Episode 47: Revolutionizing Freight Media with Craig Fuller of FreightWaves

Brent – 00:00:01:

Welcome to Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast, where we explore the fascinating world of trucking and freight management. We dive deep into the freight industry and uncover why the trucking industry is more crucial to our country now than ever before. Stay tuned to uncover the driving forces behind successful trucking businesses and hear from the hardworking truckers and leaders who keep the world moving. Let’s hit the road. All right, well, welcome back, Freight Nation. Thanks again for joining us for another podcast. We know you have a lot of things you can do with your time and your energy and all the effort in your lives, and we just appreciate that you tune in because it’s our heart at Truckstop to bring you stories in trucking that can benefit your career and your operation. We had lots of great people on the inside of Freight that tell their stories about how they got to Freight and maybe the advice that they could give to others that could create success for themselves. And today is really unique. It’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, probably since I started the podcast. The guest today was somebody that I wanted to have on because of the way in which he looks at the market, the way in which he’s grown up in the market, the way in which he helps to guide this market into areas that it hardly even knew it needed to go into. And so today joining me on Freight Nation is the one and only Craig Fuller of FreightWaves. Craig, thanks for joining us today.

Craig – 00:01:18:

Brent, super excited to be here.

Brent – 00:01:19:

Yeah, man. Well, yeah, it’s funny. When I thought about introducing Craig Fuller, it’d be like a visionary. It’d be an entrepreneur. It would be a little bit of a rebel out there in the marketplace. But, you know, what’s been interesting is that it’s unique knowing you as a personal friend, which makes this more and more fun because I get to discover more things about you every time I get to be around you. And now the Freight Nation watchers and listeners can learn about Craig Fuller, the guy who they may only know as FreightWaves and SONAR, but has an excellent history in the market. And so what I’d like to start off with is for you to talk a little bit about your story, and your background in this, because people see you as this media guy in the marketplace, the guys who’s really pushing forward the truth in the marketplace and the data in the marketplace and the insights in the marketplace. But there’s a lot more to Craig Fuller than just FreightWaves. Because you started as a young man in this industry. So if you wouldn’t mind just telling that story to the FreightWaves watchers.

Craig – 00:02:13:

Yeah, I have diesel in my blood, as I like to say.

Brent – 00:02:16:

A lot of people say that. What do they mean by that?

Craig – 00:02:18:

I think that, there’s people who come into the industry and can’t leave. Like, it’s like how Hotel California is, you check in, but you can’t check out. It’s like, if you’re in it for any period of time, you fall in love with this industry and you tend to stay and you find there’s just so much opportunity. My situation was different. I was literally born into the industry. So I am a multi-generational trucker. My grandfather was one of the first pioneers of long-haul trucking in the 1960s. And so, then he fired my dad and my dad went out and started a company.

Brent – 00:02:50:

Wait a minute. He fired your dad?

Craig – 00:02:53:

He fired my dad and then he hired him back. There’s a lot like this that happens in the family. And I’ll tell you a little bit. I got fired by my dad on two different occasions. It is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. My dad and I are good friends because it brings up a lot of questions, but my grandfather fired my dad and then he hired him back and fired him again and stuff like that just can’t happen. But, you know, my grandfather was a pioneer of long-haul trucking. He was back in the day. He was putting two drivers in a truck basically to haul carpet out of North Georgia to the West Coast. And then they would bring back like pecans or something off the West Coast. Because most freight in those days in the 1960s was in the manufacturing belt of the South. And there weren’t a lot of imports that came into California. It was a manufacturing California, but a lot of it was like the manufacturing base, the textile base was in the South. And then you would haul stuff to California and they were on that I-40. In fact, if you go back and look at long-haul trucking, that was among the most profitable forms of trucking in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, because you could have the truck run almost nonstop with two drivers. And so he was one of the big pioneers of long-haul trucking. So the godfathers of trucking, you have the folks out of Utah with that’s where the heritage of Knight and Swift and Dick Simon and PST were there. The English folks are there. You have Schneider, you have J.B. Hunt. And then you had this pocket in Chattanooga. And that was really my grandfather’s sort of pedigree. But my dad did not inherit my grandfather’s business. My grandfather sold it to a guy who actually embezzled a bunch of money, went to prison, which is a fascinating story in itself. Maybe at some point, my dad will tell that story on the podcast.

Brent – 00:04:29:

That’d be great.

Craig – 00:04:31:

When you add crime, which is not uncommon in our industry with old school trucking and big personalities, you get a lot of that. But my dad and David Parker went out and started a company, called USA Leasing in 1985. And then they decided as step brothers, they couldn’t work together in the same company. And my father started U.S. Xpress and my uncle started Covenant. I was six years old.

Brent – 00:04:50:

What year was this again?

Craig – 00:04:52:

1985, man.

Brent – 00:04:54:

1985. I was a senior in high school.

Craig – 00:04:56:

Yeah, you were like hanging out trying to find dates. And I was just…

Brent – 00:04:59:

That’s right.

Craig – 00:05:00:

My dad came home and told my mom he quit his job. And we had three boys and my mom was… I remember it. It was like a big… It was a lot of emotion. It’s all… I don’t remember a lot of the details, but I remember a lot of emotion in the house. And my mom was very upset because like my dad in those days was making $85,000 a year in 1980. It was a good job, like providing a good living for us as kids. And he quit. He just said, I’m leaving and I’m starting my own company. That’s a lot of risk as an entrepreneur. My dad wanted to be an entrepreneur. And the guy that had bought my grandfather’s company, that company was spiraling out of control. And it actually benefited because they were able to pick off all the… It was called Southwest Motor Freight. It was the name of the trucking company that my grandfather had built and then sold. It ended up basically filing bankruptcy. But as it was unraveling, Covenant was taking freight from Southwest Motor Freight and U.S. Xpress was taking freight. That was the incubation of it. So I grew up in it. I saw my dad, started a truck company. He had a trailer in Dalton, Georgia that we would go down as kids. I remember walking around the maintenance shop. If I smell new tires or axle grease today or like wheel grease today, it’s like an aphrodisiac. It takes me back to my childhood of great fond memories. It would be like the equivalent of a spring day of flowers. But for a trucker, it reminded me because my dad, every time we got a new one, he had 50 trucks at one point in the early days. And these new truck deliveries would come in. It’d be a big day because we would get to see the new truck roll in. And so it was just like a happy moment as a trucker to be hanging out on a trucking lot. And we didn’t take family vacations that did not include a stop at a terminal. This was the way a trucking family worked.

Brent – 00:06:40:

Right. Yeah.

Craig – 00:06:41:

But I really idolized my dad and he was my hero and I wanted to be my dad. And I always dreamed of owning… I would go through and make a list. When I become a big trucking type, I’m going to own this company, and I wanted to own CFI, because they had the little spot. Remember the old CFI trailers?

Brent – 00:06:57:

Oh, yeah.

Craig – 00:06:58:

And it had the like, the seven up spot on the back of it. You probably…

Brent – 00:07:01:

Oh, yes.

Craig – 00:07:02:

I thought CFI was so cool. And so anyways, that was my dream, to become, basically become a trucking magnet, if you will, at some point. And that was how I grew up. So I talked to my dad about all the things that were happening in the industry. I knew all the personalities, all the drama, all the like stories about these companies, and I loved every bit of it. It literally got in my blood.

Brent – 00:07:24:

Yeah. All right. So let me ask you. So you and I have so many things in common, not just our head shape.

Craig – 00:07:29:

We have very good looking hair.

Brent – 00:07:31:

Not just that. I’m one of three brothers. We both have five children.

Craig – 00:07:36:

I’m one of three kids.

Brent – 00:07:37:

Right. And so, so many things. I’ve said this over and over. My dad is my hero as well. I have a very close relationship with both my parents, but my dad was a larger than life figure. And so I know your dad was too. When I entered this industry in 1998, your dad’s company and your dad was like this unapproachable person in the market to me. I was brand new. I was 30 years old in this marketplace. And so just to see Max Fuller would be like, oh, it’s like a trucking royalty. But you lived in that. You lived in the middle of that. So when you started to think about the business part of your life, you’re getting a little bit older. Did you feel like you were going to go straight into the trucking part of the business?

Craig – 00:08:14:

It was never a doubt of mine. I remember in college, people were like, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to become the next Fred Smith. Logistics innovator. And the thing is like, if you grow up in an ambitious family, a very successful father. And I was around a lot of very successful people growing up because most of the social network is where you start to hold yourself to those kinds of ambitions. As a young kid, it becomes very transformative in what you want to accomplish in your life. And so for me. . I knew that I had some advantage in logistics because they understood it. And I felt like this was such a big industry. And frankly, cool. If you think about it, like the logistics industry. I have a five-year-old boy and he like idolizes all the stuff that I get to do. Think about freight. It’s trucks. It’s trains. It’s planes. It’s boats. It’s cool stuff. It’s cranes. It’s like we are playing with the, as a young boy, you’re playing with all these model trucks and trains and stuff. We get to do that in the world, in real life. We never did, that boy never grew out of me. It’s still inside me. And for me, I always felt like that was where I wanted to be. In fact, when I was unsuccessfully trying to meet girls or I would get a girl to go on a date with me, I remember I was in Waco, Texas, Baylor University, and we would drive I-35. And I knew every scene. It was almost like Bubba Gump. Have you seen Forrest Gump? And the guy can, Bubba can name off all the types of shrimp.

Brent – 00:09:45:

Types of shrimp, right, yeah.

Craig – 00:09:46:

We would pass a truck on a highway and I would be like, there’s Hirspot, there’s Schneider. And I would tell him, Nori’s in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I knew all of it. And it would bore the hell out of me. I wouldn’t get a second date.

Brent – 00:09:57:

I dropped my kids nuts for that all the time. Yeah, absolutely.

Craig – 00:10:00:

It’s like, you fall in love with this industry and you can’t get out. And so for me, I always knew I wanted to be in it. And that was, it just felt like a destiny to me.

Brent – 00:10:07:

I grew up around a dad who was the same way, but we were in the steel industry. And so I never really wanted that industry, but I loved every part of it. I worked for my dad. My dad never had to fire me, although he probably could have many times with as many times as I put my brother’s life’s at risk running a fork truck on a dock. But it was always one of the things that I grew up with a dad that was very encouraging. So was your dad that way? I know he held you to accountability. He had great aspirations for you, but was he an encouraging dad too? Or was he more just a dad that said, hey, you can go do this. What kind of relationship did he have with you? Or does he have? Yeah.

Craig – 00:10:38:

No, I think both. I think it was very encouraging, but also not warm in the sense of like, he had a set of standards he expected.

Brent – 00:10:49:

Yeah, for sure.

Craig – 00:10:50:

Greatness of story. And I was like, never a defined term in his world. But like, if we’re going to do something as kids, it had to be big. It had to be bold.

Brent – 00:10:59:

Okay.

Craig – 00:10:59:

And had to be something of significance. In other words, like not, I’ve been given this wonderful opportunity in terms of resources, in terms of opportunity for education experiences. There was a lot given to me as a young boy and opportunities. And it was like, I was not allowed to squalor that. Like I had to turn it into something. And that was impressed upon me as an expectation. It was never, we’d never had conversations about it. It was never like, you must do this for, because-

Brent – 00:11:30:

No, I get it, yeah.

Craig – 00:11:30:

It more of like, I owed something back to the family because I had been given so much opportunity.

Brent – 00:11:38:

Right.

Craig – 00:11:39:

And that has always impressed me as an entrepreneur. I need to go build something. He always had this thing. He would always say it is like, as a kid, there are wealthy consumers and there are wealth generators, and you’re a wealthy consumer. You just consume money as a child. And then he’s like, I make money as an adult. And like, you’re one day, you’re going to make money for your family.

Brent – 00:11:59:

Right.

Craig – 00:11:59:

And it was just like, to me, it was like. I have to live up to this person. And he always took a lot of pride in beating his dad. I mean, his dad ran a Southwest Motor Freight with probably 600 trucks and maybe a hundred million dollars at its peak. And he always said, do you want your kids to be more successful than them? So my dad set a pretty big market, at some point. So I’m still working towards that. I’m still working towards it, I have a long way to go. I’m losing time, unfortunately.

Brent – 00:12:26:

Well, it sounds like your dad helped you see a greater capacity for yourself because he saw it already. Because, he would see that. And so what a great role model for you to see that in yourself. Because a lot of times as men, we have a hard time seeing that. But when you have a father that can encourage you to see that there’s a much bigger picture that you can accomplish, it’s amazing how you go and do it.

Craig – 00:12:46:

Brent, what’s interesting was, it wasn’t until after he fired me and effectively shut me, like completely cut me off in some ways, that I actually, so it’s one thing to grow up in a successful family and have, determine things handed to you is probably a fair statement by a lot of people. There are opportunities given to me, not necessarily what I did with them wasn’t handed to me. I had to work for that. But I had opportunities that were simply afforded because of who I was. It wasn’t until all of that was gone that I actually had to figure it out for myself. And honestly, as a young person, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome because I didn’t know if I could ever do it on my own. It was the comfort of knowing I had these opportunities for my family, but it was, when the ships were burned for me, when my father set my ships on fire and put me on my own and I had to go do it, probably should have happened 10 years before it did, but it didn’t. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because now I can legitimately say I did it on my own and I took the opportunities given to me and I made something of them.

Brent – 00:13:49:

So you walk in one day and your dad says, all right, that’s it, you’re out.

Craig – 00:13:52:

I wish it were that simple. It was much more traumatic than that.

Brent – 00:13:56:

Yeah, it was heartbreaking because-

Craig – 00:13:59:

He made the decision at the time that he thought was right and maybe fair enough. It was really uncomfortable and I was really upset and I was really disappointed in myself. At the end of the day, I was in a bad spot and it took me a year to come out of that to realize, hey, I need to figure this out. My world had changed and I needed a year to get my stuff together. And this is a time in 2015 when venture capital discovered this little logistics.

Brent – 00:14:24:

Yeah, no doubt.

Craig – 00:14:25:

Starting to see there was opportunity in that industry. And for years, I had been in a payments business with my family, there was a spinoff of the U.S. Xpress called TransCard. And I had ran that for nine years. That’s the business my dad fired me from. I didn’t know for a year what I wanted to do. I became an employee and I was a really bad employee. I wouldn’t hire me. When I left this company, I was selling employment engagement services, which is a complete crock. But anyways, I was selling these things like these point systems for companies because I didn’t want to work in the industry. I wouldn’t recommend this business. And I remember when I was leaving the company and I resigned, I’m like, you don’t need me. Honestly, I should have fired myself. Because I was a bad employee.

Brent – 00:14:59:

You’re speaking so well of yourself.

Craig – 00:15:01:

I know, right? I had a problem. If I don’t believe in the product, I couldn’t get excited about the business and couldn’t engage. I remember when I resigned, I was like, look, I’m leaving. It took them a month to turn me off the system. Like they didn’t even know how to fire people. So a 150 million revenue company. But like I resigned, I kept thinking my paycheck would get cut off the next day. It’s like a month later, I actually reached out to HR because my manager had never turned the paperwork in, to let me go. And I’m like, they’re still paying me. Like, why are they paying me? So anyways, I was a bad employee.

Brent – 00:15:34:

Well, here’s what I like to say. I think we all tend to create maturity in ourselves through either somebody helping us or failing and realizing that’s not the person I want to be. And then you develop that competence.

Craig – 00:15:45:

So failure is an amazing teacher. It is far better because whether it’s a relationship or a business or a job, whatever, a friendship, when you reach a low and you know how painful that is to feel like you’ve lost, you’ll do everything in your life to avoid that pain. Like that’s what makes humanity. That’s why pain is so powerful as a motivator because you never want to experience it again. And it also creates a level of humility that I didn’t know was possible in my life to be far more empathetic. I think failure teaches you things that you’ll never get from success. In fact, I think success makes us complacent often.

Brent – 00:16:27:

Well, it certainly can blind us. Yeah, it definitely can blind us to our needs to grow. No doubt. So you spent a year out of the business.

Craig – 00:16:35:

I actually spent 10 years out of the business.

Brent – 00:16:37:

Oh, okay.

Craig – 00:16:37:

I was out in 2005. I left U.S. Xpress and we had this payment company called TransCard and I spent nine years building it. And as technology companies grow, they end up. Unlike trucking companies, as they grow, they generate a lot of cash. Technology companies, as they scale, they actually do the opposite. They end up consuming cash in this sort of early inflection point. And these days you had to use physical hardware. So as we would grow our infrastructure, we couldn’t use the cloud. We had to actually go buy physical servers. I’m sure Truckstop has had those days where as you grow, you have to go buy physical hardware. And it was the same thing in that business. And so we started consuming more cash as we were scaling. And my dad was just tired of funding that. I tried to raise money, but he never wanted to do that. And, basically told me not to show up the next day. So that was fun, but not really.

Brent – 00:17:21:

It was part of it. My dad had to yank my chain more than once in my life. Well, this…

Craig – 00:17:25:

Wasn’t a lesson. This was like, don’t show up and don’t call me kind of thing. And you’ll never be CEO. It was a pretty big for my mind to fall from grace. And I spent a year trying to figure it out.

Brent – 00:17:36:

Yeah, I know. There’s a backside of that story. And I’ll mention this at the end about my conversation with your dad. Just two years ago about how proud he was of all of his sons, especially you. So continue on. So, all right. So this idea of being an entrepreneur has been part of you in your whole life of creating something. So your dad built it into you. You can create something. Everybody starts somewhere. You started in a place where you had a lot of experience inside of an industry. By the way, for anybody that watches you talk while you’re talking on a sonar update, a state of the industry, everybody probably wonders. And after this podcast, I don’t think they’ll wonder, how the heck does he know all this stuff? All this history? About the marketplace and the different parts of the marketplace because they’re like, he just showed up in 2016. Didn’t he?

Craig – 00:18:20:

No, this was literally like my life and we would take long road trips. My dad would talk trucking. There were only two subjects my dad cared about growing up. One was boats. Because he loves boats, the big boater and the other was trucking. My dad’s kind of a quiet guy. He’s not very outgoing. My father-in-law loves to tell these old stories and he can talk. You’re a great guy. My father was very different. He’s pretty reserved. But the thing that you could get him to talk about was trucking. He loves this industry and he would happily share that knowledge. And I think he had a lot of pride in being able to impart his knowledge. And like, there’s so much in trucking that’s tribal. Like if you go look through a book on trucking, on Amazon. There isn’t a lot there.

Brent – 00:19:08:

Good luck. Yeah.

Craig – 00:19:09:

Like you may find some stuff that’s been written by truck drivers about some of their experience. It may be like a playbook on how to become a freight broker. There isn’t a lot of stuff written about the industry. And so a lot of what we have in our industry is very tribal. I happen to be a part of a third generation tribe, essentially, that dates back from the 1960s and the heydays of Teamsters and regulation to deregulation. And that knowledge has been imparted upon me. I am actually quite sad. I think about this often. I have five kids and I’m quite sad about that. It is likely that tribal element, because I do much broader than just freight, will probably not make it to the fourth generation the way it made it to my generation. In other words, so much of the time I spent with my father was just listening to his stories about the industry and how it works and working in dispatch. And I was the U.S. Xpress’s first help desk technician running Coaxial and TwinaX Cable through their headquarters, building their first network inside their system. I did repowers, which I absolutely loved. I was a driver manager. So I did all these things that my sons will never get to. And so I think about the fact that through FreightWaves, I had the opportunity to share the knowledge of the industry and hopefully create a hub of both historical context, but also what’s happening right now in a way that can only be shared through people that A, love the industry and B, are from it.

Brent – 00:20:33:

All right. So I want to shift into what was in your brain that made you think, I want to start a media company in the transportation industry, but I want to do it very differently. Because as many people know, I spent 15 years working for what I would say was the leading media company inside of transportation, but we weren’t FreightWaves. And I remember the day that I saw FreightWaves, when you guys started really publishing content in the marketplace. It was after you and I met at the McLeod conference, I believe back in 2016 or 2017. And I actually called my friends that are in the other parts of the media. And I said, look, you need to pay attention to how FreightWaves brings content to the market because they’re what’s going to be next for our industry. And so when I sat down with you and you told me about it, I was like, that’s it. And I was always just so amazed at your vision for what needed to be communicated to this marketplace. So what brought this about? We know your history. We know your third generation. We know, you got all this foundation of love and understanding of this industry. But something flipped the switch for you to go, I’m going to create a platform for people to understand this market.

Craig – 00:21:42:

Like I wasn’t a grand visionary of like, hey, I’m going to do this. It was accidental, Brent.

Brent – 00:21:47:

Oh, come on. It can’t be accidental.

Craig – 00:21:49:

I think most successful entrepreneurs are in many ways circumstantial, accidental. I think actually people look at stories and the great stories of Phil Knight or Fred Smith had built these wonderfully big companies. If you actually look at how they started, a lot of it was just small decisions that kind of happened and they took opportunities. I think that’s how entrepreneurship really works is like we end up in these situations and we have to make choices. And I think oftentimes successful entrepreneurs, what makes them successful is they make more choices than others do. And I think if you keep doing that, you’re increasing the reps you take in any type of decision. But also you’re improving your odds of success because so much in business is about asymmetric outcomes. It’s like if I do something and I lose something here, it’s okay. But maybe this is a thousand extra turns. And that’s exactly what FreightWaves was about, is, my original idea was to build a futures market based on trucking. This is how we arrived here. And I had a co-founder, a gentleman by the name of Ben Murphy who had sold a company to Tremble and understood pricing probably better than anybody I’ve ever met. He and I were so opposite because he was very introverted, very socially almost awkward in some ways, but a brilliant mind. And I was the opposite energy of him, just really fed off one another because he wanted to be nothing in public. And the problem was we were trying to figure out how to market this concept to futures? And we tried to hire some PR agencies, publicists in the industry, because we’re like, okay, we need to get press, and let’s go hire some PR groups that can help us. And we got turned down, like getting turned by a lawyer, like a recruiter. People are like, oh, this is too hard of a concept to take on. And I remember I was like, well, if they can make Convoy look good as a disruptive company, then they can make FreightWaves look good. I reached out to Convoy’s PR agent and I said, hey, can you take us on? And the guy’s like, look, what you’re doing is really hard. Because remember, I’m doing futures at this point. And he said, I’ll take you on. It’s $40,000 a month for Tanner. Oh, my. I don’t have that money. And he’s like, look, I think you should write your own content and post it on social media. And that was the story. We posted a job.

Brent – 00:24:02:

Wow, necessity. Necessity started this. Wow, that’s amazing.

Craig – 00:24:06:

And Brian Straight, the editor at Fleet Owner Magazine, applied for the role. And I said, Brian, I want you to write. This was like, I wasn’t sure as most startups you go through this period where you feel like you can afford them. And there was a moment where we started to run out of cash and I was almost going to retract the offer. And I’m like, no, I’m committed. This guy’s got a family. I don’t want to retract the offer. But reluctantly, he joined not knowing any of this was happening. And I was like, okay, how do I get people to tune into what we’re doing, but do it in a way that they’ll find interesting? If we’re writing about futures every day, no one’s going to tune into that content. I was like, why didn’t you cover the industry? And he didn’t. He started writing about this when Amazon was starting to come on the scene. Uber Freight was doing autonomous trucking. There’s a lot of stories out there. We were 18 on freight logistics sites. We were pretty small, but we were growing. I’m quite proud of it. Then Brian went on vacation, I think it was September of 2017. And Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. Here’s what the change was, Brian. I had run logistics, ground logistics for the U.S. Xpress’s FEMA. We were the largest FEMA contractor, indirect contractor, we started with bigger, but we were the ones that actually had the trucks on the ground, thousands of trucks during these hurricanes. And I wrote an article about what to expect when expecting a hurricane. My father, had a book about what to expect when expecting. And so like I wrote this article and the site exploded with hundreds of thousands of page views. And it was like, we were doing like 40 to 60,000 page views a month. And this was like 300,000. It was written in Brian Straight’s name. And I had never considered myself a good writer, but people were reading my content. There were tons of grammatical errors. It was, we would never publish that today without a copy editor. We had no, I didn’t know what a copy editor was in those days, but the site blew up. And what it was someone providing firsthand knowledge of what was going to happen during a hurricane from a logistics perspective. And then, so, we write this article, the site’s doing really well. And the next major story for us was Amazon moving freight. When they moved into brokerage, we wrote the story. And by that point, we realized what the industry really wanted was, if you look at like Rand O’Reilly, which is where you were at before, if you looked at like Fleet Owner, even transport topics, a lot of what the companies were doing is they were taking press releases and repurposing. They were just reprinting press lists. They might do an interview around a press release, but it was pretty much the company PR department would reach out and they would write it. What we were writing was different. And it came out of my understanding. I day traded in college unsuccessfully, I was watching CNBC and I was reading.

Brent – 00:26:41:

I love how honest you are.

Craig – 00:26:42:

There’s not a lot of things I can do well. I am fully comfortable doing things, admitting where I have fallen. Day trading is not something that I would recommend I ever do.

Brent – 00:26:52:

Yeah, I think that’s a good point.

Craig – 00:26:54:

But I was a fan of The Economist and CNBC and The Journal. I wanted to create a news business that treated freight. The way it really operates. And no one, here’s the thing is, all the freight media publications focused on fleets. They were selling to the fleet owner. They’re selling to the, maybe if it’s transport topics, it’s public policy, what the ATA is up to. If it’s OOIDA, they’re talking about truck policy for truck drivers. And those media publications are really important for the industry because there are a lot of really important things that make decisions. No one was writing for freight brokers. In fact, when we brought Brian Straight on, who had been at Fleet Owner, I think, eight years at that point, and I was like, I want you to write news about the economy about rates. And he’s like, nobody reads it. And I’m like, this is what we’re going to do. This is our business model. I mean, the reason nobody read it, Brent, was because they would publish it two months after the story. Like, here’s Truckstop rates a month later. And no one cares. What we found was this really interesting opportunity where brokerage was a big industry at this point. You had venture capital invested in technology also happening. And we were in the right place, right time, right team, that was in this business that understood. And look, I grew up in trucking. I started the on-demand division of U.S. Xpress, which was basically, we will pick up as many truckloads within six hours, but not guarantee a price. We made a lot of money doing that. I became really good at understanding the freight market, running that business, like understanding which markets are about to blow up, which ones aren’t. And so this was built as the narrative of the market. And what we realized is that’s what the industry needed. It needed a first out of real-time information, with people that were from the industry. And what’s interesting about this is, I didn’t know this at the time, but if you go back and look at CNBC, when they first started, they didn’t hire the young correspondent. That’s really a track that you would see on the evening news and traditional major news networks. They would hire former traders. In fact, an interesting thing about CNBC is if you look at the people that have been there a long time and you look at the new correspondents, they look completely different. There’s a different look in the new one for sales. This is country music, before videos came out. You know what I mean?

Brent – 00:29:09:

I got to write that one down.

Craig – 00:29:10:

John Anderson is one of the greatest country music singers, but his career went south when videos came out. So anyways, I digress. But my point is like what a lot of these major media businesses and ESPN did the same thing when it was early.

Brent – 00:29:26:

Sure did. Chris Berman is not a looker.

Craig – 00:29:28:

So yeah, like-

Brent – 00:29:29:

But he’s great. Right?

Craig – 00:29:32:

But now the people that come from journalism school and end up at ESPN have the look and have the, but these early media businesses weren’t that way, so for us, we followed a model that we now understood is what most of these, like there’s sports or in business news, you’re hiring people from the industry that can provide context. And that’s ultimately what we’ve built at FreightWaves, is we have people who were former truck drivers, Dooner is probably our biggest celebrity, if you will, he worked at a freight forwarder doing import stuff.

Brent – 00:30:05:

And he knows his stuff. Yeah.

Craig – 00:30:06:

And that is important. Like you need people who know stuff. I remember very early on the CEO of Choptank.

Brent – 00:30:12:

Know him well. Good friend.

Craig – 00:30:13:

We had to fill the content because we only had one writer. It was Brian Strait. I put a job posting out on Upwork and I had this Filipino girl for $5 an article. She would write articles. And we were like-

Brent – 00:30:25:

Did you say $5 a month?

Craig – 00:30:27:

It was $5 an article. And it was like AI, but maybe worse. I didn’t know any better. I was like, hey, this is a side project at the time. And I remember he called me out because she wrote an article. She basically wrote an article that was completely wrong. And I realized at that point. First of all, $5 is really cheap. So that we cared enough about our content to actually feel like, hey, we had a responsibility. But it was interesting to see how we evolved into becoming a truly qualified source of information. And like the whole thing about freight and media, as I learned, is that you have to have really thick skin too. Because you’re going to, if you write an article about a company, you’re going to offend somebody. If you write an article, unless it’s like, even when you write a positive article about a company, you may offend their competitors. I’ve gotten some of my nastiest messages when we’ve written a really positive article about a company. And one of their competitors is really offended that we made them look good. It’s really interesting. But you’re also writing content that maybe people don’t like from a contextual standpoint. But I’ll say that. Our motivation and our agenda is to provide content that provides a perspective on the market that we sincerely respective of what we think has happened.

Brent – 00:31:44:

Well, I remember early talking to you about what you were doing with FreightWaves. And I’ve got more than 10 years of experience in the media world. Most of the time, it was articles about the manufacturers and what was going on in the market and some decent content in the marketplace. And we did a good job. But you raised the bar when it came to the expectation of talking about the part of the market where everybody that works in this industry makes money. It’s where freight moves. No one ever talked about that. I thought I knew things before I came to Truckstop about the trucking industry. I thought, oh, I’m going to come work at Truckstop. I know my stuff. Obviously, I know this industry very well. I know the leaders of the industry very well. And then I got into logistics and realized how much I didn’t know. And then I started reading FreightWaves. I’m like, this is before I even knew you, he’s a genius. He’s the guy actually commenting and writing commentary on the part of the market where everybody is interested, which is where is freight and what’s it doing? So it’s so fascinating that necessity, you had a focus in one area and necessity created something else and the futures market is no longer around. It just didn’t wrestle along. But freight waves exploded. And then I want you to talk about how you pivot into Sonar? Because that’s another wonderful product of yours that is helping the industry as well.

Craig – 00:33:04:

So Brent, I think it’s important to know a lot of the content I’m not writing, first of all, but it’s important also to know that one of the things that is really important to us as a business, and I think this has been universal of what we look for when we bring people on, is they have to have intellectual curiosity. And I think what you’re actually seeing, is this happening in real-time is a living, breathing. Almanac of our industry. We are writing the narrative of the industry as it is forming, which means at times we’re going to get some things wrong. At times we’re going to get some things right. At other times, the industry is going to evolve in ways that we can’t ever have imagined. But we’re writing a real-time narrative on what’s happening. So what you’re seeing is not just this knowledge that we’re imparting on people. It’s informed, has context, and a lot of its pattern recognition. I was a huge fan of history in school because I was not a good student. And what I loved about history class is that most of the motivations for the world leaders were always the same. It was like money, power, sex. It was those things. And so all you had to do is change the names out and you very much have the same motivations. I learned that early on. And I think that is the way humanity works is like oftentimes what we see in the market is driven by the same fundamental truths. And so for us, it is being able to provide that narrative. And so while we may be imparting knowledge about historical context, we’re not geniuses. We’re just really good students that are in tune with what’s happening. We have fantastic sources, but we have an intellectual curiosity that runs through the organization. That enables us to bring those narratives to, I think one of the more intoxicating things, I was a freight broker at one point in my life, as Ben said, and I did freight, transactional freight. And I remember getting these huge rips and just like the dopamine surge of having a huge transaction or getting a hundred loads and you’re going to make a thousand bucks a pop on. I felt that. It is interesting being in the media and observing a story. Take us the Celadon story or the Yalow story from last year. And you’re not the story. The story’s not about you, but you get to be an observer of history and you get to participate not as a participant, but as an observer and someone that’s keeping the record of what’s happening. I think that’s a really exciting place to be, especially in an industry that you love so much.

Brent – 00:35:35:

Craig, the thing that I think is unique in what you guys are doing is probably a little intimidating to a lot in this marketplace, which you’re reporting every day, almost as it happens. And so, where it used to be, it was a 30-day period. Then we got into the internet age where websites came out and then things came out on websites, but you’re bringing it to a media level, not just a journalism level, but to a media level. It’s interesting that you didn’t know you were a good writer because some of the best stuff that I’ve read in the industry are the articles you’ve written. The one where you talked about the history of the freight brokerage marketplace, you framed it around C.H. Robinson’s leadership kind of being ebbed away a little bit, but was a textbook on how this industry has evolved over the last 10 years. And so, I just find it fascinating that you’re willing to not only do that, you’re also willing to, as a platform, take on the things that are maybe not as comfortable as others, and you’ll just hit it right on. Whether it’s a labor issue, whether it is an issue with something that goes on inside the marketplace, you’re willing to bring it to light and talk about it. Most don’t.

Craig – 00:36:33:

It took a while to get comfortable.

Brent – 00:36:36:

That’s a hard thing to do because this is a very closed industry.

Craig – 00:36:38:

I used to write under a pseudonym, I’ve never admitted this publicly, but there’s a guy named Matt Wimberley who had just disappeared. It was actually me. I was writing because I was not comfortable early on putting my own name on stuff. I didn’t want to offend anybody. I felt like a story had to be told, but I didn’t want to offend people. Now, I’m very comfortable with that. My writing has, I would say, look, if people want to be better writers or better on TV or better on podcasts, it’s just reps. And I always tell the staff, some of my younger managers that want to be better public speakers, like, how do you become a better public speaker? I tell them, go on to the video. This is the best thing you can do because it’s all about reps. It’s all about like, whether you’re writing, I was fortunate to have the opportunity in high school to go to a school that demanded writing. I never saw a multiple choice test in any of my high schools. It was all writing. And I realized that is a really powerful skill. I was always getting C’s and D’s in English. Like I was not a good writer according to my English teachers, but I now have a very different perspective on how to write and communicate.

Brent – 00:37:36:

Yeah, no doubt. So let’s talk about writing, but in a little bit different form, the data platform of SONAR. How did SONAR become in existence? And then I want you to talk a little bit about just about advice to entrepreneurs and then we’ll wrap it up. But just talk about SONAR because you not only took a different approach with the data, you took a different approach with even the visual part of the data because you have such a great visual with a display of your data. Tell us how that started.

Craig – 00:37:59:

So I have been enamored with financial markets since I was in college. My father took his company public in 1994, when I was 15. I then became a student of financial markets because of this big event. What is an IPO? And like, how does it work? How does the stock market work? And I just, one of those things that you had the opportunity to see firsthand. And I grew up, and like I said, I unsuccessfully day traded in college. I became very enamored with the chart, the tickers, and seeing them on TV and seeing them on websites. The whole fascination of financial markets is really interesting to me. And one of the things that I set out to do at FreightWaves was to build a tradable instrument based on freight. The real sort of foundational thesis behind FreightWaves, whether it’s the media business or the data business, SONAR, is that we argue and we believe fundamentally that freight is a commodity. And a commodity is like oil, coffee, and wheat. As a commodity, what drives commodity markets is information. And information can be in the form of context. So if you go watch Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and-

Brent – 00:39:07:

The orange futures.

Craig – 00:39:09:

It’s the orange juice futures. Frozen concentrated orange juice, by the way, is a real- It’s not a made up thing. That’s actually a real contract. And what’s interesting about it is they have this whole scenario where they have advanced information that they’re going, and they’re manipulating the market. It goes to show in that movie that having information is really what drives commodity markets.

Brent – 00:39:34:

Right.

Craig – 00:39:35:

Even much more so than the equity markets. Like if you look at stock prices, a lot of stock prices are based less on information and more on momentum, whereas commodity markets are all about supply and demand. And what drives commodity markets is that one person in that market or a couple of people in that market have a different thesis about the future value of the commodity based on the supply and demand balance and what it’s going to look like in the future. And so for us, the way that the market would be successful is providing real-time news and information, which we do, but also providing data. So we wanted to build a data platform that looked a lot like Bloomberg because Bloomberg is the G.O.A.T of data information.

Brent – 00:40:13:

Sure.

Craig – 00:40:13:

And we wanted to have something that looked like freight was a commodity the way a financial markets person would do it. We never imagined that SONAR would be a floor broker product. It never was intended to go under the floor. We felt like Truckstop and DAT were serving that market, and we did not expect it to be a product. So we built it for the price analysts. We built it for the executive suite. We built a data product that would inform people about the direction of the market, but was not intended to be used on the floor. And that was really what inspired the UX. It was meant to be an executive level product about the commoditization of freight or the supply and demand balance. It was never meant to go onto the floor. Now it has been adopted onto the floor very successfully, but that wasn’t the original idea. And that is why you see these really sophisticated charting libraries. Like one of the challenges we have at SONAR, frankly, it is overbuilt for most people’s day-to-day use. One of the real advantages I think that Truckstop has over, say, if somebody were, and like, at the end of the day, I think this is true across the market is people that buy SONAR also have Truckstop. Like it’s not like they’re going to rip one out and the other. It’s not a replacement. It’s never meant to be a replacement. It was always meant to be complimentary.

Brent – 00:41:31:

Right.

Craig – 00:41:31:

And we’ve always viewed it as a complimentary product. It’s never meant to be an either or thing. And we build it in a way that frankly is more complicated than most of the products in the market. Like it takes a degree of patience and willingness to learn how we provide data intelligence and provide visualizations and how people can use the data versus firing up your Truckstop dashboard. You immediately know how to use it. There is a really important part of what Truckstop does in the market to do that. And there’s an important art in what we do, but it’s because your heritage was in matching truckers and brokers in the market, making it easy and simple and quick. Our heritage was informing the executive suite and the price analysts and the direction of the market. Two different use cases. It is interesting when there is an intersection in the product suite. That was never our goal.

Brent – 00:42:25:

Well, it’s amazing to see how you just iterated along and created such a valuable product for those to come to. But what I find is also fascinating, so thanks for telling me about the SONAR product. What I also find fascinating is how you’ve now spun out a complete media group into Firecrown. It’s not just trucking and transportation and logistics. It also goes into airplanes, which I know you have a super passion for airplanes. I didn’t realize your dad loved boats and now you love it. So you’ve got boating inside of that.

Craig – 00:42:52:

I grew up on boats, man.

Brent – 00:42:53:

I know. So you are in Chattanooga. I have a real passion for that. So I’m going to go build something around it so I can enjoy being in that part of that industry.

Craig – 00:43:02:

God, I wish it was that fun. Maybe when I bought FLYING, I’m a pilot. I’ve been flying since I was 13. I was flying on Microsoft Flight Simulators when I was like five. I bought FLYING, because as a founder of a venture-backed company, you’re really not good at many things. You do it all. You’re the janitor. You’re doing payroll. I got to the point during COVID, I didn’t have anything to do because I had fired myself from every functional job, inside the company. And, I wanted to go back to flying, and I did. And I took up my hobby of flying and I was reading all of the aviation media. And now I have a media add-on and I’m like, this kind of sucks. I could do a better job than they’ve done. And I did. And I reached out and said, would you sell it to me? They’re like, it’s not for sale, but I made a deal with them and they sold it to me. So I started with FLYING Magazine and then I bought something like 20 other aviation magazines. And so now we’re the largest publisher in aviation. And then the company that sold me FLYING Magazine, reached out and said, hey, we have this, we’re the largest publisher in Marine. Would you like to buy our Marine portfolio? Which is Yachty Magazine, Selling World, the largest fishing, saltwater sportsman, boating magazine, etc. And we’re like, “yeah, we would love to, and have the same playbook and Marine.” And here’s the key. And this is what I learned from FreightWaves, is media businesses have this really incredible opportunity to influence the way consumers think about it, a product or an industry. And the problem in the modern marketing world is so much of the investment that companies make is to programmatic marketing. They buy leads from Google or Facebook or Twitter. And what they’re doing is they’re putting a lot of money and basically renting these audiences. But the thing about owning a media business is you own the audience, particularly these magazines we buy. These magazines have been around. Yachting Magazine has been around since 1907. FLYING has been around since 1927. These things have been around for decades. And there are paying subscribers that pay to subscribe to that magazine. They typically deeply care about the content they have for many years and many decades. And if these magazines have survived multiple world wars and depressions and versions of the internet, chances are they’re going to be around for another couple of decades, but there’s something really powerful. If they own the audience that cares about the content. So when we talk about aviation, we are influencing the way people think about a specific aircraft make and model, what they should be buying, how they should be thinking about the decision process, all this. So we also went out and bought a bunch of airplane marketplaces. So we’re the second largest place for aircraft in the world for selling used aircrafts. And we then bought a finance business because if you’re researching an airplane, it’s a 1942 Piper or a 1971 Cessna 172 or a 2020 Cirrus. We have all that content. We’ve written about every aircraft because we own all these magazines. So essentially when you’re researching an airplane, you’re coming and doing your research on our sites. You’re identifying which aircraft to buy through our marketplaces. The next thing we want to do is sell you finance. We want to help you finance that aircraft and then we’re going to help you insure it. And so that’s the model. We’re using media to create commerce in these markets that we’re in. Because frankly, media businesses don’t make a lot of money. Subscription and advertising is a really difficult business to maintain. But if you can find ways to build commerce outside of that media business. There’s a lot of opportunity because the hardest thing for these companies is to acquire clients.

Brent – 00:46:31:

Wow. Wow. Iterating again, man. I tell you, I can’t wait to see what’s next for Craig Fuller. So, all right, I want to close on this because I think this is where many of the Freight Nation watchers and listeners will draw some inspiration. You just look at all the things that you just described, growing up in the industry, failure, working through failure, working through the things, thinking creatively about finding something that you had passion about that you could develop in an industry, obviously a very large industry like transportation, then iterating along with the media group, with the data group, and now with an actual owning other parts of media within other parts of transportation, whether it be air or boats or whatever else. So when you think about entrepreneurism, if you were talking to one of your sons, what advice would you give him or her? Because you have some daughters as well.

Craig – 00:47:19:

I bought a tiny website for my son. He was 16 and he came to me, and was the lifeguard at the local country club. At the end of the summer, you’re making 12 bucks an hour. He realized that 12 bucks an hour after taxes is a lot of money.

Brent – 00:47:31:

Nine bucks.

Craig – 00:47:32:

Number job. And he’s like, “how do I make money?” And I was like, “I’m waiting for this conversation to happen.”

Brent – 00:47:37:

Oh, yes.

Craig – 00:47:38:

And I said, well, you started talking about it. So we found this little business. It was $10,000 on acquire.com. It’s a marketplace for small businesses. And we bought it and it had done $6,000. And it’s now doing about $120,000. But I bought it with them. And so we built this business together. And the things that I think that drive successful entrepreneurs are a couple of sort of foundational things. One is you have to have distribution. Like that’s the most important thing. And that is the thing that has actually driven all of my decisions in terms of media, is the media business is interesting and I’m really passionate about it. But it’s more about having a distribution channel where I can sell a product into. So many tech founders that come from Silicon Valley and raise money. I know you’ve seen this tons of times.

Brent – 00:48:27:

So many times.

Craig – 00:48:27:

If they can, they’re the smartest engineers and they know the problems. They have no clue how to sell it. They have no clue how to distribute it. So you have to have distribution. The nice thing about that business my son and I bought together, is that. He was selling merch-to-pilots like this case right here. And basically we are all these aviation publications, which is cheating. Because I own these publications and he gets to run it, but that’s the way business works. It’s all networking.

Brent – 00:48:50:

Oh, well, you’re building something, right? Using the resources that you have.

Craig – 00:48:53:

Using your opportunities. And so that was the first lesson. The second lesson I would say is that as a founder you need to have intellectual curiosity, which I don’t think you can teach. That is the hardest thing for people, is being curious and interested in an industry. And the reason people say you should follow your passions is because you’re more likely to be intellectually curious about that business. I had been in businesses where I had zero desire to learn anything about them. And I didn’t care about them. And therefore I didn’t care about the business outcome because I was not intellectually curious. That’s the second thing. The third thing I think is more foundational, which is you have to take and be willing to take more shots on goal.

Brent – 00:49:34:

I was going to ask you about risk and how you looked at risk.

Craig – 00:49:37:

All about shots on goal at the end of the day. And I know this quote about Wayne Gretzky is you, what is it?

Brent – 00:49:43:

You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.

Craig – 00:49:45:

It’s exactly right. And that’s the whole point is at the end of the day, most things are not going to kill a business.

Brent – 00:49:53:

Right.

Craig – 00:49:54:

And you want to take more opportunities, more shots. And I think about hiring Brian straight to come and help start freightwaves.com. I never knew that I had a skill set for media. I think about when COVID hit, and we moved to virtual events and FreightWaves TV came about. We had this event in Atlanta we were canceling. It was half our revenue, and we’re like, Hey, let’s go move all into FreightWaves TV. And that became a multimillion dollar business. I think about SONAR. The original SONAR was actually using an outside vendor’s trading platform, that they never delivered to us and we decided to go create it ourselves. And so I think it’s all about taking shots on goal. And like sometimes you’re going to like probably more than half of those experiments are going to end up in some level of failure. Like it’s not going to work out. But there you only need a couple of them to be really successful. And I think if you look at successful founders or successful athletes, probably founders more so than athletes. Most of their success is in one to two things, even though they’ve done a hundred of them. Google is a great example of this. Google has started like 50 companies, but 95% of its revenue comes from its core search engine and its core advertising business, like a tiny bit of it. And that’s because that’s where you have entrepreneurship, it’s the outliers, it’s something that dominates the success of that business. And it’s true, if you go look at Truckstop’s business, the line there of your business is the load board and everything is derived, connected to that load board that drives the majority of your success. Now over time, you get the opportunity to diversify, but there’s still something core to these businesses and every business has them. And I think for FreightWaves, it was the media business early on. Now it’s the data inside of SONAR and you want to take more shots on goal because it just improves your chances of finding something that will actually become massive.

Brent – 00:51:48:

Well, man, what a great inspiration, man. Thank you so much for those words. I’ll close with this. And this is something just for you, Craig. I remember sitting with your dad outside of one of your shows a couple of years ago and he was sitting with your mom and he’s talking and he goes, I said, “Max, you got a smile on your face.” He goes, “yeah, I’m pretty happy right now. All three of my sons are prospering.” And he goes,”and I’m very proud of him.” And I said, “yeah, FreightWaves has done a great job.” He goes,” yeah, I’m really proud of what Craig has built.” And I know it takes a team, it takes everything, but it takes somebody who is willing to go out there and step out there and do it. And you did that. And it’s been an inspiration to me. And I know I’ve complimented you many times about what you’ve created because I admire it because I know how hard it is to do something like this. And to have that grit too, I’m not going to give up until it’s successful. So thank you so much for being on Freight Nation Day. I know that the watchers and listeners benefited greatly from this. So I just appreciate you taking the time and telling your story.

Craig – 00:52:42:

Brent, I really appreciate the time. Thank you for having me.

Brent – 00:52:44:

Well, it’s great being friends with you. Thank you for what you do for this industry. And Freight Nation, that’s a wrap. You got to hear it from the man himself, Craig Fuller, Mr. FreightWaves, Mr. SONAR, Mr. Whatever’s going to be next in transportation, just watch. He’ll probably think of it. So I really appreciate you being a part of Freight Nation in the podcast from Truckstop today. And as we like to say, don’t forget to work hard, be kind, and as Craig said earlier, to be humble. Thanks a lot, Freight Nation. We’ll catch you next time. On behalf of the Truckstop team, thanks for listening to this episode of Freight Nation. To find out more about the show, head to truckstop.com/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. Until then, keep on trucking and exploring the open roads with Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast.