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. #20: Kendra Tucker
We are joined this week by Kendra Tucker, CEO of Truckstop. Our conversation starts with Kendra's pre-freight career, where she earned an International Studies degree at University of Chicago before spending the bulk of her professional time helping build CEB into an organic $500 million organization. She began in the Product org but found an adeptness at working with and understanding the needs of CEB's customers, which eventually led her to the Sales org. She rose the ranks over her twelve years with CEB and learned invaluable lessons that she still applies today at Truckstop.
One point that was abundantly clear in our conversation was the importance of having empathy for, and understanding, the customer. Truckstop's customer base includes truck drivers and freight brokers. As Kendra came into her role at Truckstop, one of the first things she did was a ride-along with an owner operator, Wayne, and longtime Truckstop customer. This experience opened her eyes to the day-to-day life of our nation's truck drivers, and Kendra felt a relatability to many drivers with a similar immigrant backstory to her own. One truth for Kendra from this experience was the validity of the American dream, something Truckstop is helping it's customers pursue through it's technology platform to improve the life and productivity of America's truck drivers.
As the conversation progresses, we talk about the evolution and maturation of Truckstop over the years. We talk about business strategy, and how Truckstop is focused on trust as a pillar to drive growth across the entire life cycle of a load. Through acquisitions, Truckstop has moved into factoring, carrier identity through RMIS, and productivity through FreightFriend. Truckstop wants to be the place that truckers can come to make their business better, end to end.
We close our journey with an exploration of the critical role trust and transparency play within the freight community. As we delve into Truckstop's strategic endeavors to combat fraud and enhance broker confidence, we also examine the human side of tech business. Kendra Tucker's rise to CEO is a testament to the transformative power of personal growth, empathy in leadership, and the enduring bonds within the transport sector. It's a narrative that celebrates the complexity, community, and the often-overlooked allure of the freight industry—an industry that tends to hook its professionals for a lifetime.
***This episode is brought to you by Rapido
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*** 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.
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- 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. ***
Hey listeners, before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out and word to our sponsor, our very first sponsor, rapido Solutions Group, danny Frisco and Roberto Acasa, two longtime friends of mine, guys I've known for 10 plus years, the CEO and COO respectively, and co-founders of Rapido Solutions Group. These guys know what they're doing. I'm excited to be partnering with them to give you a little glimpse into their business. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near-shore talent to scale efficiently, operate on par with US-based teams and deliver superior customer service. These guys work with businesses from all sides of the industry 3PLs, carriers, logistics, software companies wherever it may be. They'll build out a team and support whatever roles you need, whether it's customer or carrier, sales support, back office or tech services.
Speaker 1:These guys know logistics. They know people. It's what sets them apart in this industry. They're driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. In the current marketing conditions, where everyone is trying to be more efficient, do more with less. Near shoring is the latest and greatest tactic that companies are deploying to do so, and Rapido is a tremendous solution for you. So check them out at gorapidocom and thank you again for being a sponsor to our show, a great partner. We look forward to working with you To our listeners. That's it. Let's get the show on the road.
Speaker 2:All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I've given you about three weeks off from our last episode. That is my fault. I don't want to admit I've been slacking, but I did start a real job. You guys know I've been looking for gainful employment for about a year now, so I did embark on my new role at Mastery. We're not going to spend a ton of time talking about that today, though, because I've got a wonderful guest here. Ceo of Truck Stop, kendra Tucker. Thank you for joining me today. How are you?
Speaker 3:I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me and congrats on the new job.
Speaker 2:Thank you, a long time coming. I spent a year doing nothing, and I don't know if you've taken a year off before, but it's not for someone like me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you get antsy. I have definitely taken 10 months off. I found, though, that it took me at least two months to completely decompress. Like physically, to get yourself to a place where you Right Like in the mental state where you could appreciate I don't actually have to do anything today. I could do nothing today. So you know that takes a while to shift into that gear.
Speaker 2:It takes a while to turn that off. It also takes a while to turn it back on if you've been gone for a while. So, as someone who spent a year not working, jumping back into it of oh, it's 8 am, we should be productive at this point versus laying in bed Not that I'm admitting that. That's how I spent a lot of my time.
Speaker 3:Right, no, no, you never would have done that on your year off.
Speaker 2:No, you were up and at them at 7 am Every morning grinding into nothing.
Speaker 1:Into nothing, exactly.
Speaker 2:So let's get this thing going. I was contemplating a number of ways to start with you, I think, similar to a recent episode I did with another freight tech CEO who didn't come from the industry. I always find it interesting to figure out how to jump into your background well enough. So what I saw, what I learned, was that you were an international studies major at the University of Chicago, and I chose to start there. So what dreams did young Kendra Tucker have at 19, 20 years old, as she was trying to figure out her life? I assume it wasn't to one day be the CEO of the Hinge for Trucking.
Speaker 1:At least not yet.
Speaker 3:Not yet.
Speaker 1:So take me back there.
Speaker 3:Where was your head as you were in school and what you were trying to do with your life as a young 20-something on the University of Chicago campus where, if you know anything about UChicago undergrad, you're really just trying to survive it. One of the things it's really proud of is being on a list of 400 party schools in the stack ranking. We were number 399 in party school ranking and so you know we put that on t-shirts, so it gives you a sense of the kind of nerd level I was at back in the day.
Speaker 2:I respect that.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean now I guess I can. At the time it was not very cool. Anyway. International studies if I can be super honest, I will tell you. One of the reasons for the international studies major was really simple, in that I could string together all the courses I wanted to take, and when you strung them together, they made up an international studies major. So it wasn't that. I was like, oh you know what, I'm definitely going to be Secretary of State or I'm going to be traveling the world or working for the State Department. It was literally like I like taking Spanish, I want to take econ, poli sci. I'm originally from the Bahamas, and so I'm just international in and of myself, and so I put all of those things together and I got an international studies degree.
Speaker 3:Honestly, at that point, though, you know, at Chicago it was all liberal arts, so Chicago didn't even have accounting classes or you know basic things that you could use in the real world, and so they. One of the things that you could do on the campus was take your degree and, over the summers, work for consulting firms or investment banking, and so that was actually my path was to take my liberal arts degree and figure out how to get into a big consulting firm or iBanking, and so I tried that out. I worked for a summer, actually, jp Morgan between my junior and senior year on the trading floor, which was really very cool. I got an offer at the end of the summer and I turned it down because I was like I'm not sure.
Speaker 3:Because I was like I don't know, I can't work 100 hours a week. It felt like a lot. Right, it was a lot. So instead I took a consulting job at the Gallup organization, which was a great start to my career. But yeah, I had no grant plans for the use of the international studies degree.
Speaker 2:And you found your way to CEB right, and that's where you spent the bulk of your pre-freight career.
Speaker 3:Yes, I spent something like I don't know 12 and a half years in the CEB ecosystem, which stood for the Corporate Executive Board, and the best way I can describe that business was one I talked about it as original SaaS, so original software as a service. Because when I started, there. I didn't even know that SaaS was yet a thing. It wasn't yet a cool buzzword.
Speaker 3:It wasn't a thing at all. What CV did was they basically took all of these best practice ideas and processes from different functions within a corporation. So if you were a CFO, you typically had a budgeting and a forecasting process. Or if you were a chief sales officer or a senior sales leader, you knew how to, you know, build a BDR organization. And CEB took all of those different best practice ideas and processes and documented it, and I describe it as like putting it in a virtual box, which was essentially our website, packaging it. So we turned it into a product and then we sold it on an annual basis for a subscription. So those subscriptions were 10s of 1000s to 100s of 1000s of dollars on an annual basis and we built. This was so insane at that point I don't even think we realized how great it was. We built a $500 million business organically doing that, and what was your role in that?
Speaker 2:So you started at the bottom right as like an analyst or salesperson?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I started at the bottom in the product organization, so being one of the pawns that was going out to the execs or the companies, collecting their artifacts which is what we call their documents that they used to template their processes, used to template their processes, and then doing tons of interviews with the customers, right the companies, to understand how they developed it, what they were doing with it, and then going back to the team and trying to put it into the product that we would then publish right as a document on our site. And so I did that for six years and rose the ranks in the product division. I got really good at talking to our customers, and so the sellers, the sales guys, would always say Tucker, join us on this call, and they somehow coerced me into doing their job and so I got. I liked it in the end.
Speaker 3:I love talking to the customers, I love hanging out with the crazy sales guys, and so one day a sales leader called me. He's like hey, I hear you're pretty good at this sales thing. I was like I am. He said yeah, that's what the sales guys are saying. He's like why don't you come over to sales? And at first I was like no, I'm a product person, I can't go to sales. And then we started talking about, like what you actually do in sales. And then he started talking to me about the commissions checks and I was like I got to go to sales.
Speaker 2:You should have led with the money.
Speaker 3:I know, I know what his sales pitch to me was you're doing these jobs for the sellers right now and they're getting the commission. And I was like, why am I doing that? That's not, that's not wise. I should change that path. So so anyway, then I moved into sales and I did that for the next six years.
Speaker 2:So I learned a lot, so I'm curious the lesson in cause. It's interesting. You had a product role by default, but the way you described what you were doing, I mean you were getting out in front of the customer, understanding how they used the product, what their needs were, what could be better I mean you were doing the sales function. I mean you were understanding the customer's needs and communicating them back to the team. I'm curious what lessons you feel like you learned that you're now in the CEO role. What are some of the early lessons you took from that that you now attribute to what?
Speaker 3:you're doing today. Yeah, our chief product officer at Truckstop, julia Lauren, and I I think we are super aligned on this, even though I wasn't in original SaaS and so I didn't have the same kind of like classically trained product experiences she's had or others have had. What I'll tell you is it taught me early on that it is really important to be incredibly empathetic to the customer. It doesn't matter if you're in product or sales. You really can't create value for them unless you understand who they are.
Speaker 3:So if you even look at me and my truck stop role, one of the things that I did early on in my CEO tenure was I got in a cab of a truck with a truck stop customer. You want to know why? Because I'm not a trucker. So it's really important that I maybe go spend some time with truckers and understand what it's like to be behind the wheel for hours and how you're trying to navigate 15 to 20 apps on a screen of your phone in order to find freight and what it means to actually do route planning and just the whole thing. Like the really understanding the customer's experience has always been critical to me. It's never been more critical. So if you work at Trucks Up right now and you spend time with me. You are so tired of me talking about how important it is that we understand our customers. We understand the language they speak and the needs and their dreams and what they hope to achieve. Like just, it is really important for us to understand who we serve.
Speaker 2:Well said You've taken. There's two talk tracks we're going to go down. One is the concept of empathy in business and that we got to spend some time there. The other is the lessons you learned from that trip with the driver. So we're going to start there, because that's a little, that's fun you just brought us there. So tell me about that experience. What was the eye opening? Because you were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed right into the industry. You didn't know anything about trucking, as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 3:No, no, no-transcript ELD and how they use it. So the first thing to know is that in getting to do a ride along, it actually takes a ton of prep work, and also we have to convince oos that I'm not gonna um cost them money yes, the owner operators.
Speaker 3:We've got to convince the owner operators that I'm not going to slow them down and they're still going to make money on this trip, right. So it takes some work to recruit, uh, the trekkers who will actually let me ride with them, so that I have to make sure I don't slow them down. So that was thing. One in the experience is, we get access to them, we go to truck stops and we see them and we spend time with them, or we go to mass. We just got back from mass. We spent a lot of time in their presence, but the ride along itself, right, we had to really carve out the time. Then the logistics of it were really important because I couldn't go the whole way.
Speaker 3:Wayne was going from Delaware to Maryland, so he was deadheading from Delaware to Hagerstown, maryland, going from a point in Maryland to basically Harrisburg, pennsylvania, right. So it was hours that we were going to ride together, but then he was going to continue on. He ended up going from Harrisburg to the Bronx, then from the Bronx back to Delaware, so I could only be with him for a leg, so I had to have another car that was basically following behind us. We had, like the camera crew that was there. You know, in the the end it was quite a production. So there was that. The logistics of it were a lot to manage. What was so great about writing with him was just the diversity of his experience. So he had worked for a shipper, it was a meat producer. So he was telling me oh my gosh, we had the best conversations. He was telling me about chicken breast and how the prime time for moving chicken breast is in January because everybody goes on the diet after the holidays.
Speaker 2:Okay, you scared me. I'm a big chicken breast guy. I'm not the healthiest eater, but chicken is like my honey hole. That's my sweet spot. I thought you were about to tell me something that I didn't want to know about chicken breast.
Speaker 3:I'm sure he could tell us that, but I, like you, eat a lot of chicken and I don't want to know those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you ruined that for me today, I would have been very sad because there's not a lot when you're trying to be healthy like this. I know there's not a lot.
Speaker 3:So anyway, he moved chicken breast, he was a shipper, then he had worked for a broker and he'd done that for a number of years and then he'd been out on his own as an OO.
Speaker 3:And just the experience that he had and how he could tell me about it and the pieces, the nuggets that he pulled from each of those experiences and how they helped him run his business, was really interesting.
Speaker 3:He really helped me understand how he was using tech on his phone and actually we spent a fair amount of time on that journey trying to help him get the second leg of his trip. So we had the first leg, he had the third leg, but he didn't have the connector between Pennsylvania and New York and so at one point I think I pop open my laptop, I'm like I'm on truck stop and I'm going to help you find this load, and in the end actually he did find the load on truck stop, which is really really great. So we had a blast. I mean, we talked about everything from we were talking about gardening and growing green peppers and the shortage at that time of green peppers in the US, and then we talked about what he listened to on the radio and one of his stations was gangster rap and I was like, wait, I didn't see it coming. We talked about just all kinds of things, so that's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a really great experience. My team was joking because they're like you don't have any shoes that are appropriate for a ride-along with a trucker. They're like you're going to be moving like heavy pallets of things. And I was joking with them because, in the end, what we were moving was bread, loads of bread, and so I took a picture of a load of bread dropping on my foot. I was bread loads of bread, and so I took a picture of a load of bread dropping on my foot. I was like guys.
Speaker 2:I'm okay, I survived it.
Speaker 3:I wore, you know, I wore Timberlake. There you go.
Speaker 1:That works Right, I thought, so that fits in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right. So some quality lessons there. And I think, listen, I spent from the time I was 16 until 21,. I spent that time period, and even when I was in school, talking to truck drivers and working with owner-operators. They are the lifeblood of the industry, the backbone of the industry, and the personality is what I personally liked so much about my role. I was a carrier sales rep, so it was my job to develop relationships with these folks, and this is back in 2006, 2007, 2008. So the load boards at the time were DAT, internet Truck Stop, as you were previously known, and Get Loaded was another one.
Speaker 1:We used GetLoadedcom I don't know what ended known and Get Loaded was another one we used getloadedcom.
Speaker 2:I don't know what ended up happening to Get Loaded, but yeah, we'd pop onto those sites and look for trucks and then, once I talked to them, I'd try to become friends with them and it's just the diversity of the experience of the individual and the life they've led A lot of my guys were not from the United States led a lot of my guys were not from the united states. So I had owner operators from um, from nigeria, from serbia, from jamaica, um, uh, from nicaragua and just like you know, talking to these guys about freight. I mean, just, I enjoyed that, that part of the job. So yeah, um, I get why you, you enjoyed that as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I am. One of the lesser known facts about me is that I myself am an immigrant. Like I said, I'm originally from the Bahamas and my family came here in the early 90s. I was 11. And coming here without any family being here, without any, I don't know. My parents came here to go to college and when my dad hadn't gone to college, he came here in his mid-30s to go to college, completely disrupted our life in the Bahamas and we moved from the Bahamas to Nebraska and he spent five years in college Wait a second.
Speaker 2:He got into school in Nebraska, or like he threw a dart at a map and he hit right in the center of the country and Nebraska was where it was Like help me understand that I did gloss over that right. So it's so normal to me. You know just normal immigration path Bahamas to Nebraska, right exactly.
Speaker 3:It's normal for me? I guess no that's fair.
Speaker 3:Anyway. So we were in the Bahamas, my dad hadn't gone to school, he was running a chain of jewelry stores. He was doing well, but he felt like he couldn't get ahead enough and so he shopped himself to all these different schools in the US and the one that gave him the best scholarship and financial package was the University of Nebraska at Kearney. And so I went to Kearney, nebraska, and I lived there for four years. I went to middle school. I did like six, seven, eight, maybe it was three years grade there. I did all middle school in Kearney, nebraska, and then I went to high school in Lincoln, nebraska.
Speaker 3:So the point of me saying this is much like many of the owner operators in particular that I meet who are from other countries or who are from this country, the thing that I feel, I don't know. I just I feel like we're kindred spirits, as I so deeply believe in the American dream and I believe that they so deeply believe in American dream too, and they're working hard every day for the good, honest living, just like my parents were when they came here. And so I really relate. I love being able to support them and then get to know them. Like I know, I don't look like a trucker. I know I'm not an actual trucker, but I feel like we have the same kind of spirit inside.
Speaker 2:I respect that. I think for one, if you're in freight or if you've worked in at least retail, grocery, retail type freight at some point in your life, you do know where? Kearney, nebraska is.
Speaker 2:And it's a perfect example of you hear a state and you're like, okay, it's not that bad to move a load into Nebraska. And then you find where Kearney is and you're like, oh shit. Sorry, I shouldn't be swearing, but Kear Carney is not an easy place to move a load to. There is going to be quite a bit of deadhead coming out of there. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You need to get to like Grand Island. You've got to get to at least Lincoln, yeah.
Speaker 2:But I do really appreciate your perspective, which I think is the right word to think about here, because, depending on how you allow your attention to, or depending on what you allow yourself to see in social media and and between all the political stuff going on these days, it's like you often hear the other side of that, about how everything's so bad and whatnot. But the reality is that, like, the American dream is still as alive as ever and if you're willing to put your head down and do the work and make an opportunity for yourself, whether you're 11 years old, moving from Bahamas to Kearney, nebraska, or you're trying to become a truck driver, like, the opportunity is there. It's just a matter of how you navigate what's in front of you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and if we can use technology to help make it easier, I'm for it. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Plug in truck stop.
Speaker 3:So that's, right.
Speaker 2:So okay, so we went down that path.
Speaker 2:I you actually kind of just brought me back to the empathy piece a little bit in in, a little bit in kind of the respect that you have for all these drivers, I think largely because of the empathy you have towards them, given your own situation.
Speaker 2:But I do think something you said in talking about being a CEO and the thing that your team is most tired of hearing you say that's an interesting thing to think about. From my, from my time as CEO, it's like I think about. I would think about that too is like what? What is the one thing that people are probably most tired of hearing you say? And if you think about that, like that does represent, like what matters to you most, I think, as a CEO, or your identity as the CEO is, you know what is the message that I am most often preaching to my team? And in a service type business like mine and Frey Brokerage like yours, the voice of the customer is the most important thing or one of the most important things, and being able to have empathy for the position that they're in is critical.
Speaker 2:So I guess my question to you is what are some things that you've done since you're coming into the role of CEO to kind of ingratiate or ingrain that kind of empathetic mindset throughout the business, other than just kind of beating it into their heads every day in your one-on-ones?
Speaker 3:That's right. I probably have to lay off that now. So I'll talk about one of the most recent things actually I did, which is we just did this at the start of the year. I went back and I looked at the truck stop values, which have been the same for probably at least a decade, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the values. There's six of them in total. Nothing wrong with the values there's six of them in total.
Speaker 3:However, one of the things that was actually missing was a value that spoke very clearly to how much we care about our customers, and so we had one value. That was about putting quality first, which is still really important. But we put quality first in order to serve our customers best, and so we took that value and we expressed it differently, and now it reads put customers first and it is our first value. So the rest are still very important. They talk about service to others, acting with integrity, innovation, playing to win, et cetera, but that put customers first was really important, and we got you know, I thought really great feedback from around the company. One of our trucks up partners, as we call our employees internally said I think it's really bold that one of the first things that our senior leadership team did was for 24, was look at the values and then change it. It really sends a message about how deeply we care about being, as Julia has said, the nucleus of customer empathy and really working hard to make sure we deeply understand who our customers are so that way we can create products that actually bring them real value.
Speaker 3:For us as a tech business that serves transportation, derek Leathers actually said it really well on a panel at BGSA, I think at the beginning of this year, where he said something to the effect of you know, we can talk about technology and transportation all day, but at the end of the day, transportation is a physical goods business. I think it's really important for us to remember that as a tech firm, we don't get to do the touching and feeling of the physical goods, but keeping in mind that you're providing tech for people that are touching and feeling and distributing physical goods, it's really important. Otherwise, you're going to fall into the trap of trying to build tech for like tech people. That's. That's very different. So this is why I'm so I don't know determined, unrelenting about the focus on understanding our customers is. We are a tech company. We could fall into the trap of being tech people. We have to be tech people for transportation people. That's really important.
Speaker 2:I think it's an incredible point, derek, for those who don't know CEO of Werner, one of the largest publicly traded asset-based carriers in the industry. I think his words are very wise there, and yours as well in how you're echoing that. It's especially true in the trucking business, where there are plenty of companies, I would say, that have built technology for our industry that never gets used. And at the end of the day, if, if the, the person you're selling, to quote unquote the customer is not interested in what you're building, then your business isn't going to survive. And the interesting thing to me is that the truck driver and I don't mean to put this connotation a negative connotation, it's not what it is but truck drivers in general are resistant to change and, in some regards, resistant to specifically technological change.
Speaker 2:It's a very old school industry. The average age of the truck driver I think today you might know this better than I do, I think is mid 50s and not necessarily the most technologically savvy. That will change. Time will change that. That will change. I mean time will change that. But I'm curious for you specifically if there are any things you've seen or learned or points you'd call out specific to the truck driver, because that is part of your customer base and their resistance to technological change and just thoughts you have on that.
Speaker 3:Yes, they are definitely more tech resistant than other constituencies that I've served. So you know I was telling you about riding with Wayne on that trip. One of the things he said to me in the hours I was in his cab was he's like I'm still mad at you, you know, for changing the system over. And he was mad. This was great. He was mad at we have this. I think it might have been like the original platform that Trucks App was built on. We call it classic internally, yep.
Speaker 2:I remember that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like four or five iterations ago and he was mad that I think we finally we've had to sunset it. You can't keep it going, right, that's just. I mean, it's just proliferating tech debt. So he's like I want you to know I'm mad about that. He's like, but I do like some of the new features in the new app. So it was really interesting. Right to get his perspective. We see it whenever we make changes like that. You can see it because our net promoter score, which we use to measure our customer satisfaction with our product, you'll see it take a dip and then it recovers as they start to get used to the new features again. And then to your point. On that ride along. This is so great as I was meeting some of the other truckers who were at the dock when we were getting, when they were loading the bread, Wayne was introducing me to some of the other truckers and the way he was Like to get you in trouble?
Speaker 2:No, no.
Speaker 3:He was like he was really proud. So he was like hey, he leaned out of the window. He's like you know, he's in the driver's seat, I'm in the passenger seat. He leans out his window, rolls it like he rolls it down to this other trucker who's sitting next to us, also waiting to get loaded, and he says to the guy he's like hey, do you know the internet truck stop? And the guy was like yeah, I use the internet truck stop. He's like this is the CEO of the internet truck stop. I got her and what was great was we haven't been called the internet truck stop in like seven years.
Speaker 3:And so, anyway, I mean, that's not a guess about the technology. I guess my point is is that, you know, it just takes a while for adoption to catch on. Anything from us changing of our platform to us changing our name. Yeah, it takes a bit of time, which is another reason why we have to know our customers so well. So that way, as we change things, we're really changing it to be more usable, less friction, and they don't just feel like it's technology that's being shoved at them. Instead, they feel like I've got more control with what I'm doing, right, this actually helps enable what they're doing on a daily basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense. I mean I just think about the challenge of rolling out change to, and it can even be something so minuscule and the change might not actually have any impact to function. But maybe it's just aesthetic and you just moved a button from the left side to the right side of the app or the screen and there will be people who are unhappy with that. And I get it because I'm the same way, so I understand it. I'm curious you mentioned the net promoter score thing and I think part of the catalyst for this question is a personal issue that has to do with me. I'll at least bring it to the front, so you have that context. That has to do with me. I'll at least bring it to the front, so you have that context. But when I was at Molo I took negative customer feedback very seriously and personally almost. And if I ever saw that there was a customer unhappy with us for something, of course no-transcript. Or is this deteriorating our brand, things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we take it pretty seriously. So customer feedback in total, we take pretty seriously the NPS. We monitor, we are regularly surveying our customer base as they interact with our platform to get the NPS. So that is frequent, multiple times a day. We're capturing that and then we look at it in some on a monthly basis and we can actually see it as well by product line that we have.
Speaker 3:So we use the trend line on it as an indicator. So it's not necessarily the standalone number, but rather what's happening with the trend and did we predict it right? Did we know that that was going to happen? Because it can go down or up and it's hard to attribute. Well, it was because of these specific enhancements or it's because you know this particular functionality didn't work or something. So sometimes you can pinpoint it, sometimes you can't. What's even more helpful, particularly as we try to design and create new product, is getting customer verbatims, as we call it, so the open text, written comments that we get back. Our product team in particular, as well as our customer experience team, spends a lot of time pouring over the feedback that comes in through that channel and then we also particularly for our most strategic customers or largest customers who are not shy about offering their feedback to us. We get that feedback pretty directly Unsolicited.
Speaker 3:Unsolicited, and we appreciate it because then it spurs us to make really necessary changes because they are directly telling us. Look, here's how my workflow is structured. Here's how TruckStop is adding more clicks to the workflow, and so can you take out some clicks right in order to make it easier for us, or the carrier, sales rep or whoever it is, to do their jobs easier. So I cannot overstate how much we value the feedback because it helps us continue to earn the right to be in, how much we value the feedback because it helps us continue to earn the right to be in the workflow of our customers and helps us build a better product for them. So, yeah, we take it really seriously.
Speaker 2:And how would you define what TruckStop is today?
Speaker 3:So most people think TruckStop is a load board and TruckStop definitely has a load board at its core right when we were founded in 95, that's where we started.
Speaker 2:I was so curious how this exactly was going to are we this or that, or this is part of us, so keep going.
Speaker 3:So truck stop is more than a load board. We are more than a load board and the way we talk about it is. Truck Stop is a place where carriers, brokers in particular, can start, grow, build a business, regardless of what size they are. Behind the scenes. What powers Truck Stop today is we are now a connected ecosystem of multiple products and most importantly for our customers is that we have all these connected databases where we can put different data sets together and create recommendations now to our customers in a way that we couldn't before.
Speaker 3:So the way our customers interact with us would be we've got the load board right, which we internally call freight matching, because it's more than just loads on the board. It's got rates, data in it, there's matching capabilities, load recommendation, so it's more than just the load board, but colloquially load board. And we've got RMIS, so the automated onboarding, compliance monitoring software that we serve thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers with. And then we've got a factoring business as well and when you look at just how they come together, it really follows our customer along the freight lifecycle. So we're aiming to provide data and insights or solutions at multiple points across the freight lifecycle, and it becomes richer and richer the more we connect into it, hence the connected ecosystem. So that is what we do, what we're intending to build, what we continue to build is trust across relationships in the freight industry. So we do that through the products, but ultimately, a test is have we built trust between brokers, carriers, even shippers in some instances?
Speaker 2:So RMIS was bought in March of 21? That's right, right. And then when did the factoring business start, or was that an acquisition as well?
Speaker 3:It was an acquisition as well, so that happened in 2017. Oh, 2017.
Speaker 2:Okay, that one's been going on longer.
Speaker 3:You joined the company in 2020?. That's right 2020.
Speaker 2:Okay. So where I'm getting at here is it's an interesting evolution of the business. I completely follow how your path makes sense there. I'm curious when you came into the business at the time it was more than just a load board, so it was a load board plus factoring. Yeah, I'm curious from your perspective how has the strategy shifted in your time at the organization over the last four years from where it was to where it is now? What does that maturation look like? I see the trust aspect and I'm connecting all the dots. I'm just curious if you could put in your words how you've seen that strategy mature over the years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I joined TruckStop, you know, one of the things that was hot in the industry at large it wasn't just TruckStop was digital freight matching and everyone trying to figure out bucket now and bidding, and there was so much conversation and a lot of investment that took place and ultimately, I think, across the industry it certainly had some adoption. But you know see above right on what we said about carriers, oos, owner operators, in particular, being kind of resistant to doing things online I think no one saw as much adoption on the digital matching as we all had hoped Over time. For sure we continue to see adoption grow, but didn't go as fast as we wanted it to. So there was a really big focus on innovation and particularly in that space, innovation for sure is still a big part of our strategy. What we've pulled more to the fore, particularly as we brought on RMIS in 21 and then Freight Friend last summer, is something that's actually at the core of TruckStop. It is the trust piece and the transparency.
Speaker 3:So with RMIS, it being an industry leader in its space, was really us securing this foothold.
Speaker 3:It fit really nicely against our load board, which our customers will tell you they trust more than any other solution that they use and so putting RMIS right next to it only amplified like oh, this is a business that I can trust.
Speaker 3:That helps to bring transparency from load volumes to rates into now onboarding compliance. What I need to know about carriers With FreightFriend, what that does is actually expand the trust to have more control. So as we bring it into RMIS, it will actually give our customers more ability to expand or contract control their networks even more than they currently do. If you think about a small to mid-sized broker and the access they have to technology that helps them to get the most out of their carrier networks, they typically don't have their own dev teams or engineers and so with the Freight Friend technology we can actually help them create tech now that helps them manage their networks a little bit differently and hook it in to the information from RMIS and freight matching. So now it all comes into one view, hopefully a single pane of glass that gives them more control over how they manage the network and hopefully amplifies the trust part even more 100%.
Speaker 2:I'm not as familiar with Freight Friend but I'm very familiar with, I know of the business but I'm very familiar with RMIS, given that we used it. It is has always been the kind of industry standard for evaluating the integrity or legitimacy of carriers. And so what I think is really interesting and quite genius, frankly, of that move is it does give you that foothold and it puts a certain amount of confidence and trust that brokers now can have in the product. I want to not pivot, but there's a similar to how there's a negative connotation that exists around the word freight broker. You could argue something similar is true for load board, and not from every perspective, but from the shipper perspective. And there are plenty of shippers I've worked with in my time who have said outright to me, as we're signing the contract to work with them, that they ask you, do you use load boards? And any broker that says they don't is full of it because they do.
Speaker 2:But the aspect that you even feel compelled to say no or that you want to say no is all predicated on this negative connotation that shippers have around load boards and that it's this kind of dirty place to go get trucks. And let me first say I don't believe that's the case. I think that it's an outlet for, I'm sure, negative or bad actors to try to find freight and if you only use those actors, yeah, you're going to get bad results. But there are plenty of meaningful and great relationships that have been born out of the load board because it is a connector and there are good carriers and good brokers who are using them. But my question is around the connotation and how you think about that. You didn't mention shippers as a potential customer of yours, which I'm curious about too if that's in the future pipeline. But how do you think about that kind of negative connotation that exists around load boards and how do you combat that type of thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the negative connotation with load boards, particularly over the past year, has just had so much to do with fraud. Right, and I think we all agree, fraud has skyrocketed since the pandemic correction has really been happening. It's why we have always actually at Truck Stop. This is not new. Because of the pandemic correction we have always had a dedicated team, that a team of humans and the technology that actually roots out bad actors, and we have a 25-year-old database that keeps track of all of them as well. So I think last year we rooted out more than 10,000, just around 10,000 fraudulent or nefarious actors that we found trying to get in to TrackStop. And so we're proud of our track record of not having not being a load board that's known for fraud, but rather being a load board that people say pretty definitively they can trust. So that's thing one is. Hopefully just with the work that we're doing, that we continue to do, we help to mitigate some of that negative connotation.
Speaker 3:The second thing I'm curious what you've heard, but over the past year or so.
Speaker 3:Second thing I'm curious what you've heard, but over the past year or so I've actually heard that since the pandemic and the capacity crunch that existed in the pandemic, shippers have a different perspective on load boards, in that when things are really tight in the pandemic and you couldn't find someone to move your freight, they got a little more open with okay, we'll deal with the load boards if it's going to move our goods from point A to point B. So I've heard from some of our customers as we go to the different conferences that the tune has changed a bit. Right, whereas pre-pandemic there was more of what you were describing, there's now far more openness, because one, they had to and then two because they had decent experiences, right, they didn't have the terrible experiences that they might have predicted in the past, and so there's more openness now. I'm not saying that it's completely different, but there's more openness today than there was before the pandemic, which is kind of a silver lining, I guess, of us having gone through that. So that's been my experience, at least so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where I would add color is, I think you're you're a hundred percent spot on with respect to the changing tune that people sing, dependent on their needs and wants in the moment. So when you find yourself in a very tight market, like it was at the onset of the pandemic that first year, and you can't get your loads moved, yeah, whatever means to move it, you'll accept.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, market flips the other way, like we've seen for the last 18 months, and you get the opposite of people, and so I think the lesson there, or thought that I would point out, is one it's hard to generalize, or we should try not to overgeneralize, because, at the end of the day, whether it's a shipper, a broker or a carrier, their opinions are their own, and sometimes they're valid because they have seen enough data to support it, and sometimes they just believe it because they want to.
Speaker 1:There's not much you can do there. What?
Speaker 2:I'm curious about, though, is you mentioned that nearly 10,000 bad actors that you guys were able to fend off? It sounds like a lot of that work is done kind of behind the scenes, and it's not really being. It's just work that would be done behind the scenes. So if I'm a broker on the system, I wouldn't see it in my face. I don't see them fighting off the people.
Speaker 1:I'm like damn they're really defending us. I love them, that's right.
Speaker 2:I am curious from your perspective, because this is going to take us into maybe a social media type conversation. But do you feel like there's more you could do, maybe to vocalize or share that with the world around, how you're fighting it? Or, you know, I don't know if you had like, wanted posters, like we got this guy. I don't know, I'm just throwing stuff out there. Yeah, you get what I'm saying you know what.
Speaker 3:Honestly, I would tell you that Truxtop has always come from modest roots and so, truth be told, even in prior years, we haven't been the kind of company that says look at what we've done over the past year, the past like 12 to 15 months in particular, we have become more vocal about what we're doing in the industry, especially as we got customer feedback, and so we got a lot of customer feedback about here's the enhancements we want you guys to make in RMIS, and there's been a lot of discussion with our customers about here's the dozens of enhancements and improvements we've made. Here's the partnerships that we've built in order to really respond to fraud. We've done a pretty public partnership with the FBI, who wasn't up to speed on all that was happening in terms of cargo theft, especially when we think about the early part of 2023. So our general counsel, our chief technology officer, teamed up to do a set of educational sessions with the FBI to just help them understand what we were seeing in our data, on our board and then through RMIS as well.
Speaker 3:So there have definitely been pockets where we've been pretty vocal about what we've done, and then I think, honestly, we remain super open and welcoming, very willing to learn from our customers and so I hear, like I said, I hear directly from our customers as we launch and release and announce new things, they come back and say that's great, and here's what else we'd like to see from you also. So I think it's not that we've gone on a PR campaign, I guess about it, but certainly across our customer base about it, but certainly across our customer base. I can see what we have shared is really well received and we've been more vocal about it in the past 12 months than we perhaps were before Because, like I said we've been doing, we have this database that we've had for 25 years.
Speaker 1:That's valuable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. We've been protecting our customers against fraud for a while and it is like you said. It's one of those things where it's the absence of it that helps. You know that it's working right. It's the absence of it. So it's hard to get credit for the absence of something.
Speaker 2:Yes, I agree with that. That is definitely part of the challenge.
Speaker 3:So would you say that that's the number one issue that your business is navigating today is freight the past 12 to 15 months we do think that it's important because the cycle will change and times will change for us to talk about trust and not just fraud, right? Trust is more than fend off the bad guys. Trust is how do you want to set up your carrier network, right? Who do you want moving the high value loads versus the low value loads, and how do you set up standards so that way you've got as much control as you need over that, particularly when the cycle turns. So there's more.
Speaker 3:We know this right, we can feel it. There's more than just fraud to talk about. And at the same time, fraud can be incredibly painful, super expensive, and so we do spend. We want to make sure we're doing what we can to help our customers navigate that. But more and more I think, particularly hopefully is the cycle turns and we get out of this last 18 months, it'll switch again and then we'll be talking about how do you trust the capacity you're finding?
Speaker 2:Yep. So I think you bring up a very interesting talking point, which is kind of the need to not just play defense but also get out on offense. And so, as you think about kind of the strategy of the business overall, what are some of the more offensive type moves that you all are making, as you think kind of big picture of who truck stop will be? How do you build more trust? Is it differentiated or new service offerings, new lines of business? How are you thinking about that today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity for TruckStop, especially over the next few years.
Speaker 3:I think there are partnerships for us to continue to build with others who've done an exceptional job of building strong networks that would be complementary to ours.
Speaker 3:I think that you know when you talk about or when I describe here's the truck's upset of services. While everybody knows the load board, we really do intend to serve our customers across the freight lifecycle and while there's a number of nodes that we touch on that freight lifecycle, there's more that we can fill in and plan to, whether that be organically or inorganically. Over the next few years Our intention is to build trust at each one of those nodes through the products that we have and through partnerships that we we build and hopefully just continue earning the right to serve our customers every day. So, uh and that means that I don't want to lose sight of we will continue to evolve the products that we have as well that I I know I've made a big deal of saying we're more than a load board and we are a load board, and so it's really important to continue to drive value in that and continue to evolve as our customers need us to evolve on that part of our business, while still extending it across the rest of the freight life cycle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I really like thinking about, like strategically, how your business is so well positioned because you know, because, as you said, you're already touching a few nodes of the kind of life cycle and the others you can either build and tackle or partner with the right company so you can still support it Exactly. And at the end of the day you should be able to look at a board of the entire life cycle of the load and say we're helping in every aspect, whether it's something we own entirely or we're partnered with the right person. But when someone thinks of this aspect of a load, truck stop can come to mind in some fashion, in a positive, trusting way.
Speaker 3:That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about social media, because truck stop is far and away. If there's someone who deserves a raise, a truck stop it's whoever handles your social media accounts. I contemplated if I was going to put you on the spot and say that and we're not.
Speaker 1:I don't know what you're talking about, Andrew.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating, though, and I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. So for those that are unfamiliar, where should I start? I mean, truck Stop has someone, whoever their social media person or manager is who has become very active in the last 12 months or so on the internet, on social media, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, and they've done it with an art that is just beyond impressive and I think it's interesting. It's impressive because it's tapping into something that our industry is just so far behind on in general, especially from a corporate level. I mean, I think people are just starting to figure out personal branding in our industry, but corporate branding is not something that I've ever looked at a tech vendor in our space and been like they're really nailing it, but the kind of comedic touch and everything has just been really fun to kind of watch. So I'm curious how intentional is that? Was that a directive or someone?
Speaker 2:just got zealous, overzealous, and started doing it and then you were like huh interesting, this is making waves.
Speaker 3:Directive would be way too strong of a term. But how do I say this? You know I kind of alluded to it earlier. Trucks Up has a lot of great things going for it and we have typically been quieter in talking about it in a way that catches attention. We've been just quieter in years past past and I have created license and opportunity for us to be a little bit edgier and fun because, truthfully, it reflects, I think, who we are internally as well. We're kind of snarky sometimes but in you know good fun and we get a giggle over. You know just, you know how it is right. At work you get a giggle over just funny things or passing comments.
Speaker 3:And so we were purposeful in how we built out and who we sought to bring in for social media and across our marketing team actually. So our marketing team has undergone a bit of change over the past 12 months or so and it's really starting to settle in, and so the creative minds over there. It's showing up a lot on social media, but there's a team of people behind the scenes that think about messaging, that think about how we're going to deliver it. That you know this us being so focused on trust as we have been for the 29 years that we've been in existence is really important for us to put that out there and showcase it, but also just be personable and relatable, right as the people that we are behind the scenes. So the creative team, the social team, is doing a really terrific job of amplifying the parts of the brand I think at TrexApp that we just hadn't brought to light out to the public before. So it is really fun. We have a good time with it for sure.
Speaker 2:I'm glad it's cool to see it's given life to something that was lifeless and in a way that's just really actually, I think, meaningful. It's crazy to me but like little jokes that your social media person is making on the internet. It's like hitting home with people. It's just fun to see kind of the product of whether it's you coming in and giving that freedom or that purposeful direction. But it's hard not to think back to your comments about the importance of empathy and then find ourselves here 30 minutes later and you're talking about the need to be relatable. You can't get to one without the other and you know to be relatable you have to have empathy for what the other side is, who they are, and be able to relate to it. So kudos and credit there.
Speaker 2:Because it's hard to differentiate, I think in the load board game Not like I'm sure there are. You know I'm just speaking as someone who's been a user of all the load boards. Once they get to a certain point you're like, okay, it's a load board versus a load board, but you've actually breathed life into this thing. Where it's your competitor is a little more stale. In that regard I'm not trying to get into this kind of who's who game, but I'll just leave it there.
Speaker 3:We're having fun and hopefully more to come. It's not just to show, hopefully, the industry and our customers. Here's just a little bit more that adds more context, I guess texture, to who we are as a business, but also for people who might think about working at truck stop as well. I want, I really want us to be able to exude. Here's the kind of people we are in this business. We take our customers seriously, we don't take ourselves too seriously all of the time and we're fun to hang out with and we crack jokes, we laugh.
Speaker 3:That's good yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think we'll close with this topic. And that is kind of your own path to the CEO seat. So you started at Truck Stop as the Chief Revenue Officer, correct?
Speaker 3:That is right.
Speaker 2:When you came into the business, did you have your sights set on the CEO seat or where were you at mentally with respect to that?
Speaker 3:I was coming off that 10 months of having not worked, and part of it was I was on maternity leave. So when I joined Truck Stop, I had an eight-month-old baby my only child so I was trying to figure out how to be a mom. That I'm working mom, it was the pandemic. No, I was not thinking about being CEO at Truck Stop.
Speaker 2:The most amount of responsibility possible was not in mind as the goal.
Speaker 3:No, I did not have that as a goal at all and it wasn't that in life. I said you know, yes, I'd love to make a run at being a CEO at some point, but I certainly wouldn't have said that truck stop was going to be the place where that would have happened. No, I did not expect it.
Speaker 2:And so, when that opportunity presented itself, Trent was the last CEO right.
Speaker 3:No, it was Paris. So Trent was the COO when I joined, and then he left to become the CEO at Assertus, and Paris Cole was the CEO. And so here's what the trajectory, here's how it went. The CEO and so here's what the trajectory, here's how it went was I was CRO, so I was leading the sales and customer teams for about a year or so, and then Paris I think Trent had just left and so Paris said look, we don't have anyone in a COO role. He's like I'm thinking about getting a COO. And I was like, oh, you know, here's a profile you might want to consider. And he's like I was thinking about you in the COO role. And I was like, oh, you know, here's a profile you might want to consider. And he's like I was thinking about you in the COO role. And I said, oh, okay, yeah, we could talk about that. And so I did that from September until about December.
Speaker 3:And Paris I live right outside DC, in Arlington, virginia, and Paris is in Boise and so he said to me in December this is December 21,. He's like I'm going to come out and see you. He's like I want to just spend a day with you going over stuff for 2022. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. I made a whole PowerPoint deck. I was ready, and so he comes. We meet in this conference room, this shared workspace in DC, and I'm ready to go with my PowerPoint. He's like hang on. He's like I need to.
Speaker 2:I need to tell you something which is I want you to know. I'm going to retire in 22.
Speaker 3:And I was like, oh my gosh. And he's like yeah, so you don't want to go over this deck. Exactly, Actually, my first thought was like, oh man, who's going to be the CEO? Because I really love working with Paris, I'm worried. What is this going to mean for me? And he's like and I'd like you to be the CEO. And I swear to you I could not have been more stunned.
Speaker 1:But why I?
Speaker 2:know, I don't know when it was over the COO and CEO. Neither time was there a selfish, not even selfish, but just like a self-promotional. I can do this thought, or this should be me. No, I didn't.
Speaker 3:So hindsight is really beneficial. Right, like you're hearing me connect to the dots, but I was doing my day job, right? So when I said hey, I came up with the whole deck, it's because I was like Paris, here's the list of things I've got at least on my agenda that I think we should think about for 22. So I was in my lane doing my job and Paris was in his lane doing his job, which I can really appreciate. Now, as CEO, I will tell you, I went from chief revenue officer to chief operating officer and as chief operating officer I had about half of the business that reported to me and I would describe it as my aperture as CRO was like this big and then as COO, it went this big. As CEO it's like this wide, and even as operating. As COO, I couldn't see the things that Paris was seeing. Now I can, and so now it makes a lot of sense, Like me telling it as the story makes a lot of sense. But I was in my lane doing like just thinking about here's how we're going to execute these things, and so he really did catch me off guard. You're right, because he's done the same thing with me at COO.
Speaker 3:I probably should have been hit to the beat for it for CEO, but it still caught me by surprise. So it took me a month actually to say yes to it, because it is the most it's like getting. It's like getting married yeah, it's. It's a pretty serious commitment for a business, especially as established as truck staff. Right, truck staff is 29 years old this year and and that's that's a big deal it's got Moscow before Paris next, and then me. That's yeah, that was a big deal. So I had to reflect on it and I'm honestly so glad that I get to be leading this business. It's a fantastic business serving. Honestly. I love this industry. I told you for all the reasons already that I love it. It is the heartbeat of America and I love being able to serve it.
Speaker 2:It's hard to get out once you get back in. That's why I said your pre-freight career, because it's usually just pre-freight and then it's freight.
Speaker 3:It's just freight.
Speaker 2:You might bounce around, but you're in freight I know, especially if you get welcomed, if you get accepted into the freight community. It's really hard to get out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I get that. Yeah, I love it. There's so much, there's just so much good goodness and opportunity that exists in transportation.
Speaker 2:So I like it a lot. There is Well, we'll end with that because I like that note and I could keep peppering you about being a CEO, but I just appreciate how honest you've been and how much you've shared, so just been a really great, great opportunity to learn about truck stop and you specifically personally and and what you're building there it's. It's been very cool to see that business evolve over the years is probably the right way to put it from a guy who was 16, trying to find some trucks on it in 2006 to where it is today. You guys have built a great business and you are building that kind of trust that you're talking about across the brokers and carriers in the community.
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you being such a long user and advocate for us as well, so thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Of course, To our listeners. Thanks so much, and we'll see you then too.
