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. #73: Shawn McLeod, President of Axle Logistics
How do you build a billion-dollar freight brokerage without a single dollar of outside capital? Sean McLeod, who joined Axle Logistics as employee #21 in 2016, gives us a rare glimpse into one of the fastest-growing and most respected brokerages in North America.
Sean shares the extraordinary journey of scaling Axel from a small operation with 20 people to a powerhouse with nearly 700 employees. What makes this story particularly fascinating is how Axle has maintained its cradle-to-grave model at scale – something many industry veterans claim is impossible. "Everyone says you can't operate a billion-dollar company cradle-to-grave," Sean explains. "Yeah, you can—you just keep hiring people."
We dig deep into Axle's counter-cyclical approach to downturns, where they double down on customer visits and hiring while competitors pull back. This strategy led to explosive growth during COVID, with the company growing from $176 million to $521 million in just one year. Sean's philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "Volume is everything. The market dictates my rate and profit. All I can do is continue to find new business."
The conversation takes an emotional turn when Sean discusses his leadership style, revealing how deeply he cares about his employees, customers, and carriers. He still makes cold calls alongside his team, books freight, and holds everyone (including himself) accountable to the company's high standards. His authentic passion becomes clear when he admits, "I probably care too much, but that's all right."
Whether you're running a small brokerage or a large logistics operation, this episode offers invaluable insights on maintaining culture through growth, balancing compensation between different operational models, and strategically adopting technology without sacrificing the human touch that makes freight brokerage work.
Ready to be inspired by a freight success story built on grit, service excellence, and unapologetic commitment to people? This episode will challenge your assumptions about what's possible in building a brokerage in today's market.
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. The team at Rapido knows logistics and people. It's what sets them apart. Rapido is driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. The team is led by CEO Danny Frisco and COO Roberto Lacazza, two guys I've worked with from my earliest days in the industry at Coyote. I have a long history with them and I trust them. I've even been a customer of theirs at Molo and let me tell you they made our business better. In the current market, where everyone's trying to do more with less and save money, solutions like Rapido are a great place to start To learn more. Check them out at gorapidocom. That's gorapidocom.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I'm your host, andrew Silver, joined today by a special guest, mr Sean McLeod of Axel Logistics. Axel is one of the most fascinating freight brokerages in the industry, one of the fastest growing over the last decade, and has done it in a way that is, just frankly, respectable. Just a lot of organic, just ground and pound. Take care of your customers, execute and keep growing. So I'm excited to dive into the story of the business.
Speaker 2:But also your personal story, Sean. Absolutely Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely I'm here every day. We were just talking. You just moved into a new office, right?
Speaker 2:HQ2 took about 11 and a half months to build. We moved into HQ1. So we moved into HQ1. It was a small old Ford dealership next door and you know it was going to hold about 350 people. We moved there back in 21. And we thought it would last for about three or four years and we filled it up in just over a year. So we've been spread out all over Knoxville in three different buildings. You know it's hard to keep your culture the way you want it to whenever you're spread out. You've got one team downtown, one team across town, so we got everybody moved in. I think I was the last one to move into the building here in the last week, so it's been pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:So with yeah, you don't even. I see in the background you've got your Inc 5000 Awards. They're not even hung up yet.
Speaker 2:They're still on the ground yeah, they're probably gonna have to stay there. I was told that, um, they've got something that's got to go on this wall behind me here and they don't want anything else is what I'm being told. So I said, well, it is what it is oh good, so is that.
Speaker 1:Is the new hq going to be like one central location for everybody? How big is that office? How how many people can fit?
Speaker 2:It's five stories, I think, somewhere around 915, 920 people. And then it's literally across the street from our first building that we acquired. So we have still 325 spots in that building next door. So it should get us to about 12 or 12, 50 I think, something like that. So hopefully it'll last, you know, a couple years but it's the.
Speaker 1:It's the right problem if it doesn't. Those, those are the best problems in freight is when you're growing so fast that you know new problems you didn't expect come up. I had the same. I rememberolo we. We moved into an office. Our first like real office was, you know, we had this 2000 square foot office. We moved into an 8,000 square foot office thinking that would last a year. It lasted like four months before we took on an extra 7,000 square feet and then another 15,. You just kept going. And so those are the fun problems to have to deal with.
Speaker 2:Definitely, yeah, it's definitely a good problem to have, but at the same time it's like you know. You know this industry is a tough industry. Right, you've got to grind, you've got to hit the phones and and, um, when you get separate, you start having these like little cultures of poison that start to pop up, and they're harder control if you're not in that building every day with the team. So, um, it's also frustrating at the same time. But you know, if we fill this one up here in the next year or two, I'm not gonna be disappointed for sure, especially the way the industry's been.
Speaker 2:It's tough to. It's tough to grow. We're still growing this year but it's, it's been. It's back to the the grind. You know pre-covid, where just got to hammer the phones and hit 100 plus calls a day and see what you can get. It's still fun, it's part of the joy of the job. Right, you like the grind, you like the hard work, you love the million. No's before the yes. You get that. Yes, everybody celebrates. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:The yes is only worth people. People don't understand this unless they've done the job. The way that I think you and I have the yes is only as valuable as it is because of the amount of no's that it took to get to the yes 100.
Speaker 2:I mean, we, we still, we still do like a cold call blitz, you know. Know, once a week, twice a week, just depends on which leader is going to step in. And you know, the funny thing is they expect me to get on a call and get a yes, every time I make a call I'm just like you know, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to fail in front of you and I'm going to stumble just like everyone else does, because it's cold calling. You don't know, you don't know what's happening on the other end of the line. You know, and, and you know, these young kids right out of college, they're just like well, I need to guess, I need to win, but give it six or eight months. You know, make a lot more calls and take some practice. So you gotta sell yourself I love that I shot.
Speaker 1:We used to do these kind of cold call blitzes too and I would just set. They're just fun to set up, they're fun to to manage, they're fun to watch your team just compete and go at it. Uh. But I love what you just said about your team like the young reps expecting, when you go and hit a cold call, that it's just going to be so much better and there's going to be a yes. It's like it doesn't matter if it's you, if it's me, if it's 30 years experience. It's an even playing field when you make a cold call, because the person on the other end.
Speaker 1:They don't care who's calling, they're generally not looking for that call to come through and your ability to convince. I mean, I remember doing that myself in front of reps and it didn't matter how experienced I was as soon as that phone started ringing. I even got some of those nerves and as soon as they picked up as soon as they picked up, you feel like your stomach almost dropped. Like what am I going to say? I might ask about the weather right now.
Speaker 2:Oh no, it's exactly right. I mean it's I'm a big tone guy, right? So if you pick up, yeah, what do you want, right, and they sound like they're not having an issue right now, but it's like you just sometimes have to throw it out there and see what's going to stick it's. I always get the butterflies when you call it still, even today. I mean 23, 24 years in the industry. But you know, you want to. You want to do the right things and say the right things. That way, the team that's listening to you will learn. But at the same time, um, you're going to make mistakes. We try to tell them that, but it's just part of it. You know it's, it's fun, it's. I still saw it today.
Speaker 2:I tell everyone you know to hold accountability. Out here on the floor. I mean I still put up numbers like everyone else does and I hold myself accountable to it. That way, um, I can go, I just, I just go out and tell trash. To be honest with you, you know, walk the floor every day. What did you land yesterday? I landed one. You know, this is the opportunity I have. You know that's the fun part of it. You've got to. Otherwise it's like well, you're sitting in that back office. No, look at this code, look at this load that just picked up and I did make, you know, decent money on it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, still got. I mean, there's something about connecting with your employees in that way that I can tell just you know you and I don't know each other for the audience. Sean and I have, I think, met once and, and you know, exchange words a couple times maybe a few times, but, but we don't know each other well. But I can tell just from the first five minutes of our conversation, with how you're talking, that I bet connecting with employees is one of your strong suits or skills, and I could tell that one of the ways you do it is by, I guess, empathizing with their role and participating in the role with them. I think that's such a valuable like I just there's kind of two ways that you can lead a brokerage, and you have to.
Speaker 1:You have to do all the things, you know behind closed doors. You have to have the private meetings and make the hard decisions about you know, can we keep hiring? Do we need a freeze? Do we need to let some people go? Do we invest here or there? Whatever, those things need to happen, but at the same time, being a relatable co-worker while being the boss, being someone who understands how hard it is to succeed in a role and being willing to sit down and do that role with people. It's not full time, you're not. It's not like you spend all day, every day making phone calls. But showing your team that you're willing to do the hardest job in the building alongside them, I guarantee, earn so much respect. And being able to kind of like trash talk in freight is like someone might hear that and think the wrong thing, but like it's a way to connect with your people and motivate them and push them in a way that they appreciate. I feel like absolutely.
Speaker 2:I managed six people. I think it was the most I ever managed, you know. And I, when I came to axle and and I still remember you know they were a very close-knit group I think I was hired number 21, and I'm just sitting here, I'm two weeks down like man. How am I going to relate to this team that's here? And I just started grabbing the phone right and I started booking trucks cheaper than they were on their largest customer out of Texas at the time, and you know when I'm when I'm buying, you know 50, 75 bucks less than they are, you know. Finally there's there are one or two guys in the company at the time that had the respect of everyone else and they were kind of the leaders of the group. And and finally he just said you know what team like we better listen to this guy, because he's sitting here making us money booking freight that he's not even getting paid for and he's booking cheaper than we are.
Speaker 2:From then on, it's like you know what. I've just got to set the example. I've got to get out here and I've got to grind like the rest of them, and I've always been that way. They used to pick on me at one point because when we we expanded, we had our first expansion. We're in the same office. We tore down a wall between offices and and they were giving me a hard time because John, one of the owners, put me on this like little pedestal, like a foot tall pedestal. I had this like I was like a judge at a bench right and this is a.
Speaker 1:This is not. This is a literal pedestal, not a metaphorical pedestal.
Speaker 2:This was a they built this like 10 by 10 square and put my desk up above everyone else so I could see across the floor and I had this like gather this gavel that a judge would use and and um, I would get up there and just started hammering cold calls and I would smack it as I gotta win and you know you would see people lined up just waiting to talk to me. It was the funniest thing and it was embarrassing at the time, but now that I look back on it it was pretty funny. But you've got to get out there today. I mean, it's like anyone else. You've got to set the example. You've got to like.
Speaker 2:When I look out now around and you can see the ones that are scared to call in front of people, they're walking off with their headset on.
Speaker 2:You know that's just part of the game, but I've always been the guy that just gets you know deep in the weeds with everyone else. If I sit back here, I feel like you know I love getting in front of a customer. I feel like you kind of lose touch with the industry if you're not also out there helping do things yourself. If you sit back here and look at numbers all day long and talk about who we need to hire or how much, or what's the next move from a technology standpoint all the time. Then I feel like you lose touch with reality and then you get out in front of a customer and you don't know what to say anymore. But yeah, it's always important to set the example. You've got to get out there and grind. You've got to throw yourself in the deep end. It's what we tell everyone, and I still do that all the time, especially if you've got to do that.
Speaker 1:Something you just said really struck home with me, and it's with respect to like you hear people often talking about data-driven decisions and I 100% align with the idea that you the only world I really know.
Speaker 1:But if you just look at the numbers and you bury yourself in the numbers I just keep imagining what you said you get further and further away from some element of reality that only exists or you can only really understand through consistent engagement with the floor, with customers, with carriers, and it's not.
Speaker 1:I don't know that you're going to see like drastically different things in the numbers and what you hear in actual conversations, but I do think you miss something. For the leaders who just kind of bury themselves in the numbers and live and die by the numbers with every decision they make. I think there's something missed that can only be understood through pretty consistent conversations with customers. And when I say this I don't mean that every leader in freight should spend their whole day managing 20 customers and talking to carriers all day, but having a few customers that you are consistently in communication with and hearing directly from them the trends they're seeing from their other providers, from their own kind of sales and buying patterns, like there's just a lot that you get from those conversations that you won't find in the numbers, and I think-.
Speaker 2:Especially today. You know it's like everyone's like what's going to happen over the next six months, the next year? You know it's, you've got to get out and see the different.
Speaker 2:You know you can have a conversation with one customer sales are down, inventory is still full and the next customer you know this is their plan for the ports in August. You get a better understanding of what's going to happen in the future than what you hear through the media. Right, I feel like based on the true, actual conversations, but from the get-go. If there's one thing I would say that I'm getting better at but I still struggle with is the trust. I want to hear from the customer myself about what's going on in their business, what's going on in the industry, but what's going on with Axel? How are we performing? Are we bringing the service and the execution which you've said that many times? I've heard you from other podcasts we sell service and execution. Technology is technology and everyone's got it today.
Speaker 2:But when you get out and you start talking to the customers I mean in 17 and 18, I called and traveled to see every single customer we had. In 18, I believe it was I was on the road like 276 days that's how many nights I had at Hilton and my goal was just to see everyone as many as I could pack in all over the country and I just want to sit down and get an understanding of them, who they are, what they use us for, what they like, what they dislike, what we need to fix. So now I still try to see our top 100 every year. I don't go to many shows. It's like the show you saw me at at TIA, I believe in the fall. Shows don't make me money. If I want to know what's going on with a new piece of tech, I go to a show, but otherwise I'm I'm traveling to see customers every week.
Speaker 1:Um, it's just part of the game, you know yeah, you and I are cut from the same cloth. It's interesting because I don't go to tia often. I went because I'm not in brokerage I guess I wasn't in brokerage at the time but TIA is the one conference I've always struggled with for brokers because I'm like, if I'm going to a conference, I want to spend every waking minute in front of a shipping customer. And TIA is the one conference that there are zero customers at. I mean, you go to CSCMP, you go to food shippers, Rila, they all have shippers and it might be hard to get in front of, they might be super packed, but they're there. Tia, you know when you sign up you are not going to talk to customers. So I've always struggled with that. No offense to the TIA folks out there, I get it. You want to go learn from your competitors or something. But for me I'm like you If I'm on the road, I want to be in front of a customer.
Speaker 2:I'm going there to just scale myself and how we're performing, to see if we're at least doing what we should be doing right or growing the way everyone else is. If everyone else is growing and we're flat, we have a problem. So I use that more of a self-scoring conference to go to, I mean, some of the vendors it's great to meet and talk to and hear what other technologies out there, but yeah, I don't get many. It's like I said, I think we went to the Technovations one. I'll probably go to that this fall, just because, again, technology's evolving rapidly and AI is the new thing. Right and trying to see, we don't use much of it today except in back office. So then it's like what do we?
Speaker 2:need. So I'm going to go out there and listen and put my ear to the ground. But yeah, getting in front of customers. I've heard a lot of people reach out to me like this year, how are you still growing in this market? Well, what are your plans to see your clients? You know every other broker is probably going to see them. What are your plans? Well, travel's been restricted. We can't go anywhere. That is the biggest mistake I've ever heard in my life. Like, restrict something else. We do free lunch for our employees every Thursday. Like, I would rather not have free lunch and still continue to travel to see customers. You know it kills me how many people are not doing that right now.
Speaker 1:Are you looking 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 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.
Speaker 1: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, that that is the short-sighted nature in our industry that hamstrung hamstrings so many of the competitors because it's so focused on this last quarter, this last month, it's like, oh God, we were profitable now or not, or we were at X amount of profitability and now it's minus 20%. What are we going to cut? Let's cut something that generates revenue. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Hey, you know what?
Speaker 1:Keep doing it. That's the way I say it Keep doing it.
Speaker 2:That's opening my door a little bit more. Again, it's the short side. You see it all the time. I think as much as we've done the right things of Axel is we have no PE money, no venture capitalist money. There's no one funding this company. So you know what, if we have a bad quarter, we need to go see people more. You know we're going to pinch the bottom line a little bit, but we've got to get out there and we've got to do the right things. And they've never said no when it comes to. You know, if it's.
Speaker 2:You know, right now margin compression is everywhere. If you're a guy sitting at desk looking at numbers, you're like, all right, we need to fire these 50 customers because margin is not where it needs to be. But that would be the wrong move. The market's going to shift again. Something's going to cause that to happen. You've just got to continue to service it and reduce your losses as much as you can.
Speaker 2:And you know we hear it all the time hey, you aren't the cheapest provider. You know we're going to move forward with someone else, but then well, that's fine. You know, just reach out to us if you need anything. And we say that every time and they always reach out because in the end, they still want service and they've got to take care of their own customers. So, um, yeah, that's, that's always been a benefit. You know, everyone else can be short-sighted, they can sit there and and and get scared and slow down or lay off or whatever. But no, I mean, we're not going to get scared, we're just going to have to work harder, you know. So I tell my team.
Speaker 1:Hey, if I'm going to be here 15 hours a day, then you're going to be here 15 hours a day.
Speaker 2:Let's get after it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's work harder, it's work smarter. And I think that I haven't said this recently because I've been on the sideline for two years and this has been one of the most challenging markets for brokers to endure. So it feels almost like I don't have the right to say this, but I don't believe there's any market and I mean any market that a good broker can't grow in. I think that you can always find a way. I think that there is always a different type of freight that's growing or doing well, whether it's produce season freight or construction season or Christmas trees I mean it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:At any given time of year there's always something that's starting to ship and it's just a matter of can you work hard enough and smart enough to get your way in and get a piece of that pie? Because people just rest on their laurels and it's like, yeah, my 20 customers that I have are all down 20%, so my numbers are down 20%. And then that same person is making like 10 or 15 calls a day and it's like well, I think I understand what the real problem is. It's not the market. You can't control the market, but this pie is massive and there's room for everyone to keep existing. That means there's room for you to keep taking little pieces of that pie and growing your share from what it is to a little bit bigger.
Speaker 2:Yeah, every, every business leader that I meet speak with in Knoxville. It doesn't understand our industry. They're like man, you guys hit a billion dollars, you've got to be huge, like how much room is left? And I'm like you don't get it. I'm still just a little speck on the map and the hard part is really just getting people to figure out different ways to be creative and find leads. That's where we fight today. Everyone's just continuing to hammer through our CRM and run over the same stuff.
Speaker 2:And I told them I'm like do you know what an atlas is? I remember my days at CH. I still had success. There were 17,000 employees I had to sell against every day. But I would open an Atlas and I would not look at it and I would just put my finger on the city and I would just Google city-state manufacturing and just start hammering away. If they had a website, I would call them and that's how I landed on my business.
Speaker 2:You know, and and everyone gives me a hard time where they don't make outlets just today and and uh, I'll go and buy a bunch of them off of like eBay or something, and here's what you're going to do. If you can't finally enter, you're telling me that's your problem for not selling. This is what you're going to do, moving forward and put an Atlas on their desk and tell them just to randomly shut their eyes and choose a page. So, um, yeah, it's, it's. Uh, there's so much still out there.
Speaker 2:Um, it's crazy though, it's like I tell everyone we're in like the largest small industry ever. It's like, you know, it's a huge industry, but you somehow always run into the same people over and over again. And it's like man, you think you have this niche that you found, and some stayed out in the middle of nowhere. And over again, and it's like man, you think you have this niche that you found, and some stayed out in the middle of nowhere, and then, all of a sudden, you realize that everybody else is also in there. They've been called, you know.
Speaker 2:And then it's just give me that one chance. You know, let me prove myself. And that's what we do every time. It's like listen, I know you don't need a provider today, but give me that one chance. The next time someone fails, let me move a shipment for you and I will show you how much better we communicate and and give you the visibility and the service and and um, you know, it's just how it works. Um, get after it, though. There's a lot of freight up there and, like you said, you have to find it. You have to get creative, you have to find another mode that you don't hold for today, you know, may have to go and argue with our attorneys because we need more insurance, because we're taking over dimensional that they want us to steer clear of, but you know what it's going to help pay the bills. So there's.
Speaker 1:there's a theory that I believe in, which is the harder it is to make it happen to execute for a customer, the more likely it is that that's really going to be worth it. Because if I, as a rep, have to fight and negotiate with my insurance and my legal team for two hours or two days or two weeks about getting this extra insurance or this or that, everybody else has to do the same thing and most people, when they hit those roadblocks, they just say, ah, it's not worth it and what that means. When you think about calling Coca-Cola, you know everyone is calling Coca-Cola. It is way harder to get that opportunity because everyone wants it. But on the stuff that people don't want, because it takes a lot of front-end work to get it done, there's way less competition opportunity. For you, as the person who found a way to get your legal team to approve the insurance, you've now got a significant leverage in being able to quote at fair high margins.
Speaker 2:And even taking risk. Right, that's where, you know, I hear a lot of people you know that I've worked with over the years. It's like you know we can't take this opportunity. How in the world did you get your foot in the door? Well, you've got to be able to take the risk and and you know my attorneys don't love it, but it's like you know what there's going to be a million dollars sitting here that we may have to. You know, at some point eat one day. But let's see exactly what the opportunity is and out, it's well worth it to take that risk and we do it a lot. But you know we stay within our means. We make sure we have good coverage. It's expensive and we want to make sure that everyone's taken care of and we don't put us in some weird liability position. But you know what. We're willing to roll the dice. You have to. You've got to see what the opportunity is. I can't say no, that's my problem.
Speaker 2:You know it's, let's see what happens. I don't, you know, we don't. We don't alter documents, like I probably did 20 years ago, when it's like you know, you just need a cert holder. Let me just take that on there and send it to you real quick.
Speaker 1:But you know it's so funny, I it just.
Speaker 1:It reminds me of two stories, two completely different ends of a spectrum, one being a perfect example of the kind of customer like you could say no to, but you just don't want to and you want to see what happens.
Speaker 1:And for us, for me, at one point I'll say that was we were hauling money for an armored security company. Wow, it was just pallets of like nickels and quarters and I think we had to have a million dollars in insurance to make this happen and it would be like four pallets of quarters, which is a ton of quarters, obviously, a ton of quarters obviously. But I mean, I think it was like a load from maybe Philly to Atlanta that we were paying someone like $8,000 to move for us and we were charging $13,000 or something Like, cause there's no one who's willing to go through the effort to get approval to move that kind of money. But you figure it out, you find the right carrier that's capable of doing, because someone is doing it, like anything that's moving or has to move is currently being moved by someone. So there's a way and then it's a matter of can you figure it out, see, and that's it's funny.
Speaker 2:You say that because I said that a hundred times yesterday walking the floor. Everyone's in this building. It's like, figure it out. Like you know, here's this opportunity. They need this, this and this figured out. How's it going to happen? You know, go out there and see them. See what everyone else is doing today. You know, can we maybe lease a piece of equipment? You know as much as you know my attorneys wants to stay away from leased equipment as much as possible for the liability issues. If I can figure it out, make it happen. It's going to be worth it long-term and then it's their job to figure out how to protect us right? So that's the key.
Speaker 2:You got to fight every day. I mean, it does wear on you sometimes, but again, it's the grind, but that's the fun part of it. Every day is different. It's everything that you and I and everyone else that's been in it for the long term. A lot of people can't deal with it. We have more turnover than we want just because it's the grind and work-life balance, and it used to be. Everyone loved a big paycheck. Now it's like let's make a mediocre paycheck, but I just want to be able to get off at 5 PM. No, we need you to come here and grind and figure it out, at least for the first two years. After that it'll ease up a little bit. But then you have other problems, because now you're going to be a manager here and managing people is tough. That's my thing. People just want to turn off the switch. They want the easy way out of an opportunity. I'm like no, figure it out. If not, I'll give it to somebody else. And the minute you say that we're like no, no, no, just wait, you know.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, nothing's ever changed, you know it's. It's still the same industry as it is now. I would be afraid to hold money today, because the fraud that's out there, that we're fighting, is just unbelievable what we're seeing. But um, we'll still figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have two thoughts to that, one being you mentioned having more turnover than you want. There's something about the right kind of turnover and you know it too. It's like if the person doesn't like this is a lifestyle, moving freight is, you have to be committed to the lifestyle If you want to be good. Yeah, you can probably leave the office at five every day and pull it off, but you have to stay available. Part of the beauty of technology today is I can execute most things from my phone that I need to, or I can pop on my laptop quickly from anywhere and get it done, but it's just being available to forward an email or make a quick call for your carrier or for your shipper. That you have to be able to do, sometimes at 7.30 at night, or it's the difference between succeeding and failing, and customers have a short memory. So it's like you could be 99% on time for 500 orders, but on that 501st order because you didn't respond to the email at 6 PM, the driver didn't get the right PO number, so he didn't make the delivery on time. And now you're getting blown up and the 30 brokers who have been waiting for the opportunity for you to screw up. One of them is getting a phone call now.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting because I remember I think part of the problem in how I led a business or a brokerage was almost too much coddle culture. Like we wanted the employees to be so happy that it was like we never fired people and it doesn't necessarily take very long to know if someone has it or doesn't, in terms of just the effort and part of me wishes. And if I get to do this again, I want to figure out a way to do this. We almost have two separate cultures and like I want that. I'm going to be scared to say this, but I want that TQL culture for the initial part of the career of an employee, where it's like prove to me that you're willing to do what it takes to make it here in your first three, six months and if not, I want you out because I think it's cancerous to the rest of the culture.
Speaker 1:Out because I think it's cancerous to the rest of the culture. But then, once you've proved yourself, I want a really strong like I don't want to fire you every time you like okay, you did great for two years and then you have two bad months, you're out the door. No, I don't believe in that. I'm not trying to, you know, take your customers from you and keep them while you get bail or you get booted. But I think there's something about having a culture where early on you have to prove yourself and you have to prove you have what it takes to put in the effort, and then the effort needs to be consistent throughout your career. But like there's not as much fear that if I don't put up in the first three to six months that I'm going to get booted.
Speaker 2:So we had Allie as my VP of learning and development. So we had Allie as my VP of learning and development. She created this program called Launchpad at the beginning of last year and you know we hired, you know, 10 or 15 people more than we need because we're going to push out 10 or 15 people in the first 90 days and that's the goal 10 or 15 people in the first 90 days, and that's the goal. Now, you know, I'm not trying to be mean about it, but you're going to see, like you just said, you're going to see who has the effort and the give a damn and hey, I want this and I'm going to grind. And you're going to see the ones that come in that get scared.
Speaker 2:And I tell her all the time. You know I like to do a Q&A with new hires because I can tell already which ones aren't going to make it. You know they're not making eye contact when I look at them. They're afraid to ask questions. You know you can see how they interact with others around them and I give her a list. I can already tell you these three won't make it and I'm usually right 99% of the time.
Speaker 2:So, yeah you know if you come in and you, you show me that you're willing to do the hard work. You may not put up new customers every month like what we want you to, but I need to see that you're giving it a shot to do so. If you do, we're going to keep you. We do keep people longer than we probably should, but if you come in and you just love the fact that we have a new building, a cool swing suite on the top floor and and you can hang out with friends within, I don't, I don't need you here, and you know likely the culture puts enough pressure on you to where you end up leaving yourself. It's just part of it, though. We made it, but at the same time, it's not right for everybody. Attention.
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Speaker 1:No, I love the way you've structured that with the launchpad and the idea that you're bringing in more people than you expect to keep and that's the expectation. I think it's important. Like there's a difference between that being the stated expectation, like hey, just because you got the offer letter and you signed it, that doesn't mean you're set for life, and I think that that's a fallacy in our culture today, just in the world where it's like people think that because they got hired, now they are owed everything just by showing up and existing in the workplace. But I like the idea that you have to earn your place every day Because in our industry and I'm not the first to say and I won't be the last, but you don't own anything in this space.
Speaker 1:You don't own your freight, you don't own your customers, you don't own your employees as a company, you rent it all and rent is due every day. If you don't take care of your employees every day, they will up and leave and go to the competitor down the road and they will try to bring their customers with them. If you don't show up for your customers every day, they will certainly find someone else that will. So there is nothing owned and I think that that's probably the biggest misalignment is the employee who thinks that because they got hired, they are owed a 5, 10, 15-year career where, as long as they show up to work on time, they're taken care of and they should get their bonus and all that Like. That's not what freight brokerage is.
Speaker 2:No, and we I mean, we see it every day. You know, we, we only hire as we need it, right, but we always go again more than what we need, just in case. But there's, there's a rule set where the team leader that hires someone, they've got to give off a small book of business and you'll have one employee that gets, say, $6,000 in gross profit in a month. You know, and you get an employee that's given an account that runs 15K and the 6K person will sit there and complain well, I deserve the 15 too. No, you don't. You know, and I fight that every single week.
Speaker 2:It's like why are you leaving? Well, I wasn't given enough house freight. This person was given this. Well, we're not here to give you anything. We do it. A, because we need your help running this account. B, it's going to teach you very quickly how to cover freight, negotiate with carriers, be able to build a relationship with a customer and know, and we're trying to help give you that jumpstart and that energy. But you know you don't rely on just your house freight either. You've got to make your inorganic business. You know we're, that's our big thing. It's everything here is organic growth. You know we're. We push it hard. We average 300,. We push it hard, we average 300, 310 new customers a month. And we're you know we're down on that from our usual averages per month. But it's just a tough year to sell.
Speaker 2:But you've got to come in and you've got to grind and you've got to be able to find it and we're not going to give it to you and we tell them that the sad thing is we tell every single one of them um, you know, we have a new hire lunch, um, and I finally got to go to the last one on monday and it's like you know, their, their eyes got real big, like they ask us all questions. It's myself and my executive team and we're up there and I'm like, if you're not willing to give me all that you've got for the next two years, all I want is all you got a, a buddy of mine that I worked with at Robinson, every day all.
Speaker 2:I want is all you've got. If you're not willing to come in and grind and give it your all and deal with the lack of work life balance for the first two years of this job, leave today. Like you know, I will walk you out the front door. I'm not trying to be mean, it's just not for you and I don't want you to waste your time or hours and in six months realize that you know what. It's time to go on and move somewhere else. That kills me.
Speaker 2:I take it personally. You know, just like you know you probably do and the rest of them. It's like we've been through the grind and we've had a great, a great run and we've grown to where we want to be and we're going to continue to scale. Hopefully, you know at the pace we've been scaling at. But I take it personal. You know, if I call you and you don't answer your phone, what's the first thing you ask anybody in this company? You call them. Right now, sean McLeod calls you and you don't answer and you call him back. What's the first thing he's going to say? What if it was a customer? You know it's like I say that every single time.
Speaker 1:They say I would have answered. I didn't want to.
Speaker 2:I'm on an audit delete. I know I am with some of them, but yeah, man it's just part of today's. You know kids, my son started two weeks ago and I'm on his ASS over there. It's like you know, hey dad, let's go to lunch. Hey dad, let's go to lunch. That's too bold.
Speaker 1:We sat down. I was like let's go to lunch, that's too bold. We sat down. I was like what's your margin percent for the day?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you're operating freight. I'll put him in an optional. I don't want him in the cradle-to-grave model. I covered freight for three years of my career in the brokerage world and I feel like you learn a lot more than just diving right into sales sometimes, and even though 80% of our company is career of the grave. But he's like I don't know how many loads have you pre-booked for tomorrow?
Speaker 2:I haven't yet. It's one o'clock, why not? You know, it's like I was just telling him he's like we probably won't do lunch again for a while. I was like, yeah, probably not, I love that. But you know, gotta, you gotta gotta teach him early. You know how old is he? Uh, 23. So he's fresh out of college. Fresh out of college, yeah, I went on my first beach vacation, um, last week, without him, because, man, I can't go. No, you have a job, man, you're, you're working. You may be my kid, but you're still. You've got the same vacation time as everybody else in here you're doing it right.
Speaker 1:He, he will appreciate this in 10 years when he earns his way to wherever he will end up, because, as someone who sat in his seat, there's there's two ways it can be done and and my father also was like show up to to work, do your, do your job, get it done, earn your respect here, and you get a lot further with that than you do just expecting handouts, expecting to be given this and that and extra time off and and all the other things.
Speaker 2:So yeah, he was like apologizing for checking his phone at lunch. I'm like dude. Now you know why I do it. Everyone here my executive team gets aggravated. When I'm on vacation, I'm still checking emails. I set my alarm earlier than I do on a regular workday. I get up at 5 am and I hammer through emails for the day prior. I'm blasting them with questions and stuff before the wife gets out of bed. I expect them to do the same. You know it's I don't. I don't clock out ever. It's probably it's. If there's one negative thing about me, it's I just stop. It's like I'm going to grind until I do stop, you know, and I don't know when that'll be. But, um, you just I'm not going to slow down, so they better not either. If I'll run you, there's a problem because I'm slower. I turned 50 in three weeks, so, uh, um, they better not run. Let an old man pass them, yep 5-0.
Speaker 1:You've been doing this a long time. You said 23 years. You've been in freight yeah, I, I had.
Speaker 2:I, um, I graduated college late. I graduated and graduated high school in 93, 94. I tried to play football and couldn't do it. I was small and and got my tail kicked, kicked in, and so I got mad and I quit college for four years. So, um, I didn't, you know, I didn't graduate school until I was 27. And I worked in retail at Lowe's and I was looking through the help wanted of papers. I was tired of working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week for 23 grand a year as a manager at Lowe's Home Improvement. So I saw a CH Robinson ad in the paper from the local branch manager at the time. It was like sales, no experience needed, need someone that doesn't want to leave the area. So I applied and that's how I kind of got into it. But, yeah, I started late so I didn't start. I think 03 is when I got into Robinson, end of 02, beginning of 03, something like that. So yeah, it's been a while.
Speaker 1:And what was your kind of experience at Robinson like?
Speaker 2:I mean I would never say anything bad. They taught me everything I know, right, hammered freight for two or three years. And I remember every year my VP would come and you get 30 minutes with him and it's hey, what do you need from me? Well, I need more training. And he's like well, figure it out. We have a big network of people call and see what you need. And so then I got tired of covering freight and I told my manager at the time I was like what's next? And he said, well, what do you want to do? I like I don't know, I want to, let me try selling. And he's like well, then go figure it out. And I would sit in this conference room and I had this plant in the corner and I would nervously pick leaves off the plant until one day he was like he gave me a, a piece of paper it's almost like a fake write-up like you just destroyed my plan and then in the room because I would get nervous, cold calling, but I had to figure it out.
Speaker 2:Then, you know, I had really good success landing. I landed like an outsource for ltl and a couple large truckload accounts and and um, then the accounts grew to the size where I had to become an account manager, which they I think they put me as a cam at the time and they used to have this application process where you get you do a business plan front and back of one piece of paper and you you try to get your own branch and and tried that twice and the first time I I submitted it and never heard anything. The second time I made it to the very end. Then they said, well, we don't like your location, and they kind of put me on hold. And then 2017, you know we had like an economic downturn, so they told me no, which I'm glad they did now. But you know, at some point they just said listen, your best fit is you build great relationships with customers and you can go on site as a Sam if you want to grow, but this is it for you.
Speaker 2:And I was just like, well, probably time for me to move on. My buddy drew me to Schneider on the truckload side and I survived all of 90 days. Couldn't I stand selling truckload? I don't like telling a customer no.
Speaker 1:By truckload you mean like asset.
Speaker 2:Asset Okay.
Speaker 1:Just wanted to clarify.
Speaker 2:I brought a lot of opportunities over those 90 days, and every time we don't have enough drivers, we don't have enough equipment, I'm like I'm tired of telling them no. And so then I remember the last meeting. I went into my manager at the time. It was his first visit with me and they told me no. So I sold their brokerage side and he wrote me up in the parking lot.
Speaker 2:He was like we're a van truckload, we don't sell brokerage. I'm like, but we're still the same company. He's like it doesn't work this way Out. See ya, work this way out. See ya. Um called somebody at cs recruiting that I had met and and um she said you know what? Um, I know these two guys in knoxville that may have what you want. Go talk to them and that's what brought me here.
Speaker 1:So it's crazy and so you came in at the time. What year was it? 2016.
Speaker 2:February of 16 is when I started at Axel. We were about 15 million. They did 15 million in 2015.
Speaker 1:Yes, you said it was like 20 or you were the 21st employee 21st employee.
Speaker 2:And today the company is how many people?
Speaker 1:We're at like 684 or something like that. So nine years, from 20 people to almost 700 um and you know navigating what is probably being known now as the most challenging uh freight depression we've we've seen. Um, I think it's interesting. You said% of the business today is cradle to grave. Can you talk a little bit about the model and how you navigate, because I think it sounds like you also have some of the kind of ops split model, maybe to support large enterprise accounts.
Speaker 1:How have you been able to kind of grow so much over this time? And it doesn't feel like you're on the far end of the tech solves all problems spectrum. It feels like you're more on the ground and pound, do the work, show up, service and execute and you can grow. So I think this is kind of I love this because this is my style and I think it's kind of a it's it's a shot to all the people that think that AI and tech are going to come in and replace all the people, because companies like yours I think yeah, exactly, good luck. Companies like yours have proven that this model works even today, and so I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about how you guys have achieved such phenomenal growth over this time period and how you, how the model kind of works, to make that happen?
Speaker 2:So you know, with the cradle to grave. That's how the owner structure of the company in the beginning, and when we added the split model, this outside sales account development upside, it was solely because we had larger accounts that we just noticed that accounts would get into a cradle to grave. You're only going to go for, try to win the business that you can actually handle within that team, right. And so if you have a team of five and you can, you can, you know, realistically operate 15 loads per person per day, um, while still trying to sell and lay a new business before you can promote someone to start their own team, then, um, we just realized it was holding us back. So you know, we I had a buddy of mine that I knew from the CH days, that he was in intermodal and and and we sold a couple of large opportunities at CH together and and I told him that we were going to start this, this division, and I want him to come lead the outside sales team. So we threw two or three large accounts over there and we gave the reps at the cradle to grave.
Speaker 2:It's either split your profit or be an account manager and move with the account, because when you're a team leader here in cradle to grave, you still have to manage people, which is tough, and you're managing accounts, still selling and managing people. So, yeah, we started the split model, but the split model it's it's enterprise level, higher volume, lower margin. You know, and that's been a struggle this year and it's been a struggle for the last two years to really get your foot in the door. From a large volume perspective, they haven't needed help right and and so we still continue to see the criota grave as, um, the hub of the company today and it continues to scale and take us, you know, to the next level in terms of growth. So it's been fun, but it's uh, it's uh, it's difficult to sometimes manage because we still have huge accounts that have built very large networks of teams over here that should be an enterprise account now.
Speaker 2:But you know, we're just. You sometimes, unfortunately, turn salespeople into operators and I don't like that. But we've had to do it because I don't want to take away the pay structure that we have for that team. So it's been great. We had our biggest year in growth during COVID. I think we went from $176 million to $521 million in one year in 2021. And we just didn't take advantage of the market.
Speaker 2:My motto is always volume is everything. Volume is everything. It's like an investment market. Right, the market's going to dictate my rate, which means the market is dictating my profit. All I can do is continue to go out there and find new business and grow volume, you know, and hopefully it's all profitable and sometimes it's not. But but, um, yeah, that's, that's always been the case.
Speaker 2:Just continue to scale and with cradle to grave, you just touch, you get that more like intricate service piece of it. You know, hey, I am the person that's soliciting to you today, but I'm also going to be the person that you're going to call if you have a problem. But I'm also the person vetting your carriers and moving your freight. So you get that higher level of service where on sometimes on the split model, you don't? You know you have a carrier that's covering freight for five different customers and you've got to wait 15 minutes to get a response if you need to know where a truck's at. I hate that delay.
Speaker 2:But during that COVID growth we said as a company, we're going to keep our margins right here, we're not going to take advantage. I've got friends who, hey, if you're not making 25% margin, you're not going to take that freight during COVID. That's crazy. That was asinine to me. It's like, no, we're going to leave our market where we need them to be and we're going to just continue to take volume then. And that's what we did. That's why we jumped so much in that one year. And it was talk about a hard time of figuring out how to get all of these hires. And we're hiring 50 people a month and teaching them to sell and operate in 30 days or less. And um and I had kudos to Allie and her team, they kicked ass, um, they, they made it happen.
Speaker 2:You know, you, you get someone that has no idea what's going on in this industry and within 30, 45 days, or landing customers and operating freight, I mean, that's a pretty big deal. You know, um, and, and ever since then, the more people you have in career to grave, you know, the more people you have cold calling and scaling. And that's just how the model's been and we're not going to change it. It's like everyone's like well, you can't operate a billion dollar company career to grave. No one's been able. Yeah, you can, you can just keep hiring people.
Speaker 1:You know margins are.
Speaker 2:That's the problem. It's again. It's like what you said earlier they, you have a team that's looking at the numbers and not at the opportunity, and they stop hiring. If you stop hiring and cradle to grave, you're slowing down your sales and you can't do that, you know. You've just got to keep pushing ahead and have confidence that you're going to hire the right people, which I've realized it's not always going to be the case. I always wanted everyone to come in that we hired to be great. But now I know it's a 50-50. But you just got to. You can't slow yourself down. You got to just take a chance and keep putting bodies in the desks, hammering the phones, and that's what we do.
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Speaker 1: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. Yeah, so I'm 100% with. Like the idea that you can't operate cradle to grave at a billion is crazy because it's a math problem. As long as the math works in terms of how you design the compensation for what the employees take versus what the company takes, and the company can make money and the employees are incentivized because they're making money and doing well, there's no number that you can't do it at. What I agree with, or what I would add, is it is challenging to grow certain type of accounts in a cradle to grave only model, which we've talked about and I think you had an interest like when I think about if you put a business like yours with kind of two segments, one being cradle to grave and the other being the kind of split model designed to support the enterprise the cradle to grave, if your hiring practices stay consistent and your training practices stay consistent and the quality employees stays consistent whether that means 60% or 70% or 40% are good and your turnover is consistent, the growth should be relatively consistent and it'll flux up and down a little bit with the market, should be relatively consistent and it'll flux up and down a little bit with the market. But the interesting thing about the split model, and especially working with a large base of enterprise accounts, that's where you do see more fluctuation, more volatility, and what the volatility looks like is in a down market you will see way more margin compression because it's way more competitive, especially these companies that are now using the API spot quoting tools. It's just driving down margins. But in an up market, when things are booming, your margins can explode, can, can, explode. I mean you can. You can really see an explosive growth on the enterprise side if you are a top executing performer and you're in with a lot of these companies that have, because when they, when, when the market's booming, those are the guys who you see really explode.
Speaker 1:Like we had similar. You guys actually outgrew us in covid which you know a little bit makes me irked, but not really uh, but we went, you went, I think, one something to five something. We went 275 to 625. So you guys grew more but like I remember one grocery retailer who overnight we went from 75 loads a day to 200 loads a day, like that's something that you just can't, you won't find in the cradle to grave model ever. And it's not a bad thing, it's just being able to manage both is a delicate dance.
Speaker 1:Specifically around compensation. It's really hard to figure out how to always make people happy. You brought up earlier like handing out house accounts. That was a nightmare for me because I did a lot of selling and you can't manage it all yourself, so you have to give or handing out house accounts. That was a nightmare for me because I did a lot of selling and you can't manage it all yourself, so you have to give it to people.
Speaker 1:But it creates a lot of animosity. Why did that guy get handed a top Fortune 100 grocery retailer and I got handed this small little thing. It's like because somebody had to take over the account. It's not designed to screw you. It's not like to screw you. It's not like there's just. This is part of the nuance of managing a brokerage. That is challenging, and it's important to know that. The people who are looking for the handouts are generally the wrong people to have in the business to begin with. The people who are always looking at why not me? Woe is me. I deserve this. Those people are not good fits to begin with.
Speaker 2:Running two different models is tough. I mean our compensation sheet that we use. I mean it's a nightmare to manage. It takes two or three people on payroll to be able to figure it all out. You know, you've got people changing teams. If we have a gap somewhere and we need to fill it quickly, we're going to fill it. We have a guy that started with us probably a year and a half two years ago and landed one of those accounts last year, and it was running 40, 50 loads a month, and then, out of nowhere, 500 loads a month, 700 loads a month. It's running 4,200 shipments last month. It's running cradle to grave.
Speaker 2:The thing is, though, if they can't figure out how to build the carrier relationships to make them be able to run more freight per head to where they can still sell, we do have to hire a lot more people to support that business. But at the same time, we're still holding them accountable to growing their own book. The hard part is, if they grow their own book of business and they're using that piece of that account towards their book and they get promoted to start their own team, they've got to take part of that customer with them. So then you've got that customer spread over seven different teams. Right, and it's hard, but we keep them together on the same floor and we still ensure that we've kind of created like a middle manager role. Now, hey, if you landed this customer and you've built nine teams with it, well, you're going to get promoted to this middle manager role so you can still oversee the account, you know, manage all of those teams. I mean, we have to get creative. It's not great.
Speaker 2:You do have scenarios where you probably your comp is higher than you want it to be as a percent of revenue, but you know, in the end it still works. Do you want to do it or do you want to do? You want to see that you're paying out, you know, 30% of your commission to this one team? No, you don't want to, but I mean you gotta, you gotta make it happen. It's just a hard balance. And then you've got the split side where you want to take care of the carrier reps. They're working their tails off. They're covering 30 loads a day, you know. But how do you commission them? Because they're not selling right and they complain because the sales reps get more commission. But know we'll come, try to sell, we'll let you, you know, but, um, it's been a balance and again we screwed up and we've we've had to make changes, you know, with comp, over the years, but one thing we've never changed is the, the base way we paid from a commission perspective.
Speaker 2:You, know, um, if some people saw how much we paid in commission, they would be like an asset would be like.
Speaker 1:No way would we ever do that you know.
Speaker 2:But that's why an asset probably can't grow. A brokerage that well, you know. Let's say, let's be realistic, you're thinking about it the wrong way, but, um, it works. It's just always a struggle. It's like today, this, this account now wants people on site. So how are we we're meeting this morning? How are we going to figure this out? You know, how are we going to move somebody down there? Because I'm not going to hire somebody that I don't know, that doesn't do that customer to go be on site. Um, I want them to know the actual culture and the actual way and our expectations and how we're going to manage that business. So we're trying to figure that out now. But again, it's a great problem to have.
Speaker 1:My recommendation because I went through this is to take your rep, who's like a year into their career on the ops side, who's shown a lot of capabilities, they're strong and they're smart, and give them that job, because one being on site, you learn more about the intricacies of a customer's business being on site than you ever will in any other role. I did this. I worked on site at Kraft for a year and this was I was 21 years old, I was taking a year off college and for one I didn't even know it. Once I started digging into the systems I realized I had access to information.
Speaker 1:I probably wasn't supposed to, but like I could see what people were quoting on loads. I could see a lot of things. But, like you have to put a very curious mind in that and someone who, like I, used to just roam the floor, make friends with all the all, like people working in the building and who manage the freight and just try to find more freight. So, like you, don't want to take a top salesperson and put them in this job because, like you want your salespeople to sell, but find someone on the ops side who's shown they're capable, they're not too far in their career. They're eager, want to prove themselves. You give them that job and that person, in five years, will be leading some part of your business.
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny that you say that, because that's exactly what one of my GM said this morning.
Speaker 2:You know I don't want to get rid of my salespeople that kill it and can grow new business.
Speaker 2:You know the same people that talk about this but at the same time, yeah, they, they have some really good guys that just, I mean, I don't know one guy I think ran 900 plus shipments by himself last month and I'm just like you know he has a lot of dedicated that call, a lot of freight, but at the same time he's just a beast just hammering away at the phones and, um, you know we we've done a lot in terms of automation to from tracking, tracing, using text, locating along with macro point, and, and it really helps manage your day-to-day a lot better than I used to have to manage it, where you're check calling every other hour.
Speaker 2:You know, um, you can automate the text to go to the driver just to get an update from and, and that's really been a lifesaver. But, um, yeah, we'll figure it out. We've got a couple weeks to to make a decision on who's going to go and and how we're going to pay for them to live down there at least short term to see if it's really going to work out. But um again it's a good problem to have right the customer.
Speaker 2:There's a great relationship there and they're they're growing like crazy and it's a niche market that I've never seen in my life and, um, you know, hopefully, hopefully it'll blow up and I agree with you, the person that we're thinking about long term 100 will be a badass leader or manager here at this company.
Speaker 1:So yeah, there's two thoughts I have coming out of this. One is never say no to an opportunity. Figure it out right. Just find a way to give yourself a chance If a customer is trying to go deeper in the relationship. You're crazy if you say no because there's not a current process or a current comp structure or this or that. You've just got to figure it out. And the second thing, which I think is especially true for high-growth companies in our space never be married to your processes, never be married to your structures Like date them, love them. But there's so much change that can happen in this space and new things that come up. And if you restrict yourself and let kind of structure rule be like the law of the land, where it's like if it doesn't fit in the structure, we can't do it, we're not changing it, like I think you miss out on so much opportunity, much opportunity. But I also think the one thing you have to be so, so, so thorough and smart about is changing comp.
Speaker 1:We spent years trying to change our, wanting to change our commission structure. Our base commission did not change until like my last year or like the last year and a half that I was in the business, even though we had talked about it for three years. We felt like we were paying too much for people just kind of maintain business over time and they weren't necessarily incentivized to land new accounts, and finally we made a change to it at the end. We made a change to it at the end and I think my advice to people who think about making changes, especially around comp communicate as proactively as possible. Communicate throughout the thought process. As soon as you start thinking about changing the comp, talk to your team about it. Let them know why you're thinking about changing it, because the only reason you should theoretically be thinking about changing it is because it should make the business better.
Speaker 1:And sometimes the answer is the unfortunate and it shouldn't be. But sometimes the answer is we created a structure that is not sustainable for the profitability of the business long term and a smart employee can understand that. It's like hey, if we keep doing this forever, the business won't exist in three years, so we need to make a change. But ideally the change is hey, we're not growing because we only compensate you on margin versus compensating you on new accounts, new logos, and we're making this change because we need to land new accounts. People can understand that. Give them enough time to digest the change and don't do an overnight. Hey, we're changing your comp tomorrow. We're changing it next quarter, in three months. So if you need to make adjustments to anything in your life or to your book of business or who you pursue, you have time to do that.
Speaker 2:So those are just my thoughts on that, especially on the credit or grief side. That's one thing we're never going to do is change the comp structure. We figured out a way just to make it work. You know the owners want. One thing that the owners have always been big proponents of is they want people to make money in this industry. They want to help people. They do a ton for the local community. We give a lot of money year over year, but they also want employees to be taken care of. They, they, they swore that they would never change it and I mean I've got cradle to grave reps that you know. They, they like what they do and they make 75 grand a year. And I got guys that come in and they make five, make $75,000 a year. And I got guys that come in and they make $500,000 and $600,000 a year.
Speaker 2:But it doesn't happen overnight. They've been grinding for six years and they continue to land business and scale their teams and the only time that we've ever made a change is on the split side, because we pay outside sales reps for the life of the business and we started to see them get comfortable. So now it's if you don't hit your new revenue goal year over year. You're going to get your commission cut in half and and I hate, I, you know it it really destroyed us when we had to do it, but you had to do it because they got to. They just got laid back, you know?
Speaker 2:And? And why would you not want to continue to scale and grow? That's the fun part of the job. What are you going to do sitting there every single day? And the set, the outside sales group, is the only group that's allowed to work from home. Everybody else that's in this office every day. We don't do remote, nor will we ever do remote, other than unless we're forced to. We did it for three weeks during covid, but um yeah, it's, it's definitely it's.
Speaker 2:It's tough and and and, like I said, we pay out a lot in terms of commission, but it's for hard work. You know, the the equation we use has been around for a while and other companies have used it a long time ago in the past and it's there. It's just if you ever bring in like an equity company, they would be like, well, we can't do this, you know because then there's not enough money to pass around.
Speaker 2:So, um it, yeah, it's good, we won't change it. I'm not going to change it. I swore I wouldn't and I've got people to work for me from other brokers and that's why they left us, because every year it's a different pay structure. You know it's like every year. They realize, well, we need more money from somebody, so we're going to take it from our employees and I'm like, well, I'll never, do that here.
Speaker 2:I'll promise you that. And to this day, when I see those reps I've got one small office in Chattanooga. I still see those guys it it's like, no, you're right, thank you for not changing it. You thought you were full of it. You know, three or four years ago, when we started.
Speaker 1:So it's a tough one. I love, I love everything you just said. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's my concern Anytime you see a company gets acquired acquired whether it's an investment from private equity or acquired by another strategic or anyone and there's a new decision maker at the top of the food chain and they want to see improvement, they want to see more profit. There's the short-sighted way to do it and there's the long-term way to do it. The long-term way is you keep hiring, you stick to what works and over time you see the profit come in. But most people aren't that patient. So the short-term way to do it is you got to take the money from someone.
Speaker 1:It's in the business. You can pull a lever and go from 95% acceptance for your customers to 85% and stop taking the 10% that you promised you would take. But you're losing money on it. Boom, you just took that money from your customer and short term you will probably see a profit boost. But will that customer award you volume in next year's bid? I hope not, probably not. And the other people you can take the money from is your employees. It's not hard to do, it's a simple hey, I'm paying you 20% today. Tomorrow I'm paying you 15. Boom, there's 5% back in my pocket, and in that situation there are ramifications of that decision too. But it's like that's just how it works, it's always been that way, you know.
Speaker 1:There's a reason. I think your philosophy aligns with the fact that your company, nine years ago, had 20 people, today has 684, and you have not had to take a dollar of outside capital. This is, to me, um one of the best success stories in freight, and I think that anyone would would would benefit from understanding how you guys did it.
Speaker 2:Um I hate seeing I've never been well. I say I've never been like really rude to people. Like cold call, you know someone reaches out to me, especially LinkedIn or email. It's like, come on, guys, I'm not going to tell them, but I'll blow you off. If you just email me all day long or you send LinkedIn messages, I'm just going to archive the shit out of them because cold call me right, give me a call and I'll call it to you. But if you want to do the lazy email blaster router, let your CRM do that, then so be it. I don't want to talk about it, but it's like when you have.
Speaker 2:I'm sitting here watching somebody jump up and down. I think they landed a customer. I just lost my train of thought. I love it. No, it's awesome, it's pretty cool to see, but no, it's like shoot. I can't remember what I was going to say now, to be honest, with you when people are cold calling you.
Speaker 1:versus sending you emails, you archive them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, yeah, they don't, I don't talk to them right. When people are cold calling you, versus sending emails, you archive them. Yeah, I don't talk to them, right, but if they do cold call. But there's something I was trying to get to. There's a point with what we were saying. I can't recall now, but it goes back to the same thing. Out here on the floor I pick up the phones. We have reps that want to sit there and blast emails all day long, and then I look at their call volume on the sheet that's sitting right here. This is a lot of red because they're just not doing the right things. But yeah, sorry.
Speaker 2:I got to stop looking over there. They're all high five and something's going on, so I can't wait to find out what it is, but that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, listen, I you know it's fear much easier, like I was kind of afraid of cold calls and still kind of am. It feels like it's so like rude just calling someone out of the blue, and I spent a lot of time and effort crafting what I thought were good emails and it worked for me to some extent. But I'm a firm believer that there's no right way to sell and at the end of the day, you're selling to a person and that person has agency over their decisions and the best thing you can probably do is figure out a way to empathize with that person's position. That you archive all the emails and the LinkedIn messages and respect and appreciate the phone call is because you've done the phone call for 20 years and so you have an appreciation for that Someone on the other end who's reaching out to you. They only know that maybe if they listen to this episode of the show, but also just they'd have to somehow. Yeah, but part of the research, that's part of the job in selling, is figuring out how your customer wants to buy. Some people are like you and they they respect the phone call.
Speaker 1:Others Like I hate getting cold calls and I I would maybe prefer an email that I think is well-crafted and shows that someone like I remember we had a huge, huge real estate deal with our last office, like it was, I don't know 90,000 square feet. So whoever the real estate broker was was going to get paid a lot of money on that deal, and the person who we used was. I went to University of Michigan and this person sent me a cold email out of the blue. It was like two paragraphs and it had so much insight into me as a person and my business that I was so impressed I forwarded. Their email to my sales team was like this is how you cold email someone. I ended up giving her all of our business and she ended up getting paid on a 90,000 square foot deal in downtown Chicago.
Speaker 1:What does that say? It's just like I think people like to buy the way that maybe they like to sell. Like you know, you have to look at the individual who you're bought, who's who's buying from you and like what are they how? How are they wired? I'm someone who likes the cold email, so when I get a good cold email, I respond to it. You're someone who prefers a cold call. You've done the cold calling and you respect that. So I don't know. I just think there's a lesson in there for salespeople that there's not one right way to do it. What you should do is try everything.
Speaker 2:I remember what I was going to say when I was talking about the cold calling, before they started jumping up and down, was that you know, when it comes to like cold calling, I never try to be rude. I hope no one puts a recording out of me one day. I'm usually pretty cool if you cold call me, right, but lately, because we don't have that equity backing, I mean every other call if somebody wanted to give us money or acquire us or whatever it may be. And I hear that employees all the time, are they ever going to sell? No, I mean they, they have no reason to sell.
Speaker 2:They, they love the game. They're not the owners aren't in as much as they used to be, but they still are and they love to see the growth and it. You know they, they don't get tired of it. But man, I I've gotten to be a complete ass when it comes to these people calling me. Now it's like 15, 20 times a day. Again, I'll answer the phone, but the financial backers have been just going haywire with us and stuff, and most of the time it's through email and LinkedIn, but I just don't even connect anymore.
Speaker 2:You know, it gets old, a bit part of it. But yeah, you're right, the, yeah, the cold calling piece of it. It's just, yes, that's the game.
Speaker 1:So, as we get ready to wrap here, I wanted to spend a couple minutes on technology, ai, specifically because you know you're an ideal buyer. I imagine you're getting bombarded by every AI company who I've interviewed, plus all the ones I haven't. How do you think about deploying that type of technology in your business and how do you even think about evaluating what makes sense for your team to be using? And, specifically, what I think is interesting is you mentioned, I think, on average, like a cradle, the grave rep can get up to about 15 loads a day, managed by themselves, and I'm sure what the Vumas and the drum kits and the happy robots are going to sell to you is we can turn 15 into 50. And I'm just curious how do you think about that, given your kind of very customer-centric mindset of not wanting to fail on execution? How do you think about that?
Speaker 2:So at the end of last year I told the team no matter what we do, we're never going to have AI. I don't want it. No, it is Well. That's why, again, I said that at the end of last year. That's shifted since then. But well, there's two parts of AI. You've got the bots answering the phones and negotiating rates with carriers, which is I'm probably going to have that by the end of this year. That's like an initiative for Q3. So all of the happy robots and boomers that I said would be a Q3, q4, they're probably getting ready to call me sometime here this month. But you know, mostly AI has been more like just it's more automation than anything. You know, mostly AI has been more like just it's more automation than anything.
Speaker 2:So you know all of our back office. You know it used to be that when a carrier invoices us, you know we're waiting two weeks to get an invoice, you know. And from a carrier, at least a week. When they get home on a weekend they do their paperwork, they send it to us and then they send it to us and then you know it takes us a week to invoice our customers. So we use Navix on, you know, the back end and with Text Locate. So I'm getting PODs on 88% of my shipments within 24 hours of delivery. Most of the time as they deliver, you know Text Locate as soon as that driver gets to the receiver. Hey, as soon as you have a copy of that bill of lading you need to send us a photo. They take a picture of it and they send it to us and Tex-O-Cate puts it into our system and Navix takes it and uploads it and then invoices our customer for us. So I'm invoicing our customers in 72 hours or less, which has really turned around our AR. So I went from having 40 or 50 people to three that manage carrier payables and deal with just processing paperwork. So we've really automated the backend on the office side of things.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to that, but on the front end, we work with Vuma. Jesse and that team are great on. Like you know, right now it's more like auto reading emails and pulling rate data to them. Instead of having to have five tabs that you've got a pin where you get a review and then you get a truck stop, you got every other tool that you use for rating. We now bring all of this data in, including our API bots that you know. Chad and AVRL are awesome and we use them and we're quoting over 100,000 shipments a month and the bots are more profitable than the people rating here on the floor, you know. So we're winning at a good rate and we're getting the margin that we need in a tough market. That's good to see.
Speaker 2:But you know it brings in the bot rate. It'll bring in, you know, any other tool that you use. And then we also have our own tool that we built ourselves from a historical rating analysis and it gives you a breakdown of your carriers and what their averages are and what we suggest to sell. So Vuma is doing that for us what their averages are and what we suggest to sell. So Vuma is doing that for us. And then Vuma has also partnered with McLeod Software on the load building side. So you know we still have shimmers. Today that will screenshot or snip an Excel sheet that says here are the 15 shimmers for tomorrow. Well, it's going to take that email, read them and build them for you in our CMS. Read them and build them for you and and and our TMS. So we, once we have finished automating and all of that works, the last piece will be AI entering the towns and it's going to be mainly on just the carrier side.
Speaker 2:From like a rate negotiation standpoint, I think I can control carrier offers a little bit better. Obviously, negotiations a lot better. You'll hear me 100 times a day. Just think if you would have bought $10 less on this shipment for all the volume that you move, how much money you could have potentially made right. So it's like we know a lot of that's going on in the industry today and plus you know the phones are blowing up all day long. That's going on in the industry today and plus you know the phones are blowing up all day long. So we don't want carriers that really need to get in and talk to someone. You know whether it's trying to book a shipment or they need something else. We're going to probably go that route with one of those three or four that you've already mentioned I don't know who yet We've still got to start that vetting process, still got to start that vetting process.
Speaker 2:I'm very loyal to people that I've met and spoke. It shows that they're persistent, but they don't annoy me when it comes to the sales. And if you reach out periodically and you don't annoy me, then I'll probably give you an opportunity to at least come and pitch the way. So, between Happy Robot and Vuma and a few others, we're gonna talk to them at some point, but when it comes to the customer side other than API bot rating never. They need to be talking to a rep at all times. You know we look at response times for emails. You're supposed to respond to your customers in two minutes or less. You better learn how to manage your emails well. To do that, you better answer your cell phone. I've only called and we do have people that randomly reach out to reps to make sure they're answering their phones at night.
Speaker 2:I don't want customers talking to AI, but carriers they like it, from what we've heard, the ones that we deal with. I mean, we're starting to get AI calling in on shipments to us and it's weird to sound at first, you know, and the reps like, should we even use them? Do we trust it? Well, you know, if highways vetted them and they fall within our criteria, then yeah, use them. It's going to go to that at some point, but it's not going to go.
Speaker 2:I don't want anybody reaching out to me that's going to say, hey, we can automate your emails for sales or we can give you a salesperson to call for you and generate leads. No, you don't know us and you don't know how to sell us, so we don't want you for that. So it's mainly just going to be on carry negotiations. That's also going to help us with risk. I mean, risk has been tough. We had 33 stolen shipments last year. You know. We, just knock on wood, had one this year but somebody you know, they, they, they impersonated us and the carrier didn't know how to catch a fake email so they rerouted the shipment in transit. Wildest thing it's the first time I've ever heard that. So you know, I think if we automate the carrier negotiation side and the free booking side of it at some point, that'll help us stay within the rules that we define for carriers to haul and it also gives the reps more time at the desk to sell and manage their customers. So that's where we're probably going with it.
Speaker 1:But after that, who knows?
Speaker 2:what's next?
Speaker 1:yeah, look, there's there's. There's inarguable value in just being able to answer the phone. I mean that, that's I've. I've not been able to think of a reason not to have the carrier ai tool just to answer the phone. I mean what they say once they answer it, like if I trust them to book a load or vet the carrier. I don't know about that, I trust it'll get there. But the amount of abandoned phone calls that every brokerage deals with, just because you post the wrong loads at the wrong time and your phones blow up and there's just not enough people to supply and demand to support the amount of calls that come in at a certain time, being able to make your bandwidth unlimited to answer the calls via AI, even if it's just to answer the call, take the care information and have someone call back, that's value that you just can't get with people unless you're way overpaying to overstaff at all times. It doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:I agree, most customers are going to call their reps on their cell anyways, and so then sometimes that makes them ignore the desk phone that's ringing, and we just figured out a way to log down all the phones at a certain volume. So now all of those phones are ringing because they'll mute it half the time, and that's unacceptable to me.
Speaker 2:But um yeah, at some point, you know we're not taking care of the, the carriers, the way we should when it comes to the end on call piece of it. Um, you know it's. It's weird. If you look up like our google reviews, we seem to have a lot more google reviews for a, a broker, than and we're not as big as some of the larger ones out there that don't have hardly any. I don't know if they figure out a way to manage them or remove them or what.
Speaker 1:But the biggest thing you're going to find is it's just you don't answer the phone.
Speaker 2:Like I'm being a carrier rip in the beginning of the industry. I've still got carriers that run with me today that I signed on through pen and paper way back in the day at Robinson. You got to take care of them. If a carrier has an issue, you do it the right way and you reach out to us. We're going to take care of you. If you want to throw a bad review, we hunt you down and we call you because we want to fix the problem. Sometimes we're going to leave the review out there because you know what? You're not happy that I didn't pay you what you wanted. Well then don't take the shipment. You know it's like that whole, you know I mean it's either we don't answer the phone or we didn't pay them what they want, right? Or, oh my God, axel's posted a shipment for 60 cents a mile.
Speaker 2:Cool, it was a one pallet man. One pallet, 500 pounds. Right, we posted a pallet. You know it can go on anybody's truck. You know, if you want to try to use that as as a media ploy to say that we're paying 60 cents a mile on a shipment, well then go ahead, do it. But um, that's a different tear I won't go to.
Speaker 1:But oh good, I can personally attestest if someone were to listen to this and think I should check Axel's reviews on Google and judge them based on them, especially if they have more than others. Let me be clear about a few things. When I was leading Molo, I was approached at least a hundred times by people and companies who claimed that they could magically fix our Google reviews by getting rid of all the bad ones and putting up good ones. I never said okay to it because I don't believe in buying that kind of fake stuff. So the companies that you do see without reviews, they're paying for people to take care of them.
Speaker 1:And the reviews that are negative, they are, like you said, they're situational and they're not representative of necessarily cultural problems where it's okay yeah, this guy offers 60 percent per mile on a load, or he doesn't answer the phone, like as a broker. Like that was. One of the biggest things I struggled with and fought with my team about was the abandoned call percentage, where a carrier called in and we couldn't answer the phone in time. Like you want to do the best, you can answer the phones, but certain times you can't, um, and I do think that that problem will be solved with ai as soon as you deploy it.
Speaker 1:Yeah but, you know, at the same time.
Speaker 2:I sometimes like the negative reviews because not because I want anything to be negative but there's something occurring that I'm not seeing now that I used to be able to see everything. You know, we never created an executive level until I could manage people anymore. I think I made it 76 people at one time. I'm like you know, that's just too many to be productive and efficient people at one time. If I'm like you know, that's just too many to be productive and efficient. Um, you know, so it's. It's kind of the same thing now. It's like we can't see everything that happens in this company. But trust me, if I get a review, I'm you know, hey, team, you better track this down and figure out what we've done wrong and we're gonna fix it. And, um, as much as you know I I love to say that I'm probably a good leader. I've learned a lot over the years. If there's one thing that'll fire me up and you're going to hear me yell is if you mistreat a carrier or you don't take care of something like you're supposed to.
Speaker 2:If you know, at the new hire lunch. I mean again, we're not perfect. We grow at a rapid pace. We had 35 people in this class and their job there is to meet us, meet their potential new managers. Because when we do like a little bit of personality matching, but you know, we hire a class of people and then the managers have to interact with them to figure out who they want on their team and they kind of like fight for it a little bit. And well, you need to get more business in the next 30 days before they get out of training and then maybe you can get that person right. But so we kind of use it internally for a game.
Speaker 2:But when these reps are asking them questions and they're not, you know, answering them, I'm like man, not only are you know you're not going to be able to manage this person, you're not selling the company. But if you're not answering questions here, you're not going to be able to manage this person, you're not selling the company. But if you're not answering questions here, you're not answering them on the floor, then you're not even talking to the carriers and taking care of them. Like I lost my stuff Monday and I haven't done it in a while, but I will go out there and I will rip some tail because in the end I take it personal. You know you you've got to just handle it and some people don't love it if I'm yelling, but um take care of people, so sometimes I like the negative reviews. It helps me fine tune where we have the gaps Um.
Speaker 1:I think that's well said. I mean, I, I, I, I used to comb like Reddit and Facebook, like Chad Boblitz group, look, and I would just search Molo and I would just look for any time there was a negative review and I'd send it to someone on our team Tell me what happened here, figure this out, let me know what to do. Or I just called the carrier myself and figure it out, looking for the same things. Sometimes I would call into the company and cause I was so frustrated by this you know people not answering the phones, or how were people answering the phones? And I would call him, pretending to be a carrier, and just personally rate the experience I was getting.
Speaker 1:And I think that's an important I think, for it's hard to to manage scale and and for people who are I don't know if you're a perfectionist, but I think you want things if in your world, your values are represented on every phone call, in every email, in every interaction with the carriers, with fellow employees, with the customers, and you probably preach it consistently because you know that every deviation from those values, you know that every deviation from those values, even if it's one time, that is losing you business, it's like every action we take is either helping us grow or it's hurting us.
Speaker 1:And it's even the action of how I respond as a sales rep, how I respond to the carrier rep who booked my load. That's either helping us grow or it's hurting us. It's creating friction between us and you can't manage every conversation. But you need to be able to step in when you see little things like how your manager engages a new employee. That is representative of how they're behaving across the board and with the managers. It's way worse than just a rep, because the manager has so much more influence and if that person's not behaving in accordance to the values, that is a killer to the culture, to so much of the business. So I align with frustration.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it kills me. I'm not an emotional person, but when I talk about this place I am and I get so fired up. You know I get pissed off and I get teary eyed and I get I get all hyped up and you know I don't worry about it anymore. I used to, but you know you got to, you got to do it right from the beginning and we've done. We've done a lot. I don't know how to say. I get upset now.
Speaker 2:It's like you want it done right and I hold everybody out here accountable to do it right. We've got a good thing going and I want everybody to be just as dedicated as me and care just as much as me. And if they don't, I don't want them here. So I let them see me get upset like this sometimes. Just, it's a good business to be in, it's a great company to be in, and and um, I want us to be different, you know, and they say how are you different? You know it's it's how we're going to take care of our customer and our carrier in the end. You know it's how we're going to present ourselves. Um, you know there's a little bar across the street. If they come over and tell me, man, I'm like, how do our employees? The one thing I ask the bartender is how do our employees tip you when they come eat lunch?
Speaker 2:And I'll get mad, because if we were going to take care of you, then take care of your surroundings and the people in your community too. It's just little things that add up. I mean, I grew up in a tough life, so uh, um now that we've got this I.
Speaker 2:I, you know I take it personal. It's not even my company, it is. You know, john Drew is like this, your company as much as ours. And um, uh, they take care of me but um, they like that's one good thing about it. You know, when they hired me and that's one good thing about it, you know, when they hired me I was not a good culture person. I wasn't a good like. I mean, I wasn't a good leader in the beginning. I've learned a lot over the years and I didn't have a ton of energy. And they're like, you know, you run the business the way you want to run it, but you run the culture the way we want you to run it. And for the first three or four years that we worked together, hey, this is what we're doing in the business and then this is what we're going to do with the culture. And I just take it personal. I mean I get upset sometimes just because I care.
Speaker 1:That's what it is.
Speaker 1:I was going to say that I mean people want to work for someone who cares, and I think that most people don't understand the way that you and I do when we say things like you have to take care of each other and you have to take care of the carriers and the customers, like it just sounds like words, but there's so much meaning when you get to the depth of what it really means, because it is in every single interaction and there's a reason why you're looking at the reviews, like yeah, it's one shipment out of hundreds of thousands, but again, it's, it's one shipment that's detracting from our ability to keep growing together, to keep building together.
Speaker 1:And it's a system that when it's when it's working like a symphony orchestra, that that's like it, it's beautiful and it everyone can win. But when there are cracks, it's just it's. It's like a sinking ship, like the water's getting in one hole. You got to plug, you got to plug all the holes and it's. It's just really hard to do so. Like having people, one, showing your employees that you care, being willing to get upset in front of them from time to time, um, even cry sometimes.
Speaker 2:like it's, that's it's interior, I mean my wife's like man, you're more emotional with your work than you are with your family. It's like I was just never. You know my dad's always a hard ass. You know he was. I don't think I ever saw that guy cry, ever, so it's like I've always been that way. I I don't like cry, but I get all watery talking about it. You know, it's just.
Speaker 2:I want everybody to have a good life and work hard and take care of people and take care of others. And you know this, people, people are like you're in freight big deal. You move a and b. Well, you know what? All of these people not just us, but the ch's, you know, and the molars of the world and everyone else we're the ones that were still working 24 7 during covid to get product to the shelves when nobody else could take it. You know, and not even us, we're just connecting the carriers that were willing to put themselves at risk and go out there and do it. You know, and and it's like you are doing something for the world.
Speaker 2:when you're in this industry, it's always I think it's badass. I think it's a great thing. It's like someone else is like we want to do something to help the environment. We're doing something to help our world get product from A to B. And I remember, during COVID I mean we were, you know we all got it quickly.
Speaker 2:I got in the very beginning and and um, after that it was you know what. We're just going to be here 15, 20 hours a day and we're going to buy everybody that's here margaritas and food and whatever you want. But we're just going to sit here and and I mean you couldn't not, it was non-stop just helping people you know to where it's like. You know I did a couple cost plus scenarios with people. You know where it's like. You know they're like are you serious? You're gonna do this plus five percent? Just give me whatever you got like. If you keep getting bailed and you need to get this product to the shelves, just let us know. We're just gonna take care of it. So, and I want people to be that way today and they just got to care.
Speaker 2:Um, probably care too much, but that's all right, there's no, caring too much there's a if that's my fault and I will take that 100 I'm with you.
Speaker 1:well, listen, um, this has been awesome. I really appreciate how honest and open you've been talking about the good and the bad and everything in between, and I think that I think that my audience will have a really good understanding of what a great business Axel is coming out of this and, frankly, what a kind of leader you are.
Speaker 2:So um, there are other brokers that call me all the time and I give them advice. I mean it's like we're all in it together. You said in the beginning our industry is a huge. There's a huge industry. It's a huge market, there's enough for everybody. It's like you got to help each other sometimes and you know some. I remember someone made a comment a few days ago like man, you sure are open and honest. I'm just going to tell you how it is. I don't want to hide anything. I'm not going to tell you we've got how we pay and how we structure our company, the things that we know set us apart and why people want to work for us. But if you're struggling, I'm going to help you, whether you're a broker or a carrier or whatever it may be. It's just I don't know. I wish everybody would think that way sometimes.
Speaker 2:You still want to be the best either I want to smoke everybody in the top 25. But you know, like you said, it's like you want to win. If you get beat, then I'm like man, how in the world did they beat us this year and grow that much more than us? That? I'm digging but that's part of the competitive nature of all of us too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's something that has changed for me quite a bit, because I used to be too competitive, like ruthlessly competitive, where I hated all my competitors. I wanted everyone I wanted just us to win and everyone else to lose, and I had beef with a lot of companies. And now I think the podcast has helped with this. But I realize, like we like guys, I'm cheering for Axel today and you know I think I was before cause I generally understood but hearing this, you and I are cut from the same cloth and and I know that like I can appreciate the way you run your business and so I'm cheering for you guys, and like I don't want to take business at your expense whenever I get to do brokerage again, and so I think I appreciate the way you think about it, and that's like there's room for a lot of us to win, and I'm hopeful that the right ones continue to win.
Speaker 1:The ones who do take care of their employees, who care about taking care of the carriers and who just actually do what they say with the customers. The ones who are putting whatever nonsense in their marketing to make stuff up so that they can sound different. Those are the guys who I'm actively cheering against and I'm not afraid to admit that. But the ones who are just kind of straightforward, tell it like it is honest and doing their best. I hope we all win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sam, I agree with you. Day in and day out, man, it is what it is. I get fired. I don't look at LinkedIn as it is what it is. I I get, I get fired. I don't look at LinkedIn as much as I used to anymore just because I mean I see some of the stuff flooding out there from some of the other brokers. I'm just like man, you're making a fool out of all of us. But you know there are a lot of really good ones out there too, that you know.
Speaker 1:I agree, my buddies, have started them and are they going to work?
Speaker 2:for them today. You want to see them all succeed. Hopefully I have better success, but I don't wish failure on anybody. It's just like why do it? I'm like you. I used to be the same exact way F everyone else. I'm glad to see you dropping and whatever. It's not like that anymore. Um, that's why we don't get to shows. It's like you, you don't. What are you doing like? There's no point to prove. You know if, if I go and talk to every single broker at every single sure every year, that's not going to grow my business. The customers don't know that. So, um, it's still good to get out there and network and talk to people and learn something you may not have learned before, or get a great idea. I hear that all the time. But, um, yeah, I don't know, love it are you gonna get back?
Speaker 2:into it one day maybe yeah, I got it.
Speaker 1:I mean, just this conversation is taking me back. It makes me want to get back into it tomorrow, which I can't yet. But, um, I'm I'm hopeful that I can get my non-compete stuff figured out, hopefully sooner than later. But whenever and um, and then I got, I gotta get back into it.
Speaker 2:I miss, I miss it so much a lot of people that think that we're fake and we just talk out of our ass and we don't do that. If you ever come here, like I've let people come here and I'll walk them through the building and it's like no man, it's. Uh, this is how we operate, this is what we do, you know, and um, we have a lot of people that stay because of it and some leave because it's just a tough job, but we try to make it as fun as we can and uh, but we, we do care, we care. Probably, again, like I say, I care too much. I know there's not such a thing, but yeah, it's awesome. I love it well, listen, I've.
Speaker 1:I've kept you for longer than I said I would, but um, really appreciate the conversation and, uh, I think my own time made it happen, so yeah, you.
Speaker 2:So thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:And with that, that's all we got. We'll see you next week, you.
