DAT Buys Trucker Tools (with Jeff Clementz & Kary Jablonski) | Episode 275

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome to this week's episode of Freight 360 Podcast. Really excited. We've got two very special guests and some market news that was just announced this week that we're really excited to dig into, and here's some perspectives on this. Normally we cover a little bit of sports and the news with Nate and I. Nate's actually traveling this week, so we're not going to cover sports and this is the biggest thing in the industry news-wise. So there isn't really any segue into it, other than I'm just going to introduce our guests. We have the is it the former CEO of Trucker Tools now? So we have the former CEO of Trucker Tools, Kerry Jablonski, and we have the CEO of DAT, Jeff Clements, with us and we're going to be discussing the acquisition of Trucker Tools by DAT, Jeff Clements with us, and we're going to be discussing the acquisition of Trucker Tools by DAT, Jeff. Like I said, I'll let you introduce a little bit about yourself first, tell a little bit about your background and then we'll give Kerry a chance.

Speaker 2: 1:14

You bet you bet. I've been in the tech software space, mostly focused on e-commerce, marketplaces, fintech, for the past 25 years. I live in the Bay Area with my family. I've got a wife and two kids. I'm new to freight. This has been so much fun. This year coming in, it's been fun to be part of the Roper family but really just to learn everybody in this industry and I'm still on a pretty steep learning curve.

Speaker 1: 1:40

So that's a little bit about my background but it's been a really, it's been a great year. Yeah, and I got a chance to dig around a little bit and look at, I mean, you have a really impressive background, like you said. I mean going back all the way from PayPal and you're pretty instrumental at PayPal as well as developing the mobile wallet there, as well as building out most of the international growth through Australia and New Zealand. Was that right?

Speaker 2: 2:06

I think that might be a bit of an overstatement on both fronts, but we did build some order ahead capability in Australia that built into our mobile wallet and, yeah, being part of living in Australia and running the Australia and New Zealand teams down there was just an amazing experience. I loved it loved. I could still be living there if it were up to me, but we have family here in the US. We made our way back, but it was cool.

Speaker 2: 2:30

When I joined PayPal, there was 200 of us in the business, maybe three or 400 in operations, and to see it grow to 30,000 people and go all the way around the world, it was just incredible, and just incredible people that you could work with there too. So it was. It was fun to be part of it. Yeah, my wife and I actually worked there together for the entire time. We met at a startup that was in the e-commerce space before that, so we worked at two companies and and so she was on the eBay side and I was on the PayPal side. It was. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 2:58

I looked at the time frame because I was curious if you were there, cause I had looked back. I was like it was right after the eBay acquisition, kind of right away when PayPal mafia kind of stepped back. And I was going to ask you, cause I was super curious if you had any involvement or any work with some of those guys early on.

Speaker 2: 3:12

I get asked that by every single person. Um, they've become quite famous these days. Um, my first cube was actually the called the Saks box, so David Saks, former cube. So he had just left, so Elon had left, but some of them were still around, people that were in that famous picture. One of them worked for me for a little bit of time, but just what you took away from what they had to do to battle, battle fraudsters, frankly, to survive and to raise money. It was just so innovative and that culture persisted at PayPal and it was just so fun to be part of that, even though I was right after kind of that instrumental period of 99 to 2001, 2002. I joined in 2003.

Speaker 1: 3:55

Was it their entrance into the e-commerce space? Because I know it was really around the prime spot where they were actually really competing with Amazon back then and I think you had a pretty pivotal role or instrumental role related to that.

Speaker 2: 4:10

Yeah, gosh, I'm not sure when they started e-commerce. I want to say it was in the late 90s, but it could have been just after 2000, 2001. So it was 20 years into the journey. But it was a relatively small business. They were kind of figuring out the model. They had a lot of the foundation in place, but I was fortunate to be there.

Speaker 2: 4:29

And then we bought Jetcom famous acquisition for $3.3 billion brought in a tremendous amount of technology but also talent, and when you put that talent together with the scale that we had at Walmart at the right time and the investment by Walmart, it just has exploded. So I don't know the size. I have to look at their financials, but I'm sure that the e-commerce units well, more than a hundred billion dollars and it was about 6 billion at that time. So it was fun. A lot of that talent ended up on my team, which was great. And then I ended up helping to scale up our nascent marketplace and the marketplace If you go on walmartcom it's, it's everywhere.

Speaker 2: 5:05

When I, when I joined, they told me we had a marketplace and I spent two hours trying to find a marketplace item and I couldn't. Um, so it's. It's been fun to see that growth evolve? Um, but it was. I love being at Walmart. Uh, great people, great company. Um, I think that DAT thought I might've been close to the supply chain because I worked at Walmart they're so famous for it but I knew the supply chain team but I was on the e-commerce side, so I can't take any credit for that.

Speaker 1: 5:31

I mean for sure your background absolutely fits I mean, I think, and aligns with the role you're in now. I mean, from e-commerce, fighting fraud, the scale at which you were doing it and growing those things at PayPal all the way through Walmart, I mean for sure it makes it seem like you are a very good fit and kind of an obvious choice for the role you're in now.

Speaker 2: 5:48

There is and we have so much talent at our team that understands the industry. We're very customer forward and trying to understand and then carry in our team while the connections that they've built and the understanding of the industry. You know brokers, in particular, carriers, so it's just it takes a lot of listening to the team about. You know where do we go and what needs should we focus on.

Speaker 1: 6:14

But yeah, it's been fun. Yeah, and speaking of Kerry, jablonski is with us, the former CEO of Trucker Tools and now a part of the DAT team. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Speaker 3: 6:20

Yeah, thank you. So, kerry Jablonski, I am now a DAT employee. I've been with the business for a couple of days and it has already been just better than I could have even hoped for. We've had some really, really fun conversations.

Speaker 3: 6:34

My background I live in Chicago and started my career in management consulting knew very quickly. I wanted to get into the thick of things and I thought there was no more interesting place to get into growth and how you build businesses. At the time, um, when I was, when I was ready to leave consulting, then ride sharing so I joined Uber um back when it was it was a couple of thousand employees. Um, as they were just scaling across the country and the world. I was on the Southeast U S operations team to start, really focused on marketplace management how do we balance supply and demand, spend millions of dollars a week on rider and driver incentives to keep prices low at that point those sort of problems and then had the opportunity actually, just like Jeff did, to work abroad, had the opportunity to work abroad. I was primarily in Mexico City working on Latin American expansion, focused on Uber Eats and some new revenue lines that they were testing out. So that's really what introduced me to transportation and I was never actually a part of Uber Freight, but had heard a lot about it internally.

Speaker 3: 7:39

The auto acquisition back in 2016 was obviously really exciting and kicked the whole thing off, and so many of my colleagues post an IPO for Uber were leaving and a lot of folks were really interested in going deeper into the supply chain and into transportation, so that was always something I was intrigued by.

Speaker 3: 7:56

And then came back to the US after leaving Uber and had the good fortune of meeting the investors who had just bought Trucker Tools, a company named Alpine Investors, headquartered out in the Bay Area, and they have a pretty unique model where they hire folks with a couple of attributes they look for who are relatively early in their careers and then look for the right business internally within their portfolio to put them into.

Speaker 3: 8:20

And there was just a great fit between what I was interested in and excited in coming from a marketplace background at Uber and my interest in transportation and the business they just bought in Trucker Tools. They were looking to bring in COO to eventually transition into the CEO role, as the founder was planning to transition out, so the stars really aligned and I started that journey back in 2021 and essentially spent about three years scaling the team and building the business up until last week, when earlier this week actually, when we had the great fortune to be acquired by DAT- yeah, which is a it as a merger, and I'm curious the details on how you guys are defining it internally, maybe it's very kind to define it as a merger, but there are two different scales we're operating on here.

Speaker 2: 10:35

Yeah, there is. Having said that, you know, part of our culture is, you know, treating everyone, you know on the same team. And it's been just amazing, carrie, as we've met Carrie and worked with her and then yesterday even had us a mini offsite with some of the team. It's just how well everyone's working together. But in terms of the why behind this, I think everyone knows that DAT has this large broker and carrier network and our primary products that we sell in is our freight match platform as well as the IQ analytics platform, as well as the IQ analytics platform.

Speaker 2: 11:12

And when we started to meet with Carrie, she just highlighted how important visibility was to the brokers, in particular their relationships with shippers, helping in this market to build more trust. But then also the services that she's built out for the carriers the Trucker Tools team and Carrie have built out for the carriers, the Trucker Tools team and Carrier built out for the carriers and the size of that network. It really aligned with, kind of our path forward. We want to continue to provide more value to the industry, meet their needs and service them and if you take DAT scale plus the product and services that the Trucker Tools team has built, just felt like a great fit, and so how can we help them scale that out? How can we add more value to our network, and both sides of our network? So that's kind of the core of the driver there, gary, anything that I missed or that you would add?

Speaker 3: 12:08

Something I'm really excited about as well. I think, frankly, the Trucker Tools team has done really well and, as I've gotten under the hood at DAT, they are really revving up the engine on and releasing, automating a lot of those core processes. I think that's another huge opportunity for us. It's going to be realized quite quickly.

Speaker 1: 12:39

And that's the thing we use Trucker Tools. I mean, I've used it for years, I'm very familiar with it, obviously, I've been working with DAT for many years and I am curious, too, a little bit more in some of the details on like well and share for some of the audience on what some of those tools are like. You know just from an overview that Trucker Tools is providing and how and where they could possibly be integrated, or maybe what some of your thoughts are on how these will be utilized.

Speaker 3: 13:04

Yeah, so Trucker Tools. We are primarily a visibility platform for free brokerages and 3PLs. The story of the business is really interesting. We were founded back in 2013 by our two founders, prasad and Murali, who developed a mobile app for owner operators, kind of a digital assistant for them to find truck stops, way stations, truck-specific routing and that built this incredible carrier network that Jeff mentioned earlier, where we really captured a lot of eyeballs and build a lot of trust with those carriers very early on and continue to just serve us really, really well.

Speaker 3: 13:41

As we built that dense carrier network, realized there was an opportunity to connect them with brokers to just facilitate ease of doing business. And a huge opportunity at that time in kind of the mid 2010s was visibility. There were demands on brokers from shippers saying we need to know where shipments are every hour, every 15 minutes. The concepts of scorecarding were continuing to evolve. So we built a visibility platform, first through our mobile app, but now have developed a pretty robust ELD program as well, which is how we actually start all of our tracks.

Speaker 3: 14:11

We know that's a preference that a lot of brokers and now carriers also have, so visibility is really where we start. We also have a suite of capacity, tools that help brokers proactively find great fit carriers to work with and automate some of their core processes as well A little bit of a different flavor of capacity or approach to capacity than DAT. So I think there's a lot of great complimentary products we have available. And then I already mentioned the mobile app. But that really is the bread and butter of our carrier facing product our free mobile app for carriers.

Speaker 1: 14:42

I think that's also really important for us to kind of share is like what the different approaches are to the market and what Trucker Tools provides currently, what DAT provides, and then possibly how them working together. Because then I also want to segue a little bit into the two other things you said the ELD integration, which I love and definitely use. But I am curious and I think it's helpful for everyone to kind of understand, like what the Trucker Tools approach is to providing capacity to the same folks, I mean to brokers, to 3PLs to brokers, to 3PLs yeah, I can take a stab at that.

Speaker 3: 15:16

So our capacity products are trying to solve this problem for brokers. How do I spend more time every day building relationships with carriers, generating revenue for the business, building relationships with prospects, rather than clicking, typing, making calls? So a couple of core components of that. First and foremost, our carrier sourcing tool, in which we're taking the power of that massive carrier network and carrier data we have and building really rich portraits of carriers on a lane-by-lane basis so that brokers can search that and, proactively, if they've got an RFP or they've just won some contracted freight, can go out and find good fit carriers. We then have what we call our smart load board, which is really focused on carrier rep automation. So how do I think about getting loads out in front of good fit carriers five days in advance, so I'm not scrambling at the 11th hour to get a load covered, which is in a lot of places where DAT comes in. It is by far the largest load board out there. If you need to cover a load 24 hours or so out, that's where you go to post and you're going to get great fit inbounds coming in from different carriers Something that's also interesting that we have is our private load board, which is actually a private network for brokers, so they're able to we pull out the loads through our TMS integrations and then surface them to only carriers who you as the broker give quote, unquote the keys to.

Speaker 3: 18:00

We have really kind of sophisticated accessing and permissioning there too, so different carriers who you have different levels of relationships with can bid on some freight. Some can book it automatically. It's really up to you as the broker to tell us what you want and who you want to be able to see what. So I'd say just and Jeff, please jump in on the DAT side because you are the expert. And Jeff, please jump in on the DAT side because you are the expert that I hope to be very, very soon. The Trucker Tools approach to capacity is just more kind of. It's honestly a couple of days upstream of in a lot of cases when DAT actually comes into the mix and is just a great. It is the largest, most liquid marketplace for brokers to cover freight.

Speaker 1: 18:42

And that's what I would say. I was just going to say kind of to summarize what Kerry was saying. Too right, is it? Like I've always seen this as like solutions to the same problem, but different timeframes. Right, like you want to be able to source carriers for lanes that you know are coming for RFPs, that you know are there, and you want to be able to talk to lots of them, to be able to source carriers for lanes that you know are coming for RFPs, that you know are there, and you want to be able to talk to lots of them to be able to find the right fits for the right days for the right commodities with the right criteria.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Right, and that scenario, right. Like you want that data that Trucker Tools has. You want that large network. You know where these carriers have been, where they're likely to want to run. So it's giving you really good options to be able to source these and to be able to talk through them ahead of time. Right, and I think that's a really good segue into the timeframe at which I think DAT provides capacity same loads. I feel like different timeframe but, jeff, how would you define it?

Speaker 2: 19:34

That's right. I think historically we've played. We are the last minute safety net right For the industry and increasingly. Carrie mentioned one of the values of joining DAT was our focus on product innovation and what our teams have been doing and again we were doing this yesterday with Carrie and her team is really understanding what are the needs of brokers through the lifecycle of a load right, and they are different no-transcript and we're really focusing on the trust aspect of that. We're moving fraud. There's a lot of work, but how do we bring that massive trusted capacity for every, every time frame that works for brokers and works for your business, so that you can then be more efficient and go earn or, you know, sell more business right and grow your businesses. So that's our focus.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense too. Right, I've been in the industry at least long enough to remember, like before those tools were available, kerry, like basically we would go to DAT, post up all the loads for a bid, talk to as many carriers as you could. But then the problem is, like you talk to a lot of carriers that day that are like, yeah, I'm here today, but I'm here like once a month, and you're like okay, so you talk to 10 that are never going to be an option for that bid to get the one or two and it was just very time consuming and now you're able to use tools where, like again, like if you're talking to 50 carriers, there's a pretty good likelihood that a very good portion of them are going to be interested in what you've got moving in the future. So it makes that process, I feel, like so much more effective really from like two different approaches.

Speaker 1: 21:28

And, jeff, I want to give you a chance to kind of segue into and you had mentioned fraud, right, and clearly the entire industry is aware of it. I mean, we got to speak with your CEO last year and your chief security officer about a lot of the things you guys were doing leading into 2024. And I'm very curious how the years look from your perspective. Some of the things you guys have done in the past I would say probably more than a year now I just remember those were our last two conversations were roughly like fall 2023. And some of the things you guys were going to be putting in place, how has it looked and kind of, how are you guys looking at this moving forward?

Speaker 2: 22:01

Yeah, I appreciate you asking. So joined a year and a week ago, and the beauty of this industry is there's a lot of conferences, a lot of engagement points, and I couldn't meet with a person that didn't come up with two things about DAT that on their wish list. If you had a magic wand, what would we focus on? The first one was is our system availability? They said, listen, you're a critical part of our infrastructure and our business and you go down too much. And then the second one was fraud, and so I'd love to talk about both, because I would say we're a relatively large organization. We have a big product and tech team, a lot of talented people. We've put 75% of our resources into availability and to fraud, and so what are we getting for that investment? The first one is on availability. Under Satish's leadership last year, we started working to replatform and rebuild, because we looked at this infrastructure and we said, listen, there's been too much growth in this industry and our infrastructure hasn't kept up, and so that's not anyone's problem, it's our problem, but we had to bite the bullet on that. So we said we're going to do less front end feature work that you might see as a day to day customer and we're going to get this thing working well. And then Brian Gill joined us as our chief technology officer. He's now chief product and technology officer. He and the team have put in the right processes and technology to really make progress, and we shared at DatCon and it still remains true that for the past six months we're at 99.9% availability. We've had outages, but the outages that happened. They're much shorter, and so we're really happy with that. We're looking forward to retiring three of our big legacy systems next year and then what happens is more of that capacity can go into innovation to serve the industry. Like we were talking about the capacity solutions On fraud, we started this work again a couple of years ago because it's just been so acute.

Speaker 2: 24:00

Our first port of call was just starting to remove accounts that we could find that were fraudulent. We created the right heuristics. Satish may have shared with you that last year, in 2023, we removed 10,000 carriers. We've continued that, but we've seen that trail off because we are now manually vetting every single new customer that comes on our platform. So we feel like we're getting ahead of that curve. A week ago today, we launched strong authentication, biometric authentication, fingerprint face that you would use on a ton of apps today.

Speaker 1: 24:35

I was just going to ask you. I'm really curious Can you just elaborate a little bit on how that authentication is like? I mean just in layman terms, what is happening, how is that working?

Speaker 2: 24:45

And you bet. So historically, we put in two factor authentication. But that two fat one of those two factors could have been your email address. And so, as we know what fraudsters do, and they've done it for 20 years, they did it back when I was in fraud at PayPal. We were like the original fraud target because we were this new bank and everyone was, hey, digital money.

Speaker 1: 25:04

Internet money.

Speaker 2: 25:05

Well, that's what DAT we are loads, loads is money, loads are money, right? So we are the bank of this industry and when you have an email address as one of your authentication modalities, then it's easy to fish that, get those credentials, log in, imitate and then you're off to the races. So, by implementing a passwordless authentication with your face or your fingerprint that removes email from this whole situation, which is where we're heading, that will, as we get industry adoption, that will curb the phishing. And so our big push is we got it live this year. It took a huge effort. Now it's driving adoption and making everyone aware.

Speaker 2: 25:48

What we want to do is, when we have carriers adopt something like this, we want to give them credit for it. We want to put a badge in front of the brokers. We want to give them trust signals, which is a nice segue into the next big investment that we're making, which is around building out a carrier profile sharing all this information and insights that the brokers would need to make decisions. They're using and cobbling together many different tools today, but they've said to us hey, if you can put that in front of us in our workflow, that would be wonderful, and even better if I can use those profile indicators to say I want to filter out and find carriers that meet my needs and my expectation, that would be ideal. Then they went even as far, as brokers have said. If I can then post to those those carriers, that would be wonderful as well. So it's like the the brokers are telling us the roadmap and we're building all of these things. That's what we were meeting on with.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Carrying the team yesterday is to figure this out. How do I bring in this, the ELD data, into this right? How do I build up the most robust carrier profile possible? And then, how do we communicate to carriers to say this is what brokers are looking for. Market yourself, we can help you. We're a marketplace. Marketplaces are all about helping you to grow your business. So that's what we've, what we are building. What we will be incrementally launching over the first half of this year is to bring in as many of those signals as we can to help help both sides of the network grow their businesses.

Speaker 1: 27:15

I'm curious too, just a little bit more. So like is this is this in place now for carriers with some of the biometric and like replacing the multi-factor authentication? Is that going to happen across the carrier base? What's the time frame on kind of the rollout?

Speaker 2: 27:32

yeah, we, we launched it to the entire population on friday, a week ago today, um, we are just going to start the process of rolling that out and, uh, I don't have the stats. I should have them in front of me, but I know that we had, I believe, thousands of customers respond to this and start using it and obviously we onboard thousands of carriers a month. So all of those new carriers that will come on, we'll be setting up with this new strong we call it strong auth, so that's live. The new carrier profile is live. We are inserting that data into relevant places in the workflow, so it's, and we're building out various components of the website so it will consume the data that the brokers are looking to see, but we have I would say we're 50% of the data that we would like.

Speaker 2: 28:22

I think that's a rough estimate. In the profile, the filters are. Some filters are live, but we will be launching those fully and building out these additional capabilities like post to your filters, et cetera. That's all coming. So it was a big pivot to first. It took us several months this year, early in 2024, to figure out what do brokers want, what can DAT do, and then how do we then go build it and we're just in that production cycle right now.

Speaker 1: 28:51

And Kerry, I'm curious your thoughts on this too because, like ELD, integration has been a great fraud prevention tool. It's not only fantastic for visibility, obviously, it also lets you know where and what lanes would be a fit for a carrier. So it reduces the calls, the conversations with carriers that aren't a fit. But I think it really does kind of I don't know kind of meet with what Jeff is saying on what DAT is working on from that verification side. How are you guys seeing that from your team and what you can kind of bring to the table to kind of meet them or be aligned? I mean, you guys are together now. So it's funny.

Speaker 3: 29:24

I'm like in my head I still picture them as two organizations and it's like yeah, yeah, well, and I do think totally unrelated note, but that is something that we've been talking about a lot with customers this week.

Speaker 1: 29:34

We are continuing to run trucker tools as its independent brand and, as you know, kind of part of DAT, and I do think that's important to note because um, I mean, I use it and I like I listened to the interview you did um a couple days ago and I was like that was the first thing I was curious is is it going to exist as a brand? Is that going to change? And I think that's important for everybody to know.

Speaker 3: 29:57

Yeah, and the answer is it is. It is going to continue to exist, which I'm I'm really excited that the DAT team and Jeff see the value of that, because we do have such a strong brand with our brokers and especially with our carriers. Again, we've been around as a mobile app since 2013,. Um, really one of the first ones to market in this space, and it's so critical that we continue to just build that network. But back to your original question that is also somewhat related to that on the ELD side.

Speaker 3: 30:27

Yeah, so again, we started out as a mobile tracking platform and a couple of years ago we saw right after the ELD mandate came out in 2017 or 18, how critical building an ELD network would be for brokers, and that was kind of the emerging innovation really in the tracking space was how can we tap into these devices to make it easier for, ultimately, carriers to track and some more secure tracking method? So we started aggregatingD platform integrations from the big players the Motive, samsaras, geotabs of the world down to some really small independent ELD platforms, and that has been a huge focus of our business for the last couple of years. We've got a great team and what we've heard from our broker customers is we want this and we don't want to have to do this ourselves, so can you help us? So what we've done is actually take the burden off of them and we've focused on building that network for Trucker Tools as a whole. So we have what we call a one-to-many ELD network where, when you're a broker and you join our platform, you're able to take advantage of the tens of thousands of ELD carrier integrations we already have, rather than having to onboard all of those carriers yourself, which would just take a ton of time and be a bad experience for both brokers and carriers network. Now and it's actually only going to get larger as we join forces with DAT there are so many great points of integration there where we can introduce carriers even earlier in their lifecycle, right after buying an authority, essentially to integrate their ELDs with us. And not only is that just a critical part of the tracking workflow and what we do and what workers prefer, but, like you mentioned, ben, there's just a lot of opportunities there to build on that data to provide better insights to brokers about which carriers could be a good fit, but also better insights to carriers about how can you Jeff has mentioned this how can I market my services better.

Speaker 3: 32:28

I've got great tracking compliance. I'm always on time. I run these lanes. I specialize in this equipment type. How do I get that information and surface that up to to a broker? Because we hear all the time that obviously cost is massive when it comes to making a decision about which carrier partner to use. But that is not the only decision, especially in in the market we've been in over the last couple of years. So I'll pause there to share a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 32:55

Yeah, because I for sure, and I'm curious too. I'm curious on like two different fronts. Right One is I, we work with lots of trucking companies too and we talk with them and we do consult with like how do they get better lanes, with better relationships that are a better fit for their routes, that they run their front halls with their direct customers? How are they able to align things that make their businesses more profitable Right? Then, on the other side, you have the contention where, like I think there's just always been this to some degree more in like the overall environment, especially in a down market, where everybody's doing whatever they can to really kind of keep the wheels turning, keep the profit moving. So I mean there's clearly contention over rates and the transparency and what the FMCSA is doing. But even beyond that, the thing that I think most companies have missed in portraying these things is that they're to one side or the other. Like we talk a lot about, like there are so many ways that you can build relationships that work for everybody. Like, if you find the right shipper, the right broker that has the right network of carriers that align with the carriers, the carrier gets a better lane, has less dead miles, has less dwell time, the broker has less time and being able to coordinate that and then the shipper ends up with better pricing and better on time percentage and better capacity and whatever their criteria is right. Like not every carrier is created equal. Not like every broker, there are different variables that are important to different shippers. Right, and when you can align those things. Like, there are win win wins across the board when those things come together. But the industry has functioned in a way where, like, carriers are still emailing where their trucks are going to be every day or every week to brokers that are trying to sort through spreadsheets and then coordinate that back to a shipper, and it's incredibly inefficient.

Speaker 1: 34:44

And the thing that I've always thought was comical was that this information is available. One the government regulates ELDs, so every carrier has it is the first thing. The second thing is like, if they know where they're going, you know which lanes fit them. It reduces the cost of the carrier and the broker, which leads kind of into the question of like, what are some of the column hurdles or headwinds that you guys see in adoption?

Speaker 1: 35:08

Because for like, from the broker perspective, we wish that every carrier could just integrate and the fact that trucker tools. I mean, there's what 168 or 170 eld providers give or take and, like you guys have access to all of them, so there's really no technical issue on the integration piece. Right dat side has the majority of the market functioning there, so it's a massive carrier base. Trucker tours already has a massive carrier base. What do you guys see as some of the market functioning there? So it's a massive carrier base. Trucker Tours already has a massive carrier base. What do you guys see as some of the hurdles at being able to get all this information into a place where everybody's able to utilize it in a way that really does benefit everyone?

Speaker 3: 35:45

You should have been at our product session yesterday.

Speaker 3: 35:47

These are exactly the things we're discussing. So I'll start with actually to your point. There's no technical hurdle here. This is really. It's a cultural and operational effort.

Speaker 3: 36:00

Culturally, you know when the mandate came out, the backlash and how there are plenty of carriers, especially on the smaller side out there, who are reluctant to share their ELD information, and that is just a preference, and that is why mobile tracking and our text tracking will always have a place and are always going to be important parts of our tracking stack. I do think we're seeing that shift, especially in a loose market, though as the market tightens up, I do think we're going to see a little bit. This is always just kind of a delicate power balance. I think we're going to see a little bit more reluctance from carriers to participate in some of that if they don't want to. And I just think there's a lot more information now about data protection and exactly how we are protecting your identity and all of that through integration. But, to your point, we have all of the ELD providers integrated with our platform. They're great partners of ours.

Speaker 3: 36:54

It is now just a question of how do we because each carrier has control, as they should, over who gets to access the data on their specific ELD. We actually have to then go and unlock and get permissions from that carrier. We need to get their consent to integrate with them. It's not just a matter of integrating with Motive. We need to go to each individual carrier. So, as you can imagine, that takes time and that's exactly the operational process that the brokers who we work with said. We don't want to have to do this. Can you guys just do this and centralize it for us? So that is what we have a team who's running that, always experimenting on the best ways to connect with carriers. We've got really sleek, one-click integrations that make this easier than ever.

Speaker 1: 37:33

I did it last week. It for sure went super fast. I did it with a tanker carrier of ours and we integrated the ELDs because, to be honest, it was a hassle for both the dispatchers there and the drivers to accept it on the app and they're like look, we don't have an issue with it If it's just automated now. We just get the tractor numbers and then we can send the links directly to the shipper, which, hey, there are delays, they can see they can coordinate easier. Right On the app side you also run into just cell phone coverage issues, right when they might be going through a dead area and they got to turn it on. So I mean, there's a huge preference there.

Speaker 1: 38:05

The thing that I've seen or at the very least I guess my thoughts around it is that, like I think some from the driver's side, the folks that tend to want to do that profession like to be kind of free on the road, don't want the feeling of being under someone's thumb, and they want to be able to have also, just like the human ability to just make decisions and get to where they said hey, I'll get there.

Speaker 1: 38:29

When I said I would, I got to do all these things. Let me focus on driving the truck, not focusing on other things. Right, I'm curious how you guys are kind of thinking about how you're able to address this one, because I'm like I feel like it's in the trucking company's best interest and the drivers, because even when they're late, like they can receive them faster because they can go oh, this driver is going to be here before this one. Let's move this one up, and then they can either stage the load differently, they can receive faster. So I feel like it's more of a messaging hurdle than it is a practical one. I'm curious how you guys are approaching that.

Speaker 2: 39:04

I think you're right. And what we've been trying to do at DAT and I think that Carrie and team are going to accelerate, this is we used to, and I think the carrying team are going to accelerate. This is we used to. I think that really a mark of a great product in customer company is they go out, they understand what that insight is. How can I solve your problem? You're not going to solve it for everyone. You experiment and build that and once you have that, then you try to go explain that value.

Speaker 2: 39:27

What is the value for doing this and adopting ELT or something else? And we took that this year with our DAT1. We were migrating away from power. It's been going on forever. How do we sunset this?

Speaker 2: 39:38

And the key problem was to post a truck it took twice as long in DAT1 as power, and to post your load it was taking longer too. And the team said, okay, that's the thing that we're going to go figure out. And they just ran months and months of experiments. They took that time down by half from from to get it back to parity, the C-SAT, and power went up 20 or 30 points and then adoption happened and we were able to migrate off power, and so we're just trying to approach that as like how can we go and find what is the value of adopting ELD?

Speaker 2: 40:08

Find a small cohort. I don't think you need to get all 300,000 carriers overnight to switch, but if you can help explain it to a small cohort and then tell a story to others, you will build that flywheel, and I think we are in a really unique spot as a marketplace and as a software company to do that. And how do we actually add value? That just helps the whole network and the whole industry grow and that hopefully more and more loads are brokered over time and we can help everyone grow here. So that might be a little too high level. It's not specific to the ELD question, but it's kind of a framework or philosophy that we're putting in place and there's some green shoots. I wouldn't say we're done. We're not a mission accomplished here, but there's some green shoots that are cool and I think carrying our team have really adopted this. The product team there, the tech team, has really been good at this.

Speaker 1: 40:59

So we're looking forward to folding that into. I am curious too, and in a specific instance, trucker tools and you can tell me when you guys actually released this, but it's the reefer temp tracking, right? Like we do a lot of produce and it is fantastic for two ways. And again, I think this goes to that point of guess what A driver doesn't want to have to do answer the phone and check the reefer temp to read it back to the person calling them, or having to field that call in the first place, right. And I think, from the broker's point of view, we just want to make sure it's there to reduce the claim percentage and guess what.

Speaker 1: 41:31

That's a benefit for that's also a benefit to the carrier, because, I mean, this happened to us. I mean we had a couple of loads over the summer where the driver just literally missed the temp and ended up delivering a load that was frozen and like that happens, like there was an issue with it and it could have been prevented, and the carrier, at the end of the day, it went on their cargo insurance, right. And that is totally avoidable, right. And I'm curious what you guys have seen with the adoption and just how that's gone. Has it been accepted, as you would expect from the carrier perspective? Has there been pushback? How has that kind of played out?

Speaker 3: 42:04

Yeah, it has definitely been more which I would say readily accepted than when we started with ELD several years ago, and I think it's location information feels just more personal, I think, than what's the temperature in my reefer trailer to a lot of carriers, and that's probably why. So there's a lot of excitement around it, especially with some of the mandates coming from big shippers like Kroger. If you're part of our network, we need to have an integration with real-time temperature tracking information. So, again, it's interesting, it's a lot of this is also driven by, just, ultimately, customer needs for for the shipper or the receiver, but it's, it's, it's been received really well and really fits into this broader theme of how we're thinking about visibility.

Speaker 3: 42:48

It's not just oh, look, something's going. You know I need to. Just I'm tracing this guy along the map. It's actually how can we be more proactive about managing exceptions? A great example of oh shoot, the ice cream in the reefer is all melted. Now I wish we had known about that five hours ago so we could have started working on it or coming up with a contingency plan. So it's not just with the temperature tracking, but it's really across the entire suite of visibility tools and products we have. How do we think about getting that information and that data surfaced to you and really cut through the noise only when you, as a broker, need to know it, so that you can just rest assured that everything is tracking in the background, your shippers are getting updates when they need it, when loads are going really well, and then we let you know. Hey, this is one you actually want to take a look at, because there's going to be an exception here.

Speaker 1: 43:33

And I think, overall right, like it's not just the, I think, the benefit that we just kind of outlined, I think there's also like there's a lot of costs across the entire supply chain within labor doing tasks that, to be honest, like nobody wants to do. Like we train people, we hire people and as soon as they're doing this job, like they want to do the next one. It's basically this segue and it's the same thing I've heard on like related, like warehousing, when like there was pushback against the automation of warehousing and the reality is is like we were talking to people in the commercial real estate side and they're like do you know what the turnover is for warehouse workers in the United States? It's 100%. Like we literally cannot keep somebody in this job for more than a year. We have to rehire for every role all year. These aren't roles that people want. They're not cutting jobs. They're providing a solution for a job that, honestly, almost all human beings don't want to do in a lot of cases over the long run.

Speaker 1: 44:26

And again, different warehousing, different scenarios, and I don't want to paint the whole industry as if nobody enjoys doing this, but I do think when you can reduce those costs, you reduce the overall cost of the whole industry and, whether you're looking at it from the logistics point of view, just a consumer everybody that works in logistics buys these products and we all went through the huge inflationary period post-COVID. Regardless of why, anything that we can do to reduce some of these costs overall, I think is a benefit literally to the entire GDP of the country, and the more we can push these things forward, I think it's literally a win-win for almost everybody.

Speaker 2: 45:04

A hundred percent, we might be sharing that speech of yours at our next All Hands, because that is what we get up and think about every day. And I mentioned that 70% of our resources are on availability and fraud. As we start to kind of get over the hurdle on that, more and more of that will go into the innovation to drive that automation and the workflow that we hear from our broker customers. They want to reinvest that to kind of grow their business into business development. So to your point, it's not about kind of shrinking, it's about how do we actually grow in a smarter way. So we're pretty motivated to do that. There's a lot to be done to get there, but it's a fun challenge, to be honest with you.

Speaker 1: 45:43

Yeah, and I think it's a good segue too into kind of the future outlook and how are you guys looking at what's coming down the road? What are some of the long-term versus short-term aspects of what the partnership is going to look like? What can users of Trucker Tools and DAT expect over the next year or two? And again, timeframe-wise I don't want to even define it how are you guys looking at this and what are some of the things coming down the road?

Speaker 3: 46:09

Yeah, I'll start on the immediate term and the near term. It's business as usual for our customers is what we've been sharing with everyone and what we've been focused on internally. How do we continue to build the best tracking and visibility product possible? How do we deliver the best in class customer service and customer support that we've become so well known for? How do we continue to build our carrier network on board carriers via ELD? It's you know we're, we're really not. There's no background contractual consolidation happening on the on the trucker tool side right now. It's just kind of continuing to do business as usual. That said, like Jeff mentioned, we were, we had, we've already been figuring out where are these really exciting points of integration where we can add a lot of value from a data perspective, from a worker perspective, for both brokers and carriers? So that's what we're thinking through and have some exciting hypotheses on right now and are working on. What do you have to add, jeff?

Speaker 2: 47:09

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that we started with in your insight on the time sequence of finding capacity. You know, if we can, there was actually surprisingly low overlap in our carrier networks and Trucker Tools has a gigantic network. We have a large network. So if we can find a way to bring all of that capacity to brokers and we could do that at the time sequence that makes sense in their workflow, that would be outstanding. We don't have that nailed down, but it's something that we're working towards.

Speaker 2: 47:39

How do we actually build upon trucker tools visibility as a fraud mechanism and how do we build that into the DAT workflow and that data at the right points of intersection to help brokers make better decisions? I think that's going to be a big focus area for us and we think that the Trucker Tool app is fantastic. How do we introduce that to more of the DAT customers that don't have it? And if there are services that DAT has and we do have some integrations on carrier services that we can introduce to the Trucker Tools carriers, that would be ideal. So we're not trying to bite off too much because we think that on its own, the Trucker Tools product is fantastic and the best thing we can do is just introduce it to more brokers.

Speaker 2: 48:23

But those are some of the other things you would see here in the short term. More broadly speaking, what is really cool here is that, being part of Roper, we had the ability to bring trucker tools in, you know, and if there are other like services that we cannot build ourselves, that we can see. A one plus one equals three for DAT and the industry. That would be ideal as we move forward. So really appreciate Kerry seeking us out and having this conversation, because I don't think we saw all of the value, to be honest with you, two months ago when we started this.

Speaker 1: 48:56

Yeah, I mean I think there is a lot of opportunity for sure. I mean we worked with the partnership when you guys started working with LoadShore. The ability to be able to one click add, basically first position insurance to a load is fantastic because you have a load it's 250 load value and the carrier's got a hundred, but they're the right fit. You want to be able to go and solve that problem without going somewhere else, Right? And one of the other things I'm curious, or just how, how you're kind of thinking about, is like one of the biggest issues in fraud that we've run into and specifically in the down market it's gotten worse as carriers, motor carriers, and the FMCSA has basically said they can't or don't even have the authority to do anything about it. But it's the double brokering issue of either carriers giving a load to another carrier and in scenarios where, like that makes sense, they can have a leased on driver. We know then they're covered with the right insurance that our shipper requires in that situation, right.

Speaker 1: 49:52

And I'm curious because I feel like there's almost an obvious solution with the trucker tool piece, with the DAT piece, because what we really want to be able to do is it's not even necessarily preventing fraud.

Speaker 1: 50:04

I think in that case it's just we want to make sure that the company we're hiring is putting a driver on that has the criteria of the company we hire, right.

Speaker 1: 50:11

But we know there's really no physically way to prevent a carrier from giving a load to a carrier that might even be their best intention. It might be their sister's trucking company or their cousin's trucking company that's across the street that has the right truck, but maybe not necessarily we can't tell that that VIN is listed on that insurance or is on their ELD network. And I'm curious how you guys are thinking about the verification, because an adjusting time load or something I've got to move in three hours, right, it's a very different scenario than something I'm moving next week and how you guys maybe think about the way that because I feel like Trucker Tools has the ability in some ways to verify or solve that but being able to get them both at the same time when you have a short timeframe, are you guys thinking about any ways that you'll be able to use basically your marketplace, your availability and your tools to be able to verify that that asset is the asset that is picking this up?

Speaker 2: 51:07

The short answer is yes. So this is exactly what the data integration is, the very first thing that we're working on. So we are putting all of this data into the data lake and, as I mentioned earlier, this carrier profile that we are building will have all of these data elements. And again yesterday the team was discovering we actually had the same conversation on the VIN and how do we actually leverage some of the VIN insights and provide that? And if we know a carrier has five trucks and, for whatever reason, there's 20 that are being posted, how do we surface that up in a meaningful way at the right point of the broker workflow so that that conversation again, it might not be fraud.

Speaker 2: 51:46

I've worked in marketplaces long enough to realize that you need to provide information to the actors on both sides so that they can make rational decisions. And it's not a one size fits all and it's very hard to pinpoint down every single use case. But data sharing at the right element is the key. So I can't say that we have all the answers to your questions, but that is exactly what we're focused on. First, carrie, did I miss anything there?

Speaker 3: 52:13

I think that's spot on on the data integration side, and what I'd add just specifically from the trucker tool side adding this again goes back to what I was saying about proactive exception management and extending that into kind of proactive verification that what you need to happen is what is happening.

Speaker 3: 52:27

We've got a number of alerting tools already, kind of downstream right now. When you actually add a driver phone number to a load, we flag if it's a VOIP or there's an IP masking tool like a VPN, or if it's coming from an offshore data center, which also suggests like oh, actually this is not who I thought I was booking this load with. And we're adding in many more alerts and thinking through what those need to be and at what point in the broker workflow do we need to service those and how do we service those so that you're aware of exactly who you are working with. And the results we've already seen from that are really cool Real-time examples of oh, we prevented this load from being railed. Oh, wow, this is coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe. This is not the carrier. It turns out they were getting their identity stolen. Awesome examples of how this really is making a difference already.

Speaker 1: 53:17

Yeah, and we've seen that. And again, I'm not going to name who other companies are, but we've talked with companies that were using other tracking tools that were like, yeah, the load was tracking, it was going right through Tennessee and then it pinged in Yugoslavia or then it pinged in Eastern Europe and they're like wait a minute, like how in the world? And you're like, okay, clearly something's wrong. But, like you said, like in fraud and specifically in our industry, like if it's happened, like it's almost too late, right, like it's got to be at the preventative stage. And I think to your point, jeff. It's not that that transaction shouldn't have moved forward. It just needed to move forward in a way that made sense, honestly, according to what the shipper is asking for and what the parameters are for that situation. Like, hey, if that is the best fit for the load and you need to be involved, like clearly the money wasn't an issue because it happened. We just need to make sure that who is getting paid and how it's getting paid and which truck showed up had the right criteria to make sure that at the end of the day, like the load was insured Right, at the very least at the right amount, and that the driver met those criterias.

Speaker 1: 54:32

No-transcript. Admittedly, they don't have the authority to solve some of these things. They're trying to get there, but like it is going to be a long time before somebody is able to come in and address these things, and like they're rampant. I mean, whether it's you're talking to insurance companies, shippers, brokers or carriers like this I haven't. I don't think I've talked to a broker this year that hasn't at least experienced one or many of these and the same with the carriers. The carriers are getting penalized because somebody spoofs them and personates them. Then they get flagged on a carrier rating tool and then no broker wants to work with them and they were just a victim and at the end of the day they're paying that cost and those costs are enormous.

Speaker 2: 55:16

Yeah, well said, we, like I said, it's a critical priority and we're not waiting for any external party to solve this. We feel very responsible for supporting this industry and and protecting this marketplace. So that, um, I would love to say you know we would have all of this behind us at this point, but I think 2025, we're going to take a big step forward. Um, and in our part, and what we can do. I know there's a lot of parties coming together to help out.

Speaker 1: 55:44

Awesome, well, anything that either of you want to share before we kind of wrap up, anything that we missed or that you guys wanted to cover or at least mention, I would just say we went through the intros real quick.

Speaker 2: 55:57

Carrie, it's been awesome. She's going to lead Trucker Tools, but she's also going to lead our broker growth segment too. So, to your point, a lot of our questions were how do we actually help brokers, help their workflow and think about bringing these tools together? The nice thing about Carrie and her leadership is she'll be able to do that for us working across DAT and the Trucker Tools team. So I just wanted to call that out, because I think it's a great signal for DAT, but it's also good for the industry too.

Speaker 3: 56:23

Well, thank you, well, thank you. And actually what I wanted to add was just how excited I am to be part of the DAT team and how wonderful it's been to get to know Jeff and the rest of the leadership team. And now the holidays, because we're going to come out with some big stuff and have just all of 2025 to really make a splash, and I think it's going to be a great year and I'm just grateful to have the opportunity with this team.

Speaker 1: 57:00

Yeah, we're really excited, honestly, for you to be a part of the team and for this role to kind of come to fruition as well. We've been working on the training side with DAT for like I think, five or six years now, where we've been working with folks and helping train brokers and helping them utilize the tools and the things that are out there, and hopefully we're going to be able to work with you more over the next coming years. Super excited for you to be part of the team too.

Speaker 3: 57:21

Thank you, I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1: 57:24

Awesome. Well, really appreciate you both spending the time with us and being able to cover this. Thanks, ben, this is great. Thank you all right thanks a lot guys.