¶ Founding a Logistics Company
Hello and welcome to the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics , the podcast highlighting founders doing it the way that doesn't get a lot of attention . We're here to change that by sharing their stories and inspiring others to take the leap .
It's a roller coaster ride that you might ultimately feel . That's when I kind of knew I was onto something . It was very hard .
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I'm your host , nate Shoots . Let's build something together from the ground up . Well , hello everybody . Welcome back to the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics . Another week , another founder , as we do around here , and this week I'm excited to introduce Robert Meehan , who's the team captain over at Direct Traffic Solutions in Florida .
Robert and I met in August of this year in Tennessee and became fast friends and he shared a few stories with me and I said , robert , I don't know how many podcasts you've been on or that you've done , but we got to hear the rest of your story because I know you have more stories than most . But first , thank you for being here .
How are we finding you today ?
Thanks for having me . It's great to be here and I'm ready to share my story .
Well , let's just go right to the very beginning . I mean , I obviously know a few parts of it from some of our previous conversations . One of the most interesting parts to me was I always like to ask the question how did you fund your company in the beginning ? How did you pull together the money ?
I borrowed a considerable amount of money it was about $200,000 from my brother-in-law , who was graciously unwilling at first to do that , and then he went to the bank and he guaranteed the loan . Dts was born July 1st 2012 .
What did the bankers have to say about your agreement ?
When I first spoke to the banker , she wouldn't even look me in the eye and she didn't want to give me the loan . I was a little taken back by that , knowing that my brother-in-law had a lot of money with the bank and was willing to put his name on the line . I asked her .
I said if I don't get the loan , perhaps my brother-in-law is going to be very upset . And she took her glasses off and she looked at me and she goes when you screw this all up , robert , it's going to be very uncomfortable to go back to him and tell him that now I have to sweep $200,000 of his cash .
Did that make you feel like you didn't have the confidence in your vision ? Or just too much experience in banking and maybe seeing a lot of ships go down ?
Yeah , perhaps that is . Perhaps there's a lot of failures , right , a lot more failure stories , or failures in general , than there are success stories . We know that to be true and the first five years three to five years usually tells that story . I think it was a combination of a lot of different things .
One they don't want to come back to my brother-in-law that has come for the money based on the percentages of companies that fail . I think it was a combination .
You've obviously done quite well . Can you tell us where direct traffic solutions is at now ? And you've had 11-ish years . What does it look like now , after those humble beginnings ?
Yeah , so humbility still falls in the place today . Last year with the market , we did approximately $92 million in top-line revenue , which was a true blessing and the hard work of everybody else around me . I'm just thankful to take the credit right . But this year , with the economy and the way the freight market is , we're probably on pace around 67 .
We're just tightening the belt a little bit , streamlining and then processing like automation and other things that we see necessary for when the market turns .
What do you think people get wrong about building freight brokerages ? Because there's not very many folks that can get to almost nine figures in any kind of company , much less logistics .
It's the people . It's the people that drive it . It's the culture . In the very beginning , it was very difficult Sometimes if you had four people and one person really wasn't pulling their weight and you remove that person . It was 25% of your workforce Along the way .
It's understanding the people , trying to get the most out of them and trying to either find the right position for them or recruiting a person that fits that criteria the best . That's how we elevated and DTS . I'd love to sit here and take all the credit , but it was the great people around me and it's still accelerating today because of them .
As you have now . You look back on a decade's worth of team members and customers and building systems and doing all of those things . The company needs to change and evolve at each of those stages . How about you as a founder and as the leader of the company ? How has it pushed and stretched you into places that maybe you didn't expect the one ?
piece that I've been pushed into has been the automation right Technology segment . I come from driving a truck that's where it started and then dispatching , roll your sleeves up the ground and pound however you want to lay in the bricks . Now it has evolved so quickly into the technology sector and your automation . Every day I'm trying to learn a little bit more .
Who's out there providing a better service ? It's constant , and I think just educating myself has been the number one criteria for me to keep advancing DTS to where it needs to get to .
Well , I want to go back and I want to hear more about your truck driving days . I know your father was a truck driver too , wasn't he ?
Yeah , my dad worked for the News Mail Man's Delivery Union and MDU in North Bergen , New Jersey . He delivered newspapers and magazines throughout New York City and Northern Jersey .
Fair to say that transportation's in your blood .
Yeah for sure . I remember even going on the truck with him many , many times and helping him make deliveries . One day he cut off his thumb in Grand Central Station by putting it on a cart .
Going down this little ramp where everybody walks to the train , he lost control of the weight of the magazines and the thumb hit the wall with the cart and he lost the tip of his thumb . They wound up putting his toe on his thumb and it was comical for the next 30 years .
I mean I would love to hear what some of the jokes were . Hitchhiking must have been tougher .
Yeah , for sure . It definitely changed his fingerprints , so they had to redo those as well .
So you followed in his footsteps somewhat and you mentioned dispatching . Dispatching is one of those jobs that I don't think many people understand the adrenaline of it and that you have to be a fairly aggressive person . You can't just accept whatever's happening . You're trying to get orders moving and drivers on to the next job and you got to be super rapid fire .
When you think back to those days , how do you remember the energy of it ?
It was all paper . A lot of it was paper bins with truck numbers and driver's names and trying to match up the PODs after they handed in the paperwork . So it was always forward thinking for me . It was where they headed , where they're going to pick up . I used the big graph . We actually had it made .
It was pretty organized , at the same time disorganized because of all the paperwork .
It's dispatched . Yeah , yeah , it's dispatched .
So it was interesting , but I think that way really taught me a lot about how to connect the dots .
What do you have the most fun working on ? Nowadays , I think it's still the people .
I think , engaging the people , listening to them .
Although I'm at the top but I'm still at the ground floor I learned so much by just having a two minute to five minute conversation with someone walking in the hallway or on a team's chat , or just calling somebody out of the blue and be like hey , and usually it frightens them because most people don't get a call from the head bottle washer , floor sweeper and
team captain . So it's pretty interesting sometimes .
Not everybody knows this , but we have a group of founders that get together every month that are all in the logistics space , and in one of the recent conversations we were talking about titles and I like that . When I asked you to put together , give me some background information for the podcast , you put your title in as team captain .
In our conversations that we have with founders , they often describe themselves as the chief dishwasher or the janitor , or a role that is in service rather than one that's in power . How did you get to that place of humility and values in your own life to be able to steer a company using those same principles ?
Yeah . So it was the Ballast Group , which is a great event , and I encouraged a lot of other founders to join that group . It gave me a lot of insight as well . It was a two by four across the head , basically for me .
I was dispatching and I was giving a driver who was working for the company for over 20 years and I was giving them a really hard time , probably being disrespectful of about 26 years old .
The next day I get pulled out of the office by my ear into the hallway and the owner started telling me about how the people , how the drivers , make the money , how the company makes money off the drivers back , and that he doesn't talk to me this way and I shouldn't talk to them that way . And I became so emotional I was about to cry .
Everything kind of worked out and it was really that moment that said okay , I get it , take care of the drivers , drivers take care of the company . And that's really how that servant leadership became formed , by that little incident . I just kept building upon it .
What I like about that learning experience is it wasn't . It didn't come from success , it actually came from a failure . I mean being too big for your britches and a young man in your 20s probably felt like you knew everything or you had all the answers .
Some people take a setback like that or feedback like that and it hardens them into what they already previously believed and they don't actually internalize it and seek to change . And others are able to take those setbacks and be self-reflective and say , no , I actually don't like that part of who I am . I want to change and do better .
I don't know if I have a question in that . So much as now that you're on the other side of it , do you more patience with others when maybe they get too big for their britches , or you see yourself in them when someone's maybe being a little too forceful ?
Of course , the best comment for that is really to stay on the defense . If you want to make that corrective action with an employee or a person dispatch or whoever they might be , to try to ask them questions leading up into what happened or what transpired , and then you become the consultant rather than the aggressor . That kind of .
It's changed the way I've handled certain situations , so it's on a psychological level as well .
On the more tactical side , what is your typical day like ?
Every day I come in and I'm excited to be here . I'm having so much fun . It's not about if you're going to have any problems or headaches , it's just how many are there and how big are they . That's kind of what my day comes in . I come in with a plan . Sometimes I finish that plan and sometimes I get nothing accomplished of my time .
I don't do tests but yet engage with multiple people that my door is always open .
As you look forward to the next . Let's just say 10 years . You've been around 10 and a half fish , 11 years . When you look 10 years out into the future , what would you like to be true ?
I think it's about legacy right . What are you going to leave behind , or what are you going to create that people are going to say about you In this industry ? It's really , really small . I think it's about transparency , honesty , got good values and doing business fair in the proper way . If I could have any of those , I think it would be a success .
You bring up an interesting subject the transportation industry logistics . Given how decentralized the actual activity is , it's not all happening in the four walls of an office , the entire company , it's spread all over the place .
That decentralization can sometimes act as a buffer for people to not really know who's on the other side of a transaction , and that's not an explanation for this .
But distance creates the opportunity to be a bad actor at times , because you might be dealing with somebody in a different country or a driver on the other side of the country that you're never going to meet and you can be rude to them or you can take advantage of them . And in our industry anything from double brokering comes up or fraudulent transactions .
There are a lot of ways to lose money to bad actors in the industry . So I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what you see happening in the industry today that maybe didn't used to be here as much , and maybe why you think that's changed .
Yeah , you know it is the . You know the fraud , the double brokering , and you know we can't change people , but they've been changing the game based on technology , at different apps and disguising themselves and using other MC numbers or even buying them and then collapsing them afterwards .
So you know the technology segment you know has done so much good for this business but yet it creates a whole nother aspect of negativity , fraud and things of that nature . So I think that has caused , you know , a lot of that .
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out over the coming years
¶ Technology's Impact on Letting Go
. You hit the nail on the head Technology is a tool and it can be used for good or for evil . For where we're at right now , we're seeing a lot of the dark side of the activities that technology is enabling and , again , I don't have a solution to it .
But I think it's interesting to begin talking about it more candidly , letting others know what's actually going on , so that we can take a bunch of people who have a different set of values and try to either put protections in place or eliminate the bad actors , because there's too many good , hardworking people in the industry that are being taken advantage of and
companies that are losing money left and right , and it's up to others that are going to push back against that . That gives me a degree of hope and optimism . Technology is not going to change people , you're right . Like it does come down to . You know values .
Money makes people do crazy things . You know , we've seen it . You know I've taught my daughter , you know , numerous times that you know desperate people do desperate things . I don't know if you're ever going to change that , but you know we certainly . With technology , you know , I think on the ballast group , you know Mike Fulham .
You know he's coming up with a new product too , that anti-fraud , and which is pretty interesting . So you know we're looking at different things . So hopefully guys like Mike Fulham and others in the industry you know are going to , you know , help with the technology sector to prevent that .
Back to the people side of it for a minute . When you look at your current team , what are the things that get you the most excited about thinking of DTS beyond ? You , like , is there a day coming where you think I'm going to take a couple of steps back here and let the team you know fully run the show ? And how do you look at your leadership team ?
I have the utmost faith in , you know , in our leadership team , and I think they're ready to kind of take control . Today I'm not sure I'm ready . I always stick my nose back in there and , you know , drop in every now and then , and you know which is great , right ? So sometimes I create the confusion , right ? Am I in or am I out ?
You know that's not necessarily a good thing . It took me a long time just to let go of certain things and it was very , very difficult because I'm always hands on , I'm always present . So I think they're ready to let me , you know , take a larger step back . But we'll see how it goes .
What are the things that are hard to let go of ? Is it just control , or is it like a sense of needing to be useful ?
At first it was , you know , dispatching right , and then I let go of that . And then , you know I let go of , you know , managing the dispatchers and you know I had a hard time with that . You know , then it was , you know , some of the financials and you know I'm not sure if it's any one thing .
It's just like habit , right , when I come in and I start a routine it's hard to let go . So it's progressing as we go . I don't really have a definitive answer on it , it's just coming naturally .
Well , we should actually maybe spend a minute or two and talk about DTS . I just realized , as I'm saying it , we haven't really gotten into the basics of what it is that you do and who your ideal customers are .
DTS is a third party logistics 3PL , so to speak . We originated in the forest products and paper industry and we've involved outside of that scope . We're still very heavily involved involved in other areas and freight all kinds . There are strengths today , or truckload drage , ltl , a little bit of intermodal . We're working on those weaknesses as we go .
Obviously , we spoke about the technology segment of it , which is really important .
We wish you nothing but continued success . 11 years in , I don't know what the next chapter holds for you , but I know there's going to be a whole lot more stories , a whole lot more learning . I want to check back in with you in a year or two and ask what else you've let go of or what else you've learned and had to take on that you didn't expect .
The ride that entrepreneurship is as soon as you think you've got it figured out .
Thanks for having
¶ Comparing Progress and Looking Forward
me . I'd love to be back in a year , just so we can compare apples to apples and where we are today and where we are tomorrow . I'm just thankful and blessed to be here . We're looking forward to the future .
Thank you very much for sharing your story . We appreciate it and we will follow up in a year . Thanks for listening to another episode of the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics . And a special thank you to our sponsors and the team behind the scenes who make it all possible . Be sure to like , follow or subscribe to the podcast to get the latest updates .
To learn more about the show and connect with the growing community of entrepreneurs , visit LogisticsFounderscom . And , of course , thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories .