Surety Bonds, Teams, Claims, and Building a Professional Image | Final Mile #35

We're going to be answering five questions today , so the title might not reflect all of them , but we're going to be talking about team settings in freight brokerage , usda inspections versus non-produce or fresh food claims , filing on a bond , that process , having a website as a freight brokerage and also blind shipment .

So make sure you stay tuned for all five of those . They're also listed in the description or episode show notes , so please be patient as we will get to all of the questions .

Make sure to check out all of our other content at freight360.net , including the freight broker basics course , for everything you need to know , from how to start your brokerage and launch it successfully and go the distance , and please , to support this channel , check out the sponsors in the description box or show notes . All right , ben .

Our first question , as I alluded to before , is about team settings . So that listener asked could a team setting in freight brokering work ? Why or why not ? For example , I would have my wife work with clients who are bilingual or prefer to speak in another language .

So basically you don't have to be a solo freight broker with your own company , to answer the question up front . And most freight brokerages that succeed are not just one person . It can be , but they'll oftentimes grow out .

It could be a small group , maybe there's five to 10 people , but a lot of the big brokers out there have hundreds , if not thousands or more people all in the same organization and there's different ways to go about doing this . So for this guy's question , he said my wife would work with some clients and I'd work with others .

That's absolutely legitimate and reasonable . A lot of the successful brokerages will break out different , maybe regions or different commodities , equipment types . You might have someone that's special , like team that specializes in refrigerated or in produce , while someone else handles open deck , like steel , lumber , brick , stone etc .

You could even break out your brokerage in teams where you might have a pod where you've got a team lead and then you've got some account managers and then you've got some operations folks that assist and they keep all their business in one little pod . There's a whole lot of ways to do it . There's no prescribed right or wrong way to do it .

So by all means , the team setting can work . It's a preference thing If you want to go that route . Some people break up sales and operations , like we mentioned , and others say no , we just have a bunch of brokers and they're all credit to grave meaning . They all get their own customers , they manage those customers and they book trucks for those customers .

What else would you add in here ?

Most of them will split kind of the responsibilities that way , but what I would recommend anybody that is currently set up that way or thinking about it is to take time learning the other person's role .

Meaning if you are going to be dealing with the customer side , you absolutely should be spending time every week booking trucks , dispatching them , doing check calls and learning that side of the business , because that's the part that's going to make you far more effective at talking to customers .

And that's the thing that I think lots of companies overlook when they separate them and then they don't really talk to each other , because then you only have sales reps that only know what about the market ? They hear from that person as opposed to the actual market .

And I think anytime you can spend on the other side it makes you better at your job and vice versa , right If you're on the carrier side , understanding the sales side and what the customers are expecting , why and what's important to them makes you far more better to deal with carriers and to be bringing the right relationships for the right customers .

your customer . What goes into the carrier compliance . If you have to tell a carrier no , understand why that is , and so you can better prepare yourself to find better quality carriers . So , but good question Next up if USDA inspections are used with produce claims , what happens if industrial goods or auto parts ?

Or if it's industrial goods or auto parts involved and the receiver refuses to accept it , to do an accident and rejects everything ? So I'll generalize this . We had a recent discussion about produce and USDA inspections , but this question seemed to ask what about every other commodity where the USDA wouldn't be involved ? What does that look like ?

If there's a claim or an auto will answer afterward . What if the receiver rejects it ? So if there's just a claim on it , if the receiver accepts it and it's not a clean bill of lading there's damage or there's a shortage or something like that the claims process still carries out .

You just don't have a USDA inspection involved , which , again , that's not even a requirement to have a USDA inspection . It just helps out with identifying a third party to give the condition of that fresh food or produce to assist in the claim . But you'd have annotations on the bill of lading that here's what's damaged , here's what's missing .

Do you take pictures ? That all goes into that claims presentation to the insurance company . So the adjuster has all the information and it makes it avoids that back and forth , he said . She said Now what if the customer , the receiver , refuses or rejects everything ? What do you do ?

Well , there's no like law here and , ben , I'm curious what your experience in this is . But it's oftentimes very hectic because brokers , like receiver , won't take it . They got to call their shipper and be like hey , they're not accepted as what do you want me to do ? And the shipper might be like what's wrong with it ?

I don't want , can't come back here , right , so it comes down to like you have to figure out the best possible solution because nobody wants to take fault for it . The driver's going to say it wasn't my fault , shipper's going to say it wasn't my fault and the receiver is going to say it's definitely not my fault because I just got it , so you have to .

There's oftentimes a lot of back and forth and communication is key here , because your driver is like you guys are wasting my time , because I'm on duty right now and I have another load I have to pick up tomorrow morning , so you want to go into it .

I guess empathetic might be the best way , but put yourself on every party's shoes and Do your best job as an intermediary , which we are , as fray brokers , to try and work out a solution and then ensure that everybody knows we're going to make everybody whole here through this claims process . What's your take ?

Have you ever had that happen where the receiver is like I ain't taking it ?

What actually occurred right , and again , what happened , is likely going to determine what you do next . Right ? I mean , was it likely there was an accident right Loading it and the driver was like , hey , seem like the forklift or the guy putting it in there had some issues ? Was it something that happened in transit ?

Because again , that's going to determine what your likely next course of action is . If it's at the receiver and it might have been damaged at Loading , well , you're gonna have a conversation with the shipper as to what you think happened . They're likely gonna go talk to their dock worker to verify it and maybe you can take it back right Now .

If it happened over the road , right , you're gonna file a traditional claim and again , you might have to figure out what salvage value is and where that's gonna go from there and that , however that plays out , it's gonna play out and they're just kind of no way to know until you start working through the details .

But I've had scenarios where , like this was a , and a really odd one I've talked about this on air , where I was shipping a bunch of steel from Overseas , from the port of New Orleans to the steel mills up around the Great Lakes and they passed that tariff in like 17 or 18 on steel , 25% on imported steel .

But it wasn't outlined as to at which point in time that tariff and who paid it . So the receivers refused to pay it , the shipper and Brazil refused to pay it and then the receivers Refused to take it because they thought maybe they would be accepting responsibility for the tariff . So they just said , like the next 15 trucks , like we just can't deliver them .

So we had to find individual warehousing for every single one of these loads , transload them into a warehouse until they work through who was gonna pay the tariff and then had to pay the transportation cost to get it Delivered there . This took months to be able to resolve .

It really depends on what happens and then you really just want to go to the next party and try to work towards an amicable solution for everybody , right , hey , sometimes their salvage value , sometimes maybe the receiver is like well , hey , look , I've got some room in my warehouse , we can leave it here until you resolve it . And then and again .

You're probably gonna have to work out some type of creative solution in some of these scenarios . And again , you just got to talk to everybody .

And while the so here we'll answer the question . First , if a , if a carrier files on a freight brokers bond , the bond company doesn't just automatically pay out the claim . They're going to do a little bit of a Gathering of information . Right , because it could be , he said , she said , which it usually is .

But if it's something like Carrier was promised x amount of money for this , the broker deducts money Because they had verbiage that stated you know , if you're late , you lose 200 bucks and the carrier says I'm gonna file on your bond for the , the short payment .

The bond company , if they collect all the information and find out that the Carrier doesn't deserve that money , they're gonna , they're gonna reject the claim . If they , if the bond company does their due diligence , they does the research and finds out freight broker does all this money , the money will get issued out .

I've even seen the times with the bond companies like , hey , you , you're going to lose this , just pay it . But if you can't pay it because you don't have the money , then in this scenario the bond would pay that money out .

Now , a bond , it is an insurance product , but it's not an insurance policy that just states , oh , we'll pay out up to the 75K and there's no recourse . No , if you lose and a bond pays out , you're responsible to pay that money back . Which is why , at all costs , you should avoid the bond company being involved .

If you know you owe that money to the motor carrier , where we tend to see bonds get filed on . More so is if a broker is going out of business and they don't have the cash to pay their carriers their line-haul payments , the bond company will get chewed up pretty quick , pay it all that money and the brokerage will close their doors .

But yeah , if that bond company pays out , it is the broker's responsibility to reimburse that bond . It's the same thing with a bail bondsman or what's the pawn shop right ? Same thing . I see that .

You know the whole analysis , paralysis idea where people will Overthink and over complicate what they have to do , which then results in them not doing anything . Yeah , don't be thinking I need to have this website all shiny and ready to roll , you know , and until that's ready I can't

make phone calls . No , but as you grow and you're gonna be prospecting people , some sort of professional image is going to help you Beyond just regular relationship skills .

So , having something like a Good LinkedIn page , a professional LinkedIn page for yourself or for your , your freight brokerage company and , sure , down the road , a website If you want to go that route but it's not really necessary I feel like a website is more of just a . It's an online image of yourself .

You're not gonna get leads coming through there typically . What do you think ? I ?

But a LinkedIn business profile I would absolutely do and you should have it as you , as the employee of the brokerage , because when you're prospecting and you're calling companies and emailing them , the first thing they're gonna do Before they're ever gonna give you a load or work with you is to look to see if you are who you are .

So they're likely to gonna go to LinkedIn . And the second place they're usually gonna look is to see if you have a website right , and again , you can now get a website . You could build one on WordPress . They the um , like my mind's blanking , like the website .

Yeah , the templates to build them are super easy now , like you could basically drag and drop it . Add some text . Look at a couple other examples . You should be able to get one up for less than a hundred bucks and probably 20 bucks a month to service it .

Look at some other examples of other smaller brokerages and , to be honest , most of them look the same . For this very reason , right , yeah , stock templates .

There's a couple pictures of a truck , but the important piece is that you're relevant infos on there , right , like your company name , your address , your contact info , so that when a shipper that you've reached out to looks to verify you , they can see oh , like this is a legitimate business .

I'm at least know that I'm talking to the person that works at the company I'm talking to , right .

A website will become a good Tool because , if you think about , if you ever applied for a job , you probably checked them out on their website to see if it looks legit , and I do want to throw this in here We've had trade grigs on what like almost ten times , if not ten times , told like exactly .

That's one of the things that his company is doing now with beta consulting group is helping companies Find whatever their , their message and their vision is and put it to words and help share that on their website and throw other Testimonial type things , and I think it's .

It's definitely helpful as your brokerage goes , what grows as far as long-term you know relationships with big customers that might vet you out but also for hiring and getting the right talent and they can see that , oh , this is a legitimate company , not some guy with a Gmail account and you know a Facebook profile of him hitting a beer bong and his college years

.

Just wanted to kind of clarify no , they're not . A blind shipment is simply when the Consony or , I'm sorry , we'll just call it the shipper . We'll make this easy . The shipper is blind , aka it's not disclosed for the receiver to see .

So let's say , for example , you're a company and you're buying goods from a supplier and you're gonna drop ship them , meaning send them directly from the shipper to your customer as the receiver , but you don't want your receiver or your customer to know who you bought the goods from or where it's shipped from .

You just arranged the transportation and you were the middle person there . It helps prevent back solicitation . So that's essentially what blind shipments are . You'll see it a lot in drop shipping . You have anything you wanna add on that one ? Did you ever do anything in the blind shipping world ? Yeah , you did a lot in the LTL side , for sure .

So sometimes we'd pick up from , like , the source , sometimes we'd pick up from their warehouse , but everything we did was blind , so that they didn't know what was coming from where right they wanted to be able to hide . Yeah , exactly so .

Yeah , very common and see them more in some niches than in others , but they're all kind of usually for that same reason , for sure .

We do appreciate the opportunity to educate you and we get laughs by your comments , so continue to do all that . We appreciate it , and that's a wrap on the final mile Ben . Any final thoughts today ?