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Practical Education and AI Empowerment in Freight with Carly Monzo
27 Plays1 day ago
In this episode of Supply Chain Connections, Brian Glick speaks with Carly Monzo, founder of ExFreighters, about making freight forwarding more accessible and empowering logistics professionals with practical education and personal AI tools. Carly shares her journey from freight forwarding rookie to consultant and entrepreneur, offering a candid look at the challenges newcomers face and the critical importance of industry education.
Topics discussed include:
- Why logistics feels more complicated than it is—and how jargon plays a role
- How Carly’s workshops demystify freight operations and invoice auditing
- Strategies for preserving vendor relationships while improving freight visibility
- The emotional toll of burnout in logistics and Carly’s own experience with it
- How AI “knowledge bases” can help individual operators preserve and grow their expertise
- The importance of gratitude and recognition in a high-pressure, problem-solving culture
About the Guest:
Carly Monzo is a Supply Chain & AI Strategist with experience across the full spectrum of international logistics. She has worked for freight forwarders, consulting firms, and startups before founding her own fractional consulting and coaching practice, ExFreighters. There, she helps teams "speak forwarder," streamline invoice auditing, and strengthen vendor relationships. In addition to her consulting work, Carly focuses on equipping individual supply chain professionals with practical AI skills through her Substack, The Average User: Supply Chain Edition, helping them future-proof their careers and make their expertise irreplaceable.
Connect with Carly
Explore ExFreighters
Read The Average User: Supply Chain Edition
Connect with Brian
Follow Chain.io on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Introduction to Carly Monzo's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we're going to be talking to Carly Monzo. Carly is the founder of Freighters, which is a company that works on education and consulting in supporting logistics team. And we're going to learn a lot about what it takes to bring people up to speed in this industry and maybe what some of us do to make it harder on newcomers, along with some of the really cool things that she's spending time doing in applying new technology to the areas around knowledge and in institutional knowledge and personal knowledge and all of this built up stuff that all of us have in our heads who work in the global supply chain. So I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:54
Speaker
Carly, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So let's dive right in. Tell us how you got into this industry and why you decided to stick around.
00:01:05
Speaker
Oh, gosh. Parts of me don't know where to start with that, but I actually got into international logistics first because i wanted to leave the country. That was actually the reason that i I pursued freight forwarding is I wanted to find something that could be done in any country with the hopes that I could do what I'm doing now is is living abroad.
00:01:24
Speaker
So the first chance that I got, i started applying to freight forwarders because I was like, OK, that's a job where you can transfer to another branch and you could you know explore the world a little bit. I kind of had to a little bit of wanderlust going on.
00:01:37
Speaker
ah So, yeah, that's why I got into it. And a freight forwarder in the U.S., relatively close to where i grew up. I'm from Philly originally. I started a freight forwarder in Newark, New Jersey. Some people say it's the armpit of New Jersey.
00:01:50
Speaker
Some people get massively offended when they hear that. um But it is the central place for freight. And I got started a freight forwarder, walked in knew absolutely nothing. Not an acronym, not a word, didn't know what I was doing at all.
00:02:03
Speaker
But pretty quickly, i got hooked on the operations game. The way that the operations move, it's spontaneous. You never know what's going to happen next. And then you start to kind of get into a rhythm. And it's cool. Not every day is the same, but you start to learn through experiences, which I'm more of a ah hands-on learner. So for me, that's really important. And I'm really good at learning from my mistakes. I'm very good at that.
00:02:27
Speaker
So yeah, I started there, got kind of hooked on the
From Consulting to Founding X Freighters
00:02:30
Speaker
industry. And then ah couple years later, jumped to the other side of the business, the customer side of the business instead of the freight forwarding side of the business, where I was consulting for startups.
00:02:40
Speaker
So it was a small consulting firm, ah great people, and they knew the rest of the supply chain. And then I became their freight person. Like, great, you're here. Tell us everything about freight and explain to our customers you know how they can move their freight. Because in a lot of cases, that's kind of this black hole area that nobody knows about. So I quickly realized that there is tons of things that I knew that I thought was standard knowledge. I thought that everybody knew that really nobody outside the industry knows. And so...
00:03:12
Speaker
I consulted with you know tons of companies trying to get their their freight operations in line, get them set up with a strategy or even just an operating procedure to begin with and explaining them kind of the ins and outs of the business.
00:03:25
Speaker
I had a lot of fun doing that. Oh my gosh, i I worked with so many companies and so many great people. And I think that's the other part that helped me stay is the people in supply chain, whether you're on the forwarding side or the vendor side, 3PL, you name it,
00:03:39
Speaker
Or if you're on the the customer side, the people in supply chain are just the best. They're so much better than the other departments. No offense to the other department. But, you know, there they're witty. They're quick.
00:03:51
Speaker
They're a little intense sometimes, but they always have your best interest. which I think is is something that I've noticed not just from my vendors, but from the people that I worked with at clients as well. They just want to keep you and your best interest. and They keep that in mind all the time. And it's kind of like this tough love kind of thing.
00:04:10
Speaker
But the people are great. So I really stayed for the people. And then a couple of years ago, i took a step back and I decided to go out on my own. And I started my company, which is called X Freighters, which is centered around exactly that idea explaining to everyday people how the freight industry works, the basic things that they need to know to operate a shipment.
00:04:30
Speaker
We do, you know, fractional leadership. I do some contract stuff like reviewing contracts. We have an operations exam, which is super cool because I get to put on my investigative hat. But what's really interesting is it really has become an education source, if not anything else, because we only have two workshops.
00:04:48
Speaker
There's only two, but they've become so popular. One is an intro to freight workshop. So that's for the companies that are startups. Maybe they've moved a couple of shipments and it was a disaster or they haven't moved a shipment yet, but they want to have the all their ducks in a row.
00:05:04
Speaker
That's kind of for them. And then the other one that's gotten really popular, especially with the late stage startups and even midsize companies, not even startups, is the invoice auditing workshop. On one hand, I totally understand why people don't know how to look at their invoices.
00:05:19
Speaker
But on the other hand, I'm like, of course, if you want to control your your invoice, or your freight costs, you have to look at your invoices and make sure you understand them. But not everybody has been on the inside of the industry and not everybody understands what's on their invoice. And also not everybody wants to admit they don't understand what's going on in their invoice.
00:05:37
Speaker
So that workshop is fun because we get to tell them everything that I know and show them all the ways that they can get control of their operations, but also preserve their relationship with the forwarders. I think that's that's something that I touch on in every client interaction is preserving your relationships with your vendors.
00:05:54
Speaker
You want the operations to work, but they should work with them, not against them. um So yeah, that's at least the the freight side. So there's about a hundred directions I want to go here, but let's start with one.
Complexities in Logistics Education
00:06:07
Speaker
I'm curious from your perspective as someone who spends this time doing education, you know, I don't think anybody would argue with you that logistics and freight is hard. Yeah.
00:06:19
Speaker
But what I'm curious about is there's a few different reasons that I've seen that it's hard. And some of them are, it's hard because it's actually complicated.
00:06:30
Speaker
Some of it is it's hard because of regulatory. Some of it is it's hard because there are people who have incentives in the industry to make it hard. And sometimes I would put a lot of that invoice thing there.
00:06:43
Speaker
How do you think about the why behind the hard? Like, are there other ways to think about it or, or, you know, is it solvable? Is it inherent in what we do?
00:06:54
Speaker
Where's your head at? Well, I think it's, of course, a mixture of a bunch of those things. But for me, I think usually what it comes down to is people like to make things more complicated than they need to be when they're explaining them.
00:07:07
Speaker
So they like to use a lot of acronyms. Acronyms freak people out. Acronyms make people feel like, oh, my goodness, I don't know what I'm talking about. They really know what they're talking about. They're using this acronym.
00:07:18
Speaker
I don't understand it And so there's that dynamic, that power dynamic going on a little bit. And so to your point of people trying to make it more complicated than it is, especially when it comes to invoicing, is they want it to sound more complicated so that you know you don't realize what's going on.
00:07:33
Speaker
Not that that's always the intention. I think in most cases, especially a lot of the forwarders that I tend to work with, they're very transparent in the way that they do things, but they, after years and years of working in the industry, they forget what they know is not common knowledge.
00:07:47
Speaker
So I think there's a little bit of that. And that's why I'm tempted to say the overall theme is just a lack of education. There's that connector that isn't there, a person or system or resource to connect the dots for the people that don't understand the ins and outs of the business of freight forwarding. But it's also not rocket science. like It's just a bunch of words kind of overlapped on something that's actually quite simple when you lay it out.
00:08:14
Speaker
But one of the things that I like to highlight is even though it's not it's not rocket science, it's not brain surgery, but there are tons of moving pieces involved. And so even though conceptually it's not difficult, you do have to have this kind of head on a swivel mindset where you realize that every decision you make is somewhat time bound and somewhat connected to three or four other things.
00:08:39
Speaker
That's why they call it a supply chain. It's a chain reaction. um So overall, I think it's the education piece. Once people kind of break down that barrier of acronyms and difficult wording and all of that, then they start to understand you know the direct consequences for each of their their decisions or the emails they send or the processes that they build. It's pretty simple after that, I think.
00:09:00
Speaker
So when you see someone who's new to this, new to our industry from from the shipper side, right, come into this, i mean, I've been on some horrifying conversations in my career. I remember one, it was a guy got a, you know, he'd been doing a little bit of e-com and he got a big order from TJX and he brought in a container.
00:09:22
Speaker
And then he didn't realize that he had bought the product FOB and the customs broker called him and said, okay, I need $145,000 check today.
00:09:34
Speaker
he says, well, I don't have $145,000. Like I just do not have $145,000 sitting around to send you a check. And then I got a phone call just because he knew somebody who knew me, like, what do I do? And I had to explain to him what customs and duties were.
00:09:51
Speaker
And the product was sitting at the port and i then had to explain to him, you know, the tension and demurrage fees and say, you know, and then you say, okay, now you're in a, you're in a moment and you're going to have to make some hard choices here.
00:10:05
Speaker
Right. Is there a way to get to these people earlier? eight yeah This, I think, I don't know if it's person-to-person thing. Like, the second you don't know something, because most, especially first-time shippers, or maybe they've shipped a couple of times, but they don't they don't know what an incoterm is. They don't realize what it's flipped. They don't they don't understand any that.
00:10:27
Speaker
If you're relatively new or have low knowledge in the international logistics industry as a whole, You should be open to the idea of saying, okay, I don't know what I don't know and actually seek that information. i think that the fastest way that I've been trying to get to folks is actually i've been working with a couple of procurement people.
00:10:46
Speaker
And I say, hey, you know, your factory, when you interact with clients, If they have a question about terms or whatever, point them my direction and I'll hop on the phone for free.
00:10:58
Speaker
um In a lot of cases, I'm like, hey, let's hop on the phone 15 minutes. And I just want to point out five things that you should be aware of. um And so I have there's a couple of manufacturers that have reached out to me and connected me with some startups that are are clearly first time buyers.
00:11:12
Speaker
But it really is hard to get in front of them before it happens. And I'm not sure if there's maybe some value to letting it happen and learning the lesson the hard way. i think that's my tough Philly background wants to say, you got to learn your lesson that way. But it is really, really challenging. I mean, that's one of the the number one things, what you set up, exactly what you said is exactly what happens all the time is they ship all the time. And then all of a sudden they say, oh, I can get this product cheaper if I move to FOB.
00:11:39
Speaker
They don't know what FOB is. And so really they're taking on all these duties and taxes that it gets to the port and they're like, wait a minute, whoa, I've never done this before. i don't, I don't understand any of this. And then you know you have the the consequences of detention and demurrage.
00:11:54
Speaker
Yeah. So let's let's be more positive for a moment.
AI's Role in Logistics and Carly's Interest
00:11:58
Speaker
I know you've been working on some things around AI. And i have a little personal rule that I don't like to talk about technology without talking about the problem that you're trying to solve, because otherwise it's just technology for technology's sake. So tell me what got you interested and what problem you've been working on.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah. So a couple of years ago, just as I was starting X-Fraiders, my own venture, I actually was just coming off of some burnout, which is really not uncommon in the supply chain industry, in the international logistics industry, that whole sector of business. It's really not uncommon to be burnout. It's a 24-7 job that you can do all the time.
00:12:42
Speaker
And especially for people who really want to keep things going and really care, it can become, you know, really difficult to pull yourself out of it. So I actually was suffering from burnout myself.
00:12:53
Speaker
And so once I was ready to jump back into operations, it was about the same time that ChatGPT started to become, you know, an everyday household name. And I remember thinking, I'm like, goodness,
00:13:04
Speaker
There's got to be something, something AI related that helps the everyday person to some degree. Not, you know, companies like I love working with companies and I love, you know, being able to say that, you know, help them find a million dollars or, you know save one invoice. That's great.
00:13:22
Speaker
by the the people in supply chain are really what keeps me in it because we talked about this already. I mean, there they're part of the reason that shipments get moved or parcels get delivered is that scrappiness nature of of the people that are operating. So I really wanted to focus part of my time, ah portion of my time as much as I could on getting educated in the AI space with the intention of finding, building, promoting something like that, a product, an AI product that can help the individual in the future and not just the company that they work for, if that makes sense.
00:13:57
Speaker
And so what what did you learn? What what what has come from that? Lots of things. at First, I was in the education space. So I was educating myself on AI and I was about the only supply chain person in the room. They were all technologists, data scientists, et cetera.
00:14:12
Speaker
I was the only supply chain person in my MIT professional education class trying to understand this stuff. and I stumbled upon a couple of different products, some of which don't exist today and some of which are superpowers today.
00:14:26
Speaker
It's crazy how fast things have moved in the AI space. But I stumbled upon this idea of an AI knowledge base. This This AI knowledge base, what I've learned, goes by like 20 different names, but it's all the same concept. Some people call it an AI twin. Some people call it a digital mind, an AI doppelganger.
00:14:45
Speaker
But the concept remains the same, which is it's a place where you put your knowledge and expertise and opinions. For mine, I tell it stories that happen in the industry because that's the way I express myself.
00:14:57
Speaker
And it's a place that you can actually put all that information and then use the power of AI to amplify your voice. And before you know it, you have this AI asset that's yours, that belongs to you. And it's not something that belongs to your company. Usually when you go into a company, they give you a couple of tools, you use them, maybe you execute some great projects, or maybe you, you know,
00:15:20
Speaker
run the operations really well in that system. But as soon as you leave that company, it's really hard to retain all that experience that you gained from that company. So this AI knowledge base allows you to retain all of your experiences and put it into something that's actually useful for you in the future.
00:15:38
Speaker
So I'm going to use a really stretched analogy here, but I think it might help kind of draw the picture. I play a video game and in the video game I'm in, you know, you're with the sports team and you scout other players, right? You have this list of all these details.
00:15:53
Speaker
And then if you change teams in that game, all the lists go away. Right. And so it's like, okay, I'm on a new team and you go look up the player that you were looking up 30 seconds ago and all the knowledge is gone.
00:16:05
Speaker
And you're like, wait, but I didn't get dumber, right? But it was all here. And now I'm here. And it's like a reset. And so what I think I heard from you is essentially solving not just that problem, but partially that problem of if you're going to build up a career's worth of knowledge, you should have a spot that's separate to retain that information.
00:16:28
Speaker
Did I get that right? Exactly. And please, for those who are listening who have started fooling around with custom GPTs, please don't give all of your data directly to ChatGPT by creating a custom GPT.
00:16:39
Speaker
It really should be um a tool that is separate, that you place your information in, and something that you build. As your career goes on, you build it, and you build it, and you build it, so that this this tool, it's not just a tool anymore. It becomes an asset for you.
00:16:55
Speaker
But I love the video game analogy. That's exactly how you feel too when you know you change jobs and you're interviewing and you're trying to express you know the best parts of your knowledge. And it feels like you know one line on a resume just doesn't do it.
00:17:09
Speaker
So this is kind of my solve for that.
Conveying AI's Value to Non-Tech Users
00:17:12
Speaker
What have you learned through the journey of trying to take that from a concept to a product? It's not nearly as easy as it looks, um which I think is what everybody says.
00:17:26
Speaker
But also um it's. One thing that I learned personally is i tried really early to get this in front of a lot of people because for me, i saw the value immediately.
00:17:36
Speaker
Like, oh my goodness, you're going to have your own tool that you can optimize. And, you know, maybe some somewhere in the future, it becomes, you know, the operating brain for your own operations and you can have, you know, your own business around this.
00:17:49
Speaker
Or maybe you rent it back to your company. I saw the value in all of this, but i kind of forgot again that people don't know what I know. They haven't experienced the training and they haven't been exposed to the things that I was exposed to. Similarly to the forwarders who are talking to their customers and they're like, I don't understand what you don't understand about demerge, you have to pay it, et cetera.
00:18:13
Speaker
It was the same experience that I had with the AI thing, talking to a bunch of people that I know saying, hey, there's a huge amount of value in this. You could do X, you could do Y. And it just kind of fell flat with them in a lot of cases. They kind of just said, oh yeah, that's cool.
00:18:28
Speaker
But they kind of missed the point in a lot of cases because I wasn't conveying the point. I wasn't explaining to them the power of what an AI knowledge base can do now versus in the future in you know one year, two years, three years and how it builds.
00:18:43
Speaker
So just explaining the value of it, I think is a huge lesson that I've had to learn and have to keep learning because every day in AI, there's something new, something different.
00:18:53
Speaker
new terms that are coming across, ah new names for products that people are relating to. And so I have to change my messaging. So I think that's been a really big lesson for me. um It's just getting the point across of what this product really is and what it can be for the individual and how it benefits them. It's a huge, huge learning curve there. So I actually made the exact same, I'll call it, I don't know if mistake's the right word there, but the same mistake with chain.
00:19:20
Speaker
I go back to 2016, 2017, starting, I saw that and I can say this very bluntly now because everyone will understand what I'm talking about, but that there's too much data in too many systems and it was going to become crippling to try to put it in an organized manner into the places it needed to be when it needed to be there within the context of an actual supply chain business process.
00:19:45
Speaker
that that's hard. But in 2017, when I went to people who were used to like having one system and oh, I have to do an EDI with a customer, that's like a one off project.
00:19:56
Speaker
I was explaining that back then and people were just staring at us for years. i mean, from 2017 till about in there.
00:20:07
Speaker
twenty twenty three somewhere in there what we had to learn to do was back down the vision and not explain all the things that we knew as a company were possible and explain the thing that we had, that the customer could, the next leap they could make from where they were, which was often much, much smaller than what we wanted to sell to them from a vision standpoint.
00:20:33
Speaker
Right. But like they said, okay, well I'm used to sending an electronic invoice to a customer say, well, what if we could make it where, You could send three electronic invoices to three different customers without having to do a big project.
00:20:46
Speaker
And they're like, okay that I understand. Right. Yeah. And we said, OK, what we actually want to sell you is a comprehensive corporate data strategy that involves categorizing and standardizing your business processes from your go to market motion all the way through to cash receipt.
00:21:03
Speaker
but I'm going to sell you, you can send three invoices, right? Like that was a, sta I think for all of us who, or many of us who have the passion to start companies, right?
00:21:18
Speaker
Or the passion to be passionate about supply chain and you're going and working with a startup and you're like, we could do FTZs and we could do, we're going to have a drawback program and we're going to do tariff engineering and we're going to show you how if you put fabric on the bottom of the shoe, you could save this much of the duty and the this and the that.
00:21:37
Speaker
And the person just goes, can you just, I have an order from a customer and I'd like it to be there on time. Can we do that first? Right. And I think it's a thing that all of us who get passionate about have to remember is that you have to kind of take people one.
00:21:53
Speaker
They can only go so far from where they are. right Yeah, exactly. And we talked about this before is, you know, ah like I said, this AI knowledge base, it goes by so many different names. And when I first started talking to people, I would say, hey, do you want an AI twin? And they totally freaked out. Totally, totally freaked out.
00:22:11
Speaker
They're like, I don't want this. Like they viewed it as like a ah a chip that was implanted in their brain. um and It's nothing like that. So I've had to, you know, just express it in a way that they can understand because it's not any
AI, Job Security, and Team Collaboration
00:22:24
Speaker
of that.
00:22:24
Speaker
um It's really meant to be a tool that grows into an asset. But to your point, I think that's exactly what happens is you get so passionate and so excited that like, hey, I can solve this problem for you. I want to help you. This thing is going to help you.
00:22:38
Speaker
And you kind of lose lose sight of where they are today. um And I think one of the biggest things that I've noticed um is really resonating with people is this AI knowledge base is it's a tool, it's an asset that you can use, but it's actually a way that you're securing your job. It's a job security thing.
00:22:59
Speaker
um This is a place that you can put all of your expertise that's separate from your employer and really helps you safeguard your value in the future. I mean, some of the best operators that I know I'm not saying I condone this, but the SOP does not, it's not even close to the way that they do the operations in reality.
00:23:18
Speaker
The best operators that I know are I mean, seamless in the way that they do things. They know their vendors. They know who's going where, at what time. They know they also know three or four different backup people.
00:23:29
Speaker
um And all of that information is trapped in their head and they don't want to put it on an SOP in a lot of cases, not every case, because they're afraid that they're they've then exposed their value.
00:23:40
Speaker
And now their value is owned by their company or whoever it is that they're working with. And then they become irrelevant. um And so when we talk about the AI knowledge base, this is a place where you can feel comfortable putting your information. It's yours. The data is yours.
00:23:56
Speaker
You own the data. You control the data. And it's all yours. And you don't have to feel like you have to keep everything in your head, which is also something that contributes to burnout. Actually, when I was, but I mean years ago when I was, think it was maybe my first six months at a freight forwarder. And I'd been working there and I was ready for my vacation time, but also really, really nervous about my vacation time because on one hand, I desperately needed But on the other hand,
00:24:24
Speaker
I was like, oh my goodness, I don't want everything to collapse when I'm not there. Because if I'm not there, then nobody will know all of the ins and outs of what I do. And I remember talking to a colleague of mine and he said, listen, first of all, you need the vacation.
00:24:38
Speaker
You're going whether your SOP or whatever is finished or not, you're going. And he said, well, worst case, everything collapses and you look great. And I remember being like so, especially someone who played sports growing up, like I played basketball my whole life, team sports.
00:24:56
Speaker
I'm like, oh my goodness, I don't want to do that to someone, especially someone that I work with every single day. Although I understood the idea of like, hey, you people are reminded of your value when you're not there because everything is on fire. And then they say, Carly, ah we didn't know what to do when you weren't here. And you kind of get a little bit of ego boost and also you you get an opportunity to prove your value.
00:25:16
Speaker
But at the same time, like I was like, I don't want to do that to my workmates. That's terrible. You know they have their own workloads to manage. And then on top of that, they're handling my customers while I'm gone. And then I leave them with a dumpster fire.
00:25:29
Speaker
It's not cool. So that little tiny quote just sat in my brain because I knew that so many operators are doing that because exactly because of they're afraid if they put their information, their know-how, their process, their secret sauce into a document, they are going to be thrown out the next day. That's how they feel.
00:25:50
Speaker
ah so So I'm going to bring the senior management perspective to this for a second from having been in senior management. The people who we have, who I have always specifically like in the rooms, may sound cold, right? But I've sat in rooms. I remember in 2008, we said, okay, we've got to cut 30% the staff next week.
00:26:10
Speaker
next week Right. Because the economy collapsed. We didn't know whether money was going to come out of the ATM machines. 30 percent cut in this group. And in this case, it was an IT group. But this I would have said the same thing if I was in Freight Ops.
00:26:23
Speaker
You know, they said like we would sit down and we literally had a list of people and an org chart on the wall. And it was a very unpleasant day, of like a full day of sitting there with the management team going, OK, we all have to contribute.
00:26:36
Speaker
cash back by letting people go miserable experience right yeah but when push came to shove and i looked at my team we would say okay well we can't get rid of that person because they have this specialized thing that we don't know and it is going to cause a problem we can't get rid of this person because they have specializing we went down the list and it was like probably blah blah blah And then at the end of it, we kind of flipped our thinking. And I see this all the time now where we said, who is the most collaborative people? Like if we're going to have less people, we need the people who are the best teammates and the ones who are the most collaborative.
00:27:16
Speaker
And not the ones that are holding us hostage, essentially. And we ended up letting go the people who were the least open with information in the sense we said, well, we can recreate information, right? Because frankly, most of things people think they're in their head.
00:27:32
Speaker
But what we can't recreate is the people who adapt the most quickly to making us all successful as a team and are the most, you know, we're going to be in a new unknown world and the people who are going to be the best teammates are going to be the ones we want to keep.
00:27:48
Speaker
And so we actually specifically consciously said that out loud and it very much stuck with me that the people who thought they were protecting their jobs were the people who were doing the one behavior that we chose to let them go because of when push came to shove.
00:28:05
Speaker
So. It's so funny because the exact person who said this to me was a fantastic
Recognizing Efforts in Logistics and Closing Thoughts
00:28:11
Speaker
teammate. Like, I was surprised that it came out of his mouth, if that makes sense. Like, he would be on your list of people to be. He was just trying to get you on the plane. Maybe.
00:28:20
Speaker
but because Because I've said similar things, and I've said, like, at that moment, it's – and it gets to the burnout thing, right? Like, you you need to get that person on the plane because you know that's what's best for them. mean, you say, look – First of all, we're going to be fine.
00:28:34
Speaker
Second, if we're not, you know, it'll be fine. Right. greats Like the the thing, mother said this to me when I was 12 years old and it stuck with me. I was very upset about something. She goes, do you think the sun's going to come up tomorrow?
00:28:46
Speaker
i go, yes. She goes, well, then everything else sorted. Like, do you think your problem is going to prevent the sun from rising? I know, but except my problem was always, but the sun's already up in Asia right now. So I got it. i Yes, fair.
00:28:59
Speaker
Right. um It does get to kind of a interesting, before we wrap, I do want to, I want to just point, get into this burnout thing just one more time, more specifically that.
00:29:12
Speaker
You said something else earlier about the culture in freight and logistics in particular, even more so, I would say, than general supply chain is one where we are all excited to not have the same day twice and we're all very high energy, but you don't get a lot of thank yous and a lot of pats on the back.
00:29:32
Speaker
Right. And, you know, there is a prevalent culture that doesn't that wants to say, hey, I am essentially not human, right? Like I can just keep doing this forever and nobody ever has to say thank you for me. Nobody, i don't want, I just, and and what it is, the way I explain it to my team when I'm training people to work with our customers is everyone is focused on the problem and the moment the problem is solved, they are focused on the next problem.
00:30:00
Speaker
And that's how their brain has become wired over time. And so do not wait for the thank you because it's not coming because they are everyone has is in problem solving mode all day. And so when the problem is gone, it's forgotten and the next problem is there.
00:30:14
Speaker
Does that resonate with you? Is that a thing that you think needs to change? Is that what gets us excited? Like kind of where's where's your head at? 100% resonates with me and actually is, I have a whole slide in both of the workshops that I run and I mentioned it on almost every call.
00:30:33
Speaker
and Part of that is taking care of your relationship with your vendors. It doesn't have to be a freight forwarder. It could be any vendor that you have is, yes, it's their job to service you, but don't forget, just never forget to say thank you. Like, hey, I know this was a lot of work.
00:30:47
Speaker
um And I know i called you at five o'clock on a Friday because I personally have done that a million times. And you helped me solve this problem. Or we tried to solve this problem. I really harp on that because, you know, as much as from an inside the industry perspective, we become hardened to it. We're not really expecting the thank you.
00:31:04
Speaker
I mean, I know a lot of people that they never expect to thank you. They just do their job and they do their best. But when someone pauses to say, hey, thanks for this, or hey, I know you were working really late on this, it just adds a little something. And when it comes to a business that is so centered around relationships, you to make sure that you take care of your vendors the same way you take care of your team and recognize the work that they're doing because they want to be on your team. So yeah, you got to be hardened to it and not expect it. But as someone who is consuming a service or product, I always like to coach and remind people, hey,
00:31:38
Speaker
Always say thank you. Even if you've just had a tough conversation, make sure you go out of your way to recognize ah exactly the work that's gone into it because it's it's more than you see in a lot of cases.
00:31:49
Speaker
I think that is a fantastic note to wrap on. So why don't you tell everybody kind of where they can find you? What's the best way to to learn more? And we'll take it out on that. Yeah.
00:32:01
Speaker
My company, XFraiders, can be found xfraiders.co.co. We have resources on there. i have the AI Freight Coach, which is my digital mind or my i AI knowledge base, which is available as a resource on there.
00:32:15
Speaker
um And then you can also find our workshops, the Intro to Freight workshop, the Invoice Auditing workshop, along with a couple of other services we offer. And to get started and figure out you know how you can navigate the AI space,
00:32:28
Speaker
and secure your job and feel comfortable about you know per retaining your knowledge, you can follow me on Substack. My Substack name is called The Average User Supply Chain Edition. Every person who subscribes, free or paid, doesn't matter, gets a free AI knowledge base to to just test out And it's a place where you can feel comfortable putting your information in and knowing that you own the data and you own the control around who sees what.
00:32:53
Speaker
um And it's just a place where you can just kind of go plug and play and get involved, get your hands dirty. Awesome. Well, we will make sure we get links to all of that in the notes. And ah thank you so much for chatting today. No, thank you.
00:33:10
Speaker
are Well, thanks so much to Carly for that. It's always been a passion of mine to really look at the people in this industry. And it's it' part of why I keep this podcast going is because it's so much fun to talk to people, but to really be able to have a conversation about what really affects people at the desk level and how they think about the jobs and All of this stuff around human relationships matters so much in our industry, and I'm i'm so glad we had a chance to talk about it from several different perspectives.
00:33:42
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed the episode. As we mentioned, we'll have links to Carly's resources in the notes. And then one of the things we're learning about with new technology at Chain that certainly you'll be seeing a lot more of over the next couple of months is a theme that we're calling practical AI.
00:33:58
Speaker
And I think what Carly is doing certainly fits into that, which is how we bring some of this new technology into your existing business processes in a way where it's not, we're not leading with the word AI, we're leading with the word practical.
00:34:12
Speaker
And it's how do we take the data that you have and the information that's moving around your company and use it to move things forward. Make sure to check out our blog. know we have a couple of updates on some of the things we've done specifically around what we're calling ai checks or AI audit, depending on which side you're coming from, around being able to look in real time for very weird things that are going on inside your supply chain that maybe you couldn't write a business rule for, but that you know in your head Hey, I want to make sure that this shipment isn't being routed in a weird way or that we're not paying an unreasonable price for something. These are hard things to do with IT rules, but we're really excited about using AI to help keep an eye on your data for you. So check out the blog, check out our LinkedIn. We'll be sharing everything there. And as always, thanks for listening.
00:35:13
Speaker
are