Why Logistics Tech Rollouts Fail (and How to Fix Them) | Nate Johnson, GLCS - Everything is Logistics

Episode Transcript
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Blythe Brumleve Milliga (00:37):
Blythe, welcome into another episode of
everything is logistics, apodcast for the thinkers in
freight. We are proudlypresented by SPI logistics, and
I am your host, Blythe Milligan,and today we're doing the part
of logistics tech that nobodyputs on a booth banner
implementation, the messy middlewhere budgets get weird,

(01:00):
timelines slip, and everyonesuddenly discovers how much
tribal knowledge is trapped inone dispatcher's head. My guest
today is Nate Johnson. He is theCEO of GLCs. Nate lived the
industry from multiple angles,and now he spends his time
helping teams pick the righttools, integrate them without
lighting money on fire andactually get value after go

(01:22):
live. We're going to be talkingabout why rollouts fail, how to
budget beyond the subscriptionfee, what to demand, and
onboarding and support, whatdata and integrations really
require, and where AI fits in toall of it. So Nate, I've been
wanting to have thisconversation with you for a long
time about where logistics, techimplementation goes right and

(01:43):
where it goes wrong. So welcometo the show, especially on such
a short notice, where I askedyou yesterday and you said yes
to today.

Nathan Johnson (01:50):
Sure today works. So that's not always the
case. I've been out traveling. Igot home last late last night,
and this just fit. So it was, itwas perfect. It was meant to be
Blythe. And I appreciate youhaving Absolutely.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan (02:05):
I'm happy to have this conversation
too, right before one of thebiggest, maybe the biggest,
industry event in for logistics,and that is manifest. It's going
to be a lot of tech playersthere, and it's going to be a
lot to sort of decipher through.
But first question right off thejump, where does logistics tech
implementation go right andwhere does it go wrong?

So I'm going to answer something that you said
before. Nobody putsimplementation on their booth,
except for us, it is on ourbooth. You when you look at our
booth and our banners, we listthat we assist in
implementation, and we've donehundreds and hundreds, if not
closer to 1000 projects relatedto implementation. So where,
where we see things go wrong is,it's, there's many areas where

(02:54):
they can go wrong, but the theultimate issue is, are you
buying the right solution thatyou need, and do you even need
it? So we've seen freight techgo wild over the last 10 or 15
years, and even now today, youknow, there are so many vendors
that are dealing with oneprescriptive use case, and so

(03:16):
you end up, you know, runningdown that road, you as a carrier
or broker, run down that road,find the solution, think it's
going to work, and then findout, hey, this doesn't do
exactly what we wanted it to do.
So first and foremost, why areyou buying this? Documenting
what sort of processes you havethat are going to be impacted
with that, and understandingthat when you go to market to

(03:39):
try to find a vendor that thatvendor is reviewing your very
detailed requirements documentthat says, This is what we do
today, and this is what we'relooking to replace, and these
are our requirements that wehave to move forward. Anyone can
do that themselves. The morerobust of a solution you're
looking at, it becomes much morecomplicated. If you're looking

(04:01):
at replacing your TMS, you havea lot of requirements associated
with that. If you have, ifyou're looking to do automated
order entry using an AI solutionthat's a component of a TMS, or
a small, not a component of aTMS, with a bolt on to a TMS, so
it's much smaller requirements.
So our approach with all of ourcustomers is when they ask us to

(04:26):
help in a vendor selectionthat's pre implementation, is,
why do you want this? And proveto us that you need this
solution, and that can be ashort conversation or a long
conversation, but we are goingto take the position that you
don't need it and then decidethat you do. And it doesn't mean
that you don't need it, it justmeans that we want to go through

(04:49):
the process of proving out thatthis is going to have value for
your organization. So I'd saythat's the first place that we
start on an implementation wherewe see things lots of times go
wrong because you don't haveyour requirements set. How is
the vendor supposed to know thattheir solution is actually going
to work for you?

And so is it more like just reading a
document from the vendor, or ifyou're kind of playing like
matchmaker, in that sense, foryour clients versus the solution
that you're recommending.

So on our side, once we have that requirements
set, we've built a wholerequirements document, more of
an RFP, and it's in depth. Itreally depends upon the
engagement. And this, this getsvery, very complicated in a
multi month, if not a year. Longengagement in the larger
discussions for a largerenterprise organization could

(05:42):
take quite a while, but asmaller organization, we might
have that done in a matter of afew hours. And so it really
depends on what you're lookingfor. And then once we have that
document, we're partnered withpretty much every freight tech
organization out there, or wehave a relationship, especially

(06:03):
if they're established. We havea relationship with them in some
way, shape or form. So we havepeople in our organization that
are just studying freight tech,and that's pretty much all they
do is interact with with freighttechnology, ensure that we stay
up on top of that, because overour 400 customers, they all have

(06:24):
different needs, so we're alwayslooking to see what, what new
thing that they might beinterested in, etc, etc. So on
our side, we have a unique pointof view. But if you're coming at
it from a carrier or broker, andyou only have your view of what
time you've invested into it.
You gather that, you take it tothe vendor. The vendor then has
to come back and prove that theycan check all the boxes on that

(06:47):
requirements document, so or theRFP, whatever you wanted to
define it as, but, but if theycheck all the boxes, or if they
check 90% of the boxes, andthey're potentially a viable
solution. You go through, thisis a complicated scenario there.
I mean, if you're asking for AIautomation in some area of your
business, there's probably 1015,20 vendors that you might have

(07:11):
to walk through to go see thatif you're not to go review their
solutions, unless you have aprevious relationship with them,
and you already kind of knowwhich vendors you want to work
with. So that vendor then wouldcome forward and check those
boxes say, Yes, we can do this,and hopefully be able to do an
actual demo, which is somethingthat we typically require from

(07:34):
vendors, is you have to show usthat your solution will actually
work, not a PowerPointpresentation.

Oh, that's interesting. So you kind
of put like the feet to the firefor your clients. And so during
that demo, what are you lookingfor? You look, are there like
green flags or red flags thatyou're looking for to make that
decision?

Yeah, all kinds.
So first and foremost, can it dowhat we need it to do? Second,
we're actually looking beyondthat at how well put together
the organization is. Is this anactual demo? Is this somebody
who's grabbing at things to makeit happen? So that's going to
tell us a little bit about theorganization that we're working
with, or the vendor that we'reprospecting. So we're going to

(08:17):
look at that, ensure that thedemo is seamless and right, and
that, you know, it's notsomething that the company has
experience, I think, is the bestway of stating that. So
ultimately, we're going to lookat that, then we're going to
then we're going to aggregatecosts and see all the costs

(08:39):
across the vendors as well helpthe clients make their

(09:37):
determination based on that andpotential return on investment,
which typically return oninvestment. We're going to look
at their numbers. So we're notgoing to make up numbers for
them. We're going to sit downand actually apply their
numbers. Once again, there'sdifferent levels of this type of
an engagement, but if it'sanything moderate, we're

(09:58):
absolutely going to put somesort of cost model together that
will will be able to takeagainst the cost of the new
solution and then develop somesort of ROI.

So I remember when I worked in house
at a brokerage, and at, I thinka couple years in, we switched
TMS providers, and it was a shitshow, to say the least. And it
was just one of those thingswhere we had a previous TMS that
was deeply integrated into ouraccounting system and the

(10:33):
leadership, the IT leadershipinternally, made the decision to
switch TMS providers withoutreally engaging any of the
staff, without engaging theaccounting department. And after
we had already made thisinvestment, it wasn't fully
realized what the mistake wasuntil later on, is that, do you
see that a lot is that commonfor the internal decision makers

(10:56):
just to go ahead and just buysoftware without engaging the
employees that are actuallygoing to

use it? We're aware of that our clients don't
do that because they're engagingus so they don't have to. You
know, making a mistake on alarge piece of technology can be
catastrophic in a variety ofways to your business. It can
cause a significant amount ofdamage internally through
personnel and all the pain thathappens. You know, not being

(11:24):
able to settle orders, not beingable to have the integrations
that you once had. Or having towait a year or two to get those
done can be very, veryfrustrating and taxing for your
existing employees. Now, atrucking company has a issue
with that, even more so becausethey are working with a

(11:46):
substantial number of drivers,and so if it's something that
bleeds into drivers and causestrucks to sit or drivers to be
frustrated. Now you haveretention turnover issues or and
you have costs that that youknow are accumulated and delayed
trucks. So so we want to makesure that any sort of major

(12:07):
investment is done right. But wehear all the time about
companies that that select apiece of technology implemented
and it fails or it doesn't getthem to where they want it to
go. That being said, you know,this is a complex industry, even

(12:27):
with a fully robust requirementsdocument, you're going to be in
the middle of an implementation,and somebody is going to say,
oh, yeah, you know, we forgotabout this. So so once you go
alive, you're still going tohave problems with that. And
those requirements that wegather early on actually turn
into testing scripts. So we willtake each requirement and turn
it into testing and theneventually turn that into

(12:49):
training documentation. Sothat's very important, that
those requirements are correctearly on. Obviously you don't
want to buy a new piece of techto just replace your old tech.
So those requirements will alsoinclude, they'll include, this
is what we do today, and this iswhat we want to do tomorrow, and
the reason why we're moving to anew technology platform. So it's
absolutely you know, plenty offailures are happening. The

(13:13):
smaller of the techorganizations, I'd say there's
probably more failures. We'reactually getting scenarios where
clients are wanting to buy 234,solutions that all do the same
thing, test them all out and andrun with one that I've never
seen before. So, but they'resmaller solutions.

So I am curious, sort of like the I
guess, the overall landscape,obviously, freight Tech has
exploded in adoption rates overthe last decade, especially, you
know, over the last five, sixyears. And I'm curious, how are
the legacy players versus thenewer players? Are they? Do you

(13:53):
find that they're starting totalk to each other more software
wise, or are they still kind ofsiloed off? So the

legacy players, and that's not a derogative term
by any means, some of the legacyplayers are doing quite well,
and they have an image issue, sothey need to get away from being
considered legacy. Microsoft isone of the oldest tech companies
out there, and nobody thinks ofthem as legacy. So you know, the
challenge there is, if you aredefined as a legacy

(14:22):
organization, we work with everyone of them is, how do you
create a scenario where you'renot legacy, where you are
innovative, and many of them arevery innovative, and have very
interesting things, and arecutting edge, actually, in many
cases, but they are having tofight through that legacy

(14:44):
problem. So to the point offreight tax advanced so much
over the last 15 years, 10 to 15years, I go back to 2010 2011
on, on being employed in on thefreight tech side. Prior to
that, I ran, ran fleets. But wesee, you know, I look back just

(15:05):
a few years further than that,and just go how many trucking
companies actually had yell ormobile com, to use that term,
back in 2005 and I would say 25%so 20 years ago, maybe 20 or

(15:25):
maybe maybe 75% of Our companiesout there today were operating
without satellite tracking,probably without a cell phone
too. Well, maybe the driver hada cell phone. Maybe they
weren't, maybe they didn't, butI would say the vast majority of
the drivers had cell phones, butthey weren't smartphones. You
didn't have apps that you couldtrack your driver on. So, you

(15:48):
know, in 20 years, we've gonefrom, you know, even when I go
back 10 years previous to that,when I was entering the
industry, everything I did wason paper. There were systems,
you know, we had Westinghouse asour solution back there, which
eventually ended up becominginnovative or acquiring through
that. Anyway, the the datapoints that we would track in

(16:15):
the mid 90s were 30, maybe 30total data points. And today you
have potentially hundreds thatare being tracked daily, if not
1000s that are being trackeddaily as an asset based carrier.
So you know this. This is allevolved, really, since 2005 2006
but, but it certainly took offmuch faster in the last 10

(16:38):
years. I think a lot of thatstems from the ELD mandates. So
now, all of a sudden, we aretracking every truck, and we now
have ECM data rolling out ofevery truck, and you can now
manage every data point thatthat ECM is producing, if you
want to, which includes driver,behavior, fuel, etc. So that's

(17:02):
launched into, you know, thatimmediately created the
visibility market the way thatwe know it today. Your project,
44 your four kites, those. Theyactually existed before, but it
strengthened them, because nowevery, every class a truck is
now being tracked. So that's,that's truly where you know, if
you go back and kind of look atthe inflection point of when we

(17:24):
started the launch, it matchesup with the ELD mandate, yeah.

I mean, it makes sense like that.
Maybe that that was the firstdomino to fall. And then now
that has led to, you know, themodern freight ecosystem that we
are, freight tech ecosystem thatwe find ourselves in. And I just
as you were talking, I meangoing from, you know, 30 data
points to hundreds. How are youhelping teams, especially during

(17:51):
the implementation process,understand that they're going to
have so much more data to dealwith. How do they not have data
overload? How do they make surethat their data is is clean, is
usable? What are maybe some ofthe those steps that you
discover during implementation,or maybe even before you can
start implementation?

Well, it's just, I mean, whether it's before,
after or or during or mostlyit's after but, but carries
brokers are swimming and data wedon't even know what to do with
it all. You have behavior datathat we're starting to come
forward on. You have all kindsof data points that are,

(18:31):
frankly, just sitting there.
Many cases, they're not beingused at all. We don't know how
to use them. You know, we usedto say trucking isn't rocket
science. Well, guess who's beingemployed in trucking now, rocket
scientists. So because we haveso much data and we want so many
complicated things to save apenny mile, we've now had to
reach out to people that workfor NASA to help us out. And

(18:56):
that's cool. That's great.
That's That's wonderful. But itwasn't that long ago that
trucking wasn't rocket scienceand it was just moving a load.
We, in a lot of ways, throughadminister, through various
administrations have causedcompliance requirements that

(19:16):
have created technology andwhatnot. So the how do you
manage all of this and how doyou keep it clean? Well,
processes define everything,right? So if you do not have a
solid process to run yourorganization from order to cash,
then your data is and you're notyou're not enforcing that

(19:36):
process, then your data is goingto start to slip. You're going
to have some messy data. Goingback to those requirements,
which become test scripts, whichbecome training documentations.
Training is everything you know.
Lots of times, people will adopta solution, implement it and
never touch it again. As far asa training standpoint, never
create that documentation. Nevernever touch it again. You

(19:58):
degrade on your, what we calltribal knowledge, on every user
that's that's touching thatsoftware that leaves the
company. So you know, Billy hadit originally then, then Lisa
was the primary user after that,and Lisa was only 80% of Billy
because she didn't get directtraining. So refreshing that

(20:19):
training, keeping them engaged,ensuring that you're working
with the vendors to to meetthat, that requirement of
keeping them up to speed, Ithink, is extremely important,
as far as keeping data cleanlybeyond that, because sometimes
this is a lot of data, right? Ifyou think, in some cases, you

(20:39):
could get a data feed from atruck and get, let's say you
have 1000 trucks, and every fiveseconds you're getting a red
crumb trail with ECM data. Doyou want that? Does it make a
need for you. If you suddenlyhave a need for that, what are
you going to do with it all? Andthen you actually contain quite
a bit of data, generally, thatyou're storing. So it continues

(21:01):
to become larger and larger. SoAI is certainly a component of
the of keeping data clean. Ithink as we move on further,
we'll see that fixing some ofthese scenarios where if you
have unclean data, AI that wasone of the first use cases we
wanted to use it for, waskeeping data clean or

(21:23):
identifying that's a problem,but ultimately you're reflecting
that AI bot. Or automationaround a specific process that
you've developed. So you're justreplacing that process with a
with an automation,

with your with your processes.
Because I'm big on on and Idon't know if I'm doing this
right or I say I'm big on, youknow, documenting your
processes, but I frankly, don't.
I know that there's ways that Icould improve the documentation
of it and following through.
What are maybe some just highlevel tips for folks who are
like, I know that this issomething I should be doing, but

(22:03):
what's maybe a quick way tostart documenting my processes
in a way that won't, you know,drive me crazy?

So there's a few products that will record your
screen, right? But videos, welike videos. And unfortunately,
with a video, if you change yourprocess, you have to redo your
video. But doing a two or threeminute clip is really not that
big of a deal. So when you whenyou build out and you create
these requirements, which becometest scripts, which become

(22:33):
trading documentation, adding avideo on to that today is really
not that big of a deal. Andthere's lots of products, you
know, script, I think, is onethat we see kind of the most
because it's it's attached toGoogle, and there's a freemium
version on Google, so you canuse it within Google Chrome at

(22:53):
basically no cost. It's not asefficient as if you pay for it,
but it'll do screen capturesevery time you click on
something, and then it'll,it'll, it'll create a area where
you can go in and expand uponthose screen captures. It's not
the best documentation of it.
It's certainly not the way wewould do training documentations
15 years ago. But you don'tnecessarily need it to be

(23:17):
extremely pretty, and what youdo need it to not be so what you
want to avoid is a trainingdocumentation that is so large
that it can't possibly beconsumed, or a video that's so
long that no one's going towatch it. So there's those
pieces of it too. Also, youknow, the AI side on training is

(23:39):
emerging more and more everyday, so we're kind of excited.
It's one of the areas of AI I'mexcited for how to apply that
into software training. Youknow, I don't think anyone's
really capitalized on that to alevel, but you look at some some
products that are out there thatare more human training. It's

(24:00):
like sales training and customerinteraction, that kind of stuff.
It's not going to be too, toolong until those type of
products are going to startmoving into here's how we train
our software.

So it almost sounds like it's it could
be as simple as, you know,starting a Google Doc and taking
screenshots of every click youmake and maybe the why behind
those clicks, or the video ofjust a quick overview. But don't
make it too long to where theother people will avoid it,

(24:33):
right?

You want the users to actually go find it and
then putting the metadata behindit about what you're actually
doing so they can search it,creating a medium for that. You
can't necessarily drop it all onYouTube, because you're putting
in secret sauce to yourorganization. So it's got to be
private, or should be private.
This, although typically stemsfrom that initial requirement

(24:55):
document that we go back to. Sothat's why I started out with
that, because you know yourrequirements define your
process, your process definesyour testing, and then
ultimately, your testing andyour processes define your your
your your training so and yourtraining materials. So, yeah,
you can start out. You mightstart out with a Vizio process,

(25:17):
flow, whatever. It doesn'tmatter. You put it as long as
it's digital. You can you canadvance it. If it's an Excel,
whatever it doesn't, it reallydoesn't matter if you're doing
nothing today. The fact is,tomorrow you need to do
something and it needs to beable to be understood by more
than just the person thatcreated it.

Yeah, because if you do all of those
steps properly, because my nextquestion was going to be around,
how do you avoid some of thehidden costs and hidden fees?
But it sounds like if you dothose first few steps properly,
then you avoid some of thosehidden fees, or maybe, you know,
creep and things like that, thatyou wouldn't have anticipated,

(26:00):
maybe not have budgeted for. Andthen you know, before you know
it, you're, the project hasballooned, and you're you're way
over budget than what youanticipated,

or you can predict where you may go. And
you know, I tell every customerof ours, do not buy a solution
based upon a technology roadmapor a development roadmap. So
we're going to have this featureout in six months a year,
whatever the case may be. And Icannot. Say how many times we've

(26:32):
had customers not heed thatadvice and then end up having
cost overruns because thatfeature was now stricken or it's
not going to be out for anotheryear, but it's a go live
requirement. It's something thatthat customer needs to be able
to use the product to moveforward. So you are putting

(26:52):
yourself at risk when you go, Imean, you should buy the
solution that meets 90% of yourrequirements or more. 80% is
debatable. If you have no othersolution above and beyond that,
80% is debatable, and then canand then build something on the
side to meet and meet theremaining 10 to 20% but you

(27:16):
absolutely should not buysomething that is go live
requirement without knowing thatthat's in a sales or in a
development roadmap of somekind. If you do it's because
everyone ends up doing itanyway. You need to lock in your
contract around that can'toverrun. That has to be a

(27:38):
defined date and potentiallyrelease you of your contract if
that doesn't get you know ifthat, if that development item
does not get released at theright time, usually, there's a
lot more than one. Usually, whenyou get into this, there's going
to be dozens, potentially whenyou start looking at that. So
that's you should not have manycost overruns. If your vendor is

(28:01):
100% honest, and they didn't,they didn't create a scenario
where they're showing vaporware,which still happens when you get
away from the PowerPoints, it'sstill, I mean, you still end up
in a scenario where, yes, we cando that, yes we can do that,
they don't fully understand therequirement, and they didn't ask
enough questions. That can stillhappen. It's limited. But the

(28:23):
biggest issue is buyingsomething that doesn't exist.

And I would think that the vendor
selection part is probably themost difficult, because it
sounds like not not your firm,but maybe other firms, or maybe
companies just aren't engaging afirm to help them through this
process. And they see the bellsand whistles of all of the new
technology that's entered themarket, and they think it's a

(28:46):
great idea, and then they justspend money on it, instead of
doing their due diligence, I amcurious when maybe some of your
clients have seen some of youknow these, or maybe just leads
you've talked to, or peopleyou've talked to in general, if
they see the new shiny toy, howdo you figure out, or how do you
sort of work through them, orwork with them to figure out if

(29:09):
that solution is actually writefor their tech stack, right?

So you know that I'm going to talk about a couple
of things because you broughtup, you sort of open the door to
something, which is, you know,they see the new shiny thing and
and they, some people, don'twait. They just go out and they
do a demo, and they theypurchase it. In some cases, it's
not even a demo. It's just adiscussion or a PowerPoint slide

(29:36):
deck of, hey, we can do allthis. And you know, you look at
at an automation, for example,how do you how do you demo an
automation when it doesn't existin your system yet? So those,
those organizations need tofigure that component out
because it ends up failing, orthe adoption rate can be, can be

(29:58):
difficult because they're notgetting to the specific need of
the customer. But yeah, you dosee a lot of them run out and
buy stuff, and it doesn't,doesn't work out right? And we
do hear that, and we do seevendors exiting the market or
just simply not not being aroundanymore, especially on the
startup side, you know, theythey're not very noisy. Somebody

(30:21):
catches on that they're around.
But we've had a number ofvendors that have entered the
market, and then they are nolonger in the market anymore at
all. So, you know, they find outthat that they just can't manage
this. So Trucking is truckingbrokerage, logistics in general,
is something that never forgets.

(30:43):
So you have to be extremelyclean on those first few moves,
or be very honest on the factthat you are as a vendor, are
trying to deploy something thatyou really don't have widely
deployed, so that that should bereflective in the cost. So I
don't know if I entirelyanswered your question there,
but I think I maybe jumped inbefore it.

So no, I think it's just trying to set,
sort of the base level, baselinelevel of when companies decide
to engage with a new technologyor new technology partner, and
if that's actually going to makesense for the company's
investment, not just money wise,but but time wise too. Because
imagine that that some you knowto hint at what you were just

(31:28):
speaking to you best a lot oftime. Energy and money into
onboarding a new tool, only tofind out that they've exited the
market because they weretechnically a startup. That's
got to be incredibly frustratingand maybe crippling to some
businesses out there.

Yeah, depending upon the size of the solution,
it could be crippling. It couldbe just it can also have a
customer impact. A lot of thesetools are customer facing, or
are assisting with, you know,reduction in people that are
customer facing, which we debatewith a little bit that you
shouldn't necessarily reduce andcount, but double down your
effort towards customer facing,but, but without going down that

(32:05):
route Road, plenty of them seethings. You know, social media
is a tough one. There's lots ofpeople that'll come out there.
They'll do podcasts, they'llthey'll broadcast their tool,
whatever the case may be. Itlooks nice, shiny, all great.
There's VC investments, so theyhave some capital. They can
build a big booth, they can showup, they can do some interesting

(32:27):
things, or it appears that theycan do some interesting things,
and they do have an ICP thatprobably fits them most of the
time, or they did have acustomer base that that they
started out with. So so I thinkit's important that you ask the
right questions upfront, whichcould be, how many customers do

(32:49):
you actually have in production,not in testing. You know, in
production, what's your what isyour roadmap? What are you
working on? You know, how manyemployees do you have? I think
is another, you know, sometimesyou'll find out there's two
employees. So even thoughthere's very noisy social media
behind it, there's twoemployees, and maybe there's 15

(33:11):
developers and XYZ locationacross the world or more, but
there's really only two peoplethat are championing the
product, and that's those areall they're not bad things. By
all means, they're not badthings, but you need to be aware
of the risks that you're takingby walking down the road. In
addition, you know, all the AIand automation solutions that

(33:35):
are out there, you know, at ourenterprise and larger mid market
customers, they don't want thethey're frustrated at this
point. There's too manysolutions in market. They're
only addressing one to three usecases. Lots of them are in
competition with one another.
Or, if you look at roadmap,they're planning on competing

(33:55):
with one another. And vendormanagement is huge, you know,
especially right now where thefootprint of this looks like,
you may have 20 or 30 botsolutions out there. So there's
a few companies that are tryingto, you know, deploy many of
them, instead of just one or twoor three, so that the usual free

(34:16):
tech side is get some capital,get an idea, get to the point
where you're going to create,create a solution, get some
capital support that do onething really, really well, and
then sell it, and then figureout how to add on a few more.
And there's nothing wrong withthat, but these are small
solutions that are extremelyefficient, but I don't if I'm a

(34:38):
CIO of a company, I don't want30 vendors as my I don't want to
have to manage 30 vendors to runmy automations. Yeah.

I mean, especially with and I
definitely want to dive moreinto the AI agent side of
things, because I think thatthere's still a lot of questions
around, you know, sort of thesuccess rate. But I am curious
as a side note, you know,there's, there's a lot of tribal
knowledge when it comes tologistics and fleet operations

(35:13):
and brokerage operate, you know,all of those different silos
within logistics, with a lot ofthese, you know, sort of VC
backed firms, technologyproviders that have entered the
space within the last handful ofyears. Do you think that that
concept still exists, that, Oh,they're an outsider. They don't
know our industry. So thatsolution can't be good. Or is

(35:36):
the tide kind of shifting alittle bit where, you know, we
are as an industry starting toget more attention from
outsiders, from venture capitalfirms and things like that,
where they are looking at someof the glaring problems. Is it
good to have that outsiderperspective? Or do you still
need to pair the tribalknowledge with the with the
solutions that are beingpresented on the market?

Yeah, I look at it from both sides, right? You
are going to have someonechampioning idea that's coming
from market or potentially fromoutside of the market, but if
they're coming from outside ofthe market, then that's why you
ask that question around, who'syour who's your staff, who's
who's working with you, andwhat's their their tenure?
Because they do. We'recomplicated industry, more

(36:20):
complicated than anyone. Anyoutsider thinks that we are, and
I've had plenty of thoseconversations with outsiders,
and you know when they're goingto be problematic. Attic versus
when they're not and and some ofthe more successful solutions
are folks that are coming fromoutside of the industry, that
surround themselves with withindustry experts. In the

(36:44):
beginning, it may be an advisorycapacity, but eventually you're
bringing them on staff to helpdrive product. And you may, you
may have a whole bunch ofreally, really smart people
building it that are not fromindustry, but you have
architected out this, thissolution, using people that
understand the day to day needsof whatever ICP you have.

And so, as you know, we've talked
about, you know, the what acompany should do beforehand,
and then it may be some of thequestions that they should be,
you know, paying attention to,or some of the demo information
that they should be payingattention to. And, you know, a
little bit aroundimplementation. But after you
get the software implemented,what happens afterwards? What

(37:31):
should companies, you know, asfrom a support perspective, what
should companies be aware of?
What are some red flags, greenflags on the support side of
things, after the product isimplemented? Yeah.

So, you know, this also varies based upon the
size of the solution that you'repurchasing. So, you know, let's
go down the road of a SAS, TMS,you know, you would have already
defined who owns the data, butthose are the more complicated
sides. And you know, how do Iaccess the data? How do I go
from you're never coming out ofan implementation at 100%

(38:07):
utilization of a software, oryou're probably never going to
achieve 100% utilization ofsoftware anyway. But if you can
get to 80, you know, 80% lots oftimes you're you're doing really
well, and you're probably one ofthe stronger organizations of
that, that particular vendor. SoI think what's continued

(38:27):
training I already talked aboutthat, that's first and foremost,
vendor relations, you'recontinuing to manage that
vendor, work with that vendor,you know, quarterly, biannual,
whatever, updates with thatvendor if they're a major
component, so like a TMS, ifthey are a major component of
your of your company andcompanies, brokerages, trucking

(38:50):
companies, whatever, If you havea TMS, your entire business
circles around that if it shutsoff, tell me what happens if
it's just gone tomorrow and itwon't turn back on? Tell me what
happens you're having problemsand so maintaining that vendor
relation. Be involved with thatvendor go to their conferences,

(39:11):
even if you just send one or twopeople, I usually recommend, the
larger the organization that youhave, the more often you want to
send two people because ofredundancy scenarios. But you
know, this business is all aboutrelationships as well, and that
does not just include customers,that includes your your vendors.
So you know the continuedtraining and continued

(39:32):
relationship understanding whatthey're going to do. We are
moving fast. Rate. Tech ismoving fast. What is here last
year is not what's here thisyear they they've made a
significant, significantadvancement dependent upon who
they are. They their productmight even not look the same as

(39:52):
what it was, and you might notknow that if you don't have that
continued relationship, that isa two way street. It's not
always on the vendor. It is onthe customer as well, to show
the effort that they want tomaintain that creating your
super users so the users thatknow the products, regardless of

(40:16):
size, those that understand thatif you can't create a super
user, or you don't want tocreate a super user, you know,
give us a call. We're alreadythat. So we support everyone on
a monthly basis that way, or cansupport you on a monthly basis
that way. So you know you wantto make sure that that you're if

(40:37):
you have a list of 50 differenttech vendors that you're working
with, or 20, or whatever thenumber is, who owns that vendor
relationship, and how often arethey interacting with them?

And I imagine there's probably some
opportunities for consolidation.
If you're looking at therelationships of all of the
vendors that you're workingwith, and some of those vendors
might add some features in thefuture or maybe remove some
features that you really liked,I would imagine that that's
maybe like a yearly pruningprocess to see, depending on

(41:09):
your contract, of course, to seewhich of these vendors can you
maybe not work with anymore,versus vendors that maybe you
want to invest a little bit morein, because they're developing
those capabilities that you needfor the future.

Yeah, or the selection of a new vendor to
replace multiple existingvendors so that. Can happen too,
and your contract management isimportant. You brought up the
contract. So when you're signinga subscription or SAS agreement,
there's usually a period of timethat's going to run it. It's
going to be a year to fiveyears, something like that. You
shouldn't decide that you'regoing to look at the renewal of

(41:47):
that six months before youshould be looking at it
depending upon the size of yourorganization, potentially two
years before, 18 months before,12 months before, it depends
upon the complexity of solution.
The last thing you want to do issix months prior, start looking
for a way that's faster, better,cheaper, stronger, and not have
the time to get it done whenthat contract renews. Sometimes

(42:09):
you can go month to month,sometimes you can't. So you can
have that conversation, butcertainly, you know our target
is by all means, and we trackmost of our customers contracts,
so we're reminding them, hey,this is coming up. But you know,
if this is something, wetypically know what they don't
want and what they do want. Andso you know, if it's a TMS

(42:32):
coming up, you have a year lefton the contract, we'll we'll
definitely bring it up to them,but you can do that on your own
quite easily. So that's that'simportant. Many of these
contracts just auto renew.
That's probably less than whatit used to be. It used to be
across the board, but many ofthem will auto renew it may. I
think you need to get a reminderthese days about that, but it's

(42:53):
a reminder. It's not a I mean,if you let it go, in many cases,
it's going to auto renew for,potentially for three to five
years, and then you're lockedin. So, you know, there's
nothing wrong with keeping theexisting vendor. But to your
point, not only do you have thathappening, you have acquisitions
happening with other areas andand then you have the TMS is

(43:14):
which, historically, with theTMS, when freight tech goes
wild, the TMS is going to startand there's a subject matter
that makes sense for them,they're going to start looking
to build that in their basesolution, or as an offering in
addition to their solution. Andthat's going to create pain for
those individual solutions thatwere out there that bolted on to

(43:35):
the TMS So, but that ishistorically. I mean, going back
my entire career, that'shistorically what we've seen
happen with TMS.

So, you know, with all of your
experience in this industry, I'mcurious as to you know, you
mentioned two years that youshould be looking out on some of
these contracts with the speedof how freight tech is evolving.
I'm curious as to what is thelongest as I guess, what type of
software takes the longest toimplement, and then what is

(44:06):
surprisingly like, easier toimplement and takes a shorter
amount of time? Sure?

Sure. Well, one thing to add on there, too is
the term future proof. There'sno, I don't believe in that term
at all. We have no idea what'sgoing to happen in 2345, years.
We can guess maybe two years. Weknow five years. We have no
idea. We have no clue this. Imean, who would have thought

(44:31):
that llms and AI would have hadthe impact that it did. I mean,
we all maybe kind of thoughtthat it would, but we're still
figuring out how to even deployit. And so what is this going to
look like in five years? No oneknows. What's your hardware
requirements. Who would havethought that RAM random access

(44:52):
memory on machines would havewent nuts and cost. So you can't
even get it anymore. It's almostchampioned the whole idea of
moving off premise, on any sortof hosted solution, into a
cloud, because it allows it tobe much more managed and a
cheaper cost. So we could nothave predicted that five years
ago. I anyone who did, I thinkyou can predict components of

(45:16):
it, but anyone that did iswrong, or is it wrong? But
anyone who did, I guess I don'tknow. I don't know them. No one
came up and said, hey, you knowwe're gonna they're retired on a
beach somewhere. Right, right,exactly. So, you know, the more
complex ones. I'm just going toput it simple as this, the more
expensive it is, the harder itis to implement. It's it's very

(45:38):
simple when it comes to thatyour your freight network
optimization tools, those arepretty heavy, or can be the
moment someone says, Hey, I havea product that should take six
months or 12 months to implementand says, hey, we'll do this in
two to four weeks. You should beasking a lot more questions than

(46:01):
just accepting that. So it ispossible that we've seen some
products start to implementextremely fast. A lot of that is
driven on the fact that you knowthey're they're pushing more on
to the customer than whatthey've ever pushed before.
They're not aware of it so, butyour TMS is, is one of the, the

(46:22):
heaviest. Obviously, you knowyou have some document workflow,
Edi or customer customervisibility. Is, well, sometimes
customer visibility is not, butto use the term EDI and
encompass all API and customerinteraction with it, I think
that that can be heavy becausethere's, you know, many people,
many mid sized customers, mayhave 100 trading partners, and

(46:47):
you have to work through all ofthat. So that can be a long pull
in an implementation that you'renot expecting. And you know,
those are the primary ones, easyones. You know, we've seen some
email automation, back office,billing automation, order or
freight out of pay. Thosethings, we see substantial

(47:09):
impact in an organization very,very quickly. In some cases,
you're up and running in 3060,90 days or less. If you have an
accounting department of 60people, there's 30 people. You
need to figure out what to dowith maybe 20 on the low end.
But it is that much of asubstantial deployment, and it's

(47:30):
not that hard to implement,assuming that the product is
already integrated, already hastheir requirements all figured
out, and they're a bolt on thattypically those have, you know,
one use case to them. So this isan example of you're going to
have one vendor, but the impactof this to your organization is
so big that it's okay to havethat one vendor right now,

(47:53):
somewhere down the road, theecosystem will probably look,
look a little different, but,you know it there's, there's a
few that are out there thatencompass freight out of pay and
many, many other solutions, butthere's a lot that are targeting
freight out of Pay, that haveone solution or three or less,
are

Is there still a big I would
imagine that this debate has, isstill existing, but the build
versus buy debate, how is thathappening internally and then
related, what does, I guess,sort of a modern freight IT
department look like

two different ways, either very robust or very
lean. You know, it's very rareyou see one kind of in the
middle. And if they are in themiddle, they're looking to go
one way or the other, andthey're, they're scoping that
out. That's very robust, veryrobust, meaning many people,
there's, there's no ratio thatnecessarily hits that. But we

(48:53):
have customers that have, youknow, 150 people in their IT
department, wow, or more in somecases. And then we and they're
not in the top 25 so they might,they might be in the top 100 and
then we have, we have 1000 truckfleets that have one or two
people in it. So, and, you know,they outsource a lot of things

(49:17):
so, so it, but in the middle,you typically will have, we're
going to handle all theprocesses that we need an FTE
for, and then we're going tooutsource everything that's
fractional. So for example, ifyou don't need a full time DBA,
hiring a full time DBA and thenasking that full time DBA to do

(49:40):
vendor management,

DBA, meaning

database administrator. Yeah, so asking
them to manage vendorrelationships or something else
is not an effective use of theirtime, typically, and they may
not be the best person at that.
So you want to make sure thatyou can do that. Or there's
fractional organizations outthere, you know, we do that
across all of the IT ecosystemfor a trucking company, a

(50:07):
brokerage, a shipper, we canhandle kind of any component of
that and there, but you canoutsource it to anyone else too.
There's plenty of managedservice providers out there that
have those type of roles. Sowe've seen that. So that's kind
of the middle ground on it, onwhat it looks like. And then the
builder, by discussion, I thinkwe see our build more often on

(50:29):
the non asset side, it's andthat's because it's easier to
build a non asset TMS than anasset TMS, and it's easier by a
long shot. Doesn't mean that thenon asset TMS is out there
aren't amazing, but it is.

(50:49):
Anyone that's done it beforeknows exactly what I'm talking
about. You have all thecontiguous problems with the
assets and the driver pay andwhere are the trailers? Where
are the trucks, the ELDintegrations, driver workflow,
all of these other things thatcome in. So it's fairly rare
that we have a discussion arounda complete new build for an

(51:14):
asset company, although it canhappen most of the time, it's us
pulling them off of some sort ofproprietary build that they had
1015, 2030, years ago and movingthem to a more modern solution.
And what you do end up having isthe augment or build to build to

(51:37):
you buy a solution, and then youcustomize it to meet the final
need.

Yeah, I think you hinted at it earlier
when, because it reminds me ofthis Reddit thread that I was
going through about, you know,buying or, you know, just
analyzing a TMS and which one toinvest in. And one of the Reddit
comments, it said something tothe effect of, you know, for a
lot of the legacy systems, youknow, that's been built through
the blood, sweat and tears ofdevelopers over the last 20

(52:07):
years, and there's a reason whythese legacy systems are still
around, versus some of the newerplayers that might disrupt, you
know, some different segmentsand some different market, but,
you know, players are there.

I just, I just spent the whole week at at at
McLeod, visiting with theirteam. And that's, that's an
exact one. I just, I justunboxed that on my show a minute
ago. So, you know, they're notbad solutions. There's optics,
and there's history, andtrucking companies don't forget,

(52:42):
and brokerages don't forget. Soit's the same thing with any
competing product to the truckthat I just picked up. You know,
they there's a lot that thoseproducts do, and to think that a
new product is going to come inthe market, there are very few
that are even in the realm ofhandling 70% of what one of the

(53:07):
legacy products does. And whenyou know that's our TMS
philosophy, just like with anyother other product, is the best
TMS that you have is the onethat you own. Prove us wrong,
and we'll help you prove itwrong. But many people are just
mad because something thathappened in the past, and we can

(53:29):
assist with that too. You know,fixing the relationships is is a
big deal. But many times it'sthis thing can't be done this
way. A lot of times it'sintegration oriented along a
legacy TMS and a modern a moremodern deployment. But even the
modern companies have problemswith integrations. They're not

(53:51):
really what you think they are.
In a lot of cases, they're notas advanced. They haven't hit
every use case yet. Whenenterprise level fleets start
going on a modern TMS and thatpushes all the way down to mid
and small market processes, Ithink we'll see things clean up.
But there's no doubt that themarket is different than what it
was 10 years ago. It isabsolutely different. There are

(54:14):
more players, and there's viableoptions if you're on a legacy
TMS today, but it is expensive,as you alluded to earlier on the
brokerage you're at where youswitch the TMS. It's not a fun
process switching your TMS oryour ERP, which really redefine
the TMS as an ERP for the mostpart, for your mid market

(54:36):
fleets, larger organizations mayhave an actual ERP. So, and
that's a whole nother discussionaround you know your finance and
accounting packages and whatnot,those are also very complicated
and difficult, and manycompanies are making switches
right now, on that side too

Well, speaking of sort of the, you
know, making switches andinvestments and all of that,
let's get into the AI portion ofthis discussion. What is hype
and what is actual utility thatbusinesses are being able to use
today?

So, you know any I think I walked down that road
a little bit before, and I'lltap on it again before I say the
next thing. So anything that,well, I'll state it this way. 15
years ago, there was a lot ofoptimization that was running
everything, everything was aboutthe best choice. And I kept

(55:32):
calling out that truckingcompanies and brokerages don't
need best choices. That's tribalknowledge that's up here before
we can get to talking about thebest choice. Why don't we reduce
workload through automations?
And that's most of the areasthat we see right now, and some
are far more complicated thanothers. Some are are automations
that are very simple. You know,this thing happens over here,

(55:59):
and 10 other things happen overhere, and it's pretty linear,
where others are extremelycomplicated, like going out to
websites or interacting withcustomer portals and scheduling
appointments or whatever thecase. Yeah, the agents or the
automations, I put that alltogether into one box so it's

(56:19):
not all AI to me. It could berpa, it could be anything, but
they all are in the same box.
Primarily, it's not because ofthe tech behind them. It's
because. The solution that theyprovide to the customer. We're
making things go faster withless work, with with less labor,
and so that that all falls kindof in one bucket, and we've

(56:42):
evolved to that thinking overthe last two years, you know.
And I can't wait until AI as abetter term to it, because right
now, it's all encompassing, andthat's not accurate either. So
the hype that we see isn'tnecessarily hype, it's Moreover,
vetting out use cases. And I saythe industry has to go two steps

(57:05):
forward and one step back onthis scenario, and we have to be
willing to take that step backas fast as possible. So if
something's not working, wedon't need to grind it in and
figure out a way to make itwork. We can just let it go and
move on to the next thing. Andthere's so many different
solutions that are popping out.
A great area that this is beingdiscussed and tried out and

(57:26):
deployed is your agents that areanswering phone calls, and
there's areas that or that aremanaging the phone calls. Many
cases, it works out. In othercases, it's questionable. You
know, companies have hadsignificant pushback on it. We

(57:47):
don't know where that's going.
We in some cases, people arefine with it. In other cases,
they are not. So I think it'llbe interesting to see how that
develops. And that's so from ahype standpoint. You know, when
that first came out, which wastwo plus years ago, that it

(58:07):
started hitting market, everyonewas jumping on that. And then
came the email automations,which I don't believe that is
hype, that's, that's, that's agreat way of managing your day.
I was just on a customer calltoday that they manage one 50
million emails a year. And yeah.
So how do you manage that. So,so the how do you manage that

(58:33):
without some form of automation?
They they're, for the most part,doing it today, and we're going
to help them try to solve it.
But that being said, you know, Iyou have to question everything
out there, and a lot of it is,how many customers do you have
in deployment? Can I talk to oneof them that's using it? Are

(58:55):
they of significant size? Arethey of similar size? Are they a
competitor of yours anddiscovering kind of where you're
at? But you know, there is a lotof hype that surrounds it, but
the question is, is it hypethat's going to work out and be
something applicable, or is itnot another one that's that's

(59:16):
out is, you know, from a driverstandpoint, is mirrorless
trucks, so they don't havemirrors on them, they have
cameras. So in there, there'spart of the industry says these
are bad idea. The other part ofthe industry is saying they're
good idea. Every driver I'veever talked to actually likes
them. But, you know, there'sthings about mirrorless trucks.

(59:39):
This is not AI, but the data youcan collect from it could be
processed by AI. You havecameras around a truck which
creates a environment thatidentifies safety issues, and
those cameras have night visionto them, so, so when you're
looking out on a camera, you cansee down the back of the truck
and way back at night time whereyou can't see that during the

(01:00:01):
day. So someone without withoutlights on, could come up beside
you and be behind you on thetrailer, and you would not see
them without a camera, or,unlikely, wouldn't see them
without a camera. So, butthat's, that's a great debate on
is that hyper? Is that not real?
I'm in the I'm in the it's areal application. It's part of

(01:00:22):
the part of the argument is, inan accident, you take the mirror
out, what are you going to do?
But that same, same that's thebiggest argument I've heard, and
my point to that is, if you takethe mirror out on a truck,
that's a physical mirror, not acamera, you're still in the same
spot. So so it's all aboutrepair and how that thing goes.

(01:00:43):
But so there's, there's lots ofareas where hype is
questionable. You know, in thecab, out of the cab, with the
brokers, with the carriers,maintenance wise, you know,
we've seen AI deployed there foryears, and that seems great. But
as it continues to go on, Ithink every new use case is

(01:01:07):
going to be, is this real, or isthis something that we have to
vet out.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan (01:01:12):
You mentioned some pushback earlier.
What kind of pushback Are youhearing or or seeing when it
comes to

Nathan Johnson (01:01:20):
it's lots of times driver oriented so, and
you have to ask yourself, do youwant your drivers talking to
agents? And if so, when? Um. Ifit's something that you know
they're calling in to schedule amaintenance event you possibly
could but every time you talk toa driver, is a chance to build a

(01:01:40):
relationship and build retentionso or find out something that
you didn't necessarily know. Sothe question is, is, do you want
to lose that or are you okaywith it? You know, that's,
that's the main question. And isthe driver even going to allow

(01:02:02):
that adoption? They alreadydidn't like track and trace
solutions that were that wereoffshore. You know, this is not
even a human and, you know,whatever the case might be,
there, there, there is somepushback there. Now, there's
also areas that it may work. Soit's, I think it's something
that has to be vetted out overtime. You'd think that we've put

(01:02:24):
enough time into this already,but I think we're actually just
now getting it deployed atenough fleets where we're going
to get that that feedback.
Additionally, do you want tonegotiate a load with an agent?
I don't. I know. I wouldn't, soI that's a, there's a, there's a
algorithmic rule set around whatI can do with that agent or not.

(01:02:47):
So give me the person who canactually make the point or make
the decision. What's interestingis, on the inverse of that, I
could digitally negotiate withthat agent. Have no idea. We
could fire emails back and forthand you'd have no idea, but it's
the same rule set, right? So youhave those sides appointment

(01:03:07):
scheduling, you know, let themmake the phone calls and sit on
hold with Publix for two hours.
So there's nothing wrong withthat. You know, when I first
started talking with happyrobot, right, when they were I
think they had just come on a YCombinator. They, they, the
first question I asked them is,what happens when you have an AI

(01:03:29):
solution, a bot talking withanother bot, and what do you
call that? And they said, we've,we've coined that as soft EDI
So, but now that's happening.
You know, you have AI solutionspotentially talking to AI
solutions. And, you know, I'veheard of a few of them getting
in loops, but I really haven'theard of it being an issue. So I

Blythe Brumleve Millig (01:03:51):
remember when I was listening to a
conversation about robotics in awarehouse, and how there has to
be a level of whenever awarehouse decides to add
robotics, at any point, theyhave to have sort of a
psychological, psychologicallevel of onboarding for the
humans that are going to beworking alongside the robot to

(01:04:13):
kind of reassure them that thisis this robot's not going to
take your job. It's here to helpyou. Do you find that some of
that same sort of psychologicaltraining is also being deployed
on the agent side of things?

I don't think that we're deploying it. I think
it's being talked about in someinstances. But truly, if you
have a front office organizationand you are reducing headcount
and replacing it by AI, youknow, AI does take jobs. Anyone

(01:04:49):
that you know, we came up withthis thing where AI is not
coming for your job, right? Ifyou're not going to learn how to
use the solutions and work withthe solutions and make yourself
valuable, you are probably goingto have a problem so, or you may
have a problem at the veryleast, so it can replace you in
a certain role, right? But itdoesn't have to. It most

(01:05:12):
certainly doesn't have to. Oryou suddenly, if you learn the
solution quite well now, nowthere's people that need to
manage those solutions, andthat's hard stuff, right? That
can be complicated, at least ininitial deployment. So from a
logistic service providerstandpoint, so trucking company,
brokerage, whatever. I don'tthink there's a maybe at the

(01:05:35):
enterprise level, you're seeingsome people come in and deal
with it from a psychologicalstandpoint. But at other points,
at other other markets, or downmarket, from the enterprise
side, mid, mid and small,they're just slapping these
things in. And either theyrecognize the return or they
reapply the user to somethingelse. So we challenge all of

(01:05:58):
that and say, you know, this isstill a relationship business.
It's not going to change. And ifyou have front office people
that no longer are required todo the job that you had, it
defined point them towardscustomer facing interactions
that that they do need to workwith and help grow the business.

(01:06:19):
Same thing with the back officefolks that that may find that
they're they're not neededanymore. Many of them have been
around a long time. Your backoffice turnover is usually much
lower than front office. Officeturnover at a asset based
carrier, for sure. So apply themtowards revenue generating
potential opportunities, youknow, have them check in with

(01:06:43):
with customers, have them dothings that you weren't doing
before. They're not in sales,right? But if they are, have the
aptitude deploy them to areaslike that, and pull back, if you
look back, when I 2003 2004 Ihad plenty of time working in

(01:07:04):
operations to be able to reachout to customers or verify
things or whatnot. Now you'remanaging all these data points,
and we've effectively made thebusiness much more complex. So
So I but I do know where you'recoming from on the warehouse
side, and that's beeninteresting. But on the same

(01:07:24):
hand, there's still headcountreduction at the warehouse too.
Once, once that's fullydeployed, they're not putting
them into place to let thewarehouse worker work less. So
you know, they are experiencingthe same thing.

So it's like a stop gap where they
have to they can't fully replacethe human yet, and so they still
need to force thatcollaboration. And maybe, you
know, the psychological aspectof it is part of that long term
plan for them on the, I guessmaybe, like a AI positive or

(01:08:01):
maybe like a tech positive note,if someone is working at, you
know, a logistics company andthey want to start using some of
these tools, are there? Arethere are there any ones that
you would kind of maybe pointthem to, maybe not, you know,
vendor specific, but maybe taskoriented or goal oriented, of
that they can startexperimenting with to because we
are still so very new to this.
And I think for folks outside oftechnology, it's, it's

(01:08:25):
intimidating for them to jumpinto these things. So what would
maybe be some advice to folksout there who who maybe want to
dabble a little bit, right?

So pick one or two use cases that are going to
have. And I, almost the lastcouple months, I've been signing
off on my podcast on with thiskind of statement, which is,
pick, pick something and fix it.
You know, it's much moredetailed than that, but
effectively, find the area ofyour business that you have a
significant pain point in, andfind the solution that you want
to deploy. And if you keep itsmall, then you're not looking

(01:08:59):
for a large, impactfuldeployment of it. You just are
looking at one thing. So youknow, if you want to automate
some of your email order entrythat's that's a relatively easy
one. So we've been at carriersthat that have 60, 70% of their
orders are coming in via email,and you know, they're manually

(01:09:21):
entering that today. And youknow, within 60 days, you could
probably have that completelyautomated, if not faster. So you
know, you really pick where yourlargest pain point is and what
the value add. It's not alwaysabout workload reduction.
Sometimes it could bevisibility. Sometimes it could
be customer interactions. Theease of use of a solution, I

(01:09:43):
think, is extremely important.
And I challenge everyone, if youhand a tablet to a three year
old, they're going to figure itout, whatever, whatever game or
whatever you give them, youknow, come back to them in an
hour, and they're going to haveit figured out. There's
absolutely no reason, as we goforward that we can't produce

(01:10:07):
products that are in a similarfashion. It's It's obviously the
setup and the configuration andthe brain power to produce that
solution requires very, very,very smart people. But being
able to sit down in front of asolution and say, This is how

(01:10:27):
I'm going to use it is, is goingto be the empowerment of the
future, right? I don't needtraining anymore. I don't need
processes anymore. This is theonly way I can use this product.
So from a carrier standpoint ora broker standpoint, that's
looking to dabble in or evenwarehousing, shipper or
whatever, find if I just find aneasy use case and and go hunting

(01:10:51):
for they all exist order tocash. You know, we went on a
mission probably four or fiveyears ago to automate a trucking
company from order to cash, 100%right? And that was not our
development of the solutions.
That was finding vendorpartners. And if you actually
scroll through GLCs, vendorpage, vendor partner page, or
partnership page. A lot of theif you start looking at how

(01:11:15):
those and we partner with many,many more companies than that,
but those are our closer ones.
If you look at those providersthat are in there, you can find
pretty much in order to cashautomation in some way, shape or
form, we have. Had to see acarrier completely automate or a
broker completely automatethemselves. In theory, it could

(01:11:37):
be done, but it all starts withfinding the first thing that you
need to do that you want totackle. Don't try to hit the
home run, just get out firstbase so, you know, and work it
that way. Yeah.

I used to tell people, just keep an
extra tab open on chat, GPT orGemini, and start going there
instead of Google and justseeing it, how it answers your
questions, how it would push Iuse it a lot of times for
interview prep, where I'll saythese are the questions I was
thinking of asking based oneverything you know, based on

(01:12:11):
their LinkedIn profile, what amI missing? Push back against
some of these questions. And Ithink it just helps to kind of,
you know, maybe have a secondbrain there that that's helping
you along that thought process,

what you end up with. And I use chat GBT all the
time and for similar processes,right? So every guest that's on
I'm loading up a profile that'saround them and I've built over
many years now. And not onlythat, but I also run a lot of
other things through it. Sochat, GPT is almost another

(01:12:43):
brain of my own. It's just a lotfaster at doing research, and I
don't ever just copy pasteanything out of there. I'm
reading to ensure that it's whatI want, but it's enhanced my
productivity, you know, by along shot, and my writing, when
I do that, is typically me, butit's it's certainly got a

(01:13:05):
component of verification andwhatnot, through some solution,
and I'll actually pick thesolution based upon the need. So
I pay for a premium on prettymuch every major platform. I do
default the general day to dayto chat GPT, and then when, if I
need a good graphic, I'm goingto Gemini or a video, I'll go to

(01:13:26):
Gemini. And you know, if it hasto have correct writing on it,
I'm going to take that Geminiimage and put it back to chat
GPT and tell it to put thewriting on, because chat GPT
will get that right. But Geminican't spell so on a video, on a
picture or video. So so it'sunderstanding the solutions that
you have available to you andhow to exploit them. But

(01:13:49):
certainly if you're not usingyou know, chat, GBT, or some LLM
solution to enhance your day today productivity, you're doing
something wrong. We actually payfor every employee at GLCs to
have access to to an LLM So, andthat can typically, we're going

(01:14:11):
to have copilot injected withwith chat, GPT, and then we've
connected that to suppliers, soother vendors and their
documentation, and so thatallows us to go much, much
faster when we're trying toresearch something. It may not
be right, we need to verify it,but I actually had a scenario

(01:14:32):
where I did that and I solvedthe problem for a customer that
I had no business solving. Iended up pushing it back to our
support team and had themverify. But, I mean, I was
sitting there talking to a CIO,and I said, Have you guys tried
this? And it ended up being aproblem that that they've been
fighting with for years. So soit was, but that's because we

(01:14:53):
have these huge libraries thatwe've built out and made
available to us, and haverefined and trained the products
since we've been able to

are you utilizing any agents, and
what kind of I guess I'm justnow starting to dabble in
agents. I've used Zapier forforever. And so I've struggled
with, you know, what's thedifference between a zap and
creating an agent? And I don'texactly know quite yet if there
is a difference there yet.

So we use a peer as well. We also have a large
integrations team that will sowe are using agents on the
development side, by all means,that's probably sped up
development quite a bit, but Idon't know of any one that has a
developer on staff that's notusing some form of clod or

(01:15:46):
whatever. So the outside ofthat. You know, from a customer
facing standpoint, we do not useagents. Everything is interacted
at a human level, and I don'tsee us changing that based on
our customer base. It doesn'twe're too complicated at this
moment that, once again, wecan't predict what's going to

(01:16:09):
happen in five years. We maynot, but we haven't that
extremely trained product thatwe've opened up to everybody
that that allows answers to befound, or at least directions to
be found, you know, so if theyhave a use case that they need
to figure out, they're going togo there first. And then they're

(01:16:31):
going to potentially expandwithin our organization to ask
questions to humans. But as faras you know, specific agents on
our end, outside of development,you know, not really, and
outside of some integrations,not really, not yet. So, so

no podcast agents, because we
haven't gotten to that, youknow, part of the conversation
yet. I know I want to berespectful of your time. Talk
about the Okay, okay, we gotsome time then. But on the
podcast side of things, how doyou what inspired you to get
started? Because I was listeningto you on another show earlier
today, and I think you said thatyou had had recorded over the

(01:17:09):
summer, like 90 pieces ofcontent or something that effect
it was like a year ago, so I

don't know, I went through and started trying
to put out. So what started medoing it was I introduced, I
introduced someone at theMinnesota Trucking Association
Annual Conference. Many years, Iused to do a lot of public
speaking, and then for five, sixyears, I didn't do, do any

(01:17:39):
public speaking. And so Ieventually ended up doing this
introduction, and I frankly,bombed it. And I said, after
that, I said, you know, lots ofpeople have been challenging me
to come forward and starttalking about the industry.
There's virtually no topic thatI can't sit down and talk about
in some way, shape or form. Andyou know, whether I'm not an

(01:18:00):
authority in it or whether I'mclose to an authority in it, you
know, order to cash at atrucking company or a brokerage,
I can usually talk aboutanything there and be fine. So
that being said, I decided tostart the podcast to clean up my
speech. That was it had nothingto do with anything else. I was

(01:18:20):
just, I want to actually, whenyou and I met that next day was
my first episode was because wemet at we met at f3 years ago,
and and then my first episodewas I actually did it in
Chattanooga at a podcast studio,and so so that was the driving
factor of of why I started thepodcast. I did not care about

(01:18:45):
viewers. I did not care iThey're either coming or they're
not. I just needed to clean upthe way I speak, and that's
worked out very well. And on topof that, I was, so then you go
to the moon. Shot of it, of youknow, what do I What would I
like to achieve? After a littlewhile, it was, I'd like to get
some speaking engagements. I'dlike to, you know, learn more.

(01:19:08):
I've met more people through thepodcast that I normally wouldn't
meet than any, any other medium,I'd say. And so it served this,
this tool going forward, thatthat I just, I continue to do it
two years. And, you know, Ithink there's several 100 pieces
of content not including that,that those videos I was talking

(01:19:32):
about where it was, I wentthrough our implementation
process, and I don't even thinkI finished it. I took it through
maybe halfway, and then Irealized this was a bad way of
doing it. I should have done ita different way. I'll get back
to it. I've never gotten back toit. So at some point we will get
back to sharing that out. But Iwas doing screen shares of
here's every point that we havethrough vendor selection all the

(01:19:55):
way through go live and thenactually support following go
live. So that's all on YouTubeand is available in some
fashion. I tried to do it liketwo to three minute clips, and
then, not knowing how to dothings back then, I actually
recorded them and edited them intwo to three minute clips,
instead of recording the wholeshebang and slicing it up. And

(01:20:17):
that was my error. That wasmassive amounts of work so but,
but that's really why I startedand where it's gone from there.
Since then, it's just been agreat tool. In general. We're
looking at launching a few otherpodcasts, potentially two more.
You know, we don't take sponsorson driving forward. It's meant

(01:20:40):
to do what I want to do with it,and I don't, if I don't want to
do it, then I don't have to doit. But I don't think I've ever
outside of vacation and aconference here and there. I
don't think we've ever missed aweek.

So wow, do you have a favorite
episode

I had? So there's two episodes that come
to mind, maybe three. My firstone that I ever had, which I
can't even watch anymore becauseI just, I'm horrible, was, was
Chris Thomas? And Chris Thomasis, you know, Chris? Okay, so
yeah, and and Chris and I havebecome friends, right? He's
going to be at manifesting. He'sbeen there the last three years,

(01:21:19):
including this year. So I got toknow Chris at the same place
that I met you. So but autumntransport, I know people that
work there, and I saw autumntransport coming to f3 so I
reached out. Them. I said, Who'sthis? It's an owner operator. So
I made it. Made it my point tofind Chris at f3 so he was
actually the first episode,technically the second episode,

(01:21:41):
because the first episode was metalking about who I am following
that I enjoyed. So I enjoy anyepisode that has a senior leader
and a trucking or brokerageoperation that we go into market
discussion, I always liketalking about that. While I'm a
tech guy, I ran truckingcompanies for years, and I love

(01:22:04):
the industry, and I love thethat type of business, so I
study it still today. I need tounderstand what our customers
are dealing with. So that that'sa good portion of my time is
staying on top of market,staying on top of, you know,
processes to run your company.
And I used to be well, GLCsstill has a small component of
management consulting. So thosegenerally are my favorite, but

(01:22:29):
the two most favorite. First oneis when I had Tom McLeod on.
He's, I think he's only done twopodcasts, and ours is the second
one. The other one was, was, waswith Cassandra. And then I had
Nick Darman on at manifest lastyear, and Nick just released.
Nick Darman is the CEO of Elvis,and Nick just really surprised

(01:22:50):
me, and I've got to spend sometime with him since then, a few
times at dinners and whatnot, heis a very energetic person and
fun to understand. And just Hesurprised me. It was not the
person I thought it was going tobe when I met him at manifest

(01:23:11):
last year. So year.

So, and I imagine that, if you're
you're like me, that you use thepodcast to learn from smart
people. I mean, this is just,you know, a recorded
conversation that's a little bitmore structured. Of me picking
your brain right logistics techimplementation goes wrong
because I'm just curious aboutthe topic, and so I would
imagine that the podcast servesas a similar function for you,

(01:23:35):
where you just get to learn frompeople you you like, or maybe
don't even know you like yet,right?

In many cases, you know, I'm talking with
people on a network, but in somecases, I know them really well.
In some cases, I don't, youknow, I would like to use it for
more of those on the same end,I'm running a GLCs has become
significantly larger and morecomplex. So it's, how do I fit
in the time for the podcastevery week? And so it's a

(01:24:01):
challenge to do that sometimes,but and doing that, you know,
like, I've learned that I likeworking with with groups of
people on it, and so we startedto change the format that way,
and that's one of the reasonswhy no sponsors know anything
like that. We're just doing whatwe want to do because we want to
do it. And viewership has goneup, gone down, gone up. You

(01:24:23):
know, it's all over the place.
It's certainly stronger in thewinter and summer, but we also
keep it a live show. So, youknow, that's one that's a love
hate thing too. So everyThursday, at one o'clock central
time, I have to be somewhere todo the podcast, whether that's
in, you know, whatever statethat whatever that means I

(01:24:44):
gotta, if I'm traveling, Itravel a lot. I gotta carry a
mic with me. I gotta carry acamera with me. You know, I like
doing in person podcast too, sowe do a lot of those. I know
you, you guys do that too. So,so it's, it's, it's, it's been a
good thing. It's certain Ilearned from everyone that I sit
down in front of so or with,whether I think I'm going

(01:25:08):
through or not. And sometimesyou are absolutely surprised by
what you find out.

So are there any topics that you
haven't covered yet that youwant to cover?

Typically, if I want to cover a topic, it's
going to going to get covered.
So you know, yeah, what Iactually try to stay away from
technology as episodes, and tryto talk more market and a few
other things, and we'll bringtech. So we found that that will
bring tech forward along withcustomers. So it's not just a

(01:25:49):
discussion about what yoursolution does, it's a discussion
about what your solution doesand your customer base with with
them, discussing how you've beenimpactful to their organization,
which then typically will getinto some sort of industry
discussion about the solve and Ienjoy that more. I talk

(01:26:12):
technology all day long, frommorning till night. And so doing
a podcast on technology is notsomething I really I mean, I
will include it, but I'm notsuper excited most of the time
to do it.

Yeah, and I. You have to be excited
about the topic, otherwise, theaudience feels it and they'll do

now, yeah, absolutely. Which is why, if I'm
talking to the providers, thelist of logistics service
providers, along with theirsolution provider, it's a
different conversation. It'smuch more engaging for me. And
it's not that I don't want totalk to the technology platform.

(01:26:57):
It's you can just tell thatthere's, you know, very few
times we have the technologyplatform be an energetic episode
on my side, which is notknocking any guys, because I
love you all, but

no, I see that on my own data, where
the the executives from the techsolution will come on the show,
and it does decent, but if theyhave their customer come on and
talk about everything that theywere going through, what did
they Google Search before theyeven knew that they had a
problem, or when they diddiscover a problem, who, what

(01:27:35):
were the vendors that they weresearching? You know, those kinds
of discussions just are resonatewith my audience so much more
than, you know, a vendor comingon, and I try to balance it,
especially with the vendorconversations where I want to
kind of dig a little bit deeperand understand their onboarding
and pricing and all of that, butthe audience just, I think,
resonates more with the customerstory, and then I've seen it

(01:28:00):
where it's almost like thereverse, where they listen to
the customer story and thenthey're like, Okay, I think I'll
give the executive interview ashot now,

yeah, unless that executive is a rock star,
you know, like the Tom McLeodthing that that's our most
watched episode by a long shot,and so that and we have an
extremely niche audience. So Iknow everybody says you see us
everywhere, but we have you aretypically involved in trucking

(01:28:29):
or brokerage, and you'retypically an executive or close
there to or you're interested inbecoming an influencer, or
you're just active on LinkedIn,and we do have a following on x
and on Facebook as well. But youknow, we've never optimized any
other other platform likeYouTube has all of our content

(01:28:51):
is great and organized there,but I have no views there, but,
but if you go, your targetaudience is executives and
transportation, logistics, youhave a pretty small audience. I
mean, your total addressablemarket there is not a lot.

So you have a couple 1000, couple

Well, couple 1000. Well, if I actually kind
of know the number, so there's20,000 customers in our market,
rough, roughly. So if youfigure, you know one to three
there, you're somewhere around30 to 35,000 potential, and
we'll get as many as 1000watching a week.

So Well, I mean, this was a really
insightful conversation to me,especially because I work more
on the website management, sothe front end marketing, you
know, what you know, customersand potential employees see
before they engage with alogistics company. But I've
always been fascinated by, youknow, the, I guess, sort of the

(01:29:53):
real it that goes on inlogistics. And that's, you know,
exactly what you're you and yourcompany are providing over at
GLCs. And I'm curious, you know,last couple questions here, is
there anything that you feel isimportant to mention that we
haven't already talked about?

You know, generally speaking, we didn't
really talk touch on cyber Yes.
So lots of lots of truckingcompanies, brokerages, whatnot,
they're very aware of freightfraud. We're very aware of
freight fraud. We're right inthe middle of that battle,
because a lot of the activitiesthat happen in freight fraud are

(01:30:30):
actually cyber crimes. CyberCrimes are a $12.4 trillion
issue globally. It is the thirdlargest GDP in theory, if you
put it up, it's the US, Chinaand and. Or is it China us now
or whatever, China and the USare the top two, and this

(01:30:53):
actually sits as the third. Sowhen we talk freight fraud,
that's a number that continuesto go up in dollar amount. And
yes, there are hijackings thathappen, and that's not that's
almost not preventable, unlessyou're going to change your your
operating policies. So, but alot of these, these scenarios in

(01:31:17):
cyber are people gaining accessto your information and
exploiting it in some way, shapeor form, and so if you don't as
an organization, havefundamentals in place. A partner
that is putting thosefundamentals in place, and that
partner actually knows whatthey're doing. There's a lot of
people who tout that they'recyber but they don't really

(01:31:40):
understand. So, you know, we'rein that unique spot of we
understand the freight fraud. Weactually do freight fraud
assessments and then, but thoseare becoming less because I
think everybody's kind of gottheir grasp on it themselves.
Insurance companies have takenit over on the cyber, cyber
security side, it's extremelyimportant. And we've seen some
wild and crazy things happenover the last, well, 10 years,

(01:32:03):
but really in the last three orfour years, we've seen them
exploited even further. So sodefinitely ensure you know we're
talking about all these ways tooptimize companies, but one
stolen load can crippling. Couldbe extremely crippling. Could be
the difference of your business,or you're not. You obviously

(01:32:23):
have insurance, but one stolenload, or typically, you know, if
you're a brokerage and you gethit once. You're probably being
attempted to get hit multiplemore times, all at the same
time. We've had scenarios wheresomeone's listening in on email,
and the moment that you transferyour payment information to
them, to to a new customer, theygrab it and they go clean out

(01:32:47):
your account or attempt to so doyou have the right processes
with your bank to ensure thatthat can't happen? You know,
those type of things. So thoseare all areas. So as as your IT,
as your managed IT provider,they need to be all
encompassing, not only lookingat your typical structure of
your your Microsoft products andyour users, and setting up new

(01:33:12):
users and and whatnot. But theyalso need to be very aware of
the software that matters toyou, your TMS, your accounting
package, how that all interacts,and be able to look for
anomalies within it. When you'rebeing attacked and you are being
attacked every day, I had 1.2million hits against our router
last week. So you know that ifyou're not measuring that, and

(01:33:36):
you can't go to it and ask thatquestion, you go something
wrong.

So when you're when you talk about,
I think it was an episode that Iwas listening to you or
listening to you on earlier,when it was, I think you said a
stat that was like 85% ofcybersecurity crime happens
because at the user level,

correct just miss training. You clicked on
the wrong thing. So we offer aservice that we do. So that's a
great spot. It's not AI, butit's an automation. We offer
training on a monthly basis. Wemeasure that training, and
we'll, we'll perform kind ofmock trials for users and hit

(01:34:17):
them with generated phishingattempts and see if we can get
them to click on things orprovide a stat or whatever the
case might be internally. Andthen we get that back to the
customer, and then they can,they can. We typically want them
to work with the employee aboutthings you know. So if they've

(01:34:37):
had a bad behavior that theyshouldn't do, then you know
they're going to have to handlethat. But ultimately, 85% of all
cyber events, that number floatsbetween 85 and 93 depending upon
what data set you're looking at,come from user user error.

(01:34:58):
Another user error is someonecalling you. You know, I'll call
you Blythe and say, hey, it'sNate, but it's not me. It's some
dude in Uzbekistan or whatever,and he just sounds like me,
because my voice is all over theinternet, and it wasn't hard to
replicate. So we have policies.
You know, we're a remotecompany. We have an office, but

(01:35:18):
it's small, considering oursize, and if I want something
cash moved, or whatever the casemight be, it's a it's a multiple
authentication on our side,we're not going to just move
cash to somebody spend,especially to something weird or
outside of the organization,without having a process
completed. We've had customers.

(01:35:41):
A good story. There we have, wehave customers that we're we're
going to wire information toareas and or to to vendors. I
think they were buying trucksand the organization had locked
that down. You could no longerwire cash. You had to actually

(01:36:04):
send the check. Well, when yougo through the process of that,
does that actually make sense?
Because someone can interceptthe check too. So why not pick
up the phone? Call the location?
There's processes that fix allof these things, and lots of
times, the human interaction iswhat's required to verify you
pick up the phone, you call thenumber of the person that you've

(01:36:25):
called for the last 10 yearsbecause you've had that
relationship with them, you giveit to them digital. Give it to
them verbally instead ofdigitally. When you're going to
wire somebody a half a milliondollars so,

or buy a bunch of ways, what's that
said? Or buy a bunch of giftcards I had fell for that one.

Well, I you know the reality of it is, is
everything can be exploited. Sotrust but verify is extremely
important. And, yeah, cyber ismassive, and it's not just
attacking, you know, formillions of dollars. Right now,
it could be five it could be youpersonally, and they want $500
and that's $1 figure you'reprobably going to pay, because

(01:37:06):
by the time you go to lawenforcement and figure out
they're not going to payattention to you anyway, for 500
bucks on the law enforcementside, if you want whatever data
back, you're going to take thatrisk for 500 bucks and they're
going to get it. Then what doyou do? You clean your stuff up,
or do you go, okay, I'm okay.
Now until the next time you gethit. So it is on a personal
level. It's on a business level.
The dollar figures can be, youknow, small to very large.

Are there any? Maybe a couple of the
most common ways that you seethat these attackers are kind of
getting in, or these scammers,yeah,

certainly phishing attempts. You know,
email is going to be the largestSo, and I imagine if you looked
at your email, you may befiltering it out. There are
solutions that well, there area, okay, so that's an agent we
are using. Is that email filteron on the cyber side. So we are
looking for phishing. You know,massive amounts of emails will

(01:38:01):
come in and and you'll scrape itout. Lots of people might have
an old product called abarracuda, or something like
that, that's doing that for you.
Those work fine, too. Butfishing is absolutely, you know,
one of the I think, is thelargest, because all you have to
do is click on the wrong thingand they get access that can
happen on your phone too. So beaware of that phones are not

(01:38:22):
safe.

So I had a another girlfriend that
was working at an office, andshe they were doing a test to
the phishing email test, andthey sent her a company wide
email, and it said, you know,oh, you've been rewarded, you
know, with the we're bringingcatering lunch into the office,
and here, click here to pick outwhat you want to eat. And she

(01:38:45):
fell for it. Instead of gettingthe lunch, she had to sit
through training basics.

Yeah. Well, you know, a great one is, how many
times do you see a post comeover on email that says it's
from LinkedIn?

Those, those are a couple little
letters off, or one letter off,or

you're it could look exactly the way you
expected, or from from whatever,from Delta, if you're a
traveler, or whatever the casemight be, if it's a if it's so I
generally do not click on on anylink, like a LinkedIn link or a
social media link, becausethat's a big target. I do not

(01:39:26):
click on my email. I'll go tothe app and go find what I'm
looking for. So it might be areminder, but, yeah, I certainly
don't click on those links on myemail. You never

know all of the marketers, you have
to be aware of this that youknow. I guess that the cyber
security training is tellingpeople not to click on any
social links or email links. Sowhat's the marketer to do?
Right?

So I as a general role. I hate email
marketing. I am sorry to saythat being a marketer, you know,
I also work with a lot ofmarketing companies, but I
generally don't if we aresending out a email that's going
to have a lot of people attachedto it. It's going to be a very

(01:40:12):
unique email, and it's going tomake a lot of sense so, but we
do not generally email marketmuch, so, which is a limiter.
But I'll also tell you this, Iwork with a lot of CEOs. They're
paying people to not read youremails, to move them out of
their inbox. I actually do thesame thing. You know, I have

(01:40:34):
someone that monitors my emailand moves everything out that
that I don't want to see, whichis any solicit. If you solicit
me in any way, shape or form,most especially on LinkedIn or
or email or whatever, I'mprobably not responding to you
unless you have somethingamazing to say, and that's

(01:40:55):
because it's nothing againstyou. I am a salesperson at
heart, but I get so many. I getso many. I probably get 100 plus
messages a day on LinkedIn, wow.
I can't even maintain them. It'soff the charts. It's off the
charts. So I look for people Iknow on the LinkedIn messenger.
And if you're not someone I'veever discussed with before, you

(01:41:16):
better have the first line besomething interesting, or I'm
not going to respond to it. Andotherwise, I just look for
people I know. So some peoplewill be like, hey, it's been
four days since you got back tome on this LinkedIn message. You
want to get a hold of me. Youneed to. Need to text me or or
email me and, and, you know,have it be a real, real thing.
So, so marketing, to me, youknow, on that side, if you're

(01:41:40):
wanting to hit a CEO, in myopinion, you need to put social
media messages out in themarket, in the tools that
they're using, cuz they willeventually come across them,

and then they'll reach out to you,
and then you don't have to worryabout your your emails and your
links getting ignored,

yeah, or the in person discussion. You know,
that's one of the reasons you goto conferences, but that's the C
level approach, right? I mean,not everybody's that way, but
the C levels that we work withare primarily trying not to
engage in any way, shape orform, and you know they're
they're looking to slim down allthose interactions. So, but if

(01:42:20):
you, if you're a known person,and they know who you are,
you're probably going to have adiscussion with them, so you can
engage them in any medium then.

So that makes sense. I'll take the
personal tips, and I'll try toadjust my messaging.

You know, what's tried and true is blasting out a
bazillion emails and hoping thatsomebody responds back to it.
And, you know, people do that,that every which way, and it
still functions. So it reallydepends upon who you're wanting
to respond to. But that's justmy two cents on it, I'm probably
wrong in some fashion, but Iknow what what I don't like, and

(01:43:00):
I'm not going to have thecompany do something I don't
like.

So yeah, that's very true, and I
would imagine that more and morecompanies are going to take on
that mindset where, if you wantto reach someone to try not to
try to be where they're at, butalso in a way that doesn't take
them off platform in asuspicious way, because their IT
team is going to yell at them.

It's pretty risky. So, and you never know
these days. So, so you just kindof, you know, the manifest app
is a great app because you havethat messaging thing, and then
you can take them off of thatmessaging piece, you know, but
you reach out far before you getthere, and you get all your
meetings started, started up.
And then, although the onlyproblem with manifest now is

(01:43:45):
it's gotten so huge that thatapp has like 7000 people on it,
or something. So it's like, howdo you, how do you navigate your
way through that? You can searchthings. You can do it outside,
you know, search trucking,search logistics, search CEO,
and see who I want to talk tothat way, and then. But it still

(01:44:05):
takes a bit.

So, yeah, I did on my side of
things, on the media side ofthings, it's so many PR emails,
it's a lot, and it's a I'mfinding it difficult to manage,
even before we were startedrecording for this conversation,
I'm looking up how to labelemails within my my workspace,
within Gmail, and trying tofigure out different labeling

(01:44:31):
mechanisms so I can just contactthe people I genuinely want to
contact with. And then, youknow, some of the pitches that
don't make a whole heck of a lotof sense that go into another
folder, it's a lot, but, yeah,all of this is a lot, and I
appreciate, deeply appreciate,because we're running up, I
think, oh, close to two hours.
This might be my longest podcasthere in a couple years. Now, you

(01:44:52):
can tell, because, you know,this has been such an
interesting topic, I think, toexplore in a variety of
different ways. And thank you somuch for bringing up the
cybersecurity angle. I you know,obviously I did not have that in
my notes, and I should have, sothat was a great, great
additional bonus there. So Nate,you're doing so many things
you're going to be at manifest,this episode is going to publish

(01:45:14):
before manifest. So if folks areinterested in you and GLCs
talking, you know, checking outyour podcast, even checking out,
you know, another line ofbusiness, which we haven't
gotten into, your freightmovement events, I'll put all of
those links in the show notes tomake it easy for folks, but
where can folks engage with youthe most that maybe not LinkedIn

(01:45:35):
and maybe don't include a linkif they're going to reach out?

Right? So don't, don't. If you're new to me,
don't, don't, hit me up onLinkedIn. You can. I mean, maybe
I'll, maybe I'll respond. But ifyou do, put in Blythe, if you're
on this and you want to hit meon LinkedIn, put, put Blythe at
the top, but, but that beingsaid, it's and johnson@glcs.net
if you send me a human email,I'm probably going to catch it.

(01:46:03):
And I am on LinkedIn. A commentwill typically catch me. In at
on LinkedIn will typically catchme. It doesn't necessarily mean
I'm going to respond, but socialmedia is pretty wild, but
absolutely, email everyThursday, driving forward at one
o'clock central time, and everyfreight movement of rent out
there. For the most part, I tryto make them all and then I'm at

(01:46:26):
every major industry event forthe most part, at least through
May. So.

All.
So get in contact. You better doit in person at one of these
events.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're a
customer, I'll work with anymedium.

So Nate, this was, this was
awesome. Thank you so much, andcan't wait to catch up with you
again here. And yeah,

we'll we'll see in a few weeks. If you get in
Sunday, we're throwing a SuperBowl thing up in our suite, so
let me know. But otherwise,looking forward to seeing you
there and safe travels.

Yes, likewise, you as well. Thanks
for tuning in to another episodeof everything is logistics,
where we talk all things supplychain. For the thinkers in
freight, if you like thisepisode, there's plenty more
where that came from. Be sure tofollow or subscribe on your
favorite podcast app so younever miss a conversation. The

(01:47:22):
show is also available in videoformat over on YouTube, just by
searching everything aslogistics. And if you're working
in freight logistics or supplychain marketing. Check out my
company, digital dispatch. Wehelp you build smarter websites
and marketing systems thatactually drive results, not just
vanity metrics. Additionally, ifyou're trying to find the right
freight tech tools or partnerswithout getting buried in

(01:47:45):
buzzwords, head on over tocargorex.io where we're building
the largest database oflogistics services and
solutions. All the links youneed are in the show notes. I'll
catch you in the Next episode,in go Jags, you you.

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Why Logistics Tech Rollouts Fail (and How to Fix Them) | Nate Johnson, GLCS

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Why Logistics Tech Rollouts Fail (and How to Fix Them) | Nate Johnson, GLCS