August 5, 2025 • 40 mins
Emerging technologies like AI and machine learning could become essential tools for freight brokers to fight fraud, boost productivity and enhance customer service — key steps toward easing margin pressure in a market weighed down by stagnant rates and soft demand. In this episode of Talking Transports, Armstrong Transport Group CEO Cameron Ramsdell joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior transportation and logistics analyst Lee Klaskow to discuss the state of third-party logistics market, how Armstrong is gaining market share, the impact of tariffs, recent transportation M&A and how his disillusionment with politics led him into the freight world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi everyone, this is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Clascow, senior Freight, transportation and logistics analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg and House Research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the globe. Before diving in a little
public service announcement, your support is instrumental to keep bringing
(00:28):
great guests and conversations to you, our listeners, and we
need your support. So if you enjoy this podcast, share it,
like it, and leave a comment. Also, if you have
an idea for future episodes you're just want to talk transports,
please hit me up on the Bloomberg terminal, on LinkedIn
or on Twitter at logistics Late. Now on to our
episode I'm very excited to have with us today. Cameron Ramsdal,
(00:50):
CEO of Armstrong Transport Group. Cameron brings eighteen years of
operational technology, sales and M and a experience to the team.
Prior to Armstrong, he served as the CEO at a Merge,
President of Variant slash Us Express, and was the CTO
at Coyote Logistics. Cameeron Holds a BA in English and
(01:12):
Political Science from Dennison University and an MBA from Northwestern
University Kellogg School of Management. Welcome to the podcast, Cameeron,
Thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Thanks Lee, appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And this is an exciting episode because we're in studio.
We don't get to do this all the time and
it's a treat, so it's good to see the have
a conversation face to face. So Armstrong Transport Group again,
you know, maybe not a household name for everybody. Could
you talk about what the company does where you based
just some basic background on the company.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sure. So Armstrong is a three pl headquartered out of Charlotte.
We're about one point three five one point four billion
by total revenue. We're about twenty years old and very
well diversified. We have a hybrid operating model, so that
means we have an agent program on one side of
the business and we also have a more traditional kind
of W two brokerage like Coyote, RXO, C H. Robinson
(02:06):
type of type of model as well.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Oh interesting, what's the makeup of the agents versus the
in house brokers.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
It's seventy five twenty five, seventy five percent agent twenty
five percent all right, brokerage, so that that model is
more like a land Star. I guess right, there's some parallels.
I mean, Landstar has a lot of assets. We wear
asset light. But yeah, very similar in that we have
agents like they do.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Okay, And you know in the introduction I mentioned you
were CTO of Coyote Logistics. You know that asset has
been I guess moved around from newcomp time and sold
to RXO. Now, so Coyote was kind of I guess
known for technology is do you guys have proprietary technology
at Armstrong?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
We do. We We've always had proprietary technology. We actually
undertook quite a large project right after I came on.
So I'm in my third year now in October of
twenty three, so about four or five months after I joined,
we kind of re energized as an effort we had
had for four or five years trying to rebuild our platform,
and for whatever reason we kind of tabled it for
(03:07):
a while. And you know, the technology had been around.
The technology we were working on was functionally quite quite good,
but architecturally, you know, a lots change over the last
fifteen years. So we needed to kind of take the
paddles to it, maintain the functionality, and then expand on it.
So we've actually replatformed the entire business over the last
two years. We're about ninety five percent deployed now. It's
(03:29):
been probably one of more painstaking efforts in my career,
but we've managed to get the entire business over to
the new platform again, about ninety five percent complete. We
should be done done next month.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And you know, obviously technology has involved what are kind
of the major changes that you made to the platform.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, that was one of the challenges because you know,
when you take on an opportunity like that, you have
a massive opportunity cost, so you're rebuilding things. You're fundamentally
rebuilding things you already have, and that as that opportunity
cause of you know, what are you building that new
We were actually able to do both, so, you know,
for the last two years, i'd say it was kind
(04:07):
of six months of heads down work and we've rolled
it out kind of simultaneously, so we were able to
add new functionality to the existing system while we were
bringing people into it. So a little bit of a
difficult game there, but happy to say we're on the
other end of it.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Right, I want to talk more about technology, but before
we go on, I just want a little more about Armstrong.
So are you guys like a top twenty freight broker
in the US.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yep, We're in the top twenty. If you look at
us overall, we're very diversified. So we have look at
the one point four billion dollars of total revenue. One
of the fastest growing parts of our business is LTL,
which is a new service we launched. The second fastest
growing is our cross border Mexico which we launched last year.
Call that two hundred million between them. And then the
(04:50):
balance is really all of North America third to third
to third van reefer in flatbed. So very diversified across
different equipment types.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And you know you mentioned the top line, you know,
without sending your private company.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Are you profitable? Are you guys making money?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
We are profitable, are very much so.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
So.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
We've been in business for twenty years next year, and
I think one of the most remarkable parts of our
journeys it took us like fourteen years to get to
about four hundred and fifty billion. Hit that in twenty nineteen.
We were able to almost double it again in four
years to twenty twenty three, we're about, you know, eight
hundred and twenty five million this year. We're kind of
creeping up on doubling it again in two years. So
that pace of growth and the acceleration of that growth is,
(05:32):
as you know, despite a really nasty freight environment, which
I know you're very aware of, fed three years of
a freight recession, we've been able to grow profitably through that.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
And what's what's been like fueling that that explosive.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Growth honestly doing a lot of the things that got
us to where we were prior, so making sure we're
taking care of our customers, making sure we're taking care
of our agents, doing more with both of those. So
who are the customers that are asking us for things?
That's what led us into LTL. We had active customers
asking us if we could do LTL that loved our service.
On the truckload side, we had active customers asking us
to go handle their cross border Mexico shipment. So we
(06:07):
started that offering, so starting new service lines, but it's
really been how do we do more with the customers
that we have, and how do we add new.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Customers, right, and then I guess is the growth, at
least the percentage growth, is that coming more from the
agent network? Are you bringing more agents onto you know,
the platform? I know, you know, one of your competitors
would say, you know, we're focused on the million dollar agents,
you know, is that something that you guys are focused
on or is it more or less, you know, growing
(06:34):
the in house brokerage part of the business.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Honestly, it's it's both. So we got our brokerage from
buying two agents. It's the only our Our growth story
has really been organic, with the exception of internal M
and A. So buying agents and that want to exit
for whatever reason, they have something happened in their lifestyle
or they wanted to make a change and they're looking
for an exit. Sure, so we've done that twice, one
in twenty twenty and one twenty twenty one, and that
(06:56):
kind of seeded the brokerage. But honestly, that I just
kind of stratified our business to the one point four
and how to break it down into those parts. What's
remarkable is that over the last two years, we looked
identical two years ago than we do today. So we
are still a third to third a third vanary for flatbed.
The only thing that's really materially different is that obviously
LTL in Mexico are much bigger now.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
All right, So what's the long term plans for Armstrong?
You guys want to go Are you owned by private equity?
Do you guys want to go public? We are looking
to be acquired, like.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
What No, No, I think you know we are private
equity backed, so they'll exit at some point in time.
I think for us, we'd like to find another private
equity firm and keep doing, frankly, what we've been doing
for the last couple of years. We have an incredible
organic growth story. We don't do a whole lot of
external M and A. We're open to it, but it's
more opportunistics, something that would really add to the capabilities
(07:48):
versus some of the M and A you see in
the space. As you mentioned RXO and Coyote, which is,
you know, they're in very similar they do very similar things.
But you know, putting those two together, I've done a
few M and A deal in the past, and those
are tricky. Yeah, So you know, we tend to just
keep our heads down and kind of stay the organic
growth route. But yeah, I'm sure at some point in
(08:09):
time we'll transact. We're not really too focused on that
right now. Honestly, it's it's all about how do we
get this thing to the next milestone, a two billion?
How do we take it from two billion to three?
And frankly, I think we can just keep running the
same playbook that we've been running, ideally with some new
tools as you just mentioned, with the technology to help
us kind of accelerate that growth.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And you mentioned, you know, the company has been around
for a while and you've been in the seat for
about three years. Are any of the founders still involved?
I'm assuming it's someone with the last name Armstrong. No.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Actually, I think the story that I heard about Armstrong
when I asked was that it was, you know, this
is in the mid two thousands. It was really aligned
with the phone book and just trying to have something
at the start of the alphabet. But no, founders are
not involved at all. I guess haven't been for quite
some time. My predecessors actually are the chairman of our
boards that he's still involved.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Okay, so let's talk about the frame brokers industry. You know,
as we're recording this, there was some interesting news uh
with M and A uh DAT bought Convoy, at least
the convoy platform that was Convoy one time from flex Sport.
You know, was that an interesting deal from your perspective
(09:20):
because you know D A T I guess with their
biggest customers are are freight brokers, so it's kind of
an interesting transaction, at least from from my vantage point.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, it certainly is. I actually saw that when I
was walking in here for the first time, so that's
hot off the presses, you know. I think some of it.
My knee jerk reaction originally was, you know, does this
what does this mean? I think Convoy, that Convoy technology
stacked was probably one of the few meaningful potential disruptors
(09:53):
to a DAT, who is a very well established incumbent.
So you know, kudos to them for for taking that
chess piece off the board. It would be a good
thing for them. I think I'd like to get a
little bit more information before I say anything official on
the record about it, but I think the red line
would be, you know, if it crosses over they're taking
direct freight from from shippers. There was a line in
that article that kind of intimated that might be the case.
(10:14):
I think that would be problematic for most of dat's
customer base, But other than that, it seems like a
pretty pretty good deal for both parties.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Okay, looks like we'll have to find out more about
that in the coming days and weeks to come. So
the freight brokerage industry, you kind of eluded and eluded you.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
You said it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
The freight brokerage market stinks for the most part. It's
been a tough market for the last three years. We've
been in a quote unquote freight recession. What is your
take on the freight markets? You know, what are your
take on what I guess tariffs have been doing to
freight demand. I'd just like to hear your kind of,
you know, high level view of the freight markets.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, it's certainly been an interesting few years. I came
on board here, right, I guess during the early endings
of this freight recession, before we knew how long in
protract it would really be. This is the longest I
think any of us in this century have seen kind
of a downward cycle on the rates we're approaching here
three years now. I'd say the overhaul kind of description
(11:14):
of the market that I would give is that we're
in this kind of period of stasis where the absolute
value of rates is pretty static. So if I just
look at Armstrong's data from the last we can go,
you know, all the way back in our history. But
if I just look back to you know, twenty seventeen,
at no point in time have rates on an absolute basis,
and we look at it as a rate per mile
net a fuel. So if you take out and mute
(11:36):
the impacts of fuel, which you know, spike up and down,
sure those rates have not really moved materially outside of
about a four cent band for two consecutive years, and
they are still on a percentage basis right around equilibrium.
So if you look at year over year percent change,
we are sitting at equilibrium, meaning the rates are not
moving off where they were the same time last year.
(11:57):
Zero percent change year over year, which is very abnormal.
Usually you get usually you get maybe one quarter of
that stasis, maybe two. But to have that for you know,
it looks like eight quarters now is pretty remarkable. So
I'd say it is in a period of stasis. Some
people say that, you know, the bottom is still falling out.
(12:17):
We don't see that. Some people have said, you know,
probably pre teariffs, that they saw rates going up throughout
the course of this year. We have also not observed that.
So it's it's very much kind of a wait and
see overall outlook right now.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
And roughly how much of your business is I guess
transactional versus contractual.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
We're twenty about seventy five to twenty five, seventy contractual
seventy five percent spot spot twenty five percent. Guys are
heavy and we flex that up and down just depending
on kind of where we are in the rate cycle.
So that's not always the case. But I think a
lot of folks have been very timid to take on
too much contract and the anticipation that rates we're going
to go inflationary again, we take We took a similar
(13:00):
kind of wait and see kind of be a little
bit more conservative approach, and this year the rates haven't
moved again, So you know, it's anyone's guess. On the
tariff front, I think that there's been a lot of noise.
There's certainly a tremendous amount of uncertainty even before tariffs,
with inflation and interest rates at record levels and very
short periods of time. Tariffs just threw another kind of
(13:23):
uncertain rate wrench into the whole thing. We did not
see a meaningful change on the demand side from that.
You did see it kind of at a micro level
if you look at certain industries or certain shippers, But
in aggregate, we have not missed a beat. The only
thing I'd say is the one exception to that is
across border Mexico, we saw a tremendous amount of inventory
(13:43):
getting pulled up late February. Throughout March, volumes were just
off the chart, and then almost a full collapse after
a Liberation Day, not a full but call it fifty
percent collapse. Those have since recovered to kind of pre
inventory pull forward levels, but and it's now kind of
growing at the same pace it was before. But it
(14:04):
seemed like there was a massive pull forward of inventory
to kind of front run the tariffs and then waiting
for that to burn off, which I think just kind
of started happening now and we're seeing those volumes start
to trickle back. But other than that, we have not
seen that much of an impact from the tariffs. When
we talked to the shippers, I think they've been very
expository for many of them. So I had lunch with
(14:25):
a shipper last month that I'll, you know, spare you
their their industry and commodity, but they manufacture goods with
plastic resonance steel okay, and no one in their organization
seemed to know that all of their plastic resin actually
there was only one supplier in Canada that supplied it
for the entire company. It is a multi billion dollar organization,
(14:47):
and so I think they've really taken a look in
word and said, you know what does this mean? We're
severely exposed right now we have one supplier that's on
the wrong side of this deal, right, you know what
does that mean for us? And so that that partner
was a very good one, absorbed all the tariffs for
them in the short run, but they're still evaluating how
do we diversify that supplier base. So I think a
lot of shippers right now are doing the exact same thing.
(15:10):
But I don't know how you make decisions in an
environment where you don't have certainty around what the absolute
level of tariff is going to be. I think it's
it's very much a wait and see for most of
the shippers that I'm talking to.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Were you surprised that you didn't see a pull forward
in demand and the other businesses outside across border with Mexico.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I think we did to some extent, but it was
kind of muted and aggregate, and so some industries were,
you know, more impacted than others. It's certainly like automotive
suppliers and folks like that, but on the on the whole,
it kind of just it looked like a typical growth
month for US, Okay.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Okay, And I guess you know, given the fact that
you guys are in growth mode, you're you're growing anyway
beyond what the market's doing. Is that fair to say.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, we've we've grown nicely in spite of it.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Okay. And when you're when you're looking at you know
what your customers are telling you, and you know you've
been in the industry for a long time, so what
your gut is telling you, you know, where do you
think truckload rates are going over the next six months
into twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I know, I'll preface this by saying that I've been
wrong every time I've said it for the last two years,
so you should take whatever I say next with the
grain of salt. We we aren't forecasting anything right now.
We expect no change for the rest of this year.
We're not using that to drive any kind of decision
making in the business we have. You know, as I
was just describing a growing business, a profitable business. We
(16:30):
want to do more of the things that are working
right now, and we need to be kind of agnostic
to where the rates are and what happens with rates.
So our personal kind of internal forecast is stop looking
at it, stop talking about it, just execute, take care
of our customers. It'll, you know, we will get to
an imbalance of supply and demand again. You'll have rate
volatility again. But right now, nothing in the budget, nothing
(16:51):
and how we're operating the business assumes any change for
the rest of this year. I do think that next
year I would be shocked to see anything an inflationary market.
But you know, right now, I don't see a catalyst
on either side of the market. I don't see something
that's going to rip a bunch of capacity out of
the markets. There's been a lot of talk, and I
would say noise not signal around you know, the English
(17:14):
speaking language mandate, and I think generally that's probably at
best going to be asymmetrically imposed, probably based on the state.
And I doubt it's going to take out enough driver
capacity to really move rates. And I certainly given you know,
tariff volatility, you know, interest rates that are still high
and not coming down, although we'll see the news this week,
but I don't think anyone's really bracing for that an
(17:36):
inflation that's being awfully stubborn. I just really don't see
a demand catalyst either, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And you know you mentioned most of your businesses in
the spot market, so the capacity that you use to
fill that spot demand, are you pre negotiating with carriers
or you're actually going in the spot market too, And
in finding capacity.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
On the contract side of our business, we try to
negotiate all of those with carriers. So we try to
lock in and what we call contract to contracts. So
you got a contract rate from the shipper, we want
that on a you know, one to maybe three depending
on the volume carriers at most. Sometimes you have contracts
that are not as high density, and so that's a
little bit harder to what we call dedicate. So get
(18:15):
that on a dedicated carrier, on a contract carrier, on
the spot most of the time. What we're trying to
do is just leverage our network of carriers. Internally, we
don't like to go out to the bid boards, we
don't like to go out to the you know, to
shop these things with unknown entities. Fraud has been a
nightmare in our space, as I'm sure you know, for
probably the better half of two years, and so we
(18:37):
really try to use in network carreers as much as possible.
But we are going and buying spot.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Okay, and I do want to talk about fraud, but
before we get off this topic, So when you're renegotiating
contracts with capacity providers, you know, are are they getting
any rate increases from you? Or are you being able
to have flat rates down rates?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, so the honest answer is it depends. So we
have seen in the last year or so a return
to seasonality, which I think is a very good thing. Sure,
we didn't see much seasonality at all. I don't think
you can really say anything with seasonal COVID, you can
kind of throw that out the window because all bets
were off. But it wasn't until last year and the
kind of post COVID era that we saw that return
(19:18):
to seasonality where you had a produce season, you had
a food and beverage season. You see tightness up in
the Northeast right now, and so it really depends on
how long that contract is. So is it a three month,
six month, or a year contract really determines whether what
the rate that we're subcontracting it for. And so in
the Northeast, if you're if we just got a new
award last week and we're going up to the Northeast
(19:40):
to try to find a truck going out bound, the
rates are elevated right now, so they would be seeing
an increase in rates.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Why is the Northeast type right now?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
That is a fairly typical phenomenon that we see kind
of tail end of summer, just with a lot of
goods coming out. It may be exasperated by some of
the things happening at the ports right now, people trying
to get ahead of you know, what's going on in August.
It's always really difficult to exactly pinpoint what creates that
kind of tightness that you experienced one day and then
(20:09):
the seeming looseness of capacity the next day. But it's
been tied up there for two or three weeks and
so that would be a very different negotiation than you know,
two or three months ago or probably two or three
months from now.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Okay, you know you mentioned fraud earlier. I'd love to
talk more about fraud, you know, kind of how do
you guys combat fraud. Do you use like a third
party system, do you do you use AI internally or
what are you doing to combat fraud? And if you
can give any examples of things that you've seen, because
I think listeners are tend to be pretty surprised about
(20:44):
how widespread it is and how creative the bad guys
have become.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, it is. It's a mess. It's the worst I've
seen it in my you know, eighteen year career and transportation.
We do use a third party system called Highway Sure
So out of Dallas.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Had them on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yep, they're a great company. They've done a lot. They've
only been around for a few years, but they're they're
very adaptive, they're nimble, they're they're trying to fight the
same fight we are, which is you have very creative
criminals on one side. And I equate fraud in our
space to cybersecurity, and I don't think it's ever a
solved problem, right, somebody. There are always going to be
(21:21):
some form of social engineering that you didn't anticipate. There's
always going to be a gap or something that you
just can't plug, or you plug one and another one
pops up later. So I think it's it's never really
a solve problem. But Highways has helped us tremendously. We've
had to re engineer our entire onboarding process probably two
or three times in the last two years, just to
(21:41):
evolve it and adapt it to how creative some of
these schemes are.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
What were some of the biggest red flags that you
know that you're now looking for that you might have
not been looking for a year ago or eighteen months ago.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, I think the biggest gap that I still see,
and it's it's tough because the data isn't always available,
but the MC that are sold, So when an opera
carrier sells their MC number to another entity, sometimes for
this oh sure, it's a motor carrier number. So for
a long time it was the one unique identifier issued
by the federal government to identify carriers on the road,
(22:16):
and so we call it an MC number. There's also
a dot number, which we've kind of recently, we're doing
away with MC numbers, but my old habits die hard.
But you'll sell these these MC numbers and you won't
always know if they've if they've transacted. So the reporting
on it is still probably the single biggest gap that
we see, and it's the number one red flag is
(22:37):
you know they're selling it. Maybe the person selling it
has good intentions, but the person buying it doesn't, and
so that is an immediate red flag when we see it.
They're immediately deactivated in our system, and they stay deactivated
for six months. We want to see that they have
good operating history post transaction, but again getting that data,
they're not always reported, and it's a it's a massive,
(22:59):
massive gap.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
I don't know if you can share. Can you share,
like any major fun incidents that you guys dealt with.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah, I mean, I'll share. I'll share one that we
had fairly recently. We had loads delivering not too far
from here, and the he this was the most unique fraud,
But this isn't. This is just another kind of flavor
of the types of things that we're seeing. They were
coming up from the southeast up into New Jersey. There's
(23:27):
a long line of trucks sitting outside this facility, hours
and hours of wait time, and somebody from the shipper
at the consine came out dressed as the constine and said, hey,
it's a really long line. We have an NX warehouse.
Pull over here and get unloaded. He pulled over there,
got unloaded. Like you said, They literally just it was
an empty warehouse. He didn't know it because he never
got out of the truck. They transloated into another truck
(23:49):
and disappeared. And so you see this not just they're
not just intercepting these things on the road, you know,
posing as your as your ship or as your constone. Yeah,
so's it's different flavors of it all the time. Yeah,
And that there's you know, no amount of you know,
red flags or any kind of identification that we can
do for a fraud like that.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, it seems it seems like it's a lot more
than the hijacking scene and good fellas that it feels
like that. Yeah, I guess it's better for the driver,
it's safer for the driver, but it's still terrible for
the industry. You know, we were talking about technology. Uh,
you know, I did mention AI just FYI, if you
talk about a lot, you might get a couple of
(24:28):
turns on your valuation kind of what do you what
are you guys doing with AI internally? Are you are
you building it yourself? Are you using third parties? You know?
How how are you using AI? One of your one
of the largest brokers in the space, you know, talks
a lot about how they're making their you know, their
brokers a lot more productive by with the machine learning
that they're doing, and they're trying to, you know, reduce friction. Like,
(24:51):
what are you guys doing.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
With AIH we have, We've jumped in with two feet,
so we have been working on a number of things
for the past year to roll out throughout the business.
So I will say my general outlook on this is
that it will fundamentally change the landscape. I think for
the better. That technology is real. I think that there's
one of my favorite quotes is that the future is
already here, is just not evenly distributed. And I would
(25:15):
say that's very much the case with AI right now.
Our engineers use AI every single day. So we have
our team of internal engineers using it, our lawyers are
using it, and we have been driving it through our carrier, sales,
carrier operations, and customer operations functions now for a number
of months, so it will touch every part of the transaction.
(25:36):
We're processing documents automatically with it, so being able to
just kind of read documents, classify them, understand what they are,
get them processed to touching the actual transactions. So how
do we quote our customers? How are we interacting with carriers?
So it is in many instances right now a call
service for us. So it's feeled that we were missing
(26:00):
an abandonment rate that was too high. Our COO and
I were talking about, you know, inbound calls. How many
of these can we not get to? We missed about
five thousand phone calls every single.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Week because there was no one to pick it up.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Just everyone was dispatch. Everyone else is on the phone,
they're dealing with something else. So we were just missing
this and everything that we tried, we could chip away
at the numbers. So we have you know, AI voice
spots that are answering the phone. They sound like a
different person every time, so they have different personas you
cannot really tell that you're not talking to a human
because the intonation is so strong and they are either
(26:35):
handling the issue or sending it to the right person,
triaging it getting it to the right person. So it's
it's taken all that inbound call volume, which was too
droves and droves of people that try to do and
frankly we could never do it. Well, you just simply can't.
You know, when you have, you know, a load that
a lot of cut carriers want, they're all going to
call you at the same time, same thing that you're
(26:56):
doing on the outbound calling. So we've put it on
the phone systems, we have an email, but it is
touching every part of our transaction and I think that
the impact of it over the next few years, I
think truly we can probably double again the size of
our business by total revenue and probably increase headcount by
twenty or thirty percent. Well at most, that's what we're
(27:16):
seeing in the ear landings here.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's great, that's great. And this is a silly question,
but do you have a favorite persona of Ali?
Speaker 2 (27:23):
I don't yet. I know Grock has some racier ones
that they've come out with.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah. Absolutely, you know, we've talked a lot about you know,
well not a lot, but we talked a little bit
about M and A. You know some deals that we've seen,
you know, Coyote, your old firm, it's been acquired. You know.
Where do you see kind of M and A in
the space in the broker space? Is it? Is it
(27:52):
something where the large players are gonna you know, by
each other, or is it just really most of the
M and A is happening at the low the.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Other tale of the market.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
If you will.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, I think there's there's been a lot of learnings
over the last ten to fifteen years on M and A.
There's been a lot of deals, and I think my
general take on it is people have said the brokerage
market is going to consolidate, right, And you know, I
think for folks listening to there are estimates of how
many brokers are in the US today, is anywhere between
eighty to twenty thousand, right, So pick your number. Who
(28:27):
really operates, who operates with scale. I don't see meaningful
consolidation that would like substantively change the makeup of the
industry happening anytime soon. I just think taking that many
players down to a few is been talked about a lot,
but it's just not something that I can really imagine
happening on any kind of short time horizon. I do
(28:48):
think that the role for M and A my preference
for it. Again, I mentioned, you know, Armstrong is more opportunistic.
We're not out there looking We're perfectly happy with organic
growth story, but anything that would add to capabilities I
think can make a lot of sense. I think when
you get into where M and A fails in brokerage
is customer overlap. And so if you are a three
(29:11):
PL you buy another three PL, fifty percent of the
logos are the same, you're upsetting fifty percent of the
sales reps on one side of the transaction. Yeah, and
this is a relationship business. This is a people centric business.
So I've talked a lot about it, all the technology
and issues we have replatforming, which has allowed us to
take advantage of all the advancements in AI, but this
(29:31):
is still fundamentally a relationship business. And if you're going
to do a transaction, you're going to piss off fifty
percent of a population, or any percent of a population.
It just introduces more risk than I think is worth it.
And so I just advise anyone doing aggressive M and
A to have a really good plan and to make
sure you understand your overlap. But I think it will
(29:52):
continue to happen. I mean, I do think if you
are a large kind of three pl you're very heavily
focused on van and reefer. You know, buying a good
flatbed broker could be a great transaction for you can
break you into a new network, and those deals make
a lot more sense to me than seeing two folks
that do the same thing go after the same customer segments.
(30:14):
And I've seen that, you know, three, four or five
dozen times, and you know, I haven't heard a whole
lot of incredible growth or incredible success stories coming out.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And that's probably why consolidation is really at least not
going to happen in scale because you you you, you
will say you annoy that one broker, and it's very
easy for them to go off like a yep because
you know, with off the shelf technology that can pretty
much go up and running pretty quickly. So you know,
you mentioned you can double your size, but just adding
(30:44):
twenty to thirty percent of headcount. You know, when you
guys are recruiting brokers where you're recruiting from, I know
it's you know, the brokerage industry tends to be you know,
very I guess in office culture because there's a lot
of training on the job training that happens. Can you
talk about, you know, when you guys are hiring brokers,
(31:07):
are you are you looking for recent college grads? Are
you looking for you know, a grizzly veteran with thirty
years experience? Kind of what's what's the sweet spot for
you when you guys are adding those heads?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
You know, we have so we have recruiting on both
sides of them. So we have agent recruiting and we
also have brokerage recruiting. Right, I'd say in both instances,
we're looking for someone with experience. Generally the attrition's lower.
It's you have somebody that's kind of not already self
selected out. You see, the folks that go heavy out
of university tend to have you know, fifty percent attrition
(31:39):
would be a good thing for a lot of them
over the course of two or three years. And so
it's really really expensive and you get people. You know,
this industry tends to you self select out pretty quick
because it's a it's a tough industry. It's hard work.
It's really not for everyone. And so if when you
get them and they decide that they want to do this,
it's great And like, may I've been in it now
eighteen years, didn't expect that. But I think for us overall,
(32:03):
we prefer to have, especially on the agent side, somebody
with more experience. Maybe they were in a W two
model before they decided they wanted to be their own,
you know, a small business owner breakout on their own
and use Armstrong's platform to run their business. So it's
definitely on both sides, much more heavily weighted towards somebody
(32:24):
with experience that has realized that this industry is for them.
They want to be in it for the long run,
and we like to play long term games with long
term people.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
So okay, and I think you said you mentioned you
were in it for eighteen years. Ye, you kind of
said you were surprised, Like, what did you think you
were going to do?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Well? I thought I was. Actually I came out of school.
I was working for a senator on Capitol Hill, so
I a very different path than what I'm on now
and just fell out of love with politics and got
a job at Coyote when it was about forty million
dollars and stayed there for eleven years, went on a
crazy ride to four billion in that eleven year span.
(33:01):
But uh, yeah, it just just has this way of
getting its mits on you and not letting you go.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Is there anything you know as a leader of a
large transportation company that kind of keeps you up at night?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I don't know. I tend to be a little bit
of a warrior by by nature, which I think is
a good thing. I've tried to learn how to harness that,
so I has to say a little bit of everything,
but nothing existentially, I think, you know, the industry is
in a despite the rate cycle. I think the industry
A lot of people look at it and say, I
don't know about that. I think the industry is overall
pretty healthy, with the two exceptions of, yeah, rates everyone
(33:36):
would like rates to be a little higher than they
are now and fraud. Those are the two kind of
black eyes. But other than that, no, doesn't nothing that
really keeps me up at night at at an existential level.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Right, And we were talking a little bit about the
the LTL, the lesson truckload market. You know how that's
been a growth there. If you guys, is LTL from
a broker standpoint, more profitable than than truckload from a
margent standpoint.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, if you look at it on the yields or better,
So the margin percent is higher, the absolute amount of
money per transaction is is much lower. And so you
know your your margin per load is significantly lower than truckload,
but you certainly make up for it in the percentage.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And then I guess, you know, not to jump back
and forth, but you know, you started in politics, you
got into transports, Like what made you make the switch?
Would did you just like, like I guess, you know,
see a job opening online or something I did?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, I think I just was disenchanted with the process
of getting a bill through. I worked when I was
there on the last time we tried to address immigration reform,
and we worked for months on end to try to
push it through bipartisan support. And then you know, one
guy out of North Carolina, ironically where I live now,
(34:54):
Jim de Mint, just reversed his vote at last second
killed the whole thing. So that was the last time
we tried to address comprehensive immigration reform in the US.
I was an seven and I honestly, I mean I
was just so disenchanted with the whole thing where you know,
you had bipartis and support, everyone was kind of you
felt like you were going to get something done that
was going to meaningfully benefit the country, and you know,
snap of a finger, it's gone. And so I decided
(35:16):
I want to go into the private sector. And honestly,
I saw an article about Coyote on I think it
was in Cranes, Yeah, and about Jeff Silver, the founder,
and said, I want to work for that guy. And
I walked in with true to my you know, prior
work experience roots, I walked in with a suit and
tie into a brokerage floor. And for any of your
listeners that don't know, no one in brokerage wears a
suit and a tie. And it was like a record
(35:38):
stopped on the floor. That's funny, Joony chewing tobacco. Everyone
else did. So, so that's.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
A very interesting transition, you know. And I guess what
is the favorite your favorite thing not only about the
job that you have now, but but about the brokerage industry.
They kind of have kind of that kept you in
it for so long.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I mean, it's it's a fascinating industry. I mean, it's
it's the closest thing that I've seen to perfect free
market economics. If you look at the price for a
low just to Atlanta to Chicago, it has a different
price at eight am than it does at ten am noon,
four o'clock. So just that that kind of the economic
the underlying economics, and this the sheer fragmentation in the
(36:22):
marketplace on both sides, both shippers and on the carrier side,
right just creates this dynamic that just it's fast paced,
it's easy to get, you know, fall in love with
and get addicted to, but it's also incredibly intellectually stimulating
and really tough. And so the just thing I like
most about my job right now is just this one.
I get to work with great people. And two is
(36:43):
there's a different problem to solve every single day. It's
never boring.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Now, is most of your time client facing? Is it
inward facing?
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Like?
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Where do you spend most of your time?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Depends on the week. So I spend a lot of
time with our We say we have, you know, three
different types of customers. We have our agents, we have
our shippers, and we have our carriers. I like to
spend at least if you look at a nagrid over
a year, twenty five to thirty five percent of my
time with our customers, I spend probably I would I
would kind of carve out shippers from that. I spend
(37:16):
probably another twenty to thirty percent of my time with
our agents and our and then internally facing with our
brokerage folks and what we call shared services. So we
look at it, you know, the traditional back office functions,
so billing credit, those are not back office functions at Armstrong.
Those we call that shared services. That is a customer
service department that services our agents and our and our brokers,
(37:37):
and so we treat them with like an SLA, so
they have if you get an inbound email for this request,
you have to respond to it within this period of time.
And we track those things, we metric them, and we
spend a lot of time internally working with those teams
to try to make sure that we're hitting those slas
and that we're staying true to our word with our customers.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Great, and you know, before I let you go is
something that I always like to ask my guests, do
you have a favorite book about leadership or about the
transportation market? That's kind of close to your heart. It'd
be interesting to hear, especially since I'm looking for a
new summer read. Right now, Well, if you like history,
I'm actually in the middle. I'd say the tail end
(38:15):
of a book right now that's pretty fascinating called The
Box by Mark Levinson, and he goes through the history
of containerization and how it changed the world, how it
made it flatter, how it made it cheaper.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
But it walks you through Malcolm McLean's story, if you
know who that is from, kind of the one of
the pioneers of the industry, how the Vietnam War kind
of shaped the twenty foot container, and so it really
describes how shipping has progressed in the history of shipping
through that lens. I'd say it's one of the more
fascinating reads I've had in a while.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
All right, great, do you guys do much on the
intermodal side.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
We don't. We don't sore where I'd say where we
have all very limited kind of exposure is on intermodal Okay, awesome.
So it's a tough a that's a tough business and
will be interesting to see what happens with the recent merger.
Announcer announcement.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
I was gonna ask, do you do you have any
thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (39:06):
I don't. I mean, that's talk about an interesting day
for a podcast. It's two major announcements this morning. So
I think my early take is I think there should
there will probably be some opportunity for brokers and three
pls in the short run that play in that space.
If that deal goes through, right, there's gonna be disruption,
There's going to be congestion. How they reconfigure networks. I
(39:29):
think it's interesting and I think sorely needed to have
that kind of first coast to coast service offering. But
now I don't know. I'm gonna suspend any judgment until
I get a few more details on it.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
All right, Well, hopefully we'll come back to the podcast
we can talk more about it. Assuming that those deals
were that deal, the railroad deal between Union Pacific and
Norfolk Southern kind of evolved a little further than just
hearsay and talk. All right, Cameron, I really want to
thank you for your time and insights today.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, thank you very much for having me, and.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I want to thank you for tuning in. If you'd
like the episode, please subscribe and leave a review. We've
lined up a number of great guests for the podcast,
so please check back to hear conversations with C suite executives, shippers,
regulators and decision makers within the freight markets. Also, if
you want to learn more about the freight transportation markets,
check our work out on the Bloomberg Terminal at Bigo
(40:23):
and on social media. This is Lee Glasgow signing off
and thanks again for talking transports with me.
Hi everyone, this is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Clascow, senior Freight, transportation and logistics analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg and House Research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the globe. Before diving in a little
public service announcement, your support is instrumental to keep bringing
(00:28):
great guests and conversations to you, our listeners, and we
need your support. So if you enjoy this podcast, share it,
like it, and leave a comment. Also, if you have
an idea for future episodes you're just want to talk transports,
please hit me up on the Bloomberg terminal, on LinkedIn
or on Twitter at logistics Late. Now on to our
episode I'm very excited to have with us today. Cameron Ramsdal,
(00:50):
CEO of Armstrong Transport Group. Cameron brings eighteen years of
operational technology, sales and M and a experience to the team.
Prior to Armstrong, he served as the CEO at a Merge,
President of Variant slash Us Express, and was the CTO
at Coyote Logistics. Cameeron Holds a BA in English and
(01:12):
Political Science from Dennison University and an MBA from Northwestern
University Kellogg School of Management. Welcome to the podcast, Cameeron,
Thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Thanks Lee, appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And this is an exciting episode because we're in studio.
We don't get to do this all the time and
it's a treat, so it's good to see the have
a conversation face to face. So Armstrong Transport Group again,
you know, maybe not a household name for everybody. Could
you talk about what the company does where you based
just some basic background on the company.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sure. So Armstrong is a three pl headquartered out of Charlotte.
We're about one point three five one point four billion
by total revenue. We're about twenty years old and very
well diversified. We have a hybrid operating model, so that
means we have an agent program on one side of
the business and we also have a more traditional kind
of W two brokerage like Coyote, RXO, C H. Robinson
(02:06):
type of type of model as well.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Oh interesting, what's the makeup of the agents versus the
in house brokers.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
It's seventy five twenty five, seventy five percent agent twenty
five percent all right, brokerage, so that that model is
more like a land Star. I guess right, there's some parallels.
I mean, Landstar has a lot of assets. We wear
asset light. But yeah, very similar in that we have
agents like they do.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Okay, And you know in the introduction I mentioned you
were CTO of Coyote Logistics. You know that asset has
been I guess moved around from newcomp time and sold
to RXO. Now, so Coyote was kind of I guess
known for technology is do you guys have proprietary technology
at Armstrong?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
We do. We We've always had proprietary technology. We actually
undertook quite a large project right after I came on.
So I'm in my third year now in October of
twenty three, so about four or five months after I joined,
we kind of re energized as an effort we had
had for four or five years trying to rebuild our platform,
and for whatever reason we kind of tabled it for
(03:07):
a while. And you know, the technology had been around.
The technology we were working on was functionally quite quite good,
but architecturally, you know, a lots change over the last
fifteen years. So we needed to kind of take the
paddles to it, maintain the functionality, and then expand on it.
So we've actually replatformed the entire business over the last
two years. We're about ninety five percent deployed now. It's
(03:29):
been probably one of more painstaking efforts in my career,
but we've managed to get the entire business over to
the new platform again, about ninety five percent complete. We
should be done done next month.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And you know, obviously technology has involved what are kind
of the major changes that you made to the platform.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, that was one of the challenges because you know,
when you take on an opportunity like that, you have
a massive opportunity cost, so you're rebuilding things. You're fundamentally
rebuilding things you already have, and that as that opportunity
cause of you know, what are you building that new
We were actually able to do both, so, you know,
for the last two years, i'd say it was kind
(04:07):
of six months of heads down work and we've rolled
it out kind of simultaneously, so we were able to
add new functionality to the existing system while we were
bringing people into it. So a little bit of a
difficult game there, but happy to say we're on the
other end of it.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Right, I want to talk more about technology, but before
we go on, I just want a little more about Armstrong.
So are you guys like a top twenty freight broker
in the US.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yep, We're in the top twenty. If you look at
us overall, we're very diversified. So we have look at
the one point four billion dollars of total revenue. One
of the fastest growing parts of our business is LTL,
which is a new service we launched. The second fastest
growing is our cross border Mexico which we launched last year.
Call that two hundred million between them. And then the
(04:50):
balance is really all of North America third to third
to third van reefer in flatbed. So very diversified across
different equipment types.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And you know you mentioned the top line, you know,
without sending your private company.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Are you profitable? Are you guys making money?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
We are profitable, are very much so.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
So.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
We've been in business for twenty years next year, and
I think one of the most remarkable parts of our
journeys it took us like fourteen years to get to
about four hundred and fifty billion. Hit that in twenty nineteen.
We were able to almost double it again in four
years to twenty twenty three, we're about, you know, eight
hundred and twenty five million this year. We're kind of
creeping up on doubling it again in two years. So
that pace of growth and the acceleration of that growth is,
(05:32):
as you know, despite a really nasty freight environment, which
I know you're very aware of, fed three years of
a freight recession, we've been able to grow profitably through that.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
And what's what's been like fueling that that explosive.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Growth honestly doing a lot of the things that got
us to where we were prior, so making sure we're
taking care of our customers, making sure we're taking care
of our agents, doing more with both of those. So
who are the customers that are asking us for things?
That's what led us into LTL. We had active customers
asking us if we could do LTL that loved our service.
On the truckload side, we had active customers asking us
to go handle their cross border Mexico shipment. So we
(06:07):
started that offering, so starting new service lines, but it's
really been how do we do more with the customers
that we have, and how do we add new.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Customers, right, and then I guess is the growth, at
least the percentage growth, is that coming more from the
agent network? Are you bringing more agents onto you know,
the platform? I know, you know, one of your competitors
would say, you know, we're focused on the million dollar agents,
you know, is that something that you guys are focused
on or is it more or less, you know, growing
(06:34):
the in house brokerage part of the business.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Honestly, it's it's both. So we got our brokerage from
buying two agents. It's the only our Our growth story
has really been organic, with the exception of internal M
and A. So buying agents and that want to exit
for whatever reason, they have something happened in their lifestyle
or they wanted to make a change and they're looking
for an exit. Sure, so we've done that twice, one
in twenty twenty and one twenty twenty one, and that
(06:56):
kind of seeded the brokerage. But honestly, that I just
kind of stratified our business to the one point four
and how to break it down into those parts. What's
remarkable is that over the last two years, we looked
identical two years ago than we do today. So we
are still a third to third a third vanary for flatbed.
The only thing that's really materially different is that obviously
LTL in Mexico are much bigger now.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
All right, So what's the long term plans for Armstrong?
You guys want to go Are you owned by private equity?
Do you guys want to go public? We are looking
to be acquired, like.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
What No, No, I think you know we are private
equity backed, so they'll exit at some point in time.
I think for us, we'd like to find another private
equity firm and keep doing, frankly, what we've been doing
for the last couple of years. We have an incredible
organic growth story. We don't do a whole lot of
external M and A. We're open to it, but it's
more opportunistics, something that would really add to the capabilities
(07:48):
versus some of the M and A you see in
the space. As you mentioned RXO and Coyote, which is,
you know, they're in very similar they do very similar things.
But you know, putting those two together, I've done a
few M and A deal in the past, and those
are tricky. Yeah, So you know, we tend to just
keep our heads down and kind of stay the organic
growth route. But yeah, I'm sure at some point in
(08:09):
time we'll transact. We're not really too focused on that
right now. Honestly, it's it's all about how do we
get this thing to the next milestone, a two billion?
How do we take it from two billion to three?
And frankly, I think we can just keep running the
same playbook that we've been running, ideally with some new
tools as you just mentioned, with the technology to help
us kind of accelerate that growth.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And you mentioned, you know, the company has been around
for a while and you've been in the seat for
about three years. Are any of the founders still involved?
I'm assuming it's someone with the last name Armstrong. No.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Actually, I think the story that I heard about Armstrong
when I asked was that it was, you know, this
is in the mid two thousands. It was really aligned
with the phone book and just trying to have something
at the start of the alphabet. But no, founders are
not involved at all. I guess haven't been for quite
some time. My predecessors actually are the chairman of our
boards that he's still involved.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Okay, so let's talk about the frame brokers industry. You know,
as we're recording this, there was some interesting news uh
with M and A uh DAT bought Convoy, at least
the convoy platform that was Convoy one time from flex Sport.
You know, was that an interesting deal from your perspective
(09:20):
because you know D A T I guess with their
biggest customers are are freight brokers, so it's kind of
an interesting transaction, at least from from my vantage point.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, it certainly is. I actually saw that when I
was walking in here for the first time, so that's
hot off the presses, you know. I think some of it.
My knee jerk reaction originally was, you know, does this
what does this mean? I think Convoy, that Convoy technology
stacked was probably one of the few meaningful potential disruptors
(09:53):
to a DAT, who is a very well established incumbent.
So you know, kudos to them for for taking that
chess piece off the board. It would be a good
thing for them. I think I'd like to get a
little bit more information before I say anything official on
the record about it, but I think the red line
would be, you know, if it crosses over they're taking
direct freight from from shippers. There was a line in
that article that kind of intimated that might be the case.
(10:14):
I think that would be problematic for most of dat's
customer base, But other than that, it seems like a
pretty pretty good deal for both parties.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Okay, looks like we'll have to find out more about
that in the coming days and weeks to come. So
the freight brokerage industry, you kind of eluded and eluded you.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
You said it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
The freight brokerage market stinks for the most part. It's
been a tough market for the last three years. We've
been in a quote unquote freight recession. What is your
take on the freight markets? You know, what are your
take on what I guess tariffs have been doing to
freight demand. I'd just like to hear your kind of,
you know, high level view of the freight markets.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, it's certainly been an interesting few years. I came
on board here, right, I guess during the early endings
of this freight recession, before we knew how long in
protract it would really be. This is the longest I
think any of us in this century have seen kind
of a downward cycle on the rates we're approaching here
three years now. I'd say the overhaul kind of description
(11:14):
of the market that I would give is that we're
in this kind of period of stasis where the absolute
value of rates is pretty static. So if I just
look at Armstrong's data from the last we can go,
you know, all the way back in our history. But
if I just look back to you know, twenty seventeen,
at no point in time have rates on an absolute basis,
and we look at it as a rate per mile
net a fuel. So if you take out and mute
(11:36):
the impacts of fuel, which you know, spike up and down,
sure those rates have not really moved materially outside of
about a four cent band for two consecutive years, and
they are still on a percentage basis right around equilibrium.
So if you look at year over year percent change,
we are sitting at equilibrium, meaning the rates are not
moving off where they were the same time last year.
(11:57):
Zero percent change year over year, which is very abnormal.
Usually you get usually you get maybe one quarter of
that stasis, maybe two. But to have that for you know,
it looks like eight quarters now is pretty remarkable. So
I'd say it is in a period of stasis. Some
people say that, you know, the bottom is still falling out.
(12:17):
We don't see that. Some people have said, you know,
probably pre teariffs, that they saw rates going up throughout
the course of this year. We have also not observed that.
So it's it's very much kind of a wait and
see overall outlook right now.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
And roughly how much of your business is I guess
transactional versus contractual.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
We're twenty about seventy five to twenty five, seventy contractual
seventy five percent spot spot twenty five percent. Guys are
heavy and we flex that up and down just depending
on kind of where we are in the rate cycle.
So that's not always the case. But I think a
lot of folks have been very timid to take on
too much contract and the anticipation that rates we're going
to go inflationary again, we take We took a similar
(13:00):
kind of wait and see kind of be a little
bit more conservative approach, and this year the rates haven't
moved again, So you know, it's anyone's guess. On the
tariff front, I think that there's been a lot of noise.
There's certainly a tremendous amount of uncertainty even before tariffs,
with inflation and interest rates at record levels and very
short periods of time. Tariffs just threw another kind of
(13:23):
uncertain rate wrench into the whole thing. We did not
see a meaningful change on the demand side from that.
You did see it kind of at a micro level
if you look at certain industries or certain shippers, But
in aggregate, we have not missed a beat. The only
thing I'd say is the one exception to that is
across border Mexico, we saw a tremendous amount of inventory
(13:43):
getting pulled up late February. Throughout March, volumes were just
off the chart, and then almost a full collapse after
a Liberation Day, not a full but call it fifty
percent collapse. Those have since recovered to kind of pre
inventory pull forward levels, but and it's now kind of
growing at the same pace it was before. But it
(14:04):
seemed like there was a massive pull forward of inventory
to kind of front run the tariffs and then waiting
for that to burn off, which I think just kind
of started happening now and we're seeing those volumes start
to trickle back. But other than that, we have not
seen that much of an impact from the tariffs. When
we talked to the shippers, I think they've been very
expository for many of them. So I had lunch with
(14:25):
a shipper last month that I'll, you know, spare you
their their industry and commodity, but they manufacture goods with
plastic resonance steel okay, and no one in their organization
seemed to know that all of their plastic resin actually
there was only one supplier in Canada that supplied it
for the entire company. It is a multi billion dollar organization,
(14:47):
and so I think they've really taken a look in
word and said, you know what does this mean? We're
severely exposed right now we have one supplier that's on
the wrong side of this deal, right, you know what
does that mean for us? And so that that partner
was a very good one, absorbed all the tariffs for
them in the short run, but they're still evaluating how
do we diversify that supplier base. So I think a
lot of shippers right now are doing the exact same thing.
(15:10):
But I don't know how you make decisions in an
environment where you don't have certainty around what the absolute
level of tariff is going to be. I think it's
it's very much a wait and see for most of
the shippers that I'm talking to.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Were you surprised that you didn't see a pull forward
in demand and the other businesses outside across border with Mexico.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I think we did to some extent, but it was
kind of muted and aggregate, and so some industries were,
you know, more impacted than others. It's certainly like automotive
suppliers and folks like that, but on the on the whole,
it kind of just it looked like a typical growth
month for US, Okay.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Okay, And I guess you know, given the fact that
you guys are in growth mode, you're you're growing anyway
beyond what the market's doing. Is that fair to say.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, we've we've grown nicely in spite of it.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Okay. And when you're when you're looking at you know
what your customers are telling you, and you know you've
been in the industry for a long time, so what
your gut is telling you, you know, where do you
think truckload rates are going over the next six months
into twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I know, I'll preface this by saying that I've been
wrong every time I've said it for the last two years,
so you should take whatever I say next with the
grain of salt. We we aren't forecasting anything right now.
We expect no change for the rest of this year.
We're not using that to drive any kind of decision
making in the business we have. You know, as I
was just describing a growing business, a profitable business. We
(16:30):
want to do more of the things that are working
right now, and we need to be kind of agnostic
to where the rates are and what happens with rates.
So our personal kind of internal forecast is stop looking
at it, stop talking about it, just execute, take care
of our customers. It'll, you know, we will get to
an imbalance of supply and demand again. You'll have rate
volatility again. But right now, nothing in the budget, nothing
(16:51):
and how we're operating the business assumes any change for
the rest of this year. I do think that next
year I would be shocked to see anything an inflationary market.
But you know, right now, I don't see a catalyst
on either side of the market. I don't see something
that's going to rip a bunch of capacity out of
the markets. There's been a lot of talk, and I
would say noise not signal around you know, the English
(17:14):
speaking language mandate, and I think generally that's probably at
best going to be asymmetrically imposed, probably based on the state.
And I doubt it's going to take out enough driver
capacity to really move rates. And I certainly given you know,
tariff volatility, you know, interest rates that are still high
and not coming down, although we'll see the news this week,
but I don't think anyone's really bracing for that an
(17:36):
inflation that's being awfully stubborn. I just really don't see
a demand catalyst either, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And you know you mentioned most of your businesses in
the spot market, so the capacity that you use to
fill that spot demand, are you pre negotiating with carriers
or you're actually going in the spot market too, And
in finding capacity.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
On the contract side of our business, we try to
negotiate all of those with carriers. So we try to
lock in and what we call contract to contracts. So
you got a contract rate from the shipper, we want
that on a you know, one to maybe three depending
on the volume carriers at most. Sometimes you have contracts
that are not as high density, and so that's a
little bit harder to what we call dedicate. So get
(18:15):
that on a dedicated carrier, on a contract carrier, on
the spot most of the time. What we're trying to
do is just leverage our network of carriers. Internally, we
don't like to go out to the bid boards, we
don't like to go out to the you know, to
shop these things with unknown entities. Fraud has been a
nightmare in our space, as I'm sure you know, for
probably the better half of two years, and so we
(18:37):
really try to use in network carreers as much as possible.
But we are going and buying spot.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Okay, and I do want to talk about fraud, but
before we get off this topic, So when you're renegotiating
contracts with capacity providers, you know, are are they getting
any rate increases from you? Or are you being able
to have flat rates down rates?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, so the honest answer is it depends. So we
have seen in the last year or so a return
to seasonality, which I think is a very good thing. Sure,
we didn't see much seasonality at all. I don't think
you can really say anything with seasonal COVID, you can
kind of throw that out the window because all bets
were off. But it wasn't until last year and the
kind of post COVID era that we saw that return
(19:18):
to seasonality where you had a produce season, you had
a food and beverage season. You see tightness up in
the Northeast right now, and so it really depends on
how long that contract is. So is it a three month,
six month, or a year contract really determines whether what
the rate that we're subcontracting it for. And so in
the Northeast, if you're if we just got a new
award last week and we're going up to the Northeast
(19:40):
to try to find a truck going out bound, the
rates are elevated right now, so they would be seeing
an increase in rates.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Why is the Northeast type right now?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
That is a fairly typical phenomenon that we see kind
of tail end of summer, just with a lot of
goods coming out. It may be exasperated by some of
the things happening at the ports right now, people trying
to get ahead of you know, what's going on in August.
It's always really difficult to exactly pinpoint what creates that
kind of tightness that you experienced one day and then
(20:09):
the seeming looseness of capacity the next day. But it's
been tied up there for two or three weeks and
so that would be a very different negotiation than you know,
two or three months ago or probably two or three
months from now.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Okay, you know you mentioned fraud earlier. I'd love to
talk more about fraud, you know, kind of how do
you guys combat fraud. Do you use like a third
party system, do you do you use AI internally or
what are you doing to combat fraud? And if you
can give any examples of things that you've seen, because
I think listeners are tend to be pretty surprised about
(20:44):
how widespread it is and how creative the bad guys
have become.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, it is. It's a mess. It's the worst I've
seen it in my you know, eighteen year career and transportation.
We do use a third party system called Highway Sure
So out of Dallas.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Had them on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yep, they're a great company. They've done a lot. They've
only been around for a few years, but they're they're
very adaptive, they're nimble, they're they're trying to fight the
same fight we are, which is you have very creative
criminals on one side. And I equate fraud in our
space to cybersecurity, and I don't think it's ever a
solved problem, right, somebody. There are always going to be
(21:21):
some form of social engineering that you didn't anticipate. There's
always going to be a gap or something that you
just can't plug, or you plug one and another one
pops up later. So I think it's it's never really
a solve problem. But Highways has helped us tremendously. We've
had to re engineer our entire onboarding process probably two
or three times in the last two years, just to
(21:41):
evolve it and adapt it to how creative some of
these schemes are.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
What were some of the biggest red flags that you
know that you're now looking for that you might have
not been looking for a year ago or eighteen months ago.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, I think the biggest gap that I still see,
and it's it's tough because the data isn't always available,
but the MC that are sold, So when an opera
carrier sells their MC number to another entity, sometimes for
this oh sure, it's a motor carrier number. So for
a long time it was the one unique identifier issued
by the federal government to identify carriers on the road,
(22:16):
and so we call it an MC number. There's also
a dot number, which we've kind of recently, we're doing
away with MC numbers, but my old habits die hard.
But you'll sell these these MC numbers and you won't
always know if they've if they've transacted. So the reporting
on it is still probably the single biggest gap that
we see, and it's the number one red flag is
(22:37):
you know they're selling it. Maybe the person selling it
has good intentions, but the person buying it doesn't, and
so that is an immediate red flag when we see it.
They're immediately deactivated in our system, and they stay deactivated
for six months. We want to see that they have
good operating history post transaction, but again getting that data,
they're not always reported, and it's a it's a massive,
(22:59):
massive gap.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
I don't know if you can share. Can you share,
like any major fun incidents that you guys dealt with.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah, I mean, I'll share. I'll share one that we
had fairly recently. We had loads delivering not too far
from here, and the he this was the most unique fraud,
But this isn't. This is just another kind of flavor
of the types of things that we're seeing. They were
coming up from the southeast up into New Jersey. There's
(23:27):
a long line of trucks sitting outside this facility, hours
and hours of wait time, and somebody from the shipper
at the consine came out dressed as the constine and said, hey,
it's a really long line. We have an NX warehouse.
Pull over here and get unloaded. He pulled over there,
got unloaded. Like you said, They literally just it was
an empty warehouse. He didn't know it because he never
got out of the truck. They transloated into another truck
(23:49):
and disappeared. And so you see this not just they're
not just intercepting these things on the road, you know,
posing as your as your ship or as your constone. Yeah,
so's it's different flavors of it all the time. Yeah,
And that there's you know, no amount of you know,
red flags or any kind of identification that we can
do for a fraud like that.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, it seems it seems like it's a lot more
than the hijacking scene and good fellas that it feels
like that. Yeah, I guess it's better for the driver,
it's safer for the driver, but it's still terrible for
the industry. You know, we were talking about technology. Uh,
you know, I did mention AI just FYI, if you
talk about a lot, you might get a couple of
(24:28):
turns on your valuation kind of what do you what
are you guys doing with AI internally? Are you are
you building it yourself? Are you using third parties? You know?
How how are you using AI? One of your one
of the largest brokers in the space, you know, talks
a lot about how they're making their you know, their
brokers a lot more productive by with the machine learning
that they're doing, and they're trying to, you know, reduce friction. Like,
(24:51):
what are you guys doing.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
With AIH we have, We've jumped in with two feet,
so we have been working on a number of things
for the past year to roll out throughout the business.
So I will say my general outlook on this is
that it will fundamentally change the landscape. I think for
the better. That technology is real. I think that there's
one of my favorite quotes is that the future is
already here, is just not evenly distributed. And I would
(25:15):
say that's very much the case with AI right now.
Our engineers use AI every single day. So we have
our team of internal engineers using it, our lawyers are
using it, and we have been driving it through our carrier, sales,
carrier operations, and customer operations functions now for a number
of months, so it will touch every part of the transaction.
(25:36):
We're processing documents automatically with it, so being able to
just kind of read documents, classify them, understand what they are,
get them processed to touching the actual transactions. So how
do we quote our customers? How are we interacting with carriers?
So it is in many instances right now a call
service for us. So it's feeled that we were missing
(26:00):
an abandonment rate that was too high. Our COO and
I were talking about, you know, inbound calls. How many
of these can we not get to? We missed about
five thousand phone calls every single.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Week because there was no one to pick it up.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Just everyone was dispatch. Everyone else is on the phone,
they're dealing with something else. So we were just missing
this and everything that we tried, we could chip away
at the numbers. So we have you know, AI voice
spots that are answering the phone. They sound like a
different person every time, so they have different personas you
cannot really tell that you're not talking to a human
because the intonation is so strong and they are either
(26:35):
handling the issue or sending it to the right person,
triaging it getting it to the right person. So it's
it's taken all that inbound call volume, which was too
droves and droves of people that try to do and
frankly we could never do it. Well, you just simply can't.
You know, when you have, you know, a load that
a lot of cut carriers want, they're all going to
call you at the same time, same thing that you're
(26:56):
doing on the outbound calling. So we've put it on
the phone systems, we have an email, but it is
touching every part of our transaction and I think that
the impact of it over the next few years, I
think truly we can probably double again the size of
our business by total revenue and probably increase headcount by
twenty or thirty percent. Well at most, that's what we're
(27:16):
seeing in the ear landings here.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's great, that's great. And this is a silly question,
but do you have a favorite persona of Ali?
Speaker 2 (27:23):
I don't yet. I know Grock has some racier ones
that they've come out with.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah. Absolutely, you know, we've talked a lot about you know,
well not a lot, but we talked a little bit
about M and A. You know some deals that we've seen,
you know, Coyote, your old firm, it's been acquired. You know.
Where do you see kind of M and A in
the space in the broker space? Is it? Is it
(27:52):
something where the large players are gonna you know, by
each other, or is it just really most of the
M and A is happening at the low the.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Other tale of the market.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
If you will.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, I think there's there's been a lot of learnings
over the last ten to fifteen years on M and A.
There's been a lot of deals, and I think my
general take on it is people have said the brokerage
market is going to consolidate, right, And you know, I
think for folks listening to there are estimates of how
many brokers are in the US today, is anywhere between
eighty to twenty thousand, right, So pick your number. Who
(28:27):
really operates, who operates with scale. I don't see meaningful
consolidation that would like substantively change the makeup of the
industry happening anytime soon. I just think taking that many
players down to a few is been talked about a lot,
but it's just not something that I can really imagine
happening on any kind of short time horizon. I do
(28:48):
think that the role for M and A my preference
for it. Again, I mentioned, you know, Armstrong is more opportunistic.
We're not out there looking We're perfectly happy with organic
growth story, but anything that would add to capabilities I
think can make a lot of sense. I think when
you get into where M and A fails in brokerage
is customer overlap. And so if you are a three
(29:11):
PL you buy another three PL, fifty percent of the
logos are the same, you're upsetting fifty percent of the
sales reps on one side of the transaction. Yeah, and
this is a relationship business. This is a people centric business.
So I've talked a lot about it, all the technology
and issues we have replatforming, which has allowed us to
take advantage of all the advancements in AI, but this
(29:31):
is still fundamentally a relationship business. And if you're going
to do a transaction, you're going to piss off fifty
percent of a population, or any percent of a population.
It just introduces more risk than I think is worth it.
And so I just advise anyone doing aggressive M and
A to have a really good plan and to make
sure you understand your overlap. But I think it will
(29:52):
continue to happen. I mean, I do think if you
are a large kind of three pl you're very heavily
focused on van and reefer. You know, buying a good
flatbed broker could be a great transaction for you can
break you into a new network, and those deals make
a lot more sense to me than seeing two folks
that do the same thing go after the same customer segments.
(30:14):
And I've seen that, you know, three, four or five
dozen times, and you know, I haven't heard a whole
lot of incredible growth or incredible success stories coming out.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And that's probably why consolidation is really at least not
going to happen in scale because you you you, you
will say you annoy that one broker, and it's very
easy for them to go off like a yep because
you know, with off the shelf technology that can pretty
much go up and running pretty quickly. So you know,
you mentioned you can double your size, but just adding
(30:44):
twenty to thirty percent of headcount. You know, when you
guys are recruiting brokers where you're recruiting from, I know
it's you know, the brokerage industry tends to be you know,
very I guess in office culture because there's a lot
of training on the job training that happens. Can you
talk about, you know, when you guys are hiring brokers,
(31:07):
are you are you looking for recent college grads? Are
you looking for you know, a grizzly veteran with thirty
years experience? Kind of what's what's the sweet spot for
you when you guys are adding those heads?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
You know, we have so we have recruiting on both
sides of them. So we have agent recruiting and we
also have brokerage recruiting. Right, I'd say in both instances,
we're looking for someone with experience. Generally the attrition's lower.
It's you have somebody that's kind of not already self
selected out. You see, the folks that go heavy out
of university tend to have you know, fifty percent attrition
(31:39):
would be a good thing for a lot of them
over the course of two or three years. And so
it's really really expensive and you get people. You know,
this industry tends to you self select out pretty quick
because it's a it's a tough industry. It's hard work.
It's really not for everyone. And so if when you
get them and they decide that they want to do this,
it's great And like, may I've been in it now
eighteen years, didn't expect that. But I think for us overall,
(32:03):
we prefer to have, especially on the agent side, somebody
with more experience. Maybe they were in a W two
model before they decided they wanted to be their own,
you know, a small business owner breakout on their own
and use Armstrong's platform to run their business. So it's
definitely on both sides, much more heavily weighted towards somebody
(32:24):
with experience that has realized that this industry is for them.
They want to be in it for the long run,
and we like to play long term games with long
term people.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
So okay, and I think you said you mentioned you
were in it for eighteen years. Ye, you kind of
said you were surprised, Like, what did you think you
were going to do?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Well? I thought I was. Actually I came out of school.
I was working for a senator on Capitol Hill, so
I a very different path than what I'm on now
and just fell out of love with politics and got
a job at Coyote when it was about forty million
dollars and stayed there for eleven years, went on a
crazy ride to four billion in that eleven year span.
(33:01):
But uh, yeah, it just just has this way of
getting its mits on you and not letting you go.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Is there anything you know as a leader of a
large transportation company that kind of keeps you up at night?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I don't know. I tend to be a little bit
of a warrior by by nature, which I think is
a good thing. I've tried to learn how to harness that,
so I has to say a little bit of everything,
but nothing existentially, I think, you know, the industry is
in a despite the rate cycle. I think the industry
A lot of people look at it and say, I
don't know about that. I think the industry is overall
pretty healthy, with the two exceptions of, yeah, rates everyone
(33:36):
would like rates to be a little higher than they
are now and fraud. Those are the two kind of
black eyes. But other than that, no, doesn't nothing that
really keeps me up at night at at an existential level.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Right, And we were talking a little bit about the
the LTL, the lesson truckload market. You know how that's
been a growth there. If you guys, is LTL from
a broker standpoint, more profitable than than truckload from a
margent standpoint.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, if you look at it on the yields or better,
So the margin percent is higher, the absolute amount of
money per transaction is is much lower. And so you
know your your margin per load is significantly lower than truckload,
but you certainly make up for it in the percentage.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And then I guess, you know, not to jump back
and forth, but you know, you started in politics, you
got into transports, Like what made you make the switch?
Would did you just like, like I guess, you know,
see a job opening online or something I did?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, I think I just was disenchanted with the process
of getting a bill through. I worked when I was
there on the last time we tried to address immigration reform,
and we worked for months on end to try to
push it through bipartisan support. And then you know, one
guy out of North Carolina, ironically where I live now,
(34:54):
Jim de Mint, just reversed his vote at last second
killed the whole thing. So that was the last time
we tried to address comprehensive immigration reform in the US.
I was an seven and I honestly, I mean I
was just so disenchanted with the whole thing where you know,
you had bipartis and support, everyone was kind of you
felt like you were going to get something done that
was going to meaningfully benefit the country, and you know,
snap of a finger, it's gone. And so I decided
(35:16):
I want to go into the private sector. And honestly,
I saw an article about Coyote on I think it
was in Cranes, Yeah, and about Jeff Silver, the founder,
and said, I want to work for that guy. And
I walked in with true to my you know, prior
work experience roots, I walked in with a suit and
tie into a brokerage floor. And for any of your
listeners that don't know, no one in brokerage wears a
suit and a tie. And it was like a record
(35:38):
stopped on the floor. That's funny, Joony chewing tobacco. Everyone
else did. So, so that's.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
A very interesting transition, you know. And I guess what
is the favorite your favorite thing not only about the
job that you have now, but but about the brokerage industry.
They kind of have kind of that kept you in
it for so long.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I mean, it's it's a fascinating industry. I mean, it's
it's the closest thing that I've seen to perfect free
market economics. If you look at the price for a
low just to Atlanta to Chicago, it has a different
price at eight am than it does at ten am noon,
four o'clock. So just that that kind of the economic
the underlying economics, and this the sheer fragmentation in the
(36:22):
marketplace on both sides, both shippers and on the carrier side,
right just creates this dynamic that just it's fast paced,
it's easy to get, you know, fall in love with
and get addicted to, but it's also incredibly intellectually stimulating
and really tough. And so the just thing I like
most about my job right now is just this one.
I get to work with great people. And two is
(36:43):
there's a different problem to solve every single day. It's
never boring.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Now, is most of your time client facing? Is it
inward facing?
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Like?
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Where do you spend most of your time?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Depends on the week. So I spend a lot of
time with our We say we have, you know, three
different types of customers. We have our agents, we have
our shippers, and we have our carriers. I like to
spend at least if you look at a nagrid over
a year, twenty five to thirty five percent of my
time with our customers, I spend probably I would I
would kind of carve out shippers from that. I spend
(37:16):
probably another twenty to thirty percent of my time with
our agents and our and then internally facing with our
brokerage folks and what we call shared services. So we
look at it, you know, the traditional back office functions,
so billing credit, those are not back office functions at Armstrong.
Those we call that shared services. That is a customer
service department that services our agents and our and our brokers,
(37:37):
and so we treat them with like an SLA, so
they have if you get an inbound email for this request,
you have to respond to it within this period of time.
And we track those things, we metric them, and we
spend a lot of time internally working with those teams
to try to make sure that we're hitting those slas
and that we're staying true to our word with our customers.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Great, and you know, before I let you go is
something that I always like to ask my guests, do
you have a favorite book about leadership or about the
transportation market? That's kind of close to your heart. It'd
be interesting to hear, especially since I'm looking for a
new summer read. Right now, Well, if you like history,
I'm actually in the middle. I'd say the tail end
(38:15):
of a book right now that's pretty fascinating called The
Box by Mark Levinson, and he goes through the history
of containerization and how it changed the world, how it
made it flatter, how it made it cheaper.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
But it walks you through Malcolm McLean's story, if you
know who that is from, kind of the one of
the pioneers of the industry, how the Vietnam War kind
of shaped the twenty foot container, and so it really
describes how shipping has progressed in the history of shipping
through that lens. I'd say it's one of the more
fascinating reads I've had in a while.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
All right, great, do you guys do much on the
intermodal side.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
We don't. We don't sore where I'd say where we
have all very limited kind of exposure is on intermodal Okay, awesome.
So it's a tough a that's a tough business and
will be interesting to see what happens with the recent merger.
Announcer announcement.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
I was gonna ask, do you do you have any
thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (39:06):
I don't. I mean, that's talk about an interesting day
for a podcast. It's two major announcements this morning. So
I think my early take is I think there should
there will probably be some opportunity for brokers and three
pls in the short run that play in that space.
If that deal goes through, right, there's gonna be disruption,
There's going to be congestion. How they reconfigure networks. I
(39:29):
think it's interesting and I think sorely needed to have
that kind of first coast to coast service offering. But
now I don't know. I'm gonna suspend any judgment until
I get a few more details on it.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
All right, Well, hopefully we'll come back to the podcast
we can talk more about it. Assuming that those deals
were that deal, the railroad deal between Union Pacific and
Norfolk Southern kind of evolved a little further than just
hearsay and talk. All right, Cameron, I really want to
thank you for your time and insights today.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, thank you very much for having me, and.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I want to thank you for tuning in. If you'd
like the episode, please subscribe and leave a review. We've
lined up a number of great guests for the podcast,
so please check back to hear conversations with C suite executives, shippers,
regulators and decision makers within the freight markets. Also, if
you want to learn more about the freight transportation markets,
check our work out on the Bloomberg Terminal at Bigo
(40:23):
and on social media. This is Lee Glasgow signing off
and thanks again for talking transports with me.
Host
Lee Klaskow
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