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. Welcome back, Freight Nation. Man, I’m so glad you get to join us again for another episode of Freight Nation, a podcast by Truckstop. We’re so thankful that we get to produce these things and bring great stories to the freight industry because, man, the freight is so full of such wonderful stories because it’s such a giant part of the United States experience and what we do and where we would be without freight. And we all kind of experienced that through the pandemic where just a few things were missing. And, man, did we appreciate all of the transportation providers in the United States. And today on the show, man, we got another great episode of Freight Nation. You’re going to get to hear from one of the largest providers in the marketplace of how freight moves in the United States and a super established company in America. And my good friend, Mr. Jay Gustafson, is joining us today. Jay, thank you so much for joining us on Freight Nation. Jay is the executive vice president of Echo Global, and so a big company, but a really personable company. And I think you’ll find that out once you hear from Jay today. So, Jay, thanks again for joining us on Freight Nation.
Jay – 00:01:22:
Yeah, thanks for having me on. And I’m excited to chat and talk a bit. About myself and Echo.
Brent – 00:01:27:
Yeah, man, I appreciate you doing that. Well, I first learned about Echo many years ago. When I first started in the industry, I looked up all the big names and everything. And I looked at this name, like Doug Waggoner. What kind of name is Doug Waggoner? I’m like, that’s a cool name. So I got to meet Doug at one of the shows and everything and realized that he’s just like everybody else. He’s got a history that got him to Echo and building those things and doing that stuff because everything builds in our marketplace. And that’s really what’ the fun parts about . So if you’re watching Freight Nation today and you’re looking to increase your career in transportation, establish a career in transportation, certainly the Echo story is one that you’re going to love to hear. And Jay’s story is a story you’re going to want to love to hear. So, Jay, what I’d like to start out with at Freight Nation is I think it’s most compelling when people hear your story because they might look at you and go, you know what? Thank you. I could do that. Sure. So when you grew up as a little boy, I’m going to guess, my guess is most little boys love trucks. Maybe you love trucks. Maybe you didn’t. Did you love trucks? And what did you think you were going to be doing? I thought I was going to be Spider-Man, by the way, when I was a little boy. What did you think you were going to be doing as you grew into adulthood?
Jay – 00:02:25:
So I’d say like before college, I always had a desire to be a chef, actually. When I was young, I was super interested in cooking. When I was in high school, I spent a period of two different summers going to a culinary institute that was based in Chicago.
Brent – 00:02:46:
You were serious about this.
Jay – 00:02:47:
I was serious about it until I learned more about just the lifestyle and the career in general as I got older and started thinking more about the future. I realized it was something I always probably would want to partake in from a hobby standpoint. But as I started getting into college, I realized it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do long term. And so when I got into college, I was always someone who I would say had a little bit of the creative spark. And so my major was creative advertising. It was a blend of traditional marketing classes and then design classes. And so that’s what I thought I was going to do after I graduated college, be in the advertising industry, come up with ad campaigns, work to sell products and ended up not going that path. I interned at an ad agency. The summer going into my junior year of college.
Brent – 00:03:43:
Where were you? Where was this?
Jay – 00:03:45:
So I went to college at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
Brent – 00:03:49:
Okay.
Jay – 00:03:50:
And I was born and raised in Chicago. And so Chicago’s got a number of the large ad agency stations here and found my way through the college intern process into one of them and got my feet wet. And similar to the restaurant or the restaurant industry. When I got a chance to look under the hood and see what the days looked like, I had another kind of realization that this isn’t what I wanted to do. And I was left in this crossroads, we’ll call it, of being towards the back half of my college career, realizing the major I had invested in wasn’t what I really was passionate about doing long-term. And being in Chicago, I coincidentally got connected with some people I went to highschool with. One of those people had worked at C.H. Robinson, left C.H. Robinson in 2003 and started their own freight brokerage, AFN, that used to be based up in Deerfield, Illinois. And so through just a random set of conversations and relationships. Got exposed to the freight brokerage industry, decided the summer going into my senior year, I would intern at AFN and quickly fell in love with the space. You made a comment in your earlier remarks around how large the transportation industry was. And that was really what excited me about the space as someone who kind of had questions about what I wanted to do long-term. This scale of the industry, the fact that every day was a little bit different, really excited me. And when I graduated college, I went back to AFN and that was really where I started my career in the transportation space.
Brent – 00:05:41:
As soon as you graduated straight to AFN, straight to jump in the middle of it and just in this crazy freight market that we all work in. It’s really funny to hear you talk about Chicago and advertising. So before Truckstop, I worked for overdrive Magazine, a media company. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in Chicago. One of my biggest customers in Chicago was International Truck and Engine Corporation, so Navistar. So I’ve been all over the city and many other customers that had advertising agencies there. So I lived in that world for a long time. And it’s a fun world, but it’s a sort of sink or swim kind of world. If the economy’s doing well, people are spending money. And if they’re not, guess what they’re not spending money on? Advertising. So it’s tough. It’s a tough marketplace. But for creatives, it’s really interesting you said that because for creatives, the advertising world is lots of fun, man, because you get to think it, build it, put it out there and see people react to it. It’s a lot of fun. So I have a question for you. Before we jump in, what you did for AFN and moving on, I heard this from Mike Rowe and the Dirty Jobs guy. “He said, take your passion. And bring it to an industry that you can create a career in.” You may love a craft or something, but you can’t make any money at it because not many people buy that. But how did you take your passion for creativity and bring that into AFN?
Jay – 00:07:00:
I think there’s two kinds of themes that I would think about to that question. One is transportation. The 3PL business is all about solving problems. And so I think that ability to look at. The way things have been done and come with creative solutions around how processes can be changed or refined. It’s always been a core part of how I’ve approached the business. And so I think that foundational creative nature kind of helps there. And then the other thing I would say is as I have grown within my career in the transportation industry, a big part of my job and a big part of building a successful business and team is the art of storytelling. The why behind certain decisions are made, why we organize or pay people a certain way. And so I think that ability to connect and think about that messaging strategy has helped me throughout my career be successful.
Brent – 00:08:03:
Yeah, that’s such a great point. Such a good point. All right, Freight Nation. That’s a big pro tip right there. So Jay, we just mentioned, figure out the why in the problem solving and you’ll bring tremendous value to whatever problem is being solved. And so super what a great point, Jay. Thank you so much for making it. So you brought your creativity, passion into AFN. And let me guess, it was just super successful from day one. It was so easy. You didn’t have to tell the Freight Nation watchers and the listeners a little bit about when you first really got that first legitimate job, what it was like.
Jay – 00:08:41:
I’ll say for me, I know a lot of people look back and probably have horror stories of their first job. I absolutely loved my first job. I started the industry as a carrier sales representative. AFN was a younger company that was in hyper growth mode at the time. And so being young, competitive, hungry, it just created a great atmosphere for me to dive in and not be treated like a 21 or 22 year old who was just out of school. The leadership at AFN did a fantastic job of training, mentoring talent and giving them exposure to opportunities. And so I was a carrier up for about 20 months and then got tapped by the owners of the company to move into a management position. And so while I’m actually one way or another managed carrier sales reps or organizations throughout my career. I actually was only a rep for about 20 months. Had some really solid success, approached the job a little bit differently, but then was able to get exposure to management, which is really where I found my passion. I always used a sports analogy, liked to be the point guard or I played lacrosse growing up. I was a goalie. I didn’t need to be a person scoring the goals. I wanted to be there too.
Brent – 00:10:14:
You were the goalie. You were having that thing, that ball slung at you at a hundred miles an hour.
Jay – 00:10:19:
Yeah, I was.
Brent – 00:10:20:
I think you’re a masochist.
Jay – 00:10:25:
Well arguably, yes. But what I will say is I’ve always really enjoyed being in this position where I can help other people succeed. I don’t necessarily need the limelight on me. And so I got to move into this management role at AFN where I managed people earlier in their career and then managed the carrier sales organization. And then a few years after I moved into that role at AFN, learned about Echo, learned about this.
Brent – 00:10:52:
Before you jump into Echo, I think this is really important. How much did your internship that you did at AFN help you when you took that first job out of college to really hit the ground running hard? Because so many people just want to stay in college or stay in whatever they’re doing and not get that sort of understanding of an industry. And then they get their first job and they want the big job, right? They want the payday behind it, but there’s always a learning curve.
Jay – 00:11:18:
No, it was tremendous.
Brent – 00:11:20:
There’s a big learning curve.
Jay – 00:11:21:
Yeah.
Brent – 00:11:21:
A really big learning curve. So how did that internship help you hit the ground? Because being a manager after 20 months, that’s not a long time.
Jay – 00:11:28:
I think the internship helped me know that I was moving into a role that I was going to really love because it gave me some hands-on exposure. I think it gave me insight into the inner workings of the industry in a way that really allowed me to hit the ground running. And to be honest, my internship was focused on supporting the top sales rep app at AON
Brent – 00:11:54:
Okay. You watched him work.
Jay – 00:11:56:
Exactly. And so to see someone who had a decade-plus of experience navigate success at a newer startup type of organization, I think it really gave me the recipe of what I needed to do to create success when I went there full-time.
Brent – 00:12:15:
Man, fantastic. All right, Freight Nation, getting experience for you to jump into something, a career, can help you launch you into it. It can also help you figure out if you don’t want to do it. Here’s a little side note, Freight Nation. This is for you too, Jay. Scott Moskrip, when he was a young undergraduate at Oregon State, spent one semester doing technology help for a local brokerage in the city where Oregon State is. So he knew just enough about brokerage. When he saw an opportunity on the internet, that’s how he came up with the idea for Trucktop because he knew a little bit about it. He was able to apply that into what you know today. It’s truckstop.com. So a little side note, those internships can be very beneficial. All right, so you got the internship, 20 months. You moved into the managerial role, which helped open your mind a little further. And then you stepped up one day, the door opened, and you started to learn about Echo. So keep us on this journey. Thank you.
Jay – 00:13:09:
Yeah, so I threw relationships again and just…
Brent – 00:13:12:
Those are important.
Jay – 00:13:13:
The 3PL community in Chicago being so tight-knit. I learned about Echo and my first five years in the space was purely focused on truckload. And I heard about this company that was growing like crazy, Echo, who was really focused on the LTL side of things. And how I ended up getting exposed to Echo from a professional standpoint is they had really built a strong foundation in the LTL space, but they realized that truckload was gonna be their growth engine into the future. And so I had the opportunity to join Echo in 2008 to be one of two individuals that essentially started the truckload division at Echo. I oversaw a carrier sales organization. I worked closely with our good friend, Noam Frankel, who oversaw more of the shipper and operations side of the business and got to come in and apply some of the best practices and fundamentals that I learned at Echo and got to start building out this carrier procurement organization within the foundation that Echo had established. And so it was a new opportunity to come in and almost start a new business within one that was already generally established. And so again, a very new opportunity, a new set of challenges and, it opened my eyes, I’ll say, and it was probably the first time this really happened to the power of technology in our industry. When I joined Echo in 08. They had essentially automated most of the aspects of the life cycle of a shipment in LTL.
Brent – 00:14:55:
Absolutely, yeah.
Jay – 00:14:56:
And so seeing all this automation and efficiency within the LTL space really got my mind spinning around how some of these same processes are applied. To the truckload arena. So it was a new way of thinking and a new type of leadership I was exposed to that really helped me as a young professional continue to evolve the way I was thinking.
Brent – 00:15:23:
Wow. What great advice. That’s such great heads up advice, man. So all right, Freight Nation, here’s another big pro tip. So Jay goes to work for Echo. Now look, Freight Nation, I hope you were paying attention. He said 2008. If you recall, Freight Nation, if you were old enough in 2008, the big thing that happened that was not good in the American marketplace called the Great Recession. So he joined a business that was growing already. Freight was growing, brokerage was growing. So first off, he joined a bigger player in the marketplace that was growing into something, into a marketplace that was growing at over 10% a year. So look for marketplaces that are growing. Second off, I hope you heard Jay say this because this was super important. He helped Echo realize where they needed to pivot to grow their business in a much larger marketplace. They were already in the LTL marketplace, but LTL is only about 10% of all the freight in the United States. Truckload is over 80. Of all the freight moves. So Jay, you’re tackling the truckload marketplace for Echo. So talk a little bit about building that out. You’re obviously building a division of the company. Talk about what were some of the first things you thought about? What were a couple, maybe the potholes you stepped in? You said, do a little less of that. And then what were some of the areas you went, oh, wow. We realized we made a good decision there.
Jay – 00:16:34:
I would say that my focus when I joined the organization was really building out the operations and the organizational structure for the split model where you’ve got one part of the organization selling to shippers and one part of the organization working with carriers. Previously with the LTL focus, it was more of a cradle to grave setup. And so having this split model with different processes and levels of collaboration was really what the initial days at Echo were focused on. So building up that model, putting the right incentives in place to align the business interest of the carrier sales representatives with the long-term success of the company, building out that carrier network. In 2008, most trucking companies didn’t know who Echo was. If they did, they thought we were only an LTL provider. So it was really about building that foundation, I’ll say in 2008, 2009, early 2010. And at that point in time, I’ll drop another pro tip for the audience. In early 2010, I loved Echo. I was really happy with the opportunity. I got tapped out of the blue by both an entrepreneur and a venture capital firm out in Boston that realized that the transportation industry was. Huge from an opportunity standpoint and ended up joining a company called Open Mile, which was really one of the first 3PLs focused on digital disruption. And the pro tip I’m going to throw out there is never leave an opportunity or never leave a job on a bad note. Obviously, I’m back at Echo now. And so when I was doing my exit interview, I actually did it with Doug Wagner at the time. And it was that he couldn’t have been more supportive and professional with the departure that was happening. I had built a good reputation, good friendships, and professional relationships at Echo and let them know I was going to do something else. And I remember one of the last things Doug said in that exit interview was who knows? Maybe we’ll end up buying OpenMile one day. And almost three years to the day, Echo acquired OpenMile. No way. And I’ve been back at Echo now since March of 2013.
Brent – 00:19:04:
Wow. Okay.
Jay – 00:19:06:
Never leave a job on a bad note because you never know who you’re going to cross paths with in the future.
Brent – 00:19:11:
Yeah. You know what? I have learned that in my 27 years in transportation. This is not an industry you burn bridges in.
Jay – 00:19:17:
No, it is not.
Brent – 00:19:18:
It has a long memory, and there’s plenty of activity out there. And if you aren’t the type of character-driven person, they’ll find somebody else. So, yeah. That’s great advice. Leave on good terms. Yes. Always on good terms. So, they bought OpenMile. You came back in 2013. And so, you talked about when you joined in 2008 about really developing best practices and systems and connection between both ends of the business so it can run more efficiently. And so, then you go to OpenMile. Spend three years there, and now you’re back.
Jay – 00:19:51:
Echo and back at Echo yep and two things happened i’d say during that three-year time period one Echo organically continued to grow out their truckload volume and so i left when up using approximate numbers i left in 2010 maybe they were moving 200 shipments a day i come back in 2013 and they’re moving 500 shipments a day so i’m doing really nicely and then when i was at open mile my entire role there as the head of operations was focused on how technology could provide a better experience for carriers shippers and employees.
Brent – 00:20:32:
you were doing that 2010 to 2013?
Jay – 00:20:34:
to 2013
Brent – 00:20:35:
You were way ahead of the curve
Jay – 00:20:37:
You’re probably seven years ahead of the curve
Brent – 00:20:39:
Yeah on the sort of digital marketplace coming forward wow yeah then not surprised that Echo saw the opportunity to acquire the knowledge base there.
Jay – 00:20:50:
So Echo saw, I think, both the knowledge base and some of the technology that was supporting it. Automation and certain processes and saw us as an attractive target. And so when I rejoined Echo in 2013, I rejoined the organization at that time as the vice president of carrier sales, stepping back into the role I had previously left at a much larger scale. And then spent the last, the next, call it six years, really focused on helping Echo claim dominance within the truckload space. We got there through process and technology. We acquired command transportation. Oh yeah, I remember. In 2015, which was an awesome event for both the company and me professionally. I essentially oversaw a large part of that, the integration of those two companies. And it was transformational, both in terms of what it did to ECHO and what it allowed me to be exposed to professionally in terms of bringing companies together from a cultural standpoint.
Brent – 00:22:01:
It was one of the hardest things to do. Yeah. The experience level you’re going to learn integrating another company into another company. My goodness. Yeah. You grow leaps and bounds. Absolutely. It was great.
Jay – 00:22:11:
In 2019, I had the foresight, I’ll say, not as humble as that can sound, that technology is going to continue to be a bigger part of the Echo story. It’s going to be a bigger part of our strategy moving forward. And I had the perspective that the functional business leaders had to run the business. And for us to be thinking about the technology strategy and all the transformation that’s going to take place while doing our day jobs was a tough challenge. And so I went to our CEO and COO at the time and proposed that we stand up a new organization within Echo that’s focused on digital transformation.
Brent – 00:22:58:
Wow. So you had a whole, wow, that’s incredible.
Jay – 00:23:01:
Yeah. So I was, I love doing the carrier sales thing. But I felt like the team underneath me had grown tremendously. And I felt like there was this opportunity at Echo that needed more focus. And so we formed this department called Marketplace Solutions. I was the SVP of Marketplace Solutions. We started building out our digital transformation strategy, working with a technology organization to apply a bit more of a business perspective on the products and prioritized, and it allowed me to step away from the day-to-day operations and focus purely on the strategy, which was, again, a rewarding and different experience than I had dealt with the previous 14, 15 years. And then when Echo was acquired by the Jordan Company in 2021, we were public, we got taken private. I then was promoted into my current role, which is EVP of brokerage operations. And essentially what we did then was we combined the capacity organization and the digital transformation organization into one. And now that’s my current scope of responsibility, working with the business from a procurement, a process and technology standpoint, as it relates to our long-term digital transformation objectives.
Brent – 00:24:35:
All right. So. EVP is a big role. You’ve got to see, you’ve been able to see a lot. In this marketplace since the beginning. When you’re building out a scaled platform, a scaled brokerage, what are some of the biggest challenges to doing that? And I want you to kind of maybe, if you come from like, give some idea on tech, on what goes on the tech side, and then maybe what goes on on the human resource side, on the people side, because there’s a balance between the two, right? No matter what happens, this is still a relationship industry. Yeah. So talk a little bit about those two things, because it’s one thing to start your own thing in your own house or your own small business, and you’ve got a few things going, and you’re just bubblegum and duct tape and everything, but it’s different. You’re now working for a very large entity, and you’re building large groups out or divisions of a company out to build new things. So talk a little bit from that aspect, because I think that’s fascinating, because not everybody gets to hear this.
Jay – 00:25:31:
Sure. I think that one of the biggest differences in a large organization versus a smaller one, and I’ll use OpenMile as an example, is as an executive, or leader at a smaller company, it’s still very, I’m not going to say it’s the best use of your time, but it’s still very easy to be ingrained in all of the action and understanding and doing all this real-time coaching with the small group of people you’re working with to help make sure that they’re doing the job the way that you would want it to be done. At scale, you can’t have those conversations. You can’t be in the action. And so process definement is critical to ensuring things move and operate the way that they should. So I’d say having very, very clear rules of engagement and process definition is critical. And I would say the recruiting and training strategy is essential to the ability to successfully scale in an organization. And so not to be generic, but those would really be the areas, I would say, that are critical in a large organization.
Brent – 00:26:52:
Walk us through building out a process, because you’re so right. If you’ve got three or four people in a room and they can bounce things off each other and they know each other, what each other are going to say and stuff. Process is not that important, but when you’ve got 300 people sitting on a floor and you’ve got new ones in all the time, you’ve got some middle people that have been there, you’ve got some people that are the big producer resources out there, and they’re all focused on their game. And you want them all to be, as we used to say when I was in the media world, singing from the same hymnal. You know, you have to have a really defined process that can be taught, right? So talk a little bit about building that out. That’s fascinating.
Jay – 00:27:28:
Well, I would say, I think about a few things. One, I would say that to really start out with that process mapping or design, I think there needs to be intimate understanding and discussions around both what a happy path looks like, but also how exceptions are managed. Our industry and the transportation of freight is ripe with exceptions. And so it can’t just be about the happy path of how things should be done. You need to identify the more likely exception scenarios and also teach and map out how those should be handled and addressed when they come up. So I think it’s really clear documentation of both happy paths and exceptions. And it’s, from our point of view, deep training on what those processes look like in almost like a crawl, walk, run kind of manner. You want to give people exposure to test data so that they can non-live shipments actually demonstrate their understanding of how something should be done when certain scenarios take place. We then allow our new reps exposure to a mentorship program where they’re working with a legacy employee who is. KPIs would say is doing the job the right way. And so they’re being exposed to all of those scenarios in a real-time, real-world kind of manner and being coached on how to handle those if they were managing that freight exclusively themselves. And when they get to a state where they’re comfortable in that environment, then it’s exposure as an individual sales or operations perspective and so it’s not rocket science, but it’s, I’d say, deep education and validation of understanding of how things should be done. And then it’s real-world exposure. This is an industry that… In academia and in the real world it can look very different. And so that real world exposure is critical to the mastering of certain activities.
Brent – 00:29:49:
Yeah, no doubt. That’s fantastic, thank you for that explanation. So I want to ask you this, when you have a lot of, you have a lot of. Resources, a lot of people, resources, full-time employees, as they’re said. All right. So I remember when I was a young salesperson, we had a CEO that was pretty crazy about what he would say, the M&Ms. He would say, how are we measuring and how are we monitoring? So when you’ve got, like I said, three or four or five people, you know every day how everyone’s doing. But when you’ve got a lot of people, like at Truckstop, we have over 100 salespeople. So we’re constantly doing this. So talk about the value of measuring and monitoring and then talk about the approach to that. How do you construct that? It really has meaning and benefit, not just to the business, but to that rep themselves that’s performing that task. I think that’s paramount to understand.
Jay – 00:30:41:
I think one of the things that is a huge benefit of being at a company like Echo is that our scale and technology gives us access to data. That allows us to make really objective observations and help coach our people to do more of what they’re doing if they’re doing the job the right way or to address certain behaviors or aspects of their operation if they’re not. And so while that small company setting does give you the ability to provide much more of that real-time feedback, it feels to me like just thinking back to the days when I was in that world, it was always very subjective. You were hearing conversations and getting involved, and we weren’t capturing the data that really allowed us to truly understand what our people do. And so I think what we’ve done effectively at Echo to help in this area is to really have established clear KPIs or key performance indicators.
Brent – 00:31:50:
I was going to say, define that for me.
Jay – 00:31:52:
Of how different parts of the job should be done at different tenure levels. And that data is used in both a carrot and a stick type of manner. We’re using it and having regular conversations with our employees to address what’s working or what’s not working. Certain metrics, we create some gamification around where there’s competition that gets created around performance. But at the end of the day, we align those metrics around the expectations and the commitments that we’ve made to the shippers and the carriers that we support. So ultimately, the user, to go back to the storytelling topic I mentioned earlier, they feel connected to why we’re asking them to do certain things or why certain expectations are in place. And it’s not because Jay is sitting in his office saying it just needs to be done this way. It’s because our clients or our carriers have certain expectations that are requiring us to adjust or establish expectations. And so we try to use that data to have very objective conversations with our people so that they can continue to grow as employees.
Brent – 00:33:15:
Yeah, no doubt. So you brought up something fulfilling the customer’s expectations. So I want to spend the next few minutes talking about that because it doesn’t matter whether you’re. 10 million in revenue or 2 billion in revenue. Fulfilling the customer expectation is the most important thing. In today’s modern brokerage, you use a high amount of technology. Combined with a high focus on relationships to fulfill these expectations. Talk a little bit about how you guys approach it today. And then about what’s it going to look like two years from now or five years from now? Because all the rumors about, oh, automation is going to make everybody, they’ll just be using robots. That’s never going to happen for free. At least you and I will probably be retired or maybe even dead by the time that happens.
Jay – 00:34:00:
But no, you’re right. I agree with that point of view.
Brent – 00:34:03:
Thank you. Talk about technology and these assisting relationships and fulfilling the customer’s expectations.
Jay – 00:34:10:
This is one of the things that I, with probably some bias, believe that Echo’s had the winning formula and more perspective on. We have a tagline that we use throughout our sales collateral, our website, and presentations that we do, which is technology at your fingertips, experts by your side.
Brent – 00:34:31:
Oh, I like that. I’m all right now.
Jay – 00:34:33:
Write it down. We really believe that this is an industry where technology and relationships working in tandem is the winning formula. And you think back to seven, eight years ago when the big VC dollars were flowing into the industry and we were all told disruption is happening and the app’s going to replace the need for a 3PL. I think what’s happened over the last seven years is proven that that is not, it’s probably not the winning formula.
Brent – 00:35:07:
I think it’s a little harder than they thought it was, Jay.
Jay – 00:35:09:
It’s a little bit harder.
Brent – 00:35:10:
A little bit harder than they thought it was.
Jay – 00:35:12:
And going back to that conversation from a few minutes ago, I think those apps were really designed for the happy path. And they didn’t think about all of the exceptions that are critical to solving in a reliable way. And so we really believe relationships and technology are going to continue being the driving force. In many ways, I’ll talk about the shipper community that we support. All of the digital transformation and technology adoption we have seen with how Echo works with shippers is being driven by customers that we’ve worked with for years now. And it’s sad we’d like to start doing things differently. We want to receive pricing through API. We want all your tracking data pushed to us in real time. They’re not going out to carriers. Or 3PLs that they don’t have relationships with and saying, give me real-time API spot rates. They’re going to the companies that they have trust and have high service levels and saying, we’d like to expand our relationship with you. And so I see the relationships opening up doors to leverage technology, which ultimately help us expand the relationship. It’s kind of like a continuous loop where you need one to have success in the other. And I think we’re going to keep riding that wave of relationships and technology being what sets us apart from our digital first competitors.
Brent – 00:36:58:
And I’ve heard this over and over. Especially after since the pandemic is that if you as a brokerage are not supplying to the shipper, the information that gives them more certainty. Then they’re going to find other providers. And you have to provide most of that in an automated format because they don’t want to talk to somebody all the time either because they’re moving goods for them. It’s just a cost. They want to minimize that cost as much as possible. On the brokerage end, you want to maximize because it’s a profit center, but for the shipper, it’s not. And so using technology to advance that is only going to give you more and more relationships with the shipper if you’re the broker. All right, now we have a couple of minutes left, but I gotta ask you a really important question. As a chef what was your favorite meal to cook? Because Freight Nation, I mean, this guy brought his culinary interest. This is a unique path here that Jay said when he was growing up. He said, I’m going to be the next Emeril Lagasse. I’m going to be the next big chef and everything. But no, things change.
Jay – 00:38:03:
And so it’s funny you mentioned Emeril Lagasse, like without a question, his old Food Network episodes where he would say, bam, you know, when I was in elementary school and junior high, that is, he got me interested in the industry. I would say this is mainly, I’ve always loved making pizza from scratch. So I like making the dough. And so I would say even thinking back to when I was in high school, I used to like to make pizza from scratch, I would say.
Brent – 00:38:32:
Hey, the Hutto’s love that too, man. Every time I make one from scratch, I always tell my kids, this is the best pizza I’ve ever had.
Jay – 00:38:39:
When I retire from the freight, my goal is to have a little pizza shop somewhere.
Brent – 00:38:43:
So let me know. I’ll come and eat your pizza. Well, so Freight Nation, what a great conversation, I hope that you took many great things away from this. I hope that you heard things like continuing to bring your passion into somewhere that you can build a career in freight transportation, certainly a place you can do that. That Jay kept solving problems. You remember that he talked about being a person that solves problems. If you solve problems, man, it’s hard not to create great success anywhere you go. And then keep your eyes open. I love what you talked about. Keeping your eyes open for the opportunity when you can advance your career. And then as with everything, man, be a person of character and never burn bridges. It’s okay to leave a business and go pursue something. Most people that you’re working for will pat you on the back and go, man, I’m all for it. Hate to lose you, but don’t burn those bridges. Jay, what a great podcast. Thank you so much for giving your wisdom and your advice and teaching new people out there how to cook up some freight.
Jay – 00:39:37:
I appreciate you having me here.
Brent – 00:39:40:
That’s been fantastic. All right, Freight Nation, I hope you took a lot away from this one. Thank you, Jay, for talking really at one of the highest levels about how to build a freight operation on the highest level. So Freight Nation, I hope that you take away that you got to hear something really special today. Jay, thank you for your generosity and your time.
Jay – 00:39:56:
Of course. Thank you.
Brent – 00:39:57:
Yeah, man. All right, Freight Nation, that’s another wrap. And as we like to say at Freight Nation, don’t forget to work hard, to always be kind, and to stay humble. All right, Freight Nation, we’ll catch you the next time. Thanks for watching and listening. 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.
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