Navigating the Freight Industry: Thomas Werdine's Journey from Sales to Think Freight

Thomas Wordean is the founder of Think Freight. Thomas has carved out an innovative lane in the freight industry with his easily digestible newsletter and podcast designed to cut through the noise and provide valuable insights for everyone from SaaS providers to freight brokers and dispatchers.

In this episode, Thomas shares the origin story of Think freight, how his love for newsletters and knack for identifying market needs led to its creation.

We'll dive into Thomas's career journey through various sales positions in the freight industry and how he took the plunge to turn think freight from an idea into a thriving reality.

Expect to hear about the challenges he faced, the strategic pivots he made and the current trends he's observing in the freight market.

Whether you're interested in the entrepreneurial journey or the latest insights into the freight industry, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways.

Stay tuned as we unpack Thomas story, his vision for think freight, and his thoughts on the pressing issues like market capacity, exits and freight scams. As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe. And now here's my conversation with Thomas Wardeen. Enjoy.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast. I'm your host Dave Gulas. This week my guest is the founder of Think Freight, Thomas Wordean. Welcome, Thomas. Dave, thank you so much for having me, man. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Yeah, thanks so much for being here. Um, if you could, for everyone, can you tell us what think freight is and how to get started? Yeah, definitely, man.

So we're a, an easily to um, you know, digest, uh, freight newsletter and podcast. So our biggest goal is to provide five minute digestible content for anyone in freight.

Whether that's a SaaS provider who's trying to understand what the market is so that they can sell properly for, whether that's a freight broker who's trying to understand how to sell to their shippers, a shipper who wants to understand, hey, how can I better look at my rfps and better understand how the market's going to flow from my inventory?

And for any dispatchers or drivers out there as well, who are just like I said, trying to figure out the overall market in a really easy in digestible format so that they don't have to spend an hour a day diving through all of the content and all the noise for things that may not relate to them or be relatable to their business. Okay, and how did you get the idea to start this? I'm a big newsletter fan. I've always kind of gotten my news that way. So im a massive subscriber.

Ive probably subscribed to 30 newsletters in multiple different genres and I dont look at all of them every day, but I look at a good chunk of them, probably 80% of them. And I just kind of got this thought like, okay, theres a ton of individual freight newsletters, theres freight waves, theres TT news, theres supply chain dive, theres trucking dive, theres all these different sources of news.

And then you've got the bigger sources who also do really good reporting like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal. And I just thought to myself, where can I, is there anywhere that you can refine this all in one place? And there was a couple of smaller at the time players who were doing this. Now there's just, I believe just myself and one other player in the space.

So I just kind of got this kind of overall feeling like hey, if I'm thinking about this and wanting this, there's probably some other people out there that want this. And that definitely seems to be the case. We've summed up a lot of subscribers and interest over the last 18 months or so. Okay, and so you've had a career in freight just looking at your background, right. A lot of several sales positions, whether for carriers and then also SaaS products, is that right?

Yeah. So I've been on the brokered side most of my career and then did a little bit with a small stint with a shipper and then went into SaaS sales with SaaS sales on the freight tech side with freight waves. Okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And I myself, right, I'm relatively new to freight, I'm a subscriber and I enjoy reading your newsletter just because it gets straight to the point. And I can find a, you know, like you said, some easily digestible type of content, right.

That's meaningful and kind of cuts through some of the noise. So when you first had this idea, like what was it like getting this off the ground and turning this idea into something like tangible? So I started to subscribe to even more newsletters than I already was. I was trying to figure out my format, what I was trying to like cover, and I, you know, I saw this need for this. But I'll be frank, David, I wanted to also start a consultancy with ink freight.

So when I originally thought of this, I said, okay, I'm going to use my content, my weekly newsletter at first, now it's three times a week, but at first it would be a weekly newsletter that I was going to use to drive people to my consultancy, kind of like that top funnel. And after like a month or two, I just didn't, I didn't really want to do the consulting part. I just really started to fall in love with the content. I'm sure you can relate to this, being a content creator yourself.

You just kind of get into a groove and start to really like what you're doing. And I just said, you know what, I'm going to go all in. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something I really am passionate about, really love. And yeah, I just started this, this all in on think freight. So yeah, I was subscribing to a bunch of newsletters.

I was doing a bunch of research on different platforms, how to build out the website, what the formatting was going to be, was it going to be once a week and how we were going to expand into. I knew eventually I wanted it to be three times a week. So there was a lot of ideating and a lot of just kind of planning behind the scenes before I initially started. And at the time when I started to think about this, I still had my full time job. I was still at freight waves.

So I was selling sonar by day, researching and looking at all this at night and trying to figure out what were kind of the best paths. And ultimately I just kind of made the decision in February or early March of 2023 just to kind of make the leap and dive all in right as I was about to launch think freight. And yeah, it's been, it's been great since I took about a month, month off of even like thinking about other things. Worked on just think freight, dove all in, took a mini vacation as well.

Worked on think freight while I was on vacation. And just, yeah, I just dove all in, man. And it's been, it's been a joy ever since. Okay. And so like you said, you took some time to kind of plan it out and get your format right. And when you first started, like, what was that process like in terms of, okay, now you're all in, you left freight waves, you've got the, you've got the content coming out. What was it like? Kind of learning and adjusting once you launched?

Yeah, that process was interesting. So like I said, I went all in on the full content and I was kind of just like every few weeks, you know, as a founder, you probably start to think like, what the heck am I doing to, I had a lot of those moments, like, I was like, it's tough as hell to start a media company as it is, but like a niche freight media company. Like, yeah, it can be done. Freight waves is out there. There's a lot of good sources out there, but like, it does.

The world needed another podcast. The world needed another newsletter. So I was going through some of these, like, very initial growing pains and, like, thought processes, but I was like, no, like, I need to stay. I just had to remember that mission of, like, if I really, like, like, I talked to other people, obviously, before I put this in motion, but like, a lot of people said this was a really good idea. I thought this was a good idea. I was looking for this kind of content.

So I knew that there was the need. It was just kind of some of those growing pains and just kind of getting through some of those initial hurdles as to, like, how, you know, how I want to format it, how I want to, you know, how the logo should be done. Do we want to change things? How do we want to, like, do our website? Because the website's gone through a lot of changes and we'll go through another change going into, into 2025. Same thing with the newsletter.

We're doing a lot of refreshing going into the year. So it's just kind of about taking user feedback, a lot of feedback we get from our users as to what kind of content they're looking for. Sometimes we get too heavy on certain things, so we kind of, we're taking some of that feedback. We did it. At first, we kind of struggled with focusing more on trucking content as opposed to like, broker content.

So we made a little bit of a shift because we started to have a lot more brokers join the newsletter, and that's kind of what they wanted. So we focused more heavily on brokerage, and that's where most of my career is spent anyway. So we just kind of made that kind of shift into focusing more specifically for brokerage.

But like I said, all of that news pertains to asset based carriers, to asset based carriers with a brokerage, to dispatchers, because all of that information is where the freight is, where it's coming, and how it's getting there. The info is really for everyone, so it's just kind of making those changes based on user feedback. Okay. And like you said, you also started a podcast along with the newsletter. What was that like as far as starting a podcast for the first time? It was fun.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. Right. I had started about two or three months after the newsletter originally, and someone was like, hey, I have this, like, product I would like to talk about, and a friend of mine had a product you want to talk about. I was like, yeah, I want to, like, help you talk about this. And I was like, how can I do this in like, a way that, like, doesn't just alienate the background, like, oh, this is just like a promotion.

Like, we're just promoting a business or like a brand. And I was like, okay, like, we can dive into, like, different aspects of people's career, kind of like what you do on this podcast, but also dive into the market. We can dive into their platform a little bit as to how it's solving certain issues within the market. So it started off pretty rough, honestly. I started off as a video podcast that allowed video demos on the podcast, which I phased out extremely quickly. I didn't enjoy to do that.

I just kind of thought, like, let's just do straight interview content, podcast content, fun content, getting to know people behind the scenes a little bit because there's a lot of cool people in freight, you know that through, through your podcast and meeting a lot of cool people, there's so many cool stories in this industry. So I just wanted to kind of find a way to share some of those cool stories.

I started just having fun conversations with interesting people, learning about their backgrounds, you know, and I said, I just need to take this and turn it into some kind of podcast that can really work for everyone to hear. Whether that's sales content, freight broker content, because it's all relevant for the sales, sales, freight person. Attention, manufactures and e commerce sellers. Is fulfillment a headache for you?

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So a lot of, lot of people I talk to as well, even outside the podcast too, they have an idea and they want to start something or they have some ambitions, but so often, like fear or just, you know, indecision or whatever it may be, holds people back. But it sounds like you, when you knew what you wanted to do, even though things weren't perfect or you didn't necessarily have everything figured out, you just went in and just started doing it.

I mean, do you think that's one reason that you've been able to grow this, this platform so quickly? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, I can, I can definitely empathize with those people who, who have like the analysis of paralysis and don't want to move until the things are perfect. I used to be that person, right. But something in me just said I have to move on this as quickly as possible. I don't know what it was, but I just, I wanted to do it.

There was just something in me that was just like, this is the, this is the idea, this is that, that thing you think about as someone who wanted to be an entrepreneur. My grandparents were entrepreneurs and had a business, a family business for over 100 years in the overall family and was passed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, they lost the business in 2008 during the economic crisis. So I've always have had those ambitions to be an entrepreneur.

So I, when this idea came about, I just, I knew it was the right idea and I jumped all in and I, you know, I'd save money to do whatever it was that I was going to do in the future. But again, it's all sink or swim. So you have to find ways to start creating and generating revenue right away. And, yes, so there really wasn't a lot of time for me to be able to say, okay, if I'm going to do this, like, you know, I had to dive all in or not, you know, kind of, not at all. Wow. Okay. Okay. Got it.

All right. And so with the freight market, particularly over the last couple of years, you know, it's taken a beating.

You know, in terms of the rates are way down. A lot of people throw the term freight recession around. We've seen numerous large brokerages or carriers even just go under. So where do you see the freight market right now as we're, you know, we're heading into q four, four of 24. Where do you see the freight market going over the next like twelve months or so?

It's tough to predict, but I'll do my best and kind of throw out what I think is based on all the data I've seen so far, we need more carrier exits. Unfortunately, capacity has to leave the market and I'm not sure that we're seeing a lot of capacity actually exit. Were seeing carriers shut down. Yeah, were seeing owner ops go out of business. Yes. But a lot of those drivers are going into other carrier groups. Theyre just being absorbed into other bigger groups.

So some of this capacity really isnt leaving in the way that we thought it would the overall market. So over the next twelve months, I think its going to be interesting to watch. I saw Tanner DeHart posted something on Twitter earlier today or yesterday about carrier capacity leaving. And we're getting closer to the pre pandemic levels or the pre 2021 levels of carrier capacity. So I think that's a good trend as we get into 2025, as we're starting to see some more exits, it is unfortunate.

We don't want people's dreams to end and their, and their company had to have to shut down. But unfortunately, there was just way too many companies that entered the freight market during what is called like the COVID gold rush of freight. Right. So as carrier capacity exits, you're going to start to see, I guess, rates go higher. And it's just, you know, we have a lot of factors at play as we're sitting here before the election. We don't really know who's going to be elected.

There's factors there, so there's a lot at play. But I think overall, the market is going to start to trend upwards towards the summer. I think that obviously that's going to be some of that seasonal boost of produce and then inventories for Christmas at the tail end of that. But I think we're going to start to see some more of that elevated freight coming into the US, elevated imports, as well as just the overall market being able to handle it a little bit.

So I think rates will go back up a bit. By this time next year, I think we're going to have a good amount of care capacity that's exited and, yeah, I think that kind of going into 2026, it'll be looking a lot better than we are today. Okay. And another thing that you cover very well within your newsletter is oftentimes these, these scams or, you know, whether it's stolen loads or whatever, the hot topic of the week is in that realm.

I mean, that, that's certainly been something very, very big over the last couple of years with the double brokering and all the scams and the things going on.

I mean, where do you see that going? Because what I hear from so many people that, you know, at a macro level, authorities are not doing anything to address it and the industry really has to self police. But yet every, every week it's like you're hearing a new, new scam and a new story of just a big load being stolen. It's tough. There's, you know, these bad actors are adapting to our techniques a lot faster than we're able to, like, roll them out. Right.

I mean, I think it's, it's kind of like as soon as we roll out a new tactic, they've already, they're kind of two steps ahead of us in terms of, in terms of scamming. And it's not just double brokering at this point. I mean, they're, you know, it's phishing attempts. They're blatant phishing attempts, going after carriers, after brokers to scam and hack to get credentials for, you know, their load boards to be able to then steal their identity. And so it goes, it goes even deeper than that.

It goes into identity theft, it goes into stolen woes, it goes into pilferage, it goes into, you know, this actual, I think on yesterday's newsletter, Monday's newsletter, there was two drivers. One driver was held up at gunpoint was, I believe a FedEx driver was held up at gunpoint. Another, another truck was looted in Chicago. A UPS truck was looted in Chicago after hit a viaduct and the roof was ripped off. So there's a ton of just overall theft.

Whether that's, it doesn't really matter what it is. It's just, it's happening in this industry. Um, I think what's, what's going to have to happen is we just have to have, like you said, better self policing. Um, unfortunately, yeah, at the macro level, like police and authorities are looking at this more as a civil issue, uh, because there's, you know, quote unquote signed contracts with rate cons and all these, all these, you know, carrier contracts and they're calling it civil disputes.

And it's unfortunate because, you know, a couple months ago, 4 July, there was massive, a massive amount of load. I think it was over 50 loads that were held hostage by this nefarious group that was basically just trying to say, hey, were going to hold your load hostage or steal it if you dont pay us a ransom of five to $25,000. And what they do is they just buy these MC numbers from carriers looking to exit. Kind of like were seeing, were seeing a lot of carriers exit.

Well, they say, hey, I might as well try to sell my company. Well, if someone offers them $5,000 for just the, the name and all their company stuff, theyll easily sell it for $5,000. And then what they do is they just change some basic information so that looks like its a different company then, or not a different company, but the contact info is different. And then they use that MC to scam and scam and scam and run up a bunch of scams until it gets caught.

And then they kind of switch to another MC that they pay, you know, $300 for from the FMCSA or, you know, five or $10,000. They get it from Facebook marketplace. So it's just a tough thing to figure out. But I think with some of the tech tools in place, people just have to really be vigilant and understand that this is a massive issue. I hate the word epidemic and pandemic because they kind of feel like they have such a negative connotation after the last pandemic.

But in freight, it feels like it's an epidemic. We're having a massive, massive issue every single week, every single day, and it just feels like no one is learning from some of these past mistakes that are being made. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Another story, too that you just featured the other day. And I was shocked, too at how brazen this was.

But the guy that made the commercial where he was offering passive income investments for trucks that didn't exist, you actually played the, you put the link to the commercial and I mean, this guy's on, on tv or on video promoting that and like, you know, selling trucks that didn't exist. And luckily he got shut down and he's, I guess, arrested or whatever happened to him. But you ever seen anything like that before?

You know, I've seen so f, so since I wrote, since that story came out, since the FTC has shut them down, I had a couple of truck drivers actually reach out and said, hey, I saw a couple other scams like this being rantainde in other parts of the country. So this happened, I believe, in Florida. I don't have the article in front of me, but I believe it happened in Florida.

And some people were like, hey, there's other companies doing this that are saying, hey, we'll give you, you know, hey, you give us $40 to $70,000 and we get the truck, we get you insurance, we register it, we do all the load booking, and then we'll give you, you'll make three to $10,000 a month in quote unquote passive income and you'll make your money back in less than a year. And then they're just kind of doing the same thing.

I think over the next year or two you're probably going to see five or ten more of these, these kind of scams get shut down because it is just kind of one of those situations where some of these companies do exist that are real that say, hey, like, they're not saying, hey, we're going to give you passive income, but they say, hey, we'll actually, you buy the truck or front x amount of money for the truck, and then we actually buy the truck with you and help you do all these things.

There are legitimate companies that do that, but there's a lot of companies that see that and say, hey, we can scam off of this and run this for, I mean, this was going on for years, so they are able to get away with it for quite a while time. And, yeah, it just seems that trucking is ripe for fraud these days. Yeah. Okay, so you've got, you've got the newsletter and you've been growing that and obviously the podcast as well.

What are your plans in terms of, for the, for the media company, in terms of what you're planning to do next?

Really good question. So, you know, I've kind of got the next five years really laid out. I like to plan things as well as I can and I. The overall goal is to turn this into a mini freight empire. I'll say we want to have multiple podcasts under the umbrella, not just the one that I host, but have other ones that are more specific to different aspects or different niches in the freight industry. Having a five day week newsletter would be nice. I'm not sure that.

I'm not sure that I want to maybe pursue that route, at least for a couple of years. I think that once we have more editors and writers on staff, I think that'll be a little bit easier.

So I just think just taking the model we have and just continuously pumping out really good, high quality content, whether that's in story form, article form, newsletter form, podcast form, or even something, we're going to be rolling out here very soon, probably even before this podcast goes live, is we're going to start having a lot more news content. So like that Rivx passive income scam, that'll be an article that we turn into a video. I'll be the front facing person.

I'll be turning a lot of our actual articles into videos. So that way you'll get my perspective. I'll be talking about what happened, the scheme, what the FTC did, how they stepped in other scams that are like this. And then we'll kind of play, like you said, that commercial of FTC or of Rivax, even talking about their, their scam and kind of promoting it, things like that.

So some of those other, other avenues to just kind of keep the audience engaged and find, you know, all of the, the people that are looking for our style of content. Okay. And if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about what you're doing or get involved and reach out to you for any other reason. What's the best way people can do that? Yeah, so I'm all over the place. LinkedIn is probably the best place to get in touch with me. You can find the think freight page.

At think freight, you can find myself, Thomas wording. W e r d I n e. I have a per, both a personal and a business x or Twitter account as well. You can find those at think freight or I don't know what my personal ad is. Thomas wording, I think. And yeah, we're kind of all over the place. We're on Instagram, if you like Instagram. Thinkfrait IO. Same thing on TikTok. We're on pretty much all the platforms. We post on some Facebook groups and, yeah, we're just kind of all over, brother.

Okay. All right.

We'll link all that in the show notes for everyone. Awesome. Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Enjoyed our conversation. Really appreciate it. That is all the time we have for now. We will see you next time.