Lightning like Steve McQueen I'm in the fast lane when the light turns green And I built tough Find nothing but grit Cause I made rugged blood sweat and spit yeah, like a horse I fly Better put yourself in for a bumpy ride I like to play hard but I work harder and I weather the storm Cause I'm built stronger.
What is up, ladies and gentlemen? We are back. We are live. It is the Freight Coach Podcast, the top podcast in transportation coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30 in Pacific, 10:30 Central, to break down some industry headlines. But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen. And I say that before every single show. And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals because at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve.
So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. Happy Wednesday, everybody. I got a guest. I'm going to pull him up here in a second. I just got a couple of quick announcements, you guys. I have my weekly newsletter, all right? We drop it every single Wednesday. I don't auto sign anybody up for this. Again, it's all industry specific. We got a fuel report that we've added into it. We've got some lane data that we've added into it as well. But again, it's always about transportation. So if you guys want to go to my website, thefraycoach.com to check that out, it'll auto prompt you to register. That would be awesome if you guys want to jump on that.
And then my friends over at Green Screens, you guys, they're also, they have a webinar that they're doing next Wednesday the 29th, and it's going to be talking a lot about pricing, automation, and they have some real users of themselves. And then my friend Jesse Buckingham with vuma, he's going to be on there as well. And they're going to be talking about the synergies between the systems. I'm going to be tuning into that, you guys, because I am looking into all things automation to help us kind of grow and scale our business out. But with that being said, you guys, I got a very special guest for you guys here today. He is one of two people who I tune into their Content when it comes to ltl.
And I would put him up there as one of the foremost LTL experts that's creating content. And it's one of those modes of transportation to me that like, I know about it but like, I don't really know about it and this guy does. And we're going to talk about that today and we're going to talk about all things LTL. So I got Mr. Curtis Garrett on the show. Curtis, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
No problem, man. Excited to be here. You, you got something. You got high energy with this show. I love it.
Dude, I drink a shitload of coffee. Curtis, if I'm being honest. And you know, dude, now that you're out on your own, this will probably resonate for. I got to be my own biggest cheerleader, right? So like, I have to be as excited as I possibly can because this shit's hard, man. Building a business is hard.
It is. And, and that's so relevant. I've, I've been very recently working through stuff on my own. Just like, I think, I don't know if everybody's like this for. But my default is, you know, if I'm not actively like leaning in positive self talk. The default is just to get overwhelmed with everything that's due and everybody you need to get back to and who needs this. And I've been trying here lately just like talking to myself like I'm, you know, giving somebody else a compliment, which sounds kind of weird, but it actually is making a difference. And you know, I'm digging into the research a bit like there could be a case where, you know, you wake up in the morning, Chris, good morning. You're a good looking guy. You're doing great things. Like you've done this and this to be proud of.
And our brains may not even interpret that any differently than if somebody else walked up and said that to you. So it's interesting stuff.
It's a very real thing. Curtis. Like it. It is. If I strapped a GoPro to myself, people might think I'd be clinically insane. The amount that I talk to myself throughout the day to hype me up and to keep me going on that and you know, again. And you know, it's funny you brought that up, man. Like I literally just posted about something like that this morning is, you know, at times we get so overwhelmed about like where we're not in a lot of instances. And, and we also think like we have to fix literally Everything in one sweeping motion as opposed to like kind of taking one thing and really attacking that at first. And then that momentum and that confidence that everybody's looking for actually starts to happen.
As opposed to falling off the wagon and then looking up and you're like, fuck this. This is a dumpster fire. This is a dumpster fire. This is a dumpster fire. And then you're like, why am I even trying? But you're very right about that positive self talk. It's a very real thing. And I, I wish more people would actually apply that to their daily routines and their daily lives because a little bit of self positive talk about like, hey, you know what? You're not a complete piece of. Because that's the way I talk to myself, you know, and be like, hey, you are actually doing a lot of good out there. It'll help, man. So stick with that, Curtis.
Yeah, I will It. When you realize your mind is not, you know, your thoughts in your mind are not necessarily you. It's just this hyper vigilant, you know, awareness machine looking for risk. And if you let it's going to do that continually. But if you kind of interject, you observe some of those thoughts, you know, there's a ton of good books, you know, going all the way back to Seneca and, and all that. But yeah, it's interesting for sure, and it works.
No, I'm right there with you, man. I think that, you know, from my perspective is, you know, the, the thing with the self talk in all of that and it's, you know, correlation into business and just in life is you can be your own biggest bully because like, you know, all your weaknesses, you're the only one who knows all of your weaknesses. And that voice really likes to start prying in on a lot of that stuff.
Very true.
Yeah. So, dude, like this a, this is the first time you've been on the show, which is wild to me because I thought I'd been invited to you, but I just made that up in my head. But I was like, man, I got to get Curtis on the show. And especially when I saw that you were going out there on your own. But like, man, how'd you get your start in freight? Let's start there. How. What brought you into this industry?
Yeah, so I started in 2007. I've been in LTL, specifically my whole career. Spent 8 years in total with Old Dominion, Freightline, which is where I started. Just jumped into a dock job in A pretty sizable terminal of theirs, 200 plus stores. A lot of activity like around the clock, you know, processing of freight going on. So I spent about a year in dock operations. Then I jumped over to the driver's side and actually drove for OD for a year.
Oh nice.
Did an in house driving school there's got my cdl, drove a little bit over the road which is in the LTL world, just terminal to terminal and then a little bit doing pickup and delivery around the Columbus, Ohio area. And then I have a pattern of kind of, you know, maybe not swimming upstream but taking counterintuitive career paths and just doing what interests me and kind of what lights me up and keeps me passionate. So I remember getting all these questions when I jumped from driving into the weights and inspections WNI side which was a good size pay cut but it allowed me to kind of have one foot in operations and then start to learn the pricing and rating and yield side of the game. For me it was, you know, huge learning curve. It was.
I always say it's kind of like being at a sporting event where you know, the dock is like the arena, it's where the players are, there's pressure. You got to move this freight down, get it consolidated closed on this trailer and W and I, you're like first row front row seats where you're in there. You still get very, you know, familiar and intimately see how differently packaged and configured LTL shipments. You know the impact that has on other freight in the trailer when you're trying to fill and cube out a trailer but you're like one level removed because you don't have that operational pressure and you really just get to, you know, look for freight that's not costing well for the carrier and potentially losing money on. So that's what drives.
That's one thing that you know, a lot of people dislike about LTL is all these invoice changes and corrections and I, I agree with, you know, how it kind of trickles down to the customer's invoice. There needs to be a better way to do that, but it's necessary from, you know, if something is portrayed as something on a bill of lading as far as the shipment characteristics, the weight, the amount of space it's going to take up and then in reality it's something very different that's really going to impact the carrier's costs in a pretty, you know, slim margin business. Very capital intensive. Business so did that for a bit, then ended up coming to North Carolina. Worked in the corporate office for two years with them.
National account pricing, yield management and then 2016 jumped over to the three PL side of the world and from 2016 to 2020, early 2024 worked with three different three PLs, managed freight providers basically leading either their full LTL services or in one it was more the pricing and carrier relationships. So that was kind of chapter two. That was another eight years and then just almost a year now is March of 2024. Jumped on my own and really kind of pushing forward with. It's all under the mission of just making LTL more user friendly and easier and less, you know, cliffs and bangs and bruises for people when there are changes, whether it's a shipment exception on the service side, whether it's, you know, an invoice related issue. So we started ULTL understand ltl which is content training courses and then live events.
We've done, we've done three live mastermind events where typically 40 to 45 people come to each one. And it's a mixture of like seasoned LTL executives and veterans and newer technology companies, newer people in the brokerage space. Typically no shippers, just the way the cookies crumbled so far. But yeah, it's two days of just like really intensive discussion. We have, we have people speaking and leading certain topics but it's different than like a big conference experience where you're just kind of sitting in a crowd listening. There's a lot of Q and A and open discussion and then Rate Hero which is focusing on kind of removing friction.
A lot of our clients right now are brokerages that either currently do LTL and they just want to do it better or they're you know, a truckload brokerage that maybe has been an agent of somebody on the LTL side and they want to kind of build out their internal infrastructure in house. So we help them with pricing, with carrier relationships. We're working on an EBOL product to offer that will be kind of a plug in to any TMS when that's ready. Some like data verification and invoice audit services and yeah, having a blast with it. But it's been an interesting journey and really if I look back to what got me here, it was that change out of the dock and driving operations side at Old Dominion into the W and I side.
Because that's kind of just got my mind down, you know, the pricing and yield management rabbit hole, if you will.
Yeah, no, I I think that, that right there, you know, like, I think the traditional career path, people should just throw that out the window because I think you took the right career path here, Curtis. Like by working in multiple sides of the ltl space, you have a more comprehensive understanding than most people will ever be able to comprehend. Right. And I, I look at it as, you know, you need to become a subject matter expert in something. Right. Like the generalists and I see this a lot now. The days of the generalist service providers are slowly starting to dissipate, man. It's, they are looking for people who only do that one trick pony style of freight out there.
And you know, and again, like when I'm out there prospecting shippers because, you know, I literally cold call every single day like I don't want ltl freight and I've actually formed better relationships with people by telling them what I don't want to do as opposed to what I do actually offer. And then you know, because again, like I don't want to waste anybody's time if they're like 80% LTL or 90% LTL. I don't like, it's just not going to be a fit for my business. And you know, because it's like ultimately I truly feel like I would be doing any shipper a disservice by saying, yeah, I can get you ltl. Like could I find you a way to quote your LTL freight 100%? It's not that hard. Can I effectively move it for them? No, I don't want to do it.
I've tried it enough in my career where it is just not my cup of tea. I love full truckload. I love open deck, I love heavy haul over dimensional. That's where my passion lies. Ltl, with all due respect, it's just not my jam. And it's like for me, it's like I, I think that you're going to set yourself up for more success long term by having that core service offering.
Yeah, no, that's a good way to look at it. And I wish more companies did. Like if you see a lot of three PLs out there or a lot of TMS platforms really try to do everything but they just don't, they don't do everything well. And it's all in the name of just capturing that customer and you know, having all that revenue of their freight spend pass through them. But I think, yeah, I'm very like integration focused and partnership focused where I get requests all the Time for things I don't want to do, a lot of it, you know, falls on the truckload side. I've been asked a hundred times if I do truckload pricing and analysis, and I'd rather hand them off to an expert, you know, friend or partner of mine to do that.
And in today's day and age, with the ease, you know, to integrate systems and all the APIs out there, you don't have to be with one company for everything. You don't have to be even in one platform for everything. You should use the best for each category.
Yeah, and I think that is the most overlooked point, Curtis, by a lot of individuals out there right now is today's day and age. Like, what year did you start in the industry? Yeah. So I'm in 2011 is when I became a broker. I've been involved in transportation for Almost, you know, 20 years now at this point, loading trucks, working for a trucking company and all of that stuff. The technology that's available today in 2025 makes your point even more valid. People don't like the days of, like a generalist, hey, we'll do everything. I just don't think that is a clear path forward. As technology and automation becomes more and more prevalent out there in the shipper community, it's going to be, why would I need to do that?
Right?
Like, they can funnel all of their service providers now into like a couple of silos and, you know, and I think like the days of the spray and pray methodology, I just don't think it's sustainable. I'm putting my money where my mouth is, you guys, and I'm building a business based on that. So if I'm wrong, guess what, it's no financial failure on your guys's part. But, you know, for me, at the end of the day, man, I'm really doubling down on that. And again, my results speak for that. The conversations that I'm having with my prospects are speaking to that as being like a clear path forward with it. And you know, I, I look at it like this, you know, when you're going and you know, look at a car, for example, right?
You have tire shops out there, you have transmission shops out there. You have, you know, there's certain things and you take your car to different places for different things, and I feel like inside of transportation is no different.
Right.
At the end of the day, yep.
That'S a good analogy. I, I just was talking with somebody that's that had built a TMS in the past and is looking to build more, you know, specific operational LTL tech. And I use the car analogy there too like a TMS in the past, which by the way a lot of shippers, you know, it wasn't that long ago shipper would start working with a 3 PL, a broker managed freight provider really just to get access to a TMS and the technology. And that was a huge selling point of those three PLs as we've got this, you know, good freight management tech. But now there's so many, you know, you got my carrier out there, you got cubics is making a resurgence, you've got freight view.
All these different fairly cheap, you know, easy to get into low barrier venture TMS options there where a shipper doesn't have to go to a 3 PL just for that. But yeah, on the car thing, you know, if you look at some of the OG TMS platforms that are very broad, you know, do all modes, it's kind of like the way cars used to be built where you're sitting in the driver's seat, you've got all these dials and knobs and levers and like you may only use, you know, you may use your heat and air conditioning, you may use your audio, your radio but like most of the stuff you don't really touch but they're all there just I guess you know, for the once a year time you might need them.
Where as cars are getting more to like digital and the screen interface, you know, you can load up your screen with the widgets and things like you would on your cell phone with what is relevant to you and that's kind of what I, that's where I see like freight tech going is instead of this big broad but probably pretty shallow platform where you could do everything you could ever dream of but you only use like this little bit of it. You know, 20% of the platform, 80% of the time there's going to be more like built for purpose, you know, customizable freight tech ecosystems where you're plugging and adding certain things and it's just based off of your specific needs.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you man. So let's pivot into what you're doing now here a little bit and you know, let's start. How are you educating people on ltl? Because I personally think LTL is one of the most complex styles of freight to move because it seems like the goalpost is always moving. At least in my personal experience, the amount of reclassifications re ways not knowing where the product is because they forgot to scan this, it just wasn't worth it for me. And I will not go into anti LTL thing here. But from your perspective man, as you're working with people now, what's like their big thing, their big question about like hey man, this is what I'm trying to figure out with this.
Yeah. I try to boil it down to like principles or kind of first principles of like these are some baseline truths that if you understand and you can remember these then you can build on that and kind of build like that mental, you know, framework of LTL in your head. So one of them is, you know, even if you just look at the top 30 LTL carriers which you know, who really do control most of that 60, 65 billion dollar a year market, they're not all the same. There's so many differences. Like when you look at service footprint, equipment capabilities, you know, you got one regional in the mid atlantic that is 50% plus straight trucks and that's, that works for them and their network and their customer base.
And then you have another regional that's competing with them in the exact same states, you know, maybe similar in revenue and volume, that's more 53 foot, you know, vans and they're running, they're filling up bigger trailers and running their line haul that way. So when you look at just geographical service footprints, equipment types, capabilities, you know, who's got more lift gates than the next guy, technology, connectivity, you know, all these API rating calls, tracking, tendering, it's very different carrier to carrier.
So that's the first thing I typically suggest is just if you're a shipper or a broker and you're putting, you know, a freight and LTL opportunity in front of a group of carriers, it's really hard to make the best final choice for your customer or yourself, you know, based on price alone because there's so many differences with just the level of like friction to doing business, you know, with certain carriers. So know the carriers know the difference. That's what we try to help out with. Another big one, I came up with this a few years ago.
But if you look at, you know, all the stuff that catches people by surprise and accessorial fees or re ways or different things being added on really the, you know, there's a lot of work to do in my opinion for LTL carriers to not transfer all their raw costs onto the shipper immediately, like through the way of an invoice change. You know, like you look at a rules tariff, hundreds of pages really, it's the terms and conditions. But anytime something new comes up where it catches that carrier by surprise, they're like, well, we got to add this to the rules tariff so that, you know, we're covered going forward. It's kind of their insurance coverage in a way to account for any, you know, service level activity that might take place.
But if you look at all these different rules tariff items, all the charge types, everything boils down to either space, time or risk for the LTL carrier. And I've yet to find in all my years in the industry, you know, something that really matters. When you send a bid over to a carrier, they're looking at, you know, your credit, how many days to pay, you typically land around your, the type of freight, the commodity, the packaging, how, you know, prone to claims it might be, that's all like the risk category. And then all your like pickup and delivery activities, you know, residential, non commercial liftgate, all of that is really just a translation of time. It just means like you're not paying for, you know, the equipment itself.
You know, they buy a liftgate and use it thousands and thousands of times on each trailer over several years. So it's not the direct, you know, asset cost, it's you're paying for the additional time of the driver and the equipment being tied up on your site.
Do you think LTL pricing is going to get more simplified in the sense of like, you know, because I've seen this on the truckload side of things. You know, we found a couple of carriers that were like, you know, they just did local Los Angeles, right? So they had a $25 pallet charge if it went, you know, say 20 miles within their base and then they had a $50 pallet charge, stuff like that. Do you think it's going to get more and more simplified out there as technology makes it easier to kind of identify a lot of that stuff? Or do you think somebody is going to come in? Maybe, maybe it's a major LTL player, maybe it's FedEx. I don't know, I'm making this up.
But with FedEx kind of breaking off in there, do you think FedEx is going to be like, hey, we have a flat fee now? If you move a pallet, it fits inside of this box here, it's only going to be $40. Hypothetical example, do you see it transitioning to something like that, I think.
So it's easier for like a smaller regional carrier that doesn't have an average length of haul that's as long as like, say a national carrier like FedEx or OD or XPO would have. Like, it's easier for them to give pallet rates because it's really just, you know, everything's pretty much next day delivery. It's, you can pretty much count on it being one, you know, handling touch point on the consolidation cross stock. They're picking it up one day, they're consolidating it into a delivery route essentially and taking it out the next day.
So yes, I see a lot of opportunity and a lot of carriers in that kind of like, you know, when they're servicing a specific metro area or one state or even just a couple states, there's a lot more opportunity there for them to kind of just bundle and push all the different potential drivers of cost into some sort of a flat fee, you know, method. It's still. But once you get into the longer haul stuff, if it's super regional or national, you know, the longer it's going, the more times it's going to get unloaded and loaded at different terminal cross points there you're kind of, it's almost like you're shifting the liability.
The longer the carrier has it in their possession and has to, you know, travel it down the road and touch it and reload it's shifting that liability from the shipper or the receiver on to them because now they have to deal with, you know, how the weight's distributed on a long pallet or how the package, how robust the packaging is, how well the crate's buil, all different things like that. So I think on the national side, it'll take a bit longer.
And, and part of the problem is like, you know, I think we're turning a corner where a lot of these carriers are finally kind of catching up to where Old Dominion's been for a long time with just knowing their own costs and dimensioning, scanning the freight, like knowing that, hey, I, I can see on paper I've got two pallets of, you know, £600 in total. But when most of my cost as a longer haul carrier is in the line haul perspective, I need to know how much space that's taking up on the trailer. Like the weight is really just a, you know, it's, you got to still be legal and within the regulations and balance out how you load your trailers, obviously, but the real cost is how much space that footprint in the trailer.
So once the carrier's kind of like quantify, you know, their costs on a commodity level, an account level, even by terminal, by region, then they can start to, you know, put in more like user friendly kind of here's your price. It's not going to change. You know, Old Dominion's been trialing this for a couple years now. One rate, One time is the name of the program where if you give them correct shipment information up front, including like verified locations, you know, on the origin and destination, they'll, they won't change the bill that they give you an all in price and they're not going to go in and hit it with a reclass or you know, rebuild or something like that.
So that right there though, Curtis, I think once somebody gets that ironed out, right, with all the data, all the, you know, everything that needs to come into it, I think a carrier like Old Dominion, I'll just use them as an example here because you brought them up, they could come in and fundamentally change the game and I think they could decimate their competition with it. Right? Because I think that anybody that I talk to that does ltl, whether they're a ship broker, whatever, it's always the after the fact stuff that gets them, right? Because it's, you know, it's bid within margins, you know, from a broker's perspective, right? The customer, you know, the carrier bids you a hundred dollars, hypothetical, you bid it to your customer for 120 or whatever that looks like, right?
And then a rebill after the fact comes in that takes, you know, adds 18 to your invoice. Now all of a sudden you made two bucks on a move. And I think that the LTL carrier or provider or pricing platform, whatever you want to call it, that simplifies it down to what you're describing there, I think will steamroll the competition and it will completely upend everything in regards to LTL freight. And that's like, that's the stuff that I look forward to and I get really excited about inside of, you know, pricing and transportation and technology is stuff like that where it can take that old school industry where you know, if, you know, you brought up the top 30 LTL providers, I think there's like 10 that kind of control all of it, if I'm being completely honest.
And the same thing on the intermodal side as well. There's just a couple of providers that kind of control everything. So it's kind of like a monopoly at that point. Right. We can all go in, I'm making this up and say, hey guys, we're all going to increase our rates this year until somebody comes in. It's like, yeah, maybe we don't need to increase our prices. Maybe we just need to refine how we actually bid and then they go for that long term retention from a customer's perspective.
Yeah, that's a good point. With the size of the industry, you're absolutely right. If you know, the top 30 control that $60 billion, the top 10 probably control you know, 45 to 50 of that $60 billion. It's, it's very concentrated. But the interesting thing I've seen is, you know, it's more of an oligopy where there's several market leaders and you've got, you know, Estes Express is a $5 billion carrier. OD's six and a half. Like XBOS out there, you've got several big players. And so just by the nature of the LTL market and especially given there's really no industry wide, you know, transparent pricing indices or anything like that out there and there's not, by the way, there's some that say they have it. They're not right.
I won't names, but anyways it's, you get this effect where like a lot of LTL carriers, nope, they all want to kind of look and sound the same in the middle. Like this homogenous group. Nobody wants to be the first to try something new or to raise their price on a certain accessorial or the last, you know, typically. So a couple years ago during COVID when OD kind of took a step and raised their overlay fee which had been pretty static for several years, everyone just kind of jumped on that bandwagon and did it with different results, different levels of pricing. You know, some added a couple hundred bucks to the fee, others went as high on the longer like 20 foot plus items to like 3, $500 for an over length fee. So the results were different.
But yeah, you don't, you could sit down and talk with the top 10 carriers and the conversation is gonna sound and flow very similar. They're all gonna say we're not the cheapest. You know, we take pride in our service and they're all right. But no, there's a lot of, because of that, like just the makeup of the industry and the market size with the primary LTL carrier players, it is slower to change because nobody wants to be wrong. They, they value being a leader, but they also don't want to take a risk and step out on the branch and fall.
Yeah, down, dude. I, I completely agree. Curtis. I feel like we could talk for like three more hours about this stuff, man. And this is like, you know, ultimately, you guys, this is why I have subject matter experts come on the show because Curtis just literally put on a masterclass here for the last 30 minutes on getting a baseline understanding about LTL and pricing. And I, I truly feel like we haven't even scratched the surface on this, man. So we're gonna have to get you back on the show here soon and you know, and take a little bit more of a, an in depth thing. But dude, I, I like your, your in person events that you have there, especially because it's only LTL and it's small and it's an intimate setting.
It's education focused and I feel like that's very valuable for a lot of people. Do you have one coming up here? Put your information out there, man, for people to reach out to you to find out more.
Yeah, so we've done three so far. We're actually, instead of selling courses and events kind of in their own little product silos, we've switched in 2025 now to just annual membership. So if you sign up, you get all the digital content, the online courses, you can come to any of the live events. So we're locking down, we're going to have our next one in the middle of May in Charlotte. And we're locking down the dates, but all the information will be. If you go to RateHero IO, there's a right at the top of the page. You can click into the ultl, you know, page, I guess, slash ultl. But everything there for sign up, for information, that's where it's going to live.
Perfect. I love it, man. And if you guys can't find it for whatever reason, hit me up. I will gladly put you guys in contact with Curtis for what he's doing. I believe in what he's doing out there, you guys, especially if you are moving ltl, you have a customer who's like, hey, we have a major LTL opportunity and you need education. This is the guy you need to talk to out there because he's doing it, he's lived it. As you heard, he's literally done almost every job inside of an LTO provider that you can get so that's why we had him on here today. But, Curtis, thank you so much for your time. That's going to be it for today, you guys. We got a guest coming on tomorrow.
As always, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. You're feeling really ambitious. Rank the show on itunes and Spotify. That's how we reach more people and help them is because if you saw value, your network's going to see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon. Dude, that was.