WHO THE HELL ARE YOU ACTUALLY HAULING FOR? | Brake Check

0:00Welcome back to the loading zone. Today's D-Got trucks have big wheels. Car growth theft got smarter. Fewer thefts, bigger dam losses. Fake carrier stolen authorities doubled barcored freight. One load could look perfectly legitimate until you're freight and your money are both gone. The FMCSA can crack down all it wants, but at 6am tomorrow somebody still has to decide who to hell is actually going to haul this load. And on the other side of that who to hell is actually going to give me a load worth hauling. So today we're going to talk to both sides in the same room. This is brake check and we are going all gas right now. Now up first after we do a

1:02daily pileup we got Jason Shaftling the general manager at McCloud Express. He's the guy deciding which brokers get McCloud trucks and which ones get his voicemail. Then Desmond Clark, the president of Bear Down Logistics is in the house 12 years in the NFL 8 with the Chicago Bears. Now he's blocking for logistics instead of quarterbacks. Today we have the tail of two sides. One carrier, one broker and the same damn show and it's all been done on purpose because while those two sides are busy pointing fingers at each other the criminals are robbing both sides behind. So today we're figuring out who's real and who's full of crap. And why the hell you need to trust one side in order to move the load eventually. And now it's time to go full stop. If you're trying to keep more money in your pocket, if you're trying to move smarter and if you're trying to stay ahead of the nonsense and trucking the day make sure to hit that like, subscribe and follow right here on freightways from your top freight cash trucking news and conversations just like this one. And while

2:08you're at it, if you want to stop watching freight's future happen and get into the damn room where decisions are made. F three is right around the corner. The future of freight festival use promo code take 20 and knock 20% off your current pricing. That's take 20 get registered now before it's too late. Now I want to give a shout out to our sponsors before we get started. I want to take a minute to shout out our presenting sponsors at Apex Capital where you find better options, better solutions and better service. Check them out at apexcapitalcorp.com. All right. Now it's time to hit, you know, get into our daily pileup. We got to talk about what's happening out in the world and there's a lot happening out there. So let's talk a little bit about the news like, you know, a clear sample why barriers to entry matter. We're looking at very early. Look at the

3:24yeah, that that's happening. You know, when you look out there and you see that person on that drive and simulator, you probably don't want to see them behind the wheel over a real 80,000 pound moving vehicle. It looked like they were playing Grand Theft Auto rather than learning to drive a semi truck. But you know, if you do let those people out on the road, it might look like this. Yeah, here's. Or like this. And we got to run to make the boys are sticking that line up and there's period checks our

4:27camera and we'll bring it back no matter what it takes. He's found it down loaded up and trucking. Are we going to do what they say can't be done? We've got it on. Let's go and it's short time to get there. Now if that wasn't enough, here's another. Let me ask you a question. Now, if it's that leave, would you just keep trying to drive it down a road or would you at least pull over or stop? There's a other fault for a downer truck there. But see, here's the problem. There's no shortage of clips like that. Sometimes people confuse truck driving with tree removal services like this guy right here.

5:42Oh, Lula Lula Lula Lula, you put it down trickle. Look at that. You didn't hit the whole damn tree branch. Look at him. He don't even know where to hit it. Look at that bagging the He's bagging the steer bagging up into the tree. Lower him. Lower them. Look at him. You know, where to hit it? You thought he hit it. Look at that old one. Put it down. Like he going back to work. Look at that. Take the tree with him. Lower them. Look. Stay at going. You don't see that big end tree in your periphery. Hit him. Look at that. He's stealing. Got that truck. Oh, he go. He go. Lower them. Let me step there. Only one of them see me. Look at him. Look at him. Oh my god. I just hit a tree. Look at him. Look at him. Look at him. Look at him. Ah damn boy. You did not get quite off in the mother top of that truck. Look at him. You know, he can give a f***. Yeah. Yeah. No. Or even five. Your end play it. Even five.

6:43She had you look at it. Lula hit a tree. But see, sometimes they can get real scary. Like this one over here again and mixed up with a shoulder lean. But see, now there's finally something you can do. That's right. The everyday motoring public can get involved. Check this message out from DHS.

7:46Now we're going to go to a message from our sponsors over at Tenstreet. Do you want to grow your fleet but get buried by paperwork, slow hiring processes, and outdated systems all while struggling to comply with changing safety regulations? Enter Tenstreet, the all-in-one platform that simplifies driver lifecycle management by bringing marketing, recruiting, onboarding, safety, and retention together in one place. Sign up for demo today. All right. Now we're going to hop into it. My first guest has been moving to other people's freight before double brokered with something that we had to explain every damn week. Jason Shaftlin is a general manager at McLeod Express, a family bill, Illinois carrier running everything from van to dedicated to bulk to Dreyage and a little bit of warehousing. He spent his career on multiple sides of this business. And today I want to get him to answer something that every carrier needs to know who gets your trucks and who gets your voice mail because McLeod

8:50has scale. And this guy with five trucks doesn't need to make the same mistakes as somebody else that had a hundred trucks. And Jason's going to share the wisdom to everyone else on the road. Jason welcome to break check. Share wisdom. Yeah, okay. That's why you're running. Oh, did I get the wrong guy first? What's up, man? Good to see you. Man, it's always nice to see you. And I truly appreciate that you make yourself available to have these conversations. A lot of people in the freight world try to treat everything like it's a secret big Mac sauce. But we're all in this together. Rising tide lifts all boats. Yeah, I think I think if it was 15, 20 years ago, we were a little more secretive then. But I don't think it's too hard to figure out who my customers are and what we're doing these days. There's not a lot of secrets in this business anymore. So let's talk about it. Let's get better. Well, absolutely, man. Let's talk about who gets your trucks. You get to put real equipment under freight every day before a broker gets one of your trucks. How do you decide who's worthy of your

9:57brand moving their freight? Sure, I think what's important now is there's no offense to the brokers. We want to be primarily a customer-based carrier. So we're probably about 85 to 90% customer freight. We broker where we need to when it's out of our network or we're just a little short on freight in certain areas. And honestly, I don't shop the load boards very much. I have probably about five or six brokers that I'm really, really loyal to and they're loyal to me. And we have great relationships. I can count on them when crap goes the wrong way and they take care of us and they get my trucks first. So everybody says we vet. It sounds great on paper. It sounds great on a social media post. But give me the real red flags that you encounter that make you decide whether you're going to use a person or not. In terms of from a brokerage standpoint using a counterbroker or

11:00a shipper or just choosing a broker. I think, gosh, I haven't had to do it in a while actually. We've dealt with some of these reps with the brokers we deal with for 10 or 15 or 20 years. It's tough. I'll say while I like what highway is doing and it's great. I get calls from brokers every single day all day now. My phone number is the operations contact on our highway account, which is great. The man they blow me up now, it's giving them an avenue to just really go out there and fish. So I try to talk to every one of them I can honestly and I try to be nice to them and try not to hang up on them real at them. I can't always answer the phone but I try to every time and at least see what they have and at least see how genuine they are. I guess that's it.

12:02Just using my experience to get a good fill for their personality and if they're good people are not. So McLeod has resources. A guy watching this might have only five trucks and approximately maybe nine, 10 minutes before somebody else takes a load that's on the board that they're interested in. Give them three checks that they could do from their phone that dramatically improve their odds of finding success and working with reputable companies rather than ones that might cause them to lose their paycheck. Man, I tell you what, it's a little out of my wheelhouse just from where I work every day but just to give some examples. I mean, you got to start somewhere and if you're out there on DAT, truck stopper, the big boards and try to find a broker that is freighting the network you want to run and try to build that relationship and be loyal to the same people. I'm big on that, whether it's customers, brokers, drivers, I'm big on loyalty, I'm big on personal relationships and trying to work with people. Obviously, do your due diligence

13:09and do some background checks. Check out their profile, obviously. And maybe if you're a small player with just a few trucks, I'm sure you have other friends and other people in this business, you know that have a handful of trucks go by word of mouth too. I think like me, when I'm looking for drivers, I would rather have a referral from a driver than me just called call truck drivers that come work for me. So I think the same would apply with brokers, I think drivers need to use their network of other drivers to find who's treating people right. Now, say the rate confirmation is signed. The truck moves and you discovered a load was double brokered and suddenly everybody's phone goes straight to voicemail. Who's actually getting shafted in this situation and what's the first move to give them a fighting chance to make sure that they get paid? Yeah, I think, I think, you know, man, I just don't have to deal with that a

14:14lot. Unfortunately, unfortunately for me, but I mean, I think the driver's going to come down on them ultimately if it's double brokered and you can't reach anybody to get any contacts and get any help, especially if you've got delays or a rejected shipment, whatever, it could be a hot mess at that point. Well, how do you set yourself up to be able to be in the position to say, I just don't have these problems. Like you see them everywhere on social media, you see everyone talking about them, you see all these vetting platforms with the silver bullet, but here you are running an entire operation. Like I don't have these problems. Like what's that secret sauce? Yeah, it goes back to those relationships with a handful of brokers that we've done business with for multiple years. Maybe there's some of these brokers that I've been working with before we had, before we ever talked about these problems. So I trust them. They treat us right and they're very well respected. They're not, you know, they're big-time brokers. They're big companies and

15:15they treat us well. And when we have issues, I can pick up the phone. I'm connected with them on teams. I can get them, you know, instantly. So that just comes from building relationships over several years. I hope I hope those relationships last and we treat each other well because I don't really want to go out there and hunt for new relationships. Now, you're running in an operation that's constantly moving. The industry is always moving. And then we live in an environment that the ground seems to be changing underneath our feet. It's moving under our feet. Every day we got crackdowns, we got regulations, you got the government saying, we're here to help. Are you waiting and basing your operations off the government's ability to help? Are you building around that and just saying, well, great, when you show up to the party, we'll be ready. But for now, we're just going to keep operating the way we've always operated. Yeah, I think we stayed pretty true to and pretty disciplined to, you know, what we've

16:17done. So, you know, I think with some of the revoked CDLs, non-domiciled CDLs and some of the capacity shrinkage, we see some opportunities to grow in some areas. Obviously, over that downturn, we shrunk some of our road fleet. We increased some of our dedicated operations. And, you know, we may be back in the growth mode on the road, right? We're trying to do that. But I'm not going out and buying 150 trucks. You know, I'm not trying to grow, you know, 100% overnight. So, I know there's some companies that are doing that. And it's risky because I think you hit that up swing and you finance a truck for several years, but maybe that up swings only 18 months. So, we have to stay pretty disciplined. We've kind of, you know, stayed loyal to a very close customer base. We're taking on some new customers, obviously, but really not trying to do too much

17:22of that. We can't be everything to everybody, right? So, I think that's what everybody tries to do in this situation is they try to drink through water hose and they try to take all the freight they can. And we just need to stay really disciplined for us from a profitability standpoint. And for our drivers too, we need to stay very consistent for them to, so their mileage and their pay isn't disrupted. So, there's a cost to being in business. You got the cost of the trucks, you got your overhead. But there's also some smart business happening to diversity in what you do in your operation. You've got van, you got dedicated, you got bulk, you got dump, you got hopper, you got drage. Which part of this mix right now is giving you the strongest economic positioning in this current market? You know, over the road's tough. And obviously, it's been the weakest for a few years and we're fortunate to be very diverse and be able to make it through a down market when

18:27when the road's down. You know, we went out and actively grew our dump fleet, right? So that helped us in a lot of ways. You know, I think where we really, really want to be is we want to continue to increase our footprint with dedicated. And we want to have opportunities that get our drivers home more often. I think that's the name of the game. I think the days of having over the road drivers that stay out for a month at a time are close to over. I think there's a lot of opportunity for drivers to make over the road money but be home much more often. So we're working with our customers. We're bidding a lot of dedicated opportunities. And that's what happens when the market kind of opens up. We get some of those opportunities that come back around that that, you know, fit us again because the rates are bouncing back and the money makes sense. The math makes sense. So really, that's what we're focused on. How can we be stronger on the dedicated

19:32side of the business? And how can we get more round trip freight for our drivers so that they're very consistent? So you bet on both my shows. We talk online and offline. One of the things out there that we've talked to a lot of owner operators about is knowing your operational cost. And you find out that a lot of people, even businesses with multiple trucks don't really truly calculate this the way they should. And in markets like this where the margins are shrinking, the costs are rising. And the rates are going up, but the volume's not there. You really need to know that cost to know good freight versus bad freight. What's the true cost before you even make a dollar? What's the true cost just to move that truck? What's that number that you're looking for that you use is kind of a guiding light right now? Well, maybe that's where I get a little secretive and don't give all my stuff away. But I think we're all pretty much pretty close. And I think that I think the average is somewhere around two thirty five a mile, right? That's a break even. And that's

20:34if everything goes perfect, right? That's if we don't blow a tire. That's if we don't run over something. That's if we don't have turnover. So there's a lot of other variable costs that go into that. I've talked to customers over the last several months that still think we operate at a dollar eighty five a mile. And you know, we haven't done that in a decade, right? So I think the tough thing for owner operators, I mean you've talked about this when when we came out of that O9 that O9 to freight recession and we got into ten eleven twelve. We saw insurance come back down. We saw maintenance prices come back down. We saw fuel come back down. And for owner operators, those variable costs and the fixed costs improve. I don't see any of that happening this time. Insurance is just going to keep going up. You know, I think maintenance is going to keep going up and who knows what fuel is going to do. It's in an all time high. So I think it's going to be really

21:34tough. And and that's why I think the rate per mile can hide a lot of that right now. But like drivers getting into a four year long lease purchase, then you're probably going to do great for the next year. But who knows what's going to happen after that, right? Oh, we know what's going to happen. We've seen it. The ebbs and flows of trucking and eventually when that doesn't work in your favor, you're going to be upside down on a truck. You're going to be upside down with insurance. You're going to be upside down with a lot of different things that are continuing the rise and cost. But your rates aren't there to support it. And when it goes down, you're going to go out of business. We've seen people lose those trucks. Well, I mean, what is it we covered the government released the study? 90% of lease purchases fail. I'm really betting on me being that 10%. Yeah, man, I won't say this about everybody because we've leased purchase trucks here before we've gotten out of that in this down market because I just don't think it makes sense for the driver. But a lot of them are set up that way. A lot of them are set up to either.

22:38I mean, let's face it, if you're leasing a four year old truck with 400 and something thousand miles and it's almost out of warranty by the time you pay it off, it's time for an overhaul. And who saves up $40,000 for that, right? So it's either designed to break down where you have to upgrade or they dangle a new truck in front of you eventually and you have to upgrade or you want to upgrade. So it's a vicious cycle applaud. Some of the companies that I've seen that have done some very short term leases lately. I've seen some of those that are like 18 months or whatever. I think that's kind of the way to go. But I mean, if you're getting wrapped up in a four or five year deal, I just don't see how it makes sense. You're going to fail. Well, and I think you said something that was very interesting in there. The market's down right now as far as volume goes. It's not necessarily smart business to be leasing a truck for the the driver's perspective. So you guys have done away with it. It's not good for your drivers. That's not typically how we see leased purchase deals applied though. Typically, it's, oh,

23:40it's a down market. Let me pass this risk on to this unsuspecting person and convince them of the American dream. This is your time by now. By big. And meanwhile, you just rope to dope them. You passed on your risk to someone that watched the American dream be weaponized against them. You don't typically see businesses looking at it that way. So I do want to spend a moment on that because I think more people need to look at how can we make this individual successful? How can they go from one truck to us to two trucks and two to three and not constantly be under a payment? Like the goal shouldn't be to always be living under a payment. Sure. I think I think the what you have to think about from my standpoint, if I want to grow my fleet, it's very difficult to grow your fleet by just buying trucks and trying to seek drivers company drivers through recruiting. It's difficult to grow substantially there. We could maybe try

24:40to go 5% a year, maybe 10%, but it's really tough. So a lot of ways companies like us will grow is instead of trading those trucks one for one, they're going to lease the old equipment out, right? That's to me, that's just the company leasing those trucks out with hope of growth in an easy way to grow because usually you can dangle that carrot for the least, purchase out there a little easier. I just don't feel like that's a very honorable way to move forward and try to grow your business. So we're going to try to do it the right way. I love that. There's a cost to doing that when we're talking, fill in the trucks, pay qualifying drivers, there's a substantial cost to doing that the right way in business. Right? Now you're seeing the government tighten the qualification and enforcement across the entire driver pool. If meaningful capacity comes out of the market, how quickly does that show up in your world and

25:44in your pricing? What are you seeing right now? I think it's going to be tremendously tough, especially over the next three years for recruiting. Especially if these 30 plus thousand CDLs get revoked in New York and some other things happen. And hey, if the interest rates go down, housing market takes off cars, a car market takes off and really the freight ramps up, we're going to see some wild stuff. I think what nobody's really talking about is where we get our drivers three to five years from now. We're 400,000 welders short where we got electricians making $200,000 a year. Right? So they're pushing trades in high school and I've got a couple high schoolers. So I know they're pushing like crazy. And while I would somebody wait three years to get behind the wheel of a truck for $85,000 a year when they could go and get their electrician certification and start working right away. So I

26:47think we're going to really have a battle with the trades over the next few years in trucking. If they get 85K a year, the median is the last time I checked it was like 59,000, that's the average. Like think about that. Everyone's offering up to this, up to that. You could make this, you can make that. But like the average is the average. There's data behind that average. The average shows 59,000 dollars. We're losing these people to that to warehousing. Whether it can make more than that and be home and not be a lottery ticket. We're losing them to plumbing to electricians. Even diesel techs are doing a better job at making that more attractive than we are in trucking. Now you got organizations like the Next Generation and Trucking Association. They're trying to combat this. But the reality of the situation is this up to this 59,000, it's not substantial enough for someone to build a life off of it. We have to do better, which means we're probably going to have to pay more. We're going to have to charge more.

27:48Otherwise, to your point, we're not going to have these individuals. My son's school offers welding, carpentry, logistics as far as brokerage. You know what they don't offer? A CDL program. If we're not exciting them at his age, well, then by the time he's 23, he's probably already started the dream of a path to where he's going to go. And we're going to fall into the same trap we've historically been in, where it's their second or third career. It's not their first choice. Yeah, how many boomers are talking to their kids and to their grandkids and to going and getting in a truck? You know, 25 years ago when I started doing this, every driver that I worked with drove with their dad and their grandfather, they came from a long lineage of truck drivers. And it was a lifestyle, man. You know, those guys were warriors. They went out for two to three months at a time. They unfortunately didn't raise their family, but they provided for their family like no other and did some great things. Now it's a job. It's not a lifestyle anymore, man. It's just a job. And you know, it's their job to maintain a safe speed and say following distance, but

28:53you know, they're watched every second. There's cameras and computers and everything out there. So there's definitely not a lot of fun or definitely not much of a lifestyle in it anymore. Because there's no privacy. There's no, they're not individuals. I don't think they fill that way. So I think that's tough, but we got to make the best of it and create a good work environment for them. For me, you go back to pay. It's all about the miles for me, man. And I, through this down market, I threw myself into planning and I'm probably a little dumb to some of the current events sometimes where I used to be really on that. I don't post on LinkedIn ever and know not anybody that runs a trucking company that does, but I feel like if I'm on there, I'm not talking to my drivers. So I went back into planning. I started rolling my sleeves up and just trying to make sure my drivers got the miles that they deserve. And that's what we all have to do. Well, it's not necessarily a

29:54bad thing if someone's not on LinkedIn. There was a president of a trucking company that went on LinkedIn not that long ago and put drivers don't have an earning issue. They have a spending issue and they can stay above the poverty line if their spouse is simply went to work. Like that is someone that should not even have a log into social media. That person should be grounded from ever posting anything publicly ever again. Man, I think everybody in the country has a spending problem. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I don't think you can just say that that's the root cause of why drivers don't earn enough money. Listen, no matter what employees you hire, you're going to have good ones of bad ones. You're going to have people that are wildly productive and want to do great things. You're going to have people that aren't. There's drivers that we hire, we've hired in the past that I can't get to drive more than six hours a day. And you struggle and you try to coach them up and you try to give them opportunity. And we lose

30:54money on those drivers. That's the stuff that kind of drags us down from doing good things for the good ones. So we've got to either coach those drivers up, coach them out. And then we've got to do great things for all the other drivers that really want to get behind the wheel and work hard. And we've got some really good ones, man. I say a big number because if you want to come here and work, I've got some guys that definitely aren't earning $59,000 a year and doing some good things over the road. They earn more than that. And a lot of that is we've got to do a few things. As a company, we've got to we've got to manage our business well. We've got to spend our money well. And we've got to save our money well for all of our employees. You know, we're paying everybody every week and you know, we don't get paid for 42 days. So we got to float a lot of cash. We've got to make a lot of things happen to make sure everybody gets paid what they deserve. And we have to establish good relationships with customers and brokers so that we can negotiate rates. I have a

31:57couple of customers that work with me through this downturn and I work with them and now they're really working with me from a rate standpoint because they they have a loyalty to me and I have a loyalty to them that trickles down our drivers and helps us do good things for them. I love that which you know, it's all about relationships. I've gotten to know you over the years that we have a relationship. Relationships are very important to you and how you conduct your business. And I think more people need to take that. We need to get away from the transactional side of freight and get more into the relationship driven side. That's where you find dependability. That's also where you find the stability and the security that you need to continue your operations. And not worry about if you're going to get got by some bad actor. Sure. Sure. Yep. Just keep trying to be good people and do good things for our drivers. That's all we can do. I want to get to know every one of them and I know everybody says that. I know I know my drivers names. I know where they're from. I call them up and they're surprised

32:59sometimes when they hear me say their name and know that I know it. So I think a lot of that matters and that goes back to you know my history. I won't bore anybody with that but I came up in this business on a retention standpoint. Not from recruiting, not from sales but in a retention department that I built from you know kind of the bottom up. So that really matters to me and it matters there are company. Our turnover is definitely below average but I'm not happy with it. And I want every driver to come in here. Look how to say this. I don't expect every driver to work for us forever. Right. But how can I provide a great place for them to work as long as I possibly can and you know have them say good things about us on the end of it. I love that. Now it's time for your hard stop question. A hundred brokers are watching this right now and they start calling you

34:01tomorrow morning with freight. How many are you comfortable putting on your trucks? What's that number? What's that mixed ratio of brokerage to contract freight that you're like all right this is it. We're good. Yeah I think I'm at about 15% right customer to broker. So I only need a few. I only need a few and they need to fit. You know I think a big part of that is finding out what freight those brokers have that really truly fits our network and reputation and service from there. So that's a big part for me is finding the right brokers that can treat us well and take care of us in bad situations. Brokers that are willing to have a great carrier run freight forum that they're willing to give a better rate for. That's what we need to be and then it's on me to make sure that we provide that service to them and get the freight where it needs to be. And if you could give all the brokers out there listening right now one tip to win your business.

35:04Maybe they're listening to you right now and they're like I want to work with this guy. What's that tip of the hat trick that's going to help them win your business? What's that number one thing you're looking for? Man I think I think just be genuine up front and know what you're doing. I get a lot of cold calls from people that are obviously new and don't know how to talk shop. But also one thing that bugs me right now is everybody every broker is sending me freight and saying it's dedicated. Dedicated dedicated dedicated dedicated dedicated to me is round trip freight that my drive the same driver does the same load all the time. But what brokers mean by dedicated is we have 14 loads a month and we're going to dedicate those 14 loads a month to you. Then it really turned me on. I can find 14 more loads for my customers a month if I need to. So stop over using that word dedicated it doesn't work for me. That's so good Jason.

36:05And you're on your side of things and you're like yeah you're not using it in the right context. Move on. I promise. Jason I would appreciate the conversation appreciate you coming down the show. We're going to go to a shout out from our sponsors over at truckstop.com. And we're back. All right. My next guest spent 12 years in the NFL eight with the Chicago Bears. Then apparently decided football wasn't stressful enough. So he got into freight. Desmond Clark is the president of bear down logistics where he's gone from learning brokerage from scratch to building

37:09a business around freight heavy haul and logistics. And today he's sitting in the chair every carrier wants occupied the brokers chair because we just asked Jason which brokers deserve his trucks. Now Desmond gets the other side which carriers are going to deserve your freight. How do you trust him? And what do they have to prove before you even let him touch your freight carriers need brokers. Brokers need carriers. I mean that conversation starts right now. Desmond how you doing brother? I'm doing pretty good. How you doing? It's a Thursday on a short week for some of us. You know it's one of those things where you're playing catch up and trucking be trucking life be life and it's always moving. Never never stops never stops. But the one thing that we can say we we're getting to to the end of that week. So we can see the light at the end of the time. Ain't that the truth? We're already to the end of that week. So I was interested to get your perspective on today's show

38:09because we heard from the carrier side with Jason. I want to hear from your side and you kind of built this up in what you thought it should look like and that's a unique perspective. And anyone can go work for someone and do it their way. You had the chance to build this up your way and you made mistakes. You shared those mistakes. You shared those speed bumps and trials and tribulations. I want to capture a little bit of that here. You're the brokers sitting in front of a carrier audience right now before bear down. Trust anyone with your customers. Freight. What are you checking? What matters most when you're evaluating them? Well, I can tell you like I've been in this for four and a half years now and going back to what you said about you know building this from from scratch and in my vision. I didn't have a vision before because I never worked for anyone before I started this. So I really didn't know what to expect. But the thing that I could tell you is that initially you know you have to take some chances just like carriers and companies took chances with bear down logistics. But over the course of time what you look for is broker I mean

39:14carriers that want to be part of your team. Just like we want them to be part of our team. Meaning that you know we can depend on them. They're going to show up. They're going to represent us just like we want to be represented. They carry out our kind of cultural aspects along with them. And that's really what we're looking for. But that happens over time. The first time you book a little with with a new carrier which you will have to do you know there's that hey that that give and take hey this is what we're expecting. This is what we want to see. And you just got to monitor if we're getting that. And then once we get that then we continue to go back to that carrier you know time and time again. I love that now see some of the disconnects between carriers and brokers is things like days to pay. Let's talk realistic measurements here because a lot of carriers go out there with their understanding of what it should be their understanding of of the transparency in that process their understanding of you know how this should work in their

40:19business model. But that there's two business transactions. This is the broker. There's actually three businesses if you can count the shipper in that transaction. So what's the real number? What should carriers start thinking when they realistically look at days to pay? That should look at a 30 day net payment because that's typically what we get with when we when we have a agreement with our customer right that they're going to pay us within 30 days. I'm proud to say that we have a very very good days to pay at 15 days to pay but that comes from doing a lot of payments where our customer is paying us within a couple days and then we're getting those payments out to our carriers right away. So it brings down our day to pay days to pay. But typically 30 days to pay if you start to see a brokerage that's 35, 40 days to pay then you can look for some complications. I can't say why that what the complications may be. We also have

41:24accounts like that where you know we are waiting on money from our customer but we still have to pay our carriers on time and then go on how the customer hey y'all need to pay us because we already pay bills not even have bills to pay because we try to make sure that we pay our carriers on time because that's why they're going to want to come back and work with us because we do the things that we suppose to do on time in order and then in return that's what we expect for them to do for us and when they do that for us going back to your first question that's why we choose the carriers that we choose. So trust is an important component in this conversation today. Fraudsters and perks and eight legitimate carriers every day. Everything could look beautiful until the freight disappears. What's one verification step that Bear Down has used to actually make sure that they are who they say they are? So the one thing that we ask our customers to do is to check

42:25the actual driver's license when they get there. So we know exactly who they are and to check the numbers on the truck and everything that we verify with that carrier because as you know these guys are master manipulators. They're smart. They can get all the information, give us all the information correctly. Well as what we expect for it to be based off of what we check on my carrier package or on e-carrier check or any of those things but we need for our customer to also to verify those things because that's where in between us verifying and someone actually picking up a load is where the double brokering usually tends to happen. Now see every time a criminal burns a broker legitimate carriers have to generally jump through another hoop. Another verification, another delay, another reason somebody won't work with that new authority. How do you fight fraud

43:29without treating every good carrier like they're guilty until proven innocent? Well unfortunately man that's just everything that you just said is absolutely true right but here's the thing that I've come to notice if you're a good carrier you understand what the bad actors are out there doing so you understand why there may be an extra layer of protection or questions or verification and you don't mind doing that because you don't have anything to hide you don't have anything that's going to bring up something or red flag yeah it may get aggravating at time and you're trying to move on to the next thing but I've seen and my guys who actually have to book the carriers they come back and say you know they don't mind an extra couple minutes or a few minutes of verification because they don't they don't have anything to hide. Now another component of this is the talks around broker transparency if a carrier asks you tomorrow what bear down made on a load

44:34what do you tell them is it a yes is it a no give me the argument and understanding behind that so we can hear it from the broker's perspective. Well so if they if they were to say hey you got to just disclose what you're making I don't have I don't have a problem with that even when I play football here's the thing I never counted anybody else's money like I made the deal that I wanted to make when I was playing football and I do the same thing here and I expect for other people to do the same thing there is no one saying hey hey carrier you have to take this load at this rate right just like for us the the customer is not making us take this load at the rate we negotiate that and so we also do the same things with the carriers we negotiate that and of course we always want to be fair with the carriers just like we want our customer to be fair with us and whatever we negotiate that's what we take and whatever the carrier negotiate hey that's that's what they

45:36take so at the end of the day if we had to disclose hey this is what we're making I will hope that you know we we will have to disclose that after the fact and not have an issue with that because now and I'm just being totally honest everybody knows that the brokers we we make money off of our profit and the bigger our profit is and more money that we make but also we don't want to fleece the the driver and the carrier so if we have to that say okay we made a thousand dollars from our customer and if we have to disclose that up front you know who's to say how that leverage is going to hurt us now now to carry your I think it changes the dynamic yeah no like I can say anything that they want yeah and right instead of saying hey here's a fair price for me based off of my infor-my operating cost

46:40where I'm not operating costs right right right well and the problem with that is is when broker transparency got brought to the table it was meant to be post the transaction now too many people of kind of perverse their understanding of it and they think it's going to give them negotiating power I have a problem with that because if you're a business I'm not basing my prices off what you make I'm basing my prices off what I need to make to cover my operating cost and get the margin that I desire the moment I start basing my prices off someone else's business I'm doing it wrong absolutely and and that's what I say you count other people other people's money and that's not the way that you go about creating the finances that that you want hey if if I know that this this laning is going to take x y and z to cover then my brokers and my agents they're going to say hey I need this amount of money into the low so I can go and sell it for and of course they're not going to tell the customer that but as they're negotiating I need this amount so I can go sell it for this amount

47:48and then in the middle we can make this amount so that's just how that's just how it is done the customer is going to use their their knowledge to base what they're going to give us and we're expecting to carry it to use their knowledge based on what they should be negotiating with with us um and and here's the thing most people are not going to get on here and say this if we can squeeze out another one a two percent as a brokerage and not feel like that we're we're damaging or you know playing hardball we're never going to play hardball with with the carrier we're going to pay them you know what what they're asking for but if they come to us and say hey give us $800 and you know we we knew that we can potentially go to 850 or 875 no broker is going to negotiate against themselves like and I know some people are going to kill me for that but that's

48:53just the system network business I'd say hey you know what we was actually thinking we can go up to 875 so why don't you just why don't we just give you the other 50 75 dollars we're going to give you what you asked for and if that was good for you then we're going to let that be good for you well I think what's unique about this is you aren't just on the brokerage side you also are on the asset side so your perspective on this carries a little different weight because you've played ball from both sides you know you didn't just stay behind the brokerage desk that would be easy enough you chose to get into something that wasn't necessarily as asset light why why why enlist yourself for that headache are you talking about me starting the intermodal side of the business and now yeah we do have assets you know it's it's something that I'm learning and I have a good leadership team that's that's heading that for me but it's it's a good business to be in

49:54I feel like if you do it the right way on the asset side you know there there's a good business to be ran on the asset side also but the same thing you got to know you got to know your numbers you got to know exactly what type of margins you need to be asking for when you go to to the customer and negotiate your price that's basically what it comes down to so the the thing about being a broker is that you want carriers to come back and you want them to be happy to come back and and and move one of your loads so you want to pay them accordingly and you want to pay them on time right you want to pay them the right amount and you want to pay them on time and if you do that they'll keep coming back and and that's the kind of relationship that we built as a broker and that's the kind of relationship that we want to build as a carrier with bariton multimoto also when we when we are asking for whatever number for carrying those lows without assets

50:58now you've also got warehousing and transload capability a lot of people are talking about diversifying their offering diversifying their business and their income wins it actually makes sense versus wins it become noise like from your business dance and from your experience why did that move make sense um for me and and I can't talk too much in depth about it because like I say I'm still learning it I have um cow rich send herbicata they're teaching me this out of the business but from everything that I know from what I'm running from them you know if you can get multiple income streams into your business that's what everybody talks about and that's what everybody wants but you have to do it at a high enough level where it does not become noise right where it doesn't become distracting in the background where you're cannibalizing your business on one end because you can effectively run the other parts of the business talking about warehousing

52:01and transloading right so you just got to make sure that you have the right people in the right seats and and understand like everything that you're that you're trying to do as a company and like I said me trying to talk too deep into it right now I'll be talking out of my ass um if I have my guys on here they could talk deeper but just understanding that hey the operations that we do have they can't cannibalize themselves they they all have to play play a role with with bringing more revenue more profit and and just more service offerings to the company that people will call us for and that we could deploy and and continue to build a good name now you went from I want to switch gears because you went from the NFL to the freight industry you spent 12 years in the NFL and then took six weeks to book your first load I have to know this what the hell is everyone else doing wrong because you you kind of started it up pretty quick like what was the mentality there what

53:05what was the motivation so this this is the first level right here and I just bought a frame for it so I'm getting ready to put this frame up um the the motivation was hell it was COVID and I wasn't doing crap um I had just started I had wrote my book principles of winning and and the beginning of 2020 I was going to release the book and I was going to get on the road and and start doing motivational speaking for a time and leadership development and that all went to the wayside um it was not any money in it because everything was virtual now and so I was basically looking for something to do and I got approached by Brian Rice a Dre D Poe the question that he asked me is hey have you ever thought about logistics and I was like what the hell is logistics but after a few months of going back and forth with him and really researching what logistics was all about that's when I came back to him and say had unnecessarily want to uh work for you or work with you to help you build your business I think I

54:08want to do this um myself and I asked him to help me to do it and he he said yes so um that was the beginning of it but you know once you sink money into something at least for me that was the motivation hey I got to get a return on this money and plus like I say I I wasn't doing anything to earn income at the time and I felt like this was it and I started February I mean May 2nd of 2022 and uh June of June 24th of 22 is when I got my first my first payday but it was it was a hustle man and that month month and a half I had a whole lot of man is this going to work you know you're making 200 calls a day and you only talking to two people but then once you get that first one you become addicted uh I think I got paid 529 dollars but when I got that first one it was like okay game

55:10on I see how this is done and and as they say to the rest the rest is history it's pretty impressive to watch that uh you know as somebody that watched you play as someone that's now watching you play on a whole new field and a new industry and winning there were some things that I noticed though that uh from your postings and your story that really stood out and one of the things was that you invested in systems early instead of running a company strictly on text messages, spreadsheets at what point does that small operation officially become too big to keep winging and why did you decide to invest in those systems early like what led you to come to that conclusion because many people wait till it's too late yeah well the first the first thing I understood is all the reconciling up the numbers I had no clue it was taking me three to four hours a day once I started moving you know a small amount of lows I was going to say a good amount but that's

56:12and small amount is relative also and trying to understand the the financial part of reconciling all of these pay the the care you pay and and the pay that I'm getting that that was the first thing that I offloaded to an accountant and then the the next thing that I I invested into was a good TMS that I could understand I had a conversation last week of the week before and I was told that a company a logistics company was running their logistics company without a TMS I was like how the hell does one do that um but I know it used to be done but if you if you don't have processes in systems in place there's no way that you can scale there's no way that hey you could bring more people on and teach them effectively how to do something if there's not a process there's not a system that's something that Brian and and I'm going to give him the credit for that because you're

57:16asking when did that happen that happened early for me because Brian taught me that early hey here's the process here's the system he gave me all this SOPs here's the questions that you have that's here's how everything has have to be ran so I can't take credit for that that was taught to me early and that was Brian Rice who taught me that but I'm I'm glad that he taught me that early on because as you just said many people wait too late to where things are crashing they don't understand how this got here and where this where do I pull this information from because they don't have the processes and systems and place them and the one thing that I pride myself on um talking to my my my vendors like a hall pay or like a alvets when they when I have questions and when they have to come to me and we have to work things out the one thing I pride myself on is that they like working with me because I know where to go find answers I know where the numbers are supposed to be

58:17I know how that process is ran so I can go right into the systems get them the answers that they need and we're on and off the phone and problem is settled now I love that there's been my hard stop question for you I thought I hadn't all figured out but you answered a lot of my questions so I'm gonna throw you a curveball okay we're in football hold on hold on before before curveball the last time I seen a curveball was in high school and it scared to live in daylight so I thought I was gonna get hit um and then that joke just sunk in strike and I was out of there I only had three I don't think you're gonna strike this one out you know football it's that season who's going to the Super Bowl in your opinion who are you excited oh man um listen first of all I think the Chicago Bears have a fighting chance this year um I really do believe that are they still the Chicago Bears is the Gary like what's happening yeah it's it's gonna be the Hammond Bears pretty soon um now but they'll always be the Chicago Bears that's just been planning in Indiana um that that is going to happen they

59:22did announce that that's going to um happen and I think in 2030 uh so we still have a few years of the Chicago Bears but if you ask me my my um eyes on favor is the Los Angeles Rams I mean once they got the defensive player of the year to go along with everything else that they have are you freaking kidding me like it's almost unfair so give me the Rams we're putting it in there if this happens we're bringing you back we're gonna let you take that victory lap because that was an early call I'm excited for it yeah yeah I mean it's it's unfair for them to to get the defensive player out of here when they when they had the MVP of the whole league last year. Nah hey man I always enjoy having you on the show I love the experience that you bring I love the motivation and just the story so thank you and uh we'll definitely have you back my guy I appreciate it yes I look forward to it. All right folks I mean you think about this like

1:00:26we talked about it from both sides carriers do need the brokers brokers do need the carriers the criminals benefit from either side not trusting each other so verify who's across the table then go move some damn freight we just went full stop right here on break check see you next week as we hit the pavement for an onsite visitor cross the nation with today's top carriers for truck drivers appreciation week until then check this out. from someone who wants to be where you are today thank you for all that you do. To all the truck drivers watching this thank you for all the work that you do your job matters more than people realize. The one who's been where you are today I know how hard of a job you do let's face it that you guys America would shut down from park heritage trucking school you all want to say thank you for all you do to all the truck drivers out there thank you for all

1:01:32that you do thank you for keeping our room. One reason why I want to be doing with trucker is because I want to be able to own my own trucking company one day. I'll be kind of trucked ever because I want to learn more about the truck also because my dad was a truck driver and he still is to this day I want to be a truck driver because I've been around so much like my whole life I want to be a truck driver because of my dad I want to I like to travel so I'll just figure driving. I get job for you. America needs to keep the supply chain going thank you for all that you do. For our long nights and all the long days thank you for everything that you do thank you for all the hard work you do to keep us supplied. I'm working on getting my class ACDL and I know how difficult that is not to mention all the work you do now for all you do thank you. Thank you drivers. Thank you truck drivers. Thank you truck drivers. Thank you truck drivers. Thank you truck drivers. Thank you truck drivers. I have been truck driver appreciation. There's an old saying that says if you bought it a truck brought it we need you guys to keep the supply chain going thank you for all that you do.

1:02:40Welcome back to the loading zone today's D-GOT trucks have big wheels.