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What Freight Forwarding Customers Actually Want with Dave Broering
273 Plays3 years ago
In this episode, Dave Broering, President of Integrated Logistics at NFI, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- Creating good relationships between shippers and carriers
- The difference between non-asset solutions and integrated logistics
- Dave's passion for the tech and startup scene
- What freight forwarding customers actually want
- Advice to the next generation of logistics leaders
Dave Broering has over two decades of experience within the non-asset based logistics space. Through that time, he has developed an expertise in creating fast-growing and efficient operations focused on customer service and execution. As President of Integrated Logistics Solutions, Dave leads the Brokerage, Intermodal, Global Freight Forwarding, and 4PL services at NFI, one of the largest privately held 3PL’s in the US. By combining his upbringing at both American Backhaulers and CH Robinson with his blend of technological focus and operational execution, Dave’s Non-Asset division continues to be one of the fastest growing divisions within NFI.
Follow Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-broering-98299b5/
Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansglick/
Chain.io Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chain.io
Chain.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/chain_io
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Transcript
Understanding Shipper Needs and Relationship Management
00:00:04
Speaker
You know, in the end, relationship connects back to that idea of I'm going to only give you the as an intermediary standing between your pickup and your delivery and your sometimes last representation of your service to your customer.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm only going to tell you about the things you need to know about. And that is different from shipper to shipper, from carrier to carrier. And so some shippers want to know about every single problem that happens and others only want to know about the ones that are going to blow up in their face when they open an email from their customer. And understanding that is about the relationship.
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, your host and CEO of Chain IO.
00:00:48
Speaker
Today, we've got a pretty awesome guest honored to have Dave Boring, who is the president of Integrated Solutions at NFI, one of the largest privately held trucking providers in the United States.
Dave Boring's Career Path
00:01:00
Speaker
And so without further ado, let's just get to the episode. This is a long one and I'm really excited to be able to bring it all to you. Dave, welcome to the show. Hey, Brian. Good to see you again and very happy to be here.
00:01:17
Speaker
Great. So why don't we start with just a little bit of introduction of your background and who NFI is for any of our audience that may not have heard of you. Sure. And I'll try to do the short version because I can do the long version and everyone will be asleep by the time I get to the end of the long version. But I graduated from University of Dayton back in 1997 with a perfect degree for logistics. I got a degree in English literature.
00:01:41
Speaker
graduated, had no idea what I was going to do with my life and sort of fell backwards into freight brokerage with a little company called America Backhaulers that many people have heard of that became sort of the genesis of the freight brokerage market, specifically in Chicago, if not more broadly around the world and spent the next
00:01:59
Speaker
We got acquired by Robinson a couple years in. I spent the next 14 years of my career from hire to departure with Robinson. Learned a tremendous amount about just logistics in general and not just domestic logistics, but also international logistics is a big part of what we were doing there.
NFI's Growth and Operations
00:02:18
Speaker
got an opportunity to come and build a business inside of NFI's organization. They were really looking to grow a freight brokerage business in connection to their trucking and warehousing business. And so, you know, what better way to do that than to rip your life apart and grab your young kids and your wife and move to a place you've never been before.
00:02:35
Speaker
in Philadelphia. So back in 2012, we did that just a little bit less than 11 years ago. And since I've joined here, we've forexed our revenue as a company, NFI has and have become probably the second largest privately held family owned logistics company in the United States behind I think Estes is probably the only other one.
00:02:54
Speaker
It's bigger than us at this point. And NFI is a trucking and warehousing business. We are over 70 million square feet of warehouse, 3,000 of our NFI trucks running around the country. We've become a relatively large force in the non-acid based logistics space under my purview and then one of the top three drayage and trans-loading providers in the United States and based right here in glorious Philadelphia.
Logistics in Chicago vs. Philadelphia
00:03:19
Speaker
So I'll start with the Philadelphia question first because obviously we're
00:03:24
Speaker
Two of a very short list of logistics companies based in Philadelphia. Coming from Chicago, which obviously is a hub for logistics, what have you found different operating in the hinterlands of the logistics space out here in Philadelphia?
00:03:42
Speaker
You know, it's interesting because we were right downtown in Chicago where I worked and grew up. And the big thing for us always was that being in the city, you get access to this great town and tons of kids love moving to Chicago after they graduate from college and trying to figure out their way through the world. And it gave us all these great opportunities. We moved to Philly and the South Jersey suburbs more specifically, because we are on the wrong side of the Delaware from that perspective. It's been very similar.
00:04:12
Speaker
tons of great opportunities for young talent coming out of college, but a little bit more aggressiveness than you would get in the suburbs of Chicago. And so what I would say is like the pace of things growing up in Ohio and moving to Chicago, that was like a step forward from a frenetic pace of life and living in the city.
00:04:31
Speaker
And then moving to the suburbs in Philly, we never really took a step back from that frenetic pace. That's just the way the East Coast moves. And so we felt very at home here. We found a ton of tremendous talent here. And as you said, there aren't very many big logistics companies in the
Philadelphia Sports Culture
00:04:49
Speaker
area. So we also tend to get a lot of the really good talent that's interested in growing with a big company.
00:04:55
Speaker
Well, we are recording this prior to the Super Bowl, but I'm sure we'll post it afterwards. So for anyone who's uncertain what that intensity looks like, I guarantee you that if you go on TikTok by the time that's here, as you can see, plenty of Philadelphia intensity one way or the other coming out of the Super Bowl.
00:05:13
Speaker
So I don't think I've ever been around a more intense fan base ever in my life. And this is coming from a person who's a Bears fan, which, by the way, happy to see the Eagles succeed. And it's great to be able to root for a local team, at least passively so. But I've never, ever experienced anything like Philadelphia sports fans. It is a unique unto itself. It is a very hard thing to explain to the outside world. So.
00:05:36
Speaker
Well, everybody just knows it from throwing batteries at Santa or the jail that's in the bottom of the link or these other things that people know about. But the truth of the matter is those things all exist for a reason. It's because people take their sports very, very seriously in this town. Yes, they do.
00:05:52
Speaker
Changing topics slightly.
NFI's Rebranding Strategy
00:05:54
Speaker
So we were talking before you joined about your title and your group has changed names from non-asset solutions to integrated logistics. Why is that important? What's the difference? Well, first, we love to give out swag, just like anybody else does. And all this close, we kept hearing over and over again was, so one, nobody knew what logistics was before the pandemic, right? So nobody cared about the supply chain. If you try to explain what we did to people, their eyes roll back in their head, they glaze over. It's boring.
00:06:20
Speaker
Even worse, these people are wearing something that says non-asset on it, and it confused people even further like, so wait, you're not an asset of the company? And so what we had done with the non-asset nomenclature we were using was we'd really brought our internal language out to the street in naming it the way we did. And when I started, I was just the brokerage guy. And over the course of five to seven years,
00:06:44
Speaker
We've really aggregated a bunch of disparate businesses inside of NFI, acquired some other businesses from the outside and snapped them in to create this portfolio of non-asset services that really integrate with our other services to create value. And so as we move to the new name of integrated logistics, we were really focused on
00:07:04
Speaker
how do we tell the outside world what we do? In working with our other divisions, we have more examples than we have time to exhibit that of places where our other divisions where we're working with them to provide extra capacity or inbound support for warehouses or outbound moves or extra capacity that your age team needs, where we are at the outlet valve or the connective tissue that's helping these other services be more valuable to our enterprise clients
Role of Technology and Innovation in Logistics
00:07:31
Speaker
So we felt like integrated logistics best exhibited that for the outside world to consume. And oh, by the way, made our employees feel a little bit better about the name and the process. So when you are non asset based, let's go back to the other word for a second. The differentiation can't be how many trucks you own, right? So it's often a lot of it is service and also the tech on top of it. I know that you personally,
00:07:55
Speaker
probably take a closer look at tech than any other president of a group that I deal with on a day to day basis. Kind of, why do you have so much passion around tech and the startup scene? Kind of why? Yeah, I mean, part of it is just my upbringing. So I was, American Backhaulers was the first non-acid based logistics provider to build their own TMS of any scale or value over the top of green screens related technologies.
00:08:24
Speaker
And so, and I don't mean the existing company that has pricing, I mean the actual AS 400 green screen style business and systems that people were using that was very common in the 70s and the 80s, 60s, 70s and 80s. And so when I started out of college at Backhaulers, we were using a Visual Basic database driven system that was have been designed specifically for that company.
00:08:44
Speaker
And it really kind of struck home for me because every once in a while in my first six months, a shipper would ask me for an update about something and they'd say, give me a call back. And I'm like, hold on a second. I can tell you right now. And they're like, what? Like, hold on a second. I'll tell you. And I gave him an update and they're like, it's just a pause. And like, how did you know that? What do you mean? How did I know that? Like, there was this awe that was coming from the power that the system was giving me as a user and as a new operator that the shipper wasn't expecting to hear from us.
00:09:13
Speaker
And then add in the fact that my brother, my little brother, who's two and a half years younger than me, who is my best friend, has been for a very long time. He joined the business out of college after coming on a mission with an industrial engineering degree, and really on the computer language and software development side of things. And we were roommates and our best friends.
00:09:32
Speaker
roommates for the better part of the next ten years and still remain best friends today. So I got to see the software side of things from the inside with my brother coming up inside of Robinson and doing that, and then inevitably hitting a jack and moving on to a startup to do that work with Command, which got bought by Echo. Now, back with me as my CTO, working with me to help develop our own TMS,
00:09:56
Speaker
But it was always this idea that technology can make a user better at their job and so we call it intelligence augmentation right which is not our term that's a term that the market uses but it's this idea of giving the user superhuman powers to give them the ability to provide a better service to the customer.
00:10:12
Speaker
whether or not the customer understands what's actually driving that and so this idea of like how did you know that i'm getting back to that and finding ways to drive that is a way to really help you provide great things along the way what i've learned days.
Data-centric TMS in Logistics
00:10:28
Speaker
Working with young technology companies as partners, one, they're helping us obviate costs on the buyer's build. We don't want to build anything that somebody else has got as a product. It doesn't make any sense. We want to consume it from somebody else. How do we support those companies?
00:10:44
Speaker
as an early stage consumer to make sure that they get the best highlight to the street, to make sure they get the best street credibility, to make sure their investors understand what they do. However, we can support them. And along the way, I've learned a ton about how these companies go to market and the way they build things. So, sort of along with an answer, but really what it comes down to is, like,
00:11:07
Speaker
understanding how the technology drives the success of the business and then fitting it into that highest and best use for highlighting the things that we do really well as the people that relationship driven business is really the super most important part of what we're trying to do with technology. So the audience won't be able to see this because we're audio only, but
00:11:28
Speaker
as you're talking about this relationships, I can see over your shoulder that on your whiteboard, the only thing where it is the words relationships are all that matter. So I guess I could vouch for the fact that you're living it every day. I do appreciate that idea that the tech doesn't always have to be the forward leading edge of the knife though, that can still be people. I do see a lot of executives who get confused between tech empowering the business and the website.
00:11:54
Speaker
or the portal now. I think people have all passed the website, but that, oh, well, if we have it in a portal, then all of our problems go away. Oh, by the way, we don't have a portal. Well, there you go. We don't have an app. So we spend probably $10 million a year in technology as a division, maybe more. And it's not a point of pride, to be honest with you, but it is a point of we're giving the shippers and the carers what they want.
00:12:21
Speaker
the way they want it and sometimes that's a live report that we're giving them to one of our partner tools like meta base or something like that but we're not doing it in that canonized way that everybody expects because quite honestly. Some people really want in the end they want to be met where they are.
00:12:38
Speaker
And that is not in the form of a website. So I'm very passionate about that idea of not just going the way the herd goes, but thinking about and taking a step back and saying what's the highest and best use of our resources and what do our customers actually want from
Challenges in Data Management and Modeling
00:12:53
Speaker
us? What do they want?
00:12:54
Speaker
more than anything. They want their stuff delivered on time, man, and they want it for like the least half of possible at the lowest cost possible. And, you know, in the end, relationship connects back to that idea of I'm going to only give you the as an intermediary standing between your pickup and your delivery and your sometimes last representation of your service to your customer.
00:13:18
Speaker
I'm only gonna tell you about the things you need to know about and that is different from shipper to shipper from care to carrier and so some shippers want to know about every single problem that happens and others only want to know about the ones that are gonna blow up in their face when they open an email from their customer.
00:13:35
Speaker
and understanding that is about the relationship and so in the grand scheme of things what we try to do is to create value by right of understanding those nuances about your business by digging in and knowing what product you're shipping why your customers are buying your product those things help us make good decisions on your behalf which gives you more bandwidth back to go do other things because
00:13:57
Speaker
Lord knows one thing every company has been trying to figure out is how to push more stuff through the same sized business in order to drive some semblance of net profitability with all the inflation squeezing that's going on in this market and all the costs, you know, sort of spinning out of control at the same time, trying to figure out demand, we can take some of that work off their plate by being their intermediary and representation of that service. So in all of that, what
00:14:25
Speaker
aren't you seeing out there from the tech companies that you wish you were seeing or where are you guys struggling? What are the hard parts? Well, data is the hardest thing. I mean, you know, making sense of data, getting data to a place where you can interrelate to various segments of data or different aspects of data, you know, relational database concepts. And this is just, I'm in the weeds with this right now. So it's also just front of mind.
00:14:51
Speaker
in the sense that we build our TMS to be really data-centric and to be able to give us some real value on the back to create a feeling of scale without having scale. And by that, I mean, when I left Robinson, the thing I took for granted that I didn't realize I took for granted until the day I started at NFI was the footprint of the data.
00:15:14
Speaker
And so all the pricing data that I had at my fingertips that was being driven reciprocally every single day, the way you buy today is the way you sell tomorrow. That all disappeared overnight for me. And I was left standing there 10, 11 years ago with dad. And I'm like, Oh man, I have to figure out how to price this freight all over again. And I've got to think about it a completely different way. And what's in my brain is not able to be extrapolated out to hundreds of people because it just doesn't work that way. So how do we create a better data footprint to be able to do that?
00:15:44
Speaker
Well, it's great, but operational data is only one aspect of that. So how do you layer in other data along with that that helps create better relational value? That's really hard. And getting the right things to line up at the right, like the data modeling to where all the various inputs have the same net result so that when you're looking at a load, it's a load and not a pro or an order or whatever it is, that stuff is really, really hard.
00:16:12
Speaker
and is the thing that I know the market is chasing, but nobody has gotten to that. I'll call it automated data modeling, but it's really more of this idea of enterprise transmission language creation that doesn't require the amount of janitorial work that's happening today.
00:16:29
Speaker
And i think that's where we're really struggling as a just an industry is that we have all this data but we don't have a great way to correlate it and i will say somebody who spent most of my career on the international side it's even worse.
00:16:45
Speaker
So at least there's a lot of transactions in trucking, right? Right. Well, and it's three parties, right? Whereas when you get to global, it could be seven to 10 parties. And yes, it's even more complex and even more paper driven. And it's partially the nature of our industry and it being really latent to the overall kind of speed of data and momentum of data. But it's also just this idea that
Usability of Data Tools for Non-technical Users
00:17:12
Speaker
I think people now understand how to get to the data. I just don't think they know how to relate it and how to make it valuable. Because in the end, like we have a reporting tool called Metabase and Metabase is great, but we have like 4000 Metabase reports.
00:17:31
Speaker
But I think only 10% of them get used on a weekly basis. So people think they know something they want, they have it spun up, they go to use it, and then they never come back to it again because it didn't actually give them the value they thought they would get from it. And so in the end, I think people really struggled to figure out how to make sense or create value from the data. And that's the thing that we really have to zoom in on and figure out. How do we do this? How do we make value out of something that we are getting as a byproduct of how we operate?
00:18:00
Speaker
So back in the day when I administered an AS-400, because we're about the same age, one of the tricks that I learned from somebody, they used to disable all of the reports once a quarter. All the scheduled reports would get turned off and they wouldn't tell anybody about it. And then they would find that, yeah, something like 10% of them would get turned back on because somebody would open a support request. And those were all being printed on printers.
00:18:26
Speaker
to just the paper savings, the ROI on the paper savings of just turning off everybody's daily reports that were getting picked up and getting dropped in the trash can every day. It was pretty intense back then. There's an additional gap there, though. The only other thing I would say is that data discovery tools, so a Tableau or a Sisense or a Power BI,
00:18:49
Speaker
They're getting better, but they still require something more than an operator to really get real value out of them. And so I think that's the additional struggle is that if you think about the average everyday operator that's looking for insights from their data, they don't have a computer science background. They don't understand statistical modeling. By the way, I don't either.
00:19:12
Speaker
And so when you look at these things, it's like, okay, what do I do with this? The reason Metabase has been so powerful for us is because it is a reporting tool. It's giving you exactly what you asked for and you can ask for permutations of it and you can tweak it, but you're not doing the tweaking. A data analyst is doing the tweaking and updating that webpage that you're looking at.
00:19:36
Speaker
But it's that insight that's gotten or the derivative that comes from going down a level into something that I think our operators really struggle with. And I don't think anybody's really hit on the exact right interface to get non-technical people the ability to really deep dive into their own data. So that gets actually pretty deep into something that I think about a lot, both with our technical team and
Role of Data Analysts
00:20:04
Speaker
kind of just from my days in ops, which is there's this thinking that IT or tech or, you know, you used to all be one department and now it's different groups, right? But is about taking instructions and making things work as opposed to contributing thought to the business. And that in this kind of world that we're in now, this data world, there's a group of people who kind of are in many organizations, kind of homeless.
00:20:32
Speaker
that are deeply technical, but closer to the business problem because they're doing that analysis or they're doing that kind of second level and third level thinking. And that that's not operations, right? That's not, you know, let's make sure that we have a truck at this location on Tuesday at 8 AM. But it's certainly also not traditional IT of, you know, take the statement of work from someone and return them back a working functioning program.
00:20:59
Speaker
Do you see a home for those people? Do you think about that differently? So we just recently have started up an internal data practice specifically to go after how to solve this problem. And partially it's because our TMS is getting to a mature state where we have a majority of the business of the freight brokerage business moving through this. I'm not espousing. We have a global TMS by any stretch, just to be clear.
00:21:20
Speaker
Nor are we ever going to try to tackle that one. But from domestic perspective, we're now starting with our own data practice internally to try to tackle this, partially through relational structure, but also partially just for through insights and a better overall discovery concept. And we just recently onboarded a new data engineer and this person had probably 20 years experience in the industry as a data engineer. And as he's come on, we use Slack as our primary communication tool between our groups.
00:21:47
Speaker
I'm watching our data engineer sort of digging through the databases and trying to understand things he's asking these great questions i mean like great questions about. Not only what are these tables or what are these fields but like how does this connect like yes at one point why do we do this acquisition that's a great question and so it's like.
00:22:07
Speaker
we're trying to figure out and like some people at the operator side might be like, no, no, no, you don't need to know the answer to that question. Just do your job for us. We're trying to bring them closer to that in the sense of like having them shadow operations and we want them to understand the life cycle of an order. And they're in the nuts and bolts of this, right? They're down knee deep in the trenches of our data. They're the ones that are most likely to come up with an insight that we don't have.
00:22:34
Speaker
are not getting from our operators because they look at the world differently. And so our perspective is that we've got to do whatever we can to bring them closer to the operations and the understanding of the way the business works to allow that introspective opportunity to exist. Because if we keep them at arm's length,
00:22:53
Speaker
We'll get what we want, which is a clean, functioning, ongoing value of a database and a relational structure and probably a tool that accesses it correctly. But again, that's the most adept data person we have. So why would we not want them to understand as much about the businesses they want to understand and if not more? So the next big thing. So now you have all the data and some of it, right? What price to on this lane at this moment?
00:23:20
Speaker
is factual and you can pop it up in a screen, but a lot of it, how do we change what verticals we're targeting or how our sales process works? Those types of things. There's a lot of organizational change management that has to happen to get people who've been in this business a long time to incorporate that data into their behaviors.
Adopting New Tools and Strategies
00:23:40
Speaker
How do you guys think about it? What have your experience been around getting people to
00:23:45
Speaker
actually use this information. So that is the rub, right? And the good news is that we've been talking about data and systems as decision support tools since the day we started the development of our TMS. So our people understand that we're looking to empower them to be the best versions of themselves.
00:24:04
Speaker
That's a great place to start from first and foremost. I don't believe our people see us providing them with automation opportunities as a threat. I think they understand that what we're saying to them is we want them to be better at managing relationships. We want them to continue their march towards becoming a best in class account management organization and use the tools that are given to them. But I will say that one of our biggest struggles is getting people to adopt new tools and new processes.
00:24:34
Speaker
And I'm convinced it's an iPhone. I blame it all on Apple.
00:24:39
Speaker
you know, the iPhone and the app ecosystem has made it so easy to learn how to do just the thing the app does at its most superficial and never get deeper into it. I'm the guy who finishes every day with three emails in his inbox and his Slack is clean because I really dig deep into the tools that I use every day and understand all the nuances. But I believe that most people in this world under the age of 35 are always floating along the surface.
00:25:09
Speaker
And so like one of the biggest challenges that we have is how do we get people to dive deeper? And so for us, it's really about training and development. And it's about talking about the things that are important and being very loud about those things and then repeating it over and over again with the status. But it's something like if you want people to understand your vision or your mission, you have to say it's something like 41 times something like, I mean, it's like absurd. It's not like you say it once and it sticks.
00:25:38
Speaker
So we tend to really start with an information campaign, whether that be via our internal blog, where I tend to communicate with our teams, or via Slack, where we're doing announcements about new products, new releases, new technologies, and then following it up with trainings. And we're in the very last stages of an LMS development, where we're looking at LMSs right now to find a better tool for getting to our people.
00:26:02
Speaker
and talking to our people about the things we want them to be good at. Because instead of the way I was right when I knew all the hotkeys in my old TMS and I could move through the screens faster than the screens could save and that made me better at my job and the faster I moved the more money I could make. Like it just doesn't work that way anymore. And it's because software has become such a white noise.
00:26:22
Speaker
situation in our life. And because it governs everything we do, we have to be really prescriptive about the things we want them to focus on. Because if we don't, it could be everything and anything. And that honestly is a strategy for just like death by 1000 cuts of non engagement. So if you have to tell everyone something 41 times, and let's use that number,
00:26:44
Speaker
purposes of argument here, I would actually argue it might be low that they can tell them twice a week, right? Then you're talking about about half a year, give or take, to really drive a change. Does being a privately held family business make it easier to do that because of the confidence that
00:27:06
Speaker
A half a year later, you can still have the same strategy. Does that matter? Such a good question. It does. It absolutely does. And what I would say is that what is great about NFI and setting aside Privately Health because I won't speak for every privately held company, but I will speak for this privately held company and say that we are investing for the long term always. We take the long term view with everything we do. And for me, I didn't value it as much as I should have on the way in.
00:27:35
Speaker
It wasn't the thing that I was really locked in on as to why I wanted to join NFI. I love the family business. I miss the family culture that we had at Backhaulers that I liked so much walking into my first day in that job. And I miss that and I was looking to go back to that, setting aside the fact that they're both very well-respected Jewish families as well. And I just happened to stumble back into a really nice Jewish family owned business.
00:28:01
Speaker
It's one of those things where, as I started to understand their thought process, our owners aren't building for a sale. Our owners aren't building for an IPO. Our owners are building to get this business to the next generation because they want to hand them the biggest business they possibly can and then watch them grow it.
00:28:20
Speaker
And for us, that means medium and long-term investments. And so, yeah, it could take us... We're in the middle of an account management transition on our shipper side that literally is 15 months in. And it's been a little bit rocky. It's not gone as swimmingly as we might have hoped. And that's for a lot of reasons. But the bottom line is we're fully committed to it.
00:28:42
Speaker
And we know we may not see the value of it fully until 2024, but that's OK, because we're here for 2025 and 2026 and 2030 and none of us are going anywhere.
NFI's Long-term Strategy Focus
00:28:53
Speaker
So we may as well hunker down and do the right thing and build the right processes and make long term commitments and invest that way, too. And so that's the way we approach it from our TMS. That's the way we approach it from this data strategy perspective. And that's the way we approach it from a change management perspective, from an ops interaction perspective as well. Awesome.
00:29:12
Speaker
So I want to give you one wrap up question because we're sort of up on time. I know you and I could probably go for three or four hours here. So someone who's hopping into this industry today and they want to be in your seat in 2040, which is a scary number to say out loud. What advice would you give them today to be where you are 17 years from now?
00:29:36
Speaker
The thing I really latched onto as I joined this, because again, I had a degree in English literature. I was aimless coming out of college. I had no idea what it was going to do with my life. If I had talked and listened to enough people and sales weren't a dirty word, it had been sales, which is essentially what I did, was I took a sales job out of freight brokerage. But what I realized when I got in there was that being an intermediary,
00:29:59
Speaker
allows this connection to so many other businesses that if you're curious, and I would say at the bottom, being curious is the thing, right? And it's probably the thing my wife would say is the most annoying about me, but it is the thing that helped me understand so many different perspectives on this world.
00:30:21
Speaker
And so, by just understanding, and you heard me say it earlier, well, why does your customer buy this from you, whoever? Why does somebody buy pallet banding? Why does somebody buy shrink wrap? What's the value you're creating for them? Being a part of that company's value proposition, you start to understand better how companies build themselves and how companies work.
00:30:45
Speaker
And so by being in this really essential infrastructure that a company has in delivering, either getting their inbound product or getting their products to their customers, you're in the middle of this traffic that's happening, no pun intended, and really ends up putting you in a position to learn so much about the way companies work. And so, you know, I'm running a really large business. I'll not define it by revenue with no formal business training whatsoever.
00:31:14
Speaker
And my formal business training came from being in the seat and doing the job and being curious and being willing to listen to anybody about the way that the businesses work. And I think that is a key to being successful. And then you're really asking questions about
00:31:29
Speaker
I understand that's the way it's always been done. How do we do it differently? Because logistics and supply chain is an industry full of people who've been doing it a certain way in some cases for 30 or 40 years. And yes, we are constrained by things like railroad tracks and ocean carriers that are not voluminous or have any real opportunity to be disrupted, but there are still better ways to do things. And so really challenging that
00:31:57
Speaker
And understanding how to find another way or to find a better way and a more transparent way, a more successful and lower cost way, those are the keys to being successful longer term. And developing a career is always been about challenging that status quo. And it's not about breaking things, but it's about iterating on them. And that's where my English literature degree comes back, because there's really only four stories that have ever been written.
00:32:23
Speaker
And in the end, every story since then have all been an extrapolation from those original four
Episode Wrap-up and Preview of Next Guest
00:32:28
Speaker
stories. You don't have to be original to be successful. You just have to figure out how to do it your way. I think that is an awesome spot to wrap. So thank you so much for joining us and look forward to getting you back on here soon. Thanks for having me, man. Really appreciate it.
00:32:46
Speaker
Well, thanks so much to Dave for all the insight. It's always great to talk to a supply chain leader with such a depth of understanding of what we do on the system side of the industry. Be sure to tune in for our next episode where we're going to be chatting with Sarah Barnes Humphrey, famous from Let's Talk Supply Chain. We'll be turning around the mic and hearing about her journey through the industry and what she's got going on. Talk to you all soon.