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. #57, Part 2: Jeff Silver, CEO & Founder of Mastery Logistics Systems
In part two of this special two-part episode, Andrew continues his conversation with his dad, Jeff Silver, CEO and founder of Mastery Logistics Systems. Part two picks up with the founding and rapid growth of Coyote Logistics, a company that redefined the industry's expectation of service with its "No Excuses" mentality. Jeff says the experience was “magical the whole time.”
After UPS acquired Coyote in 2015, Jeff could have easily retired, but as he says, he doesn’t like golf. In 2019, Jeff started Mastery Logistics Systems to tackle a really hard problem: building a modern transportation management system for enterprise carriers, brokers, and shippers.
In this episode, Jeff also talks about:
- How Coyote’s "No Excuses" mentality fueled its growth and changed the industry, what made a great Coyote hire, and his proudest Coyote moments.
- Why freight brokers really exist, what shippers need from a brokerage, and how digital brokerages have gotten this wrong.
- The challenges of building technology for asset-based carriers and how Mastery balances its product roadmap with customer expectations.
- His take on AI’s impact on freight, brokerage’s future in the next five to 10 years, and when autonomy will truly change the game.
- His advice for the next generation of logistics entrepreneurs and what he’s proudest of in his 40-year career.
Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.
*** This episode is brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services. Visit gorapido.com to learn more. ***
A special thanks to our additional sponsors:
- Cargado – Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies that move freight into and out of Mexico. Visit cargado.com to learn more.
- Greenscreens.ai – Greenscreens.ai is the AI-powered pricing and market intelligence tool transforming how freight brokers price freight. Visit greenscreens.ai/freightpod today!
- Metafora – Metafora is a technology consulting firm that has delivered value for over a decade to brokers, shippers, carriers, private equity firms, and freight tech companies. Check them out at metafora.net. ***
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.
Speaker 1: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, all right. So Paul reaches out, gets you connected to Fordo Mark Fordo absolutely pivotal. This is going to be hard in general, and I'm sure it was with Back Claws. It's like how do you give credit to all the people you want to give credit to that had such a big impact and I'm speaking for you as someone who has done this on such a smaller scale, with even just like 500 employees that worked for me. It's really hard when you're trying to tell a story about your business and give credit to all the people that were impactful, and especially for someone like you where it's 10x um, it's even harder. But, um, I'm sure you'll find ways to credit as many people as you can, because it's.
Speaker 2:It's impossible. I'm not going to try because I would definitely end up leaving somebody out, not not on purpose, and you know, but but ford was critical, as you know. I wouldn't have done it without him, actually, or somebody like him, but that was a very critical thing.
Speaker 1:And so the idea there was a quick pivot from, you know, being a TMS provider to being a broker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wasn't convinced one way for sure in the first place. So it wasn't a hard pivot. We just weren't really sure and in fact we were trying to name the business. We were looking for something that could work as either.
Speaker 1:While we weren't sure, how did you settle on the name?
Speaker 2:so the, the. I'd always sort of thought that the back hauler's name was a bit of a burden. It just wasn't a great name. People would make fun of it. You know, American chicken back haulers or whatever, Just whatever it you know. So we were looking for I also didn't want to be a three-letter acronym Right, there are too many of those in the trucking business and brokerage and I didn't want to name it after the family either, because I knew at some point we would sell it and I just think that's a little strange. So we were looking for a name that would work in multiple languages because I wanted to be able to be in Europe and something that was identifiable, that would work on swag as you know, Marianne is the swag queen and loves to make that a big part of the businesses. So it had to be something that would be identifiable and we had some different ideas. Allie Cat was one. Alexandra Catherine, our only daughter that was one idea.
Speaker 2:Number five on paper number one in our hearts, belly Fire, which the idea of that was. We always looked for people that had fire in the belly when we were trying to hire them. But there was also this connotation of of a? Uh, an ulcer right, that we didn't want to be giving people an ulcer uh as a broker or as a tech company. And uh, our good friends, the, the Wiles we used to call them the Wiley Coyotes and so we were in Cabo, at their place, talking about the names, and the idea of Coyote came up. So we were, as we were just getting going and talking about what to name the business, um, in our, at our house in Lake bluff, illinois, with our three developers that work for us, and Marianne and I were sitting there and all of a sudden, with coyote on the list, coyote comes right across the backyard, looks in at us and we're like there is absolutely no freaking way. That just happened. But it did, uh, and that's how we ended up with coyote and when did you?
Speaker 1:when did you know what you wanted like who you wanted coyote to be like, at what point? And and help me understand who Coyote was Like this is. I want you to take me through those first couple years of building the business, how it was different.
Speaker 2:The critical thing that we did, our invention, if you want to call it that was not the technology, it was an idea. It was the idea that we would move every single load that we possibly could that we committed to, regardless of whether we made money on it or not. To clarify, unlike some of the entrants that came later, we never priced to lose money. That came later. We never priced to lose money. We never had this idea of burning shareholder money to lose money to gain market share. That's an idiotic idea and there are companies that are gone today because they thought it was a good idea. That was not what we did. The experiment, the idea here, was to see if we were willing to really take the responsibility of moving every load that we committed to. What would happen? How fast could we grow? What would that feel like and could we make money at it, right? So we always priced to try to be in the middle of the market and over time we did have shippers that would tell us we tend to be about right on the money with Robinson a third of the time, a little more money or a little less money a third of the time. So we knew we were always at market. But we were willing, where we had to, to lose money. And in fact early on, right as we were still building Bazooka, we didn't really have much of an accounting system yet or anything like that. But I kept a spreadsheet, an Excel document, that showed, from beginning of the first day we moved freight until that day, whether we were net positive from all the loads that we lost money on versus what we made money on, at least for the first few months. And there were times at which it was negative, not because we wanted it to be, but because we've refused to ever not step up and pay a truck, pay a carrier to move a load if we had to, and we tried to not do it. Obviously we wanted to make money, but that was a hugely altering thing. Nobody had ever done it before. I'd suggested to Paul in the days of backhaulers once or twice, if you know, the idea of like putting a, an insurance thing in where everybody would kick in $10 a load or something. So we would have this pool and we would use that to move freight. But we had never done that. So I wanted to try that this time and it worked and people saw that we were doing that. It was the first time anybody did that. Right Up until then, brokers used to say whatever and just fail on freight or lie to the customer or you know, just fail. And we were a no fail, no excuses thing. It was different and it worked. So we were off and running that way.
Speaker 2:And then uh ran into. First uh Sissler and his business and Greg Seabolt at GFS, general Freight Services in Atlanta Started talking to them a little bit. Well, they were one that we were going to sell the technology to, but got to know those guys. And then I was introduced to Warburg. So in 2007, I think we did a total of $25 million in revenue. And then I was introduced to Warburg, so in 2007, I think we did a total of $25 million in revenue. But Warburg came in and invested towards the end of that year and our experience with them really from the very start, almost 100% of the time was positive. They were great. So they provided the working capital from that time on.
Speaker 2:But also they helped us buy two companies in 2008. The first was a company called Integra out of Memphis and Atlanta. The two guys who were running that now have a business called AddedX, and it was 2008 and these guys had an all intermodal company. So they had one guy that worked for them that was based in Lake Forest, illinois, and one day a woman who worked for us drags this guy into the office. She had met him at Starbucks and I think she had a coyote shirt on and he recognized it or something and they started talking and we talked to them about this idea of combining their business with ours. They were all intermodal, we were all truck. We were a small company. They had a whole executive team. They had a CFO we didn't have one yet they had a president and a VP of sales. They had a. A logistics business too, I don't know, wasn't really doing much. So we ended up doing a deal and buying them and when we bought them, just for the detail, when we bought them, they were doing about a half a million dollars a month in margin. They were doing about a half a million dollars a month in margin.
Speaker 2:And fast forward about four months and the economy implodes and all of a sudden truck prices are cheaper than intermodal prices and it was a disaster. They were down to like under $200,000 a month from $500,000 a month in margin and Warburg's, like what the hell is going on? And I get a phone call, I think in June of that year, from Chuck Herzog, who's one of the guys whose business it was, and he said Jeff, I'm down here in memphis where he lives, uh, with our sales force. All of our sales folks are here and they're not happy and like, well, okay, chuck. Well, first, why didn't you invite me? I had to come down there.
Speaker 2:He said I didn't think you'd be interested in that. And I said, well, it would have been. I said, well, I'm not very happy either, but why don't you tell me why they're not very happy? And he said well, because they thought when you, you know you guys said when they, when you guys bought us, that they'd be able to sell truck, and not just intermodal. And I said, yeah, I thought so too. Why aren't they selling truck? And he said because they don't know how. You haven't taught them. I was like okay. So I stood back and I said you know what? I will not leave my desk for six months. I'll take some people with me to help me and I will take every call. Have them start talking to their customers, find out what opportunities they have and call me with those opportunities, and I think the first one came from maybe John Morrell or somebody it was at Menards or some business where it was an absolute wrong one to start with, because they only allowed like 21 carriers on their property.
Speaker 2:So we took two loads and had to give the loads to one of those carriers, right, and we lost money, obviously a ton of money on those because they knew what was going on. But a few days, a few days later, leslie Johnson one of the women that was selling for them calls me and she's at Coca-Cola and she had a friend that worked at Coke and she was over there and she had never been able to sell them intermodal because the way Coca-Cola was set up in those days they were very regional with seven regions and they didn't ship beyond the region, which meant that none of their loads were ever long enough to work on intermodal. She said'm down here, um at coke and and ch is failing on five loads. Can we take any of them? I said, take all of them. And and she said, well, how do you know you can move them. I said, well, because that's what we do, just take the loads. She said, what do I charge them? I don't care, take whatever they were going to pay or whatever, we'll just take them.
Speaker 2:And so we took them and we moved them and that was our start with coca-cola. And then after that, right after that, the fourth of july happened and I was at at stacy gold's house it was our controller at the time at the lake bluff parade and my phone rings and it is the guy from Coca-Cola Enterprises in Texas, corporate marketing, and decided to run a special on two liter cokes or diet coke or something in Texas. And there's all these extra loads. And ch wasn't answering the phone and I said we'll take the loads, we'll move them and we moved a bunch of loads for them. I think you were involved in that, if I'm not mistaken, but maybe that's not right I have, I have a fourth of july memory that, uh, that that sounds very similar.
Speaker 2:So pivotal, pivotal. So we ended up doing that and then, unfortunately, I mean it helped our business but hurricanes pointed themselves at at Texas, uh, I think in September of that year, and we really started getting going with them and we were off and running with Coca-Cola and and there were a lot of things that went wrong with that acquisition. In fact, I think two years later the entire executive team that we bought was gone. Most of the operations folks were gone, but I think we had kept eight of the 11 salespeople that we had and then a few other operators had kept eight of the 11 salespeople that we had and then a few other operators and it was incredibly successful because those salespeople are the ones that you know at Backhaulers.
Speaker 2:We had never had outside salespeople but intermodal sales is outside sales right, and so we were now out in front of the customers with these great relationships that these folks like James Jacobs and Pat and these guys had Jenkins and Leslie and John Morell and we were off and running with these large customers At Backhaulers. We had never gone to a grocery warehouse, we didn't do any refrigerated freight, none of that kind of stuff, so this was a whole new world, and we grew like crazy because of them. Later, that same year, though, we also bought another business. That was General Freight, the one that Sissler was in. That was also, you know, more classically, a great acquisition, in that it really did exactly what we thought it would do, as opposed to the disaster-turned great that we had with the first one.
Speaker 2:We kept most of those people for a long time, and some of them, obviously Jonathan was there in Pilbury recently at Coyote, where he was eventually the CEO, and left, but then we didn't buy anything else at all until 2014. So after that, all of our growth was organic, but a lot of it came from, you know, just people busting their butts to do it. But some of those relationships that were parlayed into other relationships, you know, we Chris Pickett was eventually able to win a full outsource for Heineken against a competitor, specifically because a guy from Coca-Cola came to the meeting we were having with Coca-Cola With Heineken, with Heineken, tossed us out of the room and told the Heineken guys that either they would use us now or waste a year and be back to use us the next year because the other guy wasn't going to do it right. And that relationship lasted a very long time and I think Coyote still does a bunch of that because well, not, I don't know, funny is the word just.
Speaker 1:It's powerful to me to think about just a quick statement around leslie and coca-cola and I am part of this, which is maybe why it feels so real and the idea that ch fails on five loads, however many loads, and that gets put in front of Leslie and she says what do we do here? And you say, just take the loads and we'll move them and figure it out. The number of times that we played hero at Coyote. It was so representative of who we were and who we were trying to be for our customers. Because I do remember that fourth of july it was, it's one of the most pivotal moments of my career and it's, I think, in a lot of ways it shaped the way I ran my business.
Speaker 1:And I remember I think the way I remember is I was, I was pulled out of the pool and, uh, you and myself and ford, and there were all these shuttle runs like, and we had just like hundreds of these. I remember we, we spent like a day, the day at the office just managing hundreds of these orders. A lot of them were shuttle runs between Memphis and West Memphis and then a bunch of them were long hauls from Dallas to Memphis or Memphis to Dallas or whatever it was. And then the aftermath of us trying to figure out how to bill. We had to have these carriers send us these PODs and I just remember sitting on the floor with Pat Campbell and we were just trying to match them all up. There were like literally like a hundred of them, and it was at the time when a shipper needed help the most. Our phone was always going to be answered and we were going to figure out how to solve that problem there are one of the things I would say, though, just to make sure that nobody is misinterpreting this.
Speaker 2:I think that there really have been two times at which I really have helped ch robinson. The first was in selling back haulers to them. The second was in the competitor that we created for them, because at some point they woke up and saw that was happening and they changed the way they did business. They stopped failing on freight because we were not failing on freight. I think we made them a much better company, or helped make them a much better company, by that. I think that was a very transformative thing for them to have happen, which is very natural. Are you looking?
Speaker 1:to grow your brokerage? Are you struggling to land new customers in these challenging market conditions? Look within so many companies that tender you freight throughout the domestic United States also have business coming out of Mexico. A year ago I understand why you might not have seen that freight as an opportunity, but today Cargado exists and that means any load coming into or out of Mexico is now an opportunity for you to support. In just over a year I've been able to see Cargado go from ideation to launch to rapid growth. It's amazing to see how many logistics companies have been able to use Cargado to expand into Mexico to grow their business. Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies who are moving freight into and out of Mexico. If you move Mexico freight or are planning to reach out to cargado today at cargadocom, that's c-a-r-g-a-d-ocom. Yeah, I mean, what's the saying? Something about tides raising all boats, something like that. I mean that's you kind of raised?
Speaker 1:the bar, for my perspective is that coyote raised the bar for not only what was possible but what could be expected of a freight broker by a shipper, and we got to a place where technology was available to create even playing fields and to measure how one performer did against another. And in doing so, it now became like you're either going to live up to the competitors who are at a certain level or you're not going to have my business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were, I mean, regularly in the high 90s for on-time delivery on people's scorecards and in a lot of cases I had out some of the asset players, which never made sense to me, but we were able to do it. So it was that focus, it was the no excuses get the job done. And, and absolutely core to that was the people that you know, marianne figured out how to go higher, right. All these athletes, all these folks that had worked two jobs in college, that we just didn't care of what their GPA was. We cared about what they would do to take care of everything that they needed to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about that. What did a great Coyote employee? What were they like?
Speaker 2:How did they operate? I think it's exactly what I just said. Right, it's, it's. It was very self-selective and so many of them came from recommendations. I forget who the guy was, but somehow they found somebody that was on the purdue lacrosse team or something like that, and then they would find five more of those folks, because the people that were already there would bring in folks like them, even if somebody was their friend and they didn't think they were going to fit and be able to deliver in the same way, they would never recommend them. And so that culture of only bringing the best, you know.
Speaker 2:And we had a ton of athletes. I think, as you know, we had at least 100 kids that played either D1 or juniors hockey. We had, you know, people in these team sports. Where these kids would be, you know. You knew if they were a D1 athlete, they were able to manage a whole bunch of stuff at the same time, because they didn't get through college without doing that. You knew they were used to being measured by numbers every day. That's just the way, you know. That's how sports works, and whether you win or lose today, you got to get back up and go and compete again tomorrow, right. So you know very early she focused on that and that was a huge part of what we did. Obviously, not everybody was an athlete, but we found that same sort of type of mojo in other types of areas, right. So I think that was a huge part of it. It and if you hire the right people, give them the right tools, they're going to take care of the customers the right way and the customers are going to take care of you. That was pretty simple. You know.
Speaker 2:I think this is so much of what has happened in this industry wrong in the last few years has been because some folks that came into the industry recently and a lot of the money that supported them, did not understand what brokerage is and why brokers make money. What is brokerage? So? The reason brokers exist is to take care of risk, to absorb risk and to spread that risk across a broader group of customers and carriers. That's what it is. That's why brokers get paid. Get paid.
Speaker 2:So all of the idiocy that came out with a couple of these so-called digital brokerages, where they were convinced that if they automated everything, they could take much smaller margin, or basically the idea that they could guarantee some margin, service and rate at the same time showed a complete lack of understanding of this business and, unfortunately, one of the folks that propagated that was somebody whose name I mentioned before in a digital brokerage, where that's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. But the idea that you could go in and automate everything, even though there were many loads that we did that CH Robinson did that, coyote did that were completely hands-free. Their idea was, if they write an app that can move freight with no hands, you don't have to pay the people, so you don't need a margin, basically, or you need a very small margin. But that's not what brokerage is. Brokerage is about absorbing risk.
Speaker 2:The other piece that they didn't understand is that, for the most part, the way that the folks that work at large companies, at large shippers, are compensated, they're compensated on a salary plus a bonus plan, so that does not mean that they're paid to find the cheapest rate on every single load, the cheapest cost. They're paid to hit their budget. So if they hit their budget for their transportation, meaning that for the entirety of the year, if you add up what they paid to all the carriers, that it matches what they budgeted to move that freight, then they get their bonus If they go above their budget. They don't get a bonus If they go way below their budget. What happens? They get a bonus, right, and then their budget gets cut the next year because obviously it was too high, very often by folks that don't understand freight and don't understand freight cycles and don't understand that freight can get more expensive from one year to the next without the person doing anything right or wrong.
Speaker 2:And so sometimes, where some of these newer companies would come out and say we will move the freight for cheaper than everybody else, that's not necessarily what that manager is looking for at a shipper. They want to make sure that the freight is delivered on time and in budget at what they expect, right. And so all of that that lack of understanding of that, you know, led to a lot of investors losing a lot of money and buying into this idea not really having any clue what they were doing, which fortunately is now gone. So one of the companies that is doing it is gone, and the other one, uber Freight, who was doing it for a while, has now fortunately pivoted and is now brokering freight the right way, where their intent is to make money right, because the reason they're being paid margin is to absorb the risk on any individual load by spreading it across many loads for many customers and many carriers and capacity. And that is why size and scale and density matter, because if not, you don't have the ability to spread that margin over multiple companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean Uber went so far as to hire a former Coyote, Todd Sauter, great former coyote to kind of help transform their business into a more well, into an eventually profitable kind of brokerage. So I'm curious now will you dive a little bit more into the risk concept, because I think that's interesting and few people maybe have talked about or understand that really. Like, what does that mean for the broker to job, to absorb risk on behalf of the shipper?
Speaker 2:So let's say that that same widget maker from North Carolina has five carriers and a hundred loads that they need to move. Today there's not enough capacity out there. I mean there has been more capacity recently, but generally there's some loads that are really good for asset-based carriers and some that are not right. So really good asset-based carriers today run their businesses in a very intelligent way. The way to do that is to make sure that you are not wasting your resources, you're not deadheading too much, you are not using too many trailers and trailer pools that you shouldn't, but mostly that you run a full network, right? So let's say that that that guy in North Carolina is shipping out loads all across the country. He's probably going to give his loads to to the Asset based carriers that are going to where they need to get to, but then he's going to have loads to go into, like Idaho, that somebody doesn't want to go to, or let's say they're going. You know he's got eight loads to Florida and he's got two carriers that each like two loads a day to Florida, but he's got four more that he can't use his normal asset-based carriers on. So he contracts with a broker to do that.
Speaker 2:So what that broker has to do. He has got to work with 400 or 800 or 10, you know a thousand different carriers that will go to Florida some of the time. Some of them might be based there, others occasionally have loads they need to pick up down there and if you talk to enough of those carriers or interact with enough of those carriers, you'll find, as a broker, eventually, somebody that will move that load. You get paid a margin because some days you just can't find anybody that's going to go to Florida or that wants to go to Florida, so you might have to pay them to go to Florida, deliver down there and then deadhead all the way back up to South Georgia, to Macon or Savannah or somewhere, to get a load. And that's what you're doing. You're spreading that across all the different customers and carriers. You have Right, spreading that across all the different customers and carriers. You have right in some case. In some cases you can just round trip a guy because one of your other customers has a load, reload back up out of flora.
Speaker 1:That's the whole idea and that in in a way that before that was, before coyote came around the risk didn't necessarily feel like you had to take it because you could just choose not to move the order. And now you had kind of created a new environment where you know it was a requirement to take on the risk if you were going to get business. And so where I think there have been a lot of companies, there's a reason. There's a couple of reasons why hundreds, maybe even a thousand people have been hired out of Coyote to lead new brokerages in the last 10 years. Like people saw the success that Coyote had. People saw the end result with the acquisition by UPS and saw, like holy cow, these guys had it figured out, how do we grow? Like they did and they would hire whoever they could get from Coyote and then throw them into the leadership position and be like do it, like make it like they did. And when you really simplify it to just like, ah, no excuses. Like we just took all the loads, we made commitments and we always moved them.
Speaker 1:If you think that it's just that simple, you likely end up where a lot of these companies did, which is floundering over time and not really reaching Few companies have grown the way that Coyote had. If you understand the importance of a guy like Ford and the team that he created and the structure created for how you develop carrier capacity, how you go about pricing business in a way that can reduce risk by knowing your lanes, that you have stronger private fleet capacity on that you know can be consistent or strong enough relationships and the technology to support it, you realize it's a way more challenging thing to effectively manage that risk in a way that allows you to be a profitable and growing business. What I'd like you to do is talk a little bit about the nuance of how to make that type of business profitable. What are the elements, outside of no excuses and great people, that allowed for Coyote to grow at the rate it did and be as valuable as it was of a business?
Speaker 2:Clearly, the technology was an enabler only. It was only an enabler because we had the right people, the right people with the right tools, taking care of the customers the right way right. And by customers I mean the customers and the carriers, because those things are are completely codependent, and I don't think there's a different way to put it right.
Speaker 2:I mean it's critical to get to size and scale, uh, because you've got to have the density and that density probably comes at that at least a thousand loads a day kind of thing, um, anything sort of short of that. It's really hard to be good at that Right Now. The industry as I see it now has changed a lot, right, but the whole post and pray thing I think people just are way too dependent on posting freight on this or that load board and having somebody hopefully call in. I was listening to one of your podcasts about having to answer all the calls that come in and not being able to answer them. For me that's mostly because you posted all the loads and you have 1,000 carriers all calling for the good load and nobody's calling for the loads that are more difficult to move, except occasionally somebody does and that's why you do it. I get it.
Speaker 2:But developing more specific, better carrier relationships where you need them in a custom way that's based on the freight that you get, that to me just makes still makes all, all the all the sense in the world. That, to me, just makes still makes all the sense in the world. So you know it's interesting, not all of those people that worked at Coyote were a great hire for the folks that hired them. Because you know there are folks that just weren't as good but a lot of them were right and the reason they were hired is because they were great people in in the first place. But in other cases somebody you know some folks have gotten a free ride just by having that on their on the resume.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about the technology then for a minute. Just given the development like looking at where express was versus what Bazooka became how did you think about knowing you weren't going to sell the technology externally? How did you think about how much to invest in building technology, given that you had taken private equity money? How do you come to the right number of what's worth investing in building so that we can get to XYZ? Talk me through that thought process as you're growing the business.
Speaker 2:Honestly, we didn't really think about it. We just knew we had to invest. There was nothing to buy. You can go buy something and make it work. At that point I mean you could, but they weren't good. You know, I remember going to a TIA convention, right as that thing, as we were starting Coyote, and it was like you got to be kidding me. These are what you can buy. Like one of them still required all caps entry because they didn't know how to sort with mixed case. I mean it was bad. So there was no question about writing it ourselves. The you know, once we hired Darren Cockrell, he did professionalize that a lot more and put something in place that really managed the whole process to make sure that the work we were going to do made sense to do as a company. But I don't think we did that before he got there.
Speaker 1:And as you take me through the years of Coyote, when did you know this thing was working? This was going to be a really big, successful business.
Speaker 2:From the start we knew it was going to work. I was never worried and we certainly knew it when we got our first loads from customers that we had had before in the olden days. Certainly knew it when Warburg invested in us. Certainly knew it when Coca-Cola was starting to use us and Pepsi and all of those large customers, and when we won that full outsource from from Eineck and frankly, that was the one of the coolest things ever. Right, and so it just, it was magic. I mean, it was magical coyote, from the very start till our relationship started with with UPS as a you know where they were a customer, uh, all the way until we sold it. Magical the whole time.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned before joining a Japanese speech contest and the aftermath being never being afraid to speak publicly again. When I've talked to people about your impact to them in the past, there are two things that get brought up a lot. One are your speeches and the other are your howlers and the quote-unquote coyote hush Howlers and the quote unquote coyote hush, which was in the minutes. In the aftermath of you sending out a howler, which was like a newsletter, you could hear a pin drop on the floor because everybody went from talking on the phones to just staring at their computer screen. Dialed in to whatever it is, you had to say Talk to me about what that experience was like. How did you use that skill of captivation to charge these people into being so bought into what we were doing?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it was all about just open, brutal honesty.
Speaker 2:That's the reason people like me to come and speak at conferences and to investors, because I just have never been afraid to speak my mind for better or worse. I mean, I am a big supporter of the right kind of people and not of others and businesses and people and things like that. I mean, what you see is what you get from me, as you know, right and sometimes to a fault, but it is what it is At this point. It's not changing. The and the same goes for what I would tell our folks in the howler or in the truck stops here before that, and that is that that you know. I would tell them exactly what we were going to do and then we would go do it, if at all humanly possible, and those people knew that I was never asking them to do anything that I hadn't done myself or wouldn't do myself. And, um, you know, I think that I think I discovered early at Backhaulers that where, in some ways, we didn't have all that much structure, and so what I first started doing and what became the truck stops here is I would send out these little letters, these little memos out these little letters, these little memos or these notes saying okay, this is what you would call today an SOP, this is how we are going to do this. Everybody needs to understand that from now on we are going to do this. It was a way of getting everybody to do something the same way, and the more I did that, the more people expected me to be the guy that did that and and that brought me the ability to tell people what to do. Right, I mean that just at that point.
Speaker 2:You know, I was about to say before there were a couple of other books that I read early on. One of them was by Deming. Deming was was the guy, uh, who, basically American guy that taught the Japanese quality for their, for their automotive industry. Uh, and still worth reading, I mean, it's, it's.
Speaker 2:He was fascinating in what he was able to figure out well before he should have, and that was to build, basically take the human element out of any kind of a technology, right?
Speaker 2:So he was the one that figured out for the worker take away the ability for them to even make a mistake, or take away the ability for them to even make a mistake, because people will make mistakes if they can, not because they're not trying, but eventually you just make mistakes. So if you have the capability of building a system that prevents that in any way, shape or form takes it out, then you should figure out how to do that. And so I started leveraging that into the way we did stuff at Bad Callers and started sending out things where I would figure out okay, if we did it this way, that removes almost every possibility of making a mistake on this. So let's all do it this way and let's train that, and everybody does it that way and you're not going to make a mistake, whether it was a technology thing or just a systematic way of doing so.
Speaker 1:And it's fascinating to me, I guess, that you started by giving people essentially SOPs and that turned into a kind of masterful form of communication between you and your employees. That what I feel like. I mean, I just remember these speeches and I remember just sitting there looking at you and then looking at the crowd and looking back at you and it's just this connection that was like unbreakable and, um, it was a really cool thing to be a part of and I just, I mean it's passion it's passion.
Speaker 2:That's why people follow passionate leaders. They don't follow passion people that are not passionate. Right, I mean it's. It's why it's hard. And this is not a knock on jonathan at all, but you know, jonathan didn't have the same passion for I mean, he was. I thought he did a great job when he came, you know, when he took over coyote, and he did a phenomenal job for us and everything that we did in building the business and selling it to ups. But you know he's never sold for his supper, right, it's it's. You know, it's different from any time. Taking over from a founder is always different and difficult. It's hard and there are people that are good at it. I don't think I could necessarily do it Right and so, but it's about that passion.
Speaker 1:And being able to articulate it in a way that helps the team identify. What are the things we need to do to make this dream a reality, and how do we do them together?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you got to have the dream in the first place and then you got to be able to explain the dream in a way that people can understand and buy in on. Yeah, you have to have enough other people that also believe in the dream. And you know it's no different from what we're doing now, right, where we have taken this thing that was impossible to do, create what was on that mainframe and build a new TMS that would work for asset companies and brokers. Nobody's ever built a TMS at all that works for shippers as ours does now shippers with private fleets, dedicated fleets, one-way truckload fleets, intermodal brokerage, power-only brokerage, which I think is really the only new thing practically in the entire industry in decades since Al Gore invented the internet or whatever.
Speaker 2:In a lot of ways, it's. It's that the task is difficult, that the dream is difficult. That makes it worthwhile. It's, but you got to be able to back it up, right. You got to be able to throw yourself into it, to convince people that you're going to be able to do it and take off running, because not every dream comes to life, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, attention, freight brokers and 3PLs. Greenscreensai is transforming how freight professionals price and quote freight. With AI-powered pricing and real-time market intelligence, greenscreens delivers accurate, reliable predictions to help stay competitive in a constantly shifting market, whether managing spot rates or long-term contracts, greenscreens empowers brokers to quote with confidence and boost profitability, removing the guesswork from freight pricing strategies. Trusted by over 220 brokerages, greenscreens is leading the way in the future of freight pricing. And now there's Illuminate, greenscreens' latest product, designed to shine a light on deeper freight market insights. Illuminate provides unparalleled visibility into spot and contract freight trends, giving users a clearer view of pricing fluctuations and market conditions to inform smarter, more profitable decisions. Market conditions to inform smarter, more profitable decisions. Visit greenscreensai, slash thefreightpod and discover how Greenscreens and Illuminate can help win more business more profitably.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the value of the relationship between the CEO and in a training class and the way that you thought about. That's funny because, again, you haven't heard this, but I interviewed cole stevens, who you know, and he talked to me about how his dad, kenny, who's like you know, just like you kind of walks around and, wherever comfortable clothes he's wearing and you know, orients the training class, his new of drivers. He's the first person they talk to and make sure they fully understand the business. And you see that a lot with successful leaders is they connect with their newest employees as early as possible and that was something that you did and I'm curious if you could take me into your brain for what you thought the value of that was and how you thought about those interactions with new hires definitely.
Speaker 2:I see that a lot from our customers. I mean you know, robert low from prime inc is, I mean until until the basketball courts in their building in Springfield have been taken over by Pickle, by Pickle courts, that they have now been transformed, robert for years and years into his 70s would go and play basketball with those drivers all the time. I mean hugely important Derek Leather's, the same way I mean from from Warner. I mean these guys, they know that that they don't, they're nothing If those drivers are not performing. It's the same thing even in a brokerage, right? If, if the if they don't have the right employees, they don't get the right employees in the first place and they don't connect with them, all's lost, it's lost.
Speaker 2:And so for me there were a couple things. Number one I got to meet the people right away and very often I would go back and say to Marianne, you know, that person would be a great trainer someday. I think what do you think? Or that person could recruit, or this is somebody that speaks French or Spanish. So if we ever are doing business in Quebec or in Mexico, we could do this. Or this guy's you know father works at at this company. That could be a customer someday, or? Or? I mean there's a million reasons to want to get to know those new people that are coming in the door, that that that's the first thing. Right, it helps you, just like it. You know any CEO that's not out in front of customers all the time is missing everything. Right, because they're not. How do they run their business without knowing what the customers want directly from the customer's mouth? It's the same thing with those new employees, right, where you're hearing why they took the job. You're hearing what their experience was, what kind of family.
Speaker 2:I used to ask them what their parents did. You know, you get to know them right from the start and I would try to. You know, first of all, I would take every at Coyote. I would take any visitors that came in to visit us, would go to that training class, everybody. If you ever meet a Coyote person, a former Coyote person, you'll know when you meet them by how they introduce themselves. We drilled it so many different times. They stand up, they look the person in the eye, their hands are quiet. They're not flailing all over the place. The person in the eye, their hands are quiet, they're not flailing all over the place. Even today at Mastery we have probably 15% of our workforce was at Coyote at some point. When folks are introducing themselves in their former Coyotes, it's just really different from if they were from somewhere else, even if they were at CH or something before.
Speaker 1:So it's an interesting transition because you mentioned bringing customers into the training classes and there was something very unique about how you would tour or the value of a tour for a customer when they would come to Coyote, and it's funny to think about now in today's largely remote world how this is very different, but this was a pivotal part of the sales process, potentially for a customer to walk the floor of Coyote with you, and I'd love for you to just explain how you thought about a tour and why you carried them the way you did, and you can include the part about bringing them into the trainees, because I think that's valuable so we would always end in the training room, uh, but look, if it was a shipper that was coming in, the first thing to do was to show them the massive group we had focused on carrier capacity that's how their freight moved and explain how it worked and what everybody did and let them, if they wanted to hear how those conversations were going with those carriers and realize the uniqueness of what we were doing in that way Right, that was.
Speaker 2:I mean, you would see a sea of those people that was sitting there guaranteeing that their freight was going to move.
Speaker 1:And some people. Everybody had the same no, not the same thought. Everybody had a thought. When they saw that bald head of yours coming around the corner with a customer, everyone was thinking is he coming to my desk?
Speaker 2:Because I would do that.
Speaker 1:I'd plop the customer down and say, listen to this guy or that girl or whatever, watch what they would do With no forewarning, so you didn't know if he was coming to you and some people got really excited about it because it was a chance to show off. It was a chance to show what they knew and that they were great at what they did and that they wanted to be the one, when Coca-Cola or Pepsi or whoever walked through the door, that they were going to be the one to show them how we talk to carriers. There was something very prideful for a lot of us about potentially having you show up behind our desk, and I'm sure others were terrified of it. Like, I don't want to be put on the spot, but talk a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I'm not even sure why. Always I would pick somebody, but it may be that you know this person graduated from this game school, that they did, or they're from the same town or whatever right there was. Whatever reason, I like to move it around because it was one of the things that you know helped people stay on their toes. So I would take them through the carrier floor and then I would take them and show them our operations floor. You know they would see where the people were selling. But I wouldn't spend much time on that, right, because they don't care that we're going and finding other customers, except to the extent it helped their, you know, helped the finding other customers, except the extended help there, you know, help the whole system work well. But explain the way those ops folks worked and and how they were being compensated to take great care of the customers.
Speaker 2:I would take them through HR and explain how we hired people, that whole process, and they would see that I would take them up to our it group and, you know, show them what we're doing with the systems and that whole thing.
Speaker 2:Right, because there weren't that many of us at the time that that had these type of of it shops, clearly, um, and then end in the training room, right, and have the customer introduce themselves and their company and in a lot of cases that would also help that customer sort of feel, the buy-in. They're part of the whole process, they're part of training folks right. Now we would also send those training classes out to customers, right, would also send those training classes out to customers, right. John Bendick from Norco had to have received I don't know a thousand at least coyotes over the course of time as and he's a friend of mine as a, as a favor to to help these kids learn, and they would go eventually, once UPS bought us to the UPS hub and they go to a railhead just to see what intermodal was and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the tour concept was something I stole from you, borrowed from you, used from you, learned from you is probably the best way to put it. And bringing the shipper into the training class and then letting them talk, asking them to teach them something was so fun to see. And you could tell these guys were like wait, I get to have a little impact on these 15 kids who started a week ago and then they just, you know, at first they maybe seemed timid and next thing, you know, they've been talking for 10 minutes, giving them every piece of gold they have. I'm like don't do this, don't act like this. If you come to me like this, I'm way more likely to be. It's like it brings them into the process in a way that I definitely understand how it generates buy-in. So, all right, let's talk about the next phase. So you know, company has massive success. It's time to sell. I mean, when did you know it was time? How did you know UPS was the one versus? You know anyone else who was interested?
Speaker 2:one versus you know anyone else who was interested. So the um, you know 2014 was really a pivotal year. We grew from a billion to two billion dollars in that year. Uh, half of that was organic, the other half was was buying access america. Uh, and just a shout out to Ted, who you interviewed, I think, in your second podcast. That guy is unbelievable. What he's done with the school that he and his wife created in Chattanooga is unbelievable, and he had built a great business. And that's the funny thing about it is that when he originally reached out to Sissler, I told Sissler don't waste your time talking to him, we'll never buy him. Sissler ignored me, fortunately, and eventually we did a deal with them and acquired them, but that was 14.
Speaker 2:Warburg had invested in, in, in, oh, seven. So you know there are very long hold great private equity group, but seven years is seven years and at some point you got to start making plans to do something with it. So we were doing the two track thing, where we would either have gone public we had got all of our stuff together, filed to go public and everything else and at the same time we were having conversations with potential acquirers. So we had known UPS for probably six or seven years by that point, and I thought UPS still think UPS is an incredible place, probably six or seven years by that point. And you know, I I thought UPS still think UPS is an incredible place and incredible business.
Speaker 2:Um, and they were my by far my my um preferred answer, although we got to meet a group another group, that is, is from Mexico actually that I don't know if I'm allowed to name them, but they were also a phenomenal family-run business that was interested in acquiring us at the same time and that would have been very different but also very cool.
Speaker 2:Also very cool. Oh, and things heated up when, I think Alan Gershon Horn saw a news article that had leaked about us getting ready to go public. And I don't still don't know whether Warburg leaked that on purpose to try to have that happen or somebody. Actually, I don't know how they would have figured it out, cause it was not a big group of folks that knew that we were doing that. But Alan reached out at that point. I'd known him already from taking care of UPS as a customer and the idea for UPS at the time was, I think they were about a $50 billion package and did about $10 billion of other stuff with their supply chain businesses and the idea at the time was to turn it into a $100 billion package company and a $100 billion logistics company over time that we would be part of.
Speaker 1:The logistics part yeah, and so the deal goes through and I mean, is it everything you imagined? What, what, what, what kind of was your plan? I mean, did you know you were going to be be leaving to do ups stuff right away, or yeah?
Speaker 2:that was the idea. I really was interested in doing that. So immediately we took sissler, put him in charge, um and I switched over to the ups side and I started doing a, a worldwide tour of UPS and I mean it's really an unbelievable place. You know, I got to see people putting on those dress browns first thing in the morning everywhere from Singapore to Shanghai to California, to Washington, to all over Europe. I mean it's pretty amazing how committed folks are. I've always said that people work for people. They don't work for companies. I think UPS is the exception. I think people work for UPS as a company and I think it's really really interesting and cool ups as a company and I think it's really really interesting and cool.
Speaker 1:Why do you think, how do you like if you could just put a guess to why how their culture is is such that people are so loyal to the company? What do you think makes it that special in that way?
Speaker 2:I think part of it is a lot of those folks started off part-time, throwing packages, as they would say, and eventually ended up there and it's you know, they do a phenomenal job at taking care of their people Phenomenal job. It's interesting with the union involvement and the contentious negotiations that happen as contracts go by. But it's amazing I always sort of try to characterize it as a cross between the discipline of the US Army and the mystery of the Catholic Church Somewhere in there, the US Army and the mystery of the Catholic Church somewhere in there. Because when UPS would say to somebody, here's an opportunity to go open a new source center in Bangladesh or wherever people would go Didn't matter. People would have been at UPS for 35 years and have had seven completely different careers there and they, they love that super committed.
Speaker 1:So we're going to wrap on coyote and I just want to wrap on a positive not that the sale wasn't a positive, it was but I want to like get to the heart strings of coyote. For you, what was your favorite moment? When you think back on, like the entirety of what you and mary and the team built at coyote, what was the favorite moment or most proud moment?
Speaker 2:you can give me two, or just one, if they're the same, because definitely that when heineken awarded us that business, that was definitely one of them. That was such a transformative thing, you know, definitely being Coca-Cola's carrier of the year, winning their thing all the time. I mean we were doing 450 loads a day for those guys, that was huge. I think that.
Speaker 1:Okay, at Molo we built a great company and I'm proud of the work we did. We knew when to ask for help, and sometimes that meant going outside of our own company. I'm proud we built an ecosystem of trusted partners like metaphor. When we need a differentiated industry expertise in business consulting or technology services, we look to peter ryan and the team at metaphor. They've consistently delivered value in the transportation and logistics space for over a decade for mid-market and enterprise brokers, for shippers, carriers, private equity and freight tech companies.
Speaker 1:At Molo we use Metafora to solve problems we simply couldn't on our own. Metafora is the only partner you should trust to help you win, whether that's doing ops and tech diligence, growing revenue, optimizing spend or selecting and building software. Go check them out at metaforanet. That's M-E-T-A-F-O-R-A dot net. So you sell the company. Warburg is ecstatic, they make a billion dollars on the deal and you certainly did well. And after a while ups, you decide not for you and you retire. Right, that's the word you were using for a minute. Okay, so you've now built two very successful businesses. You have enough money that you don't need to work again for the rest of your life. You're in your 50s, you've retired. Why would you start. Why did you start? Why go back? What, what one of my kids called?
Speaker 2:me, and so they had this logistics company and trying to use this off-the-shelf software in it and it wasn't really working for them. What was I supposed to do? Say no, I'm not gonna help that's fair.
Speaker 2:So okay, first of all, I have no desire to ever be retired. Hey, I I was retired for five years at the right time of my life, when you were playing football and Johnny and Brian were just born, and I was exhausted. That was the right time to be retired. Now is not the right time. I don't ever want to be retired.
Speaker 1:Why.
Speaker 2:Of building stuff as you know, I don't like golf, as you know. I do like to cook, but you can't just do that.
Speaker 1:I mean, you like to solve problems, you like Sudoku, you like crosswords, and it's one of the things that's always been fascinating is how you just attack a problem in a way that anyone who hasn't seen it before it's like what the hell, how does he do that? So I guess it's just such a big problem to tackle. So talk to me. I mean, yes, yes, I called you and we had. Molo was a few years old, and what year was this? 20, 2019. Yes, so molo was about two years old. Um, how big were we? Five. So we had done 40 million in revenue in 18 and 100. We were doing 130 in 19.
Speaker 1:So we were getting to a point where the software we were using was it was just becoming a more of a nuisance than than anything else. And um, yeah, I remember, I remember Vogrich and I talking about it like man, it would just be great if you would just build a TMS and you hadn't. It felt like. I remember there was a. We were flying to one of Brian's games in, I think, omaha. Actually, this game was in Iowa and I remember showing you some of how we were doing, like I was showing you some of the customers that we landed. You were kind of surprised, I think, like at where we had gotten to and the idea had just kind of come to mind of you maybe getting involved to help with the technology. And then I remember the next morning we had stayed in a hotel room and the next morning I get up and I meet you for breakfast and you're like all right, here's the plan. It was as if overnight you had formulated the entirety of a business, for what mastery would become.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think you're remembering that right, because I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Speaker 1:That's pretty funny right because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That's pretty funny. There's. There certainly was a lot of confidence on and and and you know you had, you had written a lot of shit down. Uh, you're like, and then you know this could be what this looks like and this could be what this looks like that probably is true, but that was before a very, very pivotal moment.
Speaker 2:That happened in maybe April of that year. So that says I mean the original idea was to build a brokerage TMS, first for you and then to be able to sell it to other people. We knew we could do that right. We'd done it before, it wouldn't be all that hard, I thought. And then I had heard from Alan Gershenhorn, who was the guy at UPS that we did the deal with in the first place, and Alan had retired and he was working with a group called 8VC out of California at the time, now out of Austin, texas, and he asked me to come and speak at one of their events and I said no, I'm not interested. And he said, well, it's at Meadowwood in Napa. So I said, okay, I'll go. And I agreed to go and speak there and I did.
Speaker 2:But the key thing is that while I was there I met Mark Rourke, the CEO of Schneider, and Shaleen Devgan, his CTO, and Shaleen is as much responsible for what Mastery is today as I am. I mean, his vision was that the world needed a TMS that could work for everybody, that the world needed a new, modern TMS that could be the only TMS that they needed for all their businesses. Tms that could be the only TMS that they needed for all their businesses. At the time, their brokerage and their asset businesses were on two separate pieces of technology and took an hour just to take a load from their asset businesses and get it ready for the brokerage. It was just very, very, very difficult. And so, within I would say a very few weeks of having met him, we had a deal with them to become a longtime customer for them, to invest in Mastery and to make this a TMS that would work for especially the largest shippers, carriers, brokers and all the combinations of those in North America. Needs needed, needs still something that allows for collaboration between those players, because it's built on a very modern tech stack that's API, connectable to absolutely everything. So that really first agreeing to do this for Molo and then Schneider's input was critical in what we created Now at Coyote.
Speaker 2:Our tech stack was very easy. It was all Microsoft, it was all NET. Today's tech stack is a thousand times more complicated and more difficult. To write a cloud-first app like this, like what we've done, is ten times as much work as doing the same thing for an on-prem system, because what we're serving up is just a whole bunch of web pages and a whole bunch of HTML that's being held together with all sorts of magic by all the technologies that people have built around it today to make all of that possible and work.
Speaker 2:But each individual web page is still a web page. It's not all that different from when you look at something on Wikipedia or something right. It's all of the structures, all of the work, all of the way that data works and is held together. And you know, in this business, anybody that's operating in our industry is probably going to have to have three loads open at the same time in any given point in time, plus 15 other things they're working on. Web pages aren't built to understand that right. So if you leave one and go do something else for a minute and come back to the first one, remembering the state you were in and what was going on and what was there and what you had saved and what you hadn't, and all this kind of stuff is a huge amount of effort and work to do, and I had no idea at the time that it was that much more difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean five years into building the technology versus what you had thought going in. What's the difference Six years into building the technology versus what you thought going in? What's the difference in what you thought the process would be versus what it actually was?
Speaker 2:Everything is completely different. The technology is way harder, as I've heard you say on this podcast, other podcasts, that you've done everything takes way more money and way more time to do than you think it's going to, and then that it did in the previous tech stacks. Because of all the complexity of it, I also did not realize at the very start what an incredible opportunity this was, the fact that this does not exist at all. There is not another scaled TMS that you can go and buy in North America, at least right now. That is cloud native, uh, that can do what the system can do, that, what it can do for a broker, for an asset-based carrier, one-way carrier or dedicated fleet or a private fleet. Private and dedicated fleets have been just completely ignored by anybody that's ever written any of these things, except as a sort of afterthought. We'll try to make this or that work Right, there's nothing out there.
Speaker 1:What's different about running a private dedicated fleet versus just a one-way truckload carrier? That makes this a better system than what could have been out there for them as an asset carrier alone.
Speaker 2:It's too long of a conversation to have right here right now, but most of it is that generally, dedicated fleets are running around trips all the time. That's easy because they're trying to get back, but there's the complexity of what they're doing for their backhauls and sharing the revenue. The biggest part is that the whole invoicing thing practically across the industry is all done by spreadsheet. Most shippers not everyone. Most shippers require spreadsheets for billing and most carriers bill via spreadsheet not everyone. Most shippers require spreadsheets for billing and most carriers bill via spreadsheet. Not EDI, because there are elements to it that are lane-based, that are load-based. There are elements that are overhead-based, meaning you have on-site management that costs a certain amount of money. There are technology charges, so it's a very different scenario in terms of creating the billing and all that. There are promised number of days in service for drivers and how many they actually did. That all impact each other and in some cases that's sort of bundled across multiple sites. It's just very different.
Speaker 1:And in your experience again, I've only worked in brokerage, so this is all new to me. On the asset side, in your experience, the companies that at this point we've seen the industry move to a blurred execution strategy for many companies, most asset-based carriers with, say, at least 100 trucks, likely have a brokerage of some sort, whether small overflow or meant to be its own entity altogether, whether small overflow or meant to be its own entity altogether and many brokerages are now getting into trying to own or lease trailers. So the lines are blurring a little bit and I guess from your understanding has there been other systems available in the market for a company to use that has multiple modes or multiple business units, like brokerage and asset, that can all function under the same system oh, to a certain extent, yes, but they're older technology, right?
Speaker 1:they're not cloud native and how impactful is the cloud-native architecture to improving what you had before?
Speaker 2:Well, there's two things. Number one those systems have not been improved. The fact that they're cloud-native is one thing in and of itself, but it's also indicative of the fact that when this technology which is the right technology came out, they didn't restart and rebuild their technology. They're trying to port it to the cloud, these legacy providers. That's different from starting over, where there's API connectivity to everything, where everything's built on the modern infrastructure and you can work from anywhere, as long as you can see the internet. I mean it's just. It's in and of itself, it's it's. It's one thing, but it's also indicative of of just how the software has been dealt with or not, right, I mean it has.
Speaker 2:It's been a, a space that's largely been left alone by tech companies. You know, partially, because some of them don't think that it's big enough to go attack and others that just realize it's really hard. I mean this is really hard. These systems are super complex. Just the driver paid modules that have to exist. Are, you know, a very a big carrier will have 250 different driver pay modules that have to exist. Are, you know, a very a big carrier will have 250 different driver pay programs.
Speaker 1:We. I talked to Cole about this again. You won't have heard this, but by the time this airs you will have heard. Cole and I spent five minutes from Steven's trucking talking about driver pay and I mentioned that that was one of the first things that I learned as like a nuance in an asset-based carrier that I was just dumbfounded by as a former broker or as a broker in general, that I just had never thought of that as part of the nuance to what a challenge it is to effectively operate a trucking company.
Speaker 2:It's managing trailer pools. I mean there's just, you know, and as you said, I mean I think honestly that, as I said before, I think power only brokerage is the really the biggest new difference, new thing that has happened in technology in this industry forever. I think that over my career, there are three things that have changed, regardless of what all these little startups have tried to pitch as being reinventing know, reinventing blah, blah, blah and all that nonsense. One of them was the ubiquity of the internet and the commercialization of the internet and the World Wide Web. So, obviously, when I started, the internet was only military. It didn't exist in a commercial way, right. So we were proud inventors of the rate confirmation on the fax machine kind of thing, right, that was the first thing when that became prevalent. The second was in 2007, uh. So in 2007, uh, apple came out with the, with the iphone and, and that changed a bunch of stuff. Obviously, Not much is very different up until we've gotten to power-only brokerage and the impact it's having. So if you're one of our customers like Schneider and Warner, any of those kind of guys Schneider and Warner both do a tremendous kind of guys.
Speaker 2:Schneider and Warner both do a tremendous amount of power-only brokerage, a tremendous amount, thousands of loads a day that allows them, without having to hire more drivers although hire as many drivers as makes sense for them to do, and they're obviously very good at that but this allows them to have that that sort of flexible capacity, uh, that allows them to provide solutions to their customer Right. So the customer doesn't really care. You know, they've got a, an orange trailer or a blue trailer from Warner on their dock. They don't know if it's a Schneider driver pulling the orange trailer or an owner-operator, so an employee, an owner-operator or an external driver, when that trailer is being pulled they may know. When they look at the truck that pulls in, they often don't care because those guys are taking the responsibility for moving the freight.
Speaker 2:It's that ability to sell a solution that makes a giant difference. They're selling capacity solutions, just like good brokers. Do you know and I think Robinson is up to a couple thousand trailers now they do a lot of this, A lot of this power-only brokerage. It's a big part of it and I think that's going to become a bigger and bigger part of the way the world continues to transform in this industry.
Speaker 1:What are some of the other things that, as you've spent a lot of time in the last few years curiously entrenched in these large asset-based businesses, as a former broker, I'm curious what are some of the more interesting things you've learned about asset-based carriers that make it really challenging to build a system for them to operate efficiently with?
Speaker 2:you mentioned driver pay as a big one oh my, I mean there are so many different pieces to this, but you know all of the onboard device, all the pings, the hours of service that we didn't deal with as brokers, the way you communicate with the driver by sending these forms. Platform Science has been a great partner for Mastery as we've gotten all of our integrations with them up and running, which we have now been working with other of those providers as well, but those guys have been a great partner as we've learned to do that and now have really cool things that nobody else does. Basically, right from the PMS, the folks that are interacting with those drivers via platform science are able to message the drivers right from inside of the app and they can see exactly the same thing the driver sees on their platform science device. The dispatcher or the load planner or whatever can see right from their desk. Right, that's something I don't think anybody's ever done before. But the way all those things work, the balancing that the tractors, the drivers, the trailers and the freight that's a huge difference. Things like pre-orders that allow you to create these orders in advance of when you're going to get them from the customer. A lot of these carriers will plan a lot of their work for the next week on a Thursday and say, okay, we know where what next week is going to look like, at least for the first three days. Let's get these loads in the system and plan. But they don't have the EDI 204s from the customer yet, so they need to be able to create these. But then when those 204s come in, they don't create new loads for them. They have to be able to be translated to understand that these are loads we already have. So let's treat these as, um, as updates, rather than new loads is something we're coming out with shortly. That's going to be very, very helpful. Um, I mean, managing trailer pools is is a huge thing, right, it can be a key to being profitable or not, and how much freight you're able to commit to you know just when we started. I mean, I cannot give enough thanks to Warner.
Speaker 2:So Dara Mahone came in into Warner right about the same time. Uh, that that, uh, we signed a contract with Warner. Uh, dara grew up in Ireland. He's an incredible guy. He came to the U? S on a on a visa that Schneider was was being able to issue at the time for Irish truck drivers to come over. So he came over to the US on a contract to drive a truck for Schneider. I don't think that lasted a super long time and eventually he worked himself up and became the guy that took Vonage to the cloud. So Warner brought him in to be their CTOTO and he has built a great team over there and you know he has been really pivotal and his group has been pivotal with their operations, people and with the full support of Derek Leathers the whole time and helping us get this right in terms of what we're doing for asset.
Speaker 2:And so it was interesting, whereas we knew exactly what we wanted to build for brokerage, when we sat down and said, okay, what does a driver look like in mastermind, that was a whole new thing we got to do. What does a trailer look like? What are all the different pieces, what does it track, what are all the different pieces of information that we need? And started with, you know, these Visio sketches that I would do and went and met with the Warner folks especially, also, obviously, schneider and everybody else, but those guys fell in really quickly in helping us, helping us and and helping shape what the thing became, uh, early on. And it's funny as I look at some of the some of the drawings now, because it's turned into so much more than that, um.
Speaker 2:But you know it didn't occur to us that other systems don't do some of these things Like. One great example is we have this thing for driver preferences that are things like you know, this driver prefers not to haul pork, or won't haul pork, or doesn't want to drive at night, or things like that that historically are just stuff that people write down and they're not part of a system. Well, when you go to run the optimization, you need to take those things into account. You can't just have the person sit there and say, oh no, no, I know that doesn't work because, right, it makes sense to just have that. Where it makes sense to block, that matches as what the optimization would say is a viable result.
Speaker 2:So we didn't really realize at the time, because I've never seen an asset-based system other than their AS400, which is just a bunch of blinky letters on a black screen and seeing one. So I didn't know what to expect or what to do. And so we created something from scratch with that completely. I mean, everything was from scratch, obviously, but all the rest of the stuff, as you said, I could just dream out of my head right off the bat. We had to learn everything about this, about hours of service and how that works for single drivers versus teams, because not every team is a team, not every team is a full team where you basically can ignore hours of service. There's training teams, there's husband and wife teams. There's all sorts of different things. They all work differently. There's Canadian hours of service. We had lots of different stuff like that.
Speaker 1:How do you think about prioritization? When building a product like that, where there's so much to build, you recognize that everything just generally takes longer than you think it will. So how do you navigate customer expectations or prospect expectations against a time-consuming effort and knowing what is best? I think the idea of leading from the front and a CEO who's sales-minded in front of customers is clearly proving valuable in this exact scenario, because you're out in front of Dara, you're out in front of Chalene, you're out in front of your customers, consistently having these conversations but balancing and making decisions. I'm curious how you think through that and making decisions. I'm curious how you think through that.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not necessarily an easy thing to do. You know you've met Lauren Kugler, who is our chief product officer, who is absolutely phenomenal at this and balancing all of these needs. You know we have had a very, very well thought out and now very well delivered product map for a long time. That is generally very fixed for the next two quarters and somewhat fixed for after that, and she always manages to leave room in there for certain things that got to get done that come up as we're doing implementations, or a new customer that we can sign up. We can just do this. So one thing is that we don't do any custom work at all. The only the closest thing to custom work that we do is for integration only where our system needs to talk to another system and they didn't have the API capabilities yet or something we had to figure out something. Nothing goes into the system that doesn't get blessed and that is not going to be beneficial to all or most of the folks. Now things are going to be very different for what our the folks with private fleets that are on here. Now we have a very large private fleet, whose name I can't say, but a very large private fleet for a very large retailer that's operating the system, for other companies as well that are shippers and a bunch of other dedicated fleet folks that are in here. You know you have to be responsive the first time you do that. You know. A great example is for that very large private fleet. They use a different kind of a reference number that they really everything is based on that reference number. That's a stock order number, an STO that we needed to get onto that main screen where we're doing the matching of the capacity with the freight and and we didn't think they were going to use it in that way. So we had to make that pivot very quickly and Lauren was able to figure out how to do that.
Speaker 2:You have to be able to be responsive in that, on the brokerage side, just because I've been doing this so long, it's hard for somebody to come up with some new idea for a brokerage. We're not getting a whole bunch of new ideas. A brokerage we're not getting a whole bunch of new ideas. Um, you know, when we first started working with with schneider on their power only, which is in the system live and has been for years now um, that was all new. So orchestrating the way that whole trailer thing works for the carriers that they find to to find out also, so they'll. They'll cover the load with the carrier, then the care. Then they have to tell the carrier where to go get the trailer If there's not already one dropped at the shipper. We built that in for them, but now it's useful for for other folks as well.
Speaker 2:So it's it's not easy to do. You have to manage it, but you have to be very protective of your roadmap or you end up playing whack-a-mole and nothing gets done. And the good news is our customers are just phenomenal. Many of them are also investors. In fact, all of our capital has come either from our own resources or from our clients, and they're super supportive of that. They understand that if we mess up the roadmap because of something that they want, it hurts the business. And sometimes they got to try to get us to do it and we got to do it and we got to figure it out. But they do it very carefully.
Speaker 1:So it's an interesting element of the business is that there are customers that are also investors, and I see a positive in that, being that you are that much more likely to get the most honest and best feedback for what needs to go into the system because you just have such aligned incentives and it allows you to create a system that really can cater to all of the needs of your customers. I guess would a drawback be, or a concern be, for a potential customer who's not going to invest, that they're less important or that they're? How do you think about that kind of thought process?
Speaker 2:it was early. But some of these big national, you know, manufacturers or retailers or distributors, just don't have a vehicle to invest. And you know, today if somebody asks about that, we give them somebody to call one of those companies and they say it hasn't made one bit of difference to us, right, it does not impact that at all?
Speaker 1:And do you ever run into like customers who are like well, I'm an investor, you better put this in for me.
Speaker 2:Our customers are incredible. I mean they're incredible. You know the folks that have invested, which you know the warners and schneiders and prime, who has been absolutely incredible and wonderful in every way, and, and ruan and avrit, the ones that have invested over and over in us are incredible partners. I call them all the time and talk to them all the time, because these are smart people. They are, they get the business, they're behind it, they own part of it. They are. They're just incredible.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't happen as you think about the last six years, the business has evolved quite a bit right. Initially, the first piece was the brokerage built, and then the asset, and now the shipper stuff is being done. Will there ever be a finished product like done, no more building. I don't see it.
Speaker 2:But what I will tell you is that, from where we are today, by July this product will be ready for use by 90% of the shippers, carriers, brokers and all the combinations of those in North America. Not 100%, because we'll still have this or that other type of refrigerated onboard device or refrigerated tracker that we need to add or something that somebody needs specifically uh, that we don't do yet. We have a great new uh tanker customer uh, and some of that work still needs to be done in terms of the managing the commodities that are in there and the trailer washes and things like that. But, um, we have work we're doing specifically for avrit uh on on making this system ready for work for them, for for their asset, large asset, ltl business, which then we'll be able to take to others as well.
Speaker 2:The sort of part we're on for that now, which also helps us with shippers, is the ability to have multiple orders, as many as you need on a given load. We already have multi-route, meaning you can manage three different routes for cross-border or intermodal or something like that, independently but in concert, but multi-order. We need to be able to have a load full of you know, a pickup delivery load full of, you know, 12 on and offs of different shipments. For an LTL driver or a line allall move, that's got eight customers different orders on it, so we're in a great spot. It is so cool to see this being used by thousands of drivers a day, actually real asset-based carriers and already starting to move a good chunk of America, with a lot more coming.
Speaker 1:A few months ago, I saw you cry as you addressed the mastery team.
Speaker 2:It can't be possible. What would?
Speaker 1:bring you to tears with respect to this business.
Speaker 2:It's just unbelievable what this group has been able to do. It is such a hard thing to do. There is a reason why nobody's been able to do this and these people are just unbelievable. I mean, they are so unbelievably smart and focused. It's incredible and again, it's not like I sat down and said oh, this is a really hard problem, I want to go solve this. That doesn't happen. I didn't realize until it was too late how hard this was or just in time.
Speaker 1:I mean, was there ever a party that was like screw this, maybe this is not worth doing, or was it full steam?
Speaker 2:ahead all along. Then you know, once you make a commitment to Mark or to Derek Leathers or Robert Lowe, you go figure out how to deliver that commitment Period. End of story, Not to mention all the employees and everybody else. There's no fail.
Speaker 1:So that's something about you that I think I've always admired, that many people who've worked for you have always admired, and I think certainly all of your children have admired and maybe even struggled with, is you've always set this bar so high for what you accomplish, and the basis of a lot of it is kind of following through on your commitments, whether it's to other people or to things you've set out to do.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is and I think what's once once as a child, we dissect it, we realize, like you've never pushed us to meet you at that level, rather just to whatever we commit to that we follow through on it, that we give it all we have and we do it in an honest and right way where we're not taking advantage of people or taking or cheating the system or anything like that. And so I think it's something that we've all kind of always admired but also struggled with is trying to keep up with you. Not that you've asked us to, but I guess, when I think about where you've taken this business now and it still feels like it's in its earliest stages in a lot of ways when will it feel like the mission is accomplished? Like what? What is?
Speaker 2:what is the mastery ecosystem look like when mission is accomplished I think we will have hundreds or thousands of shippers, carriers, brokers on this system and they will run this system for decades and decades. One of my goals in this business is to create a company that can live on, as I have in the past ones, past my time here. I think that's that's critical and also continue to learn right. I don't want this to be the kind of thing that somebody is looking at, like they do now with the old mainframe system, and say, oh, nobody's maintained this or this technology is out of date. My this or this technology is out of date. My, my hope is that this business will be one that continues to learn, that that somebody well, after I'm either not here or not anywhere will will be taking that next technology stack and rewriting the system to to meet that and to benefit from it forever. I don't know if that happens, but you know, I'm continue to be super proud of the back haulers folks that are still at at CH and that are all over the place, the coyote folks that have gone on to do other things and the ones that are loving their new life with rxo, which is what I hear from most of them. Um, you know, I got a lot.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of people that asked me after that was announced how I thought about it, and I wasn't sure until I actually got to spend time with Drew, and now I am very stoked about it. I'm really happy that they have him as their leader today and that they're at a company and this is not a knock on UPS at all. They're a great package business. That's what they've decided to be. And then Carol is a very smart person. But I'm excited for them, but I'm proud of them in that way. And you know, look, I think that a lot of those folks have done what they've been able to do, partially because I was there and we did start the business in Marianne, and then partially because we were also at some point able to let it go and people have gone on and learned from other folks and Marianne, and then partially because we were also at some point able to let it go and people have caught on and learned from other folks, and I think that's the way it's meant to work.
Speaker 1:You mentioned hundreds, if not thousands, of customers, and today mastery has been focused at the top of the market. How do you think about that evolving over time? Who is the right customer today from a size standpoint, and does that shift in the future?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, we have been focused on the largest, most complex guys just because that's sort of where we started and there was just this gaping need there, you know. So Pepsi is one of our customers. I'm not going to get into exactly what we're doing with them, but they should hopefully be a poster child customer for us because they have their own logistics business. They're a shipper giving thousands of loads out to other folks. They've got two giant fleets their Freo fleet and their New Bern transportation fleet. Guys that move a lot of the sparkling and water and stuff around Gator. But that's today. We will go to smaller next. I would say by this time next year. We've already started to focus there a little bit, but we will really move towards the fleets that have, let's say, between 250 and up trucks, as opposed to the at least 600, 700 that we like to see today, and the brokers and the shippers that are roughly in that same size.
Speaker 2:There's thousands of those folks that need new, modern tech as well. It's just a matter of you know, and very often you might think it's easier to start with the small guys. One of the things that's been outstanding about these larger types of folks that we've dealt with is that for most of them, their IT shops are way beyond what I would have ever expected and their capabilities that they've got. I mean, it's been incredible to get to know the IT folks, the shops at Schneider, at Warner, at Ruan and Averitt and all these companies you know. They you know, and Bison and Cat, all these guys I mean it is, they're really really good, which I was not necessarily expecting.
Speaker 2:A lot of the smaller folks don't have that same capability, right, and so for that and for some other reasons, it can be just as hard to get a new carrier, a new small carrier, set up as a new large carrier right.
Speaker 2:In some ways it can be easier, but it can be harder. Right, it takes as much work or more to do that, and we weren't situated to do that yet. But we are now and getting ourselves situated to be ready to take on an influx of those people as we move forward here. Uh, but you know I don't see doing this particularly for owner operators and very small companies, um, but you know we should have plenty of of others. You know, we're in a situation where, you know, one of the things that we've done that is just absolutely super cool is I was able to be at one of these retailers that runs a private, very large private fleet that Werner also does dedicated for, and in the same facility at one of their DCs, I was able to see the folks from Werner and the folks from the retailer both working at the same time on the same system and being able to communicate in a whole different way. It's really cool, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:You've littered some AI throughout the Mastermind technology and, as a listener of the show, you've noted that I've had a lot of conversations recently with many young folks who are bringing or trying to bring AI into our space, and you know even some more experienced people getting involved with it too, and even some more experienced people getting involved with it too. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this movement, if this is more of a hype cycle with AI into our space, or if this is really going to transform how we move freight, or if there's somewhere in the middle where it's going to make things a little bit more efficient. Like, how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:So it will definitely drive efficiency, for sure. I don't think there's any question that there is help coming for that. Well, for one thing, we do leverage it, for when we're writing code right, we use a Microsoft product that helps our folks do more faster and especially good with testing and stuff like that. That's already had an impact, a big impact.
Speaker 2:One thing that is, I think, missed and hard to explain, necessarily, is that and I mentioned before that you know everybody uses this technology differently. One thing that's really important for folks to understand about what we've done is what we have created is really for a lot of these larger companies, especially, I think, for some of the smaller guys we were just talking about, this will be the only system they have, right, and they'll connect with the other things that they need you know, the P44s and four kites and those for the brokers and et cetera. But this can do everything. Right, that's the point. But for others, it's really about the infrastructure that it brings right. So both Schneider and Warner, for example, talk about how this is just part of their suite of technologies, and we've written this.
Speaker 2:So, if I heard right, I think dave boring mentioned in in uh in your podcast with him that he thinks that. I assume you know that I think that this is a system that has to be the only tms somebody has, or it. It needs to do everything for you, and that's not at all the case. We're switzerland. Right, you can take what you want, use what you want and plug in everything else right, you can connect anything with this and while we have built in some AI, for example, to allow you to take a carrier's list of 80 trucks and automatically just have it show up in a minute in Mastermind, so you don't have to type all those trucks in Somebody else wants to use another tool to do that.
Speaker 2:They can be linked via API to ART. We don't care, right? Some of these guys that you have interviewed that are interacting using AI interacting with their customers and stuff will be super easy and the easiest DMS for them to integrate their stuff into, so they will do some of it. A lot of it is going to be folks bringing it in and either they'll integrate it to us or the customers will just integrate it.
Speaker 1:And talk to me about what you think, the impact. How do you think brokerage changes in the next five to 10 years? Like more consolidation? Are there new ways of brokering coming about? Is there an end of brokerage coming?
Speaker 2:We don't think that is the case, and again because of the reason that brokers exist, right to absorb risk. So I thought, as Coyote was growing gangbusters, that at some point it would be CH, us, echo, tql and maybe one other guy. I thought that the industry would consolidate like crazy. I didn't understand why anybody would deal with a small company. You know, one of our customers is Evans Group of Companies, that is, they've got 9,500 drayage drivers and they do brokerage etc as part of their structure. A lot of it is agent-based. Those guys have phenomenal relationships with their customers. I mean, it's unbelievable. I don't understand it, but they're really good at it and I think those are very valuable and not going away anytime in the near future. So it shows what I know nothing. When you came to me and said you're starting another brokerage, I said that's stupid. Why would you do that? We don't need another brokerage. It's the last thing we need. How are you going to go compete? Obviously, I was completely wrong. Right, you were able to build a great business very quickly. So I don't necessarily see that it's going to consolidate anymore. I think people will continue to buy each other, but it's so easy to start a new one.
Speaker 2:I do see certain things changing, certain things changing. I I you know for one. I have seen now the blending of everything. As you mentioned before, brokers are now starting to have more of their own trailers so they can do power only brokerage and hit that drop trailer freight that that becomes a big thing. It's a great sales thing for us because nobody else has a system that allows you to do that. You're seeing more and more shippers now starting brokerages. That has existed for a while. It's becoming more prevalent. I know of one or two carriers that do not broker and don't want to, even at scale, but only a few, right, pretty much everybody's doing both. So it's you know.
Speaker 2:I think what does have the ability to change everything is when we do finally get to some level of actual autonomy where you don't need a driver in a truck. At some point, that could change everything, right, that's where you know, and I think that's going to be a progressive thing. That starts with portions of highway driving in some places and eventually and I'm talking, talking, you know, not in the next five years at all, and probably longer than that, probably in the 2040s that that we actually have that at scale, even though there are some folks doing it live today, but to do it at scale, that's on normal highways. They're interacting with other drivers in bad weather and pulling loads up big hills. That's a ways away, but when that happens, everything changes. And so who wins then?
Speaker 2:If you don't have to hire drivers, which is the specialty of these big asset-based trucking companies, it's who has the densest network. Is that going to be very large retailers, the Walmarts and Amazons, and those folks? Is it going to be the folks that have the cheapest cost of capital? Who, the folks with the most trailers? Is it the large trucking companies? I think the large trucking companies are the best situated to do it, but I think that'll be interesting to see and then understanding the role of the broker there. Somebody like CH Robinson, with 30,000, 35,000 loads a day, should be incredibly well situated to be able to play that game right, especially as they get better and better with with power only trailers. Right, what are the? What do they care if it's a robot driving the truck?
Speaker 1:It's fascinating to think about. So what piece of advice would you give to the young generation? You know, you? You made a joke to me the other day. Like I'm after dave bell, I had him on, and you're like, oh, you finally had an adult on because I had some.
Speaker 2:I had some young folks. Yeah, well, that was a while ago.
Speaker 1:I just I had a series of younger entrepreneurs and those are the ones I want to kind of give a message to. So these, these young folks who are coming in trying to make an impact in the industry, start their own businesses. As someone who's on his third business, who started as a 21-year-old kid, who didn't know his head from his arse in the space, what advice do you have for these?
Speaker 2:folks Just enjoy it. I mean they've picked the best possible industry that they could ever find. There are always problems to solve and opportunities here. I mean you just got to enjoy the ride right and, like you said before, just treat people the right way. Don't make up shit for marketing purposes. We had a fill of that in the industry with a couple of those actors. Don't do that right. Be real, Be honest, Be respectful. You know our entire time at Coyote we never had a problem with CH Robinson, right, we never said a bad word about him. I would never do it. Only when we had some bad actors come in uh, have I ever said anything negative about those type of folks? And they really hurt the industry and unfortunately we're past that. So I think that's that's great. Um, but just do things the right way, even when nobody's looking. I think that's the big thing.
Speaker 1:And what would you say you're most proud of in your 40-year career?
Speaker 2:Do I have to say my kids Because you're one of them? No, you don't have to say your kids.
Speaker 1:Oh, career-wise we talked about being honest.
Speaker 2:I didn't ask you who's giving you the closest thing to a heart attack.
Speaker 2:I guess I guess the families that we've been able to create out of these businesses I mean, first of all, so many of them married each other and had kids I mean real families, but but also the families that we created that weren't weren't natural families, uh, that you know, people that know each other and whose whole social structures and and lives that are based on these things. You know that and and and what we're tackling now it is a real, real hole that people really need filled. You, I, I am also proud of what we did with coyote, for sure um in, in that it did elevate the level of service that people expect and and you know how people hire. And the level of talent in the whole industry, I think would be different had mirror not come in and and done that. I think it, it, it.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying somebody else couldn't have done it at some point, but that's not where the industry was at the time, right? So, generally, the level of talent that's in the industry, I think that the way that folks take care of each other, that learned partially by how she taught people to do that, the commitment to St Jude's that she always pursued, that everybody learned from us how to act. You know, not everybody got it. That worked for us, for sure, but enough did that. It's had an impact. But just all the folks that are still friends today because they met in these businesses that we created it's pretty cool, all right.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we're between what will likely be two parts four hours in, so, um, I think we can call it with, I feel, a debt of gratitude. Um, not just I'm on behalf of myself, but I think I can speak for hundreds I mean really thousands of people who whose careers have been shaped by you and uh, who, whether it was you just opening a door for them and giving them a job, or showing them truly how to be, how to carry themselves in business, how to engage with customers in a way that created value, which allowed them to make money, that allowed them to get married and buy a house and have kids and create a lifestyle that they wanted for themselves, or to take all of it, put it together and go start a business, like so many of us have. Just thank you. You've shown the way in so many ways, and I personally would not be where I am today if it weren't for you. So I'm really grateful and appreciative and I love you, thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, I feel the same way about other folks that have done that for me Paul for sure. You know Robert Lowe and the folks at Prime that have helped us through everything here and our other customers and stuff that have helped us through everything here and our other customers and stuff and you know it's best industry around. So if you're listening to this, you're probably in it, and so congratulations on being in the best industry you could ever be in and with that we'll see you next week.
Speaker 1:So congratulations on being in the best industry you could ever be in, and with that, we'll see you next week. You
