SIGNAL: Grounded in Truth
Everyone in this industry has a podcast now. Give it a year, the freight brokers will too.
So yes, we know the irony. We're launching a show into an industry with more voices than listeners, more hot takes than actual takes, more people explaining freight on camera than people who've dispatched a truck. Noise isn't what we're short on. It's what we're drowning in.
Here's the difference. SIGNAL: Grounded in Truth is long-format, on purpose. Truth doesn't fit in ninety seconds. A ninety-second clip is somebody's opinion wearing a blazer. A real conversation, given room to breathe, stops performing and starts being honest — worth thirty minutes of your day, and none of your scrolling.
In 1 Kings 19:11-12, Elijah stood on the mountain expecting God in the wind, the earthquake, the fire — and found Him instead in the still small voice that came after. Most of what passes for insight here is wind, earthquake, and fire. We built this show for the quiet after. That's where the signal lives.
Industry leaders. Operators. People who've lived with their own decisions. No fluff, no scripts, no one performing for an algorithm.
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The industry doesn't need another voice. It needs somewhere quiet enough to hear the ones already worth hearing.
Peace and Love.
SIGNAL: Grounded in Truth
Market Reality Check: Rates, Capacity & the Cycle
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Eric Williams has been loud and early on the rate cycle, capacity shifts, and why most brokers are still fighting last year’s war.
Proverbs 19:21 It is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. Not every voice carries truth. Not every signal cuts through the noise.
This is SIGNAL. Grounded in truth.
We talk to the movers, the shakers, and the people actually running freight — not the ones just talking about it.
Today we’re sitting down with a guy who’s lived both sides of the table: Chicago Mercantile Exchange trader, Target logistics (hundreds of millions in spend), brokerage leadership at places like XPO and US Foods, and now the founder of Beagl Technologies; the platform helping brokers stop drowning in RFPs and start winning more of them.
The industry doesn't need another voice. It needs somewhere quiet enough to hear the ones already worth hearing.
Peace and Love.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Signal Grounded in Truth. Proverbs 19, 21. It is the Lord's purpose that prevails. Not every single voice carries the truth, but signal cuts through the noise. To bring you that truth, we talked to the movers and shakers. Um, and we got one in the in the house today. His name is uh his name is Eric Williams, and he he is a mover and shaker. He doesn't know he's a mover. Well, I kind of think he does kind of know he's a mover and shaker. Chicago Mercantile Exchange Trader at one point in his life, Target Logistics, hundreds of millions of dollars in spend. And that's just on hair products. And a brokerage leader at places like, well, we're not gonna eat that, U.S. Foods XPO and so on and so forth, and founder of Beagle B E A G L Technologies, which I love it. It is a fantastic platform, and it says here it's helping brokers stop drowning in RFPs and start winning more of them. Um yeah, I mean, it it's really isn't it uh Beagle. RFPs need to stop sucking, or we remove the suckage from RFPs or something, something like that, right? Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Um I I think the tagline is RFPs suck, when more suck less, something like that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's what it is. I knew that's I don't remember that.
SPEAKER_00I I had I had the thought early, and I wanted it to be splashy and in my life.
SPEAKER_02I love it. It is it is splashy. Remember when it became cool to swear in your advertising?
SPEAKER_00I just assume that it always was. Maybe I got that wrong.
SPEAKER_02You know, I I I got became interested in marketing and advertising with that old, I forget what the name of the movie was, but it was an old Dudley Moore movie where he was in like an insane asylum or whatever. It wasn't an insane, he was in an institution, a mental institution, because he had a nervous breakdown as a marketing agent. He had a market, he had he just lost it and he went to go get better. And he took the inmates or the the patients, I guess, uh, and created a marketing firm. And it would become like the world's greatest marketing firm because it was it would do stuff like uh Volvo. Ugly, boxy, but safe. You know what I mean? Like stating the obvious, right? It's like kind of what you did. Beagle. RFP stuff stuck less.
SPEAKER_00Damn it, Michael. You're you're giving away my secrets. You got to get insane. Yeah, it's uh it it's you just have to embrace and lean into the insanity.
SPEAKER_02Is this is your new office actually at like a a uh a uh a mental hospital?
SPEAKER_00Is it I'm under I'm under strict NDA. I'm not allowed to sing.
SPEAKER_02NDA, I love it. I love it.
SPEAKER_00It's it's it's a co-working space, it's a um 100-year-old building. Uh sits right in Pioneer Square in Seattle.
SPEAKER_02Oh, does it really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, you moved to Seattle. Right. So you love there?
SPEAKER_00It's it's an incredibly beautiful place.
SPEAKER_02Have you gone and stuck gum on that alley over by the fish market or wherever it is?
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm uh I'm not much of a litterer. Um I've walked through the alley, and um some people have gotten very creative with their gum art. It's actually quite impressive.
SPEAKER_02Is it really? Is it kind of creepy to know that it's people's gum?
SPEAKER_00It grosses me a little bit. I'm I'm not gonna lie.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's kind of disgusting, isn't it? A little bit. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But you know, people have done some pretty creative things. So um art is uh I don't know. It's gross.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, as the black crow said, life sometimes life is obscene, right?
SPEAKER_00I I think uh it's it's better to live that way.
SPEAKER_02It might be better live that way. Hey, before we get into the obscenities, I mean into the market and Beagle and so on and so forth. Tell the people who you are that have been living under a rock forever and what Beagle does, bro.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, I think you hit all the highlights. I'm I'm just the guy that worked in the freight industry that got tired of having to build my own tools and not get the outputs that I thought were appropriate. So I decided to build them for people and try to help them.
SPEAKER_02You are the second guy that I know that came out of the Chicago Mercantile and has been very successful in logistics. Right? Um The other one is um is Andy Burke, if you know Andy Burke at BGO.
SPEAKER_00I do not know Andy, probably should know Andy, but I don't.
SPEAKER_02You should you should know Andy. I'll make an intro after this. You you guys should know each other. You guys are very similar. Yeah, he was a he was a mer he was on the on the on the mercantile.
SPEAKER_00Um and now he's I thought you were gonna say Kyle, but um any rate.
SPEAKER_02Oh, Lintner? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00He was uh he was a border trade guy.
SPEAKER_02He was a trade guy, so that's a third guy I know. That's right. I forgot that he was. That's right. That's crazy. So you were there for quite a well, you were there for like 10 years or so, but what so how how does that translate? I mean, why why do I know three people from there? Especially you. So that's who we're talking about, is you.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, first I we all got automated and have to find real things to do, which um I think freights uh specifically the uh brokerage space. It's a two-sided market, and if you are a market person, it looks very similar to what we were used to. So I I think it was just kind of a natural transition. And for me, when I um got into Freyley, I never could get away from the lens of a market. So, like when you think about like the wrist tiers that are in a product or conversations that I would have when I was sitting at Target, I had a really, really broad analyst. And he would tell me, Eric, can you slow it off? Because when you see a lane, you're reading a book. Like you're thinking about all these different uh components of a lane and how that impacts liquidity, how it impacts volatility, how it impacts uh ability to serve. And you're moving a little bit too fast for me. So I think it's you know, if if you've sat in the market for a number of years and you start to understand the inputs and what makes things move, and how different uh commodities have different volatility profiles, phrase kind of the same thing.
SPEAKER_02I I don't disagree when you when you when you put it into the into that lens. I mean when you put it in that perspective and you discuss that, but it's most people don't come from or have that mindset when they're entering into logistics. You know what I'm saying? So I think you have a severe advantage, and I don't like it, and I and I and I think you should dumb yourself down.
SPEAKER_00I I mean I try to. I try to make uh things as simple as possible. But these are things that everyone knows, right? Like it doesn't take you very long sitting in a seat calling on freight to understand that Chicago to Jersey is a little bit more difficult to book than Jersey back to Chicago. Um an inbounds load into a produce region in June or July is easier to book than an outbound load. So I think everyone kind of picks up on these things. I've just taken it a little bit further and tried to create a deterministic model that doesn't require you to sit in that seat and experience all of that. You can just look at the model and it tells you what to expect.
SPEAKER_02Let me um I I just am wondering why I look like I'm about to perform surgery in here with all this brightness. I gotta tone down my lights for just one second and I'll come back. Okay. The the my thought process immediately to what you're saying goes to conversations that I've had before where, and we'll get into this a little bit deeper, but I mean you you just spoke two very simple truths uh and and uh uh experiences, if you will, or knowledge that you and I both have because we've been in the industry. But somebody coming into the industry have no clue what you're talking about. And there's probably people that have been in industry for a number of years who still don't know what you're talking about, as far as I mean, just just the lane headhauls and backhauled lanes and the difficulty at different times of years or different regions and why why that is. Um but you understand that, and I think it's part of your murk, but uh background that that does that, but uh and also your you know just I think intellectual curiosity to look through some people they they experience a little bit of success, and therefore they just keep riding on that little bit of success. They just keep extrapolating and and going to that well of what it did, and don't expand that, and eventually they burn out or die because of that, right? The hockey stick happens, we're watching it in real time right now. There was a certain company that came in and went hockey stick, and now they're going, oh crap, the arc hockey stick is about to break off. What do I do? Right?
SPEAKER_00No, and like isn't how like video games always worked? You uh found a way to accumulate points for your character, and then you would just sit there and accumulate points before you advance in the game as like a like a like a cheat code, um, if you will. I I don't think that somebody that's had success doing one thing and then continuing to do that over and over and over and over is necessarily doing anything wrong. Um, in fact, like I'm of the opinion most things are a lot simpler than we make them. And I don't ever fault anybody for continuing to go back to the well that um has made them very successful. I think sometimes um people then start chasing squirrels and they don't necessarily know how to, when they capture that squirrel, get the same benefit that they did from the other thing, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02No, it 100% does, but I guess what I'm trying to say, and I get what you're saying, because optionality can can kill you, right? If you you're running that play and you're we've seen it. You're in a city, you're in a city that saw it. You you you you run, you run, you run, you run, you get to the one yard line and you throw a pass.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02Why why would you do that crap? Um and and and we we've seen people do that, but I guess what I'm saying is is you've got to continue to continuously be aware and learn the industry that you're in and understand how the dynamics work within that market, right? Like you had to know that in your previous lives, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And and I I I think um I think most business owners or market participants, specifically traders, will tell you that you you make your money being boring. And a lot of times when you go chasing shiny objects, they don't necessarily give you what you thought you were going to get. And sometimes like you take your biggest losses trying to do something cute or fancy. And and I think that's my point, is there are certain fundamentals that don't really change. And you should do more of what works, and yeah, you should always be exploring to try to find other things, but if they're not aligned with the the fundamental nature of how things work, you gotta know that going in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I liken it to um and we're gonna get into AI obviously big time, but you like the hallucinations of AI. AI has to have an answer. It's why it hallucinates, because it can't just say, I don't know. It doesn't have the language to do that.
SPEAKER_00Language is an intelligence, right? The ability to predict my next word or your next word. Um, I don't think that that qualifies as intelligence.
SPEAKER_02No, it does it absolutely does not. But I think a human nature, and sometimes like what we're you're talking about, is in human people chase shiny objects because they can't sit in the boredom and figure out the next move.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_02And and it's I kind of liken it to that. Like AI doesn't have the ability to go, hmm, I don't know the answer to that. Let's let's start thinking through a process to figure it out.
SPEAKER_00Right instead it just gives you an answer.
SPEAKER_02Just gives you an answer, just hallucinates and says, Well, here's an answer, because I don't know else to put there and I have to give you something. So here it is. And a lot of times that is BS, right?
SPEAKER_01You're training it's go ahead.
SPEAKER_02Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, please.
SPEAKER_00It's getting a lot better. Um, but the it is. The pr the the problem is is you gotta remember that LLMs were trained on pretty much the exact median of the internet. So Reddit was uh was one of the big sources for that, and then all the news articles and things like that. So when it needs to learn new things, that's either coming from users that are interacting with it, and the models will there the um people will tell you that the models don't train on themselves, but they do. And that's when you start to get model collabs. And I don't think humans are any different, like when we get in our own echo chambers and we're only relying on our own experience and we get stubborn. Yeah. That tends to be a place where you know the outcome from that may not be what you expect. So I don't think it's much different.
SPEAKER_02No, it's not a lot different, and and and really the people that rely on technology, social media, etc., to try and help them break out of that, hopefully, I mean, come to the realization that it becomes an echo chamber that that divides you anyways and segregates you out.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00That that that may be that that may or maybe may not be one of the uh goals. Who knows?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Who knows whether that's actually a goal or not? Um but so let's talk let's talk about it.
SPEAKER_00But um, yeah, let's go ahead. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, let's get let's get into it. So you're you um you know, we talked about your experience a little bit, and I just briefly touched on it, but you know, you you managed crates then and you talked about that as well, and did delivered you know uh significant savings, did a hell of a lot of good work at at different places at Target. You've been on both sides of the coin. Uh well more than two sides of the coin, because the coin is actually probably a 12-sided die more than it is a two-sided coin. But um you you've been all over that, right? And you've been responsible for thousands and thousands of RFPs, if not tens of thousands of RFPs, and probably put out a few that people went, son of a bitch, this guy's sending out this thing here, this is such a big but you have learned through those and then went and took that to to Beagle. So explain that. How how did that hit you and go, you know what? I'm not just gonna solve this for myself. I'm gonna go out there. There's there's something to do here that I can create and and positively impact this this industry and and therefore really society, because logistics, as many people may not realize it, impacts our society in a much bigger way than just hey, I got this product in two hours from you know Walgreens.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, and so one of the reasons why RP suck is they're incredibly resource intensive, they take a lot of time. So the first solve was let's let's solve for that and make getting rates on a page and being able to develop your strategy. Let's do that and make that a lot faster. I think most of my competitors think that's all you necessarily that that's all you need to do. So I'm flattered that so many people are building RFP response tools. But again, um it's not just responding to the damn thing, because that's the main reason why they suck. You do all this work and you don't get a cookie at the end. And the reason you don't get a cookie at the end is you didn't turn it into a sales opportunity. Getting an RFP and responding and sending back rates and crossing your fingers and hoping you win something, and then hoping that if you do win something, then it's going to be a good fit for your organization. Like you probably, like, that's the definition of insanity, if you think that's an appropriate strategy. And having responded to thousands of RFPs on the brokerage side and seeing what works and what doesn't work, whenever we had the time and took the time to sit down and put together a true value prompt to the customer, we had much better outcomes. When we did not do that, and we elected to bid on everything and get aggressive because we were just trying to win, either we didn't win anything because there was no relationship that was built with the customer, no true value prompt that was ever communicated, or we won stuff that we didn't actually want. And then when I moved on to the shipper side of this, simple questions of what lanes do you actually want? Which ones fit your network? These are questions that are really difficult for brokers to answer. I think the assets do a much better job of it because they're trying to sew their networks together using multiple shippers' networks. So I think they show up a little bit better in a bid, they're a lot more focused, a lot more strategic. There's no reason why a broker can't do that because in many cases, well, the industry um doesn't continue to insist on turning itself into completely transactional, but in many cases, brokers have very deep relationships with carriers where they can behave like an asset. The problem is that doesn't ever get bubbled up during the MFP process and then get communicated back to the customer. So our platform helps do that too. So now you're moving away from just getting rates on the page faster to now we're helping you with strategy and value prop, also helping you identify what your risk is seasonally or um based on our lane tiers, so you can make more informed decisions. But then the next step of that is okay, we've done some work, we've learned a lot about the market, either from what our customers' network looks like, or if we spoke to any carriers in there, we might have identified areas that they operate that we didn't know before. We stole all of that. And the reason we do that is we bring it all back so that we can create other sales opportunities for you. Because if you know your customers' demand globally, across the hundreds of RFPs you'll do in a year, any sourcing activity that you do should flow from what is known to you. Because if I'm a like just take this into a different industry, if if I'm a buyer at uh target and I'm in sporting goods, I don't ever need to talk to anybody about KitchenAid products. Like I don't need to do that. I need to be building relationships with people who build and manufacture sporting goods, and then I need to understand what my customers' demand for each of those products are, and then I forecast what that demand looks like, and then I find the right supplier for that that fits the taste that's um of the consumer to satisfy that demand. Trucking's no different, it's just lands and equipment types and service uh constraints and things like that. So all of your sourcing activity should flow from what you know about your customer. That's kind of how we tie it all together.
SPEAKER_02It's it's didn't we try to do this, or there was there were efforts to try and do similar things when you know I remember back in the 90s trying to build um they were kind of like knowledge repositories where the the company could share knowledge across different aspects. Particularly at Roadway Express, we were trying to do that when we put in our client computers before really the proliferation of laptops, et cetera. But we had these client computers that were pretty much dumb clients, but we were building um uh a repository of of solutions for um operational inefficiencies, et cetera, where you could go kind of like a fac and FAQ area, right? Yep. And you're kind of you're almost like you're automating that or or building that brain that can see across all the different siloed data and knowledge throughout your company and your customer's company to bring forth solutions, right? I mean, is that a pretty fair assessment?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's not not building, built. So built. Well, yeah, you've built it. Yeah. Yeah. So if it's so if you're at Count Manager and you did an RFP for Home Depot. And you now have a QB over pivot up for them. Yeah. One of the things you should be talking about, because every you should be turning every contact with a customer into a sales opportunity to talk about expansion. Like if you're not doing that, you should be doing that. And so you get you get in, you sit down, you talk about performance. Well, most times the conversation then goes, well, how do we grow with you? You're going to be a lot more proactive because all you have to do is pull up your customer profile of Home Depot. I have the bid. Any activity that your carrier reps have done, either by covering freight that is not Home Depot freight, or they've put preferred lanes into the carrier CRM, you're going to see that. So all you have to do is open it up. And hey, the last time we spoke, um, I bid on these lanes during the RFP. I didn't have great capacity for them, but between now and then, I've now built this out. And I was wondering if I could speak to you about these six or seven lanes. And you'd be amazed at the fact that so few people actually do that. And it drives more intelligent sales conversations because it's very specific and the shipper has time. Like, well, on out of those seven lanes, I really like three of my providers. The other four, primary acceptance is a little bit too low, and service is not great. So what do you got?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's simple.
SPEAKER_00So you all you have to do is log into PEGL and pull it up, and it's all there for you. It's activity that took place inside of your organization that is now in a usable format to create a sales opportunity for you. And to my knowledge, we're the only people doing this.
SPEAKER_02There are there are number, there when I say there are a number of, it it makes it seem like that there's a lot. The me the reason I say there are a number of, I know of one other. And one is a number. There is at least one other that I know of that is utilizing AI and and our computing uh you know advancement, power advancements, to actually utilize the technology the way it's supposed to be, which is well not supposed to be, but in its most form, which is how do I make money with it? How do I improve service? How do I improve sales with it, not how do I spam more people so that I play the numbers game more? Right? And basically, I mean when you break it down, like you said, simple. Break it down in the simplest form. RFP responses are not focused, knowledgeable, and of benefit to the company uh to the customer, and therefore you should be able to win. Because you're speaking from knowledge of what they're looking for with real solutions that you can actually provide.
SPEAKER_01Simple as I know. Yeah, it's it's there.
SPEAKER_02So let me ask you this, right? So let's let's talk about the market for for for a minute here. Yeah. Because you're seeing things that either in a different way or you're utilizing some type of tool that nobody else has caught on to yet. Or may maybe one or two have, but they interpret it incorrectly at times.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I I'm in the shitles.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, we're we're looking, you know, it's it's August 2026 for the people who are watching or listening to this in the year 3026. This was thousand years. Um truckload market right now, it's it's turning carrier or turned carrier favorable, so to speak. I mean, it's their spot rates are up, dry van reefer, uh, you know, flatbed hitting highs, that type of stuff. Contract rates are starting to rise year over year. You called it, man. You said these things were were happening. You were looking at these things, uh, at least gave implications that you understood where this was going and was telling people. Um, we've got tighter capacity, obviously. Um regulatory pressures, whatever it happens to be, fleets falling out, demand recovery, maybe uh whatever it happens to be. Uh, but but it's there. And I mean, you were one of the early people going, hey, this is what's going down. Um, your RPs are going to be inflationary. You need to get your information, right? How how how are you seeing that stuff? What were you seeing that nobody else was? Or that other people maybe were, they missed it, they just interpreted incorrectly.
SPEAKER_00All right, so the story on this, and um hats it to Jeff Amble, who was was my director when I was at Target, and I was um our financial captain at Target, which meant I was responsible for giving our budget forecast to our finance folks. And he challenged me to get a better view. There was less lick your finger sticking up in the air and more data driven. So I sat down to build a week. I don't know. Like I I'm I'm told there's an ancient trick that that'll tell you um which way the wind is blowing. I've never been good at it.
SPEAKER_02Gotcha. All right. So we're measuring which way the wind is. I gotcha.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. So what we uh set out to do was um try to create a capacity availability index. And the components of that is as I uh decided was capacity availability is the relationship at any given point in time to supply in the market and demand in the market. But this is where I use my trading background. You need leading indicators or market sentiment. So I created three different categories of indicators, sub-indices, if you will, created a waiting average of those, and then combined them into a model, and that is our Beagle barometer. And it's never been wrong. So no secret. Like, this is all data that's out there, it's all publicly available. Um, you have to play with the weightings a little bit. I don't think I did any overfitting. I'm not smart enough to do that, but um pulled it up, put some rates overlay on it, and I was like, hmm, this is very good at predicting regime detection and in terms of capacity availability, and that is a very, very strong predictor for the direction of uh rates. So not rocket science.
SPEAKER_02Um well, not anymore. I mean, at one point putting the hand between the two slices of bread was actual rocket science, but I mean now it's not, right? Right. I mean, because you put it together. So what are you looking at right now, right? I just talking to a business executive, it got a couple more years on me, probably 40 years in the business, um, saying this is the worst freight recession I have ever seen. And I had the discussion with him that it's really not, it just corrected itself to pre-pandemic, and now we're looking at regular growth. Um, because if you take out the anomalous, it's not really a recession, it's just recorrected. But what's your take on the market right now? Where where do we go from here? Is this just a slow recovery reset and and we have to wait for the economic indicators or economic policies, et cetera, of the current administration to take hold? Uh, or what are you seeing right now? What do you what is your crystal ball, not your crystal ball, your beagle barometer telling you where we're at right now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we're definitely in it. I think available capacity is you you can't debate that. That is that is not debatable. Um this was a supply side recovery that in in terms of rates, profits are still in a recession. And I think some of that may be because firms have prioritized growth over profitability, and that has maybe reset margins permanently lower. I think you can make that case, and I think we've seen that over each cycle. Every time we come through, profits tend to reset lower and lower. What that has caused is the inability to reinvest in your business because you're gonna have 18 to 24 months of of absolute hell, you're gonna have 18 to 24 months of improvement, but it's caused there to be a very unsafe fleet. I'm not gonna talk about drivers. We can have that conversation at a later date. Um, yeah. I'm talking about equipment. We have a lot of equipment on the road that is unsafe. And when I I hear stats that during uh road check week, that the average out of service for equipment, and this is folks who thought their equipment was up to snuff and actually chose to run when they knew that they were gonna be inspected, it's thirty thirty to thirty-five percent out of service of people who thought they would be okay. So that is gonna have to correct itself, and the only way that happens is through proof of period. You have to have operating income to reinvest in the program.
SPEAKER_02Your point and your your caveat to the to the out of service cannot be overstated. It it's it's a third of the people who thought their business their equipment was good enough to run. Everybody who kind of suspected it wasn't or knew it wasn't didn't run. Right. I mean that that that is can't be overstated that point. That's it.
SPEAKER_01These are the people that thought their shit didn't stink, right? Right. And Michael, it's that's that's a national safety cross. Yeah, it is. It is, it is, it is.
SPEAKER_02Um wow, and and why do you think that why how does it get to that point? And it I well, I guess you just discussed it, right? It because it's the it's the natural cyclical nature of the business that just keeps sucking. Every time we come back, the profit level is lower and lower and lower. Well, and and there is a way to get rid of it. How do you get rid of that? Is it tools and and and technology like your s like yours that's actually changing the way we think and how we sell our services and products to to our customers with a little bit more confidence from what we're doing and not just a hey, me too, I'll drop your price by a penny a mile?
SPEAKER_00No, I I think this is um this particular one, we we had labor dumping going on. Everyone knew it. I think it took us a while to figure that out. Um, some of that's coming out. So barriers of entry in this in this industry are already incredibly low. We made them even lower. And we didn't follow actual regulations and laws that uh were supposed to be followed, and that caused a what I would consider to be a national security crisis because safety crisis because the equipment isn't safe. So that is being rolled back. Freight is interesting because you want a market that is responsive to upticks in demand because you need commerce to take place. So you naturally want to have low barriers to entry. I think they might have gone a little bit too low. And I think we could probably increase barriers to entry a little bit more in the interest of national safety. Amen. I don't think I'm with you.
SPEAKER_02There's a huge percentage of issues that we have in our industry that could be solved and our society that could be solved by an adjustment of barriers to entry.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I don't think that I don't I don't think it's tools and all the things that you do because every time we get more efficient when we prioritize growth, we end up just passing that back through to the customer. And you're already talking about a very low margin business to begin with. So all of these efficiencies, like, you know, I I always joke about this, and and people tell me I'm wrong, but we have this belief you can automate the entire carrier and operation side of your business. Okay, cool. So you can you can drop your SGA, which tends to be eight to ten percent of top line, by fifty percent. What does that give you? Gives you four to five hundred basis points to play with to grow market share. My butt's nothing.
SPEAKER_02It's nothing. No, it's not not not enough to do it. No.
SPEAKER_00So I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to try to get more efficient and we shouldn't automate tasks that are menial. Like we should do be doing all of those things. But we shouldn't be thinking that that is going to be the silver bullet because if you do it and other people realize that you did it, then all of a sudden everybody did it. The early adopter um opportunity goes away, and now we just re-reset margins lower. You know, 12% is the new 15%.
SPEAKER_02Do we evolve ourselves um into a single? I mean, if you extrapolate this out to its ridiculous conclusion, like some of my favorite shows do, um, you know, take a little do we eventually wind up with carrier? That's it, not carriers eventually, right?
SPEAKER_00I I I I don't think so because I think the uh the capex to have a million truck fleet is something that nobody wants to take on, nobody wants to live.
SPEAKER_02Got you. Got you, got you. So the dynamics just bounce around who can survive on the lowest margins the longest.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's just there's there's there's some there's so many customers and the supply imbalances and sales efforts and all the things that would be required to build out a even a hundred thousand truck fleet, it it would be incredibly difficult. So I don't I don't think you see this amount of consolidation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02W what do you see in the annual cyclair uh cyc cyclical nature of the business, the different um peak seasons and troughs that happen throughout the year, and specifically the I guess the rest of this year, right? Yeah, pull forwards, tariffs, etc. Um winter it comes every year, and we always joked about that because you'd always have to tell the boss, yes, winter's happening again this year. And we had it ever since I've been at 37 years in the business, and I remember the very first year. Hey, peak season's coming, make sure you have enough casual drivers on hand so that your overtime doesn't go above eight percent, which was the magic number at that time. Don't go to five percent, don't go to twelve percent. Eight percent's your magic most efficient number in overtime, um, as calculated by Roadway Express back in the day. Um what do you see that now? How do how does that dynamic work now? I mean, is it is is it still true it happens at this time, it happens at that time? I mean, you you see different efforts.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean uh seasonality will we'll never go. Um it it's uh it's a function of when we've got growing seasons, and it's also a function of when consumers buy things. And until that dramatically changes, um I don't know, maybe if if all of our food becomes lab grown, uh then we don't have to worry about that. But there's always a harvest season that increases demand in the market. Um so what it I think most people should be thinking about in terms of seasonality is either outperformance or underperformance, and that's a function of the capacity availability regime. Um our our models, I think we do a great job of um forecasting seasonality, but and we've underperformed um against seasonality this year because the rate of change of rates has been so tremendous. So our models are still trying to catch up to it. And when you get into a superinflationary period, um seasonality bites even more. And when we came through this period where capacity was incredibly loose for so long, you didn't have to worry about seasonality near as much. It was just like, oh yeah, that's happening, but we don't really feel the pressure. So I think you got to start high level of what is the current regime that we're in in terms of uh available capacity and market sentiment, and then understand when and where seasonality is gonna take place, and then adjust your view on where the puck is going to based on which direction the wind is blowing. It's blowing really hard if you're gonna outperform seasonality.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's that's absolutely do what do you see a distortion this year in in seasonality and change? Tremendous.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's big. It's big this year. It's big.
SPEAKER_02What do you we do you see a ripple effect afterwards after this season?
SPEAKER_00Um I I want to see how I want to see how Q how NFQ three shakes out with uh as the Midwest gets tight and then see what happens into Q4 as the uh the Western 11 um get super tight. So we'll see how that uh how that plays out. I think that'll give us a gauge of has there been any improvements um in the balance and market sentiment? I'm I'm expecting seasonal outperformance for the rest of the year, um, and certainly into next.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You posted about um brokers go to market, right? Going wide, new locos, that type of stuff. Going deep is finally beating going wide. What what are you seeing? What did you mean by that? What are we talking about here?
SPEAKER_00I think if most brokers are honest about themselves and they're intimately familiar with their data and they look at where their profits come from, it follows a Pareto distribution. 60 to 80% of your profits are going to be coming from 20 to 30% of your logos. Yeah. When you think about share of wallet at a customer level, if a broker gets 10% of one shipper, specifically an enterprise shipper's share of wallet, it's a massive amount of spend. So with that comes less touch points, comes more familiarity with the accounts, allows you to build deeper relationships. You actually can get that three by three box going of multiple layers of relationship, which you need because there's so much turnover in this industry. So what I've noticed, and what my customers are doing, is there's certain accounts that they'll still try to service, but they're trying to develop a account plan for those and what they're going to do with them. And then they're clicking down into their customers that have larger percents of their volume and they're trying to go deeper. I'll give you a real-world example. One of my customers, their largest customer, they had been doing four to five million a year. Um, and they grew into that over a period of five years. They're going to do 17 million with that customer this year. Picked up 11 during the bid because they got more strategic, and then they've been going back to that customer on a regular basis, monthly cadence to talk about new lanes where they have what they would consider to be capacity strengths, and the special mass brokers, and they have an asset, and they leverage both as a blended solution, but they keep going deeper and deeper with that customer. And you know, they've almost quadrupled the uh the spend that they have with that customer, and it just cuts down on so many of the chasing around different customers who build differently, who have different SOP requirements, have different KPIs. You just have to track um track less. So it's almost like manage trends, but in a traditional brokerage sense. And where I'm watching people do that and getting aligned with customers, I'm watching relationships grow, I'm watching profitability increase, I'm watching revenue grow, and I'm watching on the other side of that carrier utilization from the repeat carriers improve. So I think those are all good things. I could be wrong, but I think those are all good things.
SPEAKER_02No, they're 100% good things. It was kind of like, oh, this is opposed to putting all, don't put all your eggs in one basket, but that's not what you're talking about here. You're you're not at all. We're talking about account penetration can be much more strategic and impactful and and and and a stronger ROI and easier to do basically by utilizing this technology, quite frankly.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I think the the fear of like putting all your eggs in one basket, sure, certainly it's real because if you lose that customer, but if you've got a rich relationship with that customer because you're a provider for them, guess what? They give you a lot more leniency when things. Go awry.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I mean, you're talking about create you're not talking about, hey, get rid of 90% of your customers and just focus on this one or whatever it happens to be. It is your core customers.
SPEAKER_00Excuse me, you should still be coaching your your logos. But you should which are the which are the best fit. And then so if you have five four anchor customers, who are my next two? And then what's the path to get there? And then you're constantly like loading that funnel and then when you get to a point of inertia, then that becomes a core anchor strategic account for you. So you have to constantly identify those involving.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, did this helps you identify those those customers that are that are really aligned with your core your core and then further penetrating them and making them more sticky, basically, really, through through offering a more strategic approach to those guys.
SPEAKER_00And and that starts with knowing the lanes they were on. Who are their customers? Who are their vendors? Yeah, 100%. Who are the decision makers? And guess what? The RP tells you all of that.
SPEAKER_02It's crazy how that works. Um it may just work better than than buying them pizzas and maybe and taking them to a ballgame.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you should do them. Um because that that's how you build relationships is breaking bread with people.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_02Sure. You need to still do that stuff. I'm saying that was like the primary and only tactic back in the day. Uh at least that's how I was taught when I first started in sales. Um dropping donuts off the box. Let's go through a couple. What's that?
SPEAKER_00Dropping donuts off at the dock.
SPEAKER_02Oh, amen. That's right, man. Climb up on the dock to get to the traffic manager who's sat in a little desk in the middle of the floor. Get him some donuts.
SPEAKER_00So I think that's so you you've got that up on that.
SPEAKER_02But let's go through a couple here, four questions here to wrap wrap things up here. You've been on the trading floor, the shipper side, the broker side, and now the tech side.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02What's the lesson that you would um that travel across all of them that you would impart to others in this industry?
SPEAKER_00No, be curious, learn how things work. As you learn how things work, pause some plays, get some feedback, figure out what's working better than not, do more of that, less of what didn't work, but ultimately just do the fucking work.
SPEAKER_02I was just I was gonna bring that up. Yeah, I was gonna bring you you you exposed your your Grant Cardone side and said, do it tired, do it up, do it down, but do the F and work, right? Yeah. I mean, that's that's what it takes if you're an entrepreneur, but that's what it takes to uh really be impactful inside a major corporation as well, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you've got to like if if you're gonna hide and show up and okay, you've got a meeting and you're gonna present your little deck grunt, like you can build in a very nice and long career on that. If you're trying to impact change, you've got to go bump into things. You've got to start exploring, you've got to be incredibly curious, you've got to understand how things work and why they're set up that way. Uh, that's that's a lesson that I think a lot of junior leaders um learn sometimes the hard way. Because, well, this doesn't make sense, but then minus why, uh, because to somebody at some point in time it made perfect sense. So if you want to unwind that uh you might want to understand why it was set up that way in the first place. That's uh great advice. It was given to me by Josh Peterson. So I you but but then you've gotta you've got to sit down and you gotta start doing the work, and then you've got to get that in front of people that can take your work and deploy it inside of their organization.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. All right, two-part question. One, is it guns and roses if there's no slash? And two, where do people find out a Beagle? Where do they go and check you out, man?
SPEAKER_00Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn if uh if that's your your flavor. I'm on X now. Um I do um a look slightly more unhinged there if that's possible. And you can always go and remove the uh beagle.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, beagle b-e-a-g-l.ai.
SPEAKER_00Right that e was 180,000 dumplings. There you go. So I drop it.
SPEAKER_02I love it. 180,000 dumplings for the E. Eric Williams, Beagle technology is one of the clear signals in a noisy market. If you're a broker still treating RFPs like a spreadsheet death march, or a shipper still hoping rates magically stay stuff, here you've been you've been warned. This is a signal grounded in truth. Thanks for listening. We'll check all you people out next time. Eric, thank you so much, my friend. We'll do this again.
SPEAKER_00Can I do can I can I do two plugs real quick?
SPEAKER_02A hundred percent, bro. Make it happen.
SPEAKER_00I will be at JOC Inlands in Chicago in September. And then Beagle was selected as a finalist for TIA's Technovation Shark Tank in Houston in October. So if you're at those events, come say hello.
SPEAKER_02I'll be there. I'll be at the TIA for sure.