Our Best Freight Brokerage Advice | Episode 300

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome back and happy 300 for a 360. We've made a milestone here, ben. Episode 300. I think the last big one we had was like 200 or 250. I remember, I remember Trey was on like episode 100 and then, I think, like 200 or 250. Maybe I was like on the road for Army and I cracked a white claw while we were recording. I do, yes, but it's I'm drinking water today. So no, no, no adult beverages. But anyway, man, congrats to what is this? Our sixth year? Yeah, cheers, but in as a way to give you guys what you want.

Speaker 1: 1:04

We've looked at our best content and we're going to pack a lot of it into one episode today. This is great for anyone that's new or growing or just wants to learn. We're going to go through our best advice for freight brokers in today's episode, and a lot of it. You know, if you want a deeper dive into any of these sections or specifics, there's probably a full length episode on it. So this is a great one to keep the keep the engine all tuned up and remind yourself of the little things you got to make sure you're focusing on to be successful.

Speaker 1: 1:34

But first, if you haven't, there's two hundred and ninety nine other episodes and a whole bunch of Q&A sessions and short form content. You go to the website Freight360.net or our YouTube channel and share us with your friends, leave us comments, ask your questions, sign up for the newsletter. You can check out the Freight Broker Basics course as well for an educational option for yourself or your team, and we appreciate all those of you who have been with us for many, many years. So, ben, what's going on Is it? Is it like super hot in Florida, as the whole country's in a heat wave right now, or what?

Speaker 2: 2:06

You know it's funny Like I keep seeing that on the news and like different articles, but like it's what's the temperature right now in Boca I?

Speaker 2: 2:14

think it's crazy hot. It's 89. I mean I will say this, like we were at the beach yesterday, like I think the real feel was like 103, so like it was that last week. I mean I was telling you in the last time we recorded like it's. I really notice it because I'm outside playing tennis this year, which is different than any of the other years, like playing golf. I don't notice it as much because like you get back in and out of the cart, like I feel like I can play I totally do during golf, man, but I also don't tennis, so I don't have that to relate it to.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Let's see what is the real feel right now. Yeah, I mean it feels like 89. I mean it is 89.

Speaker 1: 2:49

It feels like 98 in Orchard Park right now it's 86 degrees accurate or like actual temperature. Feels like 98. It's because it's humid. But, dude, I was outside yesterday and the day before just doing like stuff around the house, like yard work, and I showered three times yesterday and three times.

Speaker 2: 3:06

Like Florida. You know what else I've been doing that I think might help a little bit is like I've been doing the sauna a lot more, like I try to do it at least three or four days a week in the morning I do it before the cold plunge and like I do breathing exercises like in there just to get used to sitting in. Mine only goes up to like 160, but like it's making it easier to tolerate the heat other portions of the day well, I love summer heat, so bring it on.

Speaker 1: 3:33

That's what I say. Yeah, people are complaining about it. I'm like, yeah, you won't be complaining in six months when it's literally christmas, yeah, but anyway what we got, nhl has wrapped up. I think we already hit on that last week. The Florida Panthers won and then NBA wrapped up. We're recording on Monday this week, so I think it was last night. Don't follow NBA, but somebody won.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Somebody won, somebody didn't.

Speaker 1: 3:58

To all the listeners out there that follow basketball congrats if that was your team out there that follow basketball, congrats if that was your team. I'm a baseball guy and the Red Sox actually traded Rafael Devers last week to the San Francisco Giants, who then the Red Sox played the Giants and Devers hits a home run against the Red Sox. That was like some weird karma there. But outside of that man, you know, you got mini camps going on for football. I actually put on NFL Network this morning for like the first time in a couple months, just trying to get myself back into like NFL mentality. We'll see, we'll see News. I mean there's a lot of news going on in the world right now. What's going on in the freight world? Anything, nothing, nothing, I guess related, because we're just talking about off-air. I definitely want to get Sal Mercogliano back on here again soon because he had a very interesting post yesterday on Twitter about maritime trade, because he bombed.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Iran, he bombed Iran. And if they close the Hormez Strait, iran, and if they close the Hormez Strait.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Yeah, iran basically threatened to close one of the shipping passages and Sal had this post about how like fun fact, like a country does not have the authority to basically do what they were saying were saying. But I'd be curious his take on like rising conflicts in general in the Middle East, how that will impact trade as it funnels into the US and pricing and shipping delays, things like that. I'll be really curious to see. We'll try to get him on this summer at some point again and follow up on that, because that you know that could be on the horizon. But what do you got?

Speaker 2: 5:48

Two kind of related things I heard recently Somebody was talking about that and they said one if we actually were at war with Iran, like we don't have the ability to defend against, I think, supersonic rockets that go faster than the speed of sound, which Iran has technically. I think Russia has rockets that go faster than the speed of sound, which Iran has technically, I think Russia has, and maybe China, which you might know more about being in the army. But they were like yeah, like you can't defend against them in the same way that you do other types of rockets, and they were like no, you just try to take them out so they can't use them.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Yeah, let's see on the freight horizon here, let's see what we got. I haven't heard, haven't. Uh, I feel like nothing big in the freight world. I feel like it's the same stuff every week. Like you know, more companies are going bankrupt, um, tariffs, this, that and everything. But as far as like industry news, I feel like there's been nothing terribly breaking lately. I will say, excuse me, the the trends that I've seen lately, and this is just something to be vigilant of.

Speaker 1: 6:49

As you move into the busy summer months, when we have like Fourth of July coming up and people taking off and people kind of like losing their vigilance per se is the types of like fraud and cargo theft are getting very, very like they're they're getting very complex now. So, like, if there's ever a time to like double down on your standard operating procedures and your use of tools to implement safeguards, now is the time. We have a good listener question that we'll answer, that'll come out on the final mile on the next episode of that and we'll, you know, I'm sure we'll hit on some SOPs today on the episode, but I've definitely been seeing more and more of it and hearing more and more about it. So, yeah, yeah, ai. I feel like AI is like popping out left and right new new features within existing platforms and new tools out there. So outside of that, I got nothing else on news. All right, cool man.

Speaker 2: 7:55

Jump in.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Let's get into some good content today. So it's episode 300. We wanted to talk about some of the best, best advice that we've given over the years and, ironically, this goes to prove two things Number one, ai, and number two, how much content we've put out there. I was able to use AI to tell me what the best to compile a list of the best advice that we've given and it came out almost 100% accurate, which is pretty cool that you know. We've put out that much content and helped this many people. So really happy to, to to be there. But we'll go through.

Speaker 1: 8:31

There's no particular order on these, but, um, the. The first one that came up was to start with a niche and it's really a bigger picture. We've. We've used the phrase prospecting with a purpose, right, which is always like don't just, you know, when you start new as a, as a broker or in a sales role, you don't necessarily want to run with the rest of the herd and you also don't want to just do what the guy next to you is doing just because that's what he's doing, right, you want to have some intentionality behind it. You want to have some intentionality behind it, so like the three part thing that we've always said with prospecting with a purpose is like have a niche, so like go after something specific which was you know.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Pick a commodity or maybe a location of the country that has a similar, you know circumstances when it comes to their capacity, or maybe it's a specific type of equipment you want to work with, specialized open deck types of things, so you know. You see people whose email signature is like we handle full truck load, uh, ltl, air ocean expedite, final mile white glove, and it's like do you really, do you actually like? I remember the, the first brokerage I worked at. We like advertised in brochures and on our website that we did air and ocean and I was like we don't do an air and ocean. What are we talking about here? My dog's going nuts.

Speaker 2: 10:38

Yeah, I mean to that point. I think it's important that, like you make your customers aware of what things you can service for them once they are a customer. But I certainly don't think that's what you lead with, because I mean, whenever you're looking for anything, like you want somebody that's really good at what they do, not just okay at doing everything. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Think about it Like dude if you want to go buy, if you want to go buy like a high end TV, are you going to go to Walmart and ask some general associate there about a super good TV, walmart, and ask some general associate there about a super good TV, are you going to go to the Magnolia home theater section of your upscale Best Buy or a local home theater store? It's the same concept. Yeah, other, we'll move on to another one. Pick up the phone. Relationships, drive the business. Cold calls, follow-ups and regular check-ins are non-negotiable. So that's kind of a word salad there.

Speaker 1: 11:37

But I've always been of the mindset that's like a bunch of you know there's a bunch of trucks in and around my neighborhood all the time, or in my local area or city, and while I think you might be able to get a lot done and build rapport face to face, it's not a very efficient use of your time if that's the only way you're going to go about prospecting, because you can make you know you might be able to make five visits in a day.

Speaker 1: 12:09

You can make 200 phone calls in a day. Also, if you're only going to work in your area, you're limiting yourself to everywhere else in the country. Like I remember we had a girl from TIA that we coached a couple of years ago. That was like yeah, I grew up in the agricultural industry, live on a farm and there's a bunch of farms in my area. I'd love to prospect them because they're right here. I'm like that's great, I said, but don't only do that, right, because you can pick up the phone and call a farm three states away. Who's moving the exact same product in a similar cyclical nature throughout the year, right?

Speaker 2: 12:43

Yeah, and also like in any type of prospecting, like I feel like it's good to kind of like, like, have your ammunition kind of loaded before you go to shoot. I guess as a kind of an analogy, meaning like, if I'm going to go pick up the phone to the first point of like finding a niche, there is basically one opener I'm using for all of that group of prospects, right. Like if it's because this area just had a storm, like I am addressing that likely need in every call. It's a little bit different, but that's my opener, right, that's the reason I'm calling you. If you're going to bother somebody and make a cold call, you've got to get to what's in it for them as fast as possible, right. Same thing.

Speaker 2: 13:25

Like I've door knocked in lots of different things, especially early on in my sales career, and like one you learn real fast. You just start walking into businesses and you don't know who you're asking for or what you're asking about. Like it gets real awkward and uncomfortable real quick. Like you're just walking into a building and you're like um, hey, is, uh, who's in charge of shipping around here? And like the secretary's staring at you and like you feel super nervous already and it's just like you don't. You don't have a clear direction. You want to go Right. Yeah, but when you are selling like you need to lead that conversation or at least have a plan for where you want it to go.

Speaker 2: 14:00

So like, if I'm going to go knock on doors, I always like canvas by phone. First, because, one, I hopefully know who it is I'm trying to speak to before I knock on their door. For one. Two, hopefully find when a convenient time for day is to stop into is ideal. Three, if I know those two, I'm probably going to take something, because now it's very effective, like bagels, coffee, whatever, right. And it's really hard to do that if you're just knocking on random doors and then trying to figure out who you want to talk to there.

Speaker 2: 14:33

So it's like, hey, if I've got companies say there's a business park, an industrial park, a bunch of farms, whatever that are grouped close to my house, I want to hit those or my office. I'm first going to look up all the companies, then I'm going to go search LinkedIn and see if I can find who the shipping managers are. Then I'm going to go search LinkedIn and see if I can find who the shipping managers are. Then I'm going to go to Zoom info and at least get a pretty good idea of who they are, and then I'm going to call all of those companies first and see if I can speak to them. And then I'm going to make my second touch showing up in person, because now I'm going and going hey, is Jimmy around, sally, like I know who the who answered the phone when I called and I know who the guys I'm trying to reach answered the phone when I called and I know who the guy is I'm trying to reach and I can say something like yeah, I connected with him on a call last week.

Speaker 2: 15:13

He said if I was in the area I should swing by around now. Now there's a much higher likelihood I'm going to speak to them. I've got a reason to speak to them. All of that gets so much easier.

Speaker 1: 15:21

Agreed A hundred percent. So to that point it made me think to a couple of different things. So years ago I'm trying to think, when this was, when I worked at Conway, all of our sales was outside sales and it was territorial. So like it was, you know you would make calls, but like we're going, like these are basically in the LTL world. Like you know, the companies they're shipping LTL and you're either you're either trying to get more of their business or you're trying to get business from a competitor, right, so everyone knows who all the LTL players are in the in the game. So it was very much about, like you know, I can't call three states away because that's not my territory. I do want to go in person because I want to have time to sit down with this person, grab lunch with them, get them in a comfortable setting and build rapport and then we'll talk shop as you know deems necessary. But in our industry with, with brokerage, where it's not territory based, very, very different, like sky's the limit as far as like who you can prospect.

Speaker 1: 16:19

And I think about the customer visits that I've done in brokerage for full truckload. I had two that I did that were in my town a few years ago. No three, they were in the Buffalo area and they were great to build rapport. That was not the first time we talked. I didn't just cold arrive there. It was a lot of conversations beforehand and then it turned into routine visits at a couple places. Like you said, we're taking in a subplatter on Christmas time, or donuts or bagels or whatever the case might be Christmas cookies. You know, you name it.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Another one I did which is a city over which required a little bit of driving like I'm definitely planning that one out in advance because I'm wasting hours of my day round trip driving there and to, or you know, to and from. But that was more of a hey. This was actually like a um, a beverage company that did contract um brewing for different like um, like alcoholic beverages. So I did like Mike's hard lemonade, for example, and some other like basically like hey, a brewery that wants to get their beer brewed and distributed, um, that's in an area that's not where they're based out of. So like, let's say, I'm based in Rhode Island but I want to be distributing in, you know, new York and Pennsylvania. Well, I might have a contract brewery in Western New York so I can reach that.

Speaker 1: 17:40

You know wheel and spoke. So what do we do? We went and got a brief tour of the facility, sat down at the brewery there, had lunch and talked about you know big picture stuff, but also just build rapport about family life, what's going on outside of work. And those are great for two things you build rapport and you get eyes on the actual facility. You can see the issues that drivers talk about with. Yeah, that sign doesn't make sense when I turn here.

Speaker 1: 18:03

But again, like the initial conversation happened via phone and I think that you know not to like beat a dead horse here, but when we say you can make 200 phone calls a day, you can literally make 200 phone calls a day. It doesn't mean you're going to have 200 conversations that day, but it's a numbers game and it always has been in our industry and it's always going to be. That's why you see AI phone companies and phone systems that are out there now and AI this and that to try, and people are trying to find the shortcut to get you past all the nonsense of calling. That's why you had auto dialers that were around even 10, 15 years ago.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Right, trying to reduce the amount of downtime in between, but the phone is king when it comes to this. If you're going to try and hide behind your keyboard and email campaigns to get new customers, it's not going to work. I've had people that swore to me I've mastered this. It's going to work, never works. So pick up the phone. If you are close by, yeah, by all means, meet in person and definitely use meeting in person as a way to strengthen that relationship.

Speaker 2: 19:05

But the phone's huge. Well, I mean, our whole industry functions on relationships and trust. Why? Because it's a commodity business, meaning, like you can pretty much interchange a broker and a carrier and another one can perform pretty similar to the same work, Except in two instances when things don't go right and they don't get the information, or somebody just isn't paying attention and they don't know what's going on, right? So trust has a huge value in this industry and I can guarantee you don't have a relationship with anybody unless you've had a conversation with them.

Speaker 2: 19:39

Like I can't think of any example in any aspect of life where you could say you have a relationship with somebody that you haven't actually talked to. I guess maybe you could say that if you've had really in-depth conversations online about, maybe, something specific. But even in that scenario, like it's nowhere near the type of relationship you have, because and somebody was talking about this recently it's like, well, we used to talk about this a lot. It was like 90% of communication is like nonverbal. When you're like talking to somebody, it's like your gestures, your facial expressions, how you're saying, what you're saying, not just the words, right. So it's like your tone of voice, your inflections, your energy.

Speaker 2: 20:23

All of these things mean things, and when you're communicating so even when you're on the phone, you lose a lot of that, but you still have a lot of it. Now you go one step beyond that and you talk about text messages, right, or emails. You lose all of the context, all of the personality. All you're getting is the information, which leaves tons of room for error, miscommunication, misinterpretation. Somebody was talking about the other day I think it was on Joe Rogan. They said, like the most upsetting text message they pulled a lot of people was just the letter K, right, like when somebody responds K and it's mostly because everybody just runs through their head trying to think like well, what did they mean?

Speaker 2: 21:02

Are they mad at me? Are they upset? Did I say something that upset them? Why are they being so short with me? It's all because there's just a lack of context and no real anything around it.

Speaker 1: 21:12

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's funny because I, when you were talking through you, don't really know someone until you, like, get to talk with them. I had someone. I had a call with someone earlier today. It was basically like they're, they're trying to sell, we're looking to upgrade something at our company and they're trying.

Speaker 1: 21:32

We're basically like we're exploring a bunch of different options out there and I get on the phone with this girl and she's talking to me like I know her, and I'm like huh, she's like yeah, you know, we've been connected on LinkedIn for 10 years. I was like I've never talked to you before, though, and she treated it. She's like, yeah, you know like. I just wanted to say it's you know good to, you know good to talk to you again, and I was like what like? And then, like, by the end of the conversation, she's like you know what? I don't think we've actually ever talked before and I was like no, we haven't, but it's almost the way that it made me feel weird that she was treating it that way, whereas throughout the next 20 minutes, we actually did build a little rapport through conversation.

Speaker 2: 22:09

So I don't want to go on like a huge tangent, but like there's this thing I've read about it's called parasocial relationships where you hear somebody talk in their voice so much that you feel like you know them, but they don't know you, Right. So like take, for instance, like I listened to a lot of podcasts, right. So like whether it's like tim ferris or one of these guys like I've listened to probably hundreds of hours of them having in-depth conversations with people they know, so you feel like you kind of know them. That's why they're engaging, but they don't know you.

Speaker 2: 22:42

In fact, the person I was talking about this was there was a business interview with I think it was a porn star that was making like a ton of money, and she's like it is the weirdest thing ever because she's like people who come up to me in public and talk to me like they know me and she's like and also there's like stalkers and like really actually some like serious issues with that industry, I guess, and things like this. And she's like, yeah, like people see you and hear you talk so much that they feel like they know you, but like they've actually never actually had a conversation with you.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Yeah, that's wild man. Yeah, I guess, treat every conversation where it's at, and one of the next ones on our list, too, was qualify before you quote and all that.

Speaker 2: 23:23

That's a big one.

Speaker 1: 23:24

We've told the story numerous times of like 30 minutes, of like great conversation, and then you realize like they're not a decision maker, right, or they should?

Speaker 1: 23:36

one ltl a month yeah, yep, yeah, we had. I had a guy it was almost exactly that like, um, we were doing a cold calling session this is a few years back and, um, I, I did it. We're like, I'm muted, I'm just listening and I'm to give him feedback at the end and he got to the point where the guy it wasn't LTL, but the guy had like one, it was a farm and they had like one shipment that would go out of whatever their product was, like every two months or something like that, and I was like, oh my God, you just wasted like so so much time. And I was like, oh my God, you just wasted like so so much time. No, I shouldn't say wasted, but it could have been used better.

Speaker 1: 24:14

Right, like you, probably, early on, want to know what are you, know what are certain very objective facts about this shipper that are relevant to us. Right, and we talk about like we've got a list of like questions to ask on our website and like one of them is you know what methods of shipping are you are you typically doing? Is it? Is it full truckload? Do they try to partial things out? What's the frequency? Is it every day? Is it? They've got a few a week Because those matter, because if a company is moving one shipment every two months not a great use of your time.

Speaker 1: 24:51

There are plenty of customers at my brokerage where we've got brokers that are. They service a customer once every two or three months and those are great. Those are like little little pe customers that you can. You literally become part of their logistics and supply chain within their company because they're relying on you for not just capacity but also like keeping a pulse on the freight market and what's going on and trends and where things are headed and also how to handle problems when they happen, whereas like someone you deal with every two to three months, you really never have that much of a rapport. You're very replaceable, so definitely make sure you're asking the right questions.

Speaker 2: 25:36

So Well, my favorite qualifying question to this day and like there are always going to be examples outside of this, but it's a good rule of thumb and this is beating to my head at TQL was like you got to get what is their weekly full truckload volume number? Get to that question as quick as you can, because that's really your qualifying line and like the way my manager like trained me in this business explained it and it makes a lot of sense. He's like if they're not shipping about 20 to 25 truckloads a week, they probably aren't going to have too high of a need for a broker. It doesn't mean they don't, and there are plenty of examples.

Speaker 2: 26:13

I've had customers that ship 10 loads a week but they always use a broker because, like, they don't have a transportation department. So they give everything to one broker and you can make good margins because they care more about service than price. Instruction is a really good example of that. Like they're not going to have a logistics person when they got projects. They're giving everything to one guy. They want you to handle everything and everything's got to be there on time. Cost is usually second to service, right?

Speaker 1: 26:36

yeah but for most companies they're overall like price of the project. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Yeah, and they just add that on literally to the customer, pays the bill and then, like the way he explained to me was he's like because when you, when I learned the business, I covered freight right before I sold so you can understand the thing you're selling, right, you deal with the problems and that teaches you what problems you solve for your customers. And the way he described it like it makes a lot of sense. He goes well, think about it. Like, write it around 25 loads a week, how many of those trucks do you need to reschedule? If you have one customer and five loads a day, right and like, no matter how good you are at your job and how long you've worked with these carriers, things happen right, like, truck is delayed at the delivery, truck is stuck in traffic, maybe there's a breakdown, there's some issue that came up right and right around 2025, you start having enough need for recovering loads to keep them all picked up five a day that you kind of need to access the open market.

Speaker 2: 28:52

And if you're only shipping five to 10 loads a week, he's like that person can pretty much work directly with a trucking company and if they all don't need picked up on the day they're supposed to. They can just wait for that carrier to send another truck tomorrow. Like that's not a problem, they can save money and it's not too much of a headache for them to need to pay to go get trucks last minute. So like that is always the line that I kind of have in my head and like in my first conversation or two with anybody I'm trying to get that question answered. That's my qualifying line. If you're not shipping around that or more, then like, probably not that fit to be working with a brokerage. Like you can probably rely on maybe a broker here and there, but like you're not going to need the services we provide as much as a company that's shipping five to 10 loads a day because some of those trucks they scheduled just aren't going to make it. They're going to need last minute assistance. That's what we provide.

Speaker 1: 29:41

Yep, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Here's another one Carriers are your customers too, so I'm huge on this and I have met plenty of what I would consider like scummy freight brokers that don't follow. This is that you should be treating carriers with the same level of attention and respect as you do your customers, because they are just as important in my opinion. Just like you said if you have to reschedule a load because a carrier falls off, just like you said if you have to reschedule a load because the carrier falls off.

Speaker 1: 30:08

Yeah, like that tells me that you don't have a good carrier relationship with that driver or with that dispatcher. So some of my favorites are when you don't even have to think about where is my truck or what truck am I going to use for this load, because every Tuesday and every Friday Jimmy from Great Lakes Trucking is going to be hauling this load of mushrooms for me. Right, he's going to be picking it up. I'm going to definitely verify with him. Hey, you still good for that Tuesday pickup. Yep, all good, boss, sweet, awesome. You want to get to that point. That is like we had an episode we went through like the evolution of what a book of business looks like, and it starts with like, yeah, you're just cold calling and then you're, then you're working off local and you're quoting, right, and then then you got like a customer that's giving you opportunities and now you've got repeat business out of a customer and now you're, um, you've got contract business and, as that goes along, right, your relationship with carriers should also be developing. Um, you know, in synchronization with it, like when you're brand new booking your first load, you don't have any carrier relations, so so you're probably posting to DAT and calling out on some carriers, et cetera. Right, you're trying to source capacity from the open network, open market, whereas you get to the other side of that spectrum and, like you know, whether it's from just your experience or your relationships, or TMS data, like who is the best fit to haul this load from us? Right, and there's tools to help you bridge that gap. Gen logs, great example of a way to source capacity because it has a lot of the data for you. But your own TMS like hey, this guy's been running these loads and we've got a note in here that he prefers to operate in these states. Right, that stuff is key. So the same thing goes with, like you know, accessorials and fines and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 31:52

I had a dude that I had to have like a stern talking with last week. Who the driver was, let's see. Driver confirmed pickup on. I'll just make it up on Tuesday, right, customer was able to switch the appointment if needed. But the driver said, yep, I can do Tuesday, didn't show up till Wednesday. So naturally the customer docked a certain amount of money.

Speaker 1: 32:17

Well, this guy tries to make money on that and says, oh, instead of a couple hundred bucks, I'm gonna deduct two grand and it's like, no, don't do that, first of all, and this's an egregious amount, but like, second of all, you don't have any documentation that even supports that number or where it came from, other than the fact that you probably just wanted to make an extra 1500 bucks this week or whatever the case might be. But don't yeah, don't beat these guys up, um and try to make money off it. Like the same with like if a customer is paying a tonu for 200 bucks, that goes to the driver, don't pay him 100 and pocket 100 yourself. So things like that. Because when the market is super tight and you need drivers, that is when it's going to bite you in the butt if you've treated these folks like trash. So any thoughts on that one.

Speaker 2: 33:04

Other than that, I agree with it 100%. I mean, it is really simple things like they're people and you need them. We don't ship things. We coordinate with other people that do that and you should treat them exactly the way you would want to be treated. Yeah, there's a reason that's been around for thousands of years treating other people the way you want to be treated and it pays huge dividends in business. It saves time, it allows you to make more money, it allows everybody to win Like. There's so much more to be done and so much more opportunity to grow when you do things ethically and you do the hard things, even when somebody else doesn't want to like I just to me. Those are some of the things that are probably most important in this business.

Speaker 1: 33:53

There's actually there's another one on our list here that kind of ties in with it, which is to document everything. Um, so like this is huge, right, whether it's the customer side or the carrier side, documenting is, like, extremely important. So, for the example we just gave about finding a carrier, if you don't have a clear like verbiage or a rate for different things like detention, you know, layover, late, whatever the, you know, whatever the, whatever it might be right, it is very hard, um, to fight that uphill battle like I have seen people file on a broker's bond and the bond company is basically like dude, just just pay it because we're gonna, we're gonna pay it out and you're gonna pay us back.

Speaker 1: 34:40

Just pay it like we don't want to yeah deal with this because you did not have clear documentation. We don't care what your customer said, you never told the carrier this. So, same thing with your, with your customer, like, if your customer has, like, if they're just like, yeah, we're going to deduct a thousand dollars for this because it was. You know, we had a, the driver had an issue, it's like, what like? And that's a tough one. When you're done with your customer who's literally giving you the business, that's like kind of a a tough situation to navigate through. But document like times, like like when the tension comes down to, like literally like the what's the timestamp when that driver checked in and checked out, like those things really matter when it comes to you know, whether it's 50 bucks or 500 bucks or whatever. The numbers are very, very important.

Speaker 2: 35:21

Here's the thing I do want to add is I think lots of people end up in the habit where they don't put this in the TMS because they think it's in their email. Like, you really should get in the habit of uploading all that documentation to the TMS for a lot of reasons. One, everybody can see it in your company. Almost everybody works remote at some point or another and no one else in your company can see your email. Like I can't tell you how many times I've been working in a brokerage where, like we had this happen over the weekend once where, like the other owners getting phone calls from drivers, or I'm getting phone calls and we go to help and we pull up the TMS and we're like we just genuinely don't know what's going on. None of the communication that they've had is in there, the load's not updated right, none of their conversation with the dispatcher is in there. So, like when someone comes in to help, they're just literally blind and can't do anything right.

Speaker 2: 36:14

Like there's a reason all this information lives in your TMS. It's so everybody in the organization can access it. Like, again, I got into that habit because I worked at a big company. When you have after-hour support or a team that's going to work over the weekend. If it's not in there, it might as well not exist. It doesn't help anybody if it's just in your email or in your head. You need to have it in there for lots of reasons your accounting team invoicing things later. Documentation is absolutely essential. We do business in information. That's literally how we make money and create value as freight brokers is. We take information from one party and get it to another, and sometimes things don't go well. Everything that happens in between what did and what should happen needs to be written down so that somebody else can pick up where you left off.

Speaker 1: 37:02

Yep, a hundred percent. I'm like I might overdo this, but I write stuff down like locally all the time and then I make it a point to have like a shared version of those notes with anyone who has to see it. So like I'm even doing it on like the administrative side for for Pierce right now, which is like compiling like a cloud based. We've got like trackers that track certain things that are important for, like you know, 10 different people to see at any given point in time, where certain people can edit them, certain people can just see them for visibility. We've even got like um sop, like documents put together so that, like anybody at any time can access um to understand. Like one of them was actually about uh, it was about, I think it was something with ASL circles, like we just mentioned. So like, if there's like when in doubt, like reference this and this will tell you exactly how we're going to handle X, y and Z. So yeah, that's huge. Speaking of which we had one on here.

Speaker 1: 38:01

Follow the processes, stick to your SOPs. So I can't, I can't, I can't like emphasize this one enough, but like have processes in place is basic or as detailed as they, you know, needs to be able to step in and handle how your customer's billing gets done or how the customer's tendering happen, whatever, like someone should be able to see that. Also, when it comes to bigger processes that are broad, like how do we vet carriers and onboard them? Like there should be a set or a set process that's written out and when a new rep comes in and gets hired, they know that. Like, okay, we've created a list of rules that we want to check to make sure that carrier meets X, y and Z. If they don't pass this basic sniff test, we will not use them. That could be they have insurance, they have an active authority, right. You might have other ones that are subjective, like you might look at safety scores or how long have they been in service, et cetera. And then how are we going to go through the process of onboarding them? Is there a contract in place? Is there? Do we use credit applications for new shippers? Do we vet a shipper's or a motor carrier's email address to make sure that it matches the FMCSA?

Speaker 1: 39:31

Like, whatever the case might be, having processes in place like that will help you scale and not have to feel like you're carrying the weight of everything in your head on your shoulders because it's written down somewhere Right and also helps you just breathe easier knowing that, like, as long as follow these, these SOPs that I've created, that are that are time, trusted and proven, everything else is okay, right, like so, um, and we were talking early on about how, like fraud's gotten wild, like this is.

Speaker 1: 40:00

This is when I highly encourage people that if you've got high value load or maybe it's the first time with a certain motor carrier or a first time with a certain shipper and you want to make sure you're doing an exceptional job, this is when you want to look at implementing processes like tracking for the entirety of the load, using a tool like quick scope to verify a carrier's identity before they get loaded at that pickup location, using things like a walk around, right, hey, take a quick video, walk me around your truck.

Speaker 1: 40:29

I want to just want to make sure we've got everything here that looks good, we've got the right equipment, or, you know, pictures are good too. But stuff like that like I've seen the wrong size flatbed show up, I've seen the wrong type of open deck trailer, the wrong size tarps, you name it Like this stuff could have been prevented if we followed a certain set of instructions. We have a dispatching checklist on our website. It's a great one to help you remember the questions to ask. You know customer and carriers to make sure you've got the right driver in the right place at the right time with the right trucks.

Speaker 2: 40:59

I mean, not only does it prevent things from going wrong, it allows you to train new people to. I think the other thing you said which is super important is that, like, if you ever want to actually take a day off, someone else needs to be able to step in. If you don't have a process that is step-by-step for how you do what you do, nobody else can pick up where you left off because they don't know how you did. What you did right Is a huge one. And also, like you can't improve.

Speaker 2: 41:26

It is very difficult to find where something went wrong if you didn't standardize it. Like if you're just randomly looking at information about a carrier and then you get a load stolen and your boss goes well, hey, how did you miss this? You're like I don't know. Like, I looked at the carrier, it seemed fine. Well, did you look at this? Did you look at this? Well, I don't know. Maybe sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Well, that's probably why sometimes your loads don't get stolen and sometimes they do because you're not consistent with how you're verifying or vetting these things. Right, oh, my customer's only paying nine out of every 12 invoices we sent. Why? Oh, because sometimes I add the PO to the load. Sometimes I don't, sometimes I remember to put it in there, sometimes I don't, and sometimes the customer pays the bill and sometimes they don't.

Speaker 2: 42:10

Then you end up spending way more work later trying to fix the things that you didn't do consistently, because it's inherently going to create opportunities for errors or just things that are going to go wrong. And it's just like and even if you ever dream of automating anything in your business, you do the same thing with a computer, like I'm spending a ton of time training models and trying to see what work we can take off of people that they don't want to do anyway. You do the exact same thing with an llm. You train it. You need a process, you need the step by step. What happens here? Yes or no, it should do this. If this happens, then this happens right. If you can't map that out, you can't train a computer or another person to help with it at all.

Speaker 1: 42:55

Yep A hundred percent. Last big one I'm going to hit on here is know your numbers, understanding things like you know. Profit your margin, cost per load. It's not just about revenue. We have probably a handful of episodes that break down this and we've told many stories about it. But when it comes to brokering, when I look at if I'm going to hire somebody new let's say they have a book of business I have oftentimes heard people they talk about their book of business in their top line revenue. I don't care what someone's top line revenue is, I want to know what is the margin in that right.

Speaker 2: 43:35

So yeah, you know, there's a famous old story right when this business basically sells $5 bills for $2, right, you can generate a ton of sales selling a $10 bill for five bucks, but you're losing $5 every time you do it. You're like, oh my God, and that's what lots of businesses do. Right, like hey, I raised a bunch of money. We're selling a product for way less than it costs us to make it, but eventually we'll make some money down the future. Right Like that rarely ever works out. Right Like you need to know what is hitting the bottom line, not just the volume of dollars, because it costs money to process that volume of dollars through the business.

Speaker 1: 44:19

So super basic. Right, here are some basic metrics. I do this with every new rep at one month, two months and three months. I go through. I sent one out today, I go through their start date so I know how long have they been working there, how many customers have they set up, how many loads have they moved and we've invoiced, what is their total revenue, what is their total gross profit and what is their margin percentage on that business. Right, those are basic metrics.

Speaker 1: 44:46

You can get a whole. You can get way deeper and look at like what's their average and I do this on other um other reports I have is like I do a company wide and by the rep. I look at um average revenue per load, average profit per load and um I've even broken it down to like what is somebody gain or what are we making or losing per month from a rep? I like pro rata everything out, like cost of support, cost of software licenses, literally everything. You can get really granular on it if you want to, but basic numbers you need to understand, like are we making money? Is this business actually a successful business or is it not? Because I've seen people that come in and their margins are too thin, their customers are paying too slow, they have a claim that was short paid, but they're not considering that in the big picture numbers, this stuff all matters and there's a reason that when we teach the TIA students the freight brokering, like the basic lessons of freight brokering, there's an entire lesson dedicated to finance, because we become the bank of the transaction and you can find your entire company in a bad situation, if not going out of business, if you don't keep a close, you know a close read on like what is your financial wellness for the company? So some people have the whole idea of like, oh yeah, I'm going to come in really cheap, try to win this customer's business and then I'll just like slowly mark the rates up over time and it's like customers that will move to you because you're going to run for them at a loss and they don't care about service when you raise your prices. They're just going to move to the next dude that's going to do the same thing. So it's a slippery slope. But yeah, I know your numbers, I know you've, you've had.

Speaker 1: 46:36

Well, let's see, stephen had one and you you've had one. Basically, where the biggest issue going on or frustration has to do with finances, like the financial part of the business not getting a customer Right. So, like Stephen's thing was like the system was tracking some like wire fee the wrong way for like two years and they were overpaying people and like no one was even tracking it. You had one with like factoring data is coming in but not going out or vice versa. The whole thing is like behind all this hey, we find trucks for shippers is, we are the financial institution essentially that is supporting this whole supply chain. So numbers are like super important. That's why we had a guy in one of the TI cohorts that was like he was the CFO for a company. He just he wanted to learn everything else.

Speaker 2: 47:20

But, like you know, you have very important players there, so it's probably one of the most important things I think I've learned, like if I look at like just traditional schooling right, whether it was high school, through college, and like I majored in finance and accounting and minored in econ, and it's like econ has like the most practical analogies, cause you learn kind of like how markets work and they react and supply and demand. Finance teaches you how all these numbers relate and accounting really just teach you, teaches you like the format of which to learn to interpret those Right. So it's like you need to understand accounting to do finance because you don't know where what the words mean that are associated with the numbers. Right, like it's a number but like is it an expense? What kind of expense Is it like a fixed expense, a variable expense? And like to me, like anybody in this, in any business, if you want to run a business, I feel like you should at least learn like 101 finance stuff. Like you don't need a master's degree in finance to know this stuff. Most of that stuff isn't practical anyway, right, like once you get into high level finance, you're doing calculus and you're trying to predict things that like are never perfect anyway and they have very little practical examples or uses, unless you're literally working in finance.

Speaker 2: 48:39

And, like, I feel like everybody would benefit just understanding how to read a balance sheet, an income statement, and understanding how those things interact with each other. Right, like, what is an income statement? What does it tell you? What information is valuable there and how does that relate to the balance sheet, which is all the money we owe everybody and all of the assets this company has? Because, like, the interactions between the two are really useful and they tell you the health of your business. So it's like, yeah, you go to see a doctor to tell you about your health. You don't need to learn everything about medicine, but it's probably pretty good to understand how your cholesterol relates to some of these other things. And, like, some basic understanding so you can understand what they're trying to tell you.

Speaker 2: 49:23

Just because you have a CPA that runs all your books and maybe you have an accountant and a finance person, you should understand the basics. So when they're talking to you, you know what that practically means in your business. Right, we're not making enough money. Why? That answer could have a hundred different reasons, right, to know and to pinpoint to improve your business, you've got to be able to look at it like oh, it's because our variable costs are too high, it's because we spent too much money on a fixed cost. Maybe we didn't need that big of a building. We can downsize and all of a sudden become profitable.

Speaker 2: 49:58

You can't actually act on that information if you don't understand what it's telling you, and I'm sure there's tons of courses you could take. Even just buying a book like Finance for Dummies honestly would probably be a great step if you're running a business, because these are things that are so often overlooked and to your point. Like usually, if you don't understand these at all, you get to a place that is very, very bad before you realized it and you could have addressed it much sooner. Right, it's like oh my God, we can't make payroll. What happened? Oh, that is way downstream from all these decisions you could have made like months in advance that could have prevented that.

Speaker 1: 50:31

Yep, yeah, income statement's huge, like I love. I do it every month. I look at, like I'll look at a division and say, okay, I let it go top line, which is it's literally the top line, the revenue, and then all the way bottom line is the net income. That's why they call them top line and bottom line. You got like 50 other things in the middle. I just pulled up a recent one but I can see like X million dollars of revenue. That's the top line and X a hundred thousand dollars is the net income.

Speaker 1: 50:58

So after all expenses were paid, you know, we know that for every dollar that comes through in revenue, x amount of pennies is going to be the, the expected profit. And if I see that number getting too low, then I know that we're running too thin on margins somewhere or we're spending too much somewhere else. The higher it gets, the better, obviously, but it's when it gets below a certain point. So like that three to five percent is kind of like what I've always seen as like the, the benchmark, that for a brokerage, like if you look at everything, this is at scale too. So like whether you're agent-based and you're paying high commissions but have a low onboarding cost. Or if you're W-2 based and you have lower commissions but you're paying salaries and benefits and turnover on employees that don't produce anything.

Speaker 1: 51:44

If you can get to that like three to 5%, and that's a monthly return on your money, like you annualize that, that will tell you if you're a successful business long-term. If your company is doing what does that annualize at Like somewhere in a 30 to 50% range versus putting your money in a CD right? That's why we run businesses and put all of our blood, sweat and tears into it is to provide jobs, service people and ultimately it's going to create profits. So good stuff, man. Any other extras you want to sprinkle in?

Speaker 2: 52:15

A 5% monthly return when annualized is approximately 80%, it's a pretty big number. Yeah, there you go. Well, that's probably saying 5%, is that?

Speaker 1: 52:24

compounded, because we're not it's compounding, yeah, yeah. Well, this wouldn't be compounded though. Yeah, there you go. Well, that's probably saying 5%.

Speaker 2: 52:28

Is that compounded? It's compounding.

Speaker 1: 52:29

Yeah, yeah Well. This wouldn't be compounded though. Yeah Well, I guess it would just be 5% times 12 if it's a 30 month rolling thing, which would be 60%. So still good, right, like, if you're three to 5%, that's really good return on your money. But you got to have money coming in the door to make money on. So that's where sales and growing your business comes from or comes into play, which is where all of our other tactics and tips come in. So pick up the phone, go out there and make an extra 10 calls today that you wouldn't have otherwise made. This is a numbers game, ultimately. So if you're, if you are new to brokering, definitely understand that you will not succeed by just sending emails. You will not succeed if you make five calls a day, you will put in a large volume of phone calls. So get used to that and it becomes second nature to you, sweet man. Well, I look forward to the next 100 episodes. Go to 400. It's good. Glad to see that we got that much content out there.

Speaker 1: 53:29

I wonder how many gigabytes on the internet servers we're taking up these days.

Speaker 2: 53:34

When did we start this 2000? You started in 19.

Speaker 1: 53:37

First episode went out September of 2019. And I 2020, started doing it rebranded to Freight360, and it's been great. Since we brought Stephen on in 2023, the freight intern, We've done a mix of doing things ourselves internally and outsourcing it, and we've found some ways that work and some ways that don't work. But yeah, just like growing a brokerage man, like it's the long game, right, so you got to play with the big picture in mind.

Speaker 2: 54:15

Good stuff, that's wild to think what's that? I've been doing this for five years now.

Speaker 1: 54:21

Mm-hmm, wild, wild. Well, cool man, we'll put a bow on it with that. Final thoughts on episode 300.

Speaker 2: 54:30

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

Speaker 1: 54:34

And until next time go Bills.