Chris Jolly [00:00:01]:
Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of coffee with a freight coach. My name is Chris Jolly. I am your host, and I am the freight coach. Before we jump into the episode, as always, thank you guys so much for coming out and listening to this podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen, and I say that before every single show that I do.

Chris Jolly [00:00:25]:
And what I mean by that is I only speak to transportation professionals on this show as well as my weekday live show because I wanna talk to the individuals who have done what you’re looking to do or who are currently doing what you’re trying to achieve. So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. I do have one small favor to ask. If you get value, and I know you will, but if you get value in what you hear today, and you’re not subscribed, subscribe to the show you guys. Share it out there dear network. Because at the end of the day, this is how we grow, but most importantly, this is how we help more and more people is because if you saw value, your network’s gonna see value as well. I got a very special guest for you guys here today, and this is gonna be on a a a video component as well. I don’t know if I’m gonna be uploading this onto my YouTube channel, but I know my friends at SPI Logistics are gonna be doing that.

Chris Jolly [00:01:12]:
And who knows? Maybe I’ll start doing that and adding a video component into this podcast. But we’re here to talk about finance. Right? Like, we’re here to talk about the financial health of organizations and and really how how are you balancing any of that stuff? Whether you’re in an up market or a down market? How are you taking those times and investing into the future? So with that being said, I got my man, James Lemon, here today. He is the VP of finance and chief financial officer of SPI Logistics. James, thank you so much for joining me.

James Lemon [00:01:40]:
Thanks a lot for having me. I mean, I’ve listened to all the podcasts you’ve you’ve done with all the people here, and now I’m excited to finally be on here and get this share some knowledge.

Chris Jolly [00:01:48]:
No, man. It you know, it’s great being you know, because I like, for those who see the video out there, you get James has a phenomenal background of the beautiful British Columbia area. And, you know, having the opportunity to come up and, you know, be in the SPI offices back in August and everything was great. And, you know, we recorded a bunch of podcasts while we were up there, and, unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties with the one that we got. But I’m glad that there was because now we get to talk again, man, because it’s like Exactly. As everything gets up and running, I mean, we got we ran into each other in, you know, in Vegas, and we got to have dinner with you and Anita and everything. And, you know, but it’s always good just to sit down with you, man, because I I always enjoy learning about every aspect of the industry. Right? Because, like, at the end of the day, I’m like, I know freight, really.

Chris Jolly [00:02:30]:
Like, when it boils I know a lot of what not to do in freight. And there’s so many different components to to the business that’s out there. And, you know, I’m on a a a mission to understand my finances at a lot greater level. And, you know, it’s like I look back on it in going to school, and I’m like, man, I wish I would have got a degree in accounting. Like, truly, because I feel like understanding your money is what is I I I would say it’s very overlooked out there. Because I actually interviewed my CPA for the podcast, James, and he was talking about that. He’s like, the the amount of people that don’t know about their financials is it’s it’s almost alarming that’s out there. So, like, how did you get your start in the finance world?

James Lemon [00:03:13]:
Well, my the funny story is so I grew up in hard times. I didn’t have my parents didn’t have a lot of money. Grew up in poverty. So, you know, when you take those aptitude tests at school, it tells you what potential things you could be good at. And so on mine, accounting came up as one of them, and it had the highest, income. So I was like, well, that’s what I wanna be because I wanna make a lot of money.

Chris Jolly [00:03:39]:
Heck yeah.

James Lemon [00:03:40]:
And so in grade 12, I my school offered an accounting course. And I was like, well, let’s give it a try and see if I’m actually good at it and like it. And turns out I ended up winning the there was a award for the best student in accounting and I won I won that award and I was like, well, I guess I’m doing this. And then got got my degree, got my CPA, and, I mean, now I’m here.

Chris Jolly [00:04:04]:
Dude, it’s you know, accounting for me was it was the one course that I actually like, math related that I actually excelled in because there there was only one way of doing it. Right? And for because, like, I was actually just talking about this on my live show. Like, I I mean, I struggled in in math. Like, I struggled in algebra. I struggled in all that stuff because I’m like, what’s the point? Like, and then FYI, to this day, I have yet to quote a shipment that I needed to find out the value of the letter a. Alright? I’m just throwing that out there. But, you know, when it came down to the accounting aspect of things, like, I I actually it was weird. I was able to actually slow it down a little bit and really understand how how to work it.

Chris Jolly [00:04:47]:
And I you know, because, like, I have 2 degrees in management, and I’m, like, looking back, I’m like, man, if I could do it all over again, I woulda got my associate’s degree in accounting, and I woulda got my bachelor’s degree in management because there’s so many there’s so much value in understanding the financial health of your organization because it’s like how many people learn the hard way, right, where they make $10,000, but they think they can spend $10,000. They don’t account for taxes. They don’t they don’t understand that there’s actual assets that you can depreciate to lower your taxable income and everything else that’s out there. And then they get in a bind, they don’t pay their taxes, and then all of a sudden, they get slapped with a massive bill that they can’t afford, and then they go out of business. They’re, like, I gotta fold up. I can’t pay that.

James Lemon [00:05:33]:
Absolutely. And I mean, we’re gonna see in in our industry, you’re gonna see this coming to a head as things get tighter. You’re gonna the the companies who have a good knowledge of what their accounting is are gonna thrive and they’re gonna stay in business. And those those ones that you’re talking about that have no idea, like, what they can expense or what their expenses even are in a month.

Chris Jolly [00:05:55]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:05:56]:
And all of a sudden when your customer says, oh, sorry. I can’t afford to pay you this month and you look at your bank account and it’s negative and you’re like, well, how did that happen? I’m making all this money. But, I mean, if you don’t have money coming in, it’s not it’s not it’s not really your money until you actually have the money. Yeah. And if your customers, they end up in hard times, that can put you in hard times. And if you’re not prepared for it, it can sink you real quick.

Chris Jolly [00:06:22]:
I think that’s one of the biggest value adds about having my agency with SPI and working with SPI is the financial health of the organization. But the steps that you guys put in place for vetting customers to see, are they financially secure? Because, you know, there’s you go out there and you’re trying to develop business. Right? You’re you’re cold calling or you’re cold emailing. You you’re knocking on doors, whatever it is, to get a customer. And then you get that customer, and then you wanna think that everybody’s good. Right? Like, you wanna think, like, all these guys are gonna be great. All this freight’s gonna be moving, and you don’t have anybody to check that in some instances. Right? And then you get yourself in a pinch quick where it’s like they were it’s like you think it’s great because they’re giving you a ton of freight.

Chris Jolly [00:07:12]:
Right? Like, you’re getting a ton of stuff coming your way, and then they don’t pay. And then it’s I was like, oh, hey. We’re good. You know, just just keep we’ll keep giving you freight. And then it you know, 30 days turns into 60, turns into 90, and all of a sudden, you’re in a really bad spot. And, you know, one thing I love is, like, the the steps that you guys have in place where it’s just like, you know, even having receivables insurance, because I know that that’s not cheap to have receivables insurance that are out there, but that has to be, from your perspective, probably one of the best investments that you guys have made out there. Because how many times have you seen that in your career, James, where it’s like, hey. These customers come out hot and heavy, and then 30 turns into 6090 and everything else.

James Lemon [00:07:52]:
Well, absolutely. I mean, we it was about 5, 6 years ago now that we finally decided to take the plunge and invest in the credit insurance because we were just getting to a size where I mean, knock on wood, we haven’t had any major customers go out of business on us yet. But we’re we’re starting we were starting to delve into those customers where they’re they’re becoming a significant portion of your AR. And if something were to happen, it would have sunk us. Yeah. So we we made the decision that we regardless of the cost, we needed to make sure not just for ourselves but for all of our agents that if something bad were to happen, yeah, it would be a little bit of a speed bump, but we’re gonna we’re gonna come out stronger on the other side because we’re gonna have that protection of insurance. And, I mean, that’s what insurance is there for.

Chris Jolly [00:08:43]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:08:43]:
You you hope you never have to use it, but it’s there if you need it.

Chris Jolly [00:08:46]:
No. And and I think that that I mean, man, it’s like you know, because, like, I I’ve talked about this and for you know, fortunately, it it was a lot of money at the time, you know, because, like, I got stiffed out of it was, like, just about $5,000, you know, a couple years ago. And I was, like, fortunately, I had put money aside. Fortunately, I was saving for a rainy day in the event that that happened. But, like, add a couple more zeros to that and that bankrupts people. And then you you know, because, again, it’s just like I feel like, you you described it best with insurance, and and I truly live by this in business. I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it because, you know and and it’s even, like, with cargo insurance and everything else, everybody thinks, like, oh, it’ll never happen until they’re on the hook for a $100,000 bill. And then I would, you know, argue most people don’t have a $100,000 laying around to pay for that as an added expense to their already large p and l that’s out there.

Chris Jolly [00:09:46]:
And, you know, having insurance and having that security behind it yeah. I mean, I don’t know of anybody who loves shelling out money for insurance every single month. Yeah. But it’s gonna be great to have in the event that somebody does unfortunately stiffy because not everybody out there is good. Not everybody out there has your best interest in mind.

James Lemon [00:10:07]:
And, I mean, sometimes it’s not even their fault. Yeah. Just hey, that’s business. There there’s gonna be there’s gonna be great companies. Like, you look back 20 years ago, the some of the Fortune 500 companies that everybody thought were great, but things happened. I’d change, and all of a sudden, a lot of those companies don’t exist anymore. Nobody thought they were gonna go out of business, but they did, and you don’t wanna be left holding the bag.

Chris Jolly [00:10:32]:
Yeah, man. There’s there’s so much of that too. And because, like, I like, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Like, honestly, is I’m just like you know, obviously, nothing’s perfect and you’re gonna make mistakes and, you know, things are gonna happen. But it’s just like, what are those things that you can do to protect yourself? Right? Like, because there there there there is you know, you look at some of those large companies that are no longer around. Why are they no longer around? Is it their failure to adapt to a change? Like, I think Blockbuster is you know, because we’re pretty much the same age. Blockbuster is like the most glaring one for most of us who grew up going to a video store. And for those of you who are younger, that’s actually how you used to watch movies back in the day.

Chris Jolly [00:11:12]:
But Blockbuster is one of those things. And then because you hear about it too. Right? Because I think that they had an opportunity to do a streaming service of some sort or it was something with a Netflix style.

James Lemon [00:11:23]:
They they actually were they were in talks of buying Netflix.

Chris Jolly [00:11:26]:
Okay. That’s what it was. But Blockbuster was gonna buy Netflix.

James Lemon [00:11:29]:
Yes.

Chris Jolly [00:11:30]:
Okay.

James Lemon [00:11:31]:
Yeah. In the in the early stages, but that was back before they had figured out the pivot to streaming because, I mean, Netflix started as a DVD sharing service.

Chris Jolly [00:11:39]:
Yeah. No. Yeah. I remember that. And it’s, but it is, you know, it’s one of those things where, you know, failure to adapt, or is there an outside force that’s gonna eventually put you under? You know? And it’s just like, I just look at that because it’s like so many people out there. I mean, whether you’re an agent or you’re running a business or or you know, because if you are an agent, you are running a business. Right? Like, I gotta pay taxes on the money that I make. Right? Like, I got expenditures.

Chris Jolly [00:12:03]:
And what can I do to align myself to kinda minimize a lot of that risk and that exposure that’s out there? Because, you know, and that and that’s one of the things, like, I love working with you guys about a lot, is is is is like, yeah, when things are great, I think everybody’s happy. But most importantly, it’s when things go wrong. You know? Like, when there’s damages to loads or when there’s things out there, you guys are on top of your stuff. And it’s not a, hey. Your guys gotta pay for this or anything like that when it comes down to insurance and everything else. And that’s what I love because it’s like it gives me an opportunity to just operate and execute. And that partnerships that’s there, I like, I think that that’s the biggest that’s the biggest value add out there to anybody who’s looking to go out on their own and become an agent is is you got we have the best of the best insurance. You guys are are you guys are constantly investing and looking for new innovative ways to give agents the best tools to succeed in any freight market.

Chris Jolly [00:12:58]:
And it is very, very evident by like, if whatever I need as an agent, I’m literally one phone call away from, you know, whether it be you, Mike, anybody who is like, hey. This is what’s going on. And you guys are I was like, we’ll look into it. We’ll look into it. I mean, especially from a tech perspective. Right? Because you guys were at manifest. You guys are out there scouting all the time. What is coming up? How can we position our agents for the most success?

James Lemon [00:13:23]:
Absolutely. I mean, our biggest our biggest invest we we had 2 our biggest push came from 2 major sources. 1 was actually advertising. I mean, it’s it’s funny how a little bit of advertising can go a long way and that partnering with people like you have been a boom to our business. But the biggest one has been technology. We’ve we’ve probably quadrupled our investment in in technology over the last 5 years. And I mean, yeah, it costs a lot of money, but it’s 100% worth it because you can streamline things. You can automate things.

James Lemon [00:13:57]:
We never wanna automate people out of our business. Yeah. We wanna automate the mundane things so that our people can do things that are actually interesting. Yeah. We don’t want we don’t wanna eliminate people because we don’t that we’ve seen how bad that is. You go on some of these app that only have computer chatbots to talk to, and it it takes you half an hour talking to a chatbot to get to a person. We don’t wanna be that. We want you to call.

James Lemon [00:14:24]:
We want you to When you call in, you call to you get an actual person on the phone right away who can solve your problem. And our people are empowered to solve those problems because they’re not sitting on a keyboard all day doing the mundane task.

Chris Jolly [00:14:40]:
Yeah. It’s you know, I I remember an example here. I I mean, spent a couple of months ago by now, but, like, we had a customer of ours who, you know, the the the the receiver didn’t have a way to offload the truck. Right? And, obviously, we do a lot of flatbeds. So we had to find a third party facility to offload it with a crane, set it on the ground so the customer could come in and take it. And, you know, it was literally one phone call to client care. Hey. This is what we’re doing.

Chris Jolly [00:15:05]:
All they said is is this is the information that we need from the company. Let us know. We’ll wire the money right away, Like, without hesitation, and it’s like, they’re the it’s those instances to me, James, because it’s like on the flip side of working in a start up environment. You don’t have the resources sometimes. Right? Like, how many people are out there moving freight right now that couldn’t cover $1500 to like, even though the customer was paying us for it, front the $1500 in that instance to get that job done. Because these cranes don’t work on net 30. It’s net pay me right now or you’re not you’re not they’re not gonna offload you. And it’s situations like that from a capital perspective.

Chris Jolly [00:15:46]:
Right? Like, the financial risk is almost gone as an agent, right, at the end of the day. We we don’t take any financial risk that’s out there. You guys front you guys pay the carriers. You guys you know, from a receivables perspective, you guys are out there getting money from the customers and everything else. But then it’s it’s the ancillary expenses that pop up, like a, you know, 3rd party facility that you would need to offload a truck or restack pallets and everything else. You guys are there to take care of that stuff. That another you know, another thing too, man, is is, like, from a financial perspective, right, like, that that doesn’t, you know, on paper affect Chris Jolley’s balance sheet. That affects yours, but that’s what comes along with being an agent with SPI.

James Lemon [00:16:28]:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s for a lot there there are a lot of small brokers out there who are trying to do it all themselves. They’re probably getting into some tough times because I mean, money is getting tighter and that’s our that’s our biggest selling point for being an agent with our business is we offload all that back all that back end stuff comes off of your plate. You’re not you’re not worried about calling in customers saying, hey. I really need this payment. You’re calling new customers trying to get new business.

Chris Jolly [00:16:57]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:16:57]:
You don’t wanna spend your time dealing with AR and AP and paying carriers and receiving money. You wanna be spending your time out there prospecting, getting new customers, getting new new opportunities to grow your business.

Chris Jolly [00:17:10]:
I you know, it’s funny. I was talking to a a friend of mine, you know, and he started a brokerage. He sold it. And then through some things, he started another brokerage. And I’ve heard this from multiple friends of mine who started brokerages. They’re like, you know, early on, they’re like, when you have to invest in accounting to build out your back office before you can hire more sales reps, they’re like, that’s the most uncertain time in the business because, you know, you gotta bring in 2 to 3 people to process all your invoices at some point. And, you know, because not all factoring companies are gonna do all of that and do it, you know, entirely automate your entire back office. Some of them, you know, have those offerings now, but, like, if you’re not factorable for whatever reason or you choose to not take that route, you gotta invest in, I’ll call them a nonrevenue seat.

Chris Jolly [00:18:02]:
Because at the end of the day, in in trucking, in freight brokerage, there are sales reps who generate revenue, and then there’s operations who don’t technically generate revenue. Yes. They are part of the revenue process, but at the end of the day, you don’t put them in a seat, and then they’re out there cold calling and developing business. And all of my friends who have started Broker to Zeus, they’ve all said the exact same thing. They’re like, if I would have gone back now, taking the agent route would have been so much more beneficial in the early days to not have to pay 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year in salaries for an accounting perspective.

James Lemon [00:18:37]:
Absolutely. And I mean, it it is a it’s a hard it can be a hard sell sometimes because, I mean, when you’re doing it yourself, it’s yours. It feels like you’re in control of everything. Yeah. But in the end, when you come and you partner with a brokerage, it’s still all yours. It’s just you don’t have all the headaches that we have to we take off your plate.

Chris Jolly [00:18:57]:
You don’t have the headaches that James has.

James Lemon [00:19:00]:
Exactly.

Chris Jolly [00:19:01]:
But, you know, from a business development standpoint, I can literally count on one hand the amount of accounts that were already in use. And I’ve sent over I’m pretty sure, AR knows me by first, middle, and last name by the amount that I’ve reached out to them to see on on a business development perspective. But you know, that’s the thing is is that’s another question that I get all the time is is, oh, I’m sure all the accounts are taken. I’m like, far from it. Like, not even close in my

James Lemon [00:19:30]:
I mean yeah. We’re we’re we’re a big brokerage, but, I mean, there’s millions of customers out there. And, like, you think your customer is big and but, really, it’s just another fish in a gigantic ocean of customers. And it’s very rare that we have an instance where a agent has an opportunity and they come to us and say, hey. I have this opportunity. Are they taken? And that they actually are taken.

Chris Jolly [00:19:54]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:19:54]:
And I mean, in a in a lot of cases, there’s ways we can work out with whoever’s doing the business. Or if it’s decentralized and they’re each their own their own entity, then you get that business anyways.

Chris Jolly [00:20:05]:
Yeah. No. For sure. And, you know, and and then, you know, on top of that. Right? Because we you know, we had a customer that needed EDI capabilities, you know, as they jumped on it right away. It was done. It was up there. And, you know, an EDI can be a you know? And if you’ve never done it before and you’re listening to this, it’s a process.

Chris Jolly [00:20:24]:
Right? Like, there’s a ton of testing that’s involved in that. And, you know, again, it’s like having that backing from an infrastructure perspective to where it’s like you get to the finish line. Because, again, this is the stuff that’s not talked about out there in developing business. You get to a finish line and then you’re like, you need a half a $1,000,000 in cargo insurance to haul your freight. You don’t find that out in the first couple of conversations, FYI. It’s usually after you’ve sent over a customer agreement. Oh, FYI, you need this. IT perspective, you need EDI capabilities.

Chris Jolly [00:20:55]:
You need a fully functional we need to run testing for 2 weeks. We gotta make sure all the transmissions go through properly. That’s another reality that kinda comes along with it that you don’t know about right away. And, I mean, I think about, you know, again, for it’s it’s hard enough to develop business out there, and then you get to the finish line just to find out I don’t have the money to do that because that’s another reality. Right? Half a $1,000,000 in cargo insurance is not cheap. Right? Like, I I I again, I was talking to another buddy of mine who does this, and he’s like, I literally spend almost $1,000,000 a year on insurance as a broker. Because he has high level stuff, but a $1,000,000 a year in insurance alone. So it’s like, these are the things.

Chris Jolly [00:21:36]:
It’s like as you’re growing and building, you don’t want, like yeah. It yeah. It’s a thought that’s that’s in your mind, but it’s like, you just wanna get out there and develop freight. Right? Like, you just wanna get customers, and then this is the the the side of this business that nobody I don’t know of anybody else out there who’s talking about this at at scale about investing in the infrastructure of your company and having these things because you will inevitably get to a point where there is you’re you’re not gonna be able to move their their freight because you don’t have the money to do this unless you are an agent, and you have somebody who has already invested this over the last 40 years and built it up.

James Lemon [00:22:14]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you look at like you said, we went to manifest. There were a lot of shippers there seeing all these fun technologies that we have, and we’ve seen more and more customers coming to us saying, hey. I need x, y, and z in order for you to move my freight. I need you need to track every shipment. It needs to be sent to us every 15 minutes, and it needs to be done automatic. And if you are just getting started and you’re just slowly developing your your business and you yeah.

James Lemon [00:22:44]:
Maybe you have one of the best, EMS’s out there, but all those things cost money. Yeah. Those are free. It’s not free to get it set up. Most of the times, they have their own portals that you need to pay into in order to get those connections. And if you don’t have that on your road map for cost, that can sync you really quick.

Chris Jolly [00:23:06]:
Yeah. It’s, you know, API you know, because it is one of those things now with with the digital world that we’re operating in inside of transportation. Having API connectivity out there in all these transmissions, like, on paper, you’re always like, oh, this this is just the way it is. Yeah. But but it’s not free. Right? Like, it costs lots of money out there to to be able to do this. And, you know, that’s the thing. Like, obviously, shippers, depending on the size of them, because not all of them, some of them are very resistant to change in technology that are out there, but there are a lot of forward thinking shippers that are very streamlined there, and they are always about that.

Chris Jolly [00:23:46]:
What do you have? Do you have this? Are you know, because it’s like I know, like, 4 4 kites and project 44 are two names that have came up pretty frequently inside of my business development phone calls that are out there. Do you have these capabilities? If not, are you willing to have them? And it’s like that. It’s literally on their setup documentation that’s out there. And, you know, again, how much of that how much money do you have to pay for that if you if you don’t? Right? And, you know, for me, it’s like, this is just where the industry is heading. I I truly think automation is becoming more and more I don’t wanna call it a threat because I I don’t think you can, automate the entire experience. I still think that there’s going to be a massive void of opportunity for people who actually know what they’re doing, who can leverage technology though to go in there and grow and scale their business with a customer.

James Lemon [00:24:38]:
Absolutely. I mean, like, yeah. A shipment picks up, delivers, no problems. Yeah. You can automate that all day long. But what happens when that’s the truck’s gonna be late or that truck gets in an accident? The algorithm doesn’t know how to solve for that. It can’t it can’t be on the phone with your customers saying, hey. I got it.

James Lemon [00:24:59]:
I’m working on it. I’m getting this taken care of. I we’re getting the tow truck to come in, pick up your freight, and get it to the next place. You can’t you can’t automate that. And that’s why you want AI and all this new fancy stuff. It’s never gonna replace Yeah. The broker, but the broker who knows how to leverage AI is gonna replace the broker who doesn’t know how to do anything with AI.

Chris Jolly [00:25:23]:
And I think that that because, like, inevitably, it’s gonna get to the point, James, where it’s like, hey. We like you, but you don’t have any of this other stuff. And these other brokers, we love them too, and they have all of these, you know, fancy toys that we all wanna talk about. And because at the end of the day, it’s, like, it it’s going to be a business decision. Right? Because it’s like I think that, you know, there’s a failure or an arrogance of a lot of people out there in the brokerage world who don’t understand that shippers, regardless if they love you or not, are going to make the decision that’s best for their business. And, you know, I’ve lost customers for a lot of reasons out there. Oh, some of them were my fault that I was doing that, but there’s also been decisions that were made where they come in. They they bring in a new team of people.

Chris Jolly [00:26:12]:
They wipe out their entire network, and then you you’re out. You don’t have any freight. And then you’re looking there, and then now, like, that’s eventually what it’s gonna get to, though, where it’s gonna be like, hey. I love working with you, but unless you invest in this, I can’t work with you anymore because my leadership at, you know, the shipper organization is saying that the the broker has to have x, y, and z. And if they don’t, they will not have access to my freight anymore. It doesn’t matter how much they love you. It’s that it it eventually is going to come down to a dollar and cents perspective where they’re gonna look at the cost of transaction of every time they have to send you a shipment as a broker. Because that’s what I don’t think a lot of brokers think about is is that it costs the shipper money to send you freight.

Chris Jolly [00:26:53]:
Right? And it and it usually comes in the time of that it takes to actually tender you a shipment.

James Lemon [00:26:58]:
Yep. And I mean yeah. There’s all those hidden costs that I mean, you don’t think about once it’s set up, you don’t think about the fact that EDI, the van has a cost. You don’t think about any of those things, but the shipper’s thinking about those things. And if you’re maybe you haven’t made the move over to API connections yet, and you’re still on EDI. EDI is expensive.

Chris Jolly [00:27:21]:
Yes.

James Lemon [00:27:22]:
And so if you’ve invested in an API and so you have broker x who is only on EDI and you broker y who’s on API, which costs the shipper, It might not be a lot, but it’s gonna be a little bit cheaper and that maybe that factors into their decision where your rates are the same, but your rates aren’t actually the same because that transaction with broker x is gonna cost more than that transaction with broker y.

Chris Jolly [00:27:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. Dude, there’s there’s so many different variables out there. And and, again, like, you you people only know what they know. But, like, to me, this is this is one of those things where, you know, I I truly think that, you know, everybody wants to talk about the market shift. Right? Like, when’s the market gonna shift? When’s the market gonna shift? I don’t think a lot of people actually understand that the market is not going to be easy. It like, the the way that this is going to head, inevitably, transportation costs are going to increase. Carriers are gonna love it because they’re gonna start making more money, but their overhead isn’t gonna necessarily go down for for their stuff.

Chris Jolly [00:28:22]:
So they might get a little bit of, you know, breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s a lot of brokers out here who I think are celebrating in a market shift that I don’t under I don’t think that they’ve actually worked in an alternative market. Right? Because, like, realistically, man, the last 3 years have been easy for freight brokers. It has been very easy. 2023 was challenging from a business development standpoint because it’s been easy. Right? Like, everyone was good with their current network. I think that that’s, like, the number one response that, I’ve heard is, hey. We’re good with our current network because good enough is the biggest enemy out there to a freight market. And if you haven’t been prospecting over these last 15 to 18 months, you’re not just gonna magically turn it on.

Chris Jolly [00:29:04]:
Like, the individuals who have been heavily prospecting, there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities this year from a new business development standpoint. And you gotta ask yourself in those moments, though, because this is when all of those customer requirements are gonna start coming to light. Because you know what? They may not have been responding to your outreaches right now, but they’re gonna respond because they’re gonna be in a tough situation. And where are you gonna be? And I want people to think about this, honestly. Where how are you gonna handle it if a customer comes to you that you’ve been prospecting for the last 15 months? You’re not developing a ton of business, and they need a half a $1,000,000 in cargo to move their freight. How are you gonna handle that? Right? Like, that’s a very real conversation that is going to happen out there. Fortunately, I’m covered in that situation because, you know, with SPI, we’re we’re we’re good there. But that that’s something that I fear for a lot of people out there, James.

Chris Jolly [00:29:55]:
I I truly do because those opportunities are gonna come, but they’re gonna come with a price.

James Lemon [00:30:00]:
Absolutely. They’re gonna come with a price, and they’re gonna come with some things that you might have to do that you aren’t thinking about right now. I mean, the technology the the technological revolution has automate or hit a lot of industries, but it’s just starting to hit transportation. I mean, you’ve seen if you’ve been going to any of the transportation conferences over the last 3 to 4 years, it’s shifted from industry stuff to technology. They’re almost all becoming mini technology conferences because there is so much new stuff coming out every year. All these new things coming up and it’s are you going to accept them and and implement them in your own business? Or are you gonna let somebody else do it and you get left behind?

Chris Jolly [00:30:51]:
Yeah. No. And and it’s true. Right? And and I think that there’s there’s so much of that that is going on, and, you know, it it’s I think, you know, I I will say this. I don’t wanna ever, like, sound like I’m fearmongering. Rest assured, the fundamentals of this industry are are probably never gonna change. At least I think that they’re never gonna change. You never know, though.

Chris Jolly [00:31:10]:
But I I I truly think that if, you know, the you need to be constantly looking ahead. And that is something that I don’t I think a lot of people are more reactive than proactive in in their approach because, you know, it’s like, you you go back to, you know, look at the Blockbuster example. They never thought that their model was gonna go away until it did. And then how many meetings did they have about this prior and there was indecisiveness in there that said this will never happen, this will never happen. Same thing with so many different things, but the it’s it’s already here in freight. Right? And I think that if you’re not investing in technology, if you’re not looking at this from a business perspective right now, I don’t wanna hope that you go out of anybody goes out of business, but people are gonna have a very challenging time here. A very challenging time. How are you guys assessing technology, though? Because I’m assuming you guys get no less than 8 1,000 solicitations a day about

James Lemon [00:32:08]:
That that’s half my half my inbox is just junk mail, people trying to sell me stuff.

Chris Jolly [00:32:13]:
How do you assess, though? Like, what is that why you guys invest in going to as many conferences as you guys do? Is is you want that note you guys wanna see it for yourself and and see Absolutely.

James Lemon [00:32:23]:
Absolutely. You we we go because, I mean, a, we wanna keep up on everything that’s happening in the industry. But, yeah, we wanna like, having somebody we get cold calls about technology all the time. And you don’t know which ones to say yes to, which ones to say no to, and you there’s literally not enough time in the day to say yes to all of them. Yeah. So when you go to these conferences, it gives you the chance to actually see the products in real life and do a quick 5 minute assessment as you’re walking by the a booth. You can look at their thing and be like, is this something that could work for us? Is this something that won’t work for us? Is this something I need to learn a little bit more about? And we can make that assessment in a very quick manner rather than having to go through the whole sales pitch and listening to 15 minutes of back and forth before you actually get into anything about the actual product.

Chris Jolly [00:33:14]:
How important is it from a decision standpoint that when you’re looking at technology, the people who have created that product have worked in transportation before?

James Lemon [00:33:26]:
Alright. I’d say it factors in in the sense that you wanna make sure that it fits how the systems actually work. Mhmm. Because a lot of the times, you’ll have people who build something who have never been in transportation, and they think it should work this way, but that’s not how transportation works. Transportation works in a different cycle, and getting those two things to meet in the middle can sometimes be hard. So it definitely factors in, but I wouldn’t say it would ever exclude Yeah. Anything from our decision making because, hey, there there’s new fresh eyes coming into this industry every day.

Chris Jolly [00:34:08]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:34:09]:
And, I mean, the way things were 15, 20 years ago are not the way things are. And also getting that fresh look at the industry can be a very beneficial thing.

Chris Jolly [00:34:19]:
Oh, James, I’m right there with you, man. I think some of these people like, obviously, industry experience and and having that frontline, you know, fundamental knowledge is great. But at the end of the day, man, I I’m a firm believer in this change. Sometimes a fresh perspective is the best perspective. And, you know, because everybody gets into their routines. Right? Like, I think the biggest enemy out there in businesses is this is the way we’ve always done things. And you should be looking at innovating. You should be looking at how do we invest in into new ways of doing things that are gonna bring optimal results and more growth opportunities to to the agent network and into the people that are out there.

Chris Jolly [00:34:55]:
Right? Because it’s like, I’ve never met one person who’s like, hey. I’m I’m really planning on making less money. You know? And I I think that if you’re gonna go out there and look into, you know, any of these you know, the agent world at all is is you need to look at their what is their tech stack look like? How how open are they in showing you what their systems look like, what their capabilities are, and everything else? Because it’s like, if you’re gonna go out there and do this because, like, the agent model isn’t new. Right? Like but but there are some just like with everything, there are some very, very good agent models, and then there’s some very, very smoke and mirror agent models that are out there. And, you know, I just talk to a lot of people. I’ve heard the good and the bad and the ugly of everything that’s out there. But, you know, again, I I can say this for certain. You guys do not hold back on investing and giving your agents the best tools to succeed without hesitation.

James Lemon [00:35:52]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, change change can be scary. Change can be it can be risky because you don’t know, like, you can invest. I mean, we’ve had it on our ourselves. We’ve invested in technologies that have failed.

Chris Jolly [00:36:05]:
Mhmm.

James Lemon [00:36:05]:
And it’s cost us a lot of money. But if you’re not willing to take that risk, you’re just not gonna grow because you need to be willing to, like you said, innovate, to get better, to do things differently, to do things better because that’ll help to differentiate you with your customers.

Chris Jolly [00:36:25]:
Yeah. It’s, you know, chain I mean, it is. Right? Change is scary. I mean, I remember when we, back at a brokerage I used to work for when I first started, like, we had switched TMSs because they built a proprietary TMS, and you literally would have thought that they dropped a nuclear bomb in the vicinity and that everyone was gonna die within 3 hours because, man, there was so much. But then it’s like, I think, like, keeping an open mind with a lot of the technology and the changes that are out there are are pretty crucial. Because once you get into it and then you realize, like, oh, it I was spending so much more time doing data entry. Right? Or, you know, posting a load. I have to go to this program and then that program and everything else, and then, oh, bam.

Chris Jolly [00:37:07]:
Now we have a TMS where you can post it directly from the TMS and everything else. Like, it’s just more of, like, the uncomfortable portion of you not knowing. But I think once most people kinda get into their routine, they’re I’m assuming the positive the feedback is unwaveringly positive at at that point when everybody’s like, hey. It it it’s literally saving me 30 minutes a day on my daily tasks.

James Lemon [00:37:29]:
I mean, you’re always gonna have those holdouts who they change just for the fact that they wanna hate something. Yeah. But but in the end, yeah. Like, you don’t realize how much time you’re spending doing things that there are things that are out there that you can invest in. And a lot of the times, it doesn’t cost a lot of money. Yeah. But it’s just like turning on this widget or turning on this option in your TMS that can save you maybe it’s only 5 minutes a day, but 5 minutes a day every day adds up really quickly.

Chris Jolly [00:38:00]:
No. It it does. Right? I think lost productivity is the biggest line item on most people’s balance sheets that it’s really hard to equate. Right? Like, how I mean, I know that there’s some people out there who think that they can, you know, put an accurate guesstimate that’s out there, but it’s just like, just think about that in in in perspective. Is it’s like, if you’re 10 minutes a day, that’s, like, 2 phone calls that you could make. Right? And that’s now that’s one other person or 2 other people that you’re not speaking to, and then that opportunity goes to somebody else. Like, I think, like, you need to be in an environment where you are I’m always like, I wanna be 95% automated because 95% of my day as a broker is automated. Right? It should be automated.

Chris Jolly [00:38:39]:
But when it comes down to the customer experience and the carrier experience and talking to an actual human being and dealing with those issues that you’re talking about, that to me should never be automated because they need to feel how much I care. Really, when it boils down to it, they need to feel how much I care. And, you know, and again, and when you’re going out there and and really assessing who do you wanna work with and everything else, was what what what does that look like? We know from an infrastructure of your business because that’s what an agency is. You are a business. You have an actual company. Your brand is out there. Whether you’re a, you know, you’re you own your own freight brokerage or you’re an agent for SPI Logistics, your brand is transferable. People will always remember how you were to work with whether, you know, wherever you were working for at the time.

James Lemon [00:39:24]:
No. I mean, we’re we’re talking a lot about technology, but in the end, freight brokerage is always going to be a relationship business.

Chris Jolly [00:39:32]:
Yes.

James Lemon [00:39:32]:
And if you can have all the tech in the world, but if you don’t have the people behind behind it who can actually have a good relationship with the customer, you’re not gonna have a broker.

Chris Jolly [00:39:43]:
Yeah. And and another thing too is this freight brokerage is you it is very capital intensive. Right? Business is very capital intensive, and it’s one of those things that, you know, you think that, oh, all I need is a computer and a phone. And, you know, fundamentally, that that is all you need, but you need to be able to front 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of dollars every single month that’s out there. And, you know, if it it’s it’s one of those things, like, you’re you’re always one bad transaction away from from potentially losing everything in business. And I know that there’s some steps that you take in place, but, you know, you need to look at that too. Are you with somebody who is able to front a $100,000 a month to one customer in in in freight. Right? In freight spend.

Chris Jolly [00:40:28]:
Because that you know, like, what there there’s those different level customers out there where you’re gonna get to a point where they will only work with you if you can extend them x amount of credit. That that does exist out there. And, you know, to me, it’s like there’s there’s never been a hesitation. Anytime I’ve had to come to client care about anything with that, they’re always like, yep. We got you. Yep. We got you. Yep.

Chris Jolly [00:40:50]:
We’re gonna do that. It checks out. And to because to me, it’s like, do you wanna be pigeonholed as well too?

James Lemon [00:40:57]:
Right? Mhmm. Well, I mean, it that’s interesting that you say that because, like, when you start dealing with the bigger and bigger shippers, a lot of them, they’re not paying in that 30 days.

Chris Jolly [00:41:07]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:41:08]:
They run they’re they’re big, and they get to dictate what their terms are. They’re net 60, net 90. But guess what? We still pay our carriers net 30. We don’t it doesn’t matter what what freight they’re hauling. What our guarantee to our carriers is we’ll pay you net 30. So like you said, we’re now fronting. If it’s a net 60 day, we’re now fronting a whole month’s worth of business. Net 90 days, we’re fronting 2 months worth of business.

James Lemon [00:41:34]:
We’re not passing that extra cost on to our agents. That’s just that’s just a part of doing business, and that’s one of the services that we offer.

Chris Jolly [00:41:42]:
That right there, alone in itself, James, is is one of those things, man, where it’s like that you guys take on the financial burden. Because that’s, I mean, that’s really what it is, man. When you’re talking about net 90 and you’re paying your carriers within 30 days and the agents getting paid on top of that as well. Right? Like, that that that’s a big financial risk that goes on out there, and you guys take it with ease. Right? Like, I love Friday mornings. Why is that? Rec deposits hitting every Friday

James Lemon [00:42:11]:
Absolutely.

Chris Jolly [00:42:12]:
No matter what without hesitation.

James Lemon [00:42:15]:
Absolutely. We yep. We’re we’re paying our commissions the next week. You get yourself in by this Friday. You’re getting paid next Friday. Doesn’t matter what the terms are on your customer. Doesn’t matter any of that. It’s just we’re paying you.

James Lemon [00:42:28]:
We’re paying your carriers. We’re making sure that we have that a rating on Truckstop. We’re making sure our net days to pay is 30 so that carriers don’t say no to you. Carriers are gonna say yes because they know they haul an SPI load. They’re gonna get paid.

Chris Jolly [00:42:41]:
I would love to know the stats, James, because, yes, if we get everything closed out, we get paid the next Friday no matter what without hesitation. I wonder how many w two employees out there are not paid commission until the customer pays. I would love blue. I would love to see

James Lemon [00:43:00]:
it. It’s it’s and there’s lots of I mean, there’s other agency models where they that that is a stipulation where they don’t pay commissions until they get paid by the customer. And I mean, that’s not how we do business. That’s not how we wanna do business because in the end, this is a partnership. We’re taking risks. You’re taking a risk by being a part of our network. And so we wanna share in that risk together, and we wanna be the best brokerage out.

Chris Jolly [00:43:29]:
I you will always argue that we are the best brokerage out there, frankly, at the end of the day. And

James Lemon [00:43:34]:
And that’s what we’re striving for.

Chris Jolly [00:43:36]:
You know? And there’s no doubt in my mind that you guys are very agent first. Very agent first, giving us the best tools to succeed. And I know that that is a major part of why we’ve been able to get up kinda and running at the level that we did, and the supports there. Right. And I really, really, really want to push that support there when you need it because developing a business is hard. When you have no customers and you’re coming in from a completely cold perspective, it takes time. And knowing that the infrastructure of a very large corporation is behind you, you can go out there and operate, and you have complete autonomy to run your business the way that you see fit. Still, you have the partnerships behind you, and you’re literally one phone call away. Do you have any questions? And again, I cannot stress this enough. If you have any questions at all and you reach out to client care, it doesn’t matter when it is, weekends, whatever, people are gonna respond, and they’re gonna have answers for you so you can deliver that high-quality service to your customers.

Chris Jolly [00:44:39]:
Because inevitably, that’s all that matters in your customer’s eyes. Are you fixing things? Are you making stuff happen for them? And are you easy to work with? And if you can check all of those three things off, you’re gonna be very, very successful out there. So with that being said, James, I wanna appreciate your time, man. Like, dude, we’re we kinda blew through this here really quick. And, you know, I I just I can’t appreciate I can’t say thank you enough for the belief in what I’m doing from a media perspective, but also been building up the, you know, my agency and everything, man. So thank you so much for that. And how does anybody reach out to you, man, if they wanna find out more?

James Lemon [00:45:13]:
Anybody wants to have any questions or have a conversation, they can reach me by email. My email is jlemon@SPI3pl.com.

Chris Jolly [00:45:21]:
Perfect. I know you made it this far in the episode, but if you did and you’re not subscribed, do your boy a solid. Subscribe and share this out there because at the end of the day, this is how we reach more people. But most importantly, it’s how we help more people. It’s because if you saw value, your network’s gonna see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys, and we’ll be talking to you soon.

Chris Jolly [00:00:01]:
Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of coffee with a freight coach. My name is Chris Jolly. I am your host, and I am the freight coach. Before we jump into the episode, as always, thank you guys so much for coming out and listening to this podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen, and I say that before every single show that I do.

Chris Jolly [00:00:25]:
And what I mean by that is I only speak to transportation professionals on this show as well as my weekday live show because I wanna talk to the individuals who have done what you’re looking to do or who are currently doing what you’re trying to achieve. So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. I do have one small favor to ask. If you get value, and I know you will, but if you get value in what you hear today, and you’re not subscribed, subscribe to the show you guys. Share it out there dear network. Because at the end of the day, this is how we grow, but most importantly, this is how we help more and more people is because if you saw value, your network’s gonna see value as well. I got a very special guest for you guys here today, and this is gonna be on a a a video component as well. I don’t know if I’m gonna be uploading this onto my YouTube channel, but I know my friends at SPI Logistics are gonna be doing that.

Chris Jolly [00:01:12]:
And who knows? Maybe I’ll start doing that and adding a video component into this podcast. But we’re here to talk about finance. Right? Like, we’re here to talk about the financial health of organizations and and really how how are you balancing any of that stuff? Whether you’re in an up market or a down market? How are you taking those times and investing into the future? So with that being said, I got my man, James Lemon, here today. He is the VP of finance and chief financial officer of SPI Logistics. James, thank you so much for joining me.

James Lemon [00:01:40]:
Thanks a lot for having me. I mean, I’ve listened to all the podcasts you’ve you’ve done with all the people here, and now I’m excited to finally be on here and get this share some knowledge.

Chris Jolly [00:01:48]:
No, man. It you know, it’s great being you know, because I like, for those who see the video out there, you get James has a phenomenal background of the beautiful British Columbia area. And, you know, having the opportunity to come up and, you know, be in the SPI offices back in August and everything was great. And, you know, we recorded a bunch of podcasts while we were up there, and, unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties with the one that we got. But I’m glad that there was because now we get to talk again, man, because it’s like Exactly. As everything gets up and running, I mean, we got we ran into each other in, you know, in Vegas, and we got to have dinner with you and Anita and everything. And, you know, but it’s always good just to sit down with you, man, because I I always enjoy learning about every aspect of the industry. Right? Because, like, at the end of the day, I’m like, I know freight, really.

Chris Jolly [00:02:30]:
Like, when it boils I know a lot of what not to do in freight. And there’s so many different components to to the business that’s out there. And, you know, I’m on a a a mission to understand my finances at a lot greater level. And, you know, it’s like I look back on it in going to school, and I’m like, man, I wish I would have got a degree in accounting. Like, truly, because I feel like understanding your money is what is I I I would say it’s very overlooked out there. Because I actually interviewed my CPA for the podcast, James, and he was talking about that. He’s like, the the amount of people that don’t know about their financials is it’s it’s almost alarming that’s out there. So, like, how did you get your start in the finance world?

James Lemon [00:03:13]:
Well, my the funny story is so I grew up in hard times. I didn’t have my parents didn’t have a lot of money. Grew up in poverty. So, you know, when you take those aptitude tests at school, it tells you what potential things you could be good at. And so on mine, accounting came up as one of them, and it had the highest, income. So I was like, well, that’s what I wanna be because I wanna make a lot of money.

Chris Jolly [00:03:39]:
Heck yeah.

James Lemon [00:03:40]:
And so in grade 12, I my school offered an accounting course. And I was like, well, let’s give it a try and see if I’m actually good at it and like it. And turns out I ended up winning the there was a award for the best student in accounting and I won I won that award and I was like, well, I guess I’m doing this. And then got got my degree, got my CPA, and, I mean, now I’m here.

Chris Jolly [00:04:04]:
Dude, it’s you know, accounting for me was it was the one course that I actually like, math related that I actually excelled in because there there was only one way of doing it. Right? And for because, like, I was actually just talking about this on my live show. Like, I I mean, I struggled in in math. Like, I struggled in algebra. I struggled in all that stuff because I’m like, what’s the point? Like, and then FYI, to this day, I have yet to quote a shipment that I needed to find out the value of the letter a. Alright? I’m just throwing that out there. But, you know, when it came down to the accounting aspect of things, like, I I actually it was weird. I was able to actually slow it down a little bit and really understand how how to work it.

Chris Jolly [00:04:47]:
And I you know, because, like, I have 2 degrees in management, and I’m, like, looking back, I’m like, man, if I could do it all over again, I woulda got my associate’s degree in accounting, and I woulda got my bachelor’s degree in management because there’s so many there’s so much value in understanding the financial health of your organization because it’s like how many people learn the hard way, right, where they make $10,000, but they think they can spend $10,000. They don’t account for taxes. They don’t they don’t understand that there’s actual assets that you can depreciate to lower your taxable income and everything else that’s out there. And then they get in a bind, they don’t pay their taxes, and then all of a sudden, they get slapped with a massive bill that they can’t afford, and then they go out of business. They’re, like, I gotta fold up. I can’t pay that.

James Lemon [00:05:33]:
Absolutely. And I mean, we’re gonna see in in our industry, you’re gonna see this coming to a head as things get tighter. You’re gonna the the companies who have a good knowledge of what their accounting is are gonna thrive and they’re gonna stay in business. And those those ones that you’re talking about that have no idea, like, what they can expense or what their expenses even are in a month.

Chris Jolly [00:05:55]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:05:56]:
And all of a sudden when your customer says, oh, sorry. I can’t afford to pay you this month and you look at your bank account and it’s negative and you’re like, well, how did that happen? I’m making all this money. But, I mean, if you don’t have money coming in, it’s not it’s not it’s not really your money until you actually have the money. Yeah. And if your customers, they end up in hard times, that can put you in hard times. And if you’re not prepared for it, it can sink you real quick.

Chris Jolly [00:06:22]:
I think that’s one of the biggest value adds about having my agency with SPI and working with SPI is the financial health of the organization. But the steps that you guys put in place for vetting customers to see, are they financially secure? Because, you know, there’s you go out there and you’re trying to develop business. Right? You’re you’re cold calling or you’re cold emailing. You you’re knocking on doors, whatever it is, to get a customer. And then you get that customer, and then you wanna think that everybody’s good. Right? Like, you wanna think, like, all these guys are gonna be great. All this freight’s gonna be moving, and you don’t have anybody to check that in some instances. Right? And then you get yourself in a pinch quick where it’s like they were it’s like you think it’s great because they’re giving you a ton of freight.

Chris Jolly [00:07:12]:
Right? Like, you’re getting a ton of stuff coming your way, and then they don’t pay. And then it’s I was like, oh, hey. We’re good. You know, just just keep we’ll keep giving you freight. And then it you know, 30 days turns into 60, turns into 90, and all of a sudden, you’re in a really bad spot. And, you know, one thing I love is, like, the the steps that you guys have in place where it’s just like, you know, even having receivables insurance, because I know that that’s not cheap to have receivables insurance that are out there, but that has to be, from your perspective, probably one of the best investments that you guys have made out there. Because how many times have you seen that in your career, James, where it’s like, hey. These customers come out hot and heavy, and then 30 turns into 6090 and everything else.

James Lemon [00:07:52]:
Well, absolutely. I mean, we it was about 5, 6 years ago now that we finally decided to take the plunge and invest in the credit insurance because we were just getting to a size where I mean, knock on wood, we haven’t had any major customers go out of business on us yet. But we’re we’re starting we were starting to delve into those customers where they’re they’re becoming a significant portion of your AR. And if something were to happen, it would have sunk us. Yeah. So we we made the decision that we regardless of the cost, we needed to make sure not just for ourselves but for all of our agents that if something bad were to happen, yeah, it would be a little bit of a speed bump, but we’re gonna we’re gonna come out stronger on the other side because we’re gonna have that protection of insurance. And, I mean, that’s what insurance is there for.

Chris Jolly [00:08:43]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:08:43]:
You you hope you never have to use it, but it’s there if you need it.

Chris Jolly [00:08:46]:
No. And and I think that that I mean, man, it’s like you know, because, like, I I’ve talked about this and for you know, fortunately, it it was a lot of money at the time, you know, because, like, I got stiffed out of it was, like, just about $5,000, you know, a couple years ago. And I was, like, fortunately, I had put money aside. Fortunately, I was saving for a rainy day in the event that that happened. But, like, add a couple more zeros to that and that bankrupts people. And then you you know, because, again, it’s just like I feel like, you you described it best with insurance, and and I truly live by this in business. I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it because, you know and and it’s even, like, with cargo insurance and everything else, everybody thinks, like, oh, it’ll never happen until they’re on the hook for a $100,000 bill. And then I would, you know, argue most people don’t have a $100,000 laying around to pay for that as an added expense to their already large p and l that’s out there.

Chris Jolly [00:09:46]:
And, you know, having insurance and having that security behind it yeah. I mean, I don’t know of anybody who loves shelling out money for insurance every single month. Yeah. But it’s gonna be great to have in the event that somebody does unfortunately stiffy because not everybody out there is good. Not everybody out there has your best interest in mind.

James Lemon [00:10:07]:
And, I mean, sometimes it’s not even their fault. Yeah. Just hey, that’s business. There there’s gonna be there’s gonna be great companies. Like, you look back 20 years ago, the some of the Fortune 500 companies that everybody thought were great, but things happened. I’d change, and all of a sudden, a lot of those companies don’t exist anymore. Nobody thought they were gonna go out of business, but they did, and you don’t wanna be left holding the bag.

Chris Jolly [00:10:32]:
Yeah, man. There’s there’s so much of that too. And because, like, I like, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Like, honestly, is I’m just like you know, obviously, nothing’s perfect and you’re gonna make mistakes and, you know, things are gonna happen. But it’s just like, what are those things that you can do to protect yourself? Right? Like, because there there there there is you know, you look at some of those large companies that are no longer around. Why are they no longer around? Is it their failure to adapt to a change? Like, I think Blockbuster is you know, because we’re pretty much the same age. Blockbuster is like the most glaring one for most of us who grew up going to a video store. And for those of you who are younger, that’s actually how you used to watch movies back in the day.

Chris Jolly [00:11:12]:
But Blockbuster is one of those things. And then because you hear about it too. Right? Because I think that they had an opportunity to do a streaming service of some sort or it was something with a Netflix style.

James Lemon [00:11:23]:
They they actually were they were in talks of buying Netflix.

Chris Jolly [00:11:26]:
Okay. That’s what it was. But Blockbuster was gonna buy Netflix.

James Lemon [00:11:29]:
Yes.

Chris Jolly [00:11:30]:
Okay.

James Lemon [00:11:31]:
Yeah. In the in the early stages, but that was back before they had figured out the pivot to streaming because, I mean, Netflix started as a DVD sharing service.

Chris Jolly [00:11:39]:
Yeah. No. Yeah. I remember that. And it’s, but it is, you know, it’s one of those things where, you know, failure to adapt, or is there an outside force that’s gonna eventually put you under? You know? And it’s just like, I just look at that because it’s like so many people out there. I mean, whether you’re an agent or you’re running a business or or you know, because if you are an agent, you are running a business. Right? Like, I gotta pay taxes on the money that I make. Right? Like, I got expenditures.

Chris Jolly [00:12:03]:
And what can I do to align myself to kinda minimize a lot of that risk and that exposure that’s out there? Because, you know, and that and that’s one of the things, like, I love working with you guys about a lot, is is is is like, yeah, when things are great, I think everybody’s happy. But most importantly, it’s when things go wrong. You know? Like, when there’s damages to loads or when there’s things out there, you guys are on top of your stuff. And it’s not a, hey. Your guys gotta pay for this or anything like that when it comes down to insurance and everything else. And that’s what I love because it’s like it gives me an opportunity to just operate and execute. And that partnerships that’s there, I like, I think that that’s the biggest that’s the biggest value add out there to anybody who’s looking to go out on their own and become an agent is is you got we have the best of the best insurance. You guys are are you guys are constantly investing and looking for new innovative ways to give agents the best tools to succeed in any freight market.

Chris Jolly [00:12:58]:
And it is very, very evident by like, if whatever I need as an agent, I’m literally one phone call away from, you know, whether it be you, Mike, anybody who is like, hey. This is what’s going on. And you guys are I was like, we’ll look into it. We’ll look into it. I mean, especially from a tech perspective. Right? Because you guys were at manifest. You guys are out there scouting all the time. What is coming up? How can we position our agents for the most success?

James Lemon [00:13:23]:
Absolutely. I mean, our biggest our biggest invest we we had 2 our biggest push came from 2 major sources. 1 was actually advertising. I mean, it’s it’s funny how a little bit of advertising can go a long way and that partnering with people like you have been a boom to our business. But the biggest one has been technology. We’ve we’ve probably quadrupled our investment in in technology over the last 5 years. And I mean, yeah, it costs a lot of money, but it’s 100% worth it because you can streamline things. You can automate things.

James Lemon [00:13:57]:
We never wanna automate people out of our business. Yeah. We wanna automate the mundane things so that our people can do things that are actually interesting. Yeah. We don’t want we don’t wanna eliminate people because we don’t that we’ve seen how bad that is. You go on some of these app that only have computer chatbots to talk to, and it it takes you half an hour talking to a chatbot to get to a person. We don’t wanna be that. We want you to call.

James Lemon [00:14:24]:
We want you to When you call in, you call to you get an actual person on the phone right away who can solve your problem. And our people are empowered to solve those problems because they’re not sitting on a keyboard all day doing the mundane task.

Chris Jolly [00:14:40]:
Yeah. It’s you know, I I remember an example here. I I mean, spent a couple of months ago by now, but, like, we had a customer of ours who, you know, the the the the receiver didn’t have a way to offload the truck. Right? And, obviously, we do a lot of flatbeds. So we had to find a third party facility to offload it with a crane, set it on the ground so the customer could come in and take it. And, you know, it was literally one phone call to client care. Hey. This is what we’re doing.

Chris Jolly [00:15:05]:
All they said is is this is the information that we need from the company. Let us know. We’ll wire the money right away, Like, without hesitation, and it’s like, they’re the it’s those instances to me, James, because it’s like on the flip side of working in a start up environment. You don’t have the resources sometimes. Right? Like, how many people are out there moving freight right now that couldn’t cover $1500 to like, even though the customer was paying us for it, front the $1500 in that instance to get that job done. Because these cranes don’t work on net 30. It’s net pay me right now or you’re not you’re not they’re not gonna offload you. And it’s situations like that from a capital perspective.

Chris Jolly [00:15:46]:
Right? Like, the financial risk is almost gone as an agent, right, at the end of the day. We we don’t take any financial risk that’s out there. You guys front you guys pay the carriers. You guys you know, from a receivables perspective, you guys are out there getting money from the customers and everything else. But then it’s it’s the ancillary expenses that pop up, like a, you know, 3rd party facility that you would need to offload a truck or restack pallets and everything else. You guys are there to take care of that stuff. That another you know, another thing too, man, is is, like, from a financial perspective, right, like, that that doesn’t, you know, on paper affect Chris Jolley’s balance sheet. That affects yours, but that’s what comes along with being an agent with SPI.

James Lemon [00:16:28]:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s for a lot there there are a lot of small brokers out there who are trying to do it all themselves. They’re probably getting into some tough times because I mean, money is getting tighter and that’s our that’s our biggest selling point for being an agent with our business is we offload all that back all that back end stuff comes off of your plate. You’re not you’re not worried about calling in customers saying, hey. I really need this payment. You’re calling new customers trying to get new business.

Chris Jolly [00:16:57]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:16:57]:
You don’t wanna spend your time dealing with AR and AP and paying carriers and receiving money. You wanna be spending your time out there prospecting, getting new customers, getting new new opportunities to grow your business.

Chris Jolly [00:17:10]:
I you know, it’s funny. I was talking to a a friend of mine, you know, and he started a brokerage. He sold it. And then through some things, he started another brokerage. And I’ve heard this from multiple friends of mine who started brokerages. They’re like, you know, early on, they’re like, when you have to invest in accounting to build out your back office before you can hire more sales reps, they’re like, that’s the most uncertain time in the business because, you know, you gotta bring in 2 to 3 people to process all your invoices at some point. And, you know, because not all factoring companies are gonna do all of that and do it, you know, entirely automate your entire back office. Some of them, you know, have those offerings now, but, like, if you’re not factorable for whatever reason or you choose to not take that route, you gotta invest in, I’ll call them a nonrevenue seat.

Chris Jolly [00:18:02]:
Because at the end of the day, in in trucking, in freight brokerage, there are sales reps who generate revenue, and then there’s operations who don’t technically generate revenue. Yes. They are part of the revenue process, but at the end of the day, you don’t put them in a seat, and then they’re out there cold calling and developing business. And all of my friends who have started Broker to Zeus, they’ve all said the exact same thing. They’re like, if I would have gone back now, taking the agent route would have been so much more beneficial in the early days to not have to pay 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year in salaries for an accounting perspective.

James Lemon [00:18:37]:
Absolutely. And I mean, it it is a it’s a hard it can be a hard sell sometimes because, I mean, when you’re doing it yourself, it’s yours. It feels like you’re in control of everything. Yeah. But in the end, when you come and you partner with a brokerage, it’s still all yours. It’s just you don’t have all the headaches that we have to we take off your plate.

Chris Jolly [00:18:57]:
You don’t have the headaches that James has.

James Lemon [00:19:00]:
Exactly.

Chris Jolly [00:19:01]:
But, you know, from a business development standpoint, I can literally count on one hand the amount of accounts that were already in use. And I’ve sent over I’m pretty sure, AR knows me by first, middle, and last name by the amount that I’ve reached out to them to see on on a business development perspective. But you know, that’s the thing is is that’s another question that I get all the time is is, oh, I’m sure all the accounts are taken. I’m like, far from it. Like, not even close in my

James Lemon [00:19:30]:
I mean yeah. We’re we’re we’re a big brokerage, but, I mean, there’s millions of customers out there. And, like, you think your customer is big and but, really, it’s just another fish in a gigantic ocean of customers. And it’s very rare that we have an instance where a agent has an opportunity and they come to us and say, hey. I have this opportunity. Are they taken? And that they actually are taken.

Chris Jolly [00:19:54]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:19:54]:
And I mean, in a in a lot of cases, there’s ways we can work out with whoever’s doing the business. Or if it’s decentralized and they’re each their own their own entity, then you get that business anyways.

Chris Jolly [00:20:05]:
Yeah. No. For sure. And, you know, and and then, you know, on top of that. Right? Because we you know, we had a customer that needed EDI capabilities, you know, as they jumped on it right away. It was done. It was up there. And, you know, an EDI can be a you know? And if you’ve never done it before and you’re listening to this, it’s a process.

Chris Jolly [00:20:24]:
Right? Like, there’s a ton of testing that’s involved in that. And, you know, again, it’s like having that backing from an infrastructure perspective to where it’s like you get to the finish line. Because, again, this is the stuff that’s not talked about out there in developing business. You get to a finish line and then you’re like, you need a half a $1,000,000 in cargo insurance to haul your freight. You don’t find that out in the first couple of conversations, FYI. It’s usually after you’ve sent over a customer agreement. Oh, FYI, you need this. IT perspective, you need EDI capabilities.

Chris Jolly [00:20:55]:
You need a fully functional we need to run testing for 2 weeks. We gotta make sure all the transmissions go through properly. That’s another reality that kinda comes along with it that you don’t know about right away. And, I mean, I think about, you know, again, for it’s it’s hard enough to develop business out there, and then you get to the finish line just to find out I don’t have the money to do that because that’s another reality. Right? Half a $1,000,000 in cargo insurance is not cheap. Right? Like, I I I again, I was talking to another buddy of mine who does this, and he’s like, I literally spend almost $1,000,000 a year on insurance as a broker. Because he has high level stuff, but a $1,000,000 a year in insurance alone. So it’s like, these are the things.

Chris Jolly [00:21:36]:
It’s like as you’re growing and building, you don’t want, like yeah. It yeah. It’s a thought that’s that’s in your mind, but it’s like, you just wanna get out there and develop freight. Right? Like, you just wanna get customers, and then this is the the the side of this business that nobody I don’t know of anybody else out there who’s talking about this at at scale about investing in the infrastructure of your company and having these things because you will inevitably get to a point where there is you’re you’re not gonna be able to move their their freight because you don’t have the money to do this unless you are an agent, and you have somebody who has already invested this over the last 40 years and built it up.

James Lemon [00:22:14]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you look at like you said, we went to manifest. There were a lot of shippers there seeing all these fun technologies that we have, and we’ve seen more and more customers coming to us saying, hey. I need x, y, and z in order for you to move my freight. I need you need to track every shipment. It needs to be sent to us every 15 minutes, and it needs to be done automatic. And if you are just getting started and you’re just slowly developing your your business and you yeah.

James Lemon [00:22:44]:
Maybe you have one of the best, EMS’s out there, but all those things cost money. Yeah. Those are free. It’s not free to get it set up. Most of the times, they have their own portals that you need to pay into in order to get those connections. And if you don’t have that on your road map for cost, that can sync you really quick.

Chris Jolly [00:23:06]:
Yeah. It’s, you know, API you know, because it is one of those things now with with the digital world that we’re operating in inside of transportation. Having API connectivity out there in all these transmissions, like, on paper, you’re always like, oh, this this is just the way it is. Yeah. But but it’s not free. Right? Like, it costs lots of money out there to to be able to do this. And, you know, that’s the thing. Like, obviously, shippers, depending on the size of them, because not all of them, some of them are very resistant to change in technology that are out there, but there are a lot of forward thinking shippers that are very streamlined there, and they are always about that.

Chris Jolly [00:23:46]:
What do you have? Do you have this? Are you know, because it’s like I know, like, 4 4 kites and project 44 are two names that have came up pretty frequently inside of my business development phone calls that are out there. Do you have these capabilities? If not, are you willing to have them? And it’s like that. It’s literally on their setup documentation that’s out there. And, you know, again, how much of that how much money do you have to pay for that if you if you don’t? Right? And, you know, for me, it’s like, this is just where the industry is heading. I I truly think automation is becoming more and more I don’t wanna call it a threat because I I don’t think you can, automate the entire experience. I still think that there’s going to be a massive void of opportunity for people who actually know what they’re doing, who can leverage technology though to go in there and grow and scale their business with a customer.

James Lemon [00:24:38]:
Absolutely. I mean, like, yeah. A shipment picks up, delivers, no problems. Yeah. You can automate that all day long. But what happens when that’s the truck’s gonna be late or that truck gets in an accident? The algorithm doesn’t know how to solve for that. It can’t it can’t be on the phone with your customers saying, hey. I got it.

James Lemon [00:24:59]:
I’m working on it. I’m getting this taken care of. I we’re getting the tow truck to come in, pick up your freight, and get it to the next place. You can’t you can’t automate that. And that’s why you want AI and all this new fancy stuff. It’s never gonna replace Yeah. The broker, but the broker who knows how to leverage AI is gonna replace the broker who doesn’t know how to do anything with AI.

Chris Jolly [00:25:23]:
And I think that that because, like, inevitably, it’s gonna get to the point, James, where it’s like, hey. We like you, but you don’t have any of this other stuff. And these other brokers, we love them too, and they have all of these, you know, fancy toys that we all wanna talk about. And because at the end of the day, it’s, like, it it’s going to be a business decision. Right? Because it’s like I think that, you know, there’s a failure or an arrogance of a lot of people out there in the brokerage world who don’t understand that shippers, regardless if they love you or not, are going to make the decision that’s best for their business. And, you know, I’ve lost customers for a lot of reasons out there. Oh, some of them were my fault that I was doing that, but there’s also been decisions that were made where they come in. They they bring in a new team of people.

Chris Jolly [00:26:12]:
They wipe out their entire network, and then you you’re out. You don’t have any freight. And then you’re looking there, and then now, like, that’s eventually what it’s gonna get to, though, where it’s gonna be like, hey. I love working with you, but unless you invest in this, I can’t work with you anymore because my leadership at, you know, the shipper organization is saying that the the broker has to have x, y, and z. And if they don’t, they will not have access to my freight anymore. It doesn’t matter how much they love you. It’s that it it eventually is going to come down to a dollar and cents perspective where they’re gonna look at the cost of transaction of every time they have to send you a shipment as a broker. Because that’s what I don’t think a lot of brokers think about is is that it costs the shipper money to send you freight.

Chris Jolly [00:26:53]:
Right? And it and it usually comes in the time of that it takes to actually tender you a shipment.

James Lemon [00:26:58]:
Yep. And I mean yeah. There’s all those hidden costs that I mean, you don’t think about once it’s set up, you don’t think about the fact that EDI, the van has a cost. You don’t think about any of those things, but the shipper’s thinking about those things. And if you’re maybe you haven’t made the move over to API connections yet, and you’re still on EDI. EDI is expensive.

Chris Jolly [00:27:21]:
Yes.

James Lemon [00:27:22]:
And so if you’ve invested in an API and so you have broker x who is only on EDI and you broker y who’s on API, which costs the shipper, It might not be a lot, but it’s gonna be a little bit cheaper and that maybe that factors into their decision where your rates are the same, but your rates aren’t actually the same because that transaction with broker x is gonna cost more than that transaction with broker y.

Chris Jolly [00:27:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. Dude, there’s there’s so many different variables out there. And and, again, like, you you people only know what they know. But, like, to me, this is this is one of those things where, you know, I I truly think that, you know, everybody wants to talk about the market shift. Right? Like, when’s the market gonna shift? When’s the market gonna shift? I don’t think a lot of people actually understand that the market is not going to be easy. It like, the the way that this is going to head, inevitably, transportation costs are going to increase. Carriers are gonna love it because they’re gonna start making more money, but their overhead isn’t gonna necessarily go down for for their stuff.

Chris Jolly [00:28:22]:
So they might get a little bit of, you know, breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s a lot of brokers out here who I think are celebrating in a market shift that I don’t under I don’t think that they’ve actually worked in an alternative market. Right? Because, like, realistically, man, the last 3 years have been easy for freight brokers. It has been very easy. 2023 was challenging from a business development standpoint because it’s been easy. Right? Like, everyone was good with their current network. I think that that’s, like, the number one response that, I’ve heard is, hey. We’re good with our current network because good enough is the biggest enemy out there to a freight market. And if you haven’t been prospecting over these last 15 to 18 months, you’re not just gonna magically turn it on.

Chris Jolly [00:29:04]:
Like, the individuals who have been heavily prospecting, there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities this year from a new business development standpoint. And you gotta ask yourself in those moments, though, because this is when all of those customer requirements are gonna start coming to light. Because you know what? They may not have been responding to your outreaches right now, but they’re gonna respond because they’re gonna be in a tough situation. And where are you gonna be? And I want people to think about this, honestly. Where how are you gonna handle it if a customer comes to you that you’ve been prospecting for the last 15 months? You’re not developing a ton of business, and they need a half a $1,000,000 in cargo to move their freight. How are you gonna handle that? Right? Like, that’s a very real conversation that is going to happen out there. Fortunately, I’m covered in that situation because, you know, with SPI, we’re we’re we’re good there. But that that’s something that I fear for a lot of people out there, James.

Chris Jolly [00:29:55]:
I I truly do because those opportunities are gonna come, but they’re gonna come with a price.

James Lemon [00:30:00]:
Absolutely. They’re gonna come with a price, and they’re gonna come with some things that you might have to do that you aren’t thinking about right now. I mean, the technology the the technological revolution has automate or hit a lot of industries, but it’s just starting to hit transportation. I mean, you’ve seen if you’ve been going to any of the transportation conferences over the last 3 to 4 years, it’s shifted from industry stuff to technology. They’re almost all becoming mini technology conferences because there is so much new stuff coming out every year. All these new things coming up and it’s are you going to accept them and and implement them in your own business? Or are you gonna let somebody else do it and you get left behind?

Chris Jolly [00:30:51]:
Yeah. No. And and it’s true. Right? And and I think that there’s there’s so much of that that is going on, and, you know, it it’s I think, you know, I I will say this. I don’t wanna ever, like, sound like I’m fearmongering. Rest assured, the fundamentals of this industry are are probably never gonna change. At least I think that they’re never gonna change. You never know, though.

Chris Jolly [00:31:10]:
But I I I truly think that if, you know, the you need to be constantly looking ahead. And that is something that I don’t I think a lot of people are more reactive than proactive in in their approach because, you know, it’s like, you you go back to, you know, look at the Blockbuster example. They never thought that their model was gonna go away until it did. And then how many meetings did they have about this prior and there was indecisiveness in there that said this will never happen, this will never happen. Same thing with so many different things, but the it’s it’s already here in freight. Right? And I think that if you’re not investing in technology, if you’re not looking at this from a business perspective right now, I don’t wanna hope that you go out of anybody goes out of business, but people are gonna have a very challenging time here. A very challenging time. How are you guys assessing technology, though? Because I’m assuming you guys get no less than 8 1,000 solicitations a day about

James Lemon [00:32:08]:
That that’s half my half my inbox is just junk mail, people trying to sell me stuff.

Chris Jolly [00:32:13]:
How do you assess, though? Like, what is that why you guys invest in going to as many conferences as you guys do? Is is you want that note you guys wanna see it for yourself and and see Absolutely.

James Lemon [00:32:23]:
Absolutely. You we we go because, I mean, a, we wanna keep up on everything that’s happening in the industry. But, yeah, we wanna like, having somebody we get cold calls about technology all the time. And you don’t know which ones to say yes to, which ones to say no to, and you there’s literally not enough time in the day to say yes to all of them. Yeah. So when you go to these conferences, it gives you the chance to actually see the products in real life and do a quick 5 minute assessment as you’re walking by the a booth. You can look at their thing and be like, is this something that could work for us? Is this something that won’t work for us? Is this something I need to learn a little bit more about? And we can make that assessment in a very quick manner rather than having to go through the whole sales pitch and listening to 15 minutes of back and forth before you actually get into anything about the actual product.

Chris Jolly [00:33:14]:
How important is it from a decision standpoint that when you’re looking at technology, the people who have created that product have worked in transportation before?

James Lemon [00:33:26]:
Alright. I’d say it factors in in the sense that you wanna make sure that it fits how the systems actually work. Mhmm. Because a lot of the times, you’ll have people who build something who have never been in transportation, and they think it should work this way, but that’s not how transportation works. Transportation works in a different cycle, and getting those two things to meet in the middle can sometimes be hard. So it definitely factors in, but I wouldn’t say it would ever exclude Yeah. Anything from our decision making because, hey, there there’s new fresh eyes coming into this industry every day.

Chris Jolly [00:34:08]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:34:09]:
And, I mean, the way things were 15, 20 years ago are not the way things are. And also getting that fresh look at the industry can be a very beneficial thing.

Chris Jolly [00:34:19]:
Oh, James, I’m right there with you, man. I think some of these people like, obviously, industry experience and and having that frontline, you know, fundamental knowledge is great. But at the end of the day, man, I I’m a firm believer in this change. Sometimes a fresh perspective is the best perspective. And, you know, because everybody gets into their routines. Right? Like, I think the biggest enemy out there in businesses is this is the way we’ve always done things. And you should be looking at innovating. You should be looking at how do we invest in into new ways of doing things that are gonna bring optimal results and more growth opportunities to to the agent network and into the people that are out there.

Chris Jolly [00:34:55]:
Right? Because it’s like, I’ve never met one person who’s like, hey. I’m I’m really planning on making less money. You know? And I I think that if you’re gonna go out there and look into, you know, any of these you know, the agent world at all is is you need to look at their what is their tech stack look like? How how open are they in showing you what their systems look like, what their capabilities are, and everything else? Because it’s like, if you’re gonna go out there and do this because, like, the agent model isn’t new. Right? Like but but there are some just like with everything, there are some very, very good agent models, and then there’s some very, very smoke and mirror agent models that are out there. And, you know, I just talk to a lot of people. I’ve heard the good and the bad and the ugly of everything that’s out there. But, you know, again, I I can say this for certain. You guys do not hold back on investing and giving your agents the best tools to succeed without hesitation.

James Lemon [00:35:52]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, change change can be scary. Change can be it can be risky because you don’t know, like, you can invest. I mean, we’ve had it on our ourselves. We’ve invested in technologies that have failed.

Chris Jolly [00:36:05]:
Mhmm.

James Lemon [00:36:05]:
And it’s cost us a lot of money. But if you’re not willing to take that risk, you’re just not gonna grow because you need to be willing to, like you said, innovate, to get better, to do things differently, to do things better because that’ll help to differentiate you with your customers.

Chris Jolly [00:36:25]:
Yeah. It’s, you know, chain I mean, it is. Right? Change is scary. I mean, I remember when we, back at a brokerage I used to work for when I first started, like, we had switched TMSs because they built a proprietary TMS, and you literally would have thought that they dropped a nuclear bomb in the vicinity and that everyone was gonna die within 3 hours because, man, there was so much. But then it’s like, I think, like, keeping an open mind with a lot of the technology and the changes that are out there are are pretty crucial. Because once you get into it and then you realize, like, oh, it I was spending so much more time doing data entry. Right? Or, you know, posting a load. I have to go to this program and then that program and everything else, and then, oh, bam.

Chris Jolly [00:37:07]:
Now we have a TMS where you can post it directly from the TMS and everything else. Like, it’s just more of, like, the uncomfortable portion of you not knowing. But I think once most people kinda get into their routine, they’re I’m assuming the positive the feedback is unwaveringly positive at at that point when everybody’s like, hey. It it it’s literally saving me 30 minutes a day on my daily tasks.

James Lemon [00:37:29]:
I mean, you’re always gonna have those holdouts who they change just for the fact that they wanna hate something. Yeah. But but in the end, yeah. Like, you don’t realize how much time you’re spending doing things that there are things that are out there that you can invest in. And a lot of the times, it doesn’t cost a lot of money. Yeah. But it’s just like turning on this widget or turning on this option in your TMS that can save you maybe it’s only 5 minutes a day, but 5 minutes a day every day adds up really quickly.

Chris Jolly [00:38:00]:
No. It it does. Right? I think lost productivity is the biggest line item on most people’s balance sheets that it’s really hard to equate. Right? Like, how I mean, I know that there’s some people out there who think that they can, you know, put an accurate guesstimate that’s out there, but it’s just like, just think about that in in in perspective. Is it’s like, if you’re 10 minutes a day, that’s, like, 2 phone calls that you could make. Right? And that’s now that’s one other person or 2 other people that you’re not speaking to, and then that opportunity goes to somebody else. Like, I think, like, you need to be in an environment where you are I’m always like, I wanna be 95% automated because 95% of my day as a broker is automated. Right? It should be automated.

Chris Jolly [00:38:39]:
But when it comes down to the customer experience and the carrier experience and talking to an actual human being and dealing with those issues that you’re talking about, that to me should never be automated because they need to feel how much I care. Really, when it boils down to it, they need to feel how much I care. And, you know, and again, and when you’re going out there and and really assessing who do you wanna work with and everything else, was what what what does that look like? We know from an infrastructure of your business because that’s what an agency is. You are a business. You have an actual company. Your brand is out there. Whether you’re a, you know, you’re you own your own freight brokerage or you’re an agent for SPI Logistics, your brand is transferable. People will always remember how you were to work with whether, you know, wherever you were working for at the time.

James Lemon [00:39:24]:
No. I mean, we’re we’re talking a lot about technology, but in the end, freight brokerage is always going to be a relationship business.

Chris Jolly [00:39:32]:
Yes.

James Lemon [00:39:32]:
And if you can have all the tech in the world, but if you don’t have the people behind behind it who can actually have a good relationship with the customer, you’re not gonna have a broker.

Chris Jolly [00:39:43]:
Yeah. And and another thing too is this freight brokerage is you it is very capital intensive. Right? Business is very capital intensive, and it’s one of those things that, you know, you think that, oh, all I need is a computer and a phone. And, you know, fundamentally, that that is all you need, but you need to be able to front 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of dollars every single month that’s out there. And, you know, if it it’s it’s one of those things, like, you’re you’re always one bad transaction away from from potentially losing everything in business. And I know that there’s some steps that you take in place, but, you know, you need to look at that too. Are you with somebody who is able to front a $100,000 a month to one customer in in in freight. Right? In freight spend.

Chris Jolly [00:40:28]:
Because that you know, like, what there there’s those different level customers out there where you’re gonna get to a point where they will only work with you if you can extend them x amount of credit. That that does exist out there. And, you know, to me, it’s like there’s there’s never been a hesitation. Anytime I’ve had to come to client care about anything with that, they’re always like, yep. We got you. Yep. We got you. Yep.

Chris Jolly [00:40:50]:
We’re gonna do that. It checks out. And to because to me, it’s like, do you wanna be pigeonholed as well too?

James Lemon [00:40:57]:
Right? Mhmm. Well, I mean, it that’s interesting that you say that because, like, when you start dealing with the bigger and bigger shippers, a lot of them, they’re not paying in that 30 days.

Chris Jolly [00:41:07]:
Yeah.

James Lemon [00:41:08]:
They run they’re they’re big, and they get to dictate what their terms are. They’re net 60, net 90. But guess what? We still pay our carriers net 30. We don’t it doesn’t matter what what freight they’re hauling. What our guarantee to our carriers is we’ll pay you net 30. So like you said, we’re now fronting. If it’s a net 60 day, we’re now fronting a whole month’s worth of business. Net 90 days, we’re fronting 2 months worth of business.

James Lemon [00:41:34]:
We’re not passing that extra cost on to our agents. That’s just that’s just a part of doing business, and that’s one of the services that we offer.

Chris Jolly [00:41:42]:
That right there, alone in itself, James, is is one of those things, man, where it’s like that you guys take on the financial burden. Because that’s, I mean, that’s really what it is, man. When you’re talking about net 90 and you’re paying your carriers within 30 days and the agents getting paid on top of that as well. Right? Like, that that that’s a big financial risk that goes on out there, and you guys take it with ease. Right? Like, I love Friday mornings. Why is that? Rec deposits hitting every Friday

James Lemon [00:42:11]:
Absolutely.

Chris Jolly [00:42:12]:
No matter what without hesitation.

James Lemon [00:42:15]:
Absolutely. We yep. We’re we’re paying our commissions the next week. You get yourself in by this Friday. You’re getting paid next Friday. Doesn’t matter what the terms are on your customer. Doesn’t matter any of that. It’s just we’re paying you.

James Lemon [00:42:28]:
We’re paying your carriers. We’re making sure that we have that a rating on Truckstop. We’re making sure our net days to pay is 30 so that carriers don’t say no to you. Carriers are gonna say yes because they know they haul an SPI load. They’re gonna get paid.

Chris Jolly [00:42:41]:
I would love to know the stats, James, because, yes, if we get everything closed out, we get paid the next Friday no matter what without hesitation. I wonder how many w two employees out there are not paid commission until the customer pays. I would love blue. I would love to see

James Lemon [00:43:00]:
it. It’s it’s and there’s lots of I mean, there’s other agency models where they that that is a stipulation where they don’t pay commissions until they get paid by the customer. And I mean, that’s not how we do business. That’s not how we wanna do business because in the end, this is a partnership. We’re taking risks. You’re taking a risk by being a part of our network. And so we wanna share in that risk together, and we wanna be the best brokerage out.

Chris Jolly [00:43:29]:
I you will always argue that we are the best brokerage out there, frankly, at the end of the day. And

James Lemon [00:43:34]:
And that’s what we’re striving for.

Chris Jolly [00:43:36]:
You know? And there’s no doubt in my mind that you guys are very agent first. Very agent first, giving us the best tools to succeed. And I know that that is a major part of why we’ve been able to get up kinda and running at the level that we did, and the supports there. Right. And I really, really, really want to push that support there when you need it because developing a business is hard. When you have no customers and you’re coming in from a completely cold perspective, it takes time. And knowing that the infrastructure of a very large corporation is behind you, you can go out there and operate, and you have complete autonomy to run your business the way that you see fit. Still, you have the partnerships behind you, and you’re literally one phone call away. Do you have any questions? And again, I cannot stress this enough. If you have any questions at all and you reach out to client care, it doesn’t matter when it is, weekends, whatever, people are gonna respond, and they’re gonna have answers for you so you can deliver that high-quality service to your customers.

Chris Jolly [00:44:39]:
Because inevitably, that’s all that matters in your customer’s eyes. Are you fixing things? Are you making stuff happen for them? And are you easy to work with? And if you can check all of those three things off, you’re gonna be very, very successful out there. So with that being said, James, I wanna appreciate your time, man. Like, dude, we’re we kinda blew through this here really quick. And, you know, I I just I can’t appreciate I can’t say thank you enough for the belief in what I’m doing from a media perspective, but also been building up the, you know, my agency and everything, man. So thank you so much for that. And how does anybody reach out to you, man, if they wanna find out more?

James Lemon [00:45:13]:
Anybody wants to have any questions or have a conversation, they can reach me by email. My email is jlemon@SPI3pl.com.

Chris Jolly [00:45:21]:
Perfect. I know you made it this far in the episode, but if you did and you’re not subscribed, do your boy a solid. Subscribe and share this out there because at the end of the day, this is how we reach more people. But most importantly, it’s how we help more people. It’s because if you saw value, your network’s gonna see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys, and we’ll be talking to you soon.

Trey Griggs [00:00:11]:
Hey, Robert. How are you doing?

Robert Kowton [00:00:14]:
Good morning, Trey. How are you?

Trey Griggs [00:00:16]:
It’s good to have you on the show, and this is a great walk-up song, my friend.

Robert Kowton [00:00:21]:
Great stuff.

Trey Griggs [00:00:22]:
I need to let it play for just a little bit, you know. And we will get to Margaritaville later, but it’s always good. And I’ll

Robert Kowton [00:00:27]:
Let it be as smooth as confusing. Smooth in. Right?

Trey Griggs [00:00:29]:
That’s right. That’s right. It’s such a casual song. Such a guitar player? Are you a musician? Do you like that kind of thing, or is this just a just one of your

Robert Kowton [00:00:35]:
My favourite songs are music, and I wish I could play a guitar like yours. I have an uncle who’s very musically talented, but I’m two-left feet when it comes to music. But as far as loving music and its varieties, I’m all for it.

Trey Griggs [00:00:50]:
Well, you enjoy great music, and that’s what matters. And so, thanks for picking that song. That was a great song. And thanks for being on the show. Before we get started, I want to ask you a quick question. Are you a coffee drinker? Do you want a coffee mug? Or are you a water bottle drinker? Do you like water? Which one would you prefer? We’re going to send you one today for me on the show.

Robert Kowton [00:01:06]:
I’m both. You can go with the jeez. That’s a really tough one. I’ll go for coffee.

Trey Griggs [00:01:11]:
Coffee? Or we’ll surprise you and send you both. You never know. But we’ll get one of these out to you today. We appreciate you being on the show today and taking some time to talk a little bit about your expertise. I do have a fun fact about you. We’re gonna start with this. You recently purchased a gravel bike in October for adventure riding, and you’ve been doing this for quite a long time. How’d you get into that?

Robert Kowton [00:01:28]:
Cycling, I used to be a hockey player. I’m in Canada, so most of us play hockey. I played hockey up to about the age of 16, so kind of a higher level hockey, and I kept dislocating my shoulder. And I realized that going, I wasn’t gonna become an NHL player. Right? So I ended up departing, and through my sister, in fact, she had me volunteer at a triathlon. And I used my old mountain bike, a heavy-duty mountain bike out of triathlon. That inspired me, and I got a road bike, which led me to a race team. And. Through a fellow in my community, the Anguero family’s sons, Alex and Paul, have both been to the Commonwealth Games. They were both tracks.

Robert Kowton [00:02:08]:
Like, they’re high-end cyclists. Through that, I got connected to Juventus Cycling in Edmonton. I spent many fantastic years cycling around BC, Alberta, British Columbia, and Alberta, racing and having a lot of fun. It just really taught me a lot about myself and the community. And then, you know, wife, kids, life gets busy. I SPIll bike, but not as much. Then my neighbour reinspired me, and so I started; I ended up getting a newer version of a road bike a few years ago, back in 2017. I still have my original race bike built by Bob Townsend, but I bought another road bike. And then this year, I ended up pointing into gravel because I wanna stay off the highways.

Robert Kowton [00:02:48]:
I can’t trust the road the drivers as they used to be. So, wanna stay off the roads, and a gravel bike is that perfect mix between not. I don’t wanna be a crazy mountain biker flying down hills. So this gives me that mix they call mixed train riding. So you can do a little bit of road, a little bit of gravel, a little bit of singletrack, and have fun.

Trey Griggs [00:03:07]:
Yeah. I’m still thinking about a mountain bike and a triathlon. That’s just double the work. That’s probably a little

Robert Kowton [00:03:11]:
It was.

Trey Griggs [00:03:12]:
A little harder than when I was young.

Robert Kowton [00:03:13]:
I was pretty young. I was 15 or 15 years old or 14 years old. Just happy to

Trey Griggs [00:03:17]:
Be in the race. That’s right. Just happy to be in the race. You know, I looked up what a gravel bike is, and essentially, it’s almost like taking a road bike, listen-speed speed and putting a front suspension on it, and somewhat kinda like mountain bike tires. Little

Robert Kowton [00:03:28]:
Bit of a throttle. New. That’s new. It’s more that the frame is a little bit more beefier than a road bike. The terminology here in 2024 is that they’re built more slack than a road bike. If I showed you my road and gravel bike, you’d see the angles, and the slackness allows you to go down trails. It’s a little more comfortable ride, not as aggressive. So it’s, yeah, very intereSPIng, very intereSPIng.

Trey Griggs [00:03:53]:
Yeah. And I’m with you. I don’t I don’t ride bikes, but I like to run. When I do, I prefer a trail over riding on the road. Not so much for the cars, maybe for the knees, what it does to my knees. But at the same point, it’s much; I think it’s more enjoyable to kinda be out there on, you know, on a trail or on the gravel at so much.

Robert Kowton [00:04:07]:
I’m a runner as well.

Trey Griggs [00:04:08]:
Run. Yep.

Robert Kowton [00:04:08]:
Yeah. Very cool. Appreciate that. Yeah.

Trey Griggs [00:04:10]:
Yeah. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned in some of these endurance races, and how has that helped you in your career?

Robert Kowton [00:04:18]:
I’m gonna say I wouldn’t say I’m a super endurance racer, but I would say that, in fact

Trey Griggs [00:04:21]:
More than most.

Robert Kowton [00:04:22]:
I when I jumped into when I when I jumped into the world of freight brokering, I had started, and I started from ground 0 with no customers. And I remember one day, in fact, I was out for a run, and I’m like, I just had this vision, and I should be in Vancouver. And this was before I joined SPI Logistics. I’ve only been working with two brokerages. And when I started in the freight industry in 20 2008, and then I joined SPI in 2016. But in the summers, around 2,008, I was running, and I thought I should be in Vancouver. So I went out there, and I set out, and I met a bunch of customers. I had some set appointments and some open appointments.

Robert Kowton [00:05:00]:
Through that, I met people. In fact, I’ve been servicing two of the customers out there since that visit—since 2008.

Trey Griggs [00:05:09]:
Wow. That’s incredible. And I just had a vision for going to Vancouver. Now I can understand that. I’ve been to Vancouver. Believe it or not, I honeymooned there. I love that city. Where were you before that? Where did you start out?

Robert Kowton [00:05:19]:
So, basically, I went to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. My goal was, actually, to go focus on facility management or tourism was my angle because I have a degree in recreation administration from the University of Alberta. And I worked in that a little bit because prior to that, I was a lifeguard. I worked for playgrounds as a playground leader, lifeguard, and swim instructor. And, so I went, and I came out working at Grant MacEwan College. I was their kind of facility coordinator, booking space and such, and I that was great being at Grant McEwen College. And then a friend from university says, hey. I’m at Coca-Cola, and that’s great, and I think you’d be a great fit.

Robert Kowton [00:05:53]:
Well, one thing led to another. Spent from 1998 to 2008 at Coca-Cola doing account management district sales and eventually became a district sales manager for the last five years. So I had a team I managed, overlooked the bulk channel, and then I made the big switch to the freight world, where I started from ground 0. But I took that, my salesmanship, and my customer focus into that. Started from nothing and slowly built up. I had a great mentor when I started in 2008 at the brokerage where I was, and then, things changed in 2016 when I had to make a change, and I was looking for a company that had cross-border support. I needed LTL support. I was doing intermodal, full truckload, and various other things. I’m a generalist.

Robert Kowton [00:06:36]:
I guess you’d say many brokerage agents are very mode-specific, just reefer, just flatbed, but I focus more on customers. I looked at it from the standpoint that I could service the customer in various ways; that was my goal. And so, came across SPI logistics, and it was a perfect fit. And literally, within, it was January 6th or 8th or something. It was right at the very beginning of January. And within two days, we went through a list of my customers to verify I knew other agents had them. And within two days, I was up and running and didn’t miss a beat. And Wow.

Trey Griggs [00:07:10]:
That’s incredible. We’re going to dig into that here in just a little bit, but I have a question now. Knowing that you worked at Coca-Cola, I’ve been wondering this forever. Is there a difference between Diet Coke and Coke 0? The ingredients look the exact same on the cans.

Robert Kowton [00:07:23]:
As far as I didn’t regard to the chemical, I can tell you it’s a different sugar. Take a different instead of Diet Coke, which has aspartame; the Coke 0 is something different, and that’s what gives it a different taste. Because you have the diet, then you have hardcore Diet Coke drinkers,

Trey Griggs [00:07:38]:
And My wife the Coke 0 100%.

Robert Kowton [00:07:40]:
The Coke Zeros tasted a little different because, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coke 0 was to some people who liked Coca-Cola but wanted something different but didn’t like the diet Coke, and that’s when they came up with Coca-Cola 0, and that was that perfect hybrid.

Trey Griggs [00:07:54]:
Yeah, because it seemed like the ingredients were almost the exact same. I could never figure out the difference, but my wife is pretty strict about it. She’s like diet Coke and nothing else. And Yeah, I tend to move around a little bit. So, good to know.

Trey Griggs [00:08:04]:
Alright. So, let’s get back to what you’re talking about. You know, being a generalist definitely makes it exciting because you you get to do a lot of different things throughout the day. I tend to be a generalist about things as well, and so I can appreciate that. So when you came over to SPI, you were servicing customers in many different ways. What made it a perfect fit working with SPI?

Robert Kowton [00:08:22]:
It was the fact that when I called and had a conversation, at the time, it was Greg. It was Greg, and he was the kind of VP of operations at that time, Greg Davenport. And the conversation was perfect. When I asked if you had this, Yes. Do you have that? Yes. Do you have this? Yes. He asked me questions, and then we went through the process of reviewing our customers. And they were that was in, well, obviously, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the LTL, and that was a big part of my business, and they had everything I needed.

Robert Kowton [00:08:53]:
They had cross-border support, dual currencies, and all the software that I needed. It was just a perfect fit.

Trey Griggs [00:08:59]:
Yeah. It’s nice when you find a home like that where it’s just plug-and-play. You don’t have to do much. It just enhances what you’re currently doing and makes it even easier. It always makes it a little bit,

Robert Kowton [00:09:08]:
A problem. The other main thing was the fact that they were very strong with their cross-border freight and having the systems in place, and that I needed because I did that was the bane of my business is cross border, is internal Canada and cross border freight. And so they had the mixture of all of that that gave me the opportunity. I can move my customers’ freight within Canada, within the United States, and across the border. So it’s it’s a full 360 opportunity.

Trey Griggs [00:09:32]:
Yeah. And the dual currency is a big thing too because, you know, many brokerages in the states don’t have some of those things in play. Absolutely. Cross border to Canada or cross border to Mexico. And so just having that in play is helpful as well. So, let’s talk about LTL freight. Let’s talk about, you know, some of the differences between the USA, and Canada, and cross-border complexities. What is it about that, kinda get you I know you have a lot of interest in LTL and you have a lot of business in LTL.

Trey Griggs [00:09:56]:
What is it about that kinda get you excited?

Robert Kowton [00:09:59]:
Well, I guess a lot of, as I mentioned, a lot of broker agents tend to be mode like, when I use the word mode, reefer, flatbed, heavy haul, drive in specific, and some agents are actually mode and lane driven where they only focus on drive and freight between Chicago and Texas and Chicago anything between Chicago and Texas, that’s, like, their forte. Right? That’s their thing. And if someone calls them about something else, they kinda have the blinders on, and they’re not interested. As I mentioned, my thought was when I came into this industry of freight brokering, I realized, you know, I wanted it to be somewhat recession-proof, so I didn’t go with the traditional, I’m just gonna go after the grocery distributors. I thought, well, what if one industry goes down? I need another one to offset. And it’s worked out for me because, well, I’ve been doing it since 2008, and I have the gamut from, you know, things related to construction all the way to frozen. I’ve got the gamut of there, and they always seem like when one slows down, another one picks up, and it’s this you kind of ride I’ve been riding that roller coaster of having that variety. And so tying in LTL, what it can do first and foremost is you can your customer can now really utilize you as it gets well, one, it’s gonna get you a deeper relationship with the customer.

Robert Kowton [00:11:16]:
So when I give a simple example rather than a long story, this can lead to others. So you’re you’re doing truckload freight for a customer. You deliver the last load. 2 days later, you get a call saying they got a call. When they received the load, the consignee, one of the pals, had the wrong product, the wrong SKU, or something wrong. It got picked up incorrectly by their warehouse. That customer is not planning to order another truckload for at least 2 weeks. Now they got this dealing, but they’re short one pallet.

Robert Kowton [00:11:45]:
So instead of the customer having to figure out how to do this, they can just call you up and saying, hey, we have this one pallet. We need to ship 1 pallet. And then we need to pick up the other pallet and return it. That’s that right there in itself. The second example I can give the benefits of having the knowledge and the skill set to offer LTL service to your customers, project freight. So again, because I’m customer focused, if a customer is in construction and they’re going to be building something or they’re they’re taking on a contract. They’re gonna build something, whether it’s a house, a hospital, or whatever. Well, sometimes they might you might be sending truckloads of a variety of equipment, bobcats and tools, flatbeds of that, but you may also be shipping, you know, a truckload of insulation or pallets of brick or something like that.

Robert Kowton [00:12:28]:
But meanwhile, they may need to order some widgets and parts, 1 pallet here, 1 pallet there, and then they bring it to the yard, put it all together. Because you have that LTL ability, you can do that. 3rd way I can explain that’s a benefit you can do it. So if you’re shipping a variety of things with your customers, like I have, I have customers that ship out of, say, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin. Sometimes when the stars align, and it happens more often than you think, they’ll say I got 2 skids here, 1 skid there. Sometimes it’s better I just ship each one separately. Sometimes I pick up the 2 from here, 2 from there, bring them into, say, Toronto, and then I put them on Intermodal rail and ship it as a half a container. So, being creative and having these modes that you have the skill set for allows that your customer can totally rely on you to help their supply chain.

Trey Griggs [00:13:19]:
Yeah. I love that. And I love the fact that you like, you’re always wanting to learn, it sounds like. You want to figure out these problems and not just have, like, the same problem every day to figure out, but actually learn some new problems and work with customers.

Robert Kowton [00:13:29]:
The bean of this business. Never stop learning.

Trey Griggs [00:13:31]:
Yeah. I love it. And, you know, I I started my career at DAT in Portland and, you know, DAT really, has their load board for the United States, but then there’s, there’s there’s Loadlinkup in Canada, which is kind of the sister company for that. I know at that point that there’s quite a few differences between Canadian freight and, freight here in the United States. Does that from an LTL perspective, how would you kind of categorize the difference between Canadian freight, you know, domestic freight here in the US and cross border, what the complexities are of that?

Robert Kowton [00:13:59]:
Well, I’ll touch on this, and then I’ll get on to the next. But bay the basic summary is if you’re taking an LTL freight, like, one pallet in Canada going from, say, Vancouver to Toronto or Montreal, and you’re taking one pallet from Houston, Texas to Chicago, and you’re doing the price calculations, number one difference is in Canada, the pricing structure is much simpler. It’s a cubic. It’s either actual weight or cubic weight, whichever is greater, pure and simple. So, carriers have a model of a minimum. They have a minimum charge, and then it goes up to 500. So if it’s less than that, you get the minimum or up somewhere between. And then what happens is it’s pretty simple.

Robert Kowton [00:14:38]:
Like, you see a chart, it’s going to be £500, £1,000, maybe 15, 2,000. Typically, it’s 5, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, and then 10,000. So basically, if the cubic weight, actual weight is whichever is greater, and we’ll talk a little bit, but we can dive into it, that’s how you get priced. Whereas in the United States, the pricing model is based off of the NMFC, National Motor Freight Classification System, and often those NMFCs is based on the description of the goods. And then when you open up that NMFC number, it might be density based. It could be description based. So you could have a density-based. So you have to know how to calculate the density, which will cross-reference the freight class.

Robert Kowton [00:15:15]:
So it takes a lot of work to get to that freight class. When someone says, Yeah, we ship a freight class 70, well, hang on a sec. We got to look into this. Just this just yesterday, I picked up a pallet that’s an MFC in Georgia. It has subclasses, but not based on density. It’s based on it’s a it was a valve and it’s based on is it aluminum or iron? There’s different in what it’s made of was the determining factor that determined the NMFC. So those are the that’s the simple answer.

Trey Griggs [00:15:43]:
This reminds me of our system of measurement here in the United States. We seems like we make it more complex than it needs to be. You know, we have our our measurements, you know, we got miles and feet and pounds and the rest of the world has, you know, meters, kilometres, and a lot of simpler, you know, units of measure. Why do you why do we make it so complicated, Robert? What’s the

Robert Kowton [00:16:02]:
Well, actually, Canada is can I have to say Canada is a bit messed up? You know why? Because we’re supposed to be all kilograms. Well, guess what? The price of hamburger is advertised on a pound basis. Really?

Trey Griggs [00:16:15]:
Oh, well, see, we’ve got a few things. We’ve got leaders for a few things, you know, like sodas and, you know, some of those types of things, but not a lot of things. And we have meters only for certain sports, unpopular sports like swimming. And

Robert Kowton [00:16:27]:
in theory, if you go to a job site and you’re working, you’re cutting wood most of the time. It’s not in millimetres and centimetres, which would be more accurate. But many times they say cut me a piece of wood at 7 3 eights.

Trey Griggs [00:16:39]:
Yeah. It’s crazy.

Robert Kowton [00:16:40]:
So we’re don’t

Trey Griggs [00:16:40]:
know what

Robert Kowton [00:16:40]:
that And if you go to the hardware store, you’re not ordering 1,000 millimetres of wood.

Trey Griggs [00:16:46]:
Yeah. See, that’s America’s bad influence on Canada. That’s what that is.

Robert Kowton [00:16:49]:
That’s right.

Trey Griggs [00:16:49]:
Where

Robert Kowton [00:16:51]:
we’re we’re a mishmash of both.

Trey Griggs [00:16:54]:
You got the international, you know, flare, which is way simpler, and then you’ve got us trying to work with us. And, oh, that’s, that’s hilarious. Yeah. The the the LTL classification system is is pretty archaic, and it seems like, why do we SPIll have this? Like, who has the stronghold? Why do we keep using it? But I think it’s that,

Robert Kowton [00:17:09]:
the way that they structure. So if I can kind of touch on one thing about LTL, because sometimes, say, if an someone who’s in the freight industry has seen this this podcast and is thinking, boy, that sounds like a great idea. I should I should really offer LTL freight. Hang on a second here. We gotta you gotta you gotta hold the horses for a second and and a couple things that I would bring up. With if you’re gonna enter your customers and you wanna try to provide service, a value-added services as of LTL freight, something to consider. Number 1, patience. LTL freight is not the kind of freight where you have a drive in load that picks up, say, a short haul that picks up on a Monday, delivers Wednesday, you’ve got the POD and it’s invoiced by Thursday or Friday morning.

Robert Kowton [00:17:53]:
That’s not happening with LTL. Even if it’s only a next day service, If everything’s right, sure. But often it takes several days for the, you know, the invoicing. And if there’s problems, it can take weeks. I just, I have a shipment from October that I’m going to finish this week because it had a claim finally. There are problems. So, one is the patience. Are you a patient? If you’re like, I just want to get the loads booked, delivered, invoiced, and moved on, then maybe LTL is not your forte.

Robert Kowton [00:18:19]:
It might be, but the next thing is willingness to learn. If you’re not willing to dive deep into the LTL organizational structure and the NMFCs and the freight calculations and the processes involved, if you’re not willing to get into the weeds of that, then it may or may not be a fit for you. The other thing to consider with LTL freight, it’s very competitive. So, it may not always be the highest dollar value. Right? But your percentage wise, if you’re making 15 or 10 or 15% on a truckload of $2,000, you might only you might be shipping a pallet that’s $200 and you may only put 40 or $50 profit, $60 profit, depends what it is. And so you’re so the dollar value may not look good, but really it looks like 26, 50, 40%, 30%. It can look good on a percentage ways, but dollar value. The other thing is the appreciation of the entire complexities of it because when you think about if you compare a truckload, like, right now, you and I could go out, create a trucking business tomorrow, hire 5, 6, 7 owner operators, both working we you and I could be working from our home.

Robert Kowton [00:19:31]:
We split the country. You dispatch these drivers, and I dispatch those ones, and we work from our homes. We have five trucks. We have no facilities. The drivers work from their homes, and they take the loads, and it’s all done. There’s no infrastructure there. There’s just you and Me; we’re doing everything.

Robert Kowton [00:19:46]:
We’re dealing with the brokers and all the paperwork. And as we grow, okay, maybe we add 1 or 2 people, but essentially it’s pretty darn simple. If you go to open up an LTL business and you want to be an LTL carrier, you’re buying a you have to have a warehouse at minimum. You’re going to need a bunch of trucks for the pickup and deliveries. You’re going to need dispatchers. You’re going to need a safety manager. You’re going to need customer service staff. You’re going to need someone to hire all these staff and manage all this.

Robert Kowton [00:20:09]:
So right from the hop, their their their investment is huge, but yet they have they’re expected in the marketplace to come out and provide low cost options and provide consistent daily service. So that is one thing. Like, you’re going to get one thing with LTL Freight is you’re going to get that consistency. You can pick up if it’s 1 to 5, 1 to 4 skids, you can literally call unless it’s a remote town where it’s only serviced certain days of the week. I have that history there. There’s a lot there. But generally, if you’re in major cities, you can pick you can dispatch every single day and get a truck. Sometimes, with those truckloads, you may or may not get a truck that same day and maybe the next day, but the LTL freight can be done daily.

Trey Griggs [00:20:49]:
Yeah. There’s reasons why we have hundreds of thousands of truckload carriers and only hundreds of common LTL carriers. It’s a hard game to get into. It’s a lot of complexities and, you know, infrastructure and networks that have been created over a long time. And so, it is it’s definitely a learning game. That’s for sure.

Robert Kowton [00:21:04]:
And I was gonna say that the the real thing that the other thing is there’s the whole thing about claims, but appreciating that there’s a claims process and there’s that as well. But I think the very the the best thing that LTL can do for you, if you’re willing to dive in and learn, is it will take your customer relationship level from, say, the kind of an entry level to a, you know, a risk kind of level. And it sorry. I would say to an excellence level, meaning because when you go into the LTL world, you have to become an educator and a consultant for your customer. You need to take the time to understand their how their warehouse works. You want it so that you learn their products, that you get to the point where if they have, you know, product ABC or a 20 and code a, d 20, and d sixties, all these different codes. And you know, when you can when your customer can call and say, yeah, we had a pal that’s gonna have, you know, 3 boxes of this, 4 boxes of that, and 3 boxes of this, and you know what it is, you can calculate and say, okay, that’s going to be a 48 by 48 by 64 pallet, and it’s going to weigh this much. When your customer, when you don’t, your customer doesn’t have to tell you all the weights.

Robert Kowton [00:22:14]:
I have that with customers. That is huge. And so, but part of that process SPIll is when you enter and venture into the world of LTL, you need to look at how are your customers’ freights. If their boxes always overhang the pallets because they always do truckloads, well, that’s not suitable because if boxes overhang up the footprint on the pallet, that ships at risk shipper’s risk and liability, which will lead to a claim. And then the customer is disappointed because you didn’t educate them that, well, yeah, it shipped out and there’s a claim, but we can’t put the claim through because your pallet wasn’t professionally packaged to withstand the rigours of LTL freight. So you have to be an educator. You have to teach them. If they’re only putting a little bit of wrap and they say, well, we want to do LTL.

Robert Kowton [00:22:53]:
Okay. How much is it going to cost to buy a band, a banding machine and band it? Alright. You got to educate them on this whole process. So, there’s that’s what it does. It just takes you to that next level with your customers.

Trey Griggs [00:23:04]:
Yeah. It creates a much stickier customer, and it has the potential to create a much stickier customer in that regard. Are you going to your customers’ warehouses to talk them through that? Do you do that through videoconferencing? How do you help educate your customers?

Robert Kowton [00:23:16]:
Well, a couple of ways. I can’t go to all mine because they’re I got customers all around US and Canada, but the ones I can, I do go, and if I go, I’m walking into there with my tape measure, never leave home without? I actually have a bag in that closet behind. That’s my PPE PPE bag. So when I go to my customer’s visits, I got a safety vest, I got a hard hat, I got steel-toe shoes, and I’ve got my, tape measure. And I’m when I go, I look. If I’m going to the warehouse, I come in prepared, and I’m measuring everything. I didn’t mean to ask. I just start measuring, and then I take pictures.

Robert Kowton [00:23:48]:
And if in doubt, I ask my customer to send me a picture and but I have to you have to find different ways, to get the information or you get it from the carrier. Or if I can, if the freight say the freight came from another city and it’s going to be passing, like, it’s going to be delivering to the city near me, I’ll go and find a way to get that, get pictures. I just try to gain insight however I can, the more I learn. And I’ll keep talking to my customer and say, hey. Do would you mind helping me get some information about your product so that as I learn, if I can research it, whatever I can do to gain that extra step to make myself differentiate. Because, right, my goal as a broker agent, whether it’s LTL, whatever mode, the ultimate goal of any broker agent is that when a customer says, we just won a project. We just won some big sales where we’re gonna ship we need to ship all this product. Right? Some sales rep sold something that they need to ship, and they’re in this conference meeting in a room, And when they say we need to ship, that the first thing that comes up is that Rob or Trey or whoever the agent is, that’s our person that we’re gonna rely on again.

Trey Griggs [00:24:50]:
That’s right. I love that.

Robert Kowton [00:24:51]:
That’s what you want.

Trey Griggs [00:24:52]:
Not your first rodeo. I’d love to see a picture of you with all your gear on out there just walking in, measuring. I can see you just taking over, taking control in there, and, and doing well, which I’m sure your customers really, really appreciate that. So that’s that’s awesome to hear. Alright. We gotta pause and play a little game. I’d like to have a little fun on the show. And, Robert, today, we are gonna play a little game of would you rather.

Robert Kowton [00:25:11]:
Oh.

Trey Griggs [00:25:17]:
Alright, Robert. The way this game works is we’re gonna put some, statements up on the screen, some some kinda, this or that type of thing. So would you rather do this or that? You gotta, you know, pick one and tell us why real quick, and then we’ll we’ll move on to the next one. The first one we have for you today is, would you rather be stuck in a romantic comedy with your worst enemy or in a horror horror movie with your best friend?

Robert Kowton [00:25:40]:
I’m gonna go with the horror movie with your best friend.

Trey Griggs [00:25:43]:
Do you like horror movies, or is it because of the best friend? It’s it’s just being with somebody.

Robert Kowton [00:25:47]:
I think I think someone I’d rather be with someone, that I can trust and talk about than my worst enemy, I guess.

Trey Griggs [00:25:55]:
It’d be more adventurous. That’s for sure. And I actually have a best friend who loves horror movies, so I think that would work out well for me. So I’m with you on this. I’m I’m going the same way. Horror movie with best friend, 100%. Alright. Next one.

Trey Griggs [00:26:05]:
Would you rather be able to speak every language in the world or be able to talk to animals?

Robert Kowton [00:26:10]:
Oh, wow.

Trey Griggs [00:26:11]:
That’s an interesting one.

Robert Kowton [00:26:13]:
That is. But you know what? The animals would be cool because I think they would have some deep thoughts to share with us humans that they could say sometimes how crazy we are. But I think when you if you’ve ever traveled, being able to speak languages is huge because you know what? There’s a lot of people around the world. We’re all the same. And the only sometimes that differentiates us is our language that we can’t communicate clearly. And having that ability to speak to people around the world would be huge.

Trey Griggs [00:26:35]:
So you’re on the practical side of every language, which certainly looks better in public. If you’re speaking to animals, people might think you’re weird. But if you could speak languages, people are like, wow. Look at that guy. He’s so smart.

Robert Kowton [00:26:45]:
Exactly. Exactly.

Trey Griggs [00:26:46]:
Go that route. Animals would be interesting, though. We agree with you that that would be interesting. Alright, round 3. Which one? Would you rather have a knife when you need a spoon or a spoon when you need a knife?

Robert Kowton [00:26:58]:
Spoon all day long.

Trey Griggs [00:26:59]:
Really? Oh, for sure.

Robert Kowton [00:27:01]:
I can cut lots with a spoon. I can dig things

Trey Griggs [00:27:03]:
If it’s if it’s sharp enough, maybe if it’s a plastic spoon, you’re done. I see. I I kinda go I got it the other way. I I think I can do anything with a knife because the opposite side of a knife is not sharp. So I could eat with that side if I

Robert Kowton [00:27:12]:
Oh, true. True. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. That’s good. Like, you can

Trey Griggs [00:27:15]:
do you have there are more possibilities with a knife to cut things, to beat. Sometimes a spoon

Robert Kowton [00:27:20]:
does. And it’s, like, easier to carry. It’s flat.

Trey Griggs [00:27:23]:
Could you cut a steak with a spoon? That would be interesting. I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I think I could eat cereal with a knife. I think. A little bit.

Robert Kowton [00:27:33]:
You’d be

Trey Griggs [00:27:33]:
A little bit.

Robert Kowton [00:27:33]:
Oh, that

Trey Griggs [00:27:34]:
That would be tough.

Robert Kowton [00:27:35]:
Oh, I see you make some funny videos. That would be a, a shorty that would be the the viral shorty of the day.

Trey Griggs [00:27:42]:
You know, I may have to do it this afternoon: make a little video of me eating, trying to eat cereal with a knife. I like where you’re going with that, Robert. Okay. Next one. Would you rather have to use shrimp-flavored toothpaste or deodorant that smells like cheese? Who’s coming up with these? Alright. Which one? Shrimp? I’m gonna

Robert Kowton [00:27:57]:
go with the shrimp-flavored toothpaste because at least you know what? It kinda seems exotic. Like, hey. This guy was eating shrimp. That seems

Trey Griggs [00:28:03]:
kinda true. And you can always wash it down with something else later. You can kinda get over it. Right? But cheese cheese deodorant, what is that? That’s nobody wants to smell like cheese. Yeah. I’m with you on that. That’s terrible. Alright.

Trey Griggs [00:28:13]:
Final round, Robert. Here we go. Almost done with this. Alright. Would you rather eat all your food with your hands or use utensils with only your nondominant hand? Oh, we we just talked about this yesterday with a friend of mine. Which would you rather do? Eat with your hands only or have to use your nondominant hand?

Robert Kowton [00:28:30]:
I think eat with my hands only. Just because I have I have a funky hand, my left hand that’s the nondominant. I it’s webbed, it’s smaller, and so it it’s just not Might not work.

Trey Griggs [00:28:40]:
Might not work.

Robert Kowton [00:28:40]:
Yep. It wouldn’t be it would work, but it’s just, yeah, I’d rather You

Trey Griggs [00:28:44]:
know, there’s something there’s something fun about eating with your hands too. Kinda something something enjoyable, especially if it’s something you can lick later. Like, Doritos are great because you get a little little extra afterwards. You know? Get a little extra bonus.

Robert Kowton [00:28:54]:
So Exactly.

Trey Griggs [00:28:55]:
I’m waiting on that. I think that’s a good one.

Robert Kowton [00:28:56]:
Too. It’s kinda primitive as well. Right?

Trey Griggs [00:28:58]:
So that’s right. That’s right. Well, Robert, thank you for playing. Would you rather? That was fun. I always enjoy having those conversations. And we have one more. We have a random question for the day. We always like to throw this out.

Trey Griggs [00:29:07]:
It’s just something kind of fun. So here’s our random question of the day: What would a world populated by clones of you be like? So the world is just all Roberts. What would that be like?

Robert Kowton [00:29:20]:
Oh, boy. My wife would sure have comments about that, I think.

Trey Griggs [00:29:23]:
A lot of cycling going on, probably. A lot of races. Everybody’s got

Robert Kowton [00:29:26]:
a bike. I I the only thing I guess I could say is I’m a pretty high-energy person, so I’d say that’s a positive.

Trey Griggs [00:29:31]:
It is.

Robert Kowton [00:29:32]:
Unfortunately, the world would not have a lot of music. I could, we could pretend that we would, we would think that we’re singing. But I guess you know what? I think I’m sounding really good if it’s all me. So if it’s all of us, we will all sound really good. But That’s right. To anyone else, it just wouldn’t be there. And then, you know what? I’m not a I love to research so that part’s good. I’m willing to dive into research, and I’m okay with math, but math is not my strong point.

Robert Kowton [00:29:57]:
So to to design a bridge and calculate a bridge could be a real there could be a lot of rivers without crossings. We’d have to use

Trey Griggs [00:30:02]:
It would be a problem.

Robert Kowton [00:30:03]:
That’s okay. I like to kayak and paddleboard. So the whole world would just have to kayak and paddleboard across rivers because I couldn’t build a bridge. So It’d

Trey Griggs [00:30:09]:
be a very natural world. I like it. I like I like your creativity with that. That’s that’s awesome. I love that. That’s so good. What a question. That’s a nice random question today.

Trey Griggs [00:30:18]:
Alright, Robert. So I have one more question to ask you about your work, and then we’ll get you out of here and get you on your way today. So, you know, you’ve been with SPI for a long time. What keeps you at SPI? What about working with the team at SPI that keeps you around?

Robert Kowton [00:30:31]:
The support. You know, you’ve got an accounts payable, accounts receivable team, and a client care team, and then you’ve got upper management, from Anita to Mark to, Joe, Mike. There’s Peter and then Mitch, the owner. If you need support in any capacity, whether you’re dealing with an issue or you have a huge prospect, if you need support, there’s support. And that includes the support of Anita in helping me hire people. I, to show the complexities of freight, of LTL freight, is I have a freight auditor that works for me that I hire. So 20 hours a week, that person’s there to help me keep on top of my LTL freight for tracking, tracing, and billing purposes, making it a little bit easier for SPI’s back end. And I try to be, you know, so that things match up and everything is and I’m dealing with all the complexities behind the scenes so that when it’s all said and done, it’s easy once it hits the back office.

Robert Kowton [00:31:31]:
And that’s just because of the nature of my business. I’m not saying that’s necessary for all agents, but it just works for my particular book of business. I think it works a little bit better. Yeah, I kind of agree with you. There’s a combination there.

Trey Griggs [00:31:42]:
I kinda agree with you. When I met the team at SPI, I could just tell that they love taking care of their agents. It’s a real passion for them, and they mean it. They’re not just saying it. They mean it. I got to speak for the support staff when I was up there. They are just phenomenal people. You know? And so it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show, Robert, and to talk about your experience with SPI.

Trey Griggs [00:31:58]:
Thanks for, you know, being so creative and having fun with us today. We’re gonna get you out of here with a little more Margaritaville. So great walk of song for that.

Robert Kowton [00:32:05]:
Isawa, kudos to you, and congratulations to you. You don’t talk about yourself a lot, but you have quite the, accolade of accomplishments in your career. And sometimes in our life, what we do one part, you talked about having to accomplish a sales career, but you were a teacher. And when you’re a teacher, you’re a salesperson. Right? You have to sell to the kids, and teachers, talk to your principals away, and you guys talk to parents. You’re always telling. And that’s led you to the success you’re having today. So congratulations.

Trey Griggs [00:32:33]:
I appreciate that. That’s very kind of you to say. You’re welcome on the show anytime, my friend. You have to have me back on the show. But thanks again for being on the show today. We’ll see you real soon.

Robert Kowton [00:32:40]:
Thanks so much.

Blythe Brumleve [00:00:11]:
Welcome into another episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI Logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Brimley. And speaking of SPI Logistics, We have one of the best people working at SPI with Anita Bassi. She is the VP of people and operations over at SPI. So we’re gonna be talking All about what makes for a successful freight agent program in 2024 and beyond. So, Anita, welcome.

Anita Bassi [00:00:40]:
Thank you. Excited to be here, kind of.

Blythe Brumleve [00:00:42]:
Now as we were just talking before the show, you you you mentioned that, You know, you hate doing podcasts. They’re, you know, they’re a little nerve wracking. I totally get that. So, let’s just start off with sort of your your job role and title. You you recently Upgraded. So it was, formerly client experience, but now it’s VP of operations too. So so tell us a little bit about What that day to day role looks like for you?

Anita Bassi [00:01:08]:
Yeah. In terms of operations, it’s exactly what you think. I’m handling the day to day operations of the organization. So my Team handles any issues that come in. So if there’s a carrier issue, a stolen load, an accident, or just an agent issue where, you know, they’re having Problems with their computers, the TMS, software. We’re the ones who are kind of coming in and troubleshooting, helping them, but we’re also taking the lead when it comes to Hostage loads, a carrier not being happy, any complaints coming in. So, you know, although I focus primarily on the agent side of things, we handle quite a bit of the operations, And that includes, like, carrier satisfaction in those relationships. So it just seems like a natural progression to change my title and role and really take on operations altogether.

Anita Bassi [00:01:54]:
So Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve [00:01:54]:
I think, anyone who’s who’s met you in person knows that you are just I I joked to Mike, Mike Mikalick who also works for SPI, he’s been a former guest on the show for anybody who’s listening. You may wanna check out those episodes as well. But I joked around to Mike that I was like, Anita scares the shit out of me because she’s so badass, and I don’t I was like, I have to make sure that I’m on my p’s and q’s when I’m around her. So this is if you if you’re a little nervous, then I’m a little nervous too because I was like, I gotta make sure this interview is right.

Anita Bassi [00:02:24]:
I feel like I’m harmless, but I get that sometimes. I’m like, I’m just like, you know, I’m like a big teddy bear because I look kind of, like, scary. I have that resting face. You know? But I’m actually quite friendly and nice. I’m very kind.

Blythe Brumleve [00:02:34]:
Yes. You you you definitely are, but you’re you’re also a a a woman in this industry that you want to impress. So I I I say that as, like, a full on, like I I, like, I just I wanna make I wanna make Anita proud because I feel like if I make Anita proud, then everybody else will be okay too. And so Let’s make sure that that, you know, we we we come with it. And

Anita Bassi [00:02:55]:
now Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve [00:02:55]:
What I thought was really interesting because I also told you, before we started that I was listening to your conversation, Trey Greggs of standing out show, which was a great interview and a conversation that that you guys had as well. But what I thought was really fascinating is that before you ever joined SPI, you grew up in the trucking industry. Your dad owned a trucking company. Is that correct?

Anita Bassi [00:03:17]:
Yes. Yes. He did. So he was a so he started off as a truck driver. Since I can remember, like, Probably as a toddler. So he was driving a truck like in town, then he kinda moved to highway, then he moved back into town. Eventually, the company is working with who by the way is like a Fabulous trucking organization here. Ended up having to close shop, you know, because I think it was during one of the recessions.

Anita Bassi [00:03:41]:
And so at that time, he took the leap and opened up his trucking company, but so then I was kind of immersed into the industry at that time. Right? Like dispatching, understanding how the ports work, seeing how claims affected people, not Just the administration of a claim, but how like the impact has on real people like the drivers, the trucking company, the customer relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Just all of it. I found it really dynamic. I just didn’t think I would follow suit. Yeah.

Anita Bassi [00:04:08]:
That I

Blythe Brumleve [00:04:08]:
I would imagine that seeing it from that lens Because you you I think you mentioned during the the podcast that, you know, there were you meant you watched him, you know, late at night having to answer phone calls and answer concerns of other drivers and just seeing kind of, like, the impact of, like, the work life balance that he had. So when it came time to Join the the industry again. Were you hesitant at all to join, or was it just a good, you know, sort of it it felt right?

Anita Bassi [00:04:37]:
So when Joe reached out and you know, we had an interview, I really, really liked Joe off the bat. I liked What his vision was for the organization. And I actually went to my dad to talk about, like, the industry and the company, and he recalled SPI because he had She’d been a carrier for SMGIs. So he started saying, look, is this person still there? And I

Blythe Brumleve [00:04:56]:
was like, no, dad. That was like 20 years ago.

Anita Bassi [00:04:58]:
But but, you know, he had nothing but great things to say about SPI. So from that point of view, I wasn’t hesitant. Also when I originally started with SPI, I started more of an HR based role. So I did not have as much exposure to, I guess, like, the opportunities or the problems that might arise in this industry. It was more to do with, like, the People actually in the office or agency offices building up the culture. And the only really insight I had into, Like transportation in that particular role was claims management. So that was it was kind of like a soft introduction. And so I didn’t find it Stressful or, you know, hesitant to come in.

Anita Bassi [00:05:39]:
I was enjoying it. It was it was it was dynamic. And also 6 years ago, the industry was quite different from what it is now. You know, You weren’t having all these insurance companies where you have problems with claims and things like that, so it was quite different and I was not hesitant. I think It’s just completely, completely changed, like, the landscape of what we do in transportation or as a freight broker Right now.

Blythe Brumleve [00:06:01]:
And and for folks who who may not be aware, who is Joe and and his relationship to to the company?

Anita Bassi [00:06:07]:
Sure. So Joe Chandler is our president and our chief operating officer, And so that’s who I reported into. And he had been with the organization about 2 years when I joined, and he actually ended up bringing Mike, who’s our VP of sales and marketing, and myself on. So that was the time that he kinda decided that, you know, we needed to have more of a HR presence. And so that was my background. I came in on the HR side, but I had always been embedded within an operations team. And so I had 2 roles I’ve always played. I’ve always kind of understood how does HR really impact The strategic vision of an organization and the bottom line.

Anita Bassi [00:06:40]:
And so it was kind of a natural fit. And then as I kept working with the team here at SPI, I just I love the industry. I just found it so dynamic. Every day is different. It’s very challenging, but also when you resolve a problem, it’s so rewarding because there’s so many Players in the game. Right? And so then I just kind of naturally progressed towards operations and, that side of things.

Blythe Brumleve [00:07:02]:
So for HR, you you know, you you had mentioned this earlier that, you know, you still are heavily involved in in HR, you know, right now for for SPI. And you just mentioned, you know, that it really impacts the bottom line. Can you kind of expand on that a little bit? How does you know? Because I think for most folks, they they kinda know HR is like the The department that you go and you report a problem to. But you mentioned how much it impacts the bottom line. I’d I’d love for you to expand on that a little

Anita Bassi [00:07:29]:
Yeah. And I think any any organization that wants to be successful really has to see the value in HR because we’re not just those individuals who come to get, like, a write up from or can we terminate this employee or, you know, I wanna have an event. So like or like, I don’t know what to do so give it to HR. But, I think the important thing about it is is that We are the ones selecting the individuals. We are the gatekeepers to who represents the organization. So Having great HR leads to a successful bottom line because we bring on the talent that represents The company who is aligned with your culture, your values, your mission. You train them. Right? You get them onboard and you put them into this perfect little package She had off to operations.

Anita Bassi [00:08:14]:
But in our situation as an organization, it’s so nice that HR and ops are under one roof because now We have the people we bring on in client care. Right? But they’re also training our agents. So we’re kind of doing it as an HR department that that really is an HR function Training. And so when an agent onboards or a sub rep for an agency office onboards, we take them through the full training, we onboard them, And we help them with continuing training too when so things change, but also we understand the operations of the organization so we can act Quickly, when they have questions, we’re not saying, hey, just hold on. Let me talk to your operations manager or the ops coordinator. We can just answer those questions for them during training. We understand the industry ourselves, and we also understand how to be able to dispatch a qualified load or how to find what the proper rate would be. So aligning those 2 like, 2 departments allows you to be profitable.

Blythe Brumleve [00:09:09]:
I can. No. That that’s a great breakdown, and it and it makes a ton of sense because you’re You’re not only balancing the employees that you have in the office, but you’re balancing the freight agents that are coming into play because I think, you know, what makes SPI Super unique compared to other freight agent programs is that you only have freight agents. You don’t have an in house brokerage team that almost, You know, I I don’t wanna say can kinda steal freight away from the agents, but it’s borrow might be the best phrase. Share might be, you know, a a better phrase. Why why the focus on and may maybe this, You know, I’m not sure if you can answer this question for me, but I’m I’m gonna ask it anyways. But for the freight agents in particular, why why the focus there when, You know, you could add an additional line of revenue with an in house brokerage, but does that sort of muddy the waters too much?

Anita Bassi [00:10:00]:
You know, I think it muddies the water but I think as an organization, we’ve made a decision as to what our product is and our product is service. And we are here to provide a great service. We are back office support. That is what we specialize in and that’s where we spend our resources and our people’s training so we can provide this great service at the end of the day. Right? If we were to bring in in house brokers, you’re then deviating from kind of a service because now we’re also having to bring on our customers. We’re providing a product Kind of. You know what I mean? So you’re you’re muddying the waters. You’re also creating competition with your agency based model.

Anita Bassi [00:10:38]:
And I think it also becomes who do you service? Do you service your in house customers or do you service the agents’ customers? And this keeps it so clean for us, and it’s It’s just something we enjoy doing. It’s great having partners who know what they’re doing. We don’t have to become experts in every type of freight because our agents are experts in their freight. But what we are experts in is understanding how do we onboard? How do the systems work together? How do we integrate new tools for you? So you could just focus on Dispatching the freight, getting the customers. If there’s a claim, we’re experts in, you know, filing that claim, resolving it for you, finding A way out of it. And even when it comes to, like, accents, things like that, that’s why I think we provide, like, pride ourselves on, and it just gives us a competitive advantage, I guess, in comparison to other brokers.

Blythe Brumleve [00:11:24]:
Yeah. For sure. And and let’s get into a little bit of what that onboarding experience looks like. You you know, you you mentioned, You know, the the the value of HR being able to sort of, you know, train and onboard people and make sure that they’re a cultural fit, is that sort of, the same approach to agents as well, making sure they’re a cultural fit as well?

Anita Bassi [00:11:45]:
Yeah. And I think one thing we do strong here is that We’re we work very closely with sales. So Mike and I have a great relationship. We’re on the same page when it comes to identify Agents who are going to be onboarding, you know, he him and his team do a great job of qualifying the agents because it’s just like employees, you know. Yeah. You’re interviewing them. They’re interviewing You too. And I think it’s the same way for agents.

Anita Bassi [00:12:07]:
Yes. They’re interviewing us, but we’re interviewing them as well. Do you fit our professional, code of conduct? You know, you have the ethics, the morals that we want? Does it make sense? Are you a fit for the culture that we’ve created and that we we try very hard to protect at Right? So those are all things vetted through those conversations, and making sure that works out. But then before we even onboard, Mike’s really great with us Having calls with the prospective agent, demoing our system, making sure that there’s a great fit because what we don’t want, and you don’t want this in HR either, is turnover. We don’t want the attrition to be high. So when we onboard agent, they don’t leave because I think we’ve given them a very real picture of what they’re gonna get at SPI, Who the players are, who they’d be working with, what the system looks like, what we can truly offer. We try not to promise something that we can’t back up And that’s the same thing on the employee side too.

Blythe Brumleve [00:13:00]:
Now we’ve had, Eze who’s in charge of, IT over at SPI, and he was talking about sort of the The the technical aspect of onboarding a new agent and being able to connect to all of their different systems. What about on the operations side of things? What does that onboarding experience look like? Does, I I guess, take me from, you know, the agent signing on the bottom line to getting fully up and running with SPI.

Anita Bassi [00:13:26]:
Yeah. So once they’ve demoed our TMS and we’ve decided it’s a bet, you know, like, the basically, the onboarding process starts from setting up an agency agreement, which by the way, we have no non compete. So and that’s always a win. Right? Yeah. So we set up the agency agreement. We schedule a day within, like, It’s usually typically 24 to 48 hours depending on the agent’s, availability. And if if they’re actively working and it’s hard to onboard during work hours, then we’ll make our team, you know, reach out and they’ll coordinate it maybe an after hour session. So we’re really flexible that way.

Anita Bassi [00:13:58]:
But Basically, within 24 to 48 hours, they’ll be doing an actual training session. So we have 2 training sessions that they’ll go through, not just with our TMS, all of our load words, our company intranet, any kind of tools and technology that we have is kind of what we spend the majority Of the 2 days training on, and then we provide them support with getting their customers onboarding, making sure we have the credit agreement signed. We introduce them to AR. We also introduced them to AP at that time. So explaining, you know, what are the payment terms that their carriers can be looking for. Because we also want to make sure that they understand our procedures so they can relay the correct information to their carriers and to their customers. And if they have carriers that they want to onboard, We typically try to get that onboarded before. So put them through our carrier vetting process to make sure there’s not gonna be any issues.

Anita Bassi [00:14:44]:
And just working with getting them all set up for Their go live date of, you know, dispatching their 1st load within our system. How how long does that process typically take?

Blythe Brumleve [00:14:53]:
Is it it it sounds like it’s relatively short.

Anita Bassi [00:14:56]:
It’s pretty quick. I would say 1 to 3 days. They’re up and running. Yeah. Wow. I We actually

Blythe Brumleve [00:15:01]:
I thought you were gonna say, like, 1 one 3 months, I that that’s what I would’ve assumed, just, you know, learning any kind of new technology. But I guess if they can take all of their current Technology with them wherever they go and make upgrades where needed, then the onboarding process can be a lot quicker than that.

Anita Bassi [00:15:17]:
Yeah. And like with our company intranet, we also have a lot of resources. So we have training videos for all of, like, our TMS. So, you know, even though we’ll take them through Training, we provide them additional resources. So if they don’t wanna talk to us on the phone, they don’t wanna call us and they with just a couple quick questions after training like how they’re booking their load or a freight plan. We have all the video resources that too. So they can go step by step. You know, they’re narrated by us, so they can completely understand how to get things done.

Anita Bassi [00:15:42]:
So it’s quite efficient that way, but we have a Great, like, carrier and client care, setup team who’s available all the time. We have after hours support, so we run 247 basically.

Blythe Brumleve [00:15:53]:
There was one point in the conversation, with Trey that you were talking about a a new agent that you wanted to Help or, maybe he was an existing agent, and he was onboarding a new customer, I believe, but he didn’t know how to use Teams. And you guys actually set up a training session and got Teams set up for him so he could land that new customer. Is that accurate?

Anita Bassi [00:16:13]:
Yes. That is. So we do that with, like, Zoom or when they have these, like, online meetings, like, Because we do have agents who are not as comfortable with tech. So a lot of the times we will jump on and we’ll do, like, ConnectWise, and we’ll show them how to get it done and set up or, you know, they might Get locked into their email or they might get hacked. And so it’s us also going in and, like, having our IT team go in and support them and doing a And doing, whatever we can to get them up and running quickly as possible. You know, just going that extra mile because I think people appreciate when you actually genuinely care about them, and I think we do.

Blythe Brumleve [00:16:45]:
So Yeah. Because you were listing all of the the things that SPI provides, and it was claims, HR, day to day ops, insurance, carrier setup and vetting, AP, payroll training, fraud training, or fraud help. That’s a lot Yeah. Of stuff that that I mean, it’s essentially the entire back office. Right?

Anita Bassi [00:17:03]:
We are we’re 100% back office support. And again, that comes back to we have decided this is our service and we are gonna be great at it. So, you know, Everything that they need, it’s a one stop shop, and we’re there for them.

Blythe Brumleve [00:17:16]:
Yeah. Because I I think you had mentioned too that it was it you’re almost in the client Services business where your agents are your clients. And as long as you’re giving them everything they need, then hopefully, they don’t have any reason to leave.

Anita Bassi [00:17:28]:
Yes. Exactly. And I think, you know, that’s where that that model is different again because it’s like they’re partners, but they’re also Clients. Right? So, you know, we might go with them to pitch their customer on a new lane or a new product or a new sale. Right? But at the same time, they are also our customers. So it’s making sure that we provide the same service to them that we encourage them to provide to their customers. So it’s kind of just around back there.

Blythe Brumleve [00:17:52]:
So what, I I imagine during the onboarding process, there’s going to be some concerns. There’s gonna be some questions. There’s maybe, some objections or obstacles that that you have to overcome. What are some examples of of maybe some of the more common ones that that SPI helps them to resolve to to speed up the onboarding process.

Anita Bassi [00:18:11]:
Yeah. So typically, this is ironed out before they actually onboard. It’s usually during, like, The prospecting phase. And so if there’s any questions, we should put them in touch with the right department to answer those questions. But for example, I would say that most Two common ones that we deal with are claims claims questions. What our role is gonna be in claims because a lot of agents who come to us, I’ve had a lot of issues with their claims department. So not enough support, not helping them file the claim, not giving them direction. So those are usually the biggest hesitations or they’ve been burned.

Anita Bassi [00:18:46]:
You know? They’ve had claims that aren’t able to get settled, but their agency doesn’t go the mile to get legal involved or to pursue the claim. They just accepted maybe at the denial phase not appealing or they’ve had to pay out of pocket for ones that they weren’t negligent in. There’s no fault of their own. There’s no shared cost. So there those are the questions that typically come up with claims. And so, you know, we’re we explain our process and how it works, and we fully take ownership of the claims in terms of the administration. So that’s kind of one of the areas that could be a hesitation. You know, they’re looking for a new agency who can better support them in that side of things.

Anita Bassi [00:19:24]:
And then the other question lately that’s coming up is carrier vetting. And I would say that’s because of the fraud, and it kind of goes hand in hand with the claims stolen loads and the double brokered loads and, so, you know, a lot of the new agents are now asking, hey, what are your carrier vetting processes? What system are you using? What are you doing internally? And so that’s kind of something we’ve been working with, and, you know, I think we have a great carrier vetting process. We have a great tool with highways. So I think we can alleviate a lot of those concerns with just a quick conversation.

Blythe Brumleve [00:19:57]:
Yeah. It it it almost sounds like they’re they’re looking for a partner as well in order to help them get through some of these more difficult problems so they can focus more on their customer relationships and selling more freight While the back office things and and things that could really impact their business, I mean, one claim could maybe put, you know, some companies out of business.

Anita Bassi [00:20:19]:
Yeah. Or you could lose the customer, and some agents only have, like, 1 particular customer. So when they’re coming to you and they’re saying, hey. Like, you know, I had 3 claims back to back. We have poor carrier vetting processes. We’re on our last strike here now with this customer. What do we do? What are your processes? So Those things are really important to agents as we go into this, like, uncharted territory right now, and that’s what we’re seeing.

Blythe Brumleve [00:20:41]:
And so what other you mentioned highway. What are some other ways that that you’re helping with carrier vetting and and fraud prevention?

Anita Bassi [00:20:48]:
Yeah. We still we have our own internal systems too. So, you know, we review carry for 1. We have carrier sure. We’re using highway. And then we have other things within the internal TMS we’ve created to just have a internal carrier scorecard. So making sure we’re checking also FMCSA changes to contact information. So There’s a lot of good resources out there, and a lot of them aren’t that expensive, like CarrierSure or having access 401.

Anita Bassi [00:21:16]:
But just doing your due diligence and as an industry, I think we have to encourage everybody to get on these platforms. And I think that’s the only way you’re gonna be able to weed out, You know, these scammers and these fraudsters and the double brokering. But if we can encourage everybody to do even 1 system, I think we can help a lot. And then, you know, when you’re going to these conferences, it’s great. So Mark Funk, our director of carrier procurement, he went to a Carrier conference and you actually end up carry, creating a broker chain. So, you know, we can talk to each other and figure out best practices, But just communicating with each other is important.

Blythe Brumleve [00:21:52]:
And it almost sounds like some of these issues are are catalysts for why a freight agent would leave somewhere else and then come and join SPI. Is that a safe assumption that carrier vetting is one of those top reasons?

Anita Bassi [00:22:05]:
Yes. Carrier vetting, which leads to, you know, sizable claims. So, of course, that’s a big, big one.

Blythe Brumleve [00:22:10]:
What what are some other ones? Do do you know any offhand?

Anita Bassi [00:22:14]:
You know, I think those are the 2 challenges that we’ve seen. And prior to carrier vetting, it was mostly claims questions that we had or lack of support. So Not having a department like the client care or the carrier setup team that was responsive, you know, delayed times, taking an hour or 2 hours Respond to an email. So responsiveness is a huge thing obviously in this industry. And so agents come in without that lack of support are going to be looking for a new

Blythe Brumleve [00:22:38]:
Now we had talked, briefly about, you know, having maybe an in house brokerage is almost a a little bit of competition to a freight agent program. But what about the the freight agents themselves? It for because I I get the impression, and and I’ve talked to a a a few of the different agents with with SPI that A lot of these freight agents are friends. Like, they’re they’re not seeing each other as competition. Is that by design within the the HR part of the the program with s Within SPI?

Anita Bassi [00:23:04]:
Yes. With an SPI, they’re front. I was gonna say, I don’t I thought you meant external. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely with an SPI. It’s actually I love it. I think that we’ve just created this culture of like a family.

Anita Bassi [00:23:15]:
And so, you know, when we have our annual conference, they’re sharing ideas. They call other agents to get Help, or to recover loads or sharing customer accounts that, you know, maybe are too big for them to take on by themselves, covering for vacation time. They have great friendships. So it’s become like a network, but it’s also having respect for everybody’s, know, boundaries when it comes to like this is their client. But again, yes, they are very resourceful and sharing and helpful. And it can be tough in this industry when you maybe only have enough business to have yourself and not have employees. So creating networking relationships within the company to allow yourself to take a vacation is

Blythe Brumleve [00:23:52]:
That’s I didn’t even think about that aspect because for a lot of freight agents, it’s a it’s a 1 person operation. And so then they have the help, of course, of SPI. But if you wanna take that vacation, you probably can’t with other programs. But with SPI, you can actually trust that the other freight agents within the system are going to be able to to help you out as well to to enjoy a little downtime.

Anita Bassi [00:24:14]:
Yeah. And, like, we we don’t try to interfere too much in that part of it, But you know, when they have those conferences, that is the opportunity to network and create those relationships. And especially since we have very little attrition, They see these people over and over, and you begin to trust them and you create those relationships. And it is important because I think about my dad who never really took a vacation because he was Running the company on its own, and it it can be tiring. It could be you know, it’s like a burnout factor there too. So having people that you can rely on account as friends is really important, and we see those relationships sure in SPI, it’s it’s neat.

Blythe Brumleve [00:24:47]:
And there was, a a previous guest on the pod, in case anybody wants to listen to it is is Tynan, and he actually is a freight agent for SPI, but he is working underneath another freight agent that’s also part of SPI. So that was a this was a pathway for him to enter the industry and then start to build his book of business. Is that a common program that is offered, or is it more more like, case by case basis for for SPI.

Anita Bassi [00:25:12]:
Yeah. That’s a case by case. Like, we’re very open to helping, like you know, I’ll do interviews for agency offices when they want us to jump on or like they’re hiring like a higher level position when it comes to sales. Our team is totally willing to help and do interviews, and give our opinions and our feedback because again, they might not be experts in HR, but we can do that for them. And then we’re also keen to help and train. So, you know, if there’s situations that come up like Tynan’s, yes, we’re we’re completely hands on to help and train them and then try to find a solution. But, that’s a definitely a case by case. Is not like a regular service fee.

Blythe Brumleve [00:25:46]:
Yeah. Because I you know, for especially with with the the sponsorship and the relationship that that we have with SPI, like, We know that you need to book a business. You need to be established in order to be a good fit for SPI, but there are case by cases where you can, maybe impress Anita with your skills and then get onboarded with, with SPI. In there. Because as you were talking and you were mentioning Sometimes you join, you know, other calls. I would be having you interview or helping me interview everyone because I know that you would be able to catch something that I wouldn’t be able to catch. So kudos to those Freight agents that are that are, you know, you know, putting the Anita power behind their hiring. Now you, we had also talked I went to my first, Rendezvous, SPI.

Blythe Brumleve [00:26:29]:
Rendezvous, annual conference that you guys have. I I believe the way you approach it is you have 1 in Vancouver, then one in a It went in a US city and then back to Vancouver and then another US city. Is that the the right fluctuation?

Anita Bassi [00:26:42]:
That is. And We’re just in heavy planning right now for 2024.

Blythe Brumleve [00:26:47]:
So And it’s gonna be in Nashville for for this year. It’s usually around, like, April, May timeline. What all goes into planning an event like this?

Anita Bassi [00:26:55]:
Like a small wedding. So I get, like, you know, hot sweat thinking about it now. It’s It’s like a small wedding to be honest. It’s there’s just so much care and love that goes into this conference. And I even though Where I started in this company where I am now, I can’t let it go because I just there’s so much happiness that comes from it, from the agents and how much they enjoy it. And so I just wanna make sure it’s really perfect for them, and it’s a it’s a time for us to appreciate and thank them for their business as well. So, You know, we try to make it educational that we have speakers come out. We have the executive basically, presenting on topics that are important, that are happening, having some breakout sessions.

Anita Bassi [00:27:36]:
But, like, really the heart and soul of it is to network and to have fun. And it’s like couple of days for them to go out and get to meet other people who are in this industry where they might not get the time to do that. Right? They may not have time to go to conferences. So they had to come out and have fun and let loose, but also learn and meet with, you know, members of the, leadership team, but also with all of our staff. So it’s just a great event overall, but that’s kind of the purpose of that.

Blythe Brumleve [00:28:01]:
I I didn’t even really think about the fact that Freight agents are kind of a lot like drivers where they don’t really have that office community. They have to go, and they’re they’re working remotely for for for most of the time. And so for this event, it probably is one of the few occasions out of the year that they get to network with other like minded individuals We’re going through the same, like, trials and tribulations that they are. It I would imagine that the education being shared is really top notch at at each one of these events.

Anita Bassi [00:28:31]:
Yeah. And I think and that’s like, again, this is like the opportunity where we share everything that’s going on. So it’s great. And this year is amazing. I think we only have like 4 or 5 agents not attending and The rest are all coming. So it just kinda speaks to the volume of, like, that family feel that we have and the fact that everyone is really excited to come. But, Yeah. They share a lot.

Anita Bassi [00:28:48]:
They learn a lot. And we have some great speakers this year. We’re we’re gonna be focusing more on, like, the carrier vetting side of things. But because, again, it’s, like, the issue at Mine right now. So Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve [00:28:58]:
It’s like It

Anita Bassi [00:28:59]:
should be good.

Blythe Brumleve [00:28:59]:
The the nature of the industry. You know? It it it fraud is just in the incredible explosion in it. I think it was 57% of cargo just cargo crime in general, not even, you know, carrier fraud or, you know, impersonation or anything like that, but cargo crime itself was up 57% year over year. I saw that stat, that was just released yesterday, which is just insane to think about.

Anita Bassi [00:29:20]:
And that’s underreported too. Right? Like, that’s underreported. Think about, like so, yeah, we have access to cargo now. We’re reporting it, but a lot of organizations don’t have access to that because you have to be a member. You have to pay for it. A lot of them don’t report it. A lot of this information is just like, that data is just left there. So if we think it’s 57, imagine what it really

Blythe Brumleve [00:29:39]:
So so what else is is on I mean, I know SPI’s freight agent program is best in biz, but how do you how do you decide what to add to it? Like, What are what are some of maybe some additions that you’re gonna have in 2024 that might complement the freight agent program? Or do you have what kinda unlock?

Anita Bassi [00:29:58]:
I feel like we have unlocked. Like, we are introducing a couple new tools like I’m not privy to speak to, as of yet that we’re gonna be announcing at Rendezvous. So we’re always looking for new technologies. We’re always looking for new items that are gonna make our agents’ lives easier or more efficient or automate the Process. The only difference for us is even if we automate the process on our end is we don’t let go of our staff. We want these tools to better the life of our staff, Help our agents who can then, in return, help their customers. But, yeah, I think in terms of what we may focus on, that’s maybe my question for Sales, I’ll leave I’ll leave that to him.

Blythe Brumleve [00:30:34]:
I would’ve been the hot seat. Yes. See, we gotta get him back on the show so he can talk about, you know, Some of these things and some new additions to to the program. Now, before we kinda wrap up, what, I guess, What advice would you give to somebody who is maybe already a freight agent and is thinking about making the jump?

Anita Bassi [00:30:54]:
Yeah. And, like, do you mean a freight agent as an employee?

Blythe Brumleve [00:30:57]:
Or just just in general, just a freight agent. Maybe they’re they’re with another company right now, and they’re thinking about making the jump to to SPI. What kind of advice would you give to them to make sure that all their ducks are kind of in a row before they make that leap?

Anita Bassi [00:31:10]:
Yeah. I think Well, 1, there has to be a catalyst for the reason why they want to leave. Right? So I think they really need to identify that and see are they getting what They’re paying for. Because it being a part of a brokerage like any other industry like real estate whatever, you’re paying to be a part of that brokerage. Right. So are you getting the bang for your buck? Are you getting the support? Are you feeling protected? And I think that’s a big one coming into 2024 because Shippers understand that loads are being stolen. They also want to know what are you doing to protect my load? Are you educated in that area? Is your brokerage Forming you, are they on top of it? Do they have good processes? Do they have the technology to move forward in 2024? And I think that’s a big one that People who have not invested in technology, to this point, especially on the carrier vetting process are gonna be behind. And so as a freight broker, I think you have to real assessment as to what your system is capable of and what it’s not capable of.

Anita Bassi [00:32:06]:
Because if it’s not capable of giving your carriers a scoring, It’s not capable of you know, limiting loads or finding out you know, associations or whatever the insights or risk might be to that carrier, You’re gonna be in trouble, and you’re gonna be at high risk of losing that customer. So if you’re not prepared and your agency is not prepared, I think that’s a big catalyst for change. And at SPI, we are ready, and we can help you out. So Alright.

Blythe Brumleve [00:32:33]:
My little self. No. That that was a great answer because I I was just writing that down that, That’s gonna be our we have a new editing technique for, I guess, some behind the scenes knowledge. But we have a new editing technique for our videos is where we’re a good pull quote from the conversation to put at the front of the conversation, kinda reel people in. So that was the one. So that that’s what I just wrote down. So in case anybody’s listening and they wanna kinda, I guess, see how the the sausage is made, I guess. This is a terrible pun.

Blythe Brumleve [00:33:00]:
But, Anita, anything else that you think is important to mention that we haven’t already talked about?

Anita Bassi [00:33:09]:
No. I don’t. I think at the end of the day, I know the industry. You know, I talked to some of our agents, and I feel for them that have been in the industry for 15, 20 years, and they’ve gone their entire career without any problems, any issues. And now they’re dealing with Double broker loads or us coming in saying, hey. We gotta tighten, you know, this process or that or like, but why? You know, we remember an issue. And It’s just a lot of change, and I just want people to hang in there. And I think that even though it might not feel fun right now because we’re combat combating so much crime, I’ll get back there.

Anita Bassi [00:33:38]:
And it is a funny industry to be a part of, and the people who work for it are amazing. So just hang in and enjoy, and it’s a great ride. Yeah.

Blythe Brumleve [00:33:45]:
I think I think it’s kinda like any industry. The more digital tools you add, the the easier it is for everyone, but it’s also the easier it is for the the fraudulent players as well. So we gotta kind of, you know, keep up with the times in order to protect ourselves and our business and our customers. So, Anita, this was awesome. This was great. Where can folks follow you, sign up for SPI’s freight agent program, or, you know, book a meeting, any of that cool stuff?

Anita Bassi [00:34:10]:
Yeah. I think I’m easily accessible by email. I’m, like, total millennial. I hate talking on the phone. So, Like, just email you. But aegassi@SPI3pl.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Otherwise, you can go to our website, and there is a quick you know, you’re interested, send in your information, and they’ll come over to our sales team and Okay.

Anita Bassi [00:34:33]:
Touch with us as well.

Blythe Brumleve [00:34:34]:
So Well, this was awesome. Not not scary at all. Great conversation and a ton of value. So what more can we ask for?

Anita Bassi [00:34:43]:
Thanks so much, wife. It was fine. Absolutely. A lot better than I thought.

Blythe Brumleve [00:34:46]:
Right? You take it. You knocked it out of the park.

Anita Bassi [00:34:49]:
Awesome. Thank you.

Mike Mikulik [00:00:00]:
Thanks for coming out to our office. I know it was a long trip. Where’d you coming from?

Jordan [00:00:03]:
I’m from Dallas. So we’re based in Dallas, Texas. So you

Mike Mikulik [00:00:05]:
just blew up Dallas to here just for fun?

Jordan [00:00:07]:
No. No. Just come see you guys.

Mike Mikulik [00:00:08]:
Come see you guys. That’s awesome, man. I love the I love the support we’re getting from you guys too. And, basically, I wanted to make Something up, just a little talk a bit about your company, how it can benefit shippers. Just the overview even where the market’s heading as well too. So May 1st, I mean, there’s a ton of challenges going on with bullbroker and fraud in the market. Like, why was highway formed and, like, Like, what’s it gonna do to help us, so we can try to avoid this or at least eradicate a lot of the double up front?

Jordan [00:00:36]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So, my background is in software development and and banking. And so and the banking side, you know, what’s interesting to me is we have Imagine you went to a bank and you wanted to borrow $250,000. Right? The bank’s gonna know everything about you. Right? They don’t just hand you the money and let you walk out or it’s, you know, KYC or an underwriting process. And what was interesting to me as I was running TriumphPay prior to this, you know, we, You know, we would get calls from brokers being like, hey. Stop payment on this load.

Jordan [00:01:04]:
Don’t pay that carrier. And, you know, maybe ask the question, why? What happened? What do you know that you don’t wanna pay the anymore, then they delivered the load, and and that’s where I started to uncover. Okay. They didn’t want you to pay because they got double broker. They’re holding a hostage or something’s happening, and it led Let me see. Like, okay. Well, how do we prevent it from happening here? How do we go upstream of what’s, you know, before the payment? How do we prevent them from even getting on the load and getting in the network at all. And that led me to, like, doing some investigation about what the underwriting process looked like, in the in the freight broker community.

Jordan [00:01:36]:
And I just saw this opportunity to bring Some of the standards that we’re used to in the financial services world and bring that to to light for brokers so they can see who’s really hauling their freight. You know, there’s there’s 380,000 roughly carriers at Interstate Motor Carrier Authority in the US. Right. And what I talk to people about a lot is What’s scary about that number is there’s nowhere near that many carriers actually running in the US. Right? From the data we saw when I was running TriumphPay on the payment side, from the data we see on the the insurance stuff we work on at Highway, it’s nowhere near 350,000 carriers. And so What we tell people is having carrier authority doesn’t make you a carrier. We we wanna we wanna help brokers have transparency to who they’re really about to put that load on with so So that it’s preventive care. Prevents bad things from getting into your network at all, and, yeah, it may be more painful on the front end, But what we’re trying to do is weed out the the the sheep from the wolves.

Jordan [00:02:34]:
Right? And and it’s hard because as you know, like, There’s a there’s not a lot of transparency today, and trying to bring transparency into that market, we we do get pushback at times from from carriers. But What we’re slowly seeing is carriers see that highway is not here to make their life harder, not here to take advantage of them. We don’t charge them money. We’re not trying to take money out of their pocket. We’re trying to bring the good ones to the surface. And so if we do that, then the brokers want to work with the carriers that provide that transparency. And it’s a cycle that’s gonna make this this industry better and get rid of a lot of this nonsense that’s going on today.

Mike Mikulik [00:03:05]:
That’s that’s exactly what’s needed. I mean, the whole thing with double broker fraud. This has been around for a long time, But, like, how what what did it all accelerate to the point we’re at today? Because it’s horrible right now what’s going on.

Jordan [00:03:17]:
Yeah. So if you think about, fraud or just Specifically, freight fraud. Fraud needs 3 things to survive. So, like, so, like, fire needs heat. It needs it needs fuel. It needs oxygen. So when you try and Got a fire and try and put out 1 of those 3 or 2 of those 3 things to to extinguish a fire. Fraud means anonymity, needs urgency, and it needs the prospect of gain.

Jordan [00:03:37]:
So the prospect of gain is pretty easy. Right? You got a $200,000 loan, and you’re paying someone $2,000 to, you know, to to run it for you. There’s a big upside if they do something nefarious. The urgency freight and especially in the brokered freight community, there’s a ton of urgency. This needs to pick up today. It needs to pick up in 2 hours. Right? There’s a lot of that urgency that allows For the it just creates a greater opportunity for fraud to to occur. And then the anonymity.

Jordan [00:04:02]:
Right? A lot of what we deal with when we’re working with carriers is is over email or phone or they they found us on on the public law board, and so we’re trying to pierce the veil on the anonymity and let you see who’s really on the other side of that transaction, And that so those 3 things together. Okay? Those 3 things together is what’s led to this this explosion of fraud over the last 18 months. You know, 20 years ago, you didn’t have the same level of urgency. 20 years ago, you weren’t able to move carriers through your network as fast as you were. 20 years ago, it wasn’t that the shipper’s horn is demanding about, hey. I want this to pick up in 2 hours or 4 hours, and, you know, expecting that you would get that done for them. So this industry’s kind of Let itself to this point where you’ve you’ve created so much efficiency and speed in the transaction that now combined with the anonymity, there’s just A ton of opportunity for people that aren’t even in the US or Canada. Right.

Jordan [00:04:54]:
If they’re overseas, they’ve never set foot in the US, but they have US carrier authority, and they’re able to, you Now they’re able to make themselves appear like they’re a motor carrier. Wow.

Mike Mikulik [00:05:04]:
So DC is getting worse. Like, we may we’re coming into 2024. 2023 has been Crazy year. I mean, we’ve all had horror stories. I mean, our company, we’ve seen aspects of fraud take place just within our own company with carriers. What’s it gonna look like for 2024? Do you have thoughts as is it getting worse? Is are we gonna slowly start seeing things mellow out a bit, or is this I I promise here to stay.

Jordan [00:05:26]:
Yeah. And I’d say let’s talk about the the the market as a whole and then talk about highway brokers specifically. So the market as a whole, yes. Like, there used to be increases in not only, stolen loads, but, like, the the double brokering, the load phishing, all of that is continuing to It increased because there is still opportunity for these for for criminals to create a gain for themselves. With highway brokers, we’ve seen on Average across all the brokers that use us, a 97% reduction in fraudulent activity with highway.

Mike Mikulik [00:05:58]:
That’s huge.

Jordan [00:05:59]:
And so it’s made a huge difference for a lot of brokers saving, saving them not only the the losses. Right? Not only the financial losses of having to to to pay the deductible and stolen load or double pay on a double brokered load, But also the reputational damage. Right? You think about a stolen load. It’s not just paying the deductible. That shipper you’ve impacted that shipper’s business, And and that’s that’s 10 times more expensive than the financial cost, and that’s where you lose the customer because they say, okay. Maybe Yeah. Sure. Your insurance covered the cost of the load, but I missed out on a sales opportunity.

Jordan [00:06:34]:
Right? The goods that I needed to get out to the retail distribution center or the wholesalers Distribution center didn’t make it, and so I didn’t get that revenue opportunity. So, you know, you’ve you’ve negatively impacted their business. So we we talk a lot about Highway about owning the outcome. And so at Highway, we’re not just a software provider. We don’t just say, hey. Here’s our software taken and use a good look SPI. Good luck SPI agents. Let us know how it goes.

Jordan [00:06:56]:
When something bad happens in your network, I mean, we care deeply. We wanna engage, and we’re gonna help you figure out what happened and how we prevent it from happening again, and if we can help in recovery. And today, we’ve been very successful in helping brokers that had something bad happen recover recover, and then also, like, Preventing it from happening to to other brokers.

Mike Mikulik [00:07:16]:
Okay. So, like, I mean, a lot of this is all falling on 3 people companies like ourselves and even our Competitors. That’s that’s happening to them. But I’m finding talking to shippers, I don’t think they’ve really see how bad it actually is out there. I think they’re just relying on All the brokers to deal with the problem and to ensure they’re putting a carrier that’s reputable and it’s gonna move it from point a to point b in a in a timely manner and communicate along the way. Like, what can shippers do? Like, how do we educate shippers, and what what should be your message to shippers about utilizing tools like Highway to help us?

Jordan [00:07:47]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So So highway, we only sell the freight brokers. We we we believe deeply that we serve 1 you you can’t have 2 masters. You can’t serve 2 masters. Right? So, You know, some people in the freight tech industry like to serve brokers, and then they take brokers data and they go sell it to shippers. They take, you know, their customers’ data and go sell it to their customer’s customer. And we just We don’t do that.

Jordan [00:08:06]:
But what we do do and what we have, we probably have a half dozen, if not 10 shippers now that that We say they wanted to use highway. We say, hey. You you can’t. We only we only we only serve brokers, but if you wanna use brokers that use highway, like, You should do that. And so we have some shippers now, some big ones that say, hey, brokers at our mind network. If you’re not using highway, you’re not gonna be invited back to the bid season Because they see the benefit of the the they see the benefit of having a a tool like Highway that’s looking across 400 brokers for fraud and fraud events to protect their freight. And so it’s creating more opportunities for highway brokers And that’s what we’re looking forward to in 2024 is we wanna create a a program where we can help brokers that are using highways stand out. Like, they’re they’re going the Sure.

Jordan [00:08:52]:
Because it’s it’s harder to do this right. It’s harder because you just hire every carrier that comes through and says, hey. I’m a carrier. I want this load. So you’re doing more work. You should be rewarded for that, and you should be rewarded for that by having more opportunities with shippers and being able to tell shippers, hey. We don’t just hire any carrier that shows up I sent an email, and we don’t just take any email and trust that it’s the carrier they claim to be. We take these additional steps.

Jordan [00:09:15]:
We verify them with MFA. We make sure They have presence in the US, and if they have some red flags, we make sure we can see their ELD before we hire them. We know that we’re not just booking something in the dark. We can see the chart that we’re about to put it on. Right.

Mike Mikulik [00:09:28]:
So, like, what cut so as a shipper, what questions should a shipper be asking a broker before he does business with them? Yeah.

Jordan [00:09:34]:
Yeah. I think the first question is, what does it look like For your carrier on for your carrier vetting process. Okay.

Mike Mikulik [00:09:40]:
What are the what are the what are

Jordan [00:09:41]:
the tools that you’re using to to vet carriers today? The second thing I think you can ask is around, should we should be asking is around how are you protecting the rate confirmation and pickup information? Right? Because if you you a lot of this load fishing, They’re not even onboarding. They’re just trying to get you to send the right confirmation to some email address that they control while pretending to be this carrier over here. And so that’s where, you know, with the Outlook plug in and and, and being able to look up emails in in highway, but also having highway be able to send the right confirmation for you, make sure it gets where he needs to go. Those are the those are that’s the second thing I would say to a shipper is, like, how is your pick of information being protected? Because if that becomes compromised, number 1 doesn’t matter. If they have the pickup number, they’re gonna get they’re gonna be able to steal that load. And number 3, I would say is It’s how do they think about this holistically in terms of reporting, in terms of their business. Right? You have a network. SPI has this network, and it’s our job to be the firewall for your network and prevent bad traffic from from getting in.

Jordan [00:10:40]:
Now what can happen is that can slow down some good factors. Some good carriers may look Bad on the outside because of some choices or some things that factors out of their control.

Mike Mikulik [00:10:49]:
Right.

Jordan [00:10:49]:
And that is a part of any filter. You’ve gotta Continue to refine that so the good carriers have a great experience and get get through while keeping out the bad actors and that are gonna cause problems. So if I’m a shipper, I’m asking those 3, those 3 questions of my brokers.

Mike Mikulik [00:11:04]:
Perfect. So like even a shipper, what can a shipper do to work with a broker that try to help? I I mean, is there a communication flow that should be happening when there’s a load a load confirmation sent out and the communication between shipper and broker to help them alleviate Some of these challenges when the the carrier shows up on the dock and ready to pick up their cargo?

Jordan [00:11:23]:
Yeah. I think, you know, for for a shipper, like, they wanna know that the brokers that they’re using has These processes in place to make sure that there’s protection of their confidential information. It’s confidential information that rate that that pickup number, that pickup information. That information, they need to know that a broker is doing the right things to protect it like FBI. Like, you guys are using Highway to make sure that once you have that valuable information, it’s only going to not only the right carrier, but a carrier that would meet the standards of SPI that you’re gonna that you’re willing to send in to go pick up that load. You know, We talk about this a lot. As a as a freight broker, you don’t actually get to show up and and own the you don’t actually physically there. Right? Right.

Jordan [00:12:03]:
Your carrier that you’re in is the extension of your brand. Right? So we’ve talked

Mike Mikulik [00:12:08]:
about that a lot. Like,

Jordan [00:12:09]:
is this someone that you want representing your brand At your customers or at your customer’s customer’s doc. Right? And and so that’s why this preventative care is so important, and that’s why working with carriers that are willing to provide transparency is so important. Because if they’re willing to go through the process and they’re willing to do things right, Then that is gonna save you so much headache and pain on the back end of maybe they don’t just steal the load. Maybe they don’t broker, but maybe they give your shipper a really bad experience.

Mike Mikulik [00:12:40]:
And trying to get out of that is is hard.

Jordan [00:12:42]:
Yeah. Exactly. So, like,

Mike Mikulik [00:12:43]:
the process with highway, we’re trying to weed out these these carriers. What are some of the things that or the milestones or safety points that you guys check out to to verify a carrier?

Jordan [00:12:53]:
Yeah. So we think about risk Matrix. So this is my background in banking. When you think about, risk, you think about here’s the high risk, low risk, and there’s all kinds of factors Along the way that can make you look high risk. So there’s this basic principle we use at highway. There are 2 kinds of people. There are good guys and bad guys. Very simplistic.

Mike Mikulik [00:13:14]:
Simple things. Alright. Okay.

Jordan [00:13:15]:
But here’s the difference. So the so how do you tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy? Well, Bad guys don’t wanna leave footprints, and so a lot of what we do in highway is if we can’t see footprints. Right? Because if you leave footprints at the scene of crime, you’re gonna get caught. The same is true with people that are trying to commit freight fraud as they are trying to hide and obfuscate their identity. And so as we We we do through our process is identify high risk carriers and say, hey. Like, give them the chance to to offer us the His ability to know that they’re a great carrier and a good carrier. If they do, they’re gonna pass their flying calls. And a lot of that is around, you know, mobile phone verification.

Jordan [00:13:53]:
It’s around ELD verification. And it’s around, you know, insurance and making sure all those things are aligned and telling the same story. And if that’s happening, they’re gonna make it through great. And there’s about a 100 and 40 to a 150,000 carriers that are approved, passing the rules, insurance on file Right. Ready to go on highway. But now the carriers Don’t wanna do that. That’s your warning sign. That’s the sign of, like, if they’re not willing to show and give you that transparency if they’re not willing to give it to you before you give them the look, why would they

Mike Mikulik [00:14:20]:
give it to you after? Makes sense. So, like, thinking about let’s just delve deeper now into our business. I wanna talk in with our agents and Yeah. Yes. We’re on highway. Yes. You know, there’s hiccups with any type of software that comes in. And I think your agents wanna know I see the potential as this is a huge selling feature as to what we’ve We’ve invested in technology wise into highway to protect our customers.

Mike Mikulik [00:14:45]:
So how can our agents use this as a tool, as a selling tool to give, you know, peace of mind to their or to their customers and also to help them get other customers.

Jordan [00:14:54]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So when you when you think about, Freight brokers. Right? There’s 8,000 freight there’s there’s 30,000 registered freight brokers in the US. There’s about 8 to 10000 active. So how do you stand out? So you’re talking to your customer. How do I stand out as SPI or an agent of SPI? One of the ways that you you talk about what the shippers care about is Service and stability. Right? Those are 2 components they care about in their supply chain.

Jordan [00:15:18]:
You are you are literally being given the keys to their revenue cycle. Right? And so when you show up and say, hey, at SPI, we don’t just we don’t just make it easy for we don’t we don’t just let anyone get in. Right? We wanna make sure that we’re working with high quality vetted carriers. And if they’re high quality vetted carriers, yeah, they can get in really easy, but we make sure we make sure shippers that We are taking the the security of your freight seriously. We care about we care about the outcome for you as a shipper, not just, You know? Hey. What’s the cheapest carrier we can find to get this load moved? And and that, I think, is what separates the high quality brokers and agents like SPI From a lot of these people who, you know, are just trying to make a dollar and putting risk. You gotta think about the risk that can be put on that shipper’s business. In Talking as an agent and you’re talking to your customer, that shipper, you wanna be communicating that you’re not just taking the easy way out.

Jordan [00:16:14]:
Right. You’re here Here to think about the long term and building long term relationship by executing day in, day out, and using high quality providers to get them great results.

Mike Mikulik [00:16:24]:
I’ve I fully agree. I mean, I I see it, but you have a carrier that the funeral just lasts. It’s like, oh, yes. There’s my potential to make a few a little bit more money. Coming along with that, also risk. And the customers, they’re asking, like, boy, yeah. They’re still about rates. We a lot of customers are still about rates.

Mike Mikulik [00:16:39]:
What’s the rate gonna be? And I think we need to say, like, Hey. Yes. They have this carry a couple $100 less, but I’ll tell you what, how he shows up in the system, I have some reservations about it. This carry, for instance, is a few dollars more, which is actually more in line with what the market rate is, but I feel comfortable with this carry. This carrier is going to do a good job. We’re not gonna have any transactional issues. We’re have open communication with them. So I think there’s that segregation that you gotta segregate and also sell it to our customers that way.

Jordan [00:17:07]:
Yeah. And, You know, there’s so many scenes around this, you know, stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime. Right? Right. And and, you know, you think about you’re putting at risk potentially 100 of 1,000 of dollars of freight on that load. And not only that, but the relationship with that shipper to save a couple $100. And I we we we talk about this a lot during our in our training process with with customers is carrier authority does not make you a carrier. No longer like, that doesn’t work anymore. There’s too many shell MC numbers out there.

Jordan [00:17:39]:
I mean, there are tens of thousands of shell and seeing numbers out there that are just sitting dormant that people have registered that aren’t actually active motor carriers. And We need to do more to make sure that who we’re about to hire is actually a true carrier, has the equipment they say they do, Equipment is insured and that they’re actually gonna show up and do what you need to do. And a big, big part of that is the willingness to provide transparency. And I just I can’t I can’t emphasize it enough that if we’re thinking about building long term value for your agents and for SPI Mhmm. We need to think about service level through the cycle. We need to think about carrier usage through the cycle. Absolutely. Today, Shippers are more rate sensitive, but that’s gonna change someday soon.

Jordan [00:18:25]:
And we and we we wanna make sure that we think about what we’re doing through these these cycles and building long term value for SPI’s agents and SPI, whether it’s a down market or up market. And one area that we don’t wanna we don’t wanna compromise on is the quality of the Carriers that you’re allowing in the SPI network because that is brand. Right? The carriers are an extension of your brand, and So we need to think about when we’re bringing them into our network, are these brand ambassadors? Right? The people that we do want representing our SPI or SPI agent At the dock of our customer.

Mike Mikulik [00:18:58]:
Yeah. Makes so much sense. Interesting enough too is the fact that a lot of how do you say it here? These carriers the good ones the good ones are gonna give our our customers a really good experience. The bad ones can leave things in a bad experience. But do you think there’s value in our agents or just any any broker, for instance, going to the customer and saying, listen. I go, What impact does a fraudulent if your load is stolen have on your business? Or, you know what, if you also gonna lose complete visibility of that load because it’s been double appropriate, how does that affect your business? And painting that ugly picture to a shipper that when these bad things happen, there’s an impact to you.

Jordan [00:19:37]:
Yeah. And and I mean, it each case is Each case is different. Right? So for a CPG company, they have certain they have certain quote thresholds and delivery velocity. They have to keep up with the food retailers or the food distribution distribution, you know, the wholesalers for those food retailers. If they don’t meet that velocity, they’re not keeping that Amount of good flowing when they’ve committed to deliver it, they they’re gonna lose business. They’re gonna lose revenue, and it’s not just and, again, like, it’s not just about replacing the cost. When you replace the cost of retail, they don’t book that as revenue. And every single one of them have investors, every single one of them have financial reporting, and they’re all trying to grow their revenue.

Jordan [00:20:15]:
And so with even just 1 truckload not getting to the Wegmans distribution center when it was supposed to, it’s gonna negatively impact their quarter. 100%. Their quarter will be impacted by them. Now you’re talking about 2, 3, 4 loads that get stolen. Now we have a real problem that now c He is gonna be hearing about it at that that shipper. It gets worse when you talk about like branded apparel. When you talk about things that are licensed, No licensed goods, and you potentially have a customer that’s in possession of another brand’s licensed goods like Nike apparel or some other brand apparel. Mhmm.

Jordan [00:20:49]:
If that those if that truckload disappears, now your customer’s customer is involved. Right? Because now you have their product on the black market, their Product going into flea markets, give their product just to go into, you know, illicit distribution channels, maybe showing back up on Amazon and creating Bad outcomes for consumers, and that’s an even bigger issue for them reputationally. So I think, again, it just comes back to, like, Showing up and being a service provider that thinks about providing quality through the cycles, in through the cycle. This will turn. This day will pass. Right? There will be a strong mark. The market will swing back the other way, and it will happen in the middle of the night when none of us expected. Not even you know, my good friend Craig Frode was gonna know pretty well predict it.

Jordan [00:21:32]:
Actually, the agents are probably the best at predicting it because they’re so close to the metal. They’re so close to the hell.

Mike Mikulik [00:21:37]:
They can

Jordan [00:21:37]:
Feel it. Right? But it’ll come. And just being, you know, keeping the discipline, there’s certain disciplines that we need to refine and And build that muscle in bad markets and good markets, and this is one because this is when you think about the impact of a stolen loader, impact of a hostage load, Even if it gets delayed 2 days, like, that those impacts last forever. It you know, it takes what is it takes, you know, Reputation is gained by the inch and lost by the mile. You know, it’s the consistent, continual execution that allows you to build that reputation, that brand, Then just 1 bad character, bad 1 bad actor can mess it up.

Mike Mikulik [00:22:16]:
And that’s the thing. I mean, this this ties nicely, man. We painted the big ugly picture of how this could affect Our customer our customer’s business and even their customer’s customer. Yeah. All of over saving 2, $300 on a load going with a carrier that’s a low cost Fair. Like, it doesn’t when you paint the ugly picture, all of a sudden, the shipper’s gonna be like, yeah. You know what? I’d rather go with somebody a little bit more solid and reputable.

Jordan [00:22:39]:
Well, then and I, you know, and now let’s let’s talk about so we talk about use the term, you know, I don’t like to use the term carrier when we talk about fraudulent actors. Like they have carrier authority, but they’re not a carrier. Right? The The people out there, the carriers are actually running this freight. Like, we wanna create great outcomes for them as well. So, like, whenever carriers are willing to engage with highway and bring transparency, They they find more business. They’re gonna find more brokers willing to work with them, because they’re gonna show up in more search results. We know that carriers that provide transparency or connect a DOD device, they show up 20 times they’re 20 times more likely to show up in a search result Then a carrier that doesn’t in highway. Because brokers I mean, tens of thousands of brokers

Mike Mikulik [00:23:18]:
And not everyone’s doing it.

Jordan [00:23:19]:
Highway sourcing every day, And they’re seeing these carriers that are willing to provide transparency, and they’re getting more freight. We talked to a carrier that’s got 6 trucks. It’s a reefer carrier out of the Midwest, And they they, you know, they were hesitant about connecting their ELD, and I ended up on the phone with them talking through. I was like they’re like, why would we do this? I was like, here’s why. We’re doing this to protect you. So someone tries to pretend to be you and picking up a load in Florida, it’s not you. You don’t run outside the deadwax, and we’re gonna help protect you there. The second is it’s gonna bring you to the surface.

Jordan [00:23:48]:
People wanna work with people that provide transparency, and, like, whenever you people are searching for reefer carriers in the Midwest, they now show up in the top five Because they’re they’re providing that that transparency, and we want to reward them with great outcomes because they’re great actors and because they are good people doing good work out there. And the 3rd thing we talk about with them is as a broker, you are you know, the broker prior to Highway, before you could see the ELD data, before you could see where the carrier was, You’re booking in the dark. Maybe you can go to SAFR and see something or maybe you got some data in your TMS, but you’re booking in the dark. We want that to go away. We We want that to be a thing in the past, where in the future, we have great carriers and great brokers working together. Right? And, like, there’s Gonna be disputes. There gonna be frustration.

Mike Mikulik [00:24:34]:
Of course, sir.

Jordan [00:24:35]:
It’s just it’s just the natural order of things, but it brings the the cream of the crop to the surface, and it leaves These fraudulent actors on both sides. There’s fraudulent actors pretending to be brokers ripping off carriers, and there’s fraudulent actors pretending to be carriers ripping off brokers. We need to get where those people aren’t allowed inside the game, and so that the people that are are doing good work, both brokers and carriers can So you can can feed one another.

Mike Mikulik [00:25:00]:
And that’s the way it should be. I mean, there are there are brokers that are that shouldn’t even be being broke. I mean, I guess, again so let’s talk a little bit about You guys are you guys are partnering now with with the, the TIA, and I think that’s that’s great. Can we talk a little bit about, you know, that partnership and what you guys are looking to accomplish? What are some of the goals

Jordan [00:25:17]:
Yeah. So our partnership with, the TIA is around the watchdog program. So the TIA watchdog, was is this there’s A fraud reporting service. The TIA has had around for probably 10, 15 years, and it was kinda put up on the it it wasn’t getting a lot of over investment. I think, you know Yeah. You probably saw it before it got redone. And so we’re losing adoption. Brokers were wanting to to use it.

Jordan [00:25:40]:
And so what we did is we we took, it took about 6 months. I worked with the CIA on redesigning it and providing a lot more value, to to brokers that are TIA members. So So if you’re a TIA member, you can log in to ti watch dog .com with your official TIA email, and you get a lot more value and you did before. We’re gonna show you things like insights. We’re gonna show you, a couple, you know, free looks, at carriers and show you If we see real detail, what it is, we’re gonna give you some lot more information so that you are being able to protect yourself. And then where that what that leads to is that’s where fraud reporting happens at the CIA. So 2000, 25 100 member companies roughly with the CIA, and they’re now using that more active. I think we’ve seen 20 times more, carrier views that that were previously we see a 30% 30 x increase in the number of fraud reporting, and that’s really helping cut this stuff off before it gets legs.

Jordan [00:26:40]:
And a lot of that fraud are pointing, Mike, is not, hey. You know, my load got brokered or stolen. It’s it’s catching up before it turns into that. When the email phishing campaigns are coming out. So these guys, these fraudulent actors pretending to be carriers are emailing in, you know, to with you a little email bestonelogistics@gmail.com, but they’ll use a one instead of spelling out one, which is the right way the right email. And they’re trying to get the broker to give them that load pertaining to be a carrier that’s already in their network. And that’s what’s getting reported, and that’s Stopping the fraud from happening because now that email’s flagged. Every broker that uses TI Watchdog or Highway is now gonna have visibility that That email’s compromised.

Jordan [00:27:21]:
Don’t trust it.

Mike Mikulik [00:27:22]:
Yeah. Which is huge. So we’re finding these ways here to try to try to weed this out, which I think is great. So, I I mean, this seems like this is an evolving process for you guys. Like, what we have now, you gotta continue to evolve. So what are some of the things on the horizon for highway, some of the new Tools that we can probably expect coming out, and how are they gonna benefit us?

Jordan [00:27:40]:
Yeah. So we’ll talk about tools for both brokers and carriers.

Mike Mikulik [00:27:43]:
Okay.

Jordan [00:27:43]:
So, You know, we’ve we’ve spent a lot of time so thus far building a lot of products from brokers. Why we did that is, one, that’s where my relationships were was with the freight broker community. The second was We believe that if we can stop the fraud at that point in the cycle, we can prevent a lot of downstream, and we’ve been able to do that. But the next step is we’re rolling out a carrier product that’s gonna be free for carriers that are, in in register with Highway and and providing transparency. That they’re gonna be able to go and see and look up brokers and see a lot of the same things that brokers can see on carriers. And it’s gonna provide a lot of transparency about Where is this person actually accessing highway from? Are you know, is this really the broker they claim to be? You know, what kind of payment data have we been able to see on this broker? Like, You know? They’ve had authority for 2 years, but no one’s bought an invoice from him in 2 years. Like, what you know, what’s going on? And provide a lot of that visibility to carriers so that they can Vet the people that they’re about to do business with. Additionally, we’re gonna provide a rate confirmation delivery tool for for carriers and brokers a secure way.

Jordan [00:28:47]:
It’s available today. They can just use their MC number at gohighway.com, and they can be protected when people are sending them rate cons. Highway’s gonna tell tell them That’s not the broker it claims to be. They’re trying to pretend to be another broker, or we don’t know who that broker is. You should make them go verify their identity before you work with Those tools for carriers, I think, are gonna help a lot. Prevent a lot of fraud that they’re facing today. My buddy, I told you this earlier. You know, For instance, kindergarten.

Jordan [00:29:14]:
Went to high school together. He runs 2 trucks out of West Texas. You know, he got stopped. And it impacted personally. You know? And it’s and there’s nowhere for him to go. The the dollar price are too low. It’s not worth the time going to, you know, the collection agencies because, You know, he’s like it’s just it’s and he’s stuck, and no one’s no one’s helping him. And so that’s where a lot of inspiration with this carrier products come from is how do we help Carriers prevent bad stuff from happening to them and their network before it gets in.

Jordan [00:29:45]:
So that’s gonna pass carrier broker relations

Mike Mikulik [00:29:48]:
the way this is going. I I like I think it’s it’s it’s beautiful. It’s just it’s good stuff, and it’s gonna everyone’s gonna win. It’s gonna become a win win for everybody. You have people.

Jordan [00:29:58]:
Yeah. And, you know, we and that’s why we try and be mindful of when we talk about the fraud, not carriers. They They’re pretending to be carriers. You wanna talk about the fraud. They’re not brokers. They’re pretending to be brokers. And what’s what’s what’s hurting the good actors, right, the bad apples are spoiling the whole lot Is there you know, brokers are getting burned by these fraudulent actors pretending to be carriers, and carriers are being burned by these fraudulent actors pretending to be brokers. Uh-huh.

Jordan [00:30:23]:
And it’s causing just reputational damage across this entire industry. The need both these industries need each other, and they and and And there is great outcomes that can be had for all. And and, yes, there’s gonna be disputes along the way, and people are gonna be frustrated. And there’s miscommunication, and there’s, you know, unmet expectations about when they thought they were gonna be voted versus not in their and there are bad actions taken by both sides. I think ultimately, the more that we can bring Transparency and trust. The the trust that I’m working with something like SPI. So so think about this. Like, a carrier that’s been around In the business 6, 9 months.

Jordan [00:30:59]:
Never worked with SPI. They may not know how big you are. Right? And, like, so part of what we wanna do in the highway is exposed to these small carriers. This is a big broker. That means they’re credit worthy. That means reputationally, they’ve been doing this a long time. He’s been doing something right. In then 3, it’s like, you know they’re gonna have more freight for you.

Jordan [00:31:19]:
So you’re willing to take that load. You wanna go engage them because they’re gonna have Freight.

Mike Mikulik [00:31:23]:
And they don’t have an active Salesforce out there selling their their their carrier services to the markets. They for them, parking up with a broker could be a win win for them.

Jordan [00:31:31]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And with your agent model, what’s great, I think, you know, we wanna do a better job as per to showing to these carriers, to these carrier products is, hey. It’s not just like SPI, this one broker. There’s 60, 70, 80 agents out there that are out there hustling all day every day getting ship or freight. Like, Come work with them because you got 60 at bats. You got 60 salespeople out there for you now Yeah. Pushing freight for you.

Jordan [00:31:54]:
So we’re gonna work on, like, that messaging, and that’s what we Worked with you earlier. It’s just like how do we how do we communicate value prop that, you know, these brokers that do good work and are paying carriers Or not trying to work people over. How do we raise that to the surface so carriers know where to go home? Know what what carrier what brokers they should be working for. Yeah.

Mike Mikulik [00:32:15]:
And that I guess that’s a trust factor. So alright. Let’s let’s break it down a little bit a little bit more here. So, you know, we’re we have a great vetting pool utilizing highway, like, Brokers that are that don’t have a vetting program. Like, what are some of these the the the challenges and the rest of their experience kind of moving forward as as we’re seeing right now. Do you

Jordan [00:32:35]:
have any stories to share? Or Yeah. I mean, the the sophistication, level is is getting Pretty pretty incredible. Right? It’s it’s getting they are trying new things. They’re Some of the things we see one of the ones that I heard the other day,

Mike Mikulik [00:32:54]:
like, this stuff changes daily?

Jordan [00:32:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why I like you know, when people will say, like, oh, you know, let’s have a, Yeah. You gotta move fast to keep up with these guys because they’re they’re not they don’t have some committee where they’re sitting around talking about, oh, what should we do? Or, you know, They’re like they’re trying stuff all day every day. So some of the some of the statistics, we see 200 Reported phishing attempts per week. Wow.

Jordan [00:33:21]:
That’s crazy. 200. I mean, the scale of it is That’s 200 sorry. That’s not 200 total. That’s 200 unique email attempts. Yeah. So there’s probably a1000 Or more with those same emails. So that’s 200 unique emails that they’ve used to try and finish.

Mike Mikulik [00:33:39]:
It only takes 1 to get us started. It only

Jordan [00:33:40]:
takes 1. See, they’re playing for a lot of tickets. We’re playing defense. So, One of the ones that was I mean, the subtlety of it the genius was in the subtlety of what they did, and these these guys are this good. They they They got a carrier sales rep at a large broker, and they use a a a reasonably sized large carrier, 50 50 trucks. And they Said, hey. I want that load that you posted on on this load board. And, hey.

Jordan [00:34:04]:
Send the rate confirmation here. And they gave the domain that was The exact match for that carrier’s email domain. Like, it was they didn’t try to spoof email domain. It was a corporate domain. And they said, hey. Email it to this user c The last was at this domain, and the did the right thing, and he went and checked the domain. He sent the email, Didn’t hear anything back, and all of a sudden, you know, an hour or 30 minutes after pickup was supposed to happen, he gets a call from someone pretending to be the driver and Play the whole played the whole role. Frustrated.

Jordan [00:34:37]:
Pickup number’s not working. You know? What did you do? The pit’s not the right pick up number. Give me the pick up number. What’s pick up number? I’m sitting here. I’m about to leave if I don’t get this pickup number. And the carrier sales rep gave him the pickup number over the Oh. And that’s all it took. The the see, the car sales rep in his mind had sent it to the right place.

Jordan [00:34:56]:
So he nothing was amiss to him. Right? And he just assumed they hadn’t responded. And then when that phone call came from the driver, in his mind, the continuation of the experience was, oh, yeah. Like, I mean, how does that happen? Right? The driver doesn’t get the pickup number or can’t read the pickup number on the rate con because there’s, like, 80 numbers on there. Right? And they they fell for it. Load got stolen. Just like that. And they were smart enough to know they picked a company domain that didn’t bounce back.

Jordan [00:35:23]:
Right. See, well, that was a fake user at that company. Uh-huh. So they sent that email to, you know, carrier you know, cblast was at carrierlogistics.com. That was Domain. I wanna say who the carrier was, but they knew that that email wouldn’t bounce back. So they tested it because, you know, some email servers you send in, there’s no user there, it’ll bounce back. Right.

Jordan [00:35:41]:
Right. No one here. And it’s Kind of a security thing. Some people decide not to do that or do that. So it was sophisticated. It was thought out, And the subtlety of the that last move there where they call the Jerry Sills and pretend to be the driver is is act it’s it’s really good. It’s Scary. And they’re gonna

Mike Mikulik [00:36:00]:
come up with new tactics all the time, and they’re gonna keep on trying it. Yeah. So I mean, the rest of these smaller brokers that don’t have a real bidding process in place or ways to alleviate this are gonna have some challenges?

Jordan [00:36:11]:
Yeah. You you’ve gotta be you’ve gotta be vigilant. You’ve gotta be on your guard all the time, and that that’s our job For you, for your firewall. So, like, you know, every network has a firewall, and that’s the tip of the spear that’s out there trying to protect Things from getting into the network. That’s what our job is. So, like, we look at all this data coming in, and we’re looking at, you know, how they’re fishing for For these loads, we’re looking at what kind of loads they’re fishing for, and we’re tracking this data, and it allows us to proactive. And that’s kind of the next step with the broker communities. We’re gonna start providing this proactive intelligence about where we think they’re trying to strike or what loads we think they’re going for, and that will help you be more high alert.

Jordan [00:36:50]:
Right? So So the key is focusing your energy on high risk situations. Right? So they’re not stealing bottled water.

Mike Mikulik [00:36:57]:
No. They’re still bottled water. They are stealing pickles. We had a pickle load that got stolen. Yeah. They’re not selling bottled water loads,

Jordan [00:37:03]:
but they’re they’re targeting certain commodities that are either easy to move or high value or both. Right. And then they’re targeting in certain ZIP codes. There’s there’s certain restrictions.

Mike Mikulik [00:37:11]:
What what kind of areas then are they targeting right now?

Jordan [00:37:13]:
We don’t we don’t say that publicly. Okay. We we It’s it’s in highway. Right? Like, that’s Yeah. That’s the job here. We don’t wanna disclose what we know because then it’ll shift their tactics. Right? So we wanna, you know, we want to, as much as possible, Hold what we think we know. I’ll deliver it to you in a way that in in highway.

Jordan [00:37:30]:
That’s why sometimes in highway, you’re like, why is this more challenging for This is curious because there’s something we’re seeing about a pattern that we may not reveal to the carrier or reveal to the user, but we’re testing out in the background to say, okay. Let’s try that to See if that stops some of this activity. And we measure. We everything we do, we do AB testing where we’re saying, hey. We’re gonna try it on this carrier or try it on that carrier to see what happens. And and we’ve had some that yield great results that we don’t publicly disclose what we know, that the pattern that we see, but it’s running in the background if you’re a highway broker and it’s checking that. And, you know, that will always be how we attack things. And then once something has become revealed or known, then we may publicly

Mike Mikulik [00:38:07]:
disclose what it was. But as

Jordan [00:38:08]:
long as we know It’s working. We’re not gonna disclose it.

Mike Mikulik [00:38:11]:
Good on you for not sharing it with me, man. Yeah. So I know our agents probably a question that they may have is, like, Yeah. I’ve been dealing with this carrier prior to highway. I’ve been dealing with a carrier for years. I know I know their kids. I know. Awesome.

Mike Mikulik [00:38:25]:
Right? I know them well. Then all of a sudden, they get onboarded at the highway and it failed. Yeah. What’s the child what how how talk let’s talk let’s talk through that a little bit.

Jordan [00:38:34]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So every firewall It’s gonna his his goal is to only catch all the bad traffic and let all the good traffic come through. But in reality, there’s an overlap. Right? There is there’s traffic that’s gray. It’s not all black and white. And what I would tell you is if you know that to be true, that’s great. Get that carrier through.

Jordan [00:38:50]:
You know, there’s a process to to bring them through with the overrides, and, Like, maybe there’s a story that that needs to be told, and and we’re always receptive. We talk to carriers all the time. We’re talking to carriers, I’m trying to understand different situations, what’s happening, and it it it’s difficult because the wolves are in cheap clothing. Right? They’re they’re hiding. They’re trying to hide as a sheep, and they’re trying to look like a a carrier. So I would say every there are absolutely new on situations, and we’re always Open to hearing and learning about it. I will say, though, that that is the lever that people try and pull, and there are Dozens, if not a 100 or more stories of carrier brokers have done live with highway that it’s revealed something in their network that Scares him a little bit. Like, we’ve been working with this carrier for how long, and we didn’t know this was going on.

Jordan [00:39:37]:
There’s,

Mike Mikulik [00:39:37]:
like, there’s a key there. Yeah. Could be stuff that we don’t even know about. That it’s something was you guys picked up, and that’s where the red flags come.

Jordan [00:39:44]:
Can we talk about yeah. And so we talk about green, you know, green, yellow, red. Right? And when you see those yellow flags, those insights, it’s an opportunity for conversation. It’s an opportunity to have a conversation. Why you know, and we’ve been working there a long time. I didn’t know you had broker authority. Or why is there broker authority 3 houses down from you? Or, you know, can we talk about that? Like, you know, well, you only got 1 truck you’re scheduled on, but you got 10 that have been inspected. Were these leased on carriers, Based on drivers, are these your drivers? Right? Yeah.

Jordan [00:40:10]:
It’s an opportunity to arm you with a conversation, and that is that’s worth so much. Because when you show up to a conversation with information to be able to ask really good questions. You’re gonna find out whether you push on a nerve that, man, maybe there was something going on that you you wanted to be aware of, or Maybe there’s a story. Maybe there’s a reason why. Maybe they have a certain type of freight that they’re moving that’s making it look like they they have They’re running more billable miles than they can when reality. They’re they’re doing everything right on the up and up. I’ve seen it both ways, and and I’ve seen it both ways, but I will tell you More often than not, you need to trust the data, and the insights leads

Mike Mikulik [00:40:48]:
to be There’s something there.

Jordan [00:40:50]:
More often there’s the conversations had and you walk away being like, I probably should be a little more cautious than I was before.

Mike Mikulik [00:40:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the key. Yeah. That’s the key. You know know what? Everyone has a story too. Not everything is gonna be rosy, but After you could pick those things up and find ways to protect yourself is huge. So And

Jordan [00:41:07]:
you think about proactive communication setting expectations in any relationship. Proactive communication, setting expectations, reduces conflict because of unmet expectations down the road. Having a conversation with, you know, this carrier who Before you didn’t know he had the broker authority under his name across town or whatever. You find out how he’s got broker authority or you find out now he’s got lease on drivers. Just having the conversation about, hey. I’m aware of this now. Hey. Can we can we make sure that my freight doesn’t end End up in your broker side.

Jordan [00:41:35]:
Like, let’s just be clear. Like, I know you have broker authority now. Like, it can’t my freight can’t be brokered. If you can’t cover it, your truck breaks down. Don’t be a hero. I need you to be here, and that happens. Like, carriers wanna be the here. They don’t wanna get the freight back.

Mike Mikulik [00:41:46]:
And their intentions are good.

Jordan [00:41:47]:
They’re good. But what they don’t understand is the the The liability that’s created when that Yes. That’s right. That’s an education. We do that all the time. Like, carriers will say, man, I was just trying to do the right thing. I get it. Sometimes bad things can happen when you do the right thing, and that’s where we say, hey.

Jordan [00:42:02]:
Look. It’s better for you to get the freight back than to do something that’s outside the contract That introduces risk not only to themselves. They don’t they don’t realize they’re reducing risk to themselves because their insurance isn’t set up to cover Another carrier calling this load that was tender to them as a motor carrier. It brings risk to the broker. It brings risk to the shipper. It brings risk all along the the chain of of custody there. And that’s a we’ve had a great opportunity to educate a lot of a carrier on that that risk. And again, like you said, it’s Coming from a good place sometimes.

Jordan [00:42:32]:
Mhmm. And, you know, and and most guys get it. Once you explain it to them, then they get it. And it’s it’s okay if trucks break down. We also we also work whenever we see these reports come in about, you know, people frustrated because a 1 truck carrier didn’t show up because his truck went down. Trucks went down. We we don’t file those reports to get published in Hollywood because we know how hard it is for these guys. Like, we we we We have friends that are in the trucking industry.

Jordan [00:42:59]:
We people that, you know, we’ve financed for a long time. Like we care about their their outcome and we’re not gonna allow like Something bad happened. The truck broke down. They hit, you know these things happen. It’s Okay. Transperation. It gets sick. You gotta You gotta actually physically move this stuff.

Jordan [00:43:16]:
It’s not just like, you know, software, and so we wanna make sure that carriers’ reputation small carriers’ reputations are not damaged just because Something bad happened that yeah. It stinks for the broker. Right? They they have to go find another, find another carrier. They get because they fell off. Like, That’s the nature of why we’re compensated from the broker trade community is to provide that stability when a small carrier, Something happens, and they can’t make it to go find another one. That’s our job. Right? And so we shouldn’t punish people because of their their things that happen in the world that How’s breakdowns?

Mike Mikulik [00:43:49]:
Oh, I agree. I’m glad we’re able to do this. I think our agents, they needed to hear exactly what highway is, even the goals that are taking place in the future. But I think also too we’re talking about maybe having a Zoom discussion and having our agents jolt in there and asking questions back and forth to you. You’re cool? I love

Jordan [00:44:06]:
it, man. I love talking to the users because they, you know, the feedback is always valuable. I learn more about the product when I’m talking to users who are, like, Hey. This stinks. Like, when I hit the back button, this happens. I’m like, I never thought about that. So that’s the kind of stuff that, like, we learn from and grow from, and so, yeah, I’m excited. Tell me I’m I’m ready for Bring the Heat.

Jordan [00:44:24]:
I know they’re gonna they’re gonna come out.

Mike Mikulik [00:44:26]:
Get some heat.

Jordan [00:44:27]:
Yeah. It’s good.

Mike Mikulik [00:44:27]:
That’s the thing. Like, we went I remember when we changed from, CMS to Reva Nova. And you know what? You’re going through using a new tool. It’s challenging. You have your your ups and downs or it’s like, oh, it’s cumbersome, whatever it is. Over time, you know what? You get used to it, and you just kinda work through it. I think the same thing too. I mean, yes, we’ve had challenges here, you know, with the onboarding of highway and, you know, You know what? There’s been some frustrations, but the more we use it and the more we fine tune things, get the right carriers of the system that are approved, I believe things will be easier, and this is gonna be work in the background.

Mike Mikulik [00:44:58]:
Like you said, like, your firewall. That’s the one stuff and you’re not getting affected too much by it.

Jordan [00:45:02]:
Fair to say. Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s also us learning your business. You know, we we we respond you know, there are things that we know that we absolutely wanna do, right, and then how certain protections and data analysis that we’re doing that we know we wanna do. But then there’s another layer of here, like molding highway to fit your business. And so we’ve Absolutely made changes based on market that need us feedback, like, specifically around the inter Canadian carriers in that process. There’s some great feedback about how you all How do you all view the world.

Jordan [00:45:31]:
Right? And the things that you all know, because you move a lot more in Canadian freight than than we have. Yeah. Right? And so we make sure that our process It’s malleable. Like, it can fit around what you want it to do. Like and that’s you know, there’s some things that, like, are ground truths that we care about, and there’s a lot of things up here that we wanna make sure Makes great sense for SPI and its agents, and be responsive to feedback. And things are gonna change. Like, Mike, the the you know, as As things change, as your biz as SPI grows and brings more agents and boost and does more types of modes of freight, we wanna make sure that we’re meeting those needs not only today, but in the future, and you will always again, we we talk a lot about owning the outcome at Highway. Like, we don’t just deliver software and say it’s perfect.

Jordan [00:46:14]:
Hey. It it works, like, you know, it’s it’s software. It’s workflow. Workflows change and workflows break, and workflows have to be amended to make changing circumstance. And so we fully understand that, and that’s something that we I care deeply about personally. I write a lot of the code that goes in highway, and I Party wrote got some code that we’re right for feedback we got here. Like, I I’ll ride it on the plane tomorrow because you you know how much I care about SPI. You guys you guys took a bet on me when I was starting to try and pay starting to try and pay, and, like, you all good to me.

Jordan [00:46:47]:
And so, like, I Will not sleep if I I mean, after we talked to Freight Wave, and you’re like, hey. We got these 6 things we need you to fix. I worked on it that night because I I care that much about It’s because you’ve been so good to me.

Mike Mikulik [00:46:58]:
I appreciate it, man, and it’s a good partnership. It’s only gonna continue to grow too. And like I said, I I think we were talking about even coming rendezvous. Yeah. Maybe getting maybe getting fired on some more over our rendezvous, but the biggest key, and that’s why I thought it was important that we do this Yeah. For our agents, and we can also multipurpose This information on other channels, education. I think the big thing is understanding why we did it, why we signed with Highway, what are the benefits, and how can that help us so they’ll find better relationships with our customers and educate our customers. I think that was kind of the missing thing that we needed, and I’m glad we’re able to get this.

Mike Mikulik [00:47:33]:
Awesome. Hold on video and audio as well too. So thank you everyone for listening. We talked longer than we expected, didn’t we?

Jordan [00:47:38]:
That’s great. You’re good. Thanks, Mike. Alright. Thanks a lot.

Mike Mikulik [00:47:42]:
That was great. That was actually really good.

Jordan [00:47:45]:
Yeah, man. Absolutely. Anytime. Anytime. And we’ll do that Zoom with the agents and all, get on there and There are some thing, like, there’s so, like, there’s certain patterns we see in emails and Gee, like a Gmail authority rating addresses that I your estimate your bill be, and they don’t tell you why. And it’s it’s

Mike Mikulik [00:48:06]:
it’s the agent understand why we’re doing it, but I think they find it’s like, what’s hindering you’re not using it as a sales tool like this.

Jordan [00:49:07]:
Yeah. Awesome.

Mike Mikulik [00:49:11]:
Yeah. Before we set up the as well as make you send up, like, break out the the intros and the or the. Yeah. We all started and kinda make it like it was an interview. Maybe send it to the whole executive team go ahead. Or have a look at it

Trey Griggs [00:00:46]:
What did you do before this that, put you in this position to, to jumping on the on the carrier procurement side.

Mark Funk [00:00:52]:
Yeah. Wow. Okay. So, prior to working here, I was actually the director of carrier procurement at A company called R&L Global Logistics, and, you know, I did a 3 year stint there. And then prior to that, I was director of carrier operations at Total Quality Logistics for 10 years. And then, prior to that, I was the, administration supply chain manager for Sara Lee US Foods, and and Prior to that, I worked for a company where I would actually travel internationally and and, you know, vet, suppliers and do some of the the, Shipping from overseas into the states.

Trey Griggs [00:01:26]:
Yeah. The one that stands out to me is Sara Lee. Did you get some good pies or something out of that deal?

Mark Funk [00:01:31]:
You you know, Trey, one of the things about Sara Lee, when I right there, I was thinking, you know, pies, it’s great. But, you know, at the time, you know, certainly it’s so much larger. Right? You you’re talking Hillshire farmer, Conn’s, back then it was Hanes Kiwi shoe polish, you know. It it just goes on. It’s $18,000,000,000 company. So, Yeah. But, yeah, I did eat my cherry pie.

Trey Griggs [00:01:51]:
Yes. I I figured you might have gotten a good cherry pie or something from time to time. Well, I

Mark Funk [00:01:54]:
was hoping the camera would make me a little

Trey Griggs [00:01:55]:
bit bigger, but that doesn’t is happening. Well, you know, we do what we can around here. We do our best. But it’s clear that you you’ve been around the block. You’re not a newbie at this. You’ve seen a lot in the industry. You’ve done this for a long time. And, you know, right now, there’s a lot of issues that are facing, you know, the industry, freight brokers in particular, Agents in particular, and I think about this a lot because especially for what you guys do with agents.

Trey Griggs [00:02:18]:
I mean, the reason why somebody becomes an agent is usually because they’re really good with customer and, again, good with sales. But in terms of, like, grabbing carriers, you know, booking freight and that type of thing, maybe they don’t wanna do that. Maybe you guys are helping them out with that or maybe they are doing that. But The vetting process has been a pretty cumbersome process over the years and is especially cumbersome now because of all the fraud, theft, and double brokering that’s going on in the industry. How are you guys helping your agents really tackle that problem, so that it’s not an issue for them as little as possible? It’s almost impossible to eliminate. We’re getting close to it, I think, with some technology. What are you guys doing?

Mark Funk [00:02:52]:
Yeah. You know, so, Trey, that’s great. Right? When you think back about, you know, what happened in the industry in 2008, 2009, you saw a rise in a lot of fraud and and things like that. But that is nothing to compare to what’s happening right now. You go to any conference, you talk to any customer, you talk to any agent, We’re with SPI or other other companies. One of the things that they run into is this whole fraud and and scamming that’s happening. Right? And and when you look at the different types of scams that are out there, I mean, you know, you got the ComCheck scams, you got the double brokering scams, you got the double brokering with theft Scams. You got the triple brokering with warehouse scams.

Mark Funk [00:03:29]:
You and it just goes on. Right? So, you know, here at SPI, what we’re doing is we’re really leveraging In in diving into technology. See, one of the things that that’s different now versus what it was back, you know, in 2008, 2009 when this stuff really became prevalent, is the type of technology. Right? So, you know, we’re we’re partnering with with great vendors in the industry right now. Shout out to Highway, you know, we’re we’re with Highway, great platform. A lot of, technology there. You know, another shout out to Carrier Assure. You know, Cassandra and what that team is doing over there, which is just fabulous.

Mark Funk [00:04:06]:
Right? And and, you know, we we bring in a lot of different technology, but That’s a little bit different with with SPI. Instead of going with just 1 single platform, We’re taking that platform, and we’re using our internal IT expertise and bringing all of those together. So when our agents go to look at a carrier, they can quickly say, this is a carrier that I should be able to to trust calling our customers from.

Trey Griggs [00:04:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s huge. You know? And you we saw, the partnership between CarrierSure and Truckstop recently. We also saw the partnership with Highway and TIA with their Watchdog product. And so It’s also good to see these companies really starting to work together to eradicate an issue that’s it’s causing a lot of problems for the entire industry. And, You know, there there’s really there’s really no way to completely eliminate it, but the the closer we can get to it, the better it is for the industry. And that’s what I like about, like, what Highway is doing is because they’re keeping the bad players out of party altogether until the bad players probably figure out a way to circumvent around that.

Trey Griggs [00:05:05]:
We’re I feel like we’re constantly gonna have to iterate to stay 1 step ahead of the the bad actors in the industry, kinda like hackers. Like, you’re never gonna completely eliminate hackers. You gotta keep Changing your security protocols to make sure you can keep them out. It it’s a never ending game, it seems like.

Mark Funk [00:05:21]:
What? You’re you’re exactly right. So, you know, one of the things that, that We used to look at a lot was inspections on carriers, right? So, you know, this was the days before we had highway carrier insurance, some other technology, we would look at, you know, carrier four zero one. We will look at inspections. If care didn’t have inspections, they weren’t business for, you know, 18 months, 2 years, maybe a little bit shorter than that as well. You guys start wondering, okay, why is that?

Trey Griggs [00:05:43]:
Yeah. Right.

Mark Funk [00:05:44]:
Right. So but so we would start excluding here, not just us, but other brokers and agent and and agencies in in the industry. So you know what they do? The the scammers, the bad actors, so what they do is they go out and they get a straight truck. They rent a straight truck, and they get these placards made up, And they slap it on the side of a rented straight truck, and they drive through and they get an inspection. So then you know what? Boom. That MC now has an inspection. You know, and and some ways to prevent that and and find that, but, that that’s a a great thing that, That that, we were able to to identify with the help of of external partners, but that’s that’s one area as well. You know, some some of the issues that we have too are just related to how MCs are handled and how they’re issued, and and there’s some things with that.

Mark Funk [00:06:30]:
But, You know, technology has been able to help us out a lot. And, you know, again, leveraging some of our internal technology, we’ve been able to link in Some of our telephony solutions as well and be able to identify that maybe this number is associated with a a known bad actor and things like that, as well as an email. So before you go to send that out, we can check that and say, hey, wait a minute, that’s that’s not a good

Trey Griggs [00:06:55]:
Good answer.

Mark Funk [00:06:56]:
Or it’s not associated with that carrier. Yep.

Trey Griggs [00:06:59]:
And that’s what I love about what Highway is doing as well is they’re bringing financial data into the equation as well. They’re being bringing in, you know, VIN numbers in the equation as well. If you got a carrier that has 2 trucks and has, you know, 60,000 in payables in a week, that’s not that’s not possible. Right? I mean, that’s So so being able to line all that up and say there’s something wrong here. There’s a flag here. We need to we need to do a further inspection or we need to just have a tolerance that eliminates them. I think those are the types of technologies. And as they continue to iterate and get better and better, are gonna make it a lot easier for brokerages to do that.

Trey Griggs [00:07:30]:
You guys provide that for your agents. That’s all included. When a agent on board with SPI Logistics, these services are all just, you know, par for the course. These are table stakes. Correct?

Mark Funk [00:07:39]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. There there’s no no additional charge or anything like that to the agents at all. Right? So so if you’re an agent for SPI, you know, we have that technology. We make it available. Obviously, it’s in our system for the agents. It because look. I I don’t know if you’ve actually tendered and out there on slum freight before.

Mark Funk [00:07:54]:
Right? But you said

Trey Griggs [00:07:55]:
6 months. You know that fun? I do.

Mark Funk [00:07:57]:
Okay. So you get it.

Trey Griggs [00:07:58]:
Right? Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:07:59]:
You spend all that time, you you’re getting that that relationship together with a customer, you made all these cold calls, they’ve hung up on you, they’ve hung up you finally, okay, hey, I’m gonna give you this chance. And it’s always some load going from nowhere to nowhere. Right? Yeah.

Trey Griggs [00:08:12]:
So you’ve got Hardest load possible. That’s right.

Mark Funk [00:08:14]:
Hardest load if it wasn’t hard, you wouldn’t have it.

Trey Griggs [00:08:17]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:08:17]:
But that’s your that’s your chance. Right? So the last thing you wanna do is risk that load on a a carrier that may be less accept.

Trey Griggs [00:08:25]:
That’s right.

Mark Funk [00:08:25]:
You know, so what we try to do is we make sure that when our agent looks at a carrier, that they have all the updated information. They know what they’re getting. You know, one of the things also that that we’ve done is we’ve integrated a character scoring model where we take in components From all these different sources, well, as our own proprietary information. And we can take a look at that in in a real quick one letter transfers into a number, our agents can look at that and say, okay, this carrier should perform, you know, to a level of expectations that we would want, Right? And what that does, it does look at different data data signals and says, okay, hey, this carrier because of so many different Insights, we’re gonna exclude them.

Trey Griggs [00:09:07]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:09:07]:
Right? So yeah, that’s all part of the package.

Trey Griggs [00:09:10]:
And I think that’s the best thing about one of the best things about, you know, SPI Logistics and and freight brokerages and agents coming on board. You know, if you’re a small freight brokerage, you just might not have the capital to invest in these technologies to avoid some of these risks, Especially if you’re an agent. You know? I mean, a small agent is really a super small business, and they might not have the resources when they think they might need a TMS. They might need all these things. The technology is already there. They get to come in and plug and play and just stay in their sweet spot of selling or customers customer experience, whatever it might be. They’re able to sustain that, but they get all the benefits of a big shop just by joining with SPI.

Mark Funk [00:09:45]:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Right, Trey? So if you’re an agent and you’re gonna come to SPI, You’re getting top of the line technology. You’re get you’re getting excellent back office support. If there’s an issue, if there’s a problem, You reach out and and and the team takes care of that. Right? And and when I’m talking about top line technology, you know, we’re talking Salesforce. We’re talking revenue. We’re talking access the highway, we’re talking access of carrier, sure, we’re talking all of those different things that come together to make it as easy as possible for an agent.

Mark Funk [00:10:14]:
You know, look, A year ago, right, the the market was totally different. You could call a wrong number and probably get

Trey Griggs [00:10:22]:
a load from a customer. Right?

Mark Funk [00:10:24]:
But trying to find a truck was hard.

Trey Griggs [00:10:26]:
Right. Right.

Mark Funk [00:10:27]:
Okay? And now now everything’s changed. Right? Yeah. You know, so now you you post a load and, oh my gosh, your your phones light up. They blow up. So what we and that takes a time and energy. So what we wanna do is make it so easy that when when an agent goes in And they put this information in, and and you know what? I left this out of of of what we’re talking about too. You know, we partner with Parade. Right? So Parade is capacity matching solution.

Mark Funk [00:10:50]:
You build that load inside Revnova, inside Salesforce, and you’re gonna get a listing of carriers that you know have ran through our grading system, have met all these criteria, And you you know what you’re what you’re getting at, and you also know whether they have the the LD tracking and where they’re at. So it it’s just So much easier

Trey Griggs [00:11:09]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:11:09]:
In that regard. Agents have have their own stuff to worry about.

Trey Griggs [00:11:11]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:11:12]:
They shouldn’t have to worry about banning the carrier. Yeah.

Trey Griggs [00:11:13]:
No. It’s huge. And I got to be up in the in the headquarters About a a month ago, back in the middle of summer, I got to got to go up and and see everybody, meet the team, see how they worked with agents. Everybody up there enjoys working with the agents and making sure that they they, are there to support them and make them, make them helpful. That’s the sign to me of a really healthy organization when the frontline workers enjoy the jobs that they’re doing. They’re in the right seats. They see the value they’re providing. They see their purpose and their why.

Trey Griggs [00:11:39]:
And the leadership At SPI, I’ve been so impressed with that, you know, with, with Joe and with Mike and James and and and all of them. It’s just been impressive to see the the leadership. What attracted you to come be a part of the SPI team to support agents?

Mark Funk [00:11:54]:
You you know, it’s funny you say that, Trey, because What you just said, I probably couldn’t say it better. This this leadership team at at SPI, it’s totally different. You know, I I I’ve worked with some companies that that I I still feel very fondly about. Right? But, You know, when I got a chance to actually sit down and talk to Anita, Joe, and Mike, and the team, there there was that sense of of of of just, Hey. We love what we do, and and they they truly when they spoke, it it meant something. So, You know, my interactions with everybody in the team from, you know, on the customer support side all the way up through the the executive side, they believe in servicing the agents. They truly believe that. And and that’s great because, you know, the last thing you wanna do is is work somewhere where you don’t, You’re working with people who don’t believe what what they’re what they’re what they’re representing.

Mark Funk [00:12:52]:
So the commitment to quality to the agents was the number one thing for me. And as I was speaking to the team, the leadership team, you know, it came through that, hey, Mark. If you come on board with SPI, we’re gonna be here to support you. You’re you’re gonna be able to do what you need to do, and you’re gonna help us in our mission to serve the agents. So the leadership team is what sold me, but all the way all the way just their commitment to the agents, I guess.

Trey Griggs [00:13:15]:
Yeah. And I think that’s that that that’s the best part of organization is the leadership in terms of evaluating if you wanna be a part of an organization. So I think the SPI has that going for him in spades, and it was really funny to get up there. Have you been to Vancouver? What a beautiful place. Man. I love it.

Mark Funk [00:13:28]:
I have been. I’ve. It it is absolutely beautiful. Thankfully, I I was up there in the springtime, and, you know, it was really nice and it was warm because I’m down here in Florida, you know, so I I love this.

Trey Griggs [00:13:39]:
That’s quite the hall from Florida all the way to Vancouver. That’s like a 6 hour flight.

Mark Funk [00:13:44]:
Yeah. Well, that’s a 6 hour flight, but you got some layovers in between the way too. So But, yeah, you know, it’s a beautiful office. You know, it’s it’s a great environment. And and even the just Sit into the room with with the the agent or with the people who are supporting the agents and hearing those calls and and just the intensity in your voice, make sure that they’re pleasing the agents. It’s key.

Trey Griggs [00:14:06]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:14:06]:
It it it’s it’s exciting. It really is exciting.

Trey Griggs [00:14:08]:
Yeah. And SPI has, has its annual agent conference every other year in Vancouver. So that’s a little perk because they get to go to Vancouver every other

Mark Funk [00:14:17]:
year, and next year, it’s in Nashville. A perk.

Trey Griggs [00:14:19]:
I’m excited about Nashville, but, But being up there in Vancouver, it’s hard to beat. It’s so beautiful up there.

Mark Funk [00:14:25]:
Yeah. You know, you mentioned that, you know, we it it’s called rendezvous, and what we do is we bring all of our agents in, and it’s a chance To to celebrate who they are and their accomplishments for the year, you know, we go over some of our our our road maps of what we’re looking for and

Trey Griggs [00:14:39]:
what we’re gonna

Mark Funk [00:14:40]:
be rolling out. So it’s a it’s a great chance to to actually, mingle, have a good time, but then also set our sights on where we’re going as a company.

Trey Griggs [00:14:49]:
Yeah. Awesome. And I was in Nashville, recently for, a charity golf tournament. That’s a great that’s a fun town, man. It’s gonna be a good time next year. I think it’s gonna be in April. I know. So it’s gonna be a lot of fun to Yep.

Trey Griggs [00:14:59]:
See the agents and be together, that’ll be that’ll be a good time for sure. That’s that’s true.

Mark Funk [00:15:03]:
Fun note, this year coming up, or in April that you’re talking about, it’s it’s actually May, our 45th year in business. So very excited

Trey Griggs [00:15:10]:
about it. Nice. Excellent. I’m sure there’s a special name for 45. I don’t know what it is. I’ll have to look it up. But, yeah, that’ll be fun. That’ll be a good time.

Trey Griggs [00:15:17]:
We gotta pause for a minute because we’d like to have a little bit of fun on the show, Mark. And so today, we got a couple of things. First of all, we’re gonna look at a random question of the day. Now listen, we come up with it. Our podcast director come up with this question, every every show. I don’t know if it’s a funny question, serious question. Could be a good question. It could be a dud.

Trey Griggs [00:15:34]:
I don’t know. See what it is. Today’s random question of the day is let’s see what we got. What has been the most memorable moment of your We’re so far oh, kind of a serious one. Okay. What’s been the most memorable moment? Funny, serious, whatever. What do you got?

Mark Funk [00:15:48]:
Oh my gosh. I I wasn’t prepared for that. So most

Trey Griggs [00:15:52]:
No one ever is, Mark. That’s always why we do it.

Mark Funk [00:15:54]:
Right. No

Trey Griggs [00:15:54]:
one’s no one’s prepared.

Mark Funk [00:15:55]:
You know, most memorable moment of my career is is probably a time where I where I failed. Right. You know, we’re going way back to when I first started. And, you know, long story short, I I put all some information together With all the leadership team and and I was supposed to send over 1 document, I ended up sending over all of the notes to the meeting.

Trey Griggs [00:16:17]:
Oh, no. To,

Mark Funk [00:16:18]:
to an opposing party. Yeah. So, I was young, and, The I I thought for sure that I was gonna lose lose my career at that point, but, the individual that that I reported to Said, hey, listen. You learned a lesson. We move forward.

Trey Griggs [00:16:34]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:16:35]:
And and the thing I take away from that is is I go through my career And when I work with people, when I encounter people where they may encounter an opportunity, it’s that forgiveness.

Trey Griggs [00:16:47]:
Yeah. And that,

Mark Funk [00:16:47]:
you know what?

Trey Griggs [00:16:48]:
Right.

Mark Funk [00:16:48]:
We we we’re all human.

Trey Griggs [00:16:49]:
That’s a critical moment for you. That could have been a moment where, you know, you you became harsh because somebody was harsh with you. Or Or but in this case, you know, there’s somebody showed you mercy and now, you know, now you’re showing mercy as well. That’s a that’s a powerful moment. Clearly, you’ve never forgotten that. That’s Very memorable. And the mistakes are usually the ones we remember the most. That’s for sure.

Trey Griggs [00:17:09]:
That’s for sure. I’ll tell you for me Yeah. I think the most memorable that I had, and it’s not really a moment, but it was a season, was when I transitioned from education to door to door sales to learn sales. I had a friend who said, I think you could you could be good at sales, and the only job I could get was going door to door business to business to sell office supplies. And so I’m 32. I have a master’s degree. I’ve got a family. My wife isn’t working.

Trey Griggs [00:17:33]:
It’s a 100% commission. It was the hardest season of my life. It was like It was like boot camp, like Navy Seal training. I mean, I I don’t wanna compare to that because those are heroes. Those are true heroes. But it was really, really hard, and, and I hated it. It was so hard. It was just constantly getting beat down and constantly just just fighting for everything you could get and just figuring things out and learning.

Trey Griggs [00:17:55]:
But when I came out of that 15 months later, I was prepared to do sales. And the next sales job that I got, I did very, very well. And it wasn’t, I remember this will be this is like if there’s a moment, this is the moment. I’m sitting at lunch one day, Mark, and one of my one of my associates, on the sales team comes to me and he goes, hey. What are you doing? And I said, I’m having lunch. And he goes, no. What are you doing? How how are you selling so many people? And I started to to, like, just talk through it. Like, well, what are you doing? You know? Like, I mean, this isn’t that hard, and I started to describe what door to door sales was like.

Trey Griggs [00:18:29]:
I started to say, it’s not like we’re going into their business and meeting them for the 1st time, and we gotta sell them today because we’re not coming back tomorrow, and it’s a 100% Shannon. You only eat what you kill. And as I’m describing it, that’s when the light bulb clicked of how valuable that door to door experience was. Yep. Right? It’s the same prepared to. Yeah. It was the same thing. And I just remember that season and that moment in particular of the of how valuable door to door sales.

Trey Griggs [00:19:01]:
And now I’m a salesman at heart. When I meet other salespeople and they start talking, I can almost tell which ones went through door to door like I did, because it’s it’s almost like a rite of passage to to do that. Yeah. So, yeah, that was a memorable moment in my career as well. So that’s a good to go. Those are those are 2 good ones. So it’s a good question. Good question today.

Trey Griggs [00:19:16]:
That’s good.

Mark Funk [00:19:17]:
Awesome.

Trey Griggs [00:19:17]:
Alright. Also, it’s time for us to play this or that. This or that. Okay. This is a fun game that we play. I think we might even have graphic for this. Do we have a this or that graphic for this? We we do. Let’s play.

Trey Griggs [00:19:28]:
Uh-oh. Alright, Mark. So I’m gonna give you 2 option 2 options. You just have to tell us which one you prefer. That’s it. Alright. Okay. We’ll make them real simple.

Trey Griggs [00:19:40]:
Alright. We’ll start with 1 super simple. I think I even know the answer to this one, but I’ll just throw it out there. Okay. Beach or mountains? Beach or mountains? Beach. Beach. Clearly. Beach.

Trey Griggs [00:19:50]:
Yeah. You don’t have to get away to the mountains. You like the beach. You actually I

Mark Funk [00:19:53]:
can look at the mountains maybe beach.

Trey Griggs [00:19:57]:
You’re a beach guy. That’s for sure. Okay. Alright. Okay. Hot dog or Hamburger. You’re at a barbecue. Hamburger.

Trey Griggs [00:20:04]:
Hamburger. I was at With cheese? And if so, what kind of cheese?

Mark Funk [00:20:07]:
Oh, absolutely. What kind of cheese? Cheeseburger in paradise, man.

Trey Griggs [00:20:09]:
Oh, that’s true. I should. That’s right. Good call. What kind of cheese? Do you go regular, like American, pepper jack, do you do something different, Colby? What do you American? Just American? Just American cheese. Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:20:18]:
Just American cheese. Yeah.

Trey Griggs [00:20:19]:
That’s a good one. Okay.

Mark Funk [00:20:20]:
Now you’re making me hungry. I know what I’m gonna do after we’re done here.

Trey Griggs [00:20:23]:
The next one is also food, so I apologize. Okay. Apples or oranges, let’s go healthy. Would you prefer to eat an apple or peel an orange and then eat that?

Mark Funk [00:20:30]:
You know what? I’m gonna say orange, because it goes with a lot of drinks.

Trey Griggs [00:20:34]:
Oh, okay. Alright. Very good. Orange, that’s a good one. Orange is not bad. I like Apple because it’s just not as messy. That’s why I like Apple, but oranges are good. Oranges are good.

Trey Griggs [00:20:43]:
That’s a good point. Okay. Alright. Sports car or truck?

Mark Funk [00:20:50]:
So I own a truck, but eventually, I’m gonna get Sports car. So right now, I think that’s what everybody wants to do. Right now, it’s a truck.

Trey Griggs [00:20:58]:
Right now, it’s a truck. But, yeah. But but you like those do you have a sports car picked out? It sounds like you’ve been thinking about this. Do you have one that you

Mark Funk [00:21:04]:
I have, but, unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to to to get to that level as far as what the commitment is. But I really love the new Corvettes.

Trey Griggs [00:21:12]:
I think those look

Mark Funk [00:21:14]:
really nice, but

Trey Griggs [00:21:14]:
Would you like a new Corvette or would you like a classic like 77 Corvette?

Mark Funk [00:21:19]:
You know what? I really like the new ones.

Trey Griggs [00:21:21]:
Yeah. They really do. They are they are nice. They they look like Lamborghinis kind of. They kind of got the feel. Right? Right.

Mark Funk [00:21:27]:
Yeah. I just can’t I can’t I can’t bring myself to pay that, so I just drive my truck.

Trey Griggs [00:21:32]:
That’s a that’s a good one. Alright. Well, you know, that’s that’s a good one. Okay. Last one, vacation. Are you staying in the states? Are you going over

Mark Funk [00:21:40]:
Going on vacation next week and are gonna go up to another part of Florida.

Trey Griggs [00:21:43]:
You’re going to Florida?

Mark Funk [00:21:44]:
Panama City Beach.

Trey Griggs [00:21:45]:
Let’s let’s do this. A dream vacation. Let me make it dream vacation. Somewhere in the states or somewhere overseas?

Mark Funk [00:21:51]:
States, actually.

Trey Griggs [00:21:52]:
Stateside. Alright. Cool. You like to do national parks? You like to just like, what do you like to

Mark Funk [00:21:56]:
I’d go to Iowa or I’m sorry. I yeah. I’d I’d go to Hawaii.

Trey Griggs [00:22:02]:
Hawaii. Yeah. Have you ever been there before?

Mark Funk [00:22:05]:
No. I have not. It’s on my bucket list.

Trey Griggs [00:22:06]:
Bucket list.

Mark Funk [00:22:07]:
Yes, Brent?

Trey Griggs [00:22:08]:
I have been once. I’ve been once, and that was, that was last, last year, last May. And, I’ve never been there before. It was pretty cool. I got to take the kids too, so they’ve been there as well, which is nice. Kinda get that out of the way for them. Nice. That’s pretty cool.

Trey Griggs [00:22:20]:
Alright. Well, everybody, that was this version of this or that. So hope you enjoyed that. Alright. Let’s get back to this. We got just a few more minutes here before we wrap up, Mark. Just a couple of other things. So, know, we talked about your work at SPI.

Trey Griggs [00:22:33]:
What is your favorite thing about working with agents? What do you just enjoy? What gets you up and and just, you know, gets you excited? And are you working hand in hand with the agents? Are you really behind the scenes? About that interaction.

Mark Funk [00:22:43]:
Yeah. No. So I’ll start with the latter first. I’m a I actually go out in our in our business or visit our agents. I was visiting an agent, last week over here in Miami. I’m visiting agents a couple weeks from now. So, you know, part of my role, my job, It it is behind the scenes where I’m talking to carriers, I’m getting their equipment, I’m getting their requirements, I’m talking to our talking and working with our IT group

Trey Griggs [00:23:06]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:23:07]:
Making sure that any solution We bring we bring on matches and but, you know, what I really like and something I found about my career a long time ago, and Trey, I like to help people. I don’t know what it is. I’m sure somebody can analyze that, but you know what? I really like to help people. So when I can walk into an agent’s office And I can sit down and I can see that they’re spending a lot of time doing something that could maybe be automated and or that we already have a solution for, Then you know what? I’ll jump right in there. Hey. Let me show you this. Check this out. Right? And and we go through all that type of stuff.

Mark Funk [00:23:46]:
I absolutely love Helping people. And it isn’t necessarily agent agents, but it it does transcend nicely into that. Right?

Trey Griggs [00:23:53]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:23:54]:
So yeah. No. I’m I’m out probably 30% of the time with the agents. You know, another 70% of the time, I’m I’m working behind the scenes to to support the agents.

Trey Griggs [00:24:05]:
It seems like that’s the culture of the company because I know that Mike travels a lot to spend time with agents. He’s told me stories of, you know, going to a Kansas City Chiefs game with an agent in town and They’re doing these other activities. So it seems like that’s really a part of the culture is not just to support the agents from afar, but to really go and spend time with the agents in their neck of the woods.

Mark Funk [00:24:23]:
You know, Trey, it that is exactly our culture. And here’s the thing too. It it transcends just business. I mean, there’s agents that that I talk to on the phone all day. Hey. How’s it going? You know, and I know their family. I know their They’re they’re they’re kids. I know what’s going on in their personal life.

Mark Funk [00:24:41]:
And and, you know, it you build relationships. I mean, it the key and you get this because you’re a sales guy. The key To everything is relationship.

Trey Griggs [00:24:49]:
And if

Mark Funk [00:24:49]:
you can find people where you have that commonality and that you actually care about, it makes it so much easier to help them because It’s like an extended family, and I know that’s gonna sound corny if nobody’s ever experienced that. And and I get it, but It it is. It’s an extended family.

Trey Griggs [00:25:06]:
Yeah.

Mark Funk [00:25:06]:
It really is.

Trey Griggs [00:25:07]:
No. It it seems like that’s the culture. And, again, talking to Mike, and, you know, he’s on the road a lot traveling, which is hard being away from home and and doing that, but it’s a commitment that the company has to its agents which, which is really great. So I love hearing that. I love hearing your heart for helping people And just wanting to really be a support for the agents, which I think is more differentiated for it. Yeah. How you guys great. Mark, thank you for being on the show today.

Trey Griggs [00:25:30]:
Appreciate that, and, much, much success to you as well. Looking forward to seeing you in Nashville, you know, maybe sooner. I don’t know.

Mark Funk [00:25:37]:
Yeah. I I think I’m gonna see you up in Tampa here shortly.

Trey Griggs [00:25:40]:
Oh, nice. Are you going to the broker carrier summit? I am. Yeah. Excellent. That’s awesome. Looking forward to seeing you out there. That’s gonna be a great event. Yeah.

Trey Griggs [00:25:47]:
We’ll be right Yeah. Good here, looking forward. I know. That’ll be great. Mark, again, thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you again real soon on another episode.

Mark Funk [00:25:54]:
Thanks for having me.