From Cutco Sales to a Nine Figure Exit, Will Jenkins Journey to Success

Imagine you're fresh out of high school, heading into college to play football with dreams of becoming a doctor. But a chance summer job in sales completely changes your life's direction.

Well, that's exactly what happened to today's guest, Will Jenkins. Will has a remarkable backstory that took him from selling Cutco knives straight out of high school to co founding the multi hundred million dollar freight brokerage Molo Solutions. Join us as we explore Will's journey through the world of logistics. From his early days in B2B sales with Kimberly Clark Professional to his influential role at Coyote and the eventual founding and rapid growth of Molo Solutions.

You'll hear Will's fascinating insights on leadership, resilience and the strategic decisions that led to Molo's $235 million acquisition by ArcBest just four years after its inception. We'll also discuss the challenges that Will faced during the COVID 19 pandemic, his unwavering commitment to customer service, and the ambitious goals he set that contributed to his swift rise in the industry.

Plus, Will gives us a peek into his latest venture Journey and his plans to revolutionize recruiting, consulting and sales training within the logistics space. Tune in for an inspiring conversation filled with lessons on entrepreneurship, scalability, and the power of believing in your vision. As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast.

I'm your host, Dave Gulas, and this week my guest is the CEO and founder of Journey, Will Jenkins. Welcome, Will. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for being here. So Will, you've been in logistics for the past decade or so and you know, done some amazing things as an entrepreneur. Can you just tell the audience a bit about your backstory and how you got started? Yeah, totally. So it starts before I got into freight. I've been in sales for really my entire adult life.

My first job ever was selling Cutco kitchen cutlery. I got that job five days after high school graduation. I was 18 and I wasn't really sure what I was going to do that summer and a friend of mine recommended me for the job, ended up getting it and I did really well. I sold a ton of Cutco my first summer, like $25,000 worth, which is pretty cool. And this is before I went to school. I went to Illinois Wesleyan.

I was going down there to be pre med and to play football and getting into selling Cutco kind of changed my career arc and I said, ah, I don't know if I want to go to med school anymore. Like I think sales or entrepreneurship could be the thing for me. So that's what kind of got me into sales and thinking about being able to build a business. I did that all throughout my time in college. And then when I graduated, I worked at Kimberly Clark Professional, that's the company that makes Kleenex.

I did B2B sales for them. So during my time at Cutco, more transactional, fast paced sales. I had an opportunity to run an office for them my summer, summer of my sophomore, going to my junior year. So got a taste of the entrepreneurial kind of spirit there. Then I get to work at Kimberly Clark. Longer term sales cycles, way more buttoned up, more what we see on the transportation side of like selling to a shipper, it's just a longer sales cycle, way more sophistication there.

So I was really grateful to have that opportunity to learn from an organization as large as Kimberly Clark. And then I got into freight. So January of 2014, I started at Coyote as a carrier sales rep because a couple of my friends that I used to sell Cutco with were customer sales reps at Coyote. So that's how I got into freight. And I loved it. I was like, oh my gosh, it's like so dynamic, so fast paced. So glad to have been able to get in at that point.

Okay, so you're, you're, you finish high school, you're going to college to play football, you have an idea, you're going to be pre med that summer. You just get a sales job by chance and like a straight commission, find your own appointments. I mean, I think we all know that, that, that grind, right? Not easy whatsoever. No, no sales experience. And you, you overperform and do very well and that changes the direction of. Your career from that point 100%.

So I'm still really close with a couple of the first managers and mentors I had during my time selling Cutco because they taught me a lot about how to build a book of business, how to handle objections, perseverance, perseverance, how to train people, just like how to be a leader.

And you know, I can't say that I would be where I am today had I not gotten that experience during my four years in college because it taught me so much about how to be a professional and more specifically a sales professional and entrepreneur. Okay, yeah. All right, so you, you go through that, you get out of college, you're at Coyote carrier sales rep and then what happened next? Yep. So I spent two years on the carrier sales Side at Coyote.

And then I had the opportunity to interview for a management role as a customer sales manager at Coyote. So two years selling to drivers and developing relationships, I got that job as a customer sales manager and I started the role January of 2016. And I had eight inside sales reps who were brand new and green. So they had never sold freight before to shippers. They'd never built relationships or built their own book of business.

So my job was to coach them up, go on their calls, teach them how to cold call, develop their book of business, quote and all that stuff. And I absolutely loved it because most of my career to that point was being in front of customers, landing and adding new business. And I learned what freight was as a carrier seller. And now I've got the opportunity to help a team sell to shippers, which I hadn't done. But I knew how to sell and I knew how to coach people. So it was a natural transition.

It was a ton of fun. I learned a lot. So that was January of 2016 through the end of 2017. And then I got recruited by Transport America to join a brokerage that they purchased in Chicago to be their director of business development. So I left coyote January of 2017, and I was at Transport America from January through April.

And then I had the opportunity to co found Molo Solutions. I started working on that with some colleagues that I met at Coyote in April of 2017, and we launched Molo July 5th of 2017. Okay, so you're in sales, you're doing very well, have this upward trajectory of your career and you get into management training, helping a team, which is a natural fit. And then through meeting those people at Coyote, you guys decide to.

To found Molo. Like what, what made you guys at that point decide to start that business? I think some of it is young, dumb ambition. You know, you don't really know how hard things are and you're like really ambitious to go give something a shot. And I think we learned a ton during our time at time at Cody. I did. I spent three years in the space and then three and a half years in had the opportunity to co found quite a large organization as it ended up being.

So I think some of it was just ambition. The other part was looking at the market and understanding how large and fragmented it was. There are so many opportunities in the space. There are so many different ways to grow and to execute for customers. So we're like, man, if these other companies can do it, like we probably do it too. And I think we had good Exposure to what a strong business looked like, like really strong business fundamentals. How do you build a culture?

How do you execute for customers? How do you take care of your people? How do you execute for carriers? Like the core fundamentals of building a strong freight brokerage. We had the opportunity to see that at Coyote. And so we're like, all right, like, let's give it a try, right? Like, we think we could do this. Okay. And you know, we'll get into the journey there. And ultimately you guys ended up selling Molo four years later for like 6, 235. $235 million. Yeah. Right.

So when you start, did you have any idea that you could build such a mammoth company so quickly? I think that we all believed in each other enough to set some really, really aggressive goals. We always wanted to be the next company that people looked at in the space and said, that's the gold standard for how you manage freight. And so there were a few companies a couple of years ahead of us and we wanted to grow more aggressively, really be able to build a name for ourselves.

And I'm not sure that we anticipated the exit to occur as quickly as it did, like four years from founding. The exit's really quick. However, we always had the ambition to build a large multibillion dollar company. And in 2022 we did $1.25 billion in revenue, which was our fifth year. When we sold the company to ArcBest 2021, we did 615 million in revenue. So to kind of go back to your question, we were aggressive about the goals. We wanted to be a large, well known player in the space.

And that was always the goal. The way the exit worked out, you know, I'm not sure we expected it to happen that quickly, but, you know, not the worst thing in the world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what, what was the process like? Like, you guys are young, got some experience, believe in yourselves and each other. But what was it like? Like putting that together and really growing it and getting it off the ground.

So the beginning is a lot of visionary type stuff where you think about how do you paint this picture of what this company is going to be? Because in your head at least, if you're, if you're aggressive and you want to see your business grow, you're seeing it years down the line while you're talking about it today. So we might be in this small office and we've got six people, but we're on the phone with a really large enterprise shipper.

We're selling Them the dream of what we're going to do, we're selling them the dream of how our business is going to grow and what we're doing. We might not be there yet, but that's the ambition, that's the excitement of it. So in the beginning, it's okay. How do you architect the playbook for what this business is going to grow to become? How do you lay the infrastructure to actually scale the business up? Because if you don't have a strong foundation, you. You can't scale.

You can't add talent, you can't go get really, really good people. You can't bring in new people and train them. So the beginning was okay. What do we want to see this business be? What are our core values? How do we govern ourselves? What do we do internally to make sure we take care of each other? How do we execute for our customers? Cool. You got that base. How do you continue to grow?

And every version of the business, as you add more revenue and more load count and more people, is a different iteration of the business. It's different. There are different complexities. Customers need different things. Carriers need different things. Your people, you go from 10 to 100, drastically different organization, you go from 100 to 250, drastically different business. So every time you have to kind of think about the structure and what you're doing to take care of every facet.

And in a brokerage, there are three customers at all times. The actual shipper, the carrier partner that services the freight, and your people. And then I guess a fourth is like your vendors, so tech vendors, people that you have relationships with to keep your business going. But those three core, you have to be taking care of them at all times. And it's different depending on the size and scale of your business. So you've got to balance those plates all the time.

And how, like, what was the hardest part too, at that time? And like you said, like, you lay it out all out very well. Makes perfect sense. And clearly you guys executed very well to have an exit that quickly. But as you're growing that first year, second year, and in hitting that upward trajectory, like what, like, what was the hardest part? There were a lot of really hard parts. I think what's most challenging is when you go from 20 or so people to 100 and you think about scaling the business.

The hard part about that is what you're selling to customers and carriers into your people is how you take care of each other. The way you execute freight, your levels of communication, and that needs to remain standard. Regardless of how big you are. Otherwise, what I sold you is not true. So if I talk to Dave and I say we're going to pick up our freight on time, we're going to communicate if something goes wrong, we're going to maintain our rates regardless of what's going on in the market.

If I tell our carriers, we're going to pay you in the terms that we agree to, we're going to take care of your accessorials. We'll be here after hours to help you. If I tell our team or if we, we tell our team, there is career trajectory. This is a place where you can contribute to something bigger. If all of us don't govern the business in that manner, we're not true to who we say we are.

That is by far the hardest part because it's like easy to do when you got 10 people stand up, hey, what's up? You kind of keep everything close. You can hear the conversations. Not so easy when you have 250 people. So the way that you bring them in and train them up and then govern the way that we treat each other really, really, really matters. Because if you don't do that, you're no longer true to the core of how you said you're going to build the business. And that's super hard to do.

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And, and during that time too, as a, as a co founder and one of the key, you know, key players in the business, like how many hours a week, a week were you working on average? I couldn't even tell you because it was darn near constant. You know, the first couple of years as, as you build that business, you're just available, you know, almost in perpetuity, right? Like, you know, we're there in the office pretty early and as you're a smaller company, you're doing multiple things.

So the first year or two, like we're all chipping in to cover freight. We're all chipping in to make sure that loads are appointed and scheduled as they should be. And then you build departments and you have department owners that execute that. But still, like you told people this was going to happen the way it was supposed to and so if it needs to happen, like, you roll your sleeves up and do it. So, I mean, it's a lot of work. I don't even know if I could say how many hours. It just was a lot.

And I am appreciative for all of them because I wouldn't know a lot of what I know about the inner workings of a brokerage and how to build a business if, you know, we wouldn't have paid our dues. Okay. And so you mentioned, too, about keeping rates constant no matter what happens and that type of thing. So one of the. The unexpected things you had to navigate during that. That business journey was Covid, when that came about, and how that. How that changed everything.

So what was that time period like? It was scary and uncertain in the beginning, like it was for everyone. We went from being a business that was predominantly on site to 100% remote. We sent everybody. They've got their monitors, their keyboards, their Microsoft services. They're ready to go rock. I'm like, all right, we got to figure out a way to keep everybody together in this remote environment. And that ended up working well.

Tons of communication, things that you could do to keep teams together. But a lot of our business accelerated aggressively throughout Covid because we moved a ton of food and beverage. And so a lot of people were. I mean, you're at home, you're eating, you're drinking, you know, you're hanging out. There's not a ton going on outside of that. So we had a lot of opportunity there, naturally, based on volumes increasing.

But the other element of it which you alluded to, which is price consistency, we had contractual business that we were awarded early 2020 that looked good. And then Covid starts, and these don't look so good anymore. And we had a decision to make. Do I go back to Dave and say, hey, man, I know I told you I could run this for 1700 three times a week, but the market's at 18 or 28 or 3000. And so our new rate is X. It's not 1700 anymore. I got to give you this load back. We never did that.

And that is not always easy to swallow as an organization, because at the end of the day, you need to be profitable. You need to make money for the doors to stay open. But our thought process was, if I take care of these customers during the time where no one else is willing to, we are going to get opportunities that allow us to grow. And it did.

And there were a ton of opportunities where we have tough conversations with a customer and say, hey, we're not doing great on these particular shipments, but we're not going to come back and give you those loads back or ask for more money. Our service isn't going to falter. But where else can we grow with you? Because I know everybody else isn't doing that. Right. Like, I'm looking at the information, I see tender rejections, tender rejections, 20%, 25%.

So I know other people aren't taking these loads. Right. We see them on the spot. So where can we get ourselves slotted in for these lanes that you're having a hard time covering? You're always going out to spot. Let's find a nice rate in between what you normally pay on spot. And you know, obviously it's more than what you contracted at in January of 2020. It's July, rate's a little crazy, but let's take care of each other. And that works, you know, really well. Obviously it's challenging.

You got to make good decisions on, on which customers make sense to do that with. But it yielded a very positive return for us. Wow. And so was that when that happened? Because like, like you said too, so many people approached it as like a money grab if they were in a position of leverage at that time, right. To just jack up prices and, and take advantage of, you know, the supply demand situation. So was that just like automatic with within the company?

Like you guys just said, no, we're not changing it. Was it, you know, cut and dry and then you'll just live with the results and clearly it worked out cut and dry. I think that is one of the things that made us different. There were not conversations about, ah, like, but like, are we really going to do this? We were nothing if we weren't willing to actually step up when things got challenging, we might as well be everybody else. And we refused to be like the rest of the field.

Is that hard to do? Yeah, man. I'm looking at these loads going, oh my gosh, we're underwater with this account for this particular lane, man, if we just got rid of this lane, the rest of the account is profitable. Okay, but like, that's not what I told the customer, right? Like, I didn't agree to give them the loads back because it got hard because I quoted it and now that's no longer viable. Like, that's just the nature of the beast.

And I think there it's hard and freight because it's a little gray. The contracts only mean so much. You know, you'll get 100 loads a month? Well, you get 27. Like, all right, man, what happened to the rest of my loads? And then you're like, okay, cool. Well, I got them all during produce season. It was really hard to cover. Okay, well, I don't know. Sometimes that's how it goes. Right?

But if I make a commitment to a customer and I tell you I'm gonna do something, I need to do that if I want to have a long standing relationship, obviously you have to have good conversation internally. Does it make business sense? Is there an opportunity to grow with this customer? Are they really gonna value what we're doing? So it shouldn't just be like, carte blanche, I'm gonna get crushed and taken advantage of. That's not the sentiment there.

It's really, how do I make strong business decisions that are going to be helpful for both parties for a very long time? And shippers, they value that. Okay, all right. And then how did the acquisition come about? So there was a need to raise capital at some point if we really wanted to grow the business to be a multibillion dollar player, which were the aspirations that we had. And so we're considering raising capital.

An opportunity comes up, really because of the relationship we had with Jeff Silver as our primary investor and the company he was building, which was mastery, ArcBest approached mastery about, hey, we need a new TMS. And mastery is building an incredible TMS. And then Jeff helps to facilitate a conversation around, hey, well, maybe that conversation is viable, but there's also an opportunity here that could be strategic with the full truckload brokerage that's up and coming.

And so that was the beginning of the conversation that you kind of go through to due diligence. You understand, does it make sense? What are the offerings together? Are we stronger as an organization?

But we needed to raise money at some point, and this ended up being a really good option as a strategic acquisition that allowed us to take care of our customers, take care of our people, really take care of our carriers, the things that really mattered, and then give people the opportunity to continue to grow inside of a very long, a very strong, cash positive organization like ArcBest. They are very successful. They've been around for 100 years. Incredible balance sheet, lot of resources.

It's good to have a partner like that. Okay, and how long did the whole process take? Like start to finish? 9 plus months. It was, you know, almost a year. Okay, all right. And then so once that happened, that was 2021. You stayed on for another year? 18 months. 18 months. I stayed on until May of 23. May of 23.

Okay. All right. And then so you since left and you, you founded your, your current company, Journey. Can you talk about the decision to do that? Yeah. So I knew what I was going to build as I was on the way out. And I've got a great relationship with the execs at ArcBest and the people that, you know, had, you know, an influence in acquiring the organization. And out of respect I'm like, look, you know, I want to make sure that everything's smooth here.

I care about y'all, I want to see the team continue to succeed. So here's what I'm thinking about doing. You know, let's work on this amicably and you know, I, I love what we had the opportunity to build. I love, you know, what the, the team has been able to do since that point. But I was very forthcoming with the fact that I was going to start a recruiting company which was the first service offering of Journey. We do recruiting, consulting and training.

And so due to the nature of my non compete, I could start the recruiting part first and then work on consulting and training subsequently as my not compete fell off. But it was really about me just being forthcoming, man, I'm like, look, here's what I'm going to work on. Want to make sure you all are cool with that. When my non compete for this is over, I'm going to do consulting and when the rest falls off, I'll be training.

So today we are recruiting, consulting and training company specifically for freight brokerages. We also work with some freight tech organizations and some asset based brokerages. But the nature of my relationships are mostly lie with CEOs and owners and executives of freight brokerages. Anywhere 25 million, some smaller than that, up to some of the large top 20 players. And so we help go and find talent for them.

Executive roles, experience, sales roles, account management, carrier sales, anything inside of a brokerage will come in and do different consulting. So we'll build, go to market strategy, we'll help with compensation structure, organizational structure, will help with marketing in general, things like that, carrier sales structure, things of that nature. And then I just love training. I'm really, really passionate about it. I don't think I would be where I am.

A lot of people that had a big influence and kind of coaching me up and getting me to where we are. So we have a standalone training product that we license. So there are a ton of brokerages that license a handful of elements of it. There's prerecorded training that they access and then we have an AI role playing tool that they also license and gives reps the ability to practice 24, 7.

And they can call transportation managers here, air quotes that respond the same way you would expect a transportation manager, director of transportation to respond to a cold call, a discovery call, things of that nature. So three distinct elements. Recruiting, consulting, training. It's been a lot of fun to build. Yeah. And you know, you're very, very active on social media, promoting Journey. You just had your one year celebration. You know, saw, saw the video on that. So like what's.

And you have several people in there with you. So just talk about what the day to day is like and growing that company. Yeah. So incredible team. I'll talk a little bit about each of them. I'm super appreciative for the, the team that we've built and what they've been able to do in the first year. So the first two people that started were Maya Kihara. She's our head of business ops today. I've known her for eight years now and we've worked on different businesses in the past.

But she reached out to me fall of 2023 and was like, hey, are you working on anything new? Is there something that we could do together? And I said, ah, you know, I'm going to build this recruiting company that's going to grow to be consulting and training and I could use someone to kind of help me with sourcing and organization and things of that nature. And she took it all in full steam. We would not be where we are today if it weren't for Maya. She's incredible.

So now she helps facilitate a lot of the operational processes across all three parts of the business to execute that. So she's been with us since the beginning. Same with Aaron Sweeney, a friend of mine that I went to college with. She played softball at Illinois Wesleyan. Had an incredible career as an advertising. Advertising executive at a very large global ad agency. And she left her previous company. Timing was very, very strong.

And so we sat down and talked like, hey, could we find a way to work together? And so since that point, she's taken on the head of marketing and PR role here at Journey. So a lot of what you see is strategy from her thoughts about how to build our brand. She really challenged me about, you know, color scheme, logo positioning, what we do, how to look at us versus other competitors. So I'm super appreciative to have her and someone of her caliber in an organization like ours. She's incredible.

And then we have two full time recruiters. Morgan McDermott, she's our first full time recruiter hire and we hired her almost a year ago, January of 2024. And then I met her through LinkedIn, which I'm super active on as you mentioned, so had the opportunity to get to know her through there. And then Nikki Childers, our second full time hire on the recruiting side, we brought her on in March. And then we have a person on Aaron's team to help facilitate marketing.

Her name is Valeria, a junior social marketing or social media specialist to help execute everything. But the day to day, it varies. I am either on the phone with recruiting clients or consulting clients, working through different things. Could be onboarding, could be a project that we have had a call earlier today with a recruiting client of ours we do a ton of work with. So we're looking at candidate profiles and kind of talking about what the pipeline looks like.

Oftentimes I'm working through an engagement with a consulting client. So depending on how far through we are, there are different stages and different things that we're kind of checking off to execute that. And then on the training side of the business, creating a lot of content. So we make all of our content. So always adding new content to the repertoire and then executing that externally with clients that license it.

So it's a mixed bag, a lot of different things, but tons of, I'm almost always with clients kind of all day. Okay, okay, yeah. And like you said, the content too, you're very active there. You said Aaron does all the video, is that right? So we have, we record a lot of video with an external team that we have that helps bring in stuff. If we're going to do something live, we, we'll do a lot of stuff through a different platform that we have just to record.

And then Aaron helps facilitate the execution and the strategy behind getting the content out there. Okay, yeah. Cause that's one thing I noticed. I love your video. It's so cinematic, I guess you could say, compared to a lot of the other content you see out there on LinkedIn. At least that's, that's what I notice. Shout, shout out. Aaron and the team. Aaron and Keenan, one of our videographers. He's incredible.

But Aaron has a distinct eye and, you know, really high bar for the stuff that we work through. And man, I'll tell you straight up, like, if we're going to do something, we want to be the best at it. If not, we don't want to do it. I'm not interested in just like doing something and being mediocre. And that's, I think, something that helps us stay where we are and grow because we want to be a market leader. And, you know, we look at every aspect, everything that our brand's on.

You know, if it's not going to be top quality, we're just not interested. Okay. All right.

And so 2025 is right around the corner. Right. There's been a lot of speculation about what the freight market is going to be like and then, you know, the overall economy and whatnot. What, what are you most excited about coming into 2025? I think we have found our brand and our voice. I think we are very well solidified as a player in the recruiting, consulting and training space for freight brokerages and freight tech companies. So year two for us is going to be explosive growth.

I'm most excited about having all three elements of the business firing at the same time. When we launched the business in November, we were just a recruiting company. Then in January we became a recruiting consulting company. And then in May, recruiting, consulting and training. So it'll be the first year all three elements and services are active at the same time.

And I think we'll be sitting here in 2020, 2026 talking about how much we grew and how many different organizations and people we had the opportunity to impact. So I'm really, really excited about that. All right. And Will, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about what you do and how they can potentially work with you, what's the best way people can reach out to you? Very active on LinkedIn. So, Will Jenkins on LinkedIn.

My handle on LinkedIn and all of my socials is also Will Jenkins, WCJ and my email is Will at Journey. J O U R N E Y delivers D E L I v e r s.com will@journeydelivers.com and our website and socials are all Journey Delivers. Our website's JourneyDelivers.com so any of those methods, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or via email and glad to be able to help. All right, and we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.

All right, well, Will, we thank you so much for, for being here and taking the time to share your journey with all of our viewers. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the time. All right, and that's all the time we have for now. We will see you next time.