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Bridging Content and Technology in Logistics with Blythe Brumleve
29 Plays8 days ago
In this episode of Supply Chain Connections, Brian Glick sits down with Blythe Brumleve—seasoned logistics marketer and founder of CargoRex and Digital Dispatch—to explore her unique path from executive assistant to tech founder in the logistics space. Blythe shares how early mentorship, hands-on experience, and a passion for digital media helped her carve a niche at the intersection of freight and marketing.
Topics covered include:
- How Blythe transitioned from content creator to product founder
- The vision behind CargoRex and its mission to unify logistics information
- Lessons from launching a tech platform in the freight industry
- Why imperfect product launches matter—and how to iterate quickly
- The future of search and digital experiences in logistics
Blythe Brumleve (Milligan) is a veteran logistics marketer with over 15 years of experience in digital strategy. She’s the founder of website management firm Digital Dispatch, host of the Everything is Logistics podcast, and creator of CargoRex—a search engine for logistics professionals. She also serves on the board of the Transportation Marketing and Sales Association and is cofounder of Jax Podcasters United.
Connect with Blythe
Explore CargoRex
Discover Digital Dispatch
Listen to Everything is Logistics
Connect with Brian
Follow Chain.io on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we have Leich
Meet Leich Brom
00:00:09
Speaker
Brom. Leich is a well-known media mogul in the supply chain and a logistics space with a range of podcasts and shows and all sorts of fun stuff. and has recently made the leap from content creator extraordinaire to product
Leich's Transition to Product Development
00:00:28
Speaker
founder. And so we're going to have a really interesting conversation about her journey and the jump and the difference between building something based on yeah and content and building an actual product for people to consume.
00:00:42
Speaker
but I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:47
Speaker
life. Welcome to the show. ah Thank you so much for having me. It's a hot summer day in Florida, but hot is an understatement because as soon as you walk outside, the humidity smacks you in the face. So I'm enjoying being inside for the moment.
00:01:00
Speaker
There's likely some very poor analogy between that and shipping that I'm going to save for LinkedIn posts instead of boring everybody. But let's get to it.
Career Beginnings and Mentorship
00:01:10
Speaker
Tell us how you got into this part of the world and why you decided to stick around.
00:01:16
Speaker
Sure. So I was around, think I was 26 years old. I was waiting tables at a local golf course. And my cousin, who is kind of like a big sister to me, she said, it's time for you to get a real job.
00:01:31
Speaker
And at the time, the thought of sitting at a desk all day, i just was very anti sitting at a desk all day. And she said, well, there's an opening at this place that I work at called Elites Transportation, and they need an executive assistant. And you won't have to sit at a desk. You'll have to sit at a desk sometimes, but you'll be running errands. You'll be out, you know, making bank deposits, picking up prescriptions, you know, doing things for the C-suite.
00:02:00
Speaker
And I said, OK, that sounds interesting. Elites at the time was an asset based 3PL here in Northeast Florida.
Building a Digital Presence
00:02:08
Speaker
And as soon as I started working there, my boss and I just really clicked. He was the CEO of the company and he was a former truck driver who had worked his way up in a company and ended up earning enough money that he got out of the truck and ended up working for the C-suite, earned enough money to buy out all of the other owners, ended up owning the company outright.
00:02:33
Speaker
And so when he found out that I was going to be the new hire, i was going to be the new girl working and assisting everyone, I had a sports and entertainment blog on the side. And at the time, this was like 2007, 2008.
00:02:46
Speaker
two thousand seven two thousand eight So it was very kind of new. I mean, I know like, you know, There's a lot of people who you know started blogs way earlier than that. But at that time, it was still fairly new, especially in transportation.
00:03:00
Speaker
um And so when he found out about that side hustle, he said, you're going to do this for us and you're going to start inbound marketing, which was very also a very new concept at the time. I think HubSpot was only a couple of years old.
00:03:13
Speaker
um We were the third transportation and logistics company on the HubSpot platform. And so that's how I got my feet wet in the industry. I had ah the sports entertainment blog on the side and then my boss found out what I was doing on the side and sometimes during, you know, company hours.
00:03:32
Speaker
And he said, OK, you need to start doing this for us. And so we started social media presence. We started on digital marketing, um focused on the website, you know, SEO, um all of that stuff.
00:03:44
Speaker
And he invested in me and I owe a big part of my career to him because of his mentorship, you know, still to this day. um But he was the one to to pay for me to go to, a you know, the one of my first HubSpot inbound conferences.
00:04:00
Speaker
um He paid for me to have, you know, additional training training. At the time was all the Adobe Suite software programs, and the web developer program. i think it was Dreamweaver. Yeah, it was Dreamweaver at the time.
00:04:13
Speaker
um And all of these different software tools in order to help market the company.
Career Shift and Media Exploration
00:04:19
Speaker
And then i had worked for them for about five years until you market conditions hit the company bad enough to force it to close.
00:04:29
Speaker
And so it was very traumatic experience, as I'm sure anybody who's worked at ah maybe a trucking company and had you know the doors unexpectedly close on you. um But that also was another you know one of the best things that ever happened to me, because then I started working at a local magazine after that.
00:04:47
Speaker
just so I wasn't sure if I was going stay in transportation and logistics. um So I went to go work for a local magazine, became their editor in chief, simply based off my blog experience and digital marketing experience.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then i got a gig at a local radio station just because of my sports blog at the time. um And so all of these different I guess I started collecting almost like Thanos with his Infinity Stones. I started collecting these different Infinity Stones.
00:05:17
Speaker
that would ultimately lead me on a you know a career path that I find myself today.
Founding Digital Dispatch and Cargo Rex
00:05:23
Speaker
And I worked in local media for a handful of years as well. And anyone who works in local media knows that it doesn't exactly pay the best, um especially not anymore. And so I had to go get ah you know another job, a full-time job, and work with the local media on the side.
00:05:41
Speaker
At that point, A couple years had passed, or a few years had passed, and i went back and worked for my boss who had started up another logistics company. Because you know for a lot of folks who work in this space, when one company closes, you just go work for another logistics company down the road, or you open up another one. It's kind of the best and the worst thing, I think, about this industry is that you can start up so quickly after a failed venture.
00:06:08
Speaker
And so I went to go work for them again. And I worked for them for about two years, another local transportation company, same boss, and it got to a point where I was really annoying him.
00:06:19
Speaker
And he said that it's time for you to go out on your own. There is no room left for you to grow here. And it's time for me to push you out of the nest. And so he pushed me out of the nest and i started up my own company, at digital marketing agency.
00:06:35
Speaker
And then he became my first client. And so since then, it's been building into Digital Dispatch and now the podcast and newly Cargo Rex that I launched just earlier this year. So got into the industry because of my cousin, but I stayed because of the mentorship. I stayed because of the opportunities I was given.
00:06:54
Speaker
um that I never really went to school for, but it allowed me the hands-on experience to start diving into these other little niche areas that I feel very confident in saying that are very vital in today's business world. And that's having the business acumen, seeing the risk firsthand of what to do, what not to do when you run a company,
00:07:18
Speaker
And then the personal branding and, you know, how powerful digital media can be to make those digital handshakes. So I'm curious about, there are people I know who have a very mapped out sense of like, there's a career and you get promotions and you get, you know i you you know, if you work at Fetage, right, or you work at T-Jol, the D. there's like this path and I want to be a manager and you'll say like, what's your five-year plan?
00:07:50
Speaker
And it doesn't sound like at any point in there, you could predict the five years. Like then but like what what balance of it happened to you, you made it happen and, or that it was just like, how much of this was constructed?
00:08:05
Speaker
How much of this was happenstance? Like like it's it's a unique journey. So I think a lot of it was just me being put into an uncomfortable situation and just trying to find my way out of it.
00:08:17
Speaker
If you would have asked me at the time, I would have told you that I'll run the sports and entertainment blog on the side and I'll do that until it becomes large enough that I can leave my executive assistant position.
00:08:30
Speaker
That never came to fruition. And in fact, you know working at the executive assistant, I probably would have never left that job either. I maybe would have never started my own business, but each of... a Well, no, I take that back because I had already kind of started my own business.
00:08:46
Speaker
I don't know that I would have been brave enough to take the full leap until I was making enough money to sustain myself. But then at the same time, i probably would have never earned that much money working at a full-time job because the full-time job was safe.
00:09:02
Speaker
And I had everything taken care of. I was making... more money than I had ever dreamed of in my life. And at this time, I was, you know, I say it now, but at that time, $40,000 was a lot of money to me.
00:09:16
Speaker
And being able to have that kind of security ah was all I needed until that security wasn't there anymore. And then it was, okay, well, do I stay on this path of continuing to work in this industry?
Challenges and Innovations in Cargo Rex
00:09:33
Speaker
Or do I go and pursue these other mediums like working at a magazine or working in radio because of my experience in digital marketing? And so I think that that's where I probably made the conscious decision at that time that I didn't want to go back to transportation and logistics because I had kind of already done that. Let me explore what maybe I'm meant to do.
00:09:55
Speaker
But then when I explored what I was meant to do, you don't. make anything. I mean, to put it in perspective, ah it was about $28,000 a year to be editor in chief of a magazine.
00:10:07
Speaker
And that is, you know, even back then, it was very tough. And I say back then, this was like 15 years, 10, 15 years ago, it was not enough for me to live off of I racked up a lot of credit card debt at the time.
00:10:20
Speaker
And it got to a serious place where I had to have the conversation with my, you know, my publisher. And I said, I can't live like this. I you know, I've been irresponsible with purchasing decisions, trying to think I have the same lifestyle as the $40,000 salary.
00:10:38
Speaker
And I didn't change any of that. That's also, you know, I think learning lessons whenever you're young and, you know, how to become more financially savvy, especially as a business owner, which is something that pays off today.
00:10:51
Speaker
But at the time, it was more of the situations that I was being thrown into or situations of feeling knocked down and... Just having the mindset of like, I'll prove to you or I'll, you know, I'll show you. and That was sort of the mindset. And I think I, you know, i have a lot of that today, where if somebody tells me I can't do something, it's, ah well, if I want to do it, I will.
00:11:14
Speaker
And that I think has sustained me over those different career trajectories on which path to take. So you recently started something new, and that was kind of actually the impetus for me reaching out and saying, hey, let's let's have a conversation because beginning of the year, you started Cargo Rex, and you had to make a decision there that I find very interesting for people who come from spaces where you are your own product, which would be consultants, media, things where the product is you.
00:11:51
Speaker
to now you decided to build a product that is not you right and go run and build a business around a product take me through what happens 23 24 that gets you to december to do this Well, I have actually had the idea for Cargo Rex for years.
00:12:13
Speaker
So Cargo Rex is my mission to bring together all of the content creators and the business services and solutions and logistics together.
00:12:25
Speaker
And so over the last few years, we've seen an explosion in logistics tech. We've seen an explosion in events. We've seen an explosion in content creators.
00:12:36
Speaker
And even though it feels like it's an oversaturated market, it's still difficult to find which pathway to go down, which information to surface and i felt increasingly frustrated with running the podcast of how many silos exist in logistics.
00:12:59
Speaker
where I you know like come from an asset-based 3PL. So trucking and third-party logistics, you know the brokerage floor and the truck drivers, that's who I knew. But with the podcast, I i mean, I knew about you know intermodal and maritime and warehousing. and knew about all these other sectors of logistics, but I didn't really know how they all interconnected.
00:13:20
Speaker
And so using the podcast as an educational journey selfishly, it really started shining the light on this theory that I had had growing that why isn't there some kind of an online resource where all of these solutions are in one place, where all of these creators can be spotlighted in one place?
00:13:42
Speaker
And so I'd had that sort of working theory and then ChatGPT is launched. And I had a career internal crisis where I just saw it was maybe almost like a, it was like an internal doomsday.
00:13:57
Speaker
where I thought all of digital marketing is going to be disrupted. All of technology is going to be disrupted. And in on a large part, that's still true. But it was still my thesis of, well, ChatGPT still can't tell you the difference between a freight broker, a freight forwarder, and a freight agent.
00:14:15
Speaker
And I was like, there's not this industry level knowledge that's being surfaced in these bigger platforms. And so as I started using the tool, at first, when it first launched, I put it on the back burner. I said, this business idea can't survive in this kind of an environment.
00:14:32
Speaker
And as I started using it more and more, i said, well, actually it can. And this is how we can do that. And so that's why I built the platform. And that was the impetus of bringing it to life.
00:14:45
Speaker
Because it was a long time that I thought that Chachupiti tools just like it, I just wanted to wrap my head around what this technology means and sort of the new information era that we're in.
00:14:58
Speaker
And then you come to find out that these tools are only scraping the information that is widely known in Google and Bing and these different search engines. So if they don't know the answer, then there's still an opportunity here for us to surface those creators, those services, those solutions, that technology, and bring all of those things together in an environment where I feel very confident. you know I've built websites for a decade. I've been creating content online for a decade and building a product that is independent of me.
00:15:32
Speaker
Because, you know, as any business owner can tell you, if I leave my podcast, the podcast is done. That's not a sustainable, recurring revenue path for the future. It's my pet project.
00:15:46
Speaker
It's something that brings me a really good, you know, income. But how long is this hamster wheel going to keep going? And I don't know. And so what business can I build that can broaden and operate independently of me that I'm still incredibly passionate about?
00:16:06
Speaker
And so it's been a long sort of theory and thought process and like battling my own can I really do this? Like, is anybody really going to like pay attention? Imposter syndrome is definitely, you know, crept up a bunch of times.
00:16:21
Speaker
But ultimately, I felt that this was the strongest pathway for me to build an informational database business that can help other researchers, leaders and creators you know find those associations, find those industry events and find those services and solutions that might be a good fit for them, maybe not right now, but later on down the road.
00:16:44
Speaker
And they could start that journey on cargo wrecks. And they could start it by listening to all of the creators that are within the space and that are talking about things intelligently that some of these bigger search engines, LLMs, they just don't have the data set.
00:17:02
Speaker
And so I wanted to build the data set. So first year of any business is a little wild, right? But so far, what have you learned that's interesting?
00:17:13
Speaker
Oh, it is. I think any business venture, you think it's easier in your head, And then you launch and you learn. and I've struggled with this because we did an MVP launch in December, 2024, and then got some user feedback and got some new ideas and just got the site working.
00:17:36
Speaker
where I felt that I was comfortable enough going to the public with it. And then you go public, and you do all the PR pushes. and then you go back and start using your own product. And I'm a firm believer in I use the site every day.
00:17:50
Speaker
And I get incredibly frustrated. with it every day. And I find little tweaks and I find bugs and it infuriates me because I want it to be perfect.
00:18:02
Speaker
But I know as a business owner, if you waited until it's perfect, you waited too long. And so I think it was just getting over that initial hurdle of let's just get it to good enough and then we learn.
00:18:15
Speaker
And then we keep reiterating. And so that's the process that I find myself in right now. We have torn down our search functionality. We're on our third time right now because it's just not where I want it to be.
00:18:29
Speaker
And so just learning how information is categorized and how to have you know good fields for your data in order to keep data integrity in place and how to surface relevant results. And when somebody is searching for, I'll give you a good example, cross-border, I was on a call with someone and they were talking about, I need a cross-border TMS. And i said, that's a perfect, let me go to Cargo Rex. going to try to find a cross-border TMS and I'm going to send them the search results link.
00:18:59
Speaker
And then I did the search, and because I, on the site, we have it programmed as cross-border one word, but when I did my search, I did cross-border in two words, and it didn't surface the right results.
00:19:11
Speaker
And so it's things like this that I just didn't know until you're in it. And so finding out those little tweaks that you can make the platform that much better, that's the process we're in right now.
00:19:25
Speaker
And I feel confident in the direction we're going. But I'll tell you, March and April, i wanted to burn the whole site down a couple of times and start fresh.
00:19:36
Speaker
So I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of people who consume software have is that the people who built it are unaware of its flaws.
00:19:48
Speaker
Or are aware and indifferent to its flaws. When the truth is that there's no, from a founder perspective, this might be different for the CEO of a company that's been around for 100 years, but from founder perspective, there's no more critical user of this software.
00:20:08
Speaker
like the messages that my team get from me at three in the morning, because I woke up and I had a thought and I wanted to look at something on my phone and a page like this button rendered with our non rounded edge on a mobile browser at three in the morning in a country, you know, it's like this, that, the other.
00:20:27
Speaker
And they're like, I'm like, why the hell doesn't this work? And they're like, it works fine. I'm like, nope, that button was rounded yesterday. And they're like, who cares? We know. And we have to prioritize that the rounded edge on that button is not the thing that's going to make the most value for our end users. But like...
00:20:46
Speaker
Trust me to everyone who's listening. The founders know the flaws of the software and it kills us. It keeps me up at night. Like I have cried real tears and because a search result on my own site is not surfacing the content or the resources that I know that we've already added in there.
00:21:08
Speaker
And I want to burn the whole site to the ground and start fresh. And my, you know, credit to my dev team, because they talked me back from the ledge a few times ah during the course of this project. um But we've been in active development, we're coming up on a year.
00:21:24
Speaker
And I just have to remind myself of this is how far we've come. So what's been your favorite part of this part of your journey? Oh, ah just like all career-wise? Let's just say for this eight months or whatever it's been of CargoRise, what's been the highlight for you?
00:21:42
Speaker
I would say probably hearing the stats that people like to see. So we recently launched, within the last 30 days, this new homepage for logged-in users. There's one homepage that typical users will see,
00:22:00
Speaker
And that's guest users. But if you create an account and you're logged in, then we surface different stats for your own homepage. So what are the top five visited businesses today? What are the top 10 episodes this week?
00:22:15
Speaker
Who are the new companies in the categories you follow, whether it's maybe a TMS or supply chain visibility, all these different categories.
00:22:26
Speaker
And i think having that home stat page keeps me updated. And it's useful for me that I'm checking it every day. And so if I'm checking it every day and not wanting to burn the whole site down and I'm finding it useful, i created that logged in user homepage experience because I knew it couldn't just be about surfacing knowledge. You have to give people reasons to come back to your site.
00:22:55
Speaker
And that was giving me reasons to come back to the site and to check it regularly. And so I think that that's been the feature that I'm most proud of. And that is where I see the future of the site going, because the ultimate goal is to be able to help users find the information that they need faster.
00:23:15
Speaker
So if you are you know working in a specific career field, maybe you're working in marketing within logistics or you're working in tech onboarding, want to be able to surface the most relevant information to you as possible. and we're building towards that sort of customized user experience.
Vision for Cargo Rex
00:23:36
Speaker
And I think that that's where the web in general is going, more of a custom user experience, no matter what platform you're on. And so knowing that we're going in the right direction versus just a glorified directory,
00:23:52
Speaker
is something that I feel confident in that we're building not just a directory, but an informational resource to help those researchers, those leaders, those creators be able to know what's coming and what the mood of the industry is.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that was just an accidental feature that I was like, this is something I want to see. but let's launch it to the audience and let's see what they like. And so since then, we've seen an increase in engaged users coming back to the site.
00:24:25
Speaker
And that's ultimately my goal. now So I want to pull a ah little bit of an observation out that, right? And something that I'm jealous of. ah When you're in the stage that you're in, in this product,
00:24:41
Speaker
the The question I asked it was very broad, right? What are you excited about? You could have said, oh, I'm excited about, you know you know, something that, you know, I have this interaction with a person. or i this When you're in this early stage, the passion around the product and seeing the thing in your head be real.
00:25:02
Speaker
is so awesome. And I think that there are people who build things because they're good business ideas. And then there are people who build things because they're in their head and they have to come out.
00:25:15
Speaker
And what I'm hearing from you is that you fit in that second category. Welcome to the club because I'm that category two of light. There's a thing in your head that had to be in the world, right? And so tell me if I have this right, but that it ultimately was not a choice to start the company.
00:25:32
Speaker
It was an outcome of the fact that this thing had to come out of life and into the world. And therefore the company is just a vehicle by which that happens. Is that a good way of kind of framing that?
00:25:45
Speaker
Yes, that's exactly right. um Because like I said, I have had this idea for years, and selfishly, I wanted to have something like this for myself.
00:25:57
Speaker
And I think, you know, if you've been on LinkedIn long enough, you've probably seen people share an image of all these logistics tech companies. And it's just a bunch of logos.
00:26:07
Speaker
And I would see that image for years. And I'm like, that should be a website. Why has nobody built that? Somebody will build it eventually. It's just a matter of time. And no one built it. And I just saw it as a grand opportunity to bring together the culmination of my career, you know, building websites, creating content and working in logistics and helping break down those information silos, which I use as a sort of the ethos on the podcast.
00:26:39
Speaker
But I can't do that at scale on the podcast. I can only do that at scale through cargo wrecks. And so that was really the driving force behind it and trying to, this is my attempt to build a company that can be independent of me.
00:26:58
Speaker
So take us out with something that you're excited about for the future. What's got you really jazzed up right now? Gosh, um is it weird to say ah search?
00:27:12
Speaker
It literally would be on brand for the rest of this episode to say search. I would say that- it It's you. If it makes you happy, it makes you happy. I'll take it back to the new information era that we find ourselves in As a business owner, I felt the need or maybe the pressure from other executives, from other business leaders I follow that i have to build this giant company in order to be successful.
Benefits of Lean Operations
00:27:40
Speaker
And because of tools like ChatGPT and all of these, we're entering into the agent model as well. We're entering into an era where I feel justified now with having a lean operation, having a small team, and then putting different fishing lines in the water and seeing which one takes a bite.
00:28:03
Speaker
And with this information era that we find ourselves in, i really enjoy building. I really enjoy figuring it out and trying to create a solution in this information digital ecosystem that will be useful for a larger audience that can scale independently of me.
00:28:27
Speaker
So it just, it feels like we're in this new information era and I'm at the perfect sort of culmination of my career experience to bring all of those things together.
00:28:38
Speaker
And that's what I'm really excited about.
Conclusion and Announcements
00:28:41
Speaker
That's really awesome. And we'll get the link to Cargo Rex and all of your other wonderful endeavors in the show notes.
00:28:49
Speaker
It's been so nice having on. This a long time coming. I was on your show a long time ago. So it's it's great to get to talk again. Well, thank you so much for having me on. You've been one of my favorite podcast guests of all time.
00:29:00
Speaker
And so I consistently go back. Like anytime I see your name on a podcast episode, it's an add to queue for me in my podcast library. I appreciate that. It's bi-directional. All right. Thanks for being here.
00:29:13
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.
00:29:18
Speaker
um Thanks again to Glyce. It's so great to be around all of that positive energy and the excitement that comes from doing something new and unknown in the world.
00:29:30
Speaker
We'll have links to all of Glyce's different endeavors and cargo wrecks, at least as many as we can fit onto a website down in the show notes. And also be sure to check out especially the chain I linked in over the next few weeks, we're announcing some exciting things that are not just about AI, they're about productivity, they're about how to take a lot of this technology and actually work in your supply chain or in your customer supply chain in a way that's successful and pragmatic. So we're very excited about that and keep an eye on the social, learn more. I'm Brian Glick thank you for listening.