senior banker, we had those relationships. I worked on that and so I spent a lot of my time walking around grocery store aisles as a in a suit at 25, helping people try and buy different grocery store companies.
Speaker 2:So and some, and from there you end up starting a business, crepebind right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Actually, we were in Boston and I wanted to go do something entrepreneurial and I've been all around these grocery stores and it was 2014,. Instacart was just getting going and so I was like, hey, let's go do grocery delivery in in in a vacation market, because people on their vacation want to buy grocery, you know, are less price sensitive, they need less selection, they like the convenience of delivery. You know grocery is the last category of retail to go online and to deliver. Covid kind of supercharged that. But so we went to like 30A in Northwest Florida because 15 million people visited every year and most people drive and stay in homes with like refrigerators and need groceries. And so we went and did that and that was a crazy experience.
Speaker 1:In this is my first time starting something. You say like be the CEO three times before you're 36. If you fail a lot you can, you can run that number up pretty quick, but it was. It was. It was a great experience because people really wanted the product. It was like a great product but a terrible business, like it was horrible business and we were never going to make a dollar and because you know all the deliveries happen on two days and so you can't really even like hire. It's all the surge demand, it's just. It's really really painful. But I owned refrigerated box trucks, like I was a technically a carrier, I guess. But you should have never, no one should have ever hired me. I got to have been. That's probably illegal and you know.
Speaker 2:Wait, so. So this was Cratebind right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was the predecessor. We called it Vacate Foods. That's what became Cratebind, our IT development firm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so okay. So your initial thought was we're going to create a grocery delivery business specifically catered to vacation towns, and it was. Was was Brittany involved in this? Your wife first, she was pregnant doing something else. Or, like you guys were like we're going all in on grocery delivery in vacays. Like, as if I wasn't dumb enough as the 25 year old, I've got now a pregnant wife that like I'm trying to figure out what to do. So I'm going to start a business.
Speaker 1:Oh man, no. So Brittany was all in with me, so she is a proverb 31 woman she is. She is all in everything we do. We do it together. She was pregnant with a three, four month old walking the aisles of Walmart's price check, doing price discovery like coming up with our skew collection for our website where people could order online. But she, she's the most wonderful and beautiful, hardworking woman. She is amazing. No, she was all in. She was not going to be left out, and it didn't slow her down one bit. I don't know how she did. I don't know how she did, but, yeah, she and we moved with a six month old. We left Boston with a six month old and went to Florida and just did life.
Speaker 1:But that part of our life, though, was where we learned to code.
Speaker 1:So, because, like, we were getting so big, we were doing so many deliveries, that first father's day my first father's day as a father was the single worst day of my life, because we had all these people coming to Florida to and they were ordering groceries, and we had like $30,000 in groceries delivered in one day.
Speaker 1:That's 10,000 items across three temperature zones, reverse packed into a truck, like it was. We had zero chance of success, of making that work. And that's where you know, coming out of that, like I was up for like 48 straight hours trying to just get all these groceries to all these people and we failed miserably that weekend. But on Monday I was like, okay, we got to find a way to like have some sort of system, and I messed with VBA, macros and a foreign Excel and I just got on our big commerce API, our big commerce stores API page and figured out like, okay, this is probably something. And just out of necessity we built this system that would take the orders off the website, build a pick list in the order that things were positioned in the warehouse separated by temperature zone, and that like changed our business and I fell in love with it, felt in love with coding at that point.
Speaker 2:So it was kind of out of desperation, like on the heels of failure with this. You know, you had this idea. You kind of brought it to life, maybe more quickly than it should have been, so it didn't have all the. This is kind of the definition of building an airplane while flying, which is very much what we felt when we were building Molo, and I bet a lot of entrepreneurs feel that too. There was kind of this pivot needed on your behalf in terms of coding things. The right way to, I guess, get more process. Is that the right way to think about it?
Speaker 1:You build a system Like it was. Just it was my first like web app that I built that like would go and pull data from here, sort it, organize it based on you know whatever, and print a pick list where we could hand it to the $15 our employee to go pick the orders through the warehouse. Like, yeah, that was it it was. I wish I had kept that code. I should have kept it because it's probably just like horrible to look at looking back at it now. But it worked and it changed everything Like I did like that feeling. That moment was like I was in love with it. It was like I love writing software. This is, this is the best feeling ever. There was this thing in the physical world that didn't work and I was able to do this thing in a computer and it make this thing work.
Speaker 2:And put the puzzle pieces together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I loved it and so and so that we get to the end of the summer and like multiple things kind of happened in my life, like God had a plan and a purpose for why we were in baked foods and why we failed, like we 100% fail, like it was a. It was a failure and at the end of the summer we knew we didn't want to keep doing it. We weren't going to make money doing it. The software we were writing was actually more valuable than us running around delivering groceries. And then my dad was sick. So he, my dad, was sick. He was in the hospital in Cleveland, at the Cleveland clinic. He needed a liver transplant. He'd had. He took a medicine called amiodarin for his heart and the doctor monitoring his blood levels and he took it for too long and they should have, they should have detected it, but it caused cirrhosis of his liver. He was the Southern Baptist. Now, like he did, he probably had two beers his entire life.
Speaker 1:It was like the most just frustrating thing for you know a son to be dealing with, like he did everything right, like he didn't have a crazy lifestyle, didn't deserve it, and he's there on this liver floor. You know people that made really bad choices and ended up with a failed liver, and so I was a living liver donor for him and we, my wife and I, we moved our baby up with with our family and our Hudson, who was now probably like nine months old, 10 months old, and we were in the Cleveland clinic in the Cleveland area for like almost six months. It was such a. It was such an amazing time as a family, not only my extended family, but just for me and Brittany and Hudson, our son, because we've been running so hard with vacay foods and like it was just a time of like, respite, like it was a time of rest and restoration and healing.
Speaker 1:And God humbled me through that process because I thought I was just going to show up. Yeah, I'm 28, 27 now, I don't remember. I'm just going to. You know, they'll take my liver and they'll cut it in half and give him part. I'll just walk out of here in seven days. And that's not what happened. And I was incredibly humbled because I got infections and I kept going back into the hospital. But just like, through all of it it was. It was really a moment when God was teaching me to like be humble, like because I was a very proud 25, 26 year old. I just man. I thought I could do anything. I thought I was really smart and everything had gone my way. Most throughout my life I never faced like real adversity. This is the first time to like, hey, you can't control this outcome and you're going to have to suffer through it.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a tremendous amount of wisdom for someone. Maybe it's more reflective now. Did you feel that way in the moment? I mean, was the because I think I was similar to you, maybe in that kind of 25, 26 year old take on the world mentality and I have control issues. So I don't know if that was something that you similarly dealt with as a young entrepreneur but like everything's got to be done right, you want to make sure that you do all the things the right way, and then there are some aspects not of luck maybe, but you know things that aren't in your control. That will happen and you need to kind of react.
Speaker 2:But I used to struggle with getting pretty frustrated when things didn't go as planned. I'm curious Did you have that kind of humility in the moment? Did you have that kind of patience? Or is this something that it hit you hard and it took a while for you to realize like, wow, this has really brought our family together? Like what was that actually like emotionally for you to deal with, and how did you deal with it in the moment?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, man. No, I was not. I was not well, I was impetuous, I was, I was arrogant. Yeah, how was angry? I was angry in the moment, angry that my dad wasn't getting better right away, and frustrated, oh, it was. That was the refining part where, like Brittany, was actually Brittany who spoke into a ton of wisdom in the moment and she was like this is good, this is a purpose, this is, stop trying to make this go faster. You're not going to make it go faster. You got to accept that you're on a timeline that you don't control and no, it wasn't until after and it wasn't for the season. After that. I really gained the the discipline of humility through it. No, I was a horrible patient. I was frustrating to the medical staff. I didn't want to do what they asked me to do. I mean, I was, I wasn't. I wasn't like a bad husband, but I wasn't a great husband at 26, 27. I'm pretty put up with a lot of nonsense. I'm a much better husband at 36, after 10 years of refining.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and do you what? Do you feel like, man? Would you say that today, when you deal with challenges like that and adversity like that, that it takes as much refinement in the moment? Or are you better at kind of recognizing hey, I need to be patient. Is that a skill you've developed over the years, or is there something? You struggle with.
Speaker 1:Oh no, like there'll be periods. There'll be periods where I get in real sideways and um, and you know it can be there's a time at triumph that I got real twisted up and Aaron and I are incredibly close. Like I love my brother and um man, I have so much respect for him, he's the best older brother you could ever ask for. Um, there are times when we got all twisted up around each other just because of we were operating in close quarters and man like but, but thankfully, like yeah, like I feel, like in pretty good testified to this that I've gotten better at not causing so much emotional damage, that conflict happens, adversity happens. What we can control is the amount of emotional damage we allow that happens to us and those around us. And so that's what I try and like the sense me, that's what I'm trying to just be aware of when I'm with Brittany or around others, like in the, in the moments of adversity or conflict, is like how do I make sure to not just let the emotional damage go wild and destroy it, cause that's where you hurt relationships and that's the things that take really long to repair.
Speaker 1:And so Brittany and I, like you, know the three things that we talk about, that make our marriage successful, is trust, respect and conflict resolution. And so we're always checking those buckets of like, how's our trust? You know, making sure that we're continually adding to the trust bucket and not taking too many withdrawals. And then respect, like that's that's something that's very integral for how Brittany like we have a ton of respect for one another, like I respect for who she is as a woman, how she is as a mother, for intellect, the way she carries herself, like there's a, there's a really strong basis of respect that just is anchors us. And then the third, the conflict resolution, is the more day to day combat, like making sure that if we have conflict it doesn't take a huge emotional withdrawal to get through it, and that, like that's something we learn coming out of Cleveland and like with some mentors and some teachers that really spoke into it for us and so that, yeah, I didn't have that. No, I was. That was not, that was not in my repertoire. I'm 26.
Speaker 2:I mean, I relate so much to this, everything you're saying right now, because, as someone who I've been terrible at relationships in my life and I've now in like the ultimate relationship, the one that means more to me than anyone I've ever been in before. Like I'm getting married in less than three months and I'm so used to in in in my history of relationships. When the going gets tough, I run as far and fast as I can away from the conflict, and so we put a lot of work in and have done a therapist to work like understand how to communicate better. And it's interesting because what you said is such a core foundation of how we're trying to frame and build our own process and respect being at the foundation of that. Like it's so easy in conflict to toss respect out the window because you just you're ready to go, you're ready for battle, and so you just start to look through the, frankly, the disrespectful things that will come to mind first. But learning how to navigate conflict, conflict through a respectful means is it's just something that I'm very consciously learning about and it's this is the stuff that's worth doing, right? It's like it's so funny because you think about life like you want something right.
Speaker 2:You know, growing up like I want to get married and have kids and have an awesome relationship and build a family, and you just know that and it's at least for me, it was something I thought about so often but you never thought about, like the work it would take to make that a success and the work it would take to make that happen.
Speaker 2:And that work is the hardest part, obviously. I mean I'm not speaking, I'm not, I'm not speaking rocket science here. That's the hardest part, but that's the part that you just want to, you instinctively want to run from, but it's what builds the future state of what you want to create together. And having to go through that adversity together and deal with that is what builds the kind of strength and love and respect that you and Brittany now have. It's having gone through 10 years or 15 years of kind of stuff together. You call it shit, shit together and coming out the other side. So I appreciate your perspective and sharing that because it does really resonate and it's something that I'm very actively doing in my own life.
Speaker 1:Amen, Amen, Amen. What a? I mean it's a great work. How much work has to go into it to make it a value, and that's so true. It doesn't come easy, Like it's work and but gosh, this could work. The other rewards are so sweet. I couldn't imagine. Not.
Speaker 1:Brittany, our marriage is such a place of rest for me, like in restoration, Like when I'm struggled and stressed and work or whatever going home to me is is rest, because our home is in a great state because of our marriage and because of how great a mother she is to our kids and how much emphasis we put there. Man, and I can't imagine if it wasn't, if it wasn't, my life would be so much harder, you know, if you didn't have that place of trust and rest. Yeah, I talk, I say it a lot she's a proper 31 woman, man. Her husband and children rise up and call her blessed. She is. She lives her life as a vegan for our daughter on how to be a mother and for our boys on the kind of woman that they should marry. And so I'm blessed to have her. She is amazing.
Speaker 2:I can tell from just the 20 minutes we've talking. We thought you were in trouble with her after a joke early, but I think you're doing well now. Let's make a slight pivot here. So she was there with you in the vacay business that became Crepebind. How did that pivot take place where you recognize, okay, vacation business is a bust. This thing's a failure. How did you pivot, how did you know to pivot, and what was ultimately the driving factor behind that decision?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So first of all, just for other guys that walk in that path like they're listening to this and first of all, your gut's going to tell you like, as an entrepreneur, you have gut feelings and like you've got to know when your gut feeling is telling you something bad, like it's generally right and you know, especially with something bad, like gut feelings about good things are. I think sometimes you want to test with mentors and data points. The second was like we just did the math, like the amount of work in inertia we would have to do. The amount of work we'd have to do is just this massive amount of inertia to make this little bit of profit.
Speaker 1:Man, this guy named Ed Crenshaw, who's the CEO of Publix, who had no business wasting time talking to me, but I got on the phone with him because he went to Baylor and he was so wise and he said listen, jordan, you're not going to make any money doing it. You're going to sell a lot of groceries. The capital cost is too high for the size of the market you're going into and you're not going to be able to staff it up because you're going to do all your deliveries in two days. Like he got it. He knew he never had to deliver a dollar of groceries and he knew I mean that wisdom speaking into my brain. Like bounced around for a while and settled down, I was like okay, enough, guys with enough abaths and experience are telling me this isn't going to work. Like I really like coding, I'd rather do that. They say this isn't going to work, like let's just, let's go, let's fail fast, like yeah.
Speaker 2:Was there any part of the 26 year old arrogant Jordan in there who was like I could beat this guy's wrong, I could prove him wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but you get beat down. Like delivering groceries is I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And so, like I was delivering, I was out there hustling in a green polo. You know, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, like I'll put the Nestle Pure Life up here. It's a hard business. And so, yeah, you know. You know the fool has to be beat down, the fool has to have the knowledge and wisdom beat in his head. And so, yeah, I had to have it beat in my head.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you make the pivot and what does? What is? What is the pivot?
Speaker 1:What does the?
Speaker 2:pivot become.
Speaker 1:So we built this really cool routing software for, like, this specific grocery market or this specific vacation market. And there's a lot of beach chair equipment rental businesses down there, and so we just started trying to sell it to them. Like hey, like you could use the same, you know, we'll build you a custom website. Because my partner, he, liked doing front end work, front end development work. I really liked the server side and so we sold our first one to a equipment rental business down there beach chair rental business and bike rental and we sold our first project for like $15,000. And we thought we were like rich, or like this is amazing, like let's just keep doing this and so took that.
Speaker 1:And then then a medical waste company here in Dallas at this point we'd relocated, we'd relocated back to Dallas, which was kind of home all along for us, and then we just started hustling like hey, who has a business problem that needs to be solved by tech, we'll build it. And we'll build it fast and cheap, because we're hungry and we were hungry, like it was. It was tight, but so we just started selling custom development projects to people that couldn't buy off the shelf software to solve the problem. So that's why it was like medical waste companies, because there's no TMS for medical waste companies or beach chair rental, because there's not that many of them. So it's all these niche hedge funds.
Speaker 1:We built stuff for hedge funds because that was kind of my background, so it was all these people that had unique problems that there wasn't off the shelf solution to solve because it was a niche market and wasn't big enough to build a product around. And it was a great experience. I got dozens of that back, like people would pay me to build new things. So I would get the experience of like starting at zero and building the all the tech for somebody's product idea and they were paying me to do it. And we grew that team to about 20, 25 people. Here in Dallas, somebody learned how to write in Objective C in Swift, which is how you build mobile apps, and she would build iPhone apps, and so she wanted to be involved and she was really good at it and, man, we just it was a thing of six years and it taught me how to sell it, taught me how to like hustle, taught me how to build a team hadn't really built a team of professionals up until that point manage financials and yeah, it was, it was awesome.
Speaker 2:So was Crepe on to success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's still around, Like they still. We use them a little bit. I don't own it anymore. I sold to my partner and he runs it and dad, they're doing really well. They're really good. They got more into design the design side, like I, was always more server side or really like that aspect. John the other John, john who is involved with John Arland he was more design and he has an amazing eye for design. So they've gone down more that path.
Speaker 2:And what would you say was the best lesson that you took from that business, your time? I mean, that was your first real or successful startup as a CEO. What would you say, looking back, was your biggest takeaway that you've kept with you today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a couple of things that stick in my head, but one was like the problem about the man who gathers little by little, accumulates much and then you know he accumulates quickly, it departs from him quickly. The Crepe buying was a business of grinding it out Like it is a ground game business. You've got to, like you've got to execute, you've got to, you know, you've got to build great product. You've got to hire great people. You got to make sure those people are good and producing really good code. Like it's a ground game business and so you can't grow it quickly. Like you can't scale Crepe buying quickly. It's made me slow down.
Speaker 1:I like going fast, and so it made me slow down and like learn how to build something that will last. And in a service business, as you know, like service businesses are hard, hard, and that I learned. The other thing I learned is that I really really wanted to build a product. I wanted to build something that could be used by lots of people and it was out of like the challenge of doing it. It wasn't, you know, I didn't have an idea to go build, and so that's I learned. I learned like I took consulting as great but it's a great launching point, but it's not where, ultimately, I wanted to be for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2:It's harder to scale right Because you know you solve one person's problem and then you've got to go create a whole another solution for someone else's problem. So I get, I get why you know today in your current business is like you've created a product that you know thousands and thousands of companies can use so you can stick to that product, refine it, make it better and better and just sell it, have the right sales team to scale it kind of ad nauseam.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, exactly, and that's where. So I've been running Crabon for a while. We've done some work for Triumph, like we did some document processing stuff for Triumph, and my brother was CEO of Triumph. So he bought the Triumph as a fail bank from the FDIC in 2008 or 2009,. Just called Equity Bank and rebranded it. Triumph Raised $50 million here in Dallas when he had like there's, these people had no business giving him. I mean, he came, he was against the odds. He found a way, scratched him, called to raise that money to buy that fail bank and turned what was a.
Speaker 1:What's really cool is like stories of life, like stories of life giving. Like that thing was dead, equity bank was dead. It was, it was there, was rotten, there was no, there was no value in it. And to breathe life into something that is now, you know, touches like one out of every two payment chains, actions and freight brokerage. It's insane the story of what Triumph has become. It's inspiring. Yeah, oh yeah, I'm so proud of him as a brother and like so he's, I'm look up on the phone.
Speaker 2:It's interesting you use the term in breathe life because I'm pretty sure the the literal definition of the word inspire is to breathe life into something.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I don't think I did. No, the reason I know this is because we I did a, I did a, I did this kind of workshop with my YPO group, my forum group. We were looking for our purpose and and they brought in a couple of experts and we were really trying to understand our individual Y or individual purpose, and they, you know the first step was to look at moments of inspiration in our life, so to like really dial back into our memories and think about like what were moments that we were truly inspired, and the path to understanding your Y or your purpose is just start with moments of inspiration. And when you look back, there's there's not hundreds of times in your life where you've been inspired, but there are a few.
Speaker 2:One of mine was when I saw Brené Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability and it's interesting that like I just remember that distinctly and that was like that was like kind of the example we used in in trying to figure out my Y, but what we eventually came to he's like the reason you look for points of inspiration is because the word inspire literally means to breathe life into something. What, what these moments of inspiration do for you is they breathe life into you. They give you that life that gets you excited and motivated and wanting to go do the next thing. So, yeah, I, just I, I keep it on that. It seems like your brother is an inspiration to you in a lot of ways. I mean, how much older is he than you?
Speaker 1:I love what you just shared there. Yeah, he's 10 years older he is, so he graduated in high school when I was in second grade, so we didn't get a ton of time at Bats together, but I always looked up to him and he's one that told me I should be an investment banker. He was a lawyer and he's like man, I should have been an investment banker. You don't make my mistake, go be an investment banker instead of a lawyer. So yeah, and then when I, when I went to learn to code, he was like yeah, you're, you're kind of a nerd of the family. You should learn how to code and do that. So yeah, yeah, we've really developed our relationship after, after college and as as kind of men and and his family is so dear to our family like he's got three older. He's got three kids who are almost exactly 10 years apart from my three kids and and they, you know, yeah, we're very, we're very close and he's a great friend.
Speaker 2:Well, at some point you went to go work for him, right? I mean, that was so to walk us through that. So crepe by, like get, get us from crepe bind to triumph and kind of talk about how your brother played into that. Give us that aspect of the of your story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So in 2018, our 2017 at crepe, I got real in the blockchain, like real kind of like not not to the like level of like, like Like rabbit hole down the whole conspiracies, but I loved the, the, the intellectual challenge of like understanding how they had created that was just Bathrooming. It wasn't a single man. There's no way. Like you know conspiracy theories, it was. It was so I, my opinion, some state organization because they had advanced knowledge of distributed systems and cryptography, and anyways, I got real into it and real down the rabbit hole. And so At that time, craig Fuller was like launching Better before bidda, yeah, and I Do Craig through Steve houseman, who Steve houseman had introduced Craig to me to maybe help him build the freight futures exchange, because have crepe bind, build that. And Craig ultimately didn't in the firing us, which I should hold that over his head more but I Saw him post on LinkedIn. I was like blockchain trucking. You know that sounds awesome and so, naturally, triumph was very involved in that process because you know, steve was how I found trucking. I really was more in reckon with Steve houseman, who's Mentor of mine and now the chairman of the board of highway, and so he I kind of got into all that flow of motion of bidda and trucking and blockchain and and built a like prototype on how you would submit an invoice for payment. It would get audited and get paid for the bidda thing in the fall of that, 2017, and it was really cool because, you know Aaron's like you, you want to build a product. Hey, we got this thing called triumph pay. We've got a few customers on it. If you break it, it's not gonna be an end of the world, but like you want to come. You know it's like, so you want to take a shot downfield. Like here's a, here's an opportunity to go Do this. And and I loved it because it was just to run a product I Didn't, I wouldn't have to. You know it's like you get a salary I had three kids at that point, or two with almost three kids and so healthcare and all that we taking care of, and you get to do it with Steve and Aaron.
Speaker 1:It sounded really awesome. It was awesome. You didn't just sound awesome, it became awesome and so I Me to showed up. I mean, we had the dinners right over here when he finally made the offer and formal off and we knocked out the terms and so in 2018, I would. I sold my steak and crepe wine to John Harlan and went to work at Triumph and it was they want to say at Triumph, they, there was no triumphant. It was like inside of the factoring business, you know there was. We didn't even have trying to email addresses and so that was kind of the first order of business.
Speaker 2:We need our triumphant email addresses, but for the audience that maybe isn't as Attuned to what triumph is try and pay. Give a little bit more high-level context of what triumph was doing and then what specifically you were gonna build within triumph at Triumph pay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so triumph is a public trade of bank here in Dallas. They are the second largest factoring company trying business capital, now called, I believe, trying financial, and so their second largest factoring company in Trucking is about 300 factoring companies in trucking. They would touch about 50% of all freight bills that are paid by freight brokers in the top 10. Touch about. The top 10 factors represent 60-70% of the market. Of the factory market in triath is number two. They had started a product called trying pay because they knew factors were driving brokers crazy. They're calling all the time to verify invoices, they're falling on bonds, it's just the whole. It was goat rodeo Processing notice of assignments. They just send out these blast notice of assignments.
Speaker 1:And so trying pay was designed by Steve Hausman as a way to Go and solve the problem for brokers make the pay carrier payments on behalf of brokers and the the. The nuance, like the timing, was really really important for that business because in 2010 no broker would have ever done it because factoring was only 10 20% of their carrier portfolio and they would have never given up control of their carrier payments. But when I showed up in 2018, factoring was almost one out of every two invoices. Some brokers were paying 70% of factoring companies. And so we're like, hey, you've already outsourced carrier payments, you just outsourced it to someone you don't have a contract with, outsourced it to try and pay. You know, you've outsourced it to the factory companies, essentially paying the carrier. And so we say, hey, contract, the triad pay will take care of all the in a way processing. We'll make sure the carrier gets paid correctly and and we'll provide them a nice portal where they can come in and look at all their freight bills. And it took off.
Speaker 2:What do you think drove that massive increase in that kind of percent of the revenue that was going back or going through factors From 2010 to 2018, like why such a big jump?
Speaker 1:the reason, what causes your father, my father?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean backhaulers, right, like so. So if you look at the regulation Right, the first intermediary business that was the industry that arose was was freight brokers back. And so, as freight brokers, took market share as that idea and so you're part of the problem too, because you'd be a molo right like you guys. You took so much share of for hire transportation and pushed it in the intermediaries. What that allowed to happen, there's two effects. It allowed smaller carriers to access more freight. So you have small carriers, five trucks or less hauling freight for an hyzer push coca-cola, but they would have never had access to that freight.
Speaker 1:For the consolidation effect of the intermediaries, the secondary factors they ended up working with a lot more customers. Back in the 90s carriers would have a handful of customers, maybe five, and they would work with the same customer. So billions a lot easier. When you got five customers, you know your wife or your, your aunt can like manage that more easily. But then, when you're talking about some of these carriers were working with a hundred brokers a year and they needed they make sure they weren't gonna get ripped off like they weren't gonna get paid right, because there's a lot of Failures and the small tail of the broker market that's where factoring took off is like they outsourced, basically, their billing department the carriers did to these factory companies who would get them cast faster and also manage all the craziness of billing all these people. Yep, okay, that's my, that's my opinion.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm picking up what you're putting down. So you get involved and try and pay. You take over a CEO. What was that like? Building that business out as part of a publicly traded bank? So you went from kind of your first foray into entrepreneurship You're running your own show chaos, there's Just all this different stuff going on and now you're making the move to it's kind of entrepreneurial still, but it's within a bigger publicly traded bank situation. That's that's challenging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I, they should have fired. They should have fired me a lot like. There's a lot of times I should have been just been like, okay, you crossed the line, like we're done. But basically what happened was they created this box and they, like they put padded walls around the box and they let me live in the box and just make sure that I didn't blow up outside the box. You know, because we ran hot and like To the banking regulators that they ever hear this like gale even made sure everything was audited and done in the control environment.
Speaker 1:It was all done correctly, but she gave me yelling, was the COO at triumph in I, I love that woman, like she, she is, she is like she is the, the, the, the czar of operations and audit and control at at triumph at the time.
Speaker 1:And so, like if you messed up, like gale was coming, gale made sure that you did not mess up over there and she, like she wasn't sure of me at first, but then she kind of like we got this great working relationship where I do like I figured out the things I needed to ask for For permission versus the things that I could ask her for forgiveness, and there was this very clear line and that was the subtlety of like our relationship.
Speaker 1:But they gave me a ton of runway and let me run really fast and have a lot of autonomy and tell it got to the point that it became material and then then that's when we made you know it was material number, amount of payments, material amount of impact earnings. And then it was like, hey, like you all have to grow up a little bit, like you can't just go out and Say yes to everything and make changes to the API or make you like you got, we've got to have a little more structure and process. So they let me run hot for like two or three years until it was like okay, there's ten billion dollars of payments flowing through this. Like we need, we need a lot more control, more process control.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, yeah. I'm curious why we haven't seen more advancement in factoring Through technology. Right, because, like to this day, you've still got brokers getting hundreds of calls a day from factors verifying payment amounts and whatnot. Like, how is that not been automated or digitized? Like, what am I missing there?
Speaker 1:Well, that's what trying to pay did. So that was like trying to pay like we did, we'd make the phone call stop. We give them a portal to verify and voices. We actually gave them an API where they could submit paperwork and verify and voices. So it's changed. It's gotten better. I would say it's gotten better. What makes it hard and slow to adopt? Innovation can, at times, move slowly in transportation because it's a low margin capital and some business People have a bunch of times to sit around and be innovating. You know like how many employees at Google, these software companies, that can just sit around and innovation departments and think about Cool things and they've got they have a lot more margin to spend dollars and time on that. Where is the trucking company or brokerage? You're dealing with pennies like you don't have time to just sit around and think about. Well, what are the great ways we can make this business better? Because you're in the grind and I think that tends to make innovation go a little more slowly in our industry. Again, that's a hot sports opinion.
Speaker 2:No, I would agree with that. I mean, I just I'm curious about Just factoring, is such an interesting business. To me seems similar to brokerage, where you've got a couple really big players and then there's a super long tail and it's you know it's service oriented but, like, one of the things I was curious about is like what can you sell beyond price in factoring? I mean what like, as you're trying to differentiate as a factor? It's like you know, the the, the the rate that I'm charging you is is you know, the most important thing, I would argue.
Speaker 2:But like what else are we selling beyond that? Like what's the service in factoring look like.
Speaker 1:Oh, man, you're, this is good stuff. Man, this is, this is deep water. So, yes, in all financial services here's the dirty little secret everything they're selling is green, flat and looks like everyone else's money. Right, you're selling money and so look at it. If you look at the macro trends in factory, it's it's a perfectly competitive market. So you can see that in that, when you know price in Factoring has declined like 50 60% over the last 15 years I try and tracks this, try and tracks this very closely and it has dropped dramatically. And it's not correlated interest rates, like. Interest rates are flat for a long period and it kept the factory rates kept coming down. So they 100% are competing on price.
Speaker 1:The other thing you see in perfectly competitive markets is the consolidation is driven by at different Elements and one of those elements is strategic sourcing channel. So in a perfectly competitive market, one way that you drive consolidation is have a unique advantage on how you source customers. So when you look at the top 10 factoring companies, they all kind of have something that gave them a strategic sourcing advantage. Either they were tied to a broker or a loadboard or a fuel stop, travel stop or truck stop. They had something that they could, that they could get in front of in the face of Carriers, that wasn't just buying Google AdWords to drive consolidation.
Speaker 1:Yep, to your point, though, what ultimately looks like in a long which, in my opinion, what speak like in my professor, like what happens in a long pale, like long term, perfectly competitive market, is the cost will move down as to the long run average cost of technology in that I think you're seeing today, is the lifestyle business factors is becoming harder to sell on. Hey, I'm your guide. Some carriers want that. You have one guy and you call him, and he not only does your invoices, he funds your bank account and he'll help you find loads. Sometimes you know he'll help you He'll log into your DAT or you know he'll let your dog that's the goal.
Speaker 2:That's the goal above and beyond sale. That that tends to work in trucking with owner operators too. So I'm picking up what you're putting down there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but that's not scalable and that's not the broader market. So I agree, yeah, we're seeing consolidation in factoring and the other things about perfectly competitive markets. As you see the the complemented offerings being brought in. So higher fuel maintenance, all that is now kind of standard for all the large factors. They have these rewards programs, insurance, like all the things that a carrier need, equipment, finance. They're tying all that together to create consolidated offerings so that you can get a lot of money. It becomes more difficult to just compete on One and a half percent discount rate, right the price.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, because I remember the just so much thinking about this when we were trying to think of how to differentiate a molo and there was a point where we were gonna go down the rewards loyalty Program type deal and ultimately didn't see enough benefit in it. But like that's that you just spend so much time thinking of how to differentiate, and I've now thought about factoring. I'm like man. It feels very similar to what we're going through in brokerage, and I think one Specific thing that is interesting to me. You often hear people talk about the market and how it's moving, and it's always cyclical. It's everything cyclical, and just you know trust that it's gone up for the last year and a half. It'll come down, because that's what has always happened.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing to me, though, is like we don't have that much history on our side that shows us like a true long-term trend. We've got about 40 years for the year dating back to deregulation, and you've seen a couple things now happen in the last 10 years that are taking us well beyond anything like. The impact could be substantial. One is the technology that supply, and two is the amount of competition, and we might actually just be seeing the market mature to a point where the competition is at its peak. The technology is having as substantial of an impact as it can and my concern is does that mean we're we're gonna hit a unsustainable margin level For everyone, or for at least a lot of players? That will drive out some more competition. I don't know. I mean, these are things I don't have the answers to, but the things I'm curious about. I don't know if you have any thoughts.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm loving that, did that, that model, that that was good. That's good stuff. I.
Speaker 2:Know it is I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean in like to even keep going on what you're saying and focus in on 20, so just about 2018-19. The last four years, I mean you have up and down markets that are highly volatile because of exogenous shocks to the systems and tariffs and yield demand, aids and COVID shifting spending from services to goods. Like Unless we, yeah, yeah, like that's not a trend, that's a, that's a microcosm, like that's a little period in the broader trend, man, so okay, man, that is good. And when you think about, like freight brokerage, andrew, like there's obviously drive-in long over the road, like there's that component that's probably a large portion of the total dollars spent in freight brokerage, how do you, how do you think about the, the segmentation of? You know people that focus on heavy haul or you know temperature control or flatbed, like when your mind, when you look at see freight brokers, how big are those buckets, those other segments, I guess?
Speaker 2:So I think they're big enough to build your own little business in and be successful I mean I. So we, we were heavy on refrigerated early on me. My, my first foray into brokerage as a sales guy was refrigerated. So I worked with produce brokers initially and then the first big account I landed at, coyote was rich products, which was one of the largest frozen, privately owned frozen food companies in the country. So I just got my.
Speaker 2:You know I dip my toe in the refrigerated waters early and you know I think my, my overarching concern that I just kind of voiced is we're reaching a point of competition that is making the industry is close to commoditized and it's becoming really challenging to win on. I'm your guy, I'll go above and beyond on behalf of you and and that's why you'll be loyal to me forever, that's a really hard business to scale. So when I think about like if I were to do it again, whether I was gonna start a brokerage or start a factor in company or whatever it was, let's, let's key in on brokerage here, because that's, I guess, my, my forte I Do think if it's in three years and five years like, there's that part of me that worries. We're actually getting to a point where it's gonna be too challenging for someone new to come in and make a big splash Because there's just not anything that different about what they're doing. I think that's more true with the Drive and traditional one pick, one stop, live load, live unload.
Speaker 2:The freight that everybody wants and is easiest to move, I Think is gonna be more and more challenging to start a business and grow with you get into refrigerated, especially with where insurance costs are going like that. The more people are shy away from these things because of changes happening, the more that's where the business probably has a chance to survive and grow and thrive is if you can create the right solutions for that. So One one element is to say I'm gonna go start a brokerage and focus on oversized, over dimensional and Refrigerated like the things that are way more challenging to move, take longer to figure out. But once I do it's a stickier relationship because the next guy is not working as hard to figure it out and he's gonna struggle to find the right solution. Or it's going and building the solution through technology, through a highway type product To solve for some of these challenges and sell that and mass to all the players that are trying to play the game I.
Speaker 1:I love this. This is so fun, this is such a great okay In. You know, there's not a whole lot of other, there's not a ton of other markets where you have service providers in commodities. Right, there's service providers in commodities, not a whole bunch of others. I mean there's brokers and livestock and grain and things like that. But like this idea of being a service provider on top of a commodity, but a commodity that has to physically move out in the world, like it's interesting. There's not a whole lot of other examples of, I think, in industries you know, going through the growth cycle and the maturation cycle, like we're talking about with freight brokerage and.
Speaker 1:But your point about the technology in the live on, low, low, drive in, like that business man, you can see it already. Like Combo made a shot at it, right, they try, but they. But the low cost competitor doesn't look like convoy, it looks like Walmart, right, there's no flash, there's no. Like pizzazz, it's like we're going to grind it out, beat it down. It's Robinson, right, like that's what they're good at. Like they, that's their business. They grind it out, get the low market, they have the scale and just, yeah, it's not flashy, the low cost provider is not flashy.
Speaker 2:No, I mean it's hard to look at convoy and feel like you've come to one like the overarching lesson learned, because there's so many elements to what they did.
Speaker 2:They did go for the flash and the pizzazz and like they spent all the money on marketing they could and there's no denying they came up with some pretty interesting marketing. I don't want to say sticks, but they kind of were marketing sticks. Um, at the same time, they invested a ton of money in building out products that were true solutions and then the last pieces they were, they tried to be the service provider at the same time. So, while you're building out all of these tools that I think are creating true innovation, you're also building out the marketing stick type stuff, but at the end of the day, you are owning the service provided. On all of this, I think one of the biggest challenges for them or mistakes they made was, uh, innovating at the expense of the customer and being willing to try new things that had significant impact to a customer in the moment and create a negative reputation. I think reputation is way more important than people give credit to in this industry, because while it's a huge industry, it is quite small, everybody knows everybody.
Speaker 2:The shippers all talk to each other and if you screw over one, you might as well screw over a hundred, and I think that that happened. I think that they created a really interesting the convoy go program. I think it was really interesting. I think the, the, the uh power only the trailer management tool they were building I think had potential to be a big success in the industry, at least be a solution in the industry. But I think the fact that they were creating all these tools while operating them under the convoy umbrella created a negative uh image for them amongst a lot of companies. I mean, I'll never forget for myself personally, this was a conversation with one of the largest shippers in the country and it was the first time I had met this individual and the first question he asked me was if I was a digital broker. And the reason he asked because if his follow up was when I said no, I don't consider ourselves that he said good because I've had such a bad uh experience with them that I'm turned off on on the concept. So to me it's like it's hard to look at convoy as like the example of of of anything, because there's just so much there and I think you have to break down each part individually and recognize like yes, there is room to innovate in the industry. There are areas that you can build, tools that you know other brokers have not figured out yet. Listen, no broker has effectively at scale figured out how to do drop trailer Like in a way that is right who's solution for for the shipper. And bear in mind, like I had shippers who, if I told them, you know they gave me a lane from from upstate New York to California and another lane from upstate New York to Georgia and they want to drops on both and it wasn't acceptable that I said okay, the carrier with the green trucks or green trailers that says America, those are going to California. And the carrier with the yellow trailers that say USA, those are going to Georgia, load those. You know that seems like a fairly simple plan and the shipper couldn't handle it. You know they wanted okay, your SCAC, you have one SCAC. So if, if, if, we load the yellow trailer going to California, that's on you to figure out how to navigate.
Speaker 2:So what I'm getting at is there are still solutions out there that people can create that can work for shippers. I mean that that's at the end of the day, that's. Another interesting element to this is that the buyer the shipper, so to speak is is is a unique player and their systems are the only systems that matter to create a solution for them. So you might come up with a drop solution that you think is going to work, but if a shipper won't change the way that they operate to accept that, then it doesn't work for them. And there are thousands and thousands of unique shippers out there. Who, who, who pay their own bills and they are their own. It's their game. You got to figure out how to play it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so good, it's so good. Yeah, I love it. It comes out with the shippers once and what they're willing to do, it doesn't matter where. All this beautiful, okay, you know what. You know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of these guys coming into the industry and say the industry is so broken. You tech guys that don't like it's not broken. Listen, listen. If you really really really need the truck to show up on time and you really really really needed to deliver on time, you need that all day, every day. Yeah, ruan, also, you dedicated prey like that. There's a price point. But if you don't want to pay that price point, it's just you're buying a different price point and welcome, and, yes, absolutely, we talk about service and on time. Yes, it doesn't matter what stratification of the quality spectrum you're on, you're always trying to increase your service level to gain more price. Right, that's but that. But it's not broken, it's just different. You're buying a different product. There's a dedicated product out there. It's just expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I agree with you. The industry is not broken. The industry has challenges and people do come into it. They're thinking that their business school taught them like the first thing is the problem, like what's the problem? The industry is broken. It's like don't give brokers enough credit for, frankly, how exceptional they can be at solving problems and, just frankly, getting shit done and even if it's through brute force and grit and grind to figure out how to get it done, brokers tend to be pretty exceptional when they want to be at solving problems and getting trucks moved and getting loads delivered when they need to, despite a ton of adverse situations. So I'm aligned with you there. So we're kind of jumping and driving all over the place.
Speaker 2:I'm going to bring us back on a path that I think makes sense here. So we've started dabbling in kind of solutions for the industry. Let's make the final jump from your second act to your third act, from Triumph Pay CEO to Highway. Yeah, let's get on the highway here. So how did Highway come to be? How did that idea come about? You were at Triumph Pay. Things were going swimmingly. As far as I know, things were going well. What inspired the change? What breathed life into that change?
Speaker 1:Yeah, as much as my brother's amazing and Gail Lehmann and Adam Nelson who were amazing in that. So much respect for him. I'm not built to operate in a public-featured bank and once Triumph Pay hit a materiality threshold they needed somebody else. I wasn't the right fit for them anymore. I ran too hot. And the nepotism thing with my brother he was getting beat up by investors all the time. Why is your younger brother running Triumph Pay? Well, aaron would be like, were you around the last four years and it just didn't matter. And then I was probably one of the first.
Speaker 1:I hate using the word cry and talking about seeing things, but the fraud I started to see it earlier, probably then in most people, because I was running Triumph Pay and we tracked this thing called reversal rate. So in a payments business, your ability to hit it right the first time is so important because you're dealing very low margins, you can't touch every payment, and so our reversal rate I think we targeted it to be around 20 basis points, 20, 30 basis points, meaning like 99.7% of payments. The first time they went out. They never came back. The second check was couldn't be delivered whatever, and I started to see that reversal rate go up and we've had so much success for so long making it go down, and started to go up and I started asking questions like, hey, why is this going up? I don't understand what's half causing. And then, as I went into it, I started to see all these requests for stop payments from brokers and I started to ask why are we stopping paying a carrier on a broker's request if they've already told us that the load is delivered and whatever? And that led me down the path of, like okay, they're double broken. And the broker just found out they double broke it and it wants the whole book, the payments on all these things.
Speaker 1:And and I was like, all right, well, let's go upstream and figure out what's going on here, right, like, how did we get to this point? Why are you hiring someone that's not really the carrier, not really a carrier? And like, when I went upstream, I saw like just, there was this gap, right, okay, so very broken, just 40 years old and it's still fun talking to you because, like you get it right, like banking has been around for thousands of years and so, like people have been trying to rip off banks for thousands of years, so we got a lot of practice in banking and like knowing, like how you're going to try and steal money from us. Right, there's checkkiting, is checkkiting. It's been around for a long time, but in freight brokerage it's so new.
Speaker 1:Like these things like KYC, know your customer right, or we can talk about, know your carrier doesn't exist, and we had carrier four and one and you know I don't want to mention competitors we had, you know, products out there that you could use, but they weren't like automated, they weren't looking at it in a digital sense. So my background is in building software and so all I did it was not, it wasn't genius, it's just I had background of building products, for I had background network security, and so you called your network, your carrier network, a network. So all I did was put two and two together and take the principles of identity and access management for networks and apply it to your carrier network. So like authentication, authorization, capability, management, and just did that in a way that made sense, that was very tailored to how a freight broker had you think about carriers, and so people like ask all the time like what's the magic bullet of highway?
Speaker 1:I'm like it's not, it's just it was built to do access management in a way for a freight broker that, like nothing, no one ever did, that it just didn't exist. And so, man, like it's been such a awesome ride and we've had so many wonderful people help us along the way, like we were so blessed to be where we are. God has provided us amazing opportunity and amazing people to help us along this journey, and so many early adopters and so many people that invested in what we were doing and believed in us. And this it's just. I don't know. I don't know why. I don't know why it's had so much success, but I know there's a purpose for it. God has a purpose for it and for us, and so I'm just trying to be respectful of that.
Speaker 2:So so the I appreciate that answer. So so the business started in what? When? Late 2018?
Speaker 1:No no 2021. 2021. 2021.
Speaker 2:Sorry, yeah, tell, my time is messed up with triumph. So you know it's, it's it's late. Covid, like what when you, when you realized okay, this is, this is an idea, like you told your brother like, hey, listen, I'm tired of the nepotism crap, I'm tired of the walls that's not how I said it, andrew.
Speaker 1:That's not how I said it, andrew. That's not how you deliver that.
Speaker 2:I'll stop putting words in your mouth Like you saw this opportunity and you said let's go. What did that look like? To get started? And walk me through how the highway team came to be and all that, I'm a developer.
Speaker 1:So, like the first thing I did is you know, kind of cooling down period trap or like getting into me to like just be quiet. Like you know, let me just be respectful of the process, right, it's a public company and you have executive leaving, and so I just wrote code for like months it's been the first part of 2022. I just wrote like all day, every day, grinding building, because the benefit of being a technical founder is developers. Like I have an idea and I know what I want. Like all I have to do is type. I don't have to like tell someone else and they, you know, like there's no relay, there's no lost in translation. Try to tell a developer what we want to build. It's just like let's go and I'm passionate about it because this is my idea. So I was writing code I mean 100 hours a week, easy, just because I loved it. It was like I was on fire for it.
Speaker 2:And you felt yourself literally creating a solution to a problem, so I get why that would be an inspiring thing to be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm also just like always super competitive and so like I'm just mad at everywhere, I just want to win. I just want to go win and win big. And so I saw the window was open because of some things that had happened with some incumbents, and like I knew there was this window and I knew if I didn't bust through it, someone else would, because it was wide open and people weren't getting great service and there's a lot of frauds everywhere. And so my first hire was Brittany. So we got the team back together and it was awesome. So she's our COO and I was like, hey, brittany, we're going to have to go get all these insurance certificates. It's this really nasty, hard problem that's not fun to scale and involves managing a bunch of people. Do you want to do it? And she's like, yeah, I got it. And so, like she has just taken that on full, full steam manages. Now I think there's like 120 people under her team.
Speaker 2:Just for insurance certificates.
Speaker 1:No carrier support, Customer support, all of it. Dude, okay, my passion is if you call us, we answer. I do not. We are never like the whole, like interview people that around the operations side of said hey, if you're missed, if your mantra is like, hey, how do we automate this to get people to stop calling us, to save money. And idea about margin. Like not only do I not want you, we have zero chance of ever making it here. Like if you call us, we're going to answer. And like my goal is to have us answering on the third ring. I think we're like 95% SLA on that. So we have 24, seven, 365 carriers across three different time zones. Because we just want if you call us, we answer. And like we just like a broker, like what we do is so integral to what they do their business they can't wait for us to respond to email. They need to call. And like that's what we want to provide us. We're always going to be happy you understand.
Speaker 2:you understand the time sensitivity of your own customer. Because if a cost, if a broker is trying to book a load last minute and they're putting a potential risky they're not sure carrier on it, the last thing they want is a snag on their vendor, who's who's just not answering to give them the information so they can't make an informed decision.
Speaker 1:Your mouth and God's ear. Man, that's it, that is it. And so we tell you, I tell my team we're not a software company, we're a service provider. We're a service provider to service providers that have a high level of standard of responsiveness to their customers. So guess what? We're going to be very, very responsive. It's in our cultural tenants be responsive. We track our SLAs on how fast we respond to carriers and brokers.
Speaker 1:And it's hard because the bad guys lie, they're lying to you and like, when they're trying to get in your network on a Friday afternoon and steal that load, they're going to tell you everything they can to get you to believe them. And so it is hard because we have to like our operations. People don't have the ability to fix things. When I say that they can't be socially engineered, the carrier can't sweet talk them into letting them pass. The bad guys finally figure this out and stop trying. But they can't talk their way out of it. On a Friday afternoon load, but that's really hard for the carrier sales rep who, this guy's, ran this load for me a lot or whatever. But hey, man, he has one truck on a schedule auto and he's on three other loads for three of the brokers. It's not real. What she's telling you is not real.
Speaker 2:So what's the best example that you've seen or best or worst, depending on how you're thinking about it of how, like the most creative way that you've seen, carriers come in and try to cheat the system to get a load from a broker?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't like to call them carriers. They're called like they're fake carriers, so I tried to use that. No, I learned that six months ago. A scammer A scammer, yeah, they're not a real carrier, because I was saying that in front of a carrier and they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, watch your language boy. And he was a big guy. So I watched my language, but the moment that I I thought we were running the store on these guys pretty well in the first six months, and then they hit us back and they found a way and we don't talk publicly about vectors, but this I would talk about this one because it's when I realized that I was playing against some like really really good people, like smart like, when I say good, I mean smart, not good people, you mean really strong scammers.
Speaker 1:Frickin, it was really, really smart. So what they did? We get a call. Hey, there's a stolen load, it's you know. Let's just say the name was William at gmailcom and I'm like, okay, well, let's investigate. Like where did you send the rate con? Oh, we send. They send the email and it's missing an I and William.
Speaker 1:And I'm like guys, like how many times, like just how to use the outlook plug, and then we go look and that's the census contact information. I'm like, oh well, like maybe it was just recently changed, but you have like the census data now at this point is just garbage. There's a whole fraud there. No, it's been that way for two years Now. I'm like in a loop. And so the guys in Texas, the carriers in Texas, so I call them and I'm like, hey, man, I'm going to come drive to your house and like we're going to have this conversation because you're telling me that you didn't get this rate con.
Speaker 1:Someone stole your identity. Dude, this is the email that's been there for two years. And you know like he's like I don't know who put that. I don't know anything. You know he said that's not me. You know his really note does have the I in it. And so I'm like looking up. And then there's these ways, there's ways we have to look at how old, relatively how old the email is. And I went and looked at that one, the one without the I, the one that stole the load, and it was like three weeks old.
Speaker 1:And I was like okay, Now, now, now I know what they did and I'm like what they did is they bought the data from the government and they went and looked for typos in emails and then they went and registered that email. They went and registered. They found that that guy had someone.
Speaker 2:Someone typoed on the government site and this person went out of their way to search for typoed emails on the government site, then created the actual email, use the email to steal the load, knowing that when you guys went to check the government site you would see a correct email and it wouldn't be flagged.
Speaker 1:And the SQL query to do that is really hard. Like it's not, it's not. Like it's not. Like a one-year old of not a one-year experience. Three experience oh, that's a. That's a guy that's got five, ten years. You know that's. I know what he did and it's it's good stuff, like it's that's. So that's my new this this.
Speaker 2:This is like a legitimate high stakes game where you know these, these, you know. To frame it again for everyone who's listening, like you know, highway wasn't around More than you know you know. Let's say, a year and a half ago, highway didn't exist and these, these scammers were. It wasn't that challenging for them to figure out how to scam a broker. Highway comes into the fold and over the course of say, six months, all of a sudden these scammers like, wow, you know, this has gotten harder for us. We need to change our ways. And it's kind of a game of battleship, like back and forth. Like we, okay, you know, highway created a system to stop the five ways you were stealing loads. And they say, well, we're not quitting, so we're gonna figure out a sixth.
Speaker 2:And that's when this exact example comes into the fold. So this isn't exactly like for you. You can just create a product, that product works and for the next ten years You're gonna ride off into the sunset banking new customers. Just, the product is great. This is like every day. The scammers are going back to work to figure out how to best you and you need to, you know, keep your arms up and keep creating new ways to detect their scamming. This am, I am.
Speaker 1:I getting this right. You're exactly right. Like it never. We never sleep. Like it's never, it's never good enough. They're always going to be trying to find ways in.
Speaker 1:And every time there's something, you're either, either something Happens like they've gotten, you know, like we're not perfect, we, we, it helps a ton and we think we reduce it by 98, 99 percent the fraud in your network. But when they get through, like I'm involved and I want to know how I want to, and I go look at all the details and I'm looking at their digital activity, I'm looking at everything I can to see if I can figure out what, how they did it. And I I've told my team we are bound by our responsibility to this community that every time something happens, they get through, we have to at least release one code change to fix it, to fix some way a portion of it. We may not solve it completely, but we are not like we're gonna hold ourselves, that we are bound that something has to change, because we're not gonna let these Guys get comfortable, that we're just gonna let them keep hitting us the same way. And they don't have task force, they don't have committees, they're not sitting around talking about new.
Speaker 1:They're continued, they're, they're, they're agile, they're, they're trying all new things every time, all the time, and so, like we have to be the same way, we have to be hyper responsive, and I think we surprised him a few times how fast we respond. Like there was one. We saw him hit one way in the morning and we had a patch by the afternoon and I think we surprised him a little bit on how fast we came, because they're used to not like you know that that's a response, so it's I kind of enjoy punching them back when we get them and then when we hit them. You know that's that's kind of fun. You know to get some, yeah, when's.
Speaker 2:No, yeah for sure. So the business has been around for not even two years, yet how many employees are on highway?
Speaker 1:We, you know, we have about a hundred and forty hundred and thirty people Total okay, and most of those report up through Brittany. Yeah, we have a big operation staff and then you know we have about thirty, forty ish. That are, you know, product development, sales, marketing, those type things Actually don't have anyone in marketing. I don't know why I said that we, my company, do the marketing and he does it's your marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my Mike gets it.
Speaker 1:You know the ginger, the ginger right. He shows up all along Lincoln.
Speaker 2:Easy to easy to see him.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So my question to you is you know, I, you, you are a technical founder, so you've got the chops to build out the systems yourself, and we all have weaknesses. So I'm the opposite I don't have the technical chops. So you know, if you were to ask me about something that I'm not great at, that would be my answer. I'm curious for your perspective, because you seem to have a A decent knack for the people skills in conjunction with with the technical stuff. So what's your biggest challenge as a CEO? What's your weak spot or thing that you're needing to work on the most?
Speaker 1:operations they need. They keep me far away as possible anything related to control environment operations.
Speaker 2:I'm not, because it's a situation where like if you get added to an email, that's operationally you're gonna just cause. You come in like a bull in a china shop causing chaos.
Speaker 1:It's so bad and it's so predictably bad every time to like ready to say we just not. Can you just like? Can you just not?
Speaker 2:let this one go. Yeah, look at the right way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's just like anything. Yeah, so they they write for you. Keep me out of all things. Operations related implementations, integrating things I Over simplify integrations, api integrations.
Speaker 1:I want to go too fast and, like you like, well, it's just really simple, just do these three things and that's not never the answer. It's just never the answer. You need to think about exceptions. You need to think about data structure. You need to think about what do we do when it goes wrong, what do they think that you know that piece of data means and what does it really mean? And you got to be patient and I don't, and I'm bad, and so, like McLeod, like God bless, they should knowledge like I have tried to over I'm like they say it's just really simple, just do this. And she's like Jordan, if we're gonna roll this out to 400 brokers, like I'm gonna make sure it works for 400 brokers for more than one time.
Speaker 1:So I'm bad at sales, like I, just I'm terrible. Probably Kaynee has revoked like it's a joke, but like really the board revoked my ability to price deals. Like I don't have the authority to quote price anymore Because I'm so bad at it, because I'd like just want people to use it, and so, like they all, if you'll use it, just face what you can't you know, shut up Jordan, like stop, stop, stop hockey. And so they legitimately like kind of like as a joke revoked my authority to quote price. So so I think John Lauer at Geo this was the last one that I like Quoted a price deal, so that's it.
Speaker 2:So you know, I'm trying to get to a lesson here for our listeners, because I feel the same way and it's like you have these Relationships with your executives where there's a lot of trust and we understand each other's flaws and the things we're not could end so kind of how, the way you said it, it's like we just have kind of the joke they kicked me, I can't price anymore. But I am curious, like To try to put this in in a way that's meaningful or a lesson for for listeners or, you know, aspiring leaders or those who at least can Understand their flaws like how have you really Either worked to improve the flaws or just created the right boundaries or delegated effectively to Get the most out of yourself and those around you Without kind of running into each other?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so scary hiring C-suite and like, and it's so, so scary. You know, bro, I mean you know, brother, like you've walked it hiring those expensive people like, oh, like Katie, it was scary the idea of how much you know to get him to come on board and like and then handing over the sales element of like he's gonna be off represent my brand, like I knew him. I mean I knew him and not a respect for him, but I didn't know him. I didn't like know as well as I know now I. That's very scary and I Would, I'd recommend a recommend mentors, people that can speak into it for you when you're hired. Like we have a thing in highway where every level they have to have people above that, people above you look into it. So when I hire C-suite they all interview with the board. So all the board members will talk to every C-suite hire and then the kind of level down like we have leadership team, look at our SVP level and and it provides accountability and make sure we're all on the same page. It helps us with culture carriers, like you talk about culture carriers here and that really helps us make sure like hey, is this someone I could sit next to on a long flight and enjoy talking to them, because that's that's important, like we enjoy being together.
Speaker 1:Okay, if I was talking to a young 25 year old who wanted to go start their own thing, I would say you have to be able to articulate to yourself truthfully why you're uniquely positioned to win. And so I talked to a lot of young guys that come and it's me ideas. I'm like that's great, like that's great you should build. I don't know what. One guy came to me. He's like you know, I had the idea for Uber Eats.
Speaker 1:I'm like that means nothing, like the idea you were not uniquely positioned to win, like you had no shot right, like that business required. So how are you uniquely positioned to win? And then the. The second thing I would say is Are you passionate about it? Like, are you really ready to make this year? All in all, all day, every day, you're not willing to quit your day job to go do it, then it's not, it's not a. You don't believe in it enough and the world is zero for one million and attempts to start something while keeping your day job and make the successful. Like that doesn't. You see, if you don't want to go all in like, stop talking about it like I.
Speaker 2:Think that's great. I'm curious, like the passion piece is interesting. Yeah, because it's like, what do you need to be passionate about? Like, do you need to be passionate at highway? Do you need to be passionate about Carrier identity or is it passion about Solving real problems that impact people's businesses and lives? Because, like, those are two different things and I don't know a ton of people who are really passionate about carrier Identity, just like I don't know a ton of people that were passionate about moving truckloads around, but I was. We were able to build a passionate team. So I'm curious if you could dive into that a little bit for more color. Oh yeah, so I Love this industry, I love Fred Brokered and I kind of like it's a stick now that I like.
Speaker 1:I've never covered a load, like all my friends like to make fun of me and I'm not sure if I'm gonna be passionate about it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be passionate about it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be passionate about it. I like to make fun of me that I've never covered a load or whatever. Now it's like a thing like I'm not going to, like I never will, because, like, I just want to be my thing, right, but I, I love this industry because you all are like the Frontier.
Speaker 1:It's like the last frontier of a, of a broker market, right, like it's the last frontier and I love how fast it moves. I love how you all, the first time, anybody, any first time you meet someone, you don't trust them brokers. It's just like this thing that you're like everything you're telling me you're lying and like so I would go, so try and pay, I'd be like they hate me and it will occur was like no, like you just need to show up two more times and then by the third time They'll be like you know, and in blood brothers, yeah. And then you're this community, once you're accepted in and you prove value and you prove trustworthy and you do what you say you're going to do, like this community is loyal to, to a fault, like loyal to almost giving too much grace at times. Um, so I just I just felt deeply in love with it and um, so I have so many friends that I care about and this, this industry, has made britney and I's a career and family like it's been.
Speaker 1:It's been so good to us that, um, I yeah, when, when something happens to one of my friends, like I'm, it's, it's the passion for like defense, like we need to go protect them because this is, this, is not on our watch, like we're not letting this happen. Um, so, yeah, it's not necessarily about carrier identity. Um, it's about you know how can we serve this community? Because I hate when people show up and say we're gonna disintermediate freight brokers. It drives me, drives me, I will, if you want to see me, twist off. I get some stranger to come up to me and say, like you know, we're gonna just be no freight brokers by the time I'm done here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll be like I like, honestly, obviously you don't know what you're talking about. You know, like I love twisting off on on people about that because it's such an integral part of the supply chain and it handles and it creates so much stability and smoothness in the transaction. It opens the door for small carriers to have access to large ship of freight that they would never have had access to before. And I know that doesn't always resonate and that's not always how that appears to certain people, but it's true and and man, there's some great brokers out there. There's some brokerages that like I've seen them go above and beyond for carriers when they're hurting, and I've also seen the bad stuff too, like I have it's not all rainbows and unicorns and polyana, but like there's there's a lot of good out there and I think this industry is poised for some really, really, really great things the next five years. And, um, I just want to be there to help be a Be a service provider to this, this fantastic industry.
Speaker 2:Where do you see highway being in five years?
Speaker 1:I'm in it, I love it. I love it too much. Um, and I'm in it and this is my, this is my masterpiece. Like I want to continue to build and solve things for brokers.
Speaker 2:Do you think you could get to a point where the top 200 brokers are all highway customers?
Speaker 1:In some way I yeah, on some way. I hope in some way I hope you can provide value to any. You know, to everyone, um, and the value where they decided to get their credit card. Um, I don't think we'll do all things for all of them. I mean, it's Brokers are different. Brokers are the big In that segment you just mentioned. Like it triggers a thing in my head because that segment there's a lot of differentiation in the types of brokers. Like there's a lot of large reefer brokers, there's a lot of. There's heavy haul brokers, there's some really big flatbed brokers in there. There's like I'm just thinking through the names and faces and like they're all a little different and and um, and so, yeah, they probably won't use for everything, but man, I sure hope we get to serve all 200 of them. That would be awesome.
Speaker 2:Do you see, like, like, obviously the carrier identity is the flagship of what highway is. Do you see it expanding beyond that into something? Is there a frontier you're interested in that you? You're not yet there yet, but it's a problem you're contemplating, trying to solve, like, how do you think about that? Yeah, it's a very identity enough.
Speaker 1:It's, it's, it's enough for right now, like it's all we're eating right now. Like, if you know, you say sometimes you need to bear, sometimes the very two, like we need to focus on, on finish eating this. I think about things how we could help with better integration of, you know, better integration of the carrier, assistance to the broker, just better communication. So much conflict is all about Miscommunication of expector. You know, I met expectations. It's generally From miscommunication, and if there just was better communication to that carrier sales rep.
Speaker 1:But what's really happening out there, like in my mind, like what I want highway to be, is like this window, because right now, in five years of the for sure, carrier sales rep should book carriers without any visibility to whether they were really there or not, whether they were really able to pick up the load. And I just have this visual in my head of like highways, this window for the carrier sales rep, like in their monitor that lets them see through Into what's happening in the physical world. And so, yeah, anything I can do to bring, and with our ELD connections that we have now, like we really do bring that and and my dream is like five years from now, I carry sales reps. Like man, I can't see you in highway, I can't see where you are and I can't know who you are. Like, I want to be no chance. I'm giving you this load, like yeah, like let's, and that's when fraud goes to die. It's going to become so expensive To do, you know.
Speaker 2:I'm picking up what you're putting down. I like it. I'm team highway, thank you. So, uh, we'll wrap with this here then. So, um, it's been great getting to know you these last 90 minutes. Um, what, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned? And you know you're on your third business now, um, and this one. I can see the passion in it and and how much you love the problem you're solving. I also can speak to it, Um, knowing enough brokers who use it that there's a real problem you're solving. Um, what's, what's your, what's your advice? Um, that you would give to to the industry, to individuals in the industry, about, um, how to make an impact in our space, like, how to be valuable and create value, tangible value for your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'll talk, maybe like to the tech founders and like the tech people. There's a couple pillars that I feel really strongly about. The first is you're not Mark Zuckerberg. Like, stop trying to pretend like you're Mark Zuckerberg and build Facebook Like you're not. Like that's exception, you're the rule. Like, learn to live with the rule. So start out by solving a really specific problem that the customer wants you to solve. Like that is there. Don't start with this like, oh, we're gonna be this network, of network, this thing that like connects you know. Like no, you're not. Like you're not Mark Zuckerberg, buddy. Like, just go build something that solves problems, creates revenue, makes people's lives better. Like Tom Curie and Prasad, a cute, great example. Just like. Here's a problem. We're gonna solve appointment scheduling. We're gonna solve this one thing, okay. So kind of leads into the second thing, which is I tell guys that call me about this.
Speaker 1:I say focus plus energy equals impact. So if you have a high level of energy and a high level of focus, you create a high level of impact. You that is a law of gravity. Know that to your heart. Like, if you try and serve a bunch of different customer segments, you're gonna run out of focus and you're gonna run out of impact Like highway. The first 18 months there was a box and if you didn't fit in the box we couldn't work with you. Right, and it's just like we love you. We will come for you when we have that ability to integrate that TMS, but we can't solve the problem.
Speaker 2:Not our time yet.
Speaker 1:Not our time Makes sense. Yeah, and Zuckerberg. One is always funny to me when I say that one out loud, but the little one, what's the last thing I wanted to say? Ah, I got distracted. Oh, I had it and I lost it. I got distracted.
Speaker 2:It's there, zuckerberg, focus plus energy equals impact.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh you can't serve two masters. So okay, let's just for a second run back to convoy. Okay, they wanted to be a broker because they liked the TAM and they could raise a bunch of money at a high valuation for the TAM. But then they really wanted to be a software company because of the margins and stickiness and their current revenue. You can't serve two masters. You can't serve shippers and other brokers. Like that's not gonna work. If you're gonna pivot pivot, don't do a dead man's pivot which is like a half move and you just kind of like roll over and die One of the other. Dude, serve one master. You cannot serve two masters.
Speaker 1:And that's my message to people that want to build stuff for free brokers is like listen you, I will be loyal to you and I will help you, but if you ever catch wind that you are selling to both brokers and shippers, you're dead in my book. Like I will not help you, I won't be an advisor, I have nothing to do with you. Because you serve one master and maybe because of just a lot of this industry that you miss friends like I'm just that stuff's gotta stop right. Like serve one master because you know biblical. Like you'll love one and hate the other. So those are the, those are two masters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think those are all great pieces of advice. The third one maybe it's an extension of it, but I think have integrity with what you're building and what you're communicating in mass, because I think that's part of the two master concept. I see where it's like a company will come out and say this is who we are and this is what we do, and behind the curtain, what they do is something completely different, that contradicts what they initially said. A lot of times you're seeing this in the vendor space who also happened to be brokers, where it's like we're a procurement platform for shippers but low key, 80% of our revenue is just standard free broker Like that stuff I don't love, you know, or call it out is come out and say we are a procurement platform.
Speaker 2:That also is a brokerage. We do them both. Okay, at least you're honest with me about that. I can get behind that a little bit more. But say what you do, what you say you're going to do, and be who you say you are, or just an extension of your cancer of two masters point.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and then look in like everyone wants to, like I'm not a fool, everyone wants to be a software company the higher margins, the current revenue, better valuations, whatever. But, dude, our time is small. Our time is small compared to the time you play in, and so you can't try and do both convoy. Like you can't raise a billion. Like dude highway will never be a billion dollar company. Like I don't know how to tell you, like the physical world we occupy there's just not enough brokers, right. There's just not enough revenue. Like, just won't be. And I'm okay with that because I'm not an arrogant, greedy fool that needs to, you know, enrich himself to the point of, you know, being gorgeous, right. But if you want to play in a big game, you can't be in software because it's in freight tech, software. It's just not that big. Just not that big, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm picking up what you're putting out.
Speaker 1:A lot of hot sports opinions, man. This has been so flawed.
Speaker 2:Hot hot freight opinions. Listen, it's been great Hot freight opinions.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for inviting me. Man, I look up to you and your legacy and just have a ton of respect and it's just an honor to like get to be here and speak with you.
Speaker 2:It's been great. It's been great getting to know you and I appreciate your time and energy that you've brought. You've got a great energy to you and I think our audience will feel that and certainly see it if they watch this on YouTube, which is now one way to watch these shows on YouTube If that three of them go out on YouTube for the full video. We're doing lots of crazy things making hand signs, not really, but we're trying to have fun with it. So thank you to our audience for joining us for another episode of the Frey Pod. We'll be back again soon. Bye-bye Cool.
