Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to This Week in Trucking, the podcast that tells you what you need to know about the trucking market for the week. if you’re looking for more ways to improve your business as a small carrier, go ahead and hit subscribe on our channel. We put out a new episode every week on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. My name is Caroline. Today we have Nick Klingensmith. Nick is a cancer survivor, obstacle course racer, logistics sale expert. So we’re excited to have him on to see what we can learn as small carriers from him.

Caroline: Thanks for being here today, Nick.

Nick: Caroline, thank you for having me.

Caroline: So tell me how you got into the trucking industry in the first place.

Nick: What a weird broken path here. And I think it’s probably going to start almost about the same as everybody else. I fell ass backwards into it. Now I was a salesperson. I started my career out of college door to door sales for a business telecommunications company up in Massachusetts. And when I came and I moved to Florida 19 years ago, this month, 19 years ago, today, I started my career in logistics.

Nick: [00:01:00] Come to think of it. And I ended up working for a small DHL reseller that. Was part of a franchise based system that also sold LTL. And of course old truckload services. And we didn’t really dabble in a lot of other things at the time. Now, for me, that company had no training at the time. There wasn’t really a lot of structure.

Nick: The CEO was somebody who. Really smart guy, really knowledgeable, really ambitious, really personable. And I just believed in his vision, but the process of how I learned sales, the solution sales process was easy for me to transfer. And so I started my career in logistics as a salesperson. And honestly, the way that I sell is agnostic to the product.

Nick: So what you’re going to find when I say it’s a very broken way out of the 19 years I’ve been in logistics, I’ve been more involved in trucking in the last three years. Then I have any of this first 16 combined, including the several years where I ran the truckload department at what’s now one of the larger three PLs.

Caroline: Wow, interesting. So tell me more about that. What got you more into trucking in the last three [00:02:00] years?

Nick: Let me, I guess I’ll go back in the archives a little bit here. So just to give some background on my career, I sold for that company for several years, ultimately becoming the sales recruiter, sales trainer, sales manager, et cetera, as that company began to grow. It got bigger and expanded. I was your utility player.

Nick: My career was about building and leading teams. So solving business problems, learning the things that went into it. So why was I the recruiter? Because I had a conversation with my boss about how we needed to not just randomly recruit. We needed a process for recruiting. And so he’s okay, do it. So then I’m like, Hey, we actually need more formalized and straight, like structured training for our people.

Nick: He’s okay, do it. And then this is around 2009 when it was like, and I was an outside salesperson door to door the whole time. But I realized we’re missing too much of the market. We need to have an inside sales team. And he’s okay, do it. So much of my career was like that, where it was like, Hey, let’s examine this business problem.

Nick: And around 2015, the our company was selling truckload services as a [00:03:00] broker. And it was really like a four letter word, even to our executives. And. My guys would complain and complain about our operations team. And it became a critical mass to the point where now I never went to my boss with a complaint without a solution.

Nick: That was part of the reason I kept when he said, do it, that usually came with a promotion to go do it. So when they were telling us, just my team had enough, I finally took it to them and I was like, listen, we have an issue here, we do not have a product that’s viable. And so he’s like, all right, I want you to spend three weeks with your truckload department and find out what’s wrong and fix it.

Nick: And I said, all right, now I went into that three weeks thinking I was going to come back and tell everything those guys were doing wrong. Instead, I came back out of those three weeks with 52 pages of notes of everything that the salespeople were doing wrong. Not because they told me, it’s because I didn’t understand.

Nick: I did not understand that truckload carriers were different than LTL carriers. I didn’t understand the true independent nature of all of this was learned. And we’re talking about a company that’s now pushing a [00:04:00] billion dollars, but at that time, we were trying to build something running lean.

Nick: So a lot, and I’ve always been a very process orientated person, especially because I’ve always had to do a lot with a little from a business standpoint, which means you should only do the things that you’re best at. You should only target the things that you’re going to be the most efficient with, right?

Nick: The best route to anything you only have so much time. I can’t do it. And so when I finally came back to him with all these proposals of that, things that, and there were adjustments that needed to be made on the other side, of course, about the way that we procured cares, the way that we worked as a team, but that was all going, that was all gonna, every problem we ever had started with something that the salesperson didn’t get

Nick: Single problem always came down to that.

Nick: And this is fundamental misunderstanding. So when I say that, I then. Ran that department for several years, but again, I ran it from a high level from an executive standpoint. So when I say I still hadn’t really learned about trucking. I still wasn’t the ground level. I had guy below guy behind guy who worked for me.

Nick: I didn’t have every once in a while, I covered loads for [00:05:00] fun. And other than that, though, it was like, how do I get the most with the people that I have and the most for the people that I have? So what ended up happening though, is after I left that company in 2019, I started consulting for about a year and a half and just a lot of my network continued to expand and when I was working for this one company in 2020.

Nick: We only had about nine people or no, I’m sorry. We had 15 people, six of them were on our carrier side. Nine of them were on our salespeople and I didn’t have enough work for the six people. But I, yeah, I needed them for when we still had the work. But what we realized was this sort of pray and spray model.

Nick: This just put it up on that model. Wasn’t going to work for us. For a company like us, we couldn’t compete in this, in the uneducated customer economy of 2020 with the same way as everybody else. So here’s what we started to do to adapt differently, which is we treated every lane that was a repeat lane, whether it was awarded to us on a contractual basis or not.

Nick: And we shopped it and built carrier relationships based on that. So we’re not talking about RFP level service or something like this. We’re talking about somebody who ships three, something three [00:06:00] times a week. So we’d go find out when people who did that, but rather than just do chase the freight, as I say, where we would find out where the lanes were, then go find the carriers.

Nick: We found carriers in two different areas and we saturated our prospecting based on that. We found the thing that was going to make it so that we could provide the service better than anybody else so that we could fill those carriers trucks for them. Okay. Keep them consistent, right? As much as you could in what had to be the most volatile market economy, at least in the recent history.

Nick: And then at the same time, we had something that we could offer our customers, you didn’t need a contract when it was good for everybody. And that was only the first part of really, and I know I’m just giving you the whole life story here, but so when I’ll just segue to this. The last year after having left the logistics business where I am now a motivational speaker, mental endurance and a sales performance coach.

Nick: And yet I spend most of my time talking to people in logistics. A lot of the people that introduced us, everyone else within this community. And I’ve just exposed to a completely different conversation than I had ever been [00:07:00] exposed to before. I understood a lot of things in the last couple of years where I was working with smaller teams, where I was more directly responsible for what was happening on our operations side.

Nick: So I learned a lot those last two years, a lot more than I did the previous years, because then it was about building a team, building something and, having the smart people work for me. But when I had to be the smart person, I had to learn more and I had to actually like, and that’s exactly what we did.

Nick: Anytime we needed to find, if I wanted to penetrate an area, I found the carrier base first. built that relationship.

Caroline: Do you think that’s pretty unique? Do you think most freight brokers are going and trying to find the customers first, and then just trying to find trucks that will fulfill that need?

Nick: I can’t say that in the word most, because honestly, there’s so many different models out there. And here’s something that’s different than even just a couple of years ago, the amount of brokerages with four or less employees,

Caroline: Yeah.

Nick: just going to make up a number here and say, it’s like up 6, 000 percent than it was

Caroline: Oh, yeah. And you can look that up. That’s all public data, public [00:08:00] information.

Nick: not bad, it’s just, it changes that landscape to say what most are doing, and because I do talk to a lot of people. A lot of people who talk to me about like potential coaching, a lot of it’s just, Hey, what should I do? Which you can’t answer for somebody, but what they don’t know, the things about the business that they don’t know, and so basically it’s like, all right you think you have customers, cool, but.

Nick: You don’t have, do you have credit lined up with those carriers? Because just cause they like you by name doesn’t mean anything. You’re an email address to them.

Nick: How are you going to actually service that? And so sometimes they don’t think about that. Sometimes they’re going off the carrier side and they’re like, Hey, I have all these relationships with guys who would like to do business with me.

Nick: I would just need to go find some customers. There’s how does a broker do it? And how does a brokerage do it?

Nick: Cause a broker can only scale so much. That’s why for me, like I said, how do you, the way that you scale as an individual is by being more and more efficient with your time, or more and more effective and impactful with your time,

Caroline: Yeah. But there’s a limit to that.

Nick: Exactly. You can’t be at peak all the time.

Caroline: right. So what do you think? I’m just [00:09:00] imagining you getting these customers for this freight brokerage. And I imagine that a lot of carriers would like to know how you sourced those customers and what you think they could do to position themselves to get freight directly with shippers or with brokerages like the one that you worked for.

Caroline: How can I get better loads, higher rates? Things like that. You understand the underbelly of the beast here. So tell us what you think that particularly small carriers could do to set themselves up to get better loads and better rates.

Nick: so I’m a nerd on this topic. So I’m like, was wicked excited. And because exactly what I did is exactly what they can do. Because, So in 2018, I was running a sales team and it was a brand new team. I took 10, I was given 10 new hires straight out of college who had never seen a landline before, let alone understood the freight industry.

Nick: Okay. They were given the highest [00:10:00] sales goals, any group of new hires had ever been given. And so I was like, how in the, and not for nothing, even though at this point, the company I work for, I was working for Bluegrass logistics at the time. And Mark Ford from Coyote had been there about a year or so.

Nick: Our operations department was doing like, it was a different company than it was the two years before, like making a lot of headway at the same time, a very immature company. We couldn’t just. We didn’t have, you couldn’t just throw up any load and expect it to be done, especially because they were building it.

Nick: So in order for us to succeed, I had to look and say, what is the most impactful way these guys can spend their time? And so what I actually did is I researched everything about our top customers, about find out where our top carrier bases is on the map. The lanes that we’ve most commonly been running.

Nick: I found out what the then I actually looked up the I looked up the GDP in the various areas. The actual see what they’re producing. I’m trying to think of other demographics, but then I actually looked up the the price, the profitability of a product. And for example lumber producers enjoy [00:11:00] 0.

Nick: 017 cents, like per 100. I’m making these numbers up a little bit cause I don’t remember, but basically that’s why when people. Lumber sucks unless you, that’s what you do. There’s no profit in it. They don’t give a shit if you’re, if you drop it on the side of the road, it’s not worth them picking it up. So there’s no money in it, which means there’s no value for me to create.

Nick: There’s nothing that I can provide to the customer extra that’s going to make them want to use me other than just being the cheapest rate. So instead I yielding products, leather products, computer electronics, like in those particular areas, things that people cared about. And we’re therefore willing to spend a little bit more on it or better yet, what’s it worth on the end?

Nick: Cause it might be only worth to them a hundred dollars here, but they know that, it’s worth a hundred thousand dollars on the other end. They’re not going to care about negotiating for 50 or 75 extra on a load. They want to make sure it gets done right. So finding out what those unique things were.

Nick: And the reason I want to tell you how micro I got on this is because again, most inexperienced group of [00:12:00] kids. Least amount of resources as a company at that point, even though it was just because we were doing things differently, but it’s like still like they didn’t have any additional resources.

Nick: And the highest ramp up that we had to make sure that we were only hitting the highest things. And then what we did is we set the threshold of what I wanted from a customer. So volume. The mode, the what type of facility they were shipping in and out of all those things like that.

Nick: Because if we weren’t really good at it, I wasn’t going to sell it. My team hated me because they would get yeses from people who don’t fit in that profile and I wouldn’t let them do it. What happened? Four of them didn’t make it. And the six that did outpaced the goal of the entire 10.

Caroline: Wow.

Nick: of them beat somebody who’d been there for two and a half years. So what does the carrier need to do? They need to define in a smallest, you want to get really granular. You don’t want a hundred companies on your list. You want five, find the ones that are going to keep you most efficient and bang for your buck. And only you can decide that. But once you [00:13:00] decide.

Nick: By the way, there’s one other factor here. Sorry, I should have mentioned this when I was talking about value and things that you can provide, you have to know that you can do something for them that others can’t or others won’t just because you want it doesn’t make it so think about what is the customer base that you will be able to impact the most, get as specific about that as possible.

Nick: Find the characteristics that you want. And then be extraordinarily disciplined about finding that thing, because here’s the thing. It is hard. Number one, you narrow your prospecting base down from a billion to five number two you make it extremely harder to have that conversation because if they just want to, yep, here, we’ll email you like everybody else.

Nick: That’s not the conversation you want. If you want to establish a relationship. So you have to Hold strong to your own process. But once you get it, the value is exponential because otherwise the thing about the transportation and the truckload industry in particular, we could talk about relationships all we want.

Nick: But everything is a transaction. Every single thing is a decision that gets made. So on a [00:14:00] smaller, medium sized customer, which is perfect for a smaller, medium sized carrier, you can have a conversation. You can ask for a commitment. Hey, if I do this and I can give you this rate, I can get these three loads every week, right?

Nick: And you’re just going, and that’s your route, and that’s got to be valuable to that particular driver if that helps them do what they got to do, then everybody wins. I’m not saying it always works out that way, right? But that’s the idea, that handshake relationship, the value works for everybody else.

Nick: And the benefit of that too is when a screw up happens and it doesn’t, it will, something stupid, buy a shipper, buy a carrier, whatever, it’s no big deal because it’s just a little speed bump.

Caroline: Yeah, if you can show up in the first 50 interactions and establish your reputation with that one person that you’re working with. And they start to know you and trust you. A mistake is just that it’s just a mistake. It’s not a reflection on who you are.

Nick: And let’s not even call it a mistake. It’s just life. These things it’s transportation, right?

Caroline: There’s a reason that, that that people make, there are so many people in this industry, but only a [00:15:00] certain amount of people are really successful in this industry, if it were easy, everybody would do it and it would all be done and all the problems would be solved. It’s not easy.

Caroline: This is one of the most challenging industries to work in and to have a business.

Nick: One of the hardest things about sales is recognizing it’s that it’s just a conversation. And I think from the experience I’ve had really this year in particular, now I’m going to say in the last 10 years. I think two of the smaller carriers misconceptions are number one, that they do not have to be salespeople and number two, that their value is that they have a CDL and a truck because that’s not what separates anybody like these days in particular, that really isn’t that big a deal.

Nick: Not when capacity is where it’s at. So what is the value that you create? And you have to be able to understand that because if you think you do something better than somebody else, good, you just need to be able to articulate that’s also how you get past that imposter syndrome that a lot of people don’t want to feel about being a salesperson.

Nick: And I get it. Look at me. I’m a coach and a speaker. It’s different than when I used to work in logistics and I was working [00:16:00] for somebody,

Caroline: Yeah,

Nick: right? I’m promoting that company. But now it’s gotta be about me and that’s extremely uncomfortable.

Caroline: Totally.

Nick: but if I recognize that I’ve been able to create value for somebody and I focus on that value and communicate that value, I sleep fine.

Caroline: Tell me about a time when you’ve worked with a small carrier and you’ve helped them to identify that, or they’ve identified it. Give me an example of how specific we’re talking.

Nick: I actually have one from About 15 months ago or so this, I was working for a 3PL and I was running an office down here in Florida. And we we got in with a large appliance manufacturer and distributor and they needed a drop trailer solution. And this was one of those things that, You had to come with the solution. So that’s tough. Of course, when you’re the broker, right? Like you can of course do what a lot of people do is just make up names, put them on a spreadsheet and then try to fulfill the order later, but at the same time, I figured, you know what? This is a committed enough thing that I can actually try to [00:17:00] find a carrier to sell this to.

Nick: Now, when I say I. I made exactly zero of those phone calls. My, my ops guys did, but there was only five of us in that office. So it was a team effort, but the relationship with them was actually, they found the guy who wanted it. They found a couple who wanted it, but there were a couple of people that were willing to bid on it wasn’t the same as wanting it.

Nick: The person who wants it was like, Hey, he was looking for an excuse to go get more trailers. And we just gave it to him, like that’s, there’s a business, there’s a business need that was had. And I think that’s, again, one of the things that might be sometimes missing from a transactional level that you’ll see from an independent broker or an independent carrier is that you got to think beyond the transaction.

Nick: There’s a purpose to doing something. Sometimes you do business with people for money. Sometimes you do it for building something else. One other, who was it? Another example of somebody is where we got really specific. This was a water distributor and they had this really obnoxious Vegas to Vegas load.

Nick: This was an interesting solution. Actually. My, one of the guys who worked for me was able to discover this, but no [00:18:00] carrier wanted to do this because they were getting held up in detention for so long. And most people wasn’t, and that makes sense, right? 50 bucks an hour to 50 what is that?

Nick: That’s crazy. That doesn’t get me driving. That doesn’t get me whole and eats up my hours. Okay. I get it. That’s something I wouldn’t have understood five years ago, by the way. Like I said, you understand the impact. It’s not just, it’s, it costs me five hours of driving. That could be a day.

Nick: So we finally had to realize what, I don’t understand. This is like a large, like facility. Like why are our guys getting held up so many hours, for a down the street load. It turns out that because they The way their lumpers are being paid, they were basically waiting for paperwork and that if you actually prepaid your lumpers, you wouldn’t have to and they’d get right out, which is fine.

Nick: If you’re like one of their regular people or something, but for a broker, our truck driver wasn’t going to. So what we did is we opened an account with them directly. And prepaid the lumpers and build the customers. And then all of a sudden this load that nobody wanted, we had guys lined up who were going to do it because, and we talked to him all the time and he was like, he was [00:19:00] the guy who told us why cause he investigated why it was such a, why it was such a thing.

Nick: What was it Umberto? His name was Umberto. I remember this because we went to the raise game that night and the rep that I’m talking about actually got up on the big screen. Thank you Umberto. We love you.

Caroline: Nice.

Nick: I know those are just simple things, but those working together to solve problems, we’re going to get on this adversarial aspect or think that just because I have a telephone or just because you got a truck that we hold the power to everything like customers have complex problems and they’re not good at giving us information to solve them.

Caroline: Yeah. So I want to touch on that, the adversarial relationship between brokers and carriers, because this is something I noticed really early on. It was one of the first things that I noticed and I feel like it’s the only industry that I’ve ever worked in and I’ve worked in a couple of different ones where the customers The business and then their customers, the businesses have a lot of animosity toward their customers.

Caroline: So I’m talking about carriers toward brokers, right? There’s this feeling that brokers are [00:20:00] just middlemen, that they just extract value. They’re not adding any value to the chain. And they’re just taking a percentage off of what I could be making on this load. When you hear that, or when you see that, what is your reaction to that?

Caroline: Okay.

Nick: I want to talk about two parts of it. Let’s take the, they’re taking my percentage out of it. Put that over there for just a second. They are as right as they are wrong about the first part. There’s bad brokers. There’s, and when I say bad, there are inexperienced brokers who are trained to do things incorrectly.

Nick: And part of that is a. Hey, fuck you. I need this fucking low you mother for just that, that’s how they, that’s how they do business

Nick: That’s, there are people out there who will absolutely try to extract every nickel that there are, and you know what, out of the probably, I don’t know, 500, 000 MCs, like at least 50, 000 people making these phone calls, how many of them are we really talking about here though, I’m going to say an overwhelming few now on the, they’re taking my percentage part. It’s not your money. The shippers money. You [00:21:00] want to go get it. Like seriously, let’s talk. You want to be a business owner, be a business owner, pick up the damn phone and ask the shipper for the cut for the load. Oh, you don’t want to do sales. Okay. Hire a salesperson. Oh, you don’t want to hire a salesperson.

Nick: Then shut up. You don’t mind paying 15 percent to your dispatcher. You don’t mind paying 15 percent to your factoring company, but all of a sudden somebody who’s Like the guy who got you the business, by the way, if you ask anybody in logistics, what a 3PL, what their most expensive thing is, they are going to say their sales department.

Nick: They have a weekly meeting. Every one of these big box 3PLs have a weekly meeting where they complain that they are paying too much in commissions, but you know why they do it? Cause if they don’t, they won’t be in business. So you’ve got to get over that fact. They’re not taking any damn money out of your pocket at all.

Nick: You are outsourcing it. And if you don’t want to use them, don’t pick up the phone. It’s free. And I’ll tell you what, if you talk to any customer out there at all, they would rather do business with you directly.

Nick: You have no sales pitch to make

Caroline: That’s actually, I [00:22:00] talked to someone, I can’t remember who I was talking to about this. But they said that, yeah, one of the biggest obstacles that brokers have to overcome when they’re trying to sell their services to a shipper is that they don’t have trucks. So

Nick: side of it.

Caroline: There’s a huge opportunity then for carriers, because if you have the trucks, they would rather work nine times out of ten, let’s say, they’d rather work with someone who has trucks directly.

Caroline: Now, I think one of the reasons that they don’t is because trucking is so decentralized.

Nick: There

Caroline: maybe you don’t want to have to, maybe you don’t want to have to deal with, the 10 different carriers that you have to deal with, because they all have a really small number of trucks. And so then if you can only use one, one person to deal with that, then that there is an advantage there.

Caroline: I’m with you to a certain extent that brokerages and freight brokerages, they wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a market for them. The fact that there’s a market for them tells you that there’s some level of need in the [00:23:00] industry for what they serve. Now, are there alternatives to it? Yeah. And that’s what we’re talking about, which is pick up the phone.

Caroline: But it exists for a

Nick: Just identify what you’re looking for, right? And then you’re in that, you’re in that thing right there. Now there is one other side of that too, for the brokers who, because here’s the thing, most of them are simply selling on price and their ability to get a truck, which means The carrier’s right saying they’re just a middleman. However, so how much is the middleman worth? However, there’s also a lot of carriers out there, not carriers. I’m sorry. Three PLS brokers that are providing business intelligence, data intelligence, real time tracking. They’re doing the invoicing. They will actually answer the phone and not get lied to by a dispatcher.

Nick: They like that. They are providing additional services and guess what? You can only handle one load at a time. They’re providing all the additional ones. They’re doing the rescues. You don’t have an LTL service. There’s a reason that these guys exist. And when those, when the sales rep, when the broker is providing these value added services, [00:24:00] they’re actually creating a service in the market, which by the way, actually helps the driver too, because these are the things they don’t want to do in the first place now.

Nick: But for all the ones out there that are simply. Part of that adversarial relationship comes from brokers who are only selling on price and they’re, they don’t know how to sell. So instead they push down or push back on the carriers

Caroline: right, and I think it’s one person removed from just how costly it’s become to run a trucking business. And so you don’t, have to If you don’t know a lot about the trucking industry in the first place, and you’ve become, you’ve started to do sales for a brokerage without knowing a lot about trucking, then you don’t have an understanding of what that carrier is going through.

Caroline: There’s not a lot of empathy built there. And so it’s actually more of an emotional intelligence problem than it is a market problem. It’s not understanding where the other person is coming from. And so if you just drive down the price what is the impact of that on the profitability of the people that you’re doing business with?

Caroline: And that’s not a sustainable approach [00:25:00] to solving any business problem.

Nick: no. And it’s and this is why in 21, 22, spring 22, when rates were still really high. I think I’ve got my timeframe there. At the same time, you’ve also got TQL with 8, 000 new reps telling everybody that they can get them 40 cents a mile. So I would be calling customers though, who are not willing to hear it when I’m like, no, it’s 8 a mile for this late, like I’m giving an exaggeration, right?

Nick: But. When you challenge someone, when you get the conversation, even as a broker or as a carrier, this is a perfect example. Let me ask you something. How, what’s your chief complaint, right? And their chief complaint back then was trucks not showing up, right? whose fault was it? It was the customer’s fault.

Nick: Somebody had to show them. This is what the market says. This is the last three months that you’ve been doing this. This is how many trucks you fall off. Your broker is telling you it’s because of the drivers. It’s not, it’s because of you. You’re paying below market. Like the, of course, they’re going to drop off as soon as the, your neighbor has a load, they’re getting it.

Nick: What they don’t realize is this. What [00:26:00] is the value? Or the cost to you though, as a customer for all those misloads, because they think that it’s worth it for them to beat you down to the pennies. But at the same time if I can get these 25 percent drop offs to not happen anymore, where you don’t have to rebook your loads, where you don’t have to have late deliveries, you’re not really telling me it’s worth like an extra dollar a mile, an extra or whatever, help me out on the math, but you get it.

Caroline: Yeah.

Nick: It’s when you’re able to have, when you’re able to have those conversations and it’s tough on, when you’re talking to somebody who ships once and never, it’s not worth it. If those are just, that’s what that’s for. That’s what the load boards are for. When it’s somebody who’s shipping more than you can handle the capacity, that’s not your fit, whether you’re a broker carrier or whatever.

Nick: But when you find that right one, you can have those intelligent conversations. It doesn’t always land the way that you want it to, but I think that’s how you cut out a lot of that on. If you want to, if you want to procure your own stuff, find the right fit

Caroline: Yeah. Yeah. A trucking company that’s for everyone is a trucking company

Nick: is for no one, exactly.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think the sort of conclusion that I’ve drawn around this is this. Seemingly adversarial relationship between [00:27:00] carriers and brokers is something that you will find in comments on the Internet by people who are probably not running the most successful trucking operation in the world.

Caroline: And that the really successful people are the people who have figured out what their, what value they bring to the industry have built relationships over time, whether that be with brokers or direct shippers. And who. Who really, they, they don’t hate brokers because they have figured out how to find some really good ones that give them mutually beneficial relationships and business.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely.

Caroline: So what is your read of the freight market today and are you still in the freight sales game? And if so, in what capacity?

Nick: So perfect segue for those two questions next to each other, because, we talk about brokers wouldn’t exist for a reason, right? Look at the whole landscape now. 15, 20 years ago, freight tech was a calculator. It’s its own industry now. Maybe there was like three PL topics magazine or something a [00:28:00] decade ago.

Nick: Now there’s streaming media like all the time for insight and information again, where I’m learning so much of the market itself. Recruiting used to go to the Robert crafts of the world for some of your internal people. Now there’s very specific within, there’s a whole outsourcing division.

Nick: So what I’ve been doing and what I’m working with now is specifically logistic sales professionals who might be a little lost, stuck, or unmotivated.

Nick: And I help them to get clarity behind their goals, to align their priorities, and then to take wildly specific and stupidly simple action steps towards them, because what I find, especially with the industry right now. Now I spent 14 years in one company. That’s unheard of these days. And so I even counseled somebody yesterday and something where I told them a decade ago, I would have told you to put all your eggs in this one basket, build your brand within the company right now, I’m telling you, you have 18 months to make an impact, learn as much as you can build relationships, and then you’re going to need to go somewhere else to get promoted.

Nick: That’s also something that’s evolved in the industry again, because of also so many of these startups, [00:29:00] right? Some of them want to stay that way forever. They just want to make their money. Some of them want to expand. Some will flip flop, et cetera. The career instability that’s going to be in the industry for the foreseeable future, there’s, I see a need, maybe I’m the guy to fill it.

Nick: Or at least help someone fill it because I have been through a lot in my life. I have been through a lot in my career and by building and leading teams through all that adversity, through two different recessions, through how many different acquisitions, a story for another day, my office was once raided by the FBI that wasn’t blue grace.

Nick: We’ll talk about it. The CEO is still in prison. There’s and I’ve also now had the time to just work with the individuals outside of the day to day, and I think that’s where so many of us, depending on what echo chamber you’re part of, this could be the darkest time of any business ever, but it’s not, I think it’s also just riddled with opportunity.

Nick: And that’s at all levels. And I think that maybe because of it’s rapidly changing the way that we engage with salespeople or the prospects, the amount of actual automation, and I’m not going to use the word [00:30:00] AI, just even just the automation, the way that we can simplify some processes. Now there’s so much more opportunity where we can actually start, I don’t know, talking, using our brains, just finding ways to do things and be human beings again.

Caroline: Yeah,

Nick: on that topic all day, but I’ll, you

Caroline: couldn’t agree more. I wonder, have you worked with groups of owner operators or individual owner operators, people who are running, Really by how do I say this comparatively very small trucking operations. And what have you learned specifically about those people and what the opportunities are for them?

Nick: know, I like to call this guy out right now. He’s subsequently had dissolved the trucking company, but his name’s Troy Braven Bowery actually owns a company called Don TMS. He does a lot of other things and he’s probably one of the best human beings I’ve ever met. We met back in 2020 through a referral when I was consulting and he also owned two companies at the time.

Nick: One was a logistics company. And the other was a trucking company called Bray Freight. And he started that company. Everything he did in that [00:31:00] company was about his drivers. Every single move was about his drivers, including starting the logistics arm. So a lot of companies back then, what they were doing was they just saw the money.

Nick: So they started a logistics company. Cause I thought they would just start making money. He wanted to be able to feed his drivers more freight, you can’t just get yeses from customers in order to get consistent business. You can’t say no to the customer.

Caroline: Yeah.

Nick: So they would broker anything else.

Nick: When he brought me on as a consultant, you can’t just join the 3PL world and expect because you got an MC and a DAT license that people are just going to throw freight at you and you’re going to be able to cover it. So you got to find out what it is that you’re going to be able to do for other people and do it better.

Nick: What did we talk about earlier? How many people say they want asset based carriers showing up at their dock, right? Here’s a guy who literally wanted to be able to hire more assets, build out his trucking company. The only reason that his 3PL existed was to feed that. So why not tell the customers the truth? Hi, we’re blah, blah, blah logistics. The reason for my call is we own a we’re not, we don’t have a sister company. We have we are here to [00:32:00] feed the arm of our brokerage or of our blah, blah, blah. We’re looking for customers with consistent lanes that we can build carriers around.

Nick: Yes, we will broker until we’re able to do that until we’re able to do that. And of course, we’ll always have that as an option. That was the pitch. And so I really liked that about him, that every aspect of his company was about keeping his drivers whole. And that’s why he had six, I think he had 70 units up until a couple of years ago when he decided to move on to the next thing.

Caroline: And those were mainly owner operators who were leased on to his authority.

Nick: I’m going to say yes, but now we. Now we get past my expertise or

Caroline: Okay. All right. Can you tell me something that you’ve already answered this question to some extent, but what’s something that you haven’t mentioned yet that you wish you would have known before you got into this? Sales and trucking.

Nick: This one’s humbling and I’ll tell you why. Cause you’ve heard me talk about a lot about process, right? And you heard me talk with great fervor. About how niche down I was on the prospects. And I was creating something back then where I really believed I could create the process [00:33:00] where depending on market conditions, you could tweak a lever here and there.

Nick: The thing is that the company I was working for still was really heavy in LTL too, which is a lot more predictable and consistent. I think I spent, I wanted 80 percent process, 20 percent execution.

Nick: I should have been a lot happier with 20 percent process and 80 percent execution. This industry. Is very fluid, and I don’t believe that can be, and it should be used as an excuse to not try to improve processes and to not try to streamline things and find the most effective way to do it.

Nick: But I do believe it’s 1 of those things where you should be very rigid in your goal and very flexible in your approach. And that’s something I would have done differently. Again, I don’t believe in regret because like I told you before the show here, like it’s my mistakes that I get paid for.

Nick: So I had to learn that, but, I think I would have been able to find more ways to be successful and learn and not have to learn so much after the fact,

Caroline: I’ll also, on top of that, there is, we talked about trucking tech and there’s a lot of technology out [00:34:00] there that carriers can take advantage of. What I would caution though, is that is the technology flexible enough to accommodate for trucking? What you need to do. So I always say this in my own professional life, that if I’m going to have a tool that helps me to do something, it has to be, it has, I have to already have a process in place for doing that thing.

Caroline: And the tool has to help me do that faster, better, hopefully both. So what are some of the technologies that you think carriers should be employing in their businesses today? That

Nick: I’m the last guy to adopt tech and it’s not because I’m a, and I love tech, it’s just that, and I don’t want to slow down enough to use it.

Nick: At the same time, I look at my CRM and I’m using HubSpot, the free version, and there’s still so much more that I can do with it. And I’m barely just putting notes in. It’s one of those things that I’ll get to later, but I want you to look at where [00:35:00] I’m at in my business. I’m basically the guy who I don’t have enough loads to keep me busy.

Caroline: Yeah.

Nick: tech is not going to solve that problem. Action is going to solve that problem. Now that said if I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but if there’s something I do every day that I can automate by all means, yes. If there’s something that takes time away from what is my core competency for me, it’s being on the phone.

Nick: So for the driver, it’s being behind the wheel. What are you like on the road getting paid for your miles? If it’s not that, can it be automated?

Caroline: One of the things that came to mind was when you were talking about some of the value that a brokerage might offer to a shipper that a carrier could offer but often doesn’t is tracking. And so there are transportation management systems that are designed specifically for small carriers, where you can share the location of your truck with your customer.

Caroline: And people love that. And that is something that so few small carriers. And when I say small carrier, one, two, maybe five trucks are [00:36:00] using that can completely set you apart from everyone else. And good customers will pay you more for that.

Nick: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s the reason all the tracking apps are out there is because carriers didn’t want to get tracked.

Caroline: Right.

Nick: Like again, the market will fix itself one way or another. And for them also keep in mind, this is something that another interesting point when the whole like, Oh, the brokers take money out of my pocket.

Nick: First, no they don’t. They make money and pay you, but also out of that money, they’re paying for that service too.

Nick: Who spends a lot of money on tech, 3PLs, Too much money on tech. Most repeals because they adopt tech and don’t implement it enough, but they’re paying for that.

Nick: They’re paying per load. They’re paying a monthly service.

Nick: Everything that doesn’t get done somewhere or another, the customer, the market will correct itself. The customer wants it. They’re going to get it. And somewhere along the line. It, everyone’s got a piece of that same pie.

Nick: But that said, you take that middleman out of it, boom, and you have the control.

Nick: So it’s like nobody, it’s a real easy conversation when it, the first time they can’t [00:37:00] get tracking information from a third party and they do it and you have it done.

Caroline: right. Totally. All right. With that, if you, Enjoyed this conversation and you’re looking for more ways to improve your business as a small carrier, go ahead and hit and subscribe on our channel. We put out a new episode every week on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Caroline: So check it out. Thanks again so much for being here, Nick.

Nick: Thank you for having me.