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. #54: Jim Berlin, CEO & Founder of Logistics Plus
Andrew welcomes Jim Berlin, CEO and founder of Logistics Plus, a company he founded in 1996 and has built into a global logistics powerhouse in more than 50 countries, with $600M in revenue, customers like GE and WeWork, and a HQ within Erie, Pennsylvania’s Union Station. But success didn’t come without taking risks — and learning from failures. “I dive in with both feet without checking the depth of the water.”
In this episode, Jim and Andrew cover:
- The journey of how Jim built his company from a small operation supporting GE's transportation into a global logistics powerhouse.
- His biggest lessons, best leadership advice, and hiring mentality at Logistics Plus, which has more than 1,200 employees.
- The biggest failure of his career — launching a cargo shipping business on the Great Lakes that nearly sank his entire company.
- Stories of how simple gestures, out-of-the-box thinking, and creative problem-solving have sustained his career and the growth of Logistics Plus.
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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.
- 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. ***
Hey FreightPod listeners. Before we get started today, let's do a quick shout out to our sponsor, rapido Solutions Group. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near shore talent to scale efficiently and deliver superior customer service. Rapido works with businesses from all sides of the logistics industry. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. Rapido builds out teams with roles across customer and carrier sales and support, back office administration and technology services.
Speaker 1:The team at Rapido knows logistics and people. It's what sets them apart. Rapido is driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. The team is led by CEO Danny Frisco and COO Roberto Lacazza, two guys I've worked with from my earliest days in the industry at Coyote. I have a long history with them and I trust them. I've even been a customer of theirs at Molo and let me tell you they made our business better. In the current market, where everyone's trying to do more with less and save money, solutions like Rapido are a great place to start To learn more. Check them out at gorapidocom. That's gorapidocom. Thanks for being a sponsor. And before we get this show on the road, we have one more promotion for our old friend, paul Estrada, who's now launching his own podcast, let's Ride. Let's give him a second to show you what he's all about.
Speaker 2:What's up? Freightpod listeners? Long time no talk. It's your good old friend, paul Estrada, here to tell you about my new podcast, let's Ride with Paul Estrada, the podcast where a dad tackles the big questions of life, career and everything in between by talking to interesting people that have the answers. Our guests include a 5 million mile long haul truck driver, 1993 Rookie of the Year and World Series champion, a school custodian, a 30 year veteran with the LA County Sheriff's Department, and many more. Join me each week as my six and a half year old son, adrian, throws out a thought-provoking question or idea, and I invite a guest to help me sufficiently respond to him. From learning about money and investing to finding a passion in life and exploring careers that can be meaningful for you, we cover it all with a dose of humor and some soundbites of wisdom. The let's Ride Podcast with Paul Estrada, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1:Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I'm your host, Andrew Silver, and I'm joined today by Mr Jim Berlin, CEO of Logistics Plus. I think I've made a mistake in the past of not asking guests to just immediately give a quick 30-second elevator understanding of what your business is, and I think if I do that it will help set some context for the rest of the conversation, because I have a feeling you and I are going to go in a million different directions. So let's just start there. Walk me through just quickly. What is Logistics Plus? Some size, scope, whatever you're comfortable sharing.
Speaker 3:Privately held, started 29 years ago. I founded it because I got fired from too many companies, started my own company so couldn't get fired anymore. Ge was our first customer. At the time they were the biggest, most profitable enterprise in the history of planet Earth. So it was a good first customer to have lucky. And now we're still privately held. We're in 40 countries, 50 countries, a half a billion dollar company very unusual. And I like to say we're a solutions company, um at g. We started for one specific task of domestic inbound transportation and now we do all kinds of things all around the world for a lot of different kind of customers. All organic, no plan, uh no, no strategy, just kind of just come in every day and figure out what to do next and and give me a little bit more on the solutions, so you're not just a freight brokerage, right?
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't even think you're very similar at all to a freight brokerage, if I understand, and I don't really understand. So this is part of why I'm starting like this. So give me a little bit more on the solutions like what are some? What are half a billion dollars in revenue? Where is that coming from? What kind of transactions are you participating in?
Speaker 3:okay. I just thought it's funny that that, um, we do freight brokerage. I started out with Trucking Guys, so we kind of started. Our beginning was inbound domestic transportation for GE transportation systems. So that's a factory in Erie that made 800, 900 locomotives a year biggest locomotive manufacturer in the world and I was a trucking guy, I was an LTL trucking guy. So they asked me to start this as a project to help them save money. So I came in with two people from my trucking company and all we're going to do is inbound domestic transportation. If you think about it, the outbound goes out on rail, so it's not much to that, but the inbound is 100,000 parts from all over the world of big heavy stuff, and so we started doing that. We're named a corporate best practice the first year by Jack Walsh, so that kind of helped us.
Speaker 3:But even from the very beginning I just looked this up, actually I came up with the name Logistics Plus because I didn't see ourselves as brokers. I saw ourselves as managing a supply chain. This is way before logistics. The supply chain was a common term, like it is now, and in fact I just looked up on AI. This is what I said how many companies in the US had logistics in their name in 1995? And I swear to God this is true. It came back saying hard to tell because there weren't many digital records back then. But in 1996, a company in Erie called Logistics Plus started and it wasn't because of me, because I had a buddy do it too and he's not connected to us and got the same answer. And it wasn't because of me, because I had a buddy do it too and he's not connected to us and got the same answer.
Speaker 3:So from the beginning my concept was like yeah, you know, there's a, logistics makes the world go round. Brokerage is part of that, but there's a lot more to that. So we started with the inbound domestic transportation and did really, really well. But being at GE you know, the biggest company in the world you see all kinds of opportunities, the biggest company in the world, you see all kinds of opportunities. So I would go to the big shop and say you know I can help you with this too, I can help with that too. And as we gained their trust, they said okay, okay, okay. And so we ended up kind of doing all kinds of things.
Speaker 3:When they went global, they took me with them. When they needed warehouses, they took me with them. So from one big, big customer we started getting into all kinds of the supply chain. Now it's called the supply chain. It wasn't called that back then. Back then it's a joke that Joe's Trucking would change the name to Joe's Logistics because they could charge more.
Speaker 3:But, honestly, our DNA is logistics. Our DNA was the solutions provider for GE Transportation and while people all around the GE world thought we were GE employees, we never were. And my line to them was we're not GE but we're taken from GE's rib. So we were started by them and we became a big success. And then, three years in, through people we met or through their guys getting recruited all over the world, we started to grow.
Speaker 3:But to answer your question, now we do. We got 10 million square feet of warehousing in the US. We do. We actually. It's crazy. We actually do software development for people. We do set-up laptops and iPads for different big, big customers. I can't name names, but you think they'd be doing the software and the set-up. We do a lot of that for them. So it just it. Really.
Speaker 3:It began my crazy nature when I started with this GE thing. I'd just been fired again. I got fired for going to bat for GE shipment. So it kind of wasn't very direct, but it was somewhat direct and I told the traffic manager in the area. I said look, he knew me. I said, look, if I say shit, I'm going to go fix it. That's just my nature. And if I go too far, do something stupid, yank me back, slap me. You know I won't take offense, but I'm not going to wait for you and your chain of command to say okay, jim, that's a good idea. If I see it, I think it's the right thing I'm going to do it. If I screw up, you know, punch me in the, in the nuts, you know so, um, take me back to 1996.
Speaker 1:You, you said, people thought you were a ge employee, but you weren't. Can you explain that like what? What were you actually doing within the ge walls if you weren't an employee and you hadn't yet started your Logistics Plus company? What was actually your role?
Speaker 3:Well, the role is a Tiger Team project. So at the time one of Jack Welch's big initiatives across the G world was to take people from different parts of different departments and to look at a problem, a specific problem with fresh eyes not setting arrays didn't know much about it, but they're smart people. Problem with fresh eyes not sitting in a race didn't know much about it, but they're smart people. So this project was how do we better manage our inbound domestic transportation to save money and to save shutdowns and things like that? So that was our project. It was finance people and CEOs involved. There's a lot of big main people there and I came in and just my nature, I kind of, just kind of took, I guess I took charge but started doing things and I knew what I was talking about. You know there's one early example Gee had field offices, repair shops all over the country and, if you can imagine this, locomotive repairs. So these repair shops are way out of the way places Haver, montana and way across Georgia, not in the big cities, a lot of them and at one point they want to impress their customers, which are the three, four major US railroads, by being able to provide any part next day, you know, to get locomotives going again. It's a great idea. So I'm in this meeting with half a dozen top top-T people and the head of marketing at the time says I'm going to tell them every shop, every part, next day delivery. I said well, wait a minute, tell them almost every shop, almost every part. He said I'm telling you every day next day. I said well, you know, he told me he says you need to be more positive. I said I'm positive. I'm positive Some of those places that even FedEx and UPS don't go to every day. So unless you want to hire a Learjet and pay for that, it's like almost every day. But the fact that I kind of told this big big shot I'm nobody, you know, like you need to be more positive. I said I am positive, you're wrong, that's not going to happen. It kind of caught people's attention and we were very, you know, I'm ballsy, of nothing else, I kind of have a crazy mentality, 60s mentality.
Speaker 3:So early on we come in and there's three of us to change G's shipping habits like internal shipping habits. Well, g doesn't want us there by any stretch of the imagination. So what we do is we go to there's 12 docks at the main facility in New York, pennsylvania, and we go buy a dozen donuts so 12 dozen donuts. We go around to every dock. We we say, hey, here's some donuts for you. You think of donuts, you think of cops. We're the traffic cops. You see something stupid? You let us know and we're going to fix it.
Speaker 3:Now, a lot of times these guys would see something that would get their boss in trouble or some buyer in trouble, like doing something stupid. We didn't use it for any vindictiveness, we just said don't worry about it, we're going to fix this problem. And by kind of being ballsy we got those guys to kind of join in. And for the Altieri Motors they want to get the boss in trouble. But we would just fix the problem and go to the guy and said you know, you flew these things in for 800 bucks. You could have trucked them in for 40 bucks and they would have been here at the same time. So you know, leave the driving to us. You tell us when it needs to get there and we're not going to embarrass you, but we're going to get it there and we're going to save you money, because throwing money away is not to anybody's benefit. And the CEO at the time, a guy named John Rice. You know he was in some of those meetings and he liked that concept. He told me one time yeah, I was a buyer back in the day, an expediter, and we used to get stuff in on Friday because we knew we'd need it for Monday morning.
Speaker 3:We'd make sure it'd be there Friday though. So we'd have some stress, which I get. You don't want to cut it too close, but there's ways to get it there Monday morning a lot, lot cheaper than by getting there on Friday. And the best example of that was we had a case where there was a vendor in Pittsburgh, pennsylvania, and geez, inbound was mostly what they called the Golden Triangle Buffalo, pittsburgh and Cleveland, so 90 miles either way. So everything kind of come in pretty quickly if needed. And I noticed that every Friday there would be an expedited truck them so 90 miles either way. So everything kind of come in pretty quickly if needed. And I noticed that every Friday there would be a expedited truck of a pallet so 500 bucks to bring a pallet of some card in from Pittsburgh.
Speaker 3:And to your earlier your first question if you're a freight broker, you call that carriage truck for 500 bucks and you get them to say, hey, we do it for 400 bucks. And you say, okay, and you save a hundred bucks. And you're a freight broker. You call that carriage truck for $500, and you get them to say, hey, we'll do it for $400. And you say, okay, and you save $100, and you're a big hero.
Speaker 3:But to me, the logistics side of this, the supply chain side, was more than that. So rather than call up the trucking company and say how much can you reduce your price, we call up the vendor. Now, I wouldn't want to do that, but just called the van. Hey, let me ask you something. I notice every Friday you're hiring an expedited truck, roberts Express from this area. Why are you doing that? He says well, let me find out. So he pulls out the purchase order Ship on Friday for Friday delivery. I said, okay, you're following instructions. Let me ask you something Can you ship on Thursday for Friday delivery? I can ship it any day of the week. We got them on our shelf. I said, okay, easy, call PJax, and for $28 on Thursday you ship it, and I'll be there Friday for $28. So we didn't just reduce the $500 to $400. We changed the whole way of doing that.
Speaker 3:But to do that you have to kind of dive in and get dirty and go past the box they've given you to be in to find out what's the real story here. And we did that with all the vendors. We did that with the guys on the shop floor. We had a case where they needed a drum of green BNSF paint to come in for painting the locomotive. Well, a 550-pound drum, 55-gallon drum, it's heavy, it's hazardous, blah, blah, blah comes from Kentucky to Erie. So I go to the guy on the shop floor I said like okay, do you need this tonight? Yeah, it's only a one-guy-on-ship tonight. So how much paint does he need? He says, ah, five gallons is the point Deal, because now we can fly a five-gallon pail, pretty cheap truck, the rest of the you know 550 gallons the next morning. And it's there just so.
Speaker 3:It's just kind of digging in and finding out the, because everyone's got a pad factor and a bullshit, you know, protection to cover their ass. You have to kind of get the trust to cut through that and just find a better way. So our slogan was you know, we're the routing center, leave the driving to us. That's all Hurtz, rick Marshall Hurtz, but let us go. You're a great guy. I love Jack Welch's empowerment and boundarylessness and the guy in the tow motor can order what he needs to get his work done. I love that. But do it smart. And the smart thing was call us. If you need it by 7 am. It'll be here, I promise you, at 7 am and we gained their trust and did some bold things like that, so that's kind of how we got started.
Speaker 1:I mean, I love that nature of because I definitely, as a freight broker, I fully understand the idea of you kind of are put in a box and it's not like a bad thing but your shippers don't come to you asking you necessarily often at least to be outside the box. It's more often like I have orders for a vendor from chicago to dallas, give me a price and it's a pretty small, easy box to play within um. But I completely understand how if you break yourself outside of that and think bigger, you can create better solutions. And I imagine 25 years ago or 29 years ago that was even easier to do because there was way less technology, way less data management. That kind of showed you where those problems existed. I'm curious like when did you know? This is a business I can build into something, like you know it seems like is that, see?
Speaker 3:is that the answer?
Speaker 1:it's like you're still just kind of one day at a time finding absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3:It's crazy, it's uh. I joke and this is a little bit hyperbolic, but I say we're a half a billion dollar company with no business plan, no strategy, no HR manual, no budgets. We just kind of come every day and say, okay, let's figure out what we do today and get to tomorrow. So I talk at schools. I say don't try this at home because it shouldn't work. But we're debt-free, we're profitable. Every year for 29 years We've grown every year, but a couple in 29 years. I mean it really is.
Speaker 1:It's more than a lock now how do you, how do you run a business like that, like?
Speaker 3:help me understand. I'm serious like how do you create an organization
Speaker 1:like it's funny because we got connected through danny eunice, eunice, I don't know. I never know how to say his last name one of one of the smartest people I've ever worked with um and and he doesn't seem like someone who would thrive in this type of environment so much. I mean, he definitely seems like an outside the box thinker, but some people just need structure. And I'm just curious, like is there any structure in your business? Or it's kind of like a pretty, you know, free-spirited enterprise?
Speaker 3:I think when I'm not looking, sometimes they put some structure in, you know, behind my back. So yeah, there's more than there was. It was three of us. But I mean, my little joke was that I took the two guys or got a gal from my TNT Red Star Trucking Company that left and came with me and then we hired two other local guys, so the whole company. When we started out and we're working 12-hour days, we're in my Dodge Caravan driving from Jamestown, new York, to Pennsylvania and that was the whole company. So we talked about work on the way in. We'd work all day together. We'd talk about work on the way home and my joke was, if we went off the road in the snow and died, the company's gone. So there was no need for any organizational structure back then.
Speaker 3:Now it's interesting, it's still very free-flowing. You're right that if people, when we hire people, I don't look at resumes much. I'm not a believer in that. It's mostly word of mouth and it's mostly looking for the look in the eye, the fire in the belly, the mental attitude, more than someone that needs to be. Here's my business plan. Here's my structure. I'm going to pat you on the back. It's not much of that. It's kind of I said we throw you in the deep end of the shark tank and see how you do. But if you tell people out up front which I've always done I say look first off, not a sexy business, but it's been here since the days of the Campbell Care Advance. Everything in these offices moved. Nothing sprouts up. There's a whole world of people that make this shit happen and it's been going on forever.
Speaker 3:Until some bright young kid gets an app that takes a pallet from Chicago to Cleveland, we'll still have a business. That's the good news. It's going to be here for a while. The bad news is that it never ends and that if you want to have a life where you go home, you don't have to think about it. Your phone rings at 5 to 5 on Friday. You pick it up Monday. I said I get that. I get that lifestyle. I do understand, but this is really not the right industry and definitely not the right company for you to come to. So you go on the front and say I'm warning you, you're never going to be bored. You might go crazy, but you're not going to be bored here. It's going to be pretty wild and woolly and the people that say, ok, I want that, that's what you hire, and Wild and Wooly. And the people that say, okay, I want that, that's what you hire, and if you hire the right people, you know the line.
Speaker 3:You hire your own mistakes. If you hire the right people and you've warned them, we have a very small people of value level. Most people stick around and the other side of that is that if you're not looking at resumes, you don't really care about the pedigree. You know the background that people come with. So literally I think you'll love this. We have people running 50 to $100 million parts of our business.
Speaker 3:It came to us from McDonald's, from Starbucks, from the brewery downstairs, our train station waitress, I mean, because they have what it takes which is not what you learn at the big forward. I don't think they kind of put you in a box and there's a formula to follow and that doesn't work. Oh well, I tried, but it didn't work, whereas we try to kind of be a little more creative. So we have people with no background in logistics, no college education, that are truly leaders of dozens of people running really big parts of our company. I love that because to me I got a cultured heart and cnm gives me pride that you know these guys became way more than they were, something going to be.
Speaker 1:I love that yeah, that's what I look for, you know yeah, talk a little bit more about. What I'd like to understand is like the culture itself and what those people are truly like, that you're looking for Like what does that look like? What does it look like for someone to have the fire in their belly or the look in their eye? What are the other characteristics of someone that you think makes for a great potential you know employee in your business?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure how definable that is. I wouldn't claim to know, I don't know. It's just an interaction, it's a feel that you get when you talk to people and you know, to me sports is a good learning ground. But I guess my funny answer to that is that if I was a waiter, I think you were a waiter, john.
Speaker 3:If I'm a waiter at a place and the guy orders a hamburger or steak rare, and it comes out well done, I can't say, hey, man, go back in the kitchen. Joe cooked that steak for you, kick his ass, I'll go back and kick his ass for you. You can't do that. You got to keep this customer happy somehow. You got to go tell Joe, what the fuck, joe? And we don't overcook the guy's steak. You got to. And as the brokerage part of this business, that's a lot of what we are. We're kind of middlemen. So we got to keep the customer happy, got to keep the chef motivated and not spitting in the guy's steak he cooks next time for him. You have to be able to navigate that. And so I do think that food service like some of these gals have worked at Starbucks or McDonald's have a great experience learning how to deal with people, which, to me, the bottom line of all this is it's all about people.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, talk a little bit, then, about how do you even evaluate opportunities in front of you, like customer opportunities. It seems like it'd be so hard, because your business is not just looking for someone who ships freight, like it's not just calling Coca-Cola and saying, hey, I want to help haul your loads from Atlanta to Orlando. It feels like you're trying to solve different types of problems, and I'm just curious how do you even evaluate where those problems exist? How do you find those problems? How do you convince someone to give you the time of day to have a conversation about those types of problems?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean usually it's word of mouth. I mean, for the first 20 years we've had a salesman, not a single salesman, honest to God. We have a couple now, but it's not the main way we find business. It's more word of mouth solving a problem, having the customer say, wow, you guys are terrific, and telling people about it. So one example is we're doing some stuff with some schools Danny is involved in that and so we wow these people. I mean we do whatever it takes. And then he goes to the people from this one school and says, hey, do you know any other people who use our help? And he says, sure, we do. And it led to a second one. And then I'll source kind of one thing leading to another, which I think is always there. But these things tend to find you if you see them. I think it's the old Thomas Edison quote most people don't recognize opportunity because it's dressed in work clothes that doesn't look like anything special.
Speaker 3:We've had cases. There's one instance. This is during COVID, where DoorDash and Uber Eats took off and there's a customer of ours that does the. You can't call it programming, but they set up the iPad. So if you're a driver for Uber Eats or DoorDash. You can't watch porn or play solitaire. It's a tool and so there's certain's certain settings. I guess that I couldn't do it, but you put it in these iPads and so they were crushed. Because of the growth in that industry during COVID, they were instantly crushed somehow I'm not even sure how they found us and we were doing some of the overflow for them.
Speaker 1:We were doing the overflow what does that mean doing in terms of what?
Speaker 3:They couldn't keep up with the demand of programs or whatever, but setting up iPads for Uber and DoorDash drivers.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Right or the store, and it was a big, big growth. When COVID came out, people were going out so they were ordering food in big growth. When COVID came out, people were going out to the ordering food in. So they came to see us like because we were doing better than they were doing. They had experts at it. They were as good I won't say better we're doing. They're surprised that we're doing so well. And this is all these crazy stories they got. They're all frigging true. That's the craziest part about them. So they came up to me me and said who are these guys that are doing such a good job? And the good job was because our people were working literally through the night. I got videos of some of our guys who were up all night in the warehouse programming these things and putting on some dance music and doing some crazy dance moves to break the monotony and stay awake. That's the LP culture.
Speaker 1:But they came up and this is how stupid.
Speaker 3:Break the monotony and stay awake. You know that's the LP culture. But they came up and this is how stupid. They came up and they were amazed at how well we were doing this and they were getting more and more crushed. So they said you know what we're going to send you? Instead of 1,000 a day, I'm making these up 10,000 a day. Great, you know. Woo-hoo right, but the problem is at 10,000 a day. Great, woo-hoo right, but the problem is the 1,000 a day we were doing was four or five people in this little tiny you can't even call it a warehouse. It's an 8,000-square-foot building across the street from our headquarters that we grabbed spur of the moment to do this first work in. So they said well, we're going to start shipping these things to you like tomorrow. I said, well, we're going to start shipping these things to you like tomorrow. Okay, this isn't going to work. So we need a warehouse big enough to handle this and we need it nearby our headquarters, because what we do is we take some of the freight broker guys and when things are slow they can. You know some of the hard pro guys. It's kind of doing like 20 steps, you know. So you can send guys who are slow from any department across the street when there's a rush they can help out. That's typical kind of things we do.
Speaker 3:Well, we're downtown in Pennsylvania. There's not many warehouses downtown and I'm not good in real estate anyway. But there's a guy I know who's a developer downtown and I called him and I said Pete, I said any warehouses near us that you know about or you have? And he goes no, not really. He says but you know what? I looked at the Erie Times News Building, which is the Erie newspaper. Like a year ago I was going to buy it, but I'm so busy with other things I never bought it. But it's a good building. It's got a big warehouse where they used to do the newsprint delivery, so it's pretty big, big dock doors. So it's a good building.
Speaker 3:So I said, okay, who do I talk to? So it's like 9 o'clock in the morning. I call the guys in charge of the building. I said can I see your buildings? He says sure, when do you want to set up? I said today. So he said okay, 10.30. So okay, so 10.30 we go. And I'm a javook, I mean I bring a couple of my guys. We're just walking around like, okay, this looks good, it looks like a warehouse.
Speaker 3:And I said, okay, how much is it? And again, I'll use a thing. He says 1.2 million bucks. I said that sounds like reasonable. I said we'll do it. He reasonable, I said we'll do it. He said well, I'm just the guy here, I'm the building manager, I'm not like you. Got to talk to the real estate guy. He's in Syracuse, which is five hours away.
Speaker 3:So I called this guy in Syracuse and I tell him we saw this building, we need this thing, I'd like to buy it today. He said whoa, that's not how this works. He says this is owned by Gannett, which is in Minneapolis. They have a boarded, you know a realtor board. You know they got to go through all this. I said no, no, I need it today. I need trucks coming tomorrow. I said, look, if I have to drive five hours with a jet for 1.2 million bucks, I'll do that. But hopefully, you know, maybe do that. Let's find a way to in this modern day and age, let's do this right.
Speaker 3:So again I get my CFO, who's tough, and I tell her I said let's get this done today, because they're going to come tomorrow. Now we could actually get access to the building without, they wouldn't let us use it. But still, I tell her get it done today. So I text her at 3 o'clock I says done. Yet she goes nope, 3.30, done, yet Nope. 4 o'clock done, yet Nope. 4.30, done, yet Nope.
Speaker 3:So she calls up my COO, yuri, and says what the fuck? He says what difference does it make if we actually do this today or tomorrow? He says it's a better story if we do it today, and we did. We closed it that fucking night and the trucks came the next day and six years later they're still a customer. But that's crazy shit. I mean, you don't want to put that in a business book, but it worked, led to other things because they do stuff for Amazon, they do stuff for Microsoft and they saw how good and responsive and kind of crazy committed we are. And they realize, okay, these guys are a little bit nuts, but like, we need that, need that passion for excellence. That's our. That's kind of lucky, but that's not made up, that's our passion for crazy that's crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's we do I mean, there's something, there's 10 stories like that. Yeah, there's something there's something so endearing about it, though, and it's it, and what I'm thinking about is just the idea that there's no idea that's too crazy for you, is there.
Speaker 3:Some. There's one, Actually, there's two in 29 years, which isn't bad. One was no harm, no foul, and one almost killed us. But even then, there's more to the lessons of a defeat than just the pain. There's things you gain from getting your ass kicked.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about a time you got your ass kicked and learned from it.
Speaker 3:Well, the one it's a long story the one near-death experience we had was about 10 or 15 years ago, like 2009,.
Speaker 3:So 15 years ago and I had been involved in Erie is a port city on the Great Lakes, so I had been peripherally involved in Great Lakes shipping as a kind of my crazy idea was it wasn't my idea but I liked it was the back to the future that the French fur trappers that came in all the way to Minnesota, came through the lakes and that's really a neglected resource that we don't use anymore. At the time, the port cities the LA, new York were crushed. Bridges were falling down. If you remember that. It was an infrastructure mess. Bridges are falling down, if you remember that. I mean there's an infrastructure mess and we have the biggest water in the world that's not being used, but all these port cities like Buffalo and Detroit, cleveland and Milwaukee that are not being utilized to come back to life with this. So I love the idea and, in my typical fashion, I dive in with both feet without checking the depth of the water.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what'd you buy?
Speaker 3:Bought two ships, two giant ships, which was a mistake. Plus, we bought them in 2008, which was the peak before the crash in 2009. So the end of the story is we bought the one, we got rid of. The one we bought for $8 million and we sold it for $500,000. And we celebrated that's a bad one, but the rest of the story? So one we got rid of right away. We realized it was a mistake. The other one we were stuck with.
Speaker 3:But we had a contract with the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. That wasn't planned. The plan was Great Lakes shipping Europe all the way to Duluth. It wasn't going to happen and still not. It still hasn't happened yet. It might happen someday In our typical. Okay, that didn't work. What do we do now? We actually found a customer in Canada, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and we used this big frigging ship to run supply runs up the coast to nowhere land in Canada. It paid $13,800 a day, fuel was free because it was a Canadian government contract and it cost like $8,000 a day, 9,000 bucks a year, to run the shift. So it was good. I mean, especially for Plan B. It was making money. But the guys I hired were, I think, was con artists and were taking the money and kind of running out the back door with it and long story short, which I can't get into, but we ended up surviving. We ended up better.
Speaker 3:I'm not a big fan of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, because it can hurt like fucking hell what doesn't kill you. But in this case it made us stronger because we had to watch for a year. For a year I was what I call dead man walking. I couldn't crumble because if I crumbled, everything crumbled. So I had to act strong and assure myself. Everyone knew I wasn't. Everyone knew inside I was a dead man walking, but I kept up a strong face. Everyone rallied around. I went back to like our top 10 people. I said look, I never thought this day would ever come, but I need a pay cut from you. And every single one of them said how much. Whatever you need, we're all in this together. I had other people here that I asked. Top 10 people say if you need me, I'm in. I mean this was in 29 years. This touched my heart more than anything we've done. So everyone was kind of in.
Speaker 3:We had to spend a year watching our pennies and we had to. At the end of each week we had to say who can we pay? We have to call every vendor and say, look, I can't pay this bill in full. We always have, we're always good, paying on time. But I will pay you 30% of it. But I swear to you in my life, my kids, we will find a way I've never spent any in my life. My kids, we will find a way I've never stiffed anywhere in my life We'll pay you back. So we had our operations people calling up their vendors saying, look, we can't pay you. I'm sorry, we can't pay you. Please trust us, nobody cut us off.
Speaker 3:It was a real testament to kind of the work we'd done all these years. There's a loyalty there that is not usual in business. And we sold the shit. And then the biggest decision I've ever made in my business life was do I pursue these guys that I think rip us off, or do I turn the page and let it go? And hardest hope, as it was to do, I said, fuck them, life will take care of them. We're going to turn and look forward and we just kind of marched ahead and let a good life be your best revenge. Back then we were a $30 million company, now we're a $600 million company, so debt-free. No more con artists, you know money in the bank. I mean like all those days are long gone, but it was a near-death experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit more about that. So it's 2000,. Just so I get the context right, it's 2009. Your business at the time is 13 years old. Crazy Jim has had some crazy ideas that have largely worked, and your team is pretty bought into what you're doing. And then you get this kind of fascinating idea to you know leverage the Great Lakes to create a shipping business through the waters and it fails Like falls on its face. Fails in failing there. It put your entire business at stake. Everything was on the line and you had to go to your top people ask for pay cuts. They all showed up and said, yep, we're here with you. What was that like for you emotionally, that period, feeling like you had put your whole business at stake, like failure was staring you in the face, like you had vendors. You were having a call asking for extended terms. Can you talk a little bit about that emotional experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, tough. I came down to Long Island where I grew up, my brother and I spent a weekend at the beach with some old friends and they all said man, what happened to you? I mean, I thought I was putting on a brave face but everyone could see how hard it was crushing, not knowing if we're going to make it, having to beg, you know people kind of hat in hand. And it's funny because you know, and you had to do it on both sides. You had to do it on the LP side because that was the bank that they kind of siphoned off so we couldn't pay our LP vendors. It had nothing to do with the ship, it was just LP stuff. But on the ship side too, we had to deal with the union, with the seafarers, with the Canadian government. So I had to go begging the people and say, please give us a chance. And I learned a few things from that. One was that you have to do these things in person. I think had I just emailed or called the Seafarers Union in Canada or the Canadian government in Labrador, I'm not sure I think they could see in my voice and in my eyes and in my heart that I was going to move heaven and earth. To make this work we pay back everybody. We didn't stiff anybody on a dime. In fact I was watching the news the other night and they had a thing about the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and one of the calls they had to make was the Seafarers Union was going to shut down. If you don't pay your crew on a ship they have the right to seize the vessel. And if they seize the vessel and don't operate it, then you lose your contract and everything. The dominoes all fall.
Speaker 3:And I had to take a call from this guy from Newfoundland Labrador in the vestibule at the cathedral and it was like you know. I said, look, man, you don't know me. I said but I've got a letter on the wall from my grandfather. My grandfather was a you know. I said but I've got a letter on the wall from my grandfather. My grandfather's parents were immigrants from Russia, Poland, ukraine, lithuania, somewhere in Eastern Europe, jewish ragman that in the 20s went bankrupt. And I have on my wall in my office I have a letter from a place called Hunter's Bank in New York to my grandfather saying that you were forgiven your debt of 37,000 bucks in 1920. Today you paid back the last of a forgiven debt, last payment, and in my life I've never seen anybody who paid off a debt that was no longer owed. This should honor you and your family for generations to come.
Speaker 3:And I didn't even know my grandfather, but that always kind of stayed with me and I told this guy. I said, look, that's in my blood. I said I will find a way to don't stop operating the show. I will find a way to pay you guys, you know. And he went along with it. I mean like, and I'm not sure what you know, when it works you don't know what you did right. Necessarily it doesn't work. You know what you did wrong, but I think it was just. I mean, people saw that I wasn't a bullshitter. I was sincere, that you know. Everyone stuck with me on that. And the best story is that these guys that we had hired to run this thing, they were posers. I call them posers.
Speaker 1:The shipping part of the business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the shipping part yeah, and the LP culture. We got the train station in Erie for headquarters. Big giant, 100,000 square foot train station.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wait, I saw that you bought Union Station. You bought Erie's Union Station. Why did you do that?
Speaker 3:Because my friends have a good idea, but we paid $100 to furnish it.
Speaker 1:So there's a company going out of business. What do you mean? You paid $100 to furnish it. $100. $100. 100.00.
Speaker 3:Yes, american Meter, which was an Erie company, made these big iron steel desks the old way 500 pounds and they were going out of business. So for a hundred bucks we got all those little desks, carry them up through flights of stairs. Looked like shit, but that's the best. My hand doesn't make you money. So that's our culture. We fly, coach and all that.
Speaker 3:Well, these two guys were the ship. They were flying first class and they were going winemaking and dining and it pissed me off. And they were going wine and dining and pissing me off. One of the things they had done was they had these big giant not even posters wooden, poster-sized portraits of them in hard hats and white, you know, uniforms, like in front of the ship, like you motherfuckers, like you didn't buy the fuckers, but like they owned the fucking thing, right. And we got rid of them. And I told one of my buddies at work. I said you know, the day we get out of this, finally, I'm going to take a fucking axe and I'm going to knock the shit out of this post and we're going to make sawdust out of it, right, but I forgot about it, right. So this is like.
Speaker 3:A year later, we finally sold the ship for like 500,000 bucks. You know we spent 8 million for two years earlier and I put a notice on the speaker at work. Three o'clock conference room, all hands on board and everyone's thinking this is the end, like nobody knew. I never did that, so I was like scared to death. What I did. I lined up there may be 60 of us. I lined up 60 shots. I said, look guys sold. Lined up, maybe 60 of us. I lined up 60 shots. I said, look guys Sold the ship took a bath, it's over, bleeding stopped and we're going to come back from here. We'll be all right, cheers, right. So everyone cheers. And then my buddy says, what about that picture? I said ah, like, ah, I'm over it. No, no, no. So he starts.
Speaker 2:I'll get it, you know.
Speaker 3:Stupid, you know. So we take this big, freaking four by three wooden poster out to the park outside the train station and everyone's in the conference room looking out over the park and there's no hatchery to work but there's a sledgehammer for some of the guys that do the maintenance work. So they give me the sledgehammer and I go across the street. I look up and they're all it's like the Coliseum, they're all cheering and I look, ah, this is stupid, what the hell. So I take it and I slam, and I slam and I was like, yeah, I went like Neanderthal on it, they're all cheering that was the cathartic, uh end of that episode.
Speaker 1:That's a good release, that's great. So I just want to point out such a valuable lesson in leadership right here and in the point I'm thinking about is businesses are forced to make hard decisions at various points in their journey and it's really the leaders who have to make hard decisions at various points in their journey and it's really the leaders who have to make those decisions. And how you frame the decision, how you frame the situation, your perspective on it is so, so important. I'm just thinking of the notion that, as goes the leader, goes the pack. And you had this $8 million investment you made in a ship that was a colossal failure and you sold it for $500,000, so you took a massive bath on it.
Speaker 1:There was plenty of reason to probably be wallowing in your own pity and feeling like crap. And if you had set that meeting at 3 o'clock and said all right guys, I'm sorry I screwed up. And o'clock and said all right guys, like I'm sorry I screwed up and you know, I hope we can get better, blah, blah, blah, like that sets a tone for everybody to feel crappy and be down and out about a hard experience they had at work, which is what happens a lot of the time but instead you took it as this kind of rebirth opportunity and put some passion and fire behind it and used it as an opportunity to celebrate a bright future ahead. And that's just such a pivotal way to think about it. And by taking that direction, you instill fire in your own people to say, hey, you know what we did? Just rid ourselves of this nonsense, of this filth, of this stuff. That's not helping us. We have a clear path. Now let's go, let's run, let's move forward.
Speaker 1:And I just call that out because I think for all leaders, like I've thought of so many times where we made mistakes or we made bad decisions, and like I just put myself back in that mindset and if I had been negative and feeling like crap about it, then my people would have felt the same way. But if I come out and have this fire and energy behind me, that's like, hey, we're going to do this, this is how we're moving forward you're going to get that same response from your people. So I just call that out because I think it's a super valuable way to operate. Sorry for the audience who's listening? I don't think it's.
Speaker 3:I must have given the wrong impression. Certainly wasn't as bright and sunny as you seen the video of us. I put my best face on and I think people knew, but they knew that I was giving them all it wasn't. I tell people knew, but they knew that I was giving them all it wasn't. Can I tell people in Hiram, if you dive for the ball, darren Kincaid, I guess.
Speaker 1:Dalton, yeah, dalton.
Speaker 3:Kincaid yeah, and drop the ball. That's one thing. If you don't try, then you're not part of this team. You got to give it your all.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's kind of one thing. So I probably was riding Sunday and there was no clear path. We weren't sure what was going to happen next, but we just knew. We got over a big hump and okay, guys, but they're not looking back and they're going to go toughest. Because I'm a vindictive motherfucker. I wanted to kill these guys, but I knew I'd spent the next year or two reading emails, going to court, talking to lawyers, as hard as it was, turn the page and let's go. That was my decision.
Speaker 1:That's valuable too, and I'll call that so. I appreciate you giving additional context that I made that sound rosier than it was, but I still think the point is valid that when you're faced with difficult, situations how you approach the situation, how, like your perspective will determine your, your team's perspective, 100%.
Speaker 1:But to pile on to your other point about the vindictive nature, I also have a vindictive side to myself that you know. I I got fired from a business I started and created from scratch, and that was almost two years ago, and I spent the first year of that really upset and really feeling like crap and I wasted a year of my life because of it.
Speaker 1:And the last six months, the perspective has just shifted and I'm more focused on my own accountability and where I went wrong, and that's allowing me to focus on how do I make sure I'm not like that in the future. And so it just creates such a better path for yourself. When you're not like. There's just no benefit to the vindictive, vengeful thinking. If you can create some level of motivation for yourself, I see some value there. But, like you said, like wasting time dealing with emails and legal crap, I mean it's just going to create additional headaches versus being laser-focused on your mission and what you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 3:I try to be a fatalist. I mean to me like we don't control anything in life. I don't think so. You kind of, you know, ride the waves as best you can, so it's good. I know it's tough to let things go when things like that happen. I don't know how I'd be either, but it's a good thing. You kind of get that past Everything for a reason, man, now you've got a different path, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the business has grown substantially in the last 10 years or so. Can you talk a little bit about what you think has driven that?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I don't know. I think what's driven is just that we say yes, so one of the we've had a few. So think about this. The business is goofy, but we had GE as a customer. Ge was the biggest company in the world's history, our first customer who gets that right? Then we had WeWork. So WeWork was a crash and burn in the world's history our first customer who gets that right? Then we had WeWork. So WeWork, you know, was a crash and burn in the end, but its rise was incredible and we were the ones that rode that train to $47 billion valuation and that came about, which is funny. I mean, that came about because we said yes, I get a call on a Friday in January and they're still very small, they're just mostly New York and just starting to grow and saying that their logistics company is not doing a good job, they're not responsive, they go home at 5 o'clock.
Speaker 3:You know we need someone to bail us out. So I say yes, we do. And he said, okay, well, can you come down and see us down in Chelsea Monday morning? You know 10 o'. He said, okay, well, can you come down and see us down in Chelsea Monday morning? I'll be there I fly down to New York and it's a snowstorm. I'm no truck driver in the snow so it doesn't bother me. But I get an SUV and I get there at 930, and I'm in a coffee shop downstairs on 13th Street and I call this guy.
Speaker 3:I don't know if I'm sure, I just know from this one email exchange we had. I said hey, patrick. I said this is Jim. I said I won't be today, we don't work in the snow. I said I'm downstairs. So we come up and we say yeah, we can do this. And we take over and took them to all around the world, to, you know, setting up offices on the 80th floor in Kuala Lumpur. I mean like things that we had no clue how to do. When I said, yes, we can do that. But my thinking was and you know, and there's a moral ambiguity there I mean like, are you lying when you say, yeah, we do that? In a strict sense you are, but not if you can do it by the time you get to the job site. That's kind of my justification. And I mean the best example of lying is when I when GM April 15th 1996, when I got called in to G no, august 6th 1996. And he says okay, we want you to do this project for us. Do you have your own company and not?
Speaker 2:even as a strategy thing.
Speaker 3:I just kind of said yeah, no, I didn't. But by the time I got home an hour later, I did didn't. By the time I got home an hour later, I did. But had I said no, I would have worked for accountants or manpower, I would have been just a vendor. None of this happens, and that wasn't a brilliant thing to say. I picked yes or no off the coin, I guess, and said yes. So this whole thing is based on a lie If you look at it very seriously.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's a lie as much as it is, I don't either. You said yes to an opportunity. That's what it was right.
Speaker 3:Technically I mean if you look at it by the book, technically I did the lie. I said yeah, I did, but I had the company by the time I got home, so close enough. And same thing with rework. So the guy I bought down with me I didn't even bring an LP guy down with me, I bought a friend of mine who owns a moving and storage company down with me. He's a good friend. And they ask you you know, do you do trucking? Yeah. Do you do railing? Yeah. Do you do customs? Yeah. Do you do importing? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we get outside and he says you don't do installations.
Speaker 3:I said no. But one, if I said no to that. Next, you know like you're not checking the box. That's all they're doing is checking the box. And two, you know how to do them. You've done all your life man. He's retired, we got him back to come back to going here. But you're saying yes to an opportunity. That's a good way to put it, that's kind of a politically correct way to put it.
Speaker 3:But did we succeed Beyond freaking doubt. I mean, these guys went from nothing to ruling the world. The fact that they failed was not because we didn't get things set up in time or anything like that. It was their own internal stuff. We did things out of the stats but we did like dozens of installs a week, dozens of companies in office buildings all over the world like crazy that we were able to pull that off. We pulled off. They loved us. You know we did a great job. So that was one of the big growth things. And just like the GE see, the GE was the first customer and all the GE vendors, which there's thousands of, said hey, can you do that for us too? And we said yeah, and GE was highly recruited. So a lot of their guys from Erie went to run big companies around the country and they knew we were reliable. So we kind of grew very organic. We were the mouth.
Speaker 3:I think for the first 10, 12 years no one but me could do this. Every customer we had I could connect the dot back to G somehow. Then we worked the same thing. We got into building installs, ff&e, hotels, stadiums, we're doing those kind of things. Then the IT world kind of connected us with. We're doing stuff for Amazon and others where we do things that are not just moving stuff. I used to say people used to ask me what's logistics? I said we move shit and that's kind of what logistics is is everything moves. But the plus is, like all these other things that are moving stuff, they're kind of the background and help that happen. We do all that too now, so I can go into the truck room today and still work today, but I can't go into something like Curova. I'd be in the way.
Speaker 1:You started your career as a truck driver correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my second or third career.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how long were you doing that?
Speaker 3:Ten years.
Speaker 1:Ten years just over the road.
Speaker 3:LTL local, not over the road, but big trucks northeast. And then I you know big mouth I got kicked upstairs. I was a union organizer, a team store organizer, did some crazy shit there and then I moved to. I moved from Buffalo to Jamestown, which is like 60 miles, 70 miles southwest of Buffalo, because there's no work at the Townsend Casual and the company was opening up a terminal on Jamestown. So I moved down for that and three years later they closed the E5. They closed.
Speaker 3:So I called up my old boss at Red Star, who I'd been a driver for for 10 years, and I said I'm in Jamestown now. Do you have any driving jobs down here? And he says no, but I have a dock foreman job. I said fuck you, I'm a fucking teamster man. I'm like okay, and then, like six months later I was starting to work. I'm like okay, and then, like six months later I was trying to work. Oh, I call him back. Hey, george, is that job open? And he said I do.
Speaker 3:So I got a job as a midnight shift dock foreman in the small town of Jamestown, new York. Right, and I don't know this because George Coleman, the guy that gave me the job from Red Star has died since. I think the day after he put me in management for Red Star he went to wires. I think it was like his last fuck year to. Red Star has put me in management. I'm pretty sure of that. I can't prove it, but I became a guy on midnight shift in a small 12-door terminal.
Speaker 3:They sent a guy from corporate in New Jersey to train me. He walks in you know like 4 o'clock in the morning and I'm wearing my Teamster truck and please, jacket. He says you can't wear that jacket. He says I can't imagine. I said it's a cold night, it's freaking winter, I mean like nobody's here. He says no, no, he can't wear it. So I took her off my track and he says you don't have a tie on. I said tie the fuck do you need a tie for? He says if you don't wear a tie the men will respect you. I said we are a tie and the men will respect you. Good start, right, but anyway, that terminal ended up being the best operating terminal in a strong Northeast trucking company.
Speaker 3:I did really really well and kind of a lot of the same things that makes LP go just the energy and the passion and the hustle and the kind of getting people to pull in the same direction. Being the next driver, next union guy, I knew how you had to kind of win the arguments a little bit to get people to work harder than they normally would. But we operated you'll get this Red Star that year operated like a 104. And the industry was like a 98. We were like an 86, off the charts. You know that's because I would be able to get away with things, because guys kind of went into doing stuff. But anyway, I did that for 10 years.
Speaker 3:I got a call one day from New Jersey that they come to see me. I said you coming to fire me, you coming to close the terminal, what? No, no, nothing like that. And I still didn't wear a tie. So I had a clip-on tie in the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet. So it's like Superman going to the phone booth in China. I'd go in and I see him come and put on the tie and this Bruce Kennedy, the vice president of sales, comes up and he says Jim, I got some bad news for you. We got to let you go, good luck. And all the guys are watching like 10, 12 drivers. I said you know what, bruce? I said good luck to you. You're losing the best guy you got. I won the tournament with 86. Good luck to you, man. And the guys were looking ooh and I walked out down the stairs around the corner I fall on my knees. I had a sight of everybody Like what are you going to do now? So again, another try to put a strong face so you get out of the slate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk to me a little bit about what you think you took from those experiences that, like, helped you become a better CEO or leader of this LP business. Now, like you had very direct experience operating truck, managing drivers working in the terminal, like, what did you take from that Ten years?
Speaker 2:of each.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do you think you took from those two decades that really helped you build a really successful logistics business?
Speaker 3:A lot, I think how you deal with people, how you motivate, how you try to frame things sort of swing-wing instead of class war. I was a guy pulling pins for the team. I was doing some bad shit because it was us against them. You're against the fucking management. Where did I get you? I learned you've got to collaborate, you've got to find ways to engage and move people forward. You paint the vision of okay, guys, we could fight all the time. You win some, I'll win some and we'll end up being gone which ended up being gone anyway. But while we're here, let's try to make this a good situation. So an example of that as you know, when you're management, you can't work on the dock. You're management and what happened is we were.
Speaker 3:Red Star Express was a northeast carrier based in Newark, new Jersey. It went from Maine to Virginia and the area was Jamestown. New York was as far west as it came like 37 terminals, and back in the day, after deregulation, service mattered. You had to deliver freight on time, in good shape at a fair price. That was the model and we were the end of the line. So we were getting second-day service as opposed to overnight service.
Speaker 3:So I proposed to the bosses. I said you know what, don't cut the freight off at Buffalo until the next day, send it through. And they said well, we'll get that old 10, 11 o'clock Too late for the pedal runs. Let me work on it, send it through, we'll put it in bed in the next hour. So they didn't like it necessarily. But okay, try it. What I would do. All the guys were out already. I mean everyone's on the street by 8, 9 o'clock. I see what was coming. I diagram several. You know how we can get most of them delivered that day locally. And then, on the way out to one of the areas somewhere and I concocted a run, I called the guy next, casual, who's not working that day. I said look, if you come in and hustle your ass off, I'm going to help you on the dock. I'll help you load the truck, don't say anything. But you've got a day's work. But yeah, it's a couple hundred bucks to him that day. So better than sitting home.
Speaker 3:And after a while it was routine. I didn't have to make the pitch anymore. But he'd come in. I'd be out there checking he don't know the truck. I'd be put away to go help him load stuff. He'd get out at about 11 o'clock. He'd make five or six stops in Jamestown that got delivered next day. That way, on his way to Erie he'd deliver five or six stops in Erie and then, instead of having the Erie guy wait on overtime till 8 o'clock for the big G-load we get every night, that guy would come home, be out at five o'clock, a whole new wife at dinner with his wife, and this guy would wait on straight time. Say, take a long lunch, dude, six to seven, pick up the load, come back in and we're done.
Speaker 3:So just kind of formulating things at work, at home and even from a management side, the same guy with the tie, he worked in big terminals. So I said eight doors, 12 doors, and he had each door this was the Erie East, this was Erie West, this was Olean, this was Dunkirk. And every night he used the same thing. Well, I'd look at it and I'd see a load come in that had 14 skids going Ererie west. Well, they parked in the dunk truck door. They don't know. So they park in the dunk truck door.
Speaker 3:So he would tell me he'd come in and say, well, you got to move this truck here and this truck here. I only got two guys on the dock, I said, well, I could just move these four signs and it's done. I mean, it takes me a minute, yeah, and you got two hours of yard work to do. Like that. Just kind of like that might work. In Newark you might need 150 doors, you might need this door being burgund every night. But here you know, I will fuck it up, let me do it my way. And so I finally were able to do that.
Speaker 3:And even as a driver, I mean like when I was casual in the 80s in Buffalo this was before cell phones, right and as a casual, you sit home by the phone and you wait for some company you don't know who who needs a guy to call you up and say, hey, you want eight hours of work, you want to come in and do something. And I could have done that, which is what most guys did. But I went out. I didn't have money, but I bought a pager it was a little freaking pagers, you know and I gave everyone my number, and not only that, that way one, it got me out of the house. I didn't have to sit by a phone, I could, because the pager just told you who was calling. You had to call back, you had to find a payphone, but you didn't have to sit home, so I liked that.
Speaker 3:Anyway, shopping or hanging out, whatever, I would stop by different terminals. I'd say, hey, you got anything going today? And no one said it, but I could tell from the look in their eye hmm, this guy's got some ambition. And I also could see that they'd say wait a minute. And they'd be looking at their Whitney board, the old Whitney boards, and they'd say you can see them thinking.
Speaker 3:I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. Yeah, go get in the truck, I got something for you to do and then he could bring guys home early. So you kind of created your own future, the opportunity. You kind of created an opportunity that, had you been home, you're probably just going to use those guys that are out already and you pick these two up, you pick these three up and you're not called. So you kind of can, you know, not create the future, but it influence things a little bit, that's.
Speaker 1:I learned that from that side of it yeah, I like, I like how kind of there's just such a level of creativity around your I don't know your aura, I don't know what it is, but there's something about it's a little there's. There's there's a little bit of um. You're comfortable being on the edge of sanity, that's for sure yeah um, I'm curious because a lot of how?
Speaker 3:much more calm I used to be.
Speaker 1:That's good, that's probably good, but a lot of your ways seem very old school like. You just seem to have a very old school vibe to you and I'm curious how you think about the way technology is advancing in our industry. Things are moving away from that kind of old school approach and I'm curious how you think about applying the evolution of technology within your business, given that you're a very old school guy.
Speaker 3:I'm an old school guy. Although I had a pager when it wasn't common, I owned a K-Pro, which was the first portable computer. I was on Prodigy before AOL and all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're validating. You're a tech forward guy. All right, I take it back.
Speaker 3:I can't open the hood of a car. I can drive a car. That's not how I look at it, but I love what technology does. I love how it takes away the redundant work that people have to do sometimes, but I still think there is human interaction. That is as important as the technology. So computers can fuck up, just like old stuff can fuck up, and it's how you deal with that fuck up. So if you have the greatest technology in the world and your instrument is late, how does that fix it? You gave it all you had, you spent a lot of money on IT. It's too late, it got fucked up and I'm not sure that that AI calling the customer and apologizing and explaining it is going to have the impact that's necessary to keep that business. So I do think it's a simplistic thing, but I do think business in the end is all about people. And you know, I mean the phone is new technology. I mean everything used to be. Teamsters were guys that shot horses. You know, I mean that's where it came from. So the technology is always developing, but people are the constant. So I think that relationship is critical.
Speaker 3:So we have rooms of IT guys in our place and it used to be like, you know, you slide the pizza under the door every week or so and never enter there, you know. But what I've noticed with us and Danny's part of this a big part of it actually is that they are now much more integrated. The ops guys aren't afraid to go down there. They walk into the ops rooms because they've realized that the technology is not some, you know, on an altar. It's for these guys' jobs to get easier. They've realized that the technology is not some, you know, on an altar. It's for these guys' jobs get easier. And when you give them something now, they say, hey, that's great, thank you Not. Oh shit, I got to do this now. And that collaboration and interaction which I said Danny's been a big part of.
Speaker 3:It's a very noticeable difference to me in the company that there's no longer a wall between IT. Sometimes there's friction. I mean no doubt about that. What we need is never fast enough and what operations need is always like come on, how long is your list, man, cut it down. But there's much more of a communication, collaboration which has made a big difference, and our size too. I mean that's the other thing. I tell people we're like the Goldilocks zone. We're not a mom and pop. It has no technology. We have world-class technology. We were one of the first users of CargoWise 20 years ago. We were like one of their beta testers. So we use the top technology in the world. We're still small enough where we give a shit and the people are involved and and you're not. We don't force a customer to fit our model. We will adapt whoever they need. That's that's kind of the big differentiator, I think, and we will mold ourselves to their need, not the other way around just a couple more questions for you.
Speaker 1:I'm curious, curious for some advice you might give to the young entrepreneurs in our space. I interview a lot of CEOs, some who are as experienced as yourself, but many of them are young pups in the space, and that they're a few years into their journey, a few years into building a business. I'm just curious what advice you might have for young, aspiring entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3:I'm just curious what advice you might have for young aspiring entrepreneurs. Well, not to be negative, but it's tougher than people think. It's tougher. For business to succeed, a lot of things have to go right. There's a million ideas out there, but the greatest ideas are a dime. A dozen People who put them into practice are priceless. But to your earlier point, leadership is hard.
Speaker 3:Like the analogy I use is you know, as a Yankee fan and you see back in the day, you see Joe Torre on the bench and just like a thing, you know, just there. But all the things he's thinking about and doing and causing and anticipating, I mean like it doesn't look hard but it's really fucking hard. I'm not sure everyone's cut out for that and it's funny. Like there's an example I used. There was a guy that had a fire one time, a truck driver in Jamestown and he was a terrible worker. He was awful, awful, awful when I fired him, and I fired him for hitting the freaking bridge. I mean he had good reason to fire him, but I could tell in his heart.
Speaker 3:He thought he was the hardest working guy in the world. He's a great driver. No one cares more than he bled. Red Star Red. He was a fuck-off. He didn't remember it. But years before, when I was a casual at another company, I went on a midnight shift and he's the guy who told me. He says we're going to sit in the truck until 530 because my mom's going to know that we didn't do anything. I know more about you than you remember. That I know. But that's the hardest part. You remember that, but that's the hardest part, I mean again, the hardest part is people. You can either buy or create the greatest software in the world, but you have to find a niche, you know. You have to be able to sell things better than other people do. You have to compete on price, which is tough. I mean what percentage of businesses succeed? Five percent, I mean, not a lot.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but everyone thinks they can do this and it'll follow them. So I would just kind of temper your exuberance and enthusiasm with a little bit of reality. We can avenge reality somewhat, but there's still some facts you've got to consider. It's a hard thing. And then the point you made earlier too how do you deal with people? How do you rally people when things are slow? How do you lay people off?
Speaker 3:That was the hardest time of my life besides, the ship was when we lost part of our big customers and let people go. That did nothing wrong. Some consultants came in and told them hey, you need to use the big guys. These little guys, they're not your world class. Why are you using them? They found out why they're using us. The big guy sucked, but I had to let go of half a dozen people. That was a hard, hard thing to do.
Speaker 3:And what I've learned I'm not sure it's, you know it's always a political one I learned when things don't work out, it's best done with a hug, and you know like I'm sorry. It was my fault, not your fault. Even when it's for cause not with a truck driver, it'll be. I mean, even when it's not what I hoped it would be. I thought you would be. I mean, that's not your fault that you're not what I thought you'd be. It's my fault that I didn't see correctly. You know. So you try to never. You know you never leave anger, you never kind of burn the bridge. You leave it open because the world goes round and round. You never know where you meet again and that's proven a lot of times. People that we let go or left us have come back around and tried the rest of the world. It wasn't as green as they thought it was going to be.
Speaker 1:Great advice. My last one it's got to be really hard to be a Bills fan Summer Like. Will the Bills ever win another Super Bowl or a Super Bowl?
Speaker 3:I don't know. They never won any. Yeah, my son, who works for us now he was 12 years old in 92. And I took the train out to Minneapolis for the Bill Rivkin's Super Bowl had the time of our lives and I was so hoping that the commanders and the Bills would have gone back to New Orleans. He's in Ukraine so he couldn't go with me, but that was my dream. I kind of do a Super Bowl reprise with my kid.
Speaker 3:30-something years later, but yeah, it's tough. I'm a big fan. I got all kinds of helmets and Josh Allen pictures and jerseys around. I think he's a great quarterback. I'm not sure how we get past Reed and Mahomes, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who's your team?
Speaker 1:I'm the bears fan, so my, my misery is a little different than yours less expectations? I guess fewer expectations or lower expectations yeah I.
Speaker 3:I stay in touch with some of the old bill. Kelly's and thomas's that generation are great very nice this team should get there, man, Maybe next year. So yeah, I thought this was the year.
Speaker 1:It's a famous saying in our house, so all right. Well, any parting words of wisdom you want to leave with the audience or anything we missed? I'm sure we missed plenty in your story, but I appreciate you sharing everything you did and giving us better insight into the Logistics Plus world.
Speaker 3:Like I said, don't try this at home. It's very unique and odd and it shouldn't work, and it's been. I call it the hand of God A dozen times. It's come down and touched us. I'm not sure why. It's not because I'm special and deserve it, but there's just crazy, crazy examples of things that should not have gone the way they went, and they did. It still worked out. So knock on wood.
Speaker 1:Knock on wood. Yeah, all right. Well, that's all we got. Listeners Appreciate you tuning in for another episode of the Freight Pod and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Andrew. Out listeners appreciate you tuning in for another episode of the freight pod and we'll see you next week. You.
