Ep. #83: Ken Adamo joins Ease Logistics as Chief Strategy Officer

A major freight market intelligence leader is leaving DAT for a brokerage and he’s explaining exactly why. Ken Adamo joins me and Peter Coratola to talk about what most people misunderstand about DAT, how brokers should actually use spot market data, and why the best teams treat analytics as decision support rather than a single “rate truth.” If you’ve ever argued over Rateview screenshots, struggled to explain pricing to a shipper, or wondered why fancy tools don’t get adopted, this one will hit home.

We also break news: Ken is joining Ease Logistics as Chief Strategy Officer. We unpack what that role looks like inside a modern, tech-forward brokerage, from product and pricing science to tech adoption and strategic bets. Along the way we debate the seductive idea of drop trailers and why trailer pools can turn into a margin-killing operational tax if you don’t have the systems, discipline, and accountability to manage them.

Then we go straight into the market: Winter Storm Fern, RFP behavior, and the mistakes that cost incumbents freight when they panic, give volume back, or “quote cowardly.” Ken shares a grounded outlook on contract rates, the capacity flush, and why 2026 is the table-setting year that can create a huge 2027 for brokers who stay disciplined on pricing, operations, and portfolio thinking (yes, including the reality that some loads go negative).

If you like honest freight broker talk with practical strategy, subscribe, share this with a teammate, and leave a review so more operators can find it.

Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.

Thanks to our sponsors:

Stuut Technologies: Your AI coworker that collects your cash automatically.

https://www.stuut.ai/

Cloneops.ai: Not just AI. Industry-born AI.

https://www.cloneops.ai/

Rapido Solutions Group: Nearshore solutions for logistics companies.

https://www.gorapido.com/

GenLogs: Freight Intelligence on every carrier, shipper, and asset via a nationwide sensor network

https://www.genlogs.io/

Transcript

Sponsor And Cash Flow Pitch

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out to our headline sponsor, Stute Technologies. Every week on this show, I talk to operators who are crushing it on the service side but still chasing down payments. That cash flow gap is brutal when you're trying to scale your business. That's why I wanted to tell you about Stute. Stut is the AI platform that does accounts receivable work instead of just assisting with it. Their CEO, Taric, actually came from TQL, so he gets how logistics companies operate. I've known him for years and I truly trust what he's building. What Stut does is simple. Their AI actually collects your receivables for you, not some software that just helps you chase the payments. It literally does the work. It's up and running in days, not months. As an example, Bishop Lifting is using Stute for a 35% reduction in overdue invoices, millions more in working capital, and a reduction of manual work by 50%. If you're tired of your AR eating up time and cash, check out stute.ai. That's st-u-ut-ai. Tell them you heard about it on the freight pod. They'll get you collecting in days, not months, so you can focus on actually running your business. And let's get this episode started. I'm your host, Andrew Silver, joined today by two guests. I'm rocking my Michigan head so I can support these guests the best way I know how. I'm joined today by CEO and founder of Ease Logistics, Mr. Peter Cortola, as well as the former Chief Analytics Officer of DAT, Ken Adamo. Adamo. How do I say your last name?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Adamo is good. Like Adam with an O at the end.

Ken’s Path Into Trucking

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Adamo. Adamo. I've got two guests here. We will break some news, but we're going to get into a little bit of Ken's story. Because Peter, I've had you on before, Ken, first time. But someone whose career I've followed because you've sat at such an interesting place in this industry in between the brokers and carriers and even supporting shippers as well. As DAT is one of the most probably important uh organizations in our space. So I want to start, Ken, with some of your story. Talk a little bit to us about kind of how you got in the industry, and we'll go from there.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, I tell the story all the time, but uh I graduated at the depths of the great financial crisis with a finance degree, which is not good. Um and I got scooped up by the local utility that was deregulating for electricity from Jersey all the way over to um Chicago. And um that's a super fascinating interest industry. I think there's a ton of parallels between that and trucking. It's a non-storable commodity, there's a spot and contract component. Um but if you stay in that industry long enough, you go to jail. And again, a lot of the folks that I've worked for uh are on trial or you know, there was a huge bribery scandal in Ohio involving the Ohio speaker of the house. So um I bounced to FedEx after three or four years doing that, um, just kind of expecting it to be a safe haven and fell in love with trucking. So I worked for a custom critical, which had the air and ground expedite, um the uh chocolate brokerage, and I was there for quite a while. I used the DAT data um to build pricing models and all that fun stuff. I got hotboxed in Austin about seven years into that stint by the DAT team. I was speaking at a conference and uh decided to come on board, and that was six and a half years ago. So you know, growing that product there, wore a bunch of hats, um, and most recently was GM of the shipper business the last six or so months.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Well in your what your your primary function at DAT, will you describe kind of what that role looked like during the customer time there?

Acquisitions And The Convoy Problem

SPEAKER_00 4:04

So when I as happens at these firms, right, Roper Technologies is a publicly traded firm that owns DAT. They had some consultants come in in 2018 and they said, hey, load board's great, but you've got a crap ton of data and you're not monetizing it. And um the thing you should do is go find the people that are using it in the industry and try to hire one of them to build this into an actual product. Um so that was the that was the the goal um to turn uh DAT IQ as it became into this juggernaut. Because back then, if you remember, and you knew this, I'm sure at Coyote, right? Everyone just had like the old school rate view opened up on their screen. They had power and rate view, and that's what they were using. But I don't think anyone was thinking about it as like a wholesale analytics product, you know, buying and consuming millions and billions of rows of data. And that's what we did. Uh we opened up an office in Denver, made that kind of the tech incubation center over the years. There was one product manager when I started for all analytics products. I think there's probably close to 100 folks working between data science analytics and all of that fun stuff at DAT um at present. So building things like predictive rating and uh market conditions, all of that. Um towards the tail end of my tenure, they kind of didn't know what to do with me. This is a trend. Um, so we had a uh a really great chief product and technology officer come in, much better suited to building products than I was. Um, and they found a home for me in corporate development, so MA, thinking probably he'll just you know make some fancy charts and graphs and presentations. We ended up buying three companies in 12 months. We bought Trucker Tools, Outgo, and one of your favorites, uh Convoy, um during my time. And then we were turned off for MA. Uh you know, you take three in a year, you gotta take a you gotta sit the bench a little bit. Uh they needed to find something to do with me again. Uh, and they moved me over to run the shipper business um the last six or so months I was there.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Do you feel like those acquisitions can truly transform DAT from the position it sat in to something different and more um useful, I guess? Useful is maybe not the right word.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

I don't think we would have done them if it couldn't have, if we didn't believe that it would have. Um I think to think about how fast this AI stuff is moving, it really wasn't on anyone's radar in a bona fide way when we did Trucker Tools, which was what, in the fall, the basically the winter of 2024. Um and to think that honestly, and again, put the network effect, talk about just the software for a minute, you could probably vibe code a uh track and trace platform in like three or four weeks nowadays, like a production grade uh quality track and trace. Um so I think a lot of that is changed, but again, the network effect is not one to be trifled with. So having a million trucks in your network and having um 10,000 broker customers is a good place to be if you're looking to leverage the network effect. Convoy, I think the jury's out. It's an awesome product. Um I think uh industry adoption is probably the bigger macro hurdle there than the software problem.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

It's industry, it's interesting from industry adoption because my understanding is that the product is pretty nifty and pretty impressive. Um and I just wonder if there's too much negativity that surrounds the name itself that prevents people from willing being willing to go deeper with a product that that probably could help their business. I don't know if you saw that.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Some of it, I think. There's a lot more of that with carriers, right? Like a lot of carriers that's stiffed. I think the problem wasn't the product ever, right? It was uh Dan Lewis talking about eliminating empty miles and wanting to plant trees and stuff, and our industry just doesn't care about that. Like I they want to reduce empty miles, but this idea that some like light bulb you know uh executive on the West Coast is gonna eliminate empty miles when you know there's been people trying to do this for a hundred years since the horse and buggy is uh kind of, I think, did what made I mean, this is what, the fourth reincarnation of Convoy. So um I don't think the brokers care too much about the name. If the product works, there's like some payment components that a lot of people don't think about front of mind about like how carriers get paid. I think that was interesting to work through. But I think the name is probably something that AT is thinking about, again, this is just as a third-party observer at this current point, um, on the on the carrier side, because it just wasn't it's like surge. Remember when Surge was kind of going through its problems? Um I don't know that it's the best to reincarnate that as Surge as an example.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Yeah. Or Yellow. I agree. I agree with what you're saying. I think it's it's interesting because I I do think there was an air of there was a feeling when you heard Dan talk about Convoy that was kind of like these guys feel like they're better than the industry to an extent. Um and it would have been interesting if the cell had just been we are going to leverage technology to create the most efficient way to move freight. Um and we're the the bet or the risk we're taking is we're investing so heavily on the front end, on the technology and infrastructure. The question is if we can make that a profitable endeavor. But we will move freight more efficiently than all of the pitchforkers who hate me. Um and if he had said it like that, it would have been interesting because it that was true. That's what they were building. Um they were willing to invest hundreds of millions to do it. They just couldn't figure out how to get profitable before, you know, the debtors came banging on the door.

Why Drop Trailers Break Brokers

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Trailers, man. There's more there's more brokerages that have been folded under due to overinvesting in trailers than I can count. Like that's kind of you could do a lot. You can commit a lot of sins as a broker, I think. But if you can't commit those sins when you have a monthly trailer payment, and you know, I think that's ultimately what probably did Convoy 1.0 in um was leveraging up on trailers to ship water freight. Like that is just as anyone who's been in the industry for a long time, that is like a very that's like uh borrowing to go to Mountaineer down in West Virginia and roll the slots. Like, yeah, I don't that's not something I think you want to be doing. I think you want to probably be putting that money to use elsewhere.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

It's a funny analogy. And an interesting point that I'm gonna come back to because trailers is like, you know, when when you sit in a role, when you sit in like a strategy role within a brokerage, or you're an executive at a brokerage, if you're in Peter's seat, or if you were in my seat at Molo, um you're constantly thinking about how do I stand out? How do I do something a little bit more different than everyone else? And I promise, is if you list out like five things that you think could be ideas for how we could improve and do better, I promise trailers will be on that list for every one of us. We will we will look at it because it's like most brokers aren't doing it, so I should look at it and think about it. My my shippers want it. You know, that's a simple way to think about solving the problem is what are my shippers asking for that I'm not giving them? They want drop trailers. So I get why someone like Peter, someone like myself, or convoy would think I should go in on trailers. Um, but the execution, I don't know if it's been proven by a single broker to be doable in a scaled, profitable way. So I can, I don't know if you have just or either of you, Peter or Ken, just on DOS on that rift.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Uh I agree though. I mean, from my standpoint, and like you said, if you if you write down the top five, I think, yes, 10 CEOs or whatever, you're gonna trailers are gonna be somewhere on that list, right? Like my mind goes, uh how do we get more sticky, right? And you know, if we're gonna if we're gonna have a trailer drop to your facility, we'd think we'd be your first call type of deal, right? I mean, that's like the the the guiding, okay. What do your customers need? How do you help you know turn more capacity? How do you help give a better experience to your drivers if you are having shippers that are demanding drop trailer, right? So you like you see it go towards that and it pulls you into it, and then um, like you said, it's it's where the proverbial but honest, you know, ironic, you know, rubber meets the road, it's managing the trailers, you're they're dropped there for you know X amount of time. There's no there's no harder focus to break into a high volume account manager on the ops for. And you're pinging him. Does he remember about that trailer he dropped in Portland three weeks ago? You know, in the list of things to do or that week or today, it's hard for them to like remember, hey, I got to reposition this trailer and stuff. So you can also see from that 10,000-foot view, like Ken said, why uh when you put it on paper, it looks good, but actionable, or like actually when it comes to managing them, it's hard because they solve problems, but they also that they're this there's this overhead you carry, which kind of defeats the beauty and the purpose of a brokerage sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Yeah. It's just hard too. Like I when I was at FedEx, we rolled up under FedEx freight. At that point, they had the most number of now, it's a little bit cheating because most of them were pups, so it was two for one, but they were still managing a lot of that on shared uh the Excel spreadsheets, right? Like, hey, and Amazon, like they have hundreds of thousands of trailers and they're trying to reposition the other rail. And when you you spit all of that, especially a smaller brokerage, it's like, man. I think the ones with like the the LTL identity, like I don't know any inside information about this, but I have to imagine like Echo with Doug Wagner's background is probably pretty good. Um, and that ITS acquisition makes a ton of sense because I have to imagine like that dude thinks about trailers a lot. Um, I don't think like the CEO of a$50 million brokerage or an agent model brokerage is thinking a lot about the 20 trailers they leased from, you know, uh PACAR or something.

Sponsor Break Rapido Solutions

What People Misunderstand About DAT

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's take a quick time out and give a shout out to one of our sponsors, 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, which 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 Icaza, 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 in 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 Rappido are a great place to start. To learn more, check them out at goropido.com. That's gorapido.com. Now, let's get back to the show. Um, just one or two more thoughts on data, and then we're gonna move on from there. Um I I think just as someone who spent as long as you did inside of that business, there's so many opinions about DAT. And they're the loudest opinions, it feels like in the industry, uh, whether it's from brokers or or or carriers, and even shippers, you know, shippers, it seems like have a perspective on DAT. And and it seems it's often done without a vetted understanding of the real impact that DAT can have. So I guess a question I have is like given kind of the unique vantage point that that has over the entire spot market, like what what did you see from that seat that maybe most people not in the business wouldn't understand or wouldn't see? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yeah, I mean, I think like the thing that took me the longest to grow personally and professionally is like 95% of like the chatter on social media or in like shared text groups doesn't represent the other like that's probably 5% of what's actually happening. Like your average DAT customer that's getting value is a floor broker or an agent broker that doesn't like the average tenure in this industry is really short and they just need a starting point of negotiation. I think also people don't they fail to understand the ubiquity. Like there have been other rating startups that have tried to do what DAT does, and they fail miserably. Um, and a big part of that is they don't have 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 carrier users a day logging in and seeing the ubiquity of those rates across the entire network. And so I think when people don't use DAT well, it's because they're trying to use it as like this canonical source as opposed to like a starting point. The best brokers that I've ever worked with on either side of the fence are using it as a tool in their toolkit to price better. If it's like, hey, I'm gonna move all my freight at DAT or DAT minus 10, you're just not gonna grow and scale and be successful because the brokerage is so much more than that. Um so those are like the opinions on the product. I think like in macro, like I don't know, free people are just so deeply opinionated. Like a lot of it is dependent on what your last contract negotiation may have looked like, this, that, or the other thing. Um I I like it's hard. When you get someone in a room, especially someone who like writes this like 1500 character, just like knockdown, drag out LinkedIn posts, and you see them at a conference, like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I called in and talked to Tina and customer success, and she completely helped me out and everything's good now. It's like, why did you try that first? Like, that was a lot of wasted energy to like go bitch about something on social media before you just like called customer service. I I don't know. But I imagine all businesses of size are like that. Um But I'm a fan. I I I I'm uh I'm proud of what we've done over there. Um I'm proud of the product. It's it's unrecognizable. When I joined DAT, I had like 28,000 carriers and was still the largest in the space by an order of magnitude. Um well over 100,000 today.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Wow. And and one last kind of on things to learn there is just like, is there anything that when you start you you believed when you started there that by the time you left, like it just completely changed your perspective?

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Yeah, I'll tell you two things. One, the people marketing against DAT for the longest time were a lot better than the people marketing for. Like Craig Fuller is a master marketer, master media person. And I have the deepest respect uh for him, but like this, right? Like it's a you know, we both report seven-day averages, um, but one of those is seven days old, and the other one, only one-seventh of it is seven days old, or because it's an average over seven days. So like um DATE when I joined just wasn't aggressive enough. They needed like a bulldog out front to like really counterbalance. And that's what led to my like always on, always everywhere, sort of like jumping in to help and correct and do that. Um the other thing I learned, and it took the longest time, and people were probably so frustrated who worked with me, is like just appreciation for the simple. Like I walked in and I'm like, hey, this review algorithm is so basic, it's so simple, we need to create AI, back when AI before generative, like old school AI. We need to create all these models and all this and that. Like 99% of people just preferred like the simplicity and the explainability. And that's like something I've learned in my career in general. You can build the fanciest tech, but if like the user can't use it, it's just gonna sit on a shelf. Um, so that was like a major growing pain my first couple years there. Um, loading up on data science and then having it just sit because customers are like, how do I explain this to a carrier? Like, why is this rate more than that rate? You know, it's just yeah, those were tough.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

Simple works. Simple works. Those are great points. I appreciate that. And the point on Craig is is hilariously spot on. He's done an exceptional job of pitting sonar against DAT as if they are like one and two at the same level. Uh and I think I mean I think that gap is way wider than the world realizes, but he just positions it so well, you would think they are just like titans against each other, the same product.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

I mean the the little shipper business I ran the last six months at DAT is double the size of all of Sonar, and it is a fraction of DAT's over. And like again, but if you talk to an average person on the street, like you'd think sonar won that that battle. Um, I forget. What was the name of the other thing that Triumph acquired? Um Green Street forgot about them.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

I mean, everyone's forgot about them because like we've just you know you put them in a box and then they get bought by a corner bank in Dallas, and it's just like they're gone.

Ken Joins Ease Logistics

SPEAKER_02 20:45

Um that's enough about DAT. I think the last question uh I don't even know if I need to ask it because I think it's more important, less about why you're leaving and more about what you're moving towards. So like let's get into it. What are we doing here? Why are we here?

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Well Pete, you wanna outside of you know, hitting on some right out the gate, you guys coming out with some serious name and cut uh company drops there to heat really heat it up. You know, I think it's just you know, one of the big obviously reason outside of just getting on the call to yet again highlight uh Ohio State versus Michigan continued uh rivalry, right? But how we all can come together in the industry and still partner, right? Still work together is you know, Ease is excited to this week announce uh Ken's transition over to Ease Logistics to become part of our executive team as our chief strategy officer. And you know, we're super excited to bring him on board. Uh we're uh greatly appreciative for everything he's done uh at DAT and what they'll continue to do for us as a partner. Again, I continue to think the world of them. Um But as you transition over, we're excited to bring that kind of, you know, that firepower into uh kind of like you were saying, like actionable, actionable impact. Uh, how do we how do we deliver better products? How do we really hone in our focus on tech, tech adoption? Um, and then at the end of the day, just put better products, better tools in front of our employees, our customers, and our carers. So we're super amped up to bring them on board. Um, he's obviously really well known in the industry, but again, what I'm most excited about is being able to take that knowledge and then make it into actionable uh impacts inside our organization and and really elevate everybody inside our walls. I can then deliver that over to our customers and our carriers.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Ken, why ease? A lot of reasons. I mean, I've tailgated with these guys. I mean, so you have moving to DAT, I knew a lot of the executive and working team moving to DAT. So like it was nice to be able to walk through the door and not kind of start from scratch. You knew a lot of these people, you knew the product. Um, and again, I've I've tailgated with the Ease crew. Uh, but you know, we've been fortunate enough to work together in uh really collaborative capacity as a customer. Um, I think point two, uh, air travel in the in 2026 stinks, like traveling for a company that's on the West Coast or you know, commuting around in the air versus driving. I was able to drive down for their board meeting on Friday, and it was just like it was four hours in the car, but it was glorious, right? It was so I mean, four hours in today's world, you're not even too O'Hare yet. Um so I think that was part of it. And I think like most importantly, saving the best for life. I'm just really bought into the to the vision. This idea, the the reason I um was intrigued by this and to think about leaving DAT was to get back to moving fast. When we were stacking our growth years on the IQ business, we were growing that business, or we're talking about a 40-plus-year old software company at that point. We were growing our segment 30 to 40 percent per year, year on year. And that really wasn't COVID-sensitive, right? Because the network side was the COVID-sensitive piece. We were just building, deploying, and moving quick. And I think I'm extremely bullish on what DAT growth is gonna look like over the next few years, but I think a lot of that's gonna be predicated on the new acquisitions, and that's just not my bag. Like those Bill Driegert's the convoy mind, like the way that you think about freight matching. I like to think about how to deploy analytics and tech to help people make better pricing, um, network optimization, RFP decisions. So um all of that came together, and it just seemed like an extremely exciting opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Did you this is like you kind of saying you you're betting on brokerage? Like how do you think about brokerage in general in the next five to ten years, given that you're obviously wanting to stamp your own career flag in the space?

Brokerage Growth And The Market Tail

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I've never not been bullish on brokerage. I mean, I think when I joined DAT, brokerage share was what, 10%? You'd know this better than me, because you were growing Molo at the time. It was 10%, 10% of all freight, give or take. We're talking like six or seven years ago. And it's 20% today. So that's persisted through COVID. I mean, I think a lot of people were afraid after COVID it was gonna be this huge recession back to the asset fleets. And it certainly came back down because I think it probably hit 30% during the peak of the pandemic, but it's doubled in the last six years. I think um ease sits in the sweet spot where you know, current size where it is today, trajectory to get into that billion dollar class in the next few years, um, if not sooner, right, Pete? Um and you know, able to grow a lot faster than some of the bigger and entrenched players. So I think the long tail is probably gonna be pretty brutal over the next couple of years, to be totally honest. I think, as we all know, there's 20 some thousand brokerages, but 90% of the freight's moved by the top, call it 250 or 500, however you want to draw that line, depending on agent models. And uh I'm I'm really bullied. Because who can bring these technology solutions to bear faster, if you had to guess? A nameless, faceless 10,000 truck fleet or a broker that has access to 200,000 carriers at any point in time. It's like I I think I'd bank on the intermediary um to move fast uh in that space.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

It's interesting you point out the tail, because I feel like the tail's in trouble too. I wouldn't want to be the tail. Um I agree. That that it worries me to just be a the small mom and pop couple, you know, four or five guys in a small little office trying to compete. But but it seems almost impossible to imagine the disappearance of brokers, you know, the intermediary intermediary completely being disrupted. That doesn't seem possible. So like the sweet spot seems to be in that like top 50 players being able to continue to grab market share. Um, which is why like when I think about my own situation and being six months out, it's like I every day I feel less and less like I want to start from scratch versus buying something that's already got infrastructure and systems in place and credit established, uh, versus burning two or three years trying to build all that while chasing what seems like a very, very big uphill climb.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Um I mean, in your situation, you're not going to be small for a long. I mean, so like I mean I've taught how like the Paul Loeb tree or you know the Jeff Silver tree of brokerage royalty, as it were. Like I think like those folks can kind of come together and through non-compete cycles, you'll see these avenue is a great example, just a bunch of awesome guys who they didn't wait three or four years. You know what I mean? Like they were able to what I would say is if I didn't know a lot of them so well and had such great relationships and confidence in them, I'd be worried to be the top ten even. I because I think there's this world where the extremely big brokerages kind of face somewhat of like quasi-commoditization and they can't grow as fast as like that broker 20 to broker 150. And those are just squishy numbers, but like this ability, like ease has it all in front of them right now, just from what I've seen in my you know short time working as a quasi-employee, like day negative one on Friday. Like, like just the ability to like really go fast and like change course, like if the number one broker in the country wanted to pivot their course and strategy tomorrow, that would be a heck of an endeavor. You got public shareholders, you've got boards, you've got crazy amounts of tape. But um, I mean, how I'll ask you a quick, and it's your podcast, but uh, did you feel that at Molo as you but you know as you were growing, could you change course quicker and and maybe pivot things up?

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Yeah, I to a point. I mean, what I was gonna get to without you asking me as I thought about the the comments you were making was like he's my thought was he's right. Like if you were to ask me, if you were to put me, if you gave me the ability to put myself in any company today, with the goal being to put myself in the position that will be most fun and rewarding for me personally, it's gonna be very close to a job like the one you just took, and a company like the one you just took it at. Because um the company is sizable enough to like have a name and for people to know who you are and for you to actually move the needle when you do something, but not so large that when you want to do something, it takes months to even get to a decision. Like you're at a you're at a place where you tell Pete, I have this idea, you and the rest of the executives sit down for four to six hours in a room, whiteboarding it out, considering every option, and within a day or two, you could be moving. You could be really thinking about like changing the path of the company for hundreds of people. And that to me is so fun.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Like, yeah. That's how it was when we were starting what we would call in inside of, and again, it became outside at some point, out you know, inside of IQ. We had kind of like the teacher's pet treatment of the CEO of the time. I don't know if you ever knew Claude Pamilia, but you know, he was in Denver and like basically anything we asked for, we were the favorite child at that point, like more resources, tooling. And that's how it felt then of like what was going on with the loadboard side didn't, I mean, they were going through a huge structural shift and back end. And that's not sexy to anyone. Like, no one gives a crap if you're going from like on-prem to in the cloud. Like, I don't wake up every day going, yeah, we're gonna get this thing in the cloud. I know it's necessary, but like, yeah, we're gonna go forecast rates and grow that into a$20 million line of business for us over the next three years. It's like that's cool. And uh I agree. I there are some really fun jobs too in the top 10, but I do think they're kind of harder to come by. And uh you kind of have to find the right situation. Like, I I think I have a lot of really close friends at Echo as an example, and I think like they're gonna have a lot of fun with this ITS thing. It's gonna be a lot of long nights, it's gonna be a lot of stress and successes and failures, but that seems like a fun shot in the arm to go do something like that, too.

What A Chief Strategy Officer Does

SPEAKER_02 30:58

Holy! That is what everyone says when they see Gen Log's truck intelligence platform for the first time, founded by XCAA operatives and fueled by 15 million daily images across a nationwide camera network. Genlogs gives you the power of total market capacity while also defending you against fraudulent carriers. Holy sh is what Genlog's customers say again when they see the ROI from covering loads faster with fatter margins. Holy shippers! That's right. Genlogs unveils the locations and lanes for all the shippers in America. In the era of artificial intelligence, nothing beats actual intelligence from verified by video data. See what Genlogs can do for you. Check out a demo at genlogs.io. Again, that is G-E-N-L-O-G-S.io. Tell them Andrew sent you, and they'll include their carrier compliance suite for free. And if you haven't already, I interviewed their founder, Ryan Joyce, last year, and it's one of my personal favorite episodes that we've done. Check it out. Now, let's get back to the show. So you're you're in a funny role to me, the chief strategy officer role. I was giving Moto some some crap for this simply because the the title chief strategy officer I've seen in the past be one that it looks great on paper, but it's harder to execute because sometimes the chief strategy officer doesn't actually get to own any of the departments or any of the teams. They're in every meeting, so their voice is intended to matter, but they don't own the carrier team, they don't own the customer team, they don't own the tech team. So they're more like sitting next to these people that actually have accountable groups to work with. And every company's different, so like how you structure it, you could tell me you're owning everything. Who knows? But um, I am curious from your perspective, what what do you actually like when you go to work tomorrow as a full-time employee, what does your job really look like as chief strategy officer?

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Yeah, so Pete was great to work with on this. I don't think either of us really cared what it was called. I think like when you look across the broker landscape, like because it's really more like a chief product officer role, but like that is a pretty frowned-upon term as a masthead employee at a brokerage. Like if you look at um Arune is, I believe, his name, came in at Robinson from Chewy, it was a chief product officer, and that was very, very quickly modified to chief strategy officer. Like, so I think in a lot of brokerages, in modern kind of the tech forward ones, chief strategy officer owns product tech, pricing science, and then kind of any strategic and MA stuff. So that's very similar, Pete, when you agree to what this role is going to look like.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Yeah. And I think like you said, Andrew, uh, we've gone through and I think there's beauty in that CS role having the autonomy to go in and out, go change things, and not, you know, respectfully be tied down to the day-to-day like management of a team. I think there's beauty in it, right? But I also think that again, like we we were very uh we were very open and transparent about what this role needs to focus on and what other things it can pick up on. And I think it was a good first kind of like showcase of our ability to collaborate, you know, you got a tech tech analytical mind, and then you know, you have the blunt force uh broker ops, you know what I mean? Um so I think I think it was a good kind of showcase. Um, and I'm sure just like as it started a couple weeks ago, it will continue to evolve, right? You know, it's um why why try to why try to encapsulate or try to put try to encapsulate, see, phone never stops. Um but why try to why try to put it into a a silo right off the rip type of deal, right? Where um anywhere Ken feels like he has the ability to change, elevate, or give insight across your organization, I feel like uh we should allow, we should give him that avenue to do so because it, you know, for us as you know, ease, uh it only it only makes us better when we allow more people to come in, great minds come in and challenge what we're doing and give insight to it.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

I'll be the person to tell you, I'm not a carrier sales guy. Like that's not my background. I think I've been happy to do it in the past. Like I've been more, it's just my pricing background. I've been more on the front end when I was at FedEx, you know, going to shippers for live negotiations or working those events. Um, so I think I'll probably be when I'm customer-facing, leaning more towards helping with shippers and and backstopping a lot of that. But how do you feel about how do you feel about taking on our trailer, our trailer side as well? I can make an Excel spreadsheet with Claude in about 15 minutes. I'm sure we can figure that out.

Pricing Conviction And Tech Adoption

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Well, I mean, that that that was what I was kind of laughing at earlier when we started talking trailers, because like to me, this role you're in, it like perfectly encapsulates like that line of thinking, and that's your job to figure out is Peter crazy for thinking about this or should he be spending more time thinking about it? Right. Um and so it's like it it's it's interesting because I know you know my my the extent of my relationship to ease, you know, Peter and I have had a couple conversations, and then you know I know Brian Kremoto pretty well, and when he gets excited, he just starts blowing up my phone with whatever's on his mind. So, you know, he certainly mentioned when when you guys were when he was hiring you guys, um, when he was hiring you, Ken. Um, but the the interesting thing that I hear a lot from Brian about is is around pricing and leveraging technology to create uh stickier relationships with your customers through maybe the right pricing vehicles or or pricing partnerships or just I guess partnerships in general. Um so I guess the question I have is around technology and it it kind let's just get into kind of a bit of a bit of the build versus buy nature. Um because AI is still like it's even though Peter and I, I don't know, when we had our our last conversation, maybe it was a year ago, but even in that time frame, so much has changed in the technology space. So I'm curious how you both think about the future of ease with respect to technology and where you think it makes sense to be buying versus building on your own.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Yep. I mean, you know, from uh, like you said, a lot has talked. I think also in the industry, as we've as we all know, and you you all kind of hit on it, was it's getting harder and harder to be a successful brokerage in the in the industry, right? I mean, you got to be big enough to show security to your customers, but nimble enough to be able to say, yes, we can do that, right? I think the days of getting a customer quote of and then taking the time, which you have to, but you know, then go adding some set margin to it and and then quoting that. I think we all understand that those days, it's it's it's very hard to be a successful broker with that. You got to move quicker, but you got to move um with intention. And one of the first big talks that we had with uh Ken, he made this comment about you you can't you can't quote cowardly. You know what I mean? You got you gotta you got to know your markets, you got to know your carrier pay, your carrier base, but you got to move quickly to make an impact on your customer. And I think that's something that uh I'm looking most forward to answer your question is how does how do we take somebody with Ken's mind to come in and really elevate the account manager's mindset inside of our walls to deliver better, quicker pricing to our customers and our carriers, right? You have all the talk in the world now, cost plus index-based pricing, all this, right? Um how how we accept those or how we bring those into our into our walls is something that I'm excited to see how Ken does that, right? Again, I'm a uh you know, blunt force. Let's rip the phones, let's let's respond to our customers quick, you know, and let's make sure that we bring options on all opportunities that we feel confident in, right? Uh Ken knows that's that's that is the sauce that's made us successful, right? And and Andrew, we've even joked about our two-minute response time, you know. Um how does how does Ken give us the ability to hold true to our core values, but now use tech technology to truly to make it scalable as we go, you know, as we as we our focus is on that you know billion-dollar market top line.

RFP Mistakes After Winterstorm Fern

SPEAKER_00 39:22

I need to think so much of price. I mean, technology is a great conduit. It helps get your the strategy and decision that you have, it helps get it into the hands that are making the people that are making the decisions a lot faster. But if you put the world's best pricing system in place and you're as Pete uses, and you're still a coward, like you're not gonna win any business. But if you look at like the brokerages that I look up to, that in my career in the industry, call it like the last 13 years, that have done really well, that have gone from mid-size or small to huge, it's done on the backs of pricing really well, operating in a world-class way, and you know, being awesome on the code. That's like the triangle, I think, of brokerage. Um, and there's been a recent one which is like being solvent, you know, like that's important. Some of these bigs that, you know, over the last year that have been having some some issues in that regard. But you know, I think with pricing, yeah, you have to manifest how your confidence in your ops team, your confidence in the carrier base, your confidence in what that customer is gonna ship with you, and how you can pivot and just project that forward in your pricing, your pricing strategies. I think a lot of brokerages are gonna lose business over this rebid cycle because they they really goofed around in the first quarter. Like when the storm came through, they made some decisions that like care shippers just had to live with. Um, and they basically filed that away in their mental filing cabinet for what comes later in this year.

SPEAKER_02 40:42

So take a step back and help explain that because I wanted to ask you kind of a state-of-the-market question, and I think you just opened that door. So are you suggesting that actually, rather than me guess, just kind of take a step back and further explain what you mean in terms of what kind of decision would have been made with what pretense or understanding they thought was going on versus what you're saying you think is going on.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Yeah, but let's just say you finalize an RFP with a customer in Q4, and then when Winterstorm Fern hit in Q1, you said, hey, I'm gonna give you back all this freight. Like that's obvious. So we all we all three can agree that that's a no-no regardless. But it's happening a lot. Like from my vantage point at DAT, from my vantage point in just being a person in the industry with a cell phone, like a lot of chats blowing up of like, we can't possibly handle this freight that we quoted in Q4. But you see the other people who are like, this sucks, but I'm gonna grin and bear it because the reward on the other side is gonna be all the people who didn't volume, right? Like, so I think that's that's part of it. I think there's people who quoted in Q1, uh, reading way too much FreightX posts, like, you know, let's say you're an incumbent in a big bid and you, you know, you came out of the gate at plus 20, 30, 40 percent, you're gonna shed a bunch of volume. The people who I think had the relationships who went in and said, hey, I'm gonna bid what I think the market's at now. Here's all the reasons why I believe that. And can we get a handshake or a formal kind of paper agreement to revisit this in six months? And those are the people that are winning. Um, I know brokers obviously can't mention names that lost 30 to 40 percent of their incumbency awards because they they raised price from round three to four. Like we all know round three to four is just like final grooming. Like that's like I's and T's and doing this. And if you come in with a double-digit increase from rounds three to four, you're gonna have a really rough time. Um so I just think you know it's there for the people who are able to do it. And again, there's a lot of brokers who just can't stomach it. They can't have a bad quarter. Um, but you know, there's a there's a lot of freight that'll be given back and available to go get, I think, over these coming months and quarters as the market starts its upcycle back.

SPEAKER_02 42:45

Yeah, so uh that's I guess what I'm curious about. Is is your take my reading between the lines of what you suggested, it sounds like Winterstorm Fern gave people a lot of conviction that the super cycle had started and rates were not coming back, rates were going up and not coming back down, and that people took action as a result of that, asking either for 20-30% increases or just giving back freight. But reality is after the storm things settled a bit and things have come down, and they will go. You think this year they do start to go up, but not in some like crazy convicted way that you should have re-rebid all your freight because of a couple bad years prior.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

Yeah, I mean, I've been working with shippers in a kind of analytics capacity for six and a half years. The word revenge has never been uttered in a conference call, in-person meeting, or email. Like they I understand why that moves like social media algorithms, but like it's just not how they were thinking about it. They're like, hey, and even if it was true, like just the o the audacity if you're a broker or a carrier to like approach a shipper and say, Hey, I know the entire Northeast is frozen. Here's a 30%. It just feels like you're selling water during a hurricane and pricing. Like so. I just think, again, 95% of what actually happens is more rooted in, hey, we've had a major fuel disruption. We actually had two back-to-back. We had a bad nor'easter after fern. And I think most shippers were just like, hey, let's let things get back to normal. They f they they proactively switched more volume to spot, which I think any broker you talk to would tell you that they saw more spot volume. And then when fuel spiked, you saw a little bit of a push back to contract because those are where the fuel surcharges are. So I think everyone was curious, like, why are the spot rates up 20%? But contract rates haven't budged, and that's why. So I think we'll probably end a year, and again, all I have to now check my bias because this is going to sound really self-serving today versus two weeks ago. I think uh contract rates will probably end a year 10 to 12% up, maybe a little bit richer than that. Um, but uh certainly not. I wouldn't I wouldn't presume 40 to 50 percent. Although, as of today, like sure, yeah, bring it on. 80% contract rate increases would be fantastic. But um I think you're probably gonna see something more in the 10 to 12, maybe push in 14% range by the end of the year, which every everyone will benefit from. I think that would be a great outcome for that, but I don't think it's gonna be this. And again, when you're this isn't uh directed at Craig, because everyone does this. When you're putting out like 15 hot takes a week of like tariffs are gonna be apocalyptic, weather is gonna be apocalyptic, like what happened? Like, where's all these like tariff shipping volumes where warehouses are gonna be constructed in everyone's backyard? Like, did anyone get any tariff freight really? It's like, not really.

Sponsor Break Cloneops AI

Capacity Cycle And 2027 Outlook

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Hold up, wait a minute. Let's give a quick shout out to our sponsor, clone ops.ai. Logistics moves fast. There are calls to make, updates to send, documents to track. Your customers are always waiting. Cloneops.ai helps teams stay ahead with a platform that can be white labeled and a marketplace of AI agents built for real logistics operations. Inside the Clone Ops Marketplace, you'll find agents for tracking, documents, after hour support, finance workflow, fraud prevention, and more. These agents plug into your workflows and existing systems to handle the repetitive tasks, whether it's making calls, sending emails, replying to texts, gathering info, or writing updates. Your team stays in control with real-time visibility into every interaction. And because the AI is always turned on, operations keeps moving even when your team can't. A standout is carrier screening plus voice ID, which ties a voice to a DOT number and alerts your team when that same voice appears across different or multiple DOT numbers, helping catch fraudsters before they cause damage. No one else has this. And for companies building a long-term AI strategy, CloneOps.ai gives you the ability to white label, build, own, and control every AI use case across your business. And this team is run by David Bell, founder and leader who I've known for years, a good friend of mine, and someone who, frankly, anything he touches in this industry turns to gold. I trust him with what he's building here. If you're ready for automation that supports your people, visit cloneops.ai. Now let's get back to the show. Yeah, that that's the last question I have coming on to the market is any uptick you see this year, 10, 12%, whatever it may be, can you attribute any of it to being demand driven? Or is this all capacity driven, supply-driven, being pulled out of the market via whatever governmental stuff is going on?

SPEAKER_00 47:16

I just like first of all, I do think manufacturing is up largely around data centers and some of the like ancillary pieces. But I think there's like manufacturing renaissance where they're gonna start like making iPhones and things in central Ohio. Like I think like that is like it may happen. I don't know that it will, but like that is so far off that like I don't think that's I don't think we're in a renaissance of American manufacturing where that that that's gonna shift. Um I don't think it's been primarily demand-driven. I think you've reached like a three-year flush out of capacity that hit equilibrium in December. It's just too coincidental for me to believe that like that wasn't the primary factor. And non-domicile, all that stuff's a factor for sure. But um housing starts have been abysmal. We've had two pretty good readings in a row, though, on permits and things like that. If interest rates can come down, I think you light a candle on this thing. Like, I think I've said this to many people in the industry. Uh, I think 2027 could be the best year for brokers in uh a decade, like truthfully. Just because like I think everything's gonna line up right where you're gonna go through a lot of contract repricing this year, um, you're gonna have some structural shifts in the capacity pool, and you're gonna probably gonna have maybe two or three rounds of interest rate cuts heading into like a slam year in 26, where you've got volumes, you've got the third phase of the infrastructure bill, and so you have all of these things coming together that right because a brokerage is a three-leggstool. It's rates, volume, and margin. Or revenue volume and margin, however you think about it. Um and you could have a year where all three of those kind of line up. Because like the big margin year for brokers was 22 when rates and volumes were crashing. So, like, again, I don't know. I'm not 100% convicted in that, but it seems to line up, and a lot of other brokers and pricing seem to agree that 26 could be a pretty splendid year for brokers and carriers. 27. 27, yeah. I think 26 will be a good year too. Don't get me wrong. It'll be much better than 25 and certainly better than 24. But I don't think this is going to be the year. I think it'll be 27, is when we'll be kind of talking about it. You can't have them back-to-back.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

You have to have one has to set up the other. So, like, if 27 is a great year, 26 has to be the cleanup year where you get the pricing where it needs to be, so you can put all three legs of the stool where you want them.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

That's what I mean about like not being you can use the word cow or lot, but like not being too conservative. Because if you don't set the table in 26 with some low margin quarters and months and accounts, where's that volume going to come from in 27 when everyone's feasting? Like that, and again, this is where I come back to loving pricing's pricing strategy of it all. Like, if we set the table in 26, you feast in 27, and then in 27 you have your mind to what's gonna happen in 28, and prepare myself for not like hiring hundreds and hundreds of people that I need to go life. You know what I mean? Like that, those are what I think the smart brokerages are doing out there.

Winning Requires Some Losing Loads

SPEAKER_02 49:56

Yeah, you you you have to be able to play the game in all facets. And and I definitely think using the term cowardly or having conviction in in the system and your both the market system and your system is so important because it is so easy to fuck to sorry, I don't know why I almost just tossed an F-word in there. It's so easy to pull to pull the chute, to pull the parachute early because you just feel pressure. You feel, you know, month or day-to-day margin pressure, you feel pressure of some random lawsuit that claim thing that hits you out of nowhere, and all of a sudden you're thinking about that. It's hard to stay convicted and and stay in the game through all elements of the cycle. But when you do, it it pays off uh if you do it well.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

For sure. I agree with that 100%. It's uh it's a hard skill to teach, right? What's the hardest thing to convince a broker, a floor broker of that you need to lose money on some loads? No matter where I've been, I've talked to my last six years, I've talked to probably a thousand plus brokers. I've probably visited three or four hundred in person. The single hardest thing to do is convince them that the bell curve doesn't stop at zero. Like if you're gonna have a beautiful portfolio at 12% gross margin for your brokerage, this idea that no loads move at negative margin, it's like, well, where is that observed in nature? It's like, well, here.

SPEAKER_01 51:17

You gotta earn that great freight. You know, and a lot of it is eating the hard contract freight, right? Getting getting the good getting a good freight and positioning for great freight. I also think it says a lot about what we've all learned in the industry from that 22 to 23, what companies actually materially changed their structure and learned those, you know, learn those hard lessons and are able to truly, you know, live in those ups and downs swings so you can you can get to that market. I think that says a lot about um what's evolved in the industry as well, where you can lower your operating costs and still survive, right? How long can you weather that storm? I think that's also going to be a huge uh indicator or a huge point of the companies that are successful in the upcoming years of who actually grasped on and took those hard lessons and made changes. Mm-hmm.

Trust In Operations As The Edge

SPEAKER_02 52:09

Yeah, Ken, something that pops in my head a minute ago is as you were talking about having visited hundreds of brokerages, is you you've spent the last six and a half years sitting in a spot where you kind of got to see behind the curtain for a lot of companies and see how how the sausage is made. And and there's a lot of similarities, I'm sure, across the top 250 brokers, but everyone has their own secret sauce or their own thing that makes them unique. I'm curious if you have a perspective, an opinion, or a thought that you've learned from being inside so many of these companies that you're excited to bring to ease that you think could help bring ease to the next level or help you know build ease in a way that it wasn't being built today.

SPEAKER_00 53:00

I mean, I think first and foremost, that comes with like being a high integrity person and like having a high degree of trust. I think there's this misconception. I know some of the best pricing minds in the entire industry in a very like non-collusive, non-antitrust way, are all chatting with each other all the time. Like to be successful in the job of pricing freight or pricing electricity or pricing commodities, right? You you learn from each other in a way that, again, isn't sharing your own strategy or your success, but it's techniques, it's market views, it's it's all of that. Um I think the thing that I would lean on the most that I've learned, so it's been coming up on seven years since I've actually done the job, the thing that I'll bring with me uh from day one is just putting more, like relying more on the ability to operate. Like a thing that stuck with me for a while, when I was at FedEx, like our division was the tip of the iceberg, the within an outfit that is known globally as wonderful operators. We were the best of the best. If you needed to get penguins out of Antarctica, or you had to get, remember when uh Katrina and the or the BP oil spill, and you had to get turtles and ducks covered in Dawn dish soap. Like once we lost faith, things changed over there, and it's actually a fascinating story for a different time. But like, long time amazing CEO kind of gradually trans, you know, she retired and change in leadership. Once you didn't have that faith in operations anymore, like the whole thing kind of comes apart because you're like, well, you've got this big account, it requires like a high set of standards, or anyone who hauls for the autos knows that if you get a bad scorecard one month, you're totally screwed on any of the uh tier one, two, or three auto suppliers. So, you know, just having that faith and deep connectivity with operations um is I think what makes a lot of these folks successful.

SPEAKER_02 54:46

I like that. I haven't thought about you saying that. I I I developed conviction in your answer as as you gave it, and then I compared it to what we built in Molo and thought about that because like I think that was my job was so much easier because of the confidence and conviction I had in our operators. There was nothing I was afraid to tell a customer for fear that we wouldn't be able to do it, and it's interesting because like getting to that place, you know you're in a great place. When when you know as any leader in the business that you have that conviction in your operators, you know you've won. I don't know about one, but you know you're in a really good place. I guess the question I would start to ask myself is how do you get to that place? How do you get to the place where you know you could have that conviction in your operators? And that might be a harder question to answer.

SPEAKER_01 55:39

I think it's I mean, for me, it's do you are we following through with what we say we're gonna do every day, right? Or are we seeing it across? Is is ops leadership built in? I think that's something where um again, uh Ken didn't uh Ken didn't come to ease because he was with respect to our tech team and tech leadership that he was completely blown away by our our current tech stack, right? I think there was a uh inherent confidence in our control tower, our ops for and are we gonna do with what we're gonna say, right? And there's an area that we can improve without giving up our core values, right? I mean, for the last 12 years, my entire focus is on how do we how do we continue to make our operations sound, right? And through there, we've been able to sprinkle in some great technology and all that, but really at the end of the day, it's it's we have complete inherent trust, and our operations are gonna do what they say they're gonna do, right? And it takes a very long time to build that kind of operations. And when you do that, um, like you all did at Coyote, then you did at my Molo, you you land in that sweet spot where you have that full confidence, you start to attract talent, right? And I've always been incredibly impressed, you know, the 2000 era, and then when you look at everybody that was surrounded by uh you all at Coyote, and then you at Molo, right? You all are able to attract great talent. And I think that says a lot about what Ease is being able to do now. And I think we we've been attracting great talent at Ease inside our walls for quite some time. I think Ken is um is a also a great representation of that. Is it says a lot about what's going on in our walls, the confidence we have in our operations, but we're also vulnerable to a point where we know we have a lot of room to improve, and when great people want to come on board, they know they can make an impact. There's it's still gonna be hard work, right? But we believe in what we're delivering on the op side. So now we know we have a model that we can invest our time in to elevate it and scale it, right? And but we also know those liberties or those guide rails we got to stay in between because what made us successful to this point.

SPEAKER_00 57:39

I mean I think you're a hoops guy, right? I mean, like I still play uh as much as I can two or three days a week. And like I just equate it to you know, you're guarding someone out on the elbow, someone's good with the ball. Like the extent to which you're gonna pressure him and and and make him make a play is so in the back of your mind, like if you've been playing long enough, it's just extinctional to how much backside help you trust that you have, right? Like, and like take a non non-freight example, not a non-freight example. When we were doing this MA stuff, I didn't I didn't have the Ivy League degree, I had no experience in corpdev and none of that. But just to be like glomed on, like Roper is a world-class MA machine. You hear a lot about like the Toma Bravos and the big PE firms, but as far as like publicly traded MA shops, like Roper is the cream of the crop at what they do. And like, you know, the Trucker Tools Things was a learning experience. And then we get the outgo book on a Friday. We did an LOI on Sunday night. Like, like being a part of that team and just like each trusting each other and like just kind of being along for that ride kind of taught me what extreme performance looks like, you know, in that setting. So I think it all comes down to just having that trust, knowing your blind spots, and then just not being like too pride or too boastful to like, ah well, you know, when the moment you start doing that kind of crap, I think you start losing your edge. And how many brokers have we seen over the year lose their edge because they're like, yeah, we've made it. We don't have to worry about the blocking and tackling anymore.

SPEAKER_02 59:02

Yeah, which we've not. Oh, a lot of interesting thoughts just spurred my head after that. One being, how does how does how does DAT not I I want I need to get I need to have a conversation with Roper because I bet there's a lot to be learned about that business that some of us just have no idea. We just think of this like DAT rate moving machine.

SPEAKER_00 59:22

So Yeah, there's a lot of really great folks over there. I've learned, you know, getting to work, I've always you know known Bill in the industry, but getting to work close with Dre gird over the last six months has been fun. Um yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff going on over there, too.

Risks Of The Move And Final Banter

SPEAKER_02 59:34

Yeah. Well, listen, uh, this has been really great. I've one last question for each of you. Um Ken, kind of what are you nervous about making this move?

SPEAKER_00 59:47

That's a good question. I think you always wonder, like software is so different. I mean, it's different for a lot of ways. It's different in the personalities, it's especially like a true like West Coast software company. Um, I the only time in my entire career I've ever been like complained to on HR is because I said homeless instead of houseless. Like it's just a different vibe, man. Like it's it it and it's a different level of motivation, it's a different like incentive structure for your team and your folks and the rewards that they get and how they perceive success. Because I know like how brokers operate and like what like what a great week looks like, what a great day, what a great load looks like for them. Um so it's just like how um drinking from a fire hose, it's a change in context, and it's like how fast am I gonna be able to get up to speed and start adding value? And part of that though is like mitigated by knowing a lot of these folks. Like once you have a personal relationship, you get a little bit more, you know, slack, a little bit more uh you can kind of come to someone to be a little bit more vulnerable about what you don't know um rather than like just a stranger off the street. Yeah. There's just the risk that you suck, too, right? Like you just we're Midwesterners, like we're I you know, Catholic guilt, um, self-deprecating, like you know, you just might stink. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Yeah, but you get the Midwest work ethic, so you'll be alright. Yeah. Uh Peter, any closing thoughts for us? Where where are we gonna be 12 months from now with this deal with Ken and Ken in the ring with you?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:13

Um 12 months from now, you know, Ease has pushed, you know, pushed our presence and delivering, I would say, elevated uh market market insight to our customers, carriers, and and and really and push position the Ease name as um uh a leader in that space, right? And and we've delivered a fully baked out internal uh AI product that our teams are using across the organization every day to help us go quick, quicker, faster, stronger. And we're also able to deliver some components of that to our customers and carriers.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:50

And last but not least, a year from now we'll be celebrating another Michigan National Championship. Sport, TBD, could be all of them. Hockey, football, basketball, could go three for three next year.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:01

Jeez, lacrosse, throw it in there. And I mean this truthfully. Like I'm a I love like my favorite sport is college football. Without, and it's not even close, like to watch. But I'm a basketball, I played basketball my whole life. Um, I don't have anything critical. Like, I think Dusty May's team this past year was truly exceptional from special. Like the way they play, they play like the Cavs of a couple years ago played, just like team basketball when one side of the ball, because you can't always count on the shot, like they they were doing the right things on the glass and down deep, digging things out. Like, I just and I'm from Pennsylvania. I I went to Ohio State, but like I'm a Pennsylvania. I don't have like the Michigan hate like deep in my soul. Like I didn't like the cheating thing on football, but I I had really no shade to throw at the basketball team, truthfully. I I I wouldn't like buy memorabilia, but and I wouldn't say this to too many people, but I I really think that basketball team was something special.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

It it was hard not to enjoy them, even if you weren't a fan. I mean, they just did things right, and you could tell they had so much fun, they trusted each other, they they did everything they were supposed to. Dusty had undialed. I got to go to, I think I went to seven games this year. Some of it was pure luck. Michigan played the Big Ten tournament in Chicago, and then they got the regional Sweet 16 and Elite Eight in Chicago. I went to a road game at Purdue. It was a two-hour drive. Just because I was so confident in how good the team was, I was like, it'll be fun to be the only fan there cheering for this team and know that you're probably gonna win. We were up by 15 the whole game, it was awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

So I thought the national championship, even though it wasn't like super close, just like those like two exceptionally well-coached teams that thrive on the fundamentals. It's just like I think you got a pure play of just how much better and talented the Michigan basketball team was than Yukon. Because like I think they Yukon wins a lot of games that they shouldn't because of their coaching and like the way that the things that Hurley focuses on. But he just couldn't, I think. I think if they played 100 times, Michigan probably would have won that 85 times.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54

So so the the the big takeaway from this whole conversation, and I'll make sure I put this in big bold letters, you guys can market it, is that Ease Logistics 12 months from now wants to be the 2026 Michigan men's basketball of freight. That's it. We're aligned. That's how we end up.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:11

And the 2026 Ohio State National Champion Football.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:15

It was distinct. We said keep it simple. You said simple works. We got it simple, it's dialed in. Get the marketing folks on it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:22

They take anything from it, that's success. That's it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

And we need to get you to Columbus, right? They play in the shoe this year. It'll be a big game from Michigan. Probably playoff hopes at stake.

Wrap Up And Goodbye

SPEAKER_02 1:04:34

Um I'll be very happy if there are playoff hopes at stake for Michigan by November 20th or whenever we're playing Ohio State. Whittingham's a good coach. I just don't know if he's a fit for the rivalry, but we'll see. I think he'll be fine. I just first year I think is going to be tough given the stuff he's dealing with. Yeah, for sure. All right, friends. Yeah, thanks for coming on. This was great. And uh, Ken, welcome to the dark side. Back to the dark side. Thank you. Welcome back to the dark side. And I'm happy to be here. Thank you. That's all we got. We'll see you next time.