Should You Be A Freight Broker In 2026? | Episode 331

SPEAKER_01: 0:19

Should you be a freight broker in 2026? Well, that's what we're going to break down today. In this episode, and make sure to follow all the way to the end as we bring it all together, but we break down where the market is right now, where it's heading, where it used to be years ago, a lot of the different challenges that folks are facing these days. And it's one of the most common questions we get for people that are considering getting into the business. So make sure to follow, like listen through the entire episode. If you're brand new, we've got a ton of other content too. Check it out at freight360.net. Um, you know, make sure to share us with your friends, leave that comment, ask us your questions. And uh we've got the Freight Broker Basics course on the website as well. If you're looking for an educational option, Ben, what are your thoughts on the episode that we just wrapped up?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01

Just super excited to get this one out because I think we've covered some of the most interesting changes that have occurred in the past five, six years. So this is definitely a great one to bookmark.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11

All righty, let's get into it. Hey guys, today's episode is brought to you by Ascend TMS. If you're getting started in brokerage or considering a new software system for your brokerage, make sure to give Ascend a uh check it out for sure. If you use the promo code in the description box, you'll get 90 days of their full premium version for free. We recommend it. We've used it, we recommend it to our clients. Give it a uh a test and uh let us know what you think. And if you got feedback on uh on their features or any requested updates, let us know and we'll push them in the right direction. Ben, how are we doing today?

SPEAKER_00: 1:47

Man, hey, are your kids off school today?

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

Like President's Day break. I remember when I was a kid and like spring break was two weeks, and now for Easter, it's one week in like Easter time and one week in February.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

So wait, so your kids are off all week? Mine are just off today.

SPEAKER_01: 2:02

Yeah, they're off all week, the whole week, every year.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

Because I didn't know I'm like, why are they not off Monday? It would have been a three-day weekend. So, like they had Monday was the holiday, right? And they're off today. I it just anyway, it doesn't make any sense to me.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18

You guys how's the weather? Are you guys warming up?

SPEAKER_00: 2:21

Oh, yeah, it's nice. Supposed to get a little chilly next week, but we're back into like normal weather again.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25

Good, good, good, good. Yeah, it's thawed out this week in uh Buffalo. The uh two-inch layer of snow and ice on my driveway is gone. I can see my driveway again, so things are good. Um in the news, I think the biggest thing that I saw while doing our newsletter in the last week or so was the um, did you see like the the DOT's non-domiciled CDL? Like they kind of they kind of put out like an almost final rule, like rule or guidance on it, and it's really cracking down on um the the basically the the drivers that are truly illegal and revoking uh they're basically cracking down on much of like a bunch of the CDL mills, and um, but it sounds like they're they're giving these carriers a chance to reapply and recertify their fleet of drivers the correct way. But that's like the biggest one that I saw lately. I don't know if you saw anything else in the news outside of like the market doing what the market's doing.

SPEAKER_00: 3:32

I haven't gotten any specifics on that. Like, I'm kind of reading, like you said, like anecdotes, people talking about it, like, you know, how much capacity will be affected if you know Illinois' CDL and California CDL programs alone were decertified. Then it's like the current administration pursues more efforts to ban uh illegal migrant truck drivers. And then I've seen another one I noted it was like federal regulators are escalating their crackdown on domiciled CDLs, warning Illinois could lose its$128 million in highway funding. But beyond like we're doing more, I haven't read any specifics on how or what's changing. I guess maybe there's more enforcement. I'm not really sure. I couldn't find anything other than like the general tone of like, we'll do more about this. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 4:20

Yeah. I know that like with uh like I know Highway put out this non-domicile CDL rule a couple months ago, recommended all their customers turn it on. Um, even us at Pierce, like we put out a memo yesterday to our company, like we're we're going to monitor how the industry is treating that situation and reevaluate it um in the near future, but um it's still a it's still a failing criteria for us that would require like a manual review. So um in the market, I found this interesting. This was yesterday I read this article about the rates and freight volume. So like rates are up, as we know, they're up like not just a little bit, but quite a bit. Like we're talking 20, 30 percent in some areas, um versus like a year ago, and even versus like four months ago. But the cas index, which is a good indicator of like outbound shipment volumes, the cas index is down. Um and a lot of that is probably tariff related, but we're at 2009 levels, and that so that's like you know, think back to like the Great Recession era or just post-great recession era. And um, you would think that those two would correlate the other way, right? Like if rates are up, you would assume shipment volumes are up and it's tight capacity, but it's just capacity has reduced from a lot of the enforcement. And like we talked with Dean a couple weeks ago about folks just leaving the industry, going to India, not coming back. Um so rates are up, but the volumes have actually slightly ticked downward. And they they took they took COVID out of the equation just to not make it totally skew um the numbers from that period of time. Um, but yeah, it's interesting to see that like it's a good indicator overall for for driver pay and for you know brokerage if you are building up your business now. So like if you know if you start to grow this year and if volumes increase because of any factor in the economy, right? It could be interest rates going down, it could be um tariffs being repealed, um, whatever might give us that boost on the shipment volume side. If we're already seeing rates go up on the carrier side, um without more volume of freight moving, um, it could be a very, very uh fruitful 2026 for brokers and carriers alike.

SPEAKER_00: 6:53

So I I posted uh I reposted a really good breakdown of this on LinkedIn. Um, and what they did was they compared basically non-compliant carriers, right? The ones that we're getting rid of, whether it's the ELDs or whatever falls under that bucket versus compliant ones. And they broke the math down and they showed like the incentive to be non-compliant, and it's it was pretty shocking. Like I've tried to do ballpark math on this because it's really hard to figure out what they're manipulating and how and who to get a general sense, but this is a pretty good one. It was like a compliant fleet, 2,000 to 2,500 miles per week at$2.30 a mile. Okay. They're losing about$1,000 a month per truck.

SPEAKER_01: 7:39

It says a non-compliant based on like average overhead and cost to operate.

SPEAKER_00: 7:43

Correct. Yeah. Now, non-compliant fleet, and they do have in parentheses, they specifically focused on tampered ELDs, so not driving legitimate hours of service. Those drivers are doing four to five thousand miles a week at only a dollar eighty a mile. Okay. So this speaks to the other side on the rate of what we'd seen for the past few years, right? They're profiting$2,000 per truck per month. So compliant losing a grand on average per truck at$230 a mile, non-compliant driving as many hours as you can, they're doing it for$1.80 a mile, right? 50 cents less per mile, and they're making three times$3,000 more than the ones that are our compliant, right? Wow. Double the miles, 22% lower cost per mile, right? And it says, and the cost to cheat,$30 a week for an ELD editing service that will erase driver hours overnight. And it it it says basically it's like for a fake ELD software that will like it's like$30 a week. So now so$30 in gets you$2,000 out, right? And and it points out, right, like when the return on investment for fraud is 16x, you don't have a safety problem. You have a market structure problem, right? Yeah. And it really is the point that we've been talking about for a long time is that like the financial incentive is so large to basically cheat the system that one, more people are going to do it just from the money side. And the other side, when you have a market, right, which is kind of circular logic, one where like you have depressed rates because of massive influx of carriers, right? Due to COVID and them not rolling back any of this stuff, you just exacerbate that problem, right? More people make less rates on the driver and carrier side, right? Well, as there's less ability to make money legitimately, more people will find illegitimate ways to survive. And then when you make even more money cheating the system than you would have doing it legitimately, you then have more and more people doing this until you have rates depressed more and more for longer periods of time, which is exactly what we saw. Like in the 40-some years the industry's functioned this way as a free market, this is three and a half to four years where we've never seen this. It doesn't make any economic sense to your point that freight volumes have decreased, right? And rates have gone down, but they've never come back up. And it's cheaper to go to the spot market than the contract market, which is the opposite of what should happen, right? Well, now seeing that we talked with Dean about it, where like the curve is gonna go back to where it should be, meaning like it should cost you more money to get a truck today than for me to give a carrier this load every Wednesday, every single week.

SPEAKER_01: 10:25

Yeah, so it's so current, this is gonna be uh national van rates, I'll give you for example, and then I'll go through reefer and flatbed. But if I do um I'll do broker spot with fuel and then shipper contract with fuel. So broker spot is up to 243 a mile this month, and if you go back three months, it was 209. So you're talking like what is that, 34 cents up and shipper spot is 252, so it's still a little bit higher, but it was 245 three months ago. So shipper contract has only gone up by seven cents versus 34 cents on the spot market. So they are very, very close now. Um, I had a uh group that I was talking with last week, I think, and they're taking a beating right now on one of their customers because the they took as a broker, they took a contract rate for I think it was a year for a customer, and they're booking spot market trucks and they're like, we can't wait until like I think it's another month before the contract renews and they can rebid because they're like, We're getting we're getting killed right now. Like they felt it the last they started feeling it like November, December, and then like it's just been exacerbated since. But like that is one of the risks of uh contracting long-term rates with a customer in a market. Because a lot, a lot of people, let's be honest, they probably thought, like, yeah, it's been steady for years, it's probably going to be steady for years. Let's get the volume, and you know, we'll just make the money in a volume uh mentality. Um whereas like, well, sometimes if the dice roll a certain way and the rates tick up, like we you and I have talked about this when trying to project rates out over a period of time. Um, you kind of got to find that you know that balance. Um on the reefer side, um, it's flip-flopped officially. So spot rate flipped 292 spot rate, 285 contract. So it was just dead even in January, but it is officially um uh spot rates are higher than contract rates now for your reefers. And if you look at flat eds, um contract is still higher, they've kind of almost gone in line with one another. Um, 270 spot rate for flat ed, 314 contract. So Dean was the one that projected it. Reefer produce season coming up. It's gonna be a wild one this year, and we are just getting, we're just about to get into it. We haven't even hit peak produce season in the U.S. yet. We're still dealing with a lot of the imported stuff through the cross-border areas in Mexico to the U.S. Just wait until you know March, April, May. It's gonna be uh it's gonna be something. So we'll see.

SPEAKER_00: 13:42

This is a perfect segue, right? Perfect segue into should you start a brokerage, right? Or we can even make it general, like should you get into the transportation industry or stay into it in 2026, right? And what we just outlined is what I would say is like the biggest reason why this is the best year, and at the very least, past five years. Oh, yeah. Get into the industry, get back into the industry.

SPEAKER_01: 14:05

I mean, maybe 2021 if you're to go forward. Like, yeah, yeah. That was like that was like the tail end of like everyone's making money hand over fist. But yeah, correct. Generally speaking, in the last five years, this is arguably going to be one of the best, and it's not even close compared to what we saw the last four, three, four years. So um, but yeah, should you? Because we get the question a lot. Our Facebook group has, I looked at it last night, 103 and change thousand members in it. All right. And that is with us blocking people that don't answer our basic vetting question. So we don't have bots in there, we don't have um, you know, people spamming with the crypto bros and give me your dope logo. Like we have legitimate, good, moderated, as best as you can moderate 100,000 people, right? Um, we got a really good group in there. And a lot of the questions I was looking at last night were people that were new and had very basic questions, and just you know, the the one-on-one level stuff that we talk about oftentimes on our show and in our content. And it's kind of refreshing to see those questions because a lot of times in the past, people's questions were just like, I'm having a tough time getting new business, and you know, you got carriers complaining that rates are bad and the broker carrier, everyone hates each other, debate, and you've actually got people asking legit questions, wanting to get involved in the industry now. So is 2026 a good year to get into it, or should you stay in it? We're gonna break it all down and kind of give you our thoughts on what's going on in the market, what you know, what things you could look at. Because depending on what market you're in and what you know part of that market cycle you're in, the opportunities, the problems, the situations you're gonna deal with are gonna be very, very different. So um, if you're to take a look at it right now, we're in the middle of February of 2026, what's kind of like your overall take on the momentum, or kind of how would you how would you explain it to somebody?

SPEAKER_00: 17:17

Well, I think it's positive. And before I would explain why I think that's true now, I want to explain for everybody like fundamentally how our industry works so they have a context, right? So the one thing that I think is very different about our industry is like there are lots of jobs, right, as brokers or providers or suppliers of other commodities, right? That all lots of things we buy, whether it's coffee, stocks, all kinds of things that are commodities, right? Pork bellies, aluminum, all these things, right? But what's very different, I think, about our industry is one, it's the sale, right? Or what is known as sales in freight brokerage, right? Which is in lots of other sales jobs. And I've worked in lots of other industries, coached lots, consulted in lots of different, worked in them. But in a lot of other ones, your sales cycle is I meet you, I build rapport, I find a need, I show you that I can provide value that will make that need right either go away or lessen or do something faster, cheaper, more effective, or more efficient. Then when you make the decision, you buy said product for some period of time, I take money, you get the product, then it works, and then we service that product. Hopefully it does what it's supposed to, right? In our job, right, it's very different, a sense that like there is no finish line. So like I've got to go through to get you trust before you're willing to work with me, right? Then when we get onboarded and we're working together, we continue building trust to be able to do more business and help each other more, right? Is like the first thing that is different. The second thing that I would say is very different is almost every shipper, for sure, in this era, pre-COVID, a little different. Post-COVID, since every shipper couldn't find trucks for a couple years, every one of them has worked with a broker that was in existence five years ago. They've had brokers, they probably do work with brokers. So when you're approaching a shipper to do business with them as a new broker or an existing broker and a new relationship, like they already have somebody. They already have brokers that they've trusted. They have brokers they've worked with mostly for probably a few years, right? So when things aren't changing and rates are stagnant and there's plenty of trucks, the shipper has no incentive to bring on another broker in most cases because like everything's going fine. Yeah. No problems. Like, hey, trucks are showing up, rates are good. There's some issues here and there, maybe some better communication, maybe a little cheaper of a truck. I can save some money. But like those are pretty much the only things that really get you in the door in a flat rate market for as long as it's been, right? The second thing is what it's always looked like is it's cycled between very hard to find a truck, which is tight market to loose market, roughly every 14 to 18 months for 40 years.

SPEAKER_01: 20:11

So even when it was like with a very few amount of exceptions to that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:15

Correct. Now, when you look back over a very long period, right? Like, okay, it's really easy to find a truck, but you know, eventually in the next few months or year, it'll get hard again. So that'll open the door for shippers to evaluate new brokers, then it gets easier, and then the whole thing just circles, right? So the past few years, it's really hard to find a shipper that had a need that isn't just onboarding you to get a little bit of a better price, maybe a little better service. However, when the market changes, and that is the thing that I think is most important, right? Volatility fluctuations, meaning like it's easy to get a truck, then it's really hard to get a truck. Or I can still get a truck, but I've been paying$4,000 for this same lane for three years. Now it's$5,500. Shippers and their bosses and their CFOs and the people looking at the how much money they spend versus are their loads picking up on time, are going, these numbers are not looking good, guys. So the people we do business with getting loads from solving problems, their supervisors, bosses, and managers are going, like, why is our budget getting so much more expensive? We expected to spend$5,000 a load all year long on this lane. You're spending 50% more in some cases this week. What's going on? So now you have pressure on the decision makers to get better rates, right? And also the other side of that coin is the incumbents, the brokers that have already been working with that shipper for three years, right? You pointed out a great example. They have dedicated rates, call it for a year. So they might have done this, done this bid for 2026. Say it's the first quarter of 26. They submitted those rates in like September, October when rates were still flat. So those brokers are now looking at shippers that are going, hey, you got to hold this rate at five grand. And they're losing$1,000 on every shipment because the rates have gone up and the broker doesn't want to basically pull away from that shipper. So brokers will hold the lower rate as long as they can and literally lose money until they can't lose money anymore. But as rates go up, right, the current brokers working with the company you're calling to do business with, little by little are going to start having service issues because their bosses at the broker is going, dude, you cannot lose another$1,500 on these three loads today. Like you've got to do better, or you're going to have to start giving these loads back to the shipper, right? So as rates go up, the shippers that are working with brokers that they have been, they start getting loads handed back to them. And they're just going, like, I can't cover this. Like, I can't lose money on three of these today. I'll take one at a loss, but you're going to have to find another truck or another broker for the other two. Then that company you're prospecting that has told you for the past year, we don't need help, everything's great. All of a sudden you're going to start seeing an email come in your inbox. You go, who's this from? And you're like, wait a minute. I talked to that guy like six weeks ago. I must have talked to him 10 times last year. He told me everything's fine. They don't have any problems this year. Now he's emailing me two, three loads a week, going like, can you help with this? Can you pick this one up today? That is that indicator, right, that the door is opening to new business. And the more rates go up and capacity. Gets smaller, even if the load volume hasn't gone up, right? Like more and more doors will open when you're prospecting to get new business, to get in the door, to show either better service, better rates, or both, right? So for me, like the overall landscape of the industry has just improved significantly for brokers. And we covered a moment ago, it's also improving for carriers, because one of the reasons why legitimate carriers weren't making even enough money to stay in business was because they were being undercut by people cheating the system, driving unsafely, manipulating hours of service, doing everything the government said you're not allowed to do because they got away with it. So just like we always talk about, supply and demand is what determines what you pay for something. How much freight needs moved out of that city to this city today, and how many trucks are there that meet those requirements that are willing to do that, right? As there's less trucks and the same number of shipments, rate goes up. And if more shipments start coming along this year, meaning the economy does better and there's less trucks, it's gonna put even more upward pressure on rates.

SPEAKER_01: 26:08

Agreed. Now, um, I wanna I wanna compare the landscape outside of rates this year versus let's say two, three years ago, right? So something that's been very new and introduced into our industry in the last few years has been the I'll say fraud in general, but the types of fraud that we're seeing and how how advanced and intricate um the bad actors are getting, right? Because if you go back, you know, five years ago when the market was hot and everyone's making money, you didn't really have to commit aggressive levels of fraud to get in on it and and kind of skim off the top. All you had to do was literally skim off the top and double broker, and people didn't have the technology and software out there to really um predict this kind of activity. It was pretty much like, hey, because rates were so high and all of what do you get?

SPEAKER_00: 27:09

Pause there. Because I wanted you to pause on that one point because I don't think people talk about this enough. Not only is what you said, I think, true, but the other thing is there's been this huge push to automation, right? There's been this huge push to do more with less. We'll use this tool so that you don't have to have as many people. Well, as you automate more things, your cost goes down, but your visibility and oversight also goes down. So you have less human beings that are trained to look at these things. And when you automate it, you have more vulnerabilities for criminals and fraud to grab information in the middle and then run with it and steal it, right? Which I think is the other thing that's coupled exactly with what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01: 27:51

So yeah, so I mean, that's a great point. And I'll I'll I'll make sure I hit on that. So the if you go back like five years, I remember um like the skimming off the top thing, like that, I mean, that's happened for decades, right? And we usually just never caught it. So it would be it would be something like this. I book a truck and I'm gonna let's say my customer's paying me five grand for a um you know, a long haul run and I book a truck for 4200 bucks. All right, I'm just making this up. Um when I'm not thinking about fraud, and you know, I'm vetting this carrier by just I would at the time we're probably checking like, do they have insurance? Cool. Just do they have insurance? I'm not even checking like Vin level did. Do they have insurance? Cool, all right. Um, do they have an authority? Cool, all right. What are their safety stats show for the CSA scores from FMCSA? All right, cool, they're good. I give it to this guy for 4200, he resells it for 4100 immediately to somebody else and gives me updates the whole time. I'm just, you know, text message or email, little check call updates, whatever, load gets delivered, customers happy, I'm happy. The guy who skimmed off the top made a hundred bucks for like literally doing almost nothing. He's happy, he does that 20 times a day. And that's what we used to see.

SPEAKER_00: 29:11

And that used to not even be a problem because everyone thinks that you don't even know, right?

SPEAKER_01: 29:15

You wouldn't know that was happening most of the time.

SPEAKER_00: 29:17

And it wasn't even people that were like trying to be bad actors. Sometimes it's like, hey, I got a trucking company and you got one, and your office is literally next to mine, and we use the same yard. And I got a driver.

SPEAKER_01: 29:29

No, I don't.

SPEAKER_00: 29:29

Yeah, my my driver's sick today, called off, something happened, and you're literally having coffee with me in the morning. Go, dude, I my driver that was supposed to run this load across the street up to Georgia can't take it. Do you have a guy? And you're like, Yeah, I got an extra guy. He's just sitting here, or you'll jump in the truck, help me out. Customers still get serviced, brokerage still keeps their reputation, loads delivered, no one has any problem. I pay you and nobody cared because, like, you weren't trying to steal things. I just give you an extra hundred bucks because you help me out so I look good to my customer, and nobody cared, right? Like that was very common for decades.

SPEAKER_01: 30:04

And then here's what happened is when rates plummeted, there wasn't the meat on the bone to be able to do that anymore. So what people started doing was all right, I'm just going to double broker it, take a quick pay or an advance, and I'm gonna bounce. Like I'm gonna just disappear into thin air and whatever. And they started offering ridiculously high rates to a driver to re-broker it to because it's like I'll just get it covered quick. You know, let's say that same lane, let's say I got three grand and I book a truck for$2,600, and he wants to rebroker it. Well, how do I rebroker it quick? I'm gonna offer somebody$3,500.

SPEAKER_00: 30:46

They'll take it.

SPEAKER_01: 30:47

This dude's gonna hop on it, he's gonna take it for me, and I'm gonna take a quick pay from the broker or an advance, and I'm just gonna disappear. You won't be able to reach me. I'm gonna, you know, my burner number is gonna be deleted, whatever. My Gmail account that you booked me on is gonna get closed, and next thing you know, a month later, some owner operator comes knocking on the broker's door and says, like, hey, I hold this load and I never got paid. So I went to the shipper. They told me it was your load, and I booked it with somebody else. And next thing you know, for like a good 18 months to 24 months, like we were like figuring this out, and we ended up paying double.

SPEAKER_00: 31:33

Here's the other one. Let's let's go to the one that is like, I would say less malicious, but still not legitimate, right? You are about to go out of business, but you've got drivers that want to keep working for you, right? You work out of the same yard as me, and you're like, Ben, like I just can't keep the lights on, but I don't want to let these guys go. I think it'll get better. And you got your insurance renewal, and you're like, you know what, like I just literally can't afford the insurance I used to have. I'm gonna drop my cargo insurance to save 70 grand a year, and I'm gonna drop my general liability. I'm just gonna keep the insurance the government requires for me to operate, right? So you just have B I P D. You saved money to keep your lights on. Well, now I'm getting a load for 4,500 bucks. You can run that load for$4,400 because you're not insured. Yeah,$15,000 in insurance. So now I'm still giving the load to you. I keep$200 because I need the money to keep my lights on. You need the business, but the person that gave me the load doesn't know you ran it and they don't know you don't have insurance, which is why you were able to run it cheaper than I would have.

SPEAKER_01: 32:35

Yeah. Yep. So that's some of the stuff. So what happened is all this technology came out, right? We started seeing, I mean, and a lot of it arguably is very good. Um, it's a whole nother discussion to figure out what your tech stack should look like, but we saw the introduction of companies like Genlogs, where you're getting real data, photo evidence, timestamped, geotagged of where and when actual trucks are. And you could see on the side of the truck, you know, name MC. Is the placard original? Is it is it you know, taped on there because they're pretending to be leased onto somebody? You started getting data from companies through ELD, um, ELD based on location and stuff like that. So you think about like highway and trucker tools, all the different telematics-based companies. Um, you started seeing very rigorous carrier compliance rules getting put into place and um a lot of distrust between brokers and carriers. And I think that has really, I mean, there's always been a level of distrust, and like, you know, when the market's tight, brokers are pissed at carriers because they're like, man, they're they're gouging us. And when the market's loose, carriers are like, man, these brokers are screwing us, they're not paying us enough money. Um, we started having a very exacerbated level of distrust between, you know, oh, your authority's too new and you don't have any inspections. I'm not gonna load you. And the guy's like, well, yeah, it's just me. It's just me and my truck. Like, I haven't, I've been in business for a year and I haven't been in hit our DOT inspection yet. And then like you start, we start penalizing the small guy who really didn't do anything wrong. And then these criminals get more and more sophisticated, and they start doing things like um, you know, if they're cell tracking, right, they're they're spoofing this the GPS signal. So it kind of looks like they're tracking it, and next thing you know, they're stealing the load. And then you got people that are manipulating ELDs. So either location is manipulated or hours of service is manipulated, whatever the case might be. And fraud got very, very dynamic and complex. So being a broker, what used to be, how can I find a truck for my customer, has turned into, well, I can find a truck for my customer, but I have to find the right truck, the safe truck, the vetted truck for my customer. And now, as we enter the era of capacity is exiting the market, and it's not just like, you know, 12 people call you, you just got to find the right one. Now it's you're gonna maybe get less calls, and um, you know, people are asking for more money and you still have to vet them. And you get to a part now where it's almost like if you got too strict, if you if you ratchet it down too tight on your compliance rules, and you just because you're just relying on automation, like to kind of relay what you said before, and you take the human element out of it of trust and instinct, you're gonna, I think you're gonna end up in a tough spot if you don't shift the way that you're that you're doing business this year. So um, all that to say what a broker's job was five, 10 years ago, at the core, it's still the same, but it's very, very, very different today as far as the intricacies of the tools we have to use, the processes we're gonna be following, and the trends that we're seeing. So um this is why I definitely recommend if you're getting into brokerage, it's good to understand what kinds of things, like this is why I always say like learn from someone who's been through changes in the past, because you'll you you can kind of take away from them what are the core things that will always be true? And those are gonna be the way that you deal with customers, the way you build relationships, the way that you build rapport with good carriers and capacity. But what's changed is how do we actually do the job? Like when we're in the trenches, how am I communicating with my customers? Because you get, you know, as the generation gets, I don't want to say younger and younger, but as you get the newer generations in your workforce at your customers, you might have a shipping manager that like just wants to text, right? They don't want to pick up the phone and talk to you. They they're not like a big email person, they're like, Yeah, just text me, you know, or whatever. So, like the and then on the carrier side, like the tools that we're using, they're they're constantly changing, they're constantly releasing new features. TMSs are drastically um changing. You might say, improving, you might say getting too complex, and depending on which one it is. But um, you know, if you're not a tech savvy person, um I would say that maybe this is not the right career field for you because we have we have moved as an industry very heavily on a lot of automation, a lot of technology. Um, and that will never change the basics of of what we do and how you build rapport relationships. But there's like a million different tools you use now. Like I remember like when I first started, um like it was very rare to track a load. Like we would, like I said, you make sure they have insurance, make sure the carrier's got an authority and their safety is good, they're not out of service, like basic checks, right? And we do manual check calls. You're calling a driver, getting an update, load gets delivered, cool, right? We used to do manual carrier packets, like it was like you would mail a PDF over, and a lot of times these guys would print it off, sign it, scan it back, fax it back. Yep. Now everything is done through third parties. You've got uh MCP, highway, RMIS, it's all done electronically now. You've got multi-factor authentication, you've got alerts that you would never have thought about, and you're like, what does this even mean? It's telling me that this is a red flag, and I don't even, I never would have thought about this 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 38:17

Here's what I agree with and disagree with. And I don't even know that I disagree with what you're saying, but the thing I would say is like human beings have what's like recency bias, meaning like we think what has ever happened most recently is most likely to be what it's like tomorrow, right? So we've had three years of the market not moving, right? Every truck's the same cost. You're just trying to find the right one and you're speeding up communication to make things cheaper, whether it's vetting, onboarding, or finding the right truck, right? The thing that I would say that I just personally don't agree with is that everyone in that space thinks it's gonna continue that way. I think as soon as the market gets tight and you can't find a truck, all that shit goes out the window. Because when there's four trucks there and everyone, all those four trucks are getting 15 emails and all these things beeping in their app going, take my load at all the same rate. How are you gonna differentiate yourself to get that truck? You have to literally get on the phone and be a human and actually connect with that person and understand what they need, meet that need to be able to get that truck when every other broker is trying to get that truck. Automation means nothing when I've got to compete with 10 other brokers to get one truck. That's a good point.

SPEAKER_01: 39:26

Because you got like the highways TFX, that's like basically their load board. You've got the convoy platform, you've got all these online exchanges where people are trying to like take the human out of the equation and just it's easy.

SPEAKER_00: 39:40

When there's more humans and there is a demand for them, then like they're all gonna use the tech and get whatever they can. When there's less of the people you need to do the job and more people need the job done, all of a sudden automation isn't very useful because you look just like every other broker. You have to get in there and be able to have conversations and connect with a person, whether it's a shipper or driver, to be able to make that situation feasible for the shipper and the truck, right? Yep. That is one of the things that I think has been underestimated, if not completely ignored, because of what's happened over the past couple of years. Yeah. The other thing is the vetting software, right, and automating the onboarding has a use, right? But I absolutely disagree that almost any of those companies have done that well. I think they've automated it well, but I don't think any of it takes into account the risks that you learn doing this manually, which you and I talk about and teach in the TIA over and over again. Hey, this will make it faster, but you need to know what it's doing. Because when you make it faster, it is going to overlook things you wouldn't overlook as a person. And that's what criminals and people committing fraud take advantage of. They're like, no one's reading this shit. They just push the button. If they get a green light, I got the load. But you and I might look at that and go, that driver does not have insurance. I talked to the driver, I know his VIN, it's not on their, you know, scheduled auto policy. So, like, we can't even use them. But yet their MC came through, they got on board, and everyone gave you a green light. But when you manually look at it, you're like, well, that's definitely not right. Yeah. And to me, that over reliance on that is what's creating the opportunity, which is why fraud has gotten worse, because the companies that have sold you use this system five years ago, didn't understand the underlying data they were trying to automate and didn't do it well at all. Most of them.

SPEAKER_01: 41:23

Yeah, I've had a bunch of convers. This is a great point. I bought I've had a bunch of conversations with people that I would, I'll just generalize them and say they're like they're a carrier rep, right? They their main job is to find a truck, book the truck, negotiate the rate, make sure the truck is a good, it's good, it's a good quality carrier, right? And they have a they've developed a level of instinct that I don't think any software can ever fully replace because like they'll be like, uh man, like I can just tell from the background noise that like this dude's not didn't felt off, right? Or of a a bunch of other factors that might come into play. It could be um a certain group of words that they said that reminded them of another bad care they talked with, or um, it could be it could be the background noise, it could be an accent, it could be their tone of voice, right?

SPEAKER_00: 42:19

Yeah. So that one just right there, right? Which I think is a great example, because I we teach this in sales, but like there was a study I read a long time ago, and they were trying to figure out how gatekeepers actually screen salespeople, ones that are really good at it and ones that aren't. And they're like fundamentally a gatekeeper is supposed to let important people through quickly and prevent people that their boss doesn't need to speak to unless they want to, right? So let the important people go and hold back the people that maybe they want to speak to, but not urgently, right? And when they really tested this, they were they found that like within milliseconds, or at the most a second or two, a gatekeeper that did that job for some significant amount of time wasn't even hearing like a full word before their brain literally lit up and went, go stop. And it's exactly what you said. It's these intangibles that happen in communication that we don't even realize happen, that happen instinctively over time through habits that like that person probably couldn't even tell you what made them make that decision. They've just done it so many times that like the littlest things that aren't even necessarily like audible in someone's voice, they can hear immediately and screen that, right? And that's that intuition, which isn't just like, oh, some people are good at this and this might work or not. Like these have been tested. Like there are scientific studies that show human beings that have done these things over and over again get better at it to a degree that you can't just map out and have a piece of software do in the same way, I don't think. At least not yet. Not saying we won't get there, but it's sure as shit ain't today.

SPEAKER_01: 43:51

Yeah. So, and to come back to like, should you get, you know, should you do this in 2026? Um, I want to I'm gonna try to hit on a couple of different points here. But the first thing is think about the average age and tenure of a broker, right? It's oftentimes it's a high turnover job. So you get you have a lot of young, inexperienced people, and if they are relying solely on, hey, this software tells me they've passed all of our rules, and that's all they rely on, and they don't think or they haven't learned or been taught to like ask this question, ask that question, right? That's where there's there's vulnerabilities there. So that's the kind of changes we've had. I remember we put out a this is probably like four years ago, five years ago, we put out a dispatch checklist, right? Yep, and a lot of the stuff that like we put out there was like things that to ask drivers about, like, you know, um, well, you're gonna have like customer questions. You know, origin destination pickup times, is there any requirements? Is there any tarps, blah, blah, blah? And then carrier questions. And we added in at the bottom, like red flags to look out for. Like, does the rate seem too good to be true? Because I'm telling you right now, like, highways not capable of telling you if the rate's too good to be true, right? Like, I don't know if a single um vetting software, like your TMS is not gonna yell at you if your profit seems too high. Um, does the like does the driver or dispatcher you're talking to seem way too like agreeable on the rate and isn't a pushing back now, isn't trying to get even a single extra penny out of you. Your software is not going to flag any of that at all. That comes down to instinct and experience right there. All right. So the other part, too, is like when you look at, I think um the last time we got the number of like active authorities, it was like 27,000 or something like that. And people are exiting, right? So let's we'll just call it 25,000 brokerages, right? And a lot of those are like one person, and then some of those have thousands of brokers in them, right? But when you have so like when you've got literally tens of thousands of people working in our in our industry, over 100,000 probably, um, to be successful at it, all you have to do is like be that 51st percentile or higher, and you already have eliminated half of your competition, right? And what does that take when half your competition is young and experienced, doesn't have the right tools or you know, education. All you've got to do is set yourself apart by do like doing your homework, getting the right training, having people that you can rely on. And this is why I think we've like, not I don't think I know that we've helped tons of people become successful brokers because they rely on just consuming content from other brokers, whether it's us or they read articles on you know transport topics or freight waves, or they make it a point to sit in sit in on webinars and ask questions to their customers about issues that they've been having and you know, potential fraud or stolen that they've experienced. They're constantly trying to learn and be better and get better and better and better. That the other 50% that aren't doing that, like that's all that's all you got to do. There's such a low barrier to entry that I would even argue like three years ago was a good time to get into our industry if you could at least swallow the pill and understand that like it's a war out there right now and you've got to work extra hard to make money. Whereas, like, you know, when rates are up and we're margin-based, you know, one load is gonna pay you on average maybe a hundred dollars more in profit than it was two years ago. So um just things to consider that like if you are if you're young and lazy and don't want to learn, like, yeah, if you want to get into brokerage and you're willing to change, like you gotta go work for somebody. Or it's maybe not the right industry for you, but you gotta go work for somebody that's got very concrete training program and and guidance and leadership and whatnot. But if you're trying to be like a solopreneur and go build your own thing, um, you've got to be disciplined, you've got to be open-minded to learning new things and and uh you know shifting as the the market around us changes. Um but it really like it's it is not a hard job. It is just it's a job that throws a lot of challenges at you. Um, but if you're flexible, like there is a lot of opportunity and it literally like you can a small handful of customers can change your life, like can truly change your life, and then that gives you the freedom and flexibility to create a great life and then still prospect a little bit, right? To keep your pipeline full. So when volumes change in a certain customer, or a certain customer goes out of business or gets bought out, or you what do you lose the business, you just keep refilling it. But you can like this is a job where you can write your own paycheck. Like, there is literally no cap to earning, right? Like if you build up a book of business yourself and you get you get tapped out on available time, well, then you scale it by hiring people. And we've talked about how to hire and add ops people and then build a sales team and yada yada. You can go from being, you know, Ken Oaks and just you know, dude brokering to like running a company that does billions of dollars a year and has thousands of employees. Like you there is no, there's no limitation or like regulation that states what kind of experience you need to have, or how much revenue you can do, or how many customers you can have, or how many like there's literally nothing telling you that you can't do more and more and more.

SPEAKER_00: 49:23

And he and he's even an example, right? Like he started that company because brokers were complacent, didn't pay attention to details, and he was a produce broker, and all the freight brokers he had to work with just couldn't give him the service, couldn't do what they said they would. And he's like, This industry is ripe for me to be able to do well in because all I've got to do is be better than everybody that's out there. And he's like, This is a pretty low bar, right? Yeah, and to me, it's the same thing that makes me super excited about this industry is like, what do I look for in a business that I want to get into? I want my competition to be as average as possible. I want them to be as complacent as possible. I want them to have learned it relying on software and not having to do it the hard way because when it gets hard, they won't be able to do it, right? And then I want that entire environment to change because people that are complacent, that don't continue learning, that don't continue improving, as soon as it changes, they can't compete with me, right? And like you said, like I don't nobody out there needs to be 10 times as good as an existing freight broker. Like you've got to be a few percentage points better than who you're competing with, right? We were talking about this last week, that thing I uh interview with Roger Federer, arguably one of the best tennis players ever. Over that span of his career, he only won 54% of his points and was just that much better than the entire field for like more than a decade, right? Like you don't have to be, you don't even have to be as smart as your competition. You just have to care more than them, work one or two percentage points more than they did, do that every day. Every day get a little better than you were yesterday. You don't need to go crazy. You don't need to work 20 hours a day. Like, you just need to get a little better than you were yesterday and care more than your competition, right? Or like when I'm when I'm running a training, I'm like, you just have to do like one more thing than your competition would do, which means you just called one more truck when your competition got lazy and didn't call all of them. You need to make one more prospecting call, maybe make one more check call, learn one more detail to verify a carrier to make sure you've got the right one. Negotiate one more time to get a little bit more out of a situation from your shipper or vice versa, right? Like those little percentage points, one or two a day, adds up to a tremendous amount of growth over a year. And like you said, like you don't need massive pieces of the industry to make a really good living, right? You need like the crumbs, right? Like you need four or five decent customers and you can make a quarter of a million dollars a year. And at a time in this year, where all these shippers are gonna be looking at their existing brokers and going, my rates are getting expensive, my service is getting worse, and they're not answering the calls. They're literally opening the doors to the folks that want to get into the industry or have been in it and are ready to get back into prospecting to start growing their brokerages or their trucking companies. So to me, like this is one of the best landscapes or economic environments for our industry for sure in the past five years, right?

SPEAKER_01: 52:25

Yeah. Um, I'll I'll wrap it up with this like, and it's it's to your point, and I'll give you a real world example is like, you know, we preach that this is a numbers game. And if you put the calls in and you develop your your sales skills, you will succeed in this industry. And most people that uh fail because of they can't get business is because they're not putting the calls in. And it's that simple. Like, you're if you're not doing the 80 calls a day or the few hours of talk time or whatnot, it's on you. Like you're we we can lead you to water, but can't make you drink the whole you know um adage there. But one of the guys with my company um took time out of the industry, got back in and just reapplied his old like metrics of like calls. And like it's like almost every other day, he's got a new customer that like somebody dropped the ball and didn't get the truck in there on time, and they need to get this out quickly, right? Like, you make the if you make 80 calls a day or 100 calls a day, like, yeah, you're gonna get a lot of voicemails, a lot of rejection, but you're gonna get those little nuggets that sprinkle in there throughout the week that like will turn into something. So, I mean that's that's really it. So, like if if you know, and that's whether or not the market's tight, loose, whatever, it's just gonna change, you know, how many customers you'll talk to and what the issues are. Um, but I I think absolutely like there's a lot of promise this year, and I think, you know, forever, like transport, like as the world grows and as our population grows and our consumption grows, that stuff has to move, right? And it's going to move somehow and it's gonna be coordinated by somebody. So our job is definitely not going anywhere. We might we might be more efficient headcount-wise, but as everything continues to grow overall, over the long, the long haul, um, there is a ton of opportunity in our industry. Like, we're not like so. I was thinking about this earlier. It's like, we're not the solar industry where all of a sudden, like, hey, that tax rebate's gone or the tax credit's gone, and like it's really hard to sell solar now. Um, it is it is it's different.

SPEAKER_00: 54:34

Like, we have tide's going up.

SPEAKER_01: 54:36

Yeah. Exactly. But there you go. 2026. Is it good to be a broker? Um, I would say overall, yes. Just depends on who you are, and if you set your expectations right. You got any other thoughts on it?

SPEAKER_00: 54:48

Just show up every day and do a little better than you did yesterday, right? Consistency beats talent when talent doesn't show up, right? Just a little bit more every day.

SPEAKER_01: 54:56

All right, Ben, final thoughts.

SPEAKER_00: 54:58

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

SPEAKER_01: 55:02

And until next time, go team USA for the Olympics.