Borderless Ambition with Mark Vickers

That it does that it takes to share more founder stories with a broader audience , and that's what we're all about here at the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics is spreading the word about companies and founders that are doing it the way .

That doesn't get a lot of attention , and Bootstrapping is very , very old fashioned , and that's part of why I find it so appealing and why I'm always on the hunt for people who have started interesting companies with limited resources .

And so this week we're going to talk with Mark Vickers , who started a cross-border insurance product company called Borderless Coverage . Good morning , mark . Can you explain a little bit more about why was ? What niche did you see didn't have a solution and that you felt like you were equipped to be the one to go solve that problem ?

But what Borderless Coverage is in its most simplistic form is all risk cargo insurance in Mexico , something that didn't used to exist even eight or nine years ago , and we've automated the process for obtaining this coverage and it's something that all of the top logistics companies and motor carriers now kind of have in there as a quiver in their risk management

cross-border risk management program .

They asked me for real-time shipment tracking for cross-border shipments in Mexico and they asked me for all risk cargo insurance in Mexico , and I really couldn't answer either one of those 10 , 12 years ago .

So started using MacroPoint quite a bit for cross-border shipment tracking and , while the freight was in Mexico , worked quite well , and then I really couldn't find a solution for cargo insurance in Mexico . So I spent a few years figuring it out and put it together , called a borderless coverage and scale it , and that's the huge need .

So near-shoring was not a thought in my mind when I put this together . Covid didn't exist before we formulated this concept called borderless coverage . It is certainly something that has helped us scale this thing like wildfire , though .

So I think throughout this discussion I'll refer back to probably a number of mentors that I had in my life , and a lot of these guys were really scrappy business owners in the Cleveland area who were doctors , lawyers , bankers , who had side jobs that were pretty scrappy jobs and they make more on these side jobs and would sell these side jobs while still working

their full-time deal . So I went to a lot of these guys with asking for advice in this scenario because I was really excited about what I was doing at borderless coverage . I was scaling it well myself , but I was having things .

Things were picking up like some of the big some of the big 10 names in trucking and in brokerage were our clients and I needed to do a better job in the back office and servicing them from accounting standpoint and I just didn't want to do that work .

So that that was one of the reasons why I was willing to sell , which is it's not at the best reason to sell it all , thank you . Well , you know , I met a guy named Tom Albright . Tom was the CFO of Celadon , which he closed .

Celadon closed their doors and Celadon's Mexican entity was Jaguar and Jaguar was using my borderless coverage product for Mexican cargo insurance . Tom was speaking at an event in Columbus . I literally cornered him and cold called him pretty much about our product , and then , a year later , he was working at a company called Reliance Partners .

Reliance Partners is the largest transportation logistics insurance agency in the United States . Tom gave me a call . He said hey , mark , we like what you're doing . Would you mind sharing some more information about who your clients are , what your revenue looks like ?

And at that moment I was like I don't want to share this information , sure , so so I went back to my mentors and I talked to him about hey , what , what ? Talk to me about how you've done acquisitions successfully . And I got some awesome advice from these guys .

What they told me , what my father told me , is that construction and civil litigation and transportation attorney and Cleveland they told me to just put all your cars on the table , be 100% honest about where your business is right now and then , on a separate page , tell them about where you see it going . So what I told them is these are my exact clients .

This is the exact revenue that I'm , that I'm seeing from from these clients , this is the premium that's that's associated with these clients and this is , this is what you're getting , which , at the time , was , hey , it's a significant amount , but probably not what they were expecting .

And I was like , as a salesperson , by nature , I'd usually prop everything up , make it look beautiful , and I did the opposite .

In this circumstance , I told them this is where I'm at , this is what the nearshoring wave looks like , this is what I think this could could happen , and these are the deals I've gotten the pipeline and this is all you're getting right now and you're getting me , and that ended up being something that worked out really well and something that I would tell anyone

that's selling their company to do is be 100% honest , because when you go on board at another company , they're going to feel like , hey , we're working with an honest person and we're going to let them do whatever they want and sorry for alliances listening to this , but they really let me do anything that I feel is adding value to their client base , to new

client base . I'm allowed to create new revenue streams , so I can still act as an entrepreneur within an organization . I guess it felt like an intrapreneur . Sure , so I'm able to really attack aggressive markets . I can travel wherever I want .

That all looked , I'll say , you know a few decades , you're a senior and there's something to be said for following in the footsteps of people who have been there and done that , but it doesn't seem to be as popular as it once was .

Like , people have this , I have to go it alone , I don't want to ask for help or I don't want , I don't want to listen to anybody else , and yet there's a wealth of knowledge and experience that you can tap into .

How do you balance like listening to their advice and being humble that way , along with needing to be , you know , pretty confident in your own abilities if you're going to be an entrepreneur ?

So I mean going back to my childhood , I always was starting scrappy businesses .

I mean , you know those , those addresses that are painted on the street , on the street curbs that was one of those jobs is driving around in my truck with a friend of mine and spray paying those street addresses , and we make $100 an hour on the weekends doing that , while I was working at a boxing factory and working at an Applebee's , which is another

glamorous job . But the owner of that the owner of that boxing factory that I worked at was one of the guys in that picture and he was a banker . And when he was a banker he knew that he wanted to start his own business .

So he saved up a bunch of money and started a boxing factory on the side and then that became his main job and I worked for him . And guys like that , who were my father's friends growing up , really helped me get different perspectives on things that I wanted to do . So I was scrappy by nature .

I always knew that , even even before high school , that I was going to start my own business one day , and going to people that have been there and done it before that that we're able to kind of just pour wisdom into me .

I wouldn't always agree with them , but getting different perspectives and being told I'm wrong by people that have done it before really helped me formulate strategies better .

But after being in logistics for a long time and seeing some of the pain points that other people didn't see , like for example for cross-border , when you're working in the cross-border business and you're working with asset-based motor carriers in Colorado , texas , nuevo Laredo , those groups have been handed these trucking companies down from their fathers so they're used

to a certain way of doing business and they don't want to get out of their comfort zone . They don't want to change anything . They're not huge in the technology . So when I went down to Laredo , texas , for the first time to kind of get feedback on this idea of borderless coverage , I was told no nonstop .

I was told this is just not the way you do business . Mark , you're wrong . Go back to Cleveland , ohio . Because over the years if I was to start this business before I got into the logistics industry probably wouldn't have worked out .

But because I was in the logistics industry and because I was used to being told no , a lot , a lot of those no's end up kind of justifying that my business idea that , hey , this is going to be hard , but once I push through this I'm going to see some success and I'm not going to have any competitors because no one else is willing to go to these lengths

that I'm willing to go through . So I would say over the years I've gotten wisdom on work ethic and just sticking with it .

I think it was an awesome thing for me , and to be able to start an office on Broadway in Nashville was really fun . One of the shirts that we had was just earn it and nothing's going to be given to you in the logistics space and you're just going to have to earn it every single day .

They're gonna start seeing like the DATs of Mexico start to pop up . There's different financing options . I think there's some really cool stuff . But in all honesty , this took me 10 , 12 years to build this cross-border cargo insurance product . We just automated it four years ago .

We're just scratching the surface on the market share and just now we're starting to get some serious raving fans from the largest logistics companies and asset-based motor carriers , where we are not prospecting , we're not even really marketing this product .

It's just people need it and they're coming to us and I really you know growing up at TQL it's straight up cold calling and that's how I had to start this borderless coverage business . I actually I found where the head of NAFTA was speaking in the rate of Texas . So while I was working full-time , I jumped on a plane on my own dime , went down to Laredo .

I cornered him , like I guess I did that . It's Tom Albright too . I guess that's kind of a thing that I do . Actually , I read a book called Living with a Seal , and there's a guy named Jesse Itzler that wrote that book . Jesse Itzler was married to Sarah Blakely that started Spanx .

He's in the water , and one of the things that he said in his book is that he just liked to cold call famous people and ask them to be their friends . And that's basically what I did in this circumstance was I hopped on a plane .

I met the head of NAFTA , I took him to dinner , I told him all about this borderless coverage concept this 10 years ago , and he loved it . So the next step was he flew me from Laredo to Mexico City and then I got to meet the chief negotiator of USMCA on behalf of Mexico and meet the Ministry of Insurance and the Ministry of Transportation in Mexico .

And without taking that bold move of kind of asking these people to be my friends and telling them about my ideas , none of this is what had really happened , and it's certainly one that's scaled the way it has . So I pretty much forget your initial question now .

bucks on a hotel room , in a room of complete strangers , that takes guts and that's how interesting things end up emerging , because you don't know what happens after that .

But not until I met the chief negotiator of USMCA , who is a partner of mine now and a good friend his name is Kenneth Smith Ramos did I really start to feel like I had credibility around this program . He's like this is something our country needs , and when that happened and near shoring happened , it was it just I got lucky .

It kind of made my own luck , but I got lucky with some geopolitical events that happened where everything came together and my initial clients were some of the biggest cross-border logistic service providers in the world . And these groups were the ones that they're these people , these good guys that became new mentors for me .

So I mentioned that I had early mentors in my life . These people that I called called to be my friends are now my mentors . One of them started TransPlace Mexico . One of them started Redwood Mexico .

These are good guys that make bold business moves , that have really gone out of their way to kind of propel my career and my ideas , and they of course , have one significant business by using my product too .

And I'll lean on these guys when we're doing kind of cross-border business consulting projects and helping large freight brokers just expand their footprint into Mexico and stuff like that .

So I mean there's a lot of different tentacles of other businesses that can arise from borderless coverage , but my core focus for at least the next three to five years is just going to be making this product better and making it more accessible for people that actually understand cross-border and actually understand the risk and honestly , most groups don't understand the

risk and most shippers don't understand what they're getting for cargo insurance in Mexico . Most shippers think that they either are insured or that their global policy or their self-insurance program covers them in Mexico . But in reality they either don't have insurance or they've got a deductible of about $100,000 .

Maybe it's truckload , maybe it's small parcel , you name it but the subject matter is so large that every country operates differently . You could take the same mode in a different country .

Ltl in Europe is called groupage it's kind of the same thing but it's not exactly the same thing and that endless opportunity for discovery of knowledge and learning new norms and cultures and building those relationships is a fun way to spend a few decades of our lives professionally . I'm curious . You've got a plan now .

You have a path , I should say professionally , that should take you forward for the next 5 , 10 , 15 years Outside of work

. What are the things that motivate you or that you focus on or that you're excited about ?

And I've gotten better at that and , to be 100% honest , I care more about being a kindergarten football coach for my son because he's got good hands . I care more about that than I do with business . I'm trying to figure out how to balance it better , because everybody in logistics works nonstop .

I started my business by being at this library that I'm at right now . I'd come in to work . I'd come in here for an hour before work . I'd be in here an hour after I got back from working on the weekends . But I've done that hard work already . I want to spend more time with my family and a good friend of mine .

We actually started a fraternity together at Ohio State . Jim Tressel actually was a member of this fraternity and he urged us to start this at Ohio State . This guy started a group called Beyond the Game . He's also one of the offensive coordinators for Ohio State's football team right now . And what Beyond the Game is ?

It's going into inner cities where some of these boys in third grade do not have a father figure in their life , and it's an eight lesson curriculum that he put together and that he's got 30 different schools now and we just go in and we teach these boys about just general life etiquette how to hold the door for a girl , how to shake a hand , what a business

conversation could look like and I had no idea that just wasn't being taught . And what we found is that this school that we're sponsoring , they didn't even have a teacher at the school that would be willing to teach these lessons . So I've actually got to teach these lessons for the first time . I've never done that in my life .

I thought I was just going to be a guest speaker , but these are the things that are really motivating me . I'm motivated to have . You know I don't really care about the life work balance . I feel like work is something that enables me to provide .

It's something that is able , it enables me to give back , and I want my kids to know that their dad worked their butt off and wasn't giving everything .

Before we wrap up , I always like to ask questions around the people that have impacted you the most or that you would offer gratitude towards , because you've benefited from others investment in you throughout your life . So , as you look at the stable of people around you , who would you like to say thank you to ?

He's really instilled in me some significant worth at work , ethic and ability to stick with things when people tell you no , and that really came from him Telling me to stick

with football .

When I wanted to quit my freshman year , when I was a shrimp getting plowed on the field and , you know , separate from my dad , my mom really instilled in me some Christian values and , to be 100% honest with you and your audience , I pretty much lost those values while I was in college and right when I was after college , I was an absolute wild man and I

wanted to be the wolf of Wall Street and I thought that was cool . And I think , because my mom and spent a lot of time and instilling those Christian values , it's something that I came back to and now I'm able to be involved with their church or get to send my kids to a certain school and without her , you know , I could be totally lost .

So , with those two people and with the sport of my wife and with some mentors that I've continually to get new ones and then continue to have relationships with my old ones . You know , without them I definitely feel like I'd be lost .

So you know it's good to have a good support system , no matter how well you're doing life , because things can be stripped from you pretty quick .

I have gotten to spend time one-on-one with people who are in the highest highs of owning and running a business , and I also take a lot of phone calls from people who are at their lowest lows , and it's been a tough year for the industry and for a lot of business owners .

And yet it's been really gratifying to get to see a community of people support each other .

And it doesn't always make it onto social media , it doesn't make it into a show or anything like that , but it's real , and there is a network of people out there that want to do business well and do it the right way and lift each other up , and in doing that , it does extend beyond the game or beyond the industry , where people's lives are actually being

impacted and they're getting the help that they need to just make it through a difficult time and know that they're not alone . And so I would just like to thank every single entrepreneur and founder that has come across my path this year , along with all of the folks that listen . This show doesn't .

If we don't have an audience , we don't have people to listen to the stories that are being shared , and so I just want to say thank you to each and every person that has been a part of this journey so far . We're so glad you're here , and we can't wait to share more of what's going to happen for us in 2024 .

Mark , thank you for sharing your story and for opening up , and just know that we're all rooting for you .