Came back with a bank window down yelling now money anything hey oh Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm getting to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them made them make a bigger balls.
Hey what is up ladies and gentlemen? We are back. We are live. It is a freight coach podcast, the top podcast in transportation coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30am 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. 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 bring him up here shortly. Just a quick reminder though, our weekly newsletter dropped this morning, you guys. I don't auto sign anybody up for it. Go to thefraycoach.com it will auto prompt you to go and register for it. It's growing. It's kind of wild. Which is starting and doing it every single week. Does the subscribers are adding to it, you guys. So get on it. It's all industry news. We're doing a little bit of fuel report on there. We're doing some rates as well for people to start tracking. But most importantly, you guys, it's all going to be about freight because frankly, you guys, that's all I know. All right?
I don't know much else about anything. So. But with that being said, I got a very special guest for you guys here today. This is one of the AI companies that I'm really high on long term. I've, I've talked to some buddies of mine who use their product. They come from the industry and I'm excited to talk about this and building up a company like that inside of the industry. So I got Mr. Paul Singer on the show with Fleetworks. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris.
No, dude, you're. You're literally live from the floor at Manifest right now. Well, not from the floor, but you're in Vegas, you're out there, you guys got everything going on.
So.
Dude, how's that going, man?
Yeah, yeah, were kind of talking before the show. The, the reception on the show floor has really kind of completely flipped. It's no secret that were really one of the first to be in the space, really be building in AI for brokerage, for logistics companies. I remember our first show is maybe about a year and a half ago. First of all, no, we, of course, no name brand recognition, you know, people. When, when I started to ask people about it, what they thought about what were building, asking them for feedback, pretty much the feedback was categorically no. And it's funny that we actually kind of shook hands on a pretty large deal that we're basically like, we're going to be drawing the ink on that pretty soon in the next couple days and not able to share more.
But someone that I've gotten to know really well over the industry, he was one of the first people to actually tell me no about this product. He said, hey, AI can never talk to carriers. Carriers will never take it. And really the feedback here has completely flipped, right? Like, we've got this deal sign. We have more, of course, coming down the pipeline. But the feedback from our customers, as you know, has been really positive. And as Kyle and I are walking the floor, folks are just grabbing us and saying, hey, we've been looking to meet with fleetworks. We reached out to you guys last week or folks that we've been talking with for a couple weeks, couple months, and this is our chance to really meet in person. So it really feels like the market has come to us in a lot of ways.
By being first in this space, we've built a product that really is great for brokers, but most importantly, just super carrier first in everything. We can kind of go into what that means and why. But that's. The show's been great. All to say.
No, that's awesome, man. So, like, dude, I think, like, I'd like to take this kind of spin on it, right? Because it's like AI has about as much free marketing as imaginable right now as like a whole, right? Like, everybody in every industry is seemingly talking about it and there's been a lot of, you know, push for automation for a while now in transportation. But, like, what's been the main pushback, man? Like, I want to go out there and kind of take this angle about you guys building your company. Kind of like, what made you start, Paul? And then kind of like what are some of those early obstacles that you guys have start had to kind of overcome here?
Yeah, so I, I've been in brokerage now for counting fleetworks. I've been doing brokerage for about seven years, so I started at Uber Freight, led small carrier strategy at Uber, ultimately ended up leading small carrier products. So a lot of the products that I designed and led the team that built are still kind of helping run Uber Freights brokerage today. So for example, Uber Freight's entire performance management is completely automated using automated loyalty incentives, both positive incentives and negative incentives for carriers. So that's how Uber manages 100,000 carriers without even talking to them. But we also built like really interesting features like facility ratings and reviews dwell time notifications for facilities so carriers sort of can know what to expect when they book a load.
So when I was at Uber I really just fell in love with building products and figuring out how to empower kind of the small carrier, like the small carrier kind of the lifeblood of this industry. Everyone knows that. And of course, you know, rightfully so there's a lot of emphasis on fraud and preventing fraud. But I think it's also important to remember that hey, 99% of the guys in the space are really just honest, hard working people who want to provide great service and want to make a living doing it. Of course we need to do things to prevent that 1% from spoiling the other 99. But that's really what gets me up in the morning, is hey, how do we help small carriers become more successful? That really led to the idea behind fleetworks.
So as my co founder Quang and I, were sort of spinning our wheels at the start of Incubator, Y Combinator's famous incubator out of Silicon Valley. And were realizing, hey, some of our first ideas were not working well, which is, I think a lot of founders are going to resonate with that, right? Like you try something or you try ten things and none of them are working. You're in what's called pivot hell. You feel like you've lost all purpose in life. A lot of folks have been there and it's a tough place. But were thinking about my time at brokerage and despite really all the amazing automation that we had built at Uber Freight, when you still looked at the floor, it still looked in many ways like a traditional brokerage.
You had people answering emails, you had people scheduling appointments, you had people picking up phone calls, you had people making phone calls and we realized that for the first time in history, really, technology had caught up to that problem in the form of large language models. So large language models, you can effectively. One of the things they're really good at is turning sort of unstructured information like a phone call transcript or an email into structured data. And we've seen so many AI companies come into the space. Our approach really has been and will continue to be how can we better connect the broker and the carrier using AI? And when it makes sense, how does AI get out of the way so that humans can continue to develop great relationships? That's sort of the history behind the company today.
So we connect brokers and carriers over phone, over email, over text message. Carriers really like it because they don't have to wait on hold anymore. They get all their questions answered and they can even book loads with our AI brokers of course, like it because we're saving them a lot of time and money. Individual brokers on the floor quickly realize that fleetworks is actually their best friend. We're not taking business away from them. We actually help them book more with relationship carriers, spend less time talking with carriers who just aren't serious about booking their freight.
No, I'm right there with you, Paul, and a couple of my buddies who use you guys. And some of the examples that I've heard, I honestly never had thought about it in this situation with the, you know, you're right in the sense of like there's a lot of quality carriers that are out there, like that 99, but like that 1% that does come through or you know, the people who tr, who are the bad actors who are out there trying what, you know, a couple of the specific use cases that I heard about is like, hey, these guys are weeding out a lot of those guys from even talking to the carrier reps, right? So when they're utilized, Fleetworks, if they call in, they get the mc. They can tell like, oh hey, this carrier is denied.
Or you know, maybe it's a carrier that called in there was a stolen load or undead, you know, unpaid claims or whatever it is, they stop them from even wasting the carrier reps time. And I was like, damn, that's actually a really good idea from it because you know, the amount of times that I've booked loads throughout my career and you know, you maybe you make the mistake of not asking for the carrier's MC right away. You go through this huge spiel, you get the load covered, then you pull up their MC and you're like, damn, you guys are denied. And then, you know, so you wasted all of that time and you know, so it's like, I think like there's a gradual. I don't want like resistance is the first is the word that comes to mind.
But I know it's not right where it's like people are being less and less resistance to it because they can start seeing the gaps inside of their operations where it's like, damn, how great would this be to have a tool like that where I can keep my people productive and working as opposed to fielding inbound calls on a hot lane, you know, Atlanta to Chicago. And you get all your phone bricks, you get a hundred inbounds at the exact same time.
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we kind of talked. You were sort of asking, hey, like, what's been the pushback and what's been that journey from, I would say like non acceptance or maybe even just the simplest way to put it of not having product market fit to having product market fit. So, you know, when we first started, I would be kind of the first one to say that our product just wasn't very good. But we had a lot of confidence that it can get better. So I'll talk about what didn't work well and why we thought things would work. So basically everything was not good. So the voice quality was pretty robotic. You know, the pauses and the time it took to respond to carriers was really long.
The ability for the AI to sort of reference relevant information at just the right time, it's something that we call tool calling. So the ability basically pull load data and respond to questions was pretty poor. We saw really low success rate there. So those are kind of three things that we felt like were pretty bad. Given the pace of our own personal development and the development of the underlying tech. We felt like those things could get solved and that was correct. Like, I think the right bet to make in AI is just, AI is getting better. But the thing that gave us a lot of confidence beyond that it was going to work was I was telling Andrew Silver this story not too long ago.
So we, when we first started, we found a load board, and I forget the name of the load board, it was kind of like a really, like not a famous one. It had no fraud checks and anyone could post any freight on there. And so what we wanted to do is we said, hey, let's post three loads on lanes that we know are going to blow up the phones and let's see what the carrier experience is like, right? And we're going to run this one day experiment. So we posted those three loads. Two of them got calls. We got three calls in total. And all three of those calls, I would say like the carrier went through the full call and talked to the AI and one of them, despite how bad the tech was, the carrier didn't even know they were talking AI.
They just thought they were talking like a really bad carrier rep. We listened to the call and we could tell the carrier was like, hey, why aren't you understanding this? So despite like the product was terrible, but we saw that the carrier experience could get there. And so that we, you know, once we did that, we spent the next four or five months really kind of developing it out, making sure that it was like a stable product and something that was production ready. And then we, you know, came out to market again. The first people who saw it were like, still, like, hell no. We were able to find, I think, just a few people who really took a risk on us as founders. Like, not even, they're like, we really like you.
The product, we're a little bit like, you know, we're a little bit 5050 on it, but we really like you guys and we see that you're gonna like bust your ass to make it better. So we'll give you guys a try for a couple months. And those customers, you know, John Ackerman at Capstone, I think one of the earliest guys to take a risk on us. And obviously, you know, we've kind of paid back that trust a lot over time, but we would, we really would not be here in general without those early customers in particular. So big hats off to them.
So with this, is this mainly designed to take inbound calls? Like, we're not at a point where it's starting to call posted trucks on any load boards or anything like that. This is primarily set up where if I post Atlanta to Chicago for a dry van now this is where you guys would step in and kind of run that transaction.
So we do, we do outbound calling. So we do outbound calling on posted trucks or any other type of outbound call that our customer needs to make. We see a lot of power on the inbound side, of course, but outbound is working really well. Carriers are negotiating with the outbound AI. They're telling it what they want to book. We're selling them multiple loads on those calls. We're Doing track and trace for customers. We're doing document retrieval, bread and butter. What we do, I think is really going to be inbound.
Okay, no, for sure. And I think like that's, you know, I look at it as a lot of companies are, you know, at least when I'm out there covering freight and when I've covered freight in the past, especially on some of those power lanes, when you're getting a ton of inbound calls at the exact same time and fielding all of that. And how do you know that the right truck for that load was even talked to? Right. And then it's kind of going and setting those parameters up. I think it's crucial. Right. And, and I, I think a lot of people, you don't think about this in the moment when you're booking because like, you might have found that, you know, the truck that fits for that price at the end of the day, right?
But maybe one of these carriers that were out there that called in ran that lane every single day of the week. And just because you found the right carrier, it might have been the right one for this load. But what about the next 10, 15, 20 that you're running? Because that's the way that I like to operate as a broker, right? Because I'm doing both, right. Like, we're primarily cradle the grave. We're a startup, we're doing cold calls to shippers, but we're also booking all of our own freight and everything else. And I'm like, I want the right carriers out there. Because our whole business model that's been successful is we use the same trucking companies time and time again. We've identified the right carriers for those lanes for the long term.
So it's like if we had 10 loads dropped on our plate late today, we can actively cover them with the right drivers for those shipments. And I've been in the opposite position of that though, right? Where it's like I found a carrier who worked at one time, but then we couldn't find any carriers for those lanes long term. So it's like, I think like from a data collection standpoint and everything else that comes along with it, knowing who to reach out to for the next one is just as important as, is this the right truck for this shipment today?
Yeah, I think that's right. So, you know, maybe I think about this company kind of in phases. So phase zero was saying, hey, can we get a couple brokers on the platform? Right. Can we even convince anyone to use us? Phase One was, phase one was scaling that. Phase one was saying hey, how do we make this better? How do we make this more fully featured, how do we make this more self serve? And phase two to your point is really, hey, how do we help people get smarter on their data? Brokers are sitting on amazing pricing data lane preference data. On the flip side, carriers want to occasionally work consistently with brokers where it makes sense. And carrier reps are often really busy.
They can't always do carrier development on every phone call because they've got to go cover the next load or they've got to go put out a fire that's happening on the load they just covered. There's so much on a carrier reps plate. So we think about the AI's sort of helping the carrier rep just be really diligent, follow the SOP every single time, but also help them collect data that helps them connect more with carriers, helps the brokerage become more successful, drives the right rate for the market, drives the right service outcome. Those are really all the ways that we partner with our customers to try to help them grow. And our goal with fleetworks really kind of our big audacious goal is to help the fleetworks brokers win the market.
And we fundamentally believe that if we are successful in completing all of the missions and tasks that we know we need to do, if you are a fleetworks broker, you will out compete a broker, even a broker using another AI platform, that's going to be our number one goal.
I look at it from a volume perspective here, right? Because you know, I operate in reality and I know where my revenue is and I want to hire people. But I also understand that like training, all of that stuff is a, is an, you know, an issue and there's a ramp up period for that. So it's like where I'm the most excited about is you know, how do I find the right tech partners in some other areas that can help me scale operationally? Because as I'm out here and actively prospecting, I'm hoping to get that volume based shipper right at the end of the day where it's like, hey man, we got 10 loads a day, 15 loads a day, whatever that is out there across the country.
And that might happen and fall on my plate before I have the manpower on staff that can actively manage it, right? So it's like where's that alternative? Where's that next step? Or maybe you're inside of a growing organization and your customers like Hey, I need you to take more volume. I need you to take more volume or you're going to get kicked out of network. You know, that's a very real thing that comes on out there with some of those enterprise shippers. So it's like, where are those tools?
I don't want to call it a band aid or a stopgap or anything like that, but what are those tools that we can invest in to where it's like there's like an ROI almost instantly where it's like, I don't have to maybe train them to, you know, differentiate between a reefer or drive in or whatever equipment type, whatever load details and you can implement that and see, you know something early on from that.
It's a great point. I mean, you also asked what are the obstacles that we face? Like, I think so there were some early obstacles now that we're really kind of scaling. I think one of the things that we're seeing, funny enough is I think there's been there's of course a lot of great freight tech companies and a lot of whom have been on the show, right. But there's also, as I don't think anyone's going to deny, there's a lot of like not so great freight tech companies who've sold, you know, millions of dollars worth of product, Right. And what we found is that sometimes our customers or our prospective customers, they've been burned by these, like these providers who sold them on a dream and the ROI was never there, right?
So we're in a fortunate position that, you know, the ROI from our product, excuse me, tends to be pretty obvious, you know, tends to be saying, hey, like if you've got a shipper who's going to give you 10 more loads a day instead of bringing on another person who by the way, now you need to manage that person. You need to train them, you need to kind of, you know, of course monitor their development and you need to make sure they're servicing your freight accurately. Instead of bringing that person on, bring on a pre trained AI that already knows what the difference is between a reefer and a flatbed and knows how to negotiate and knows how you like to sell your freight. So that's kind of how we think about it.
I think typically what we find is that it might be a band aid solution, but it grows beyond that. Where, okay, I've got those 10 loads per day. Okay. Now that I know I can trust fleetworks, to handle those loads, let me go and get more shippers. And for effectively a almost no or marginal extra cost, fleetworks is helping me service that freight, you know, where otherwise I would have had to pay someone, you know, 40 to 70k to help me run this business.
No, I mean, and this comes as a shock to some individuals who have always worked for a company or, you know, maybe they've had a bunch of VC funding where they never actually needed revenue. But in the real world you need revenue to be able to hire people. And if you don't have revenue, you know, or maybe, you know, put yourself in this position. And this is the position that I've worked in. I've bootstrapped my companies up, all right? So I've gone from $0 to where I am today. And guess what, you guys, you get stretched very thin and a lot of times you're getting pulled in multiple different directions and there is no perfect, hey, it was a six month ramp up with the shipper and then all of a sudden was great and they only made us take one load a day.
Like you're gonna go from zero to a hundred. And a lot of scenarios out here when you're growing and scaling. And you know what, here's another thing, maybe you need to stack some money in the bank so you can make some other strategic moves inside of your business. Maybe buying a biz building is in your, you know, or there's some other investments inside of your company and that money coming in, that revenue coming in is not now designed to hire people, you know. So these are very real scenarios most founders are going to find themselves in. If you're actually building a business and you're not just sitting behind your laptop and posting about how you have this company that doesn't actually exist.
So it's like this is where a lot of these scenarios, Paul, that I'm hearing now is really opening up my mind and my eyes to a lot of future situations that we're going to be in, right? Maybe it's like, hey, we don't have the money, or maybe we have the money to hire somebody, but like we want to stack eight months or 12 months of somebody's salary. Or maybe now this gives us an idea, like an avenue to where we can stack two people's 12 month salaries in our bank account before we hire them and deploy them. So like this is like a stepping stone and then something that our people can utilize out there, right? Because again, in a perfect world, you guys, you have all this money to operate with, never have any challenges in business.
You're all driving Ferraris and everything else and nothing ever goes wrong. But you know, again, I operate in the real world and I know how hard it is to build a business and that's why it's like I'm very high on a lot of these products. And then, you know, and then hearing about yours too, man, is like, hey, this is a great tool to implement to where you know what, maybe instead of hiring a carrier sales rep, you can hire another customer sales rep to put another more revenue focused seat. Fill that up and everything else, man. So that's where my mind goes with a lot of this.
I think that's right. So like what we see with AI and how it changes how companies think about their workforces is like, is it? We're, in some ways we're actually kind of like a miniature version of this. So I think you've got this cohort of startups who realize that you no longer need to build a 100 person, 200 person team to go out and build something amazing. We just hire literally the best engineers that we could possibly hire. All the engineers on our team are former founders and CTOs themselves. So really kind of when you're working with us, you're working with sort of a super elite group of both operators, but also technologists. And then we use AI to make those people hyper efficient and make someone who's already worth two or three times a normal engineer, worth 10 times a normal engineer year.
The same principle applies to brokerage. If you are someone who is an incredible freight broker, who has a ton of relationships with carriers, with shippers, who knows how to service freight, you're going to be able to use fleetworks to become even better at your job. Like you're just going to be able to do even more. And so I think a freight brokerage of the future may not be especially like a large one, may not be an army of people, but rather like a more sort of elite strike force that can serve and target and fix very small issues as opposed to saying hey, we need to. The, the math is no longer 10 loads per day, 1, 1 head. The math is now maybe 50 loads a day 1 head.
That person can now actually go out and do a lot more with their time, frankly, actually probably make more money too. If you're a great broker, you're going to make more money with our product.
And, and that's exactly where my mind goes. Right. I said this. Yes, on yesterday's show. And I say this a lot, right? Like, I will never have cap commission my brokerage. I want absolute killers out there, but I want to arm them with the right tools where they can maximize their efforts to make themselves as much money as humanly possible. And, you know, you're right, man. I think like, where the future of freight is, you know, I, I'm never going to say we automate everything, but I think like 95 of my day should be automated at the end of it, right? And that's where it's like, I want to plug in those right tools. And I just think, like, freight brokerage will always be there, but the way that it's done is going to look vastly different. Right?
And that's where it's like, you know, your operations will always be a part of it. There's going to be certain components of it, but why not? What used to take maybe a thousand people in the traditional sense, maybe you can get it done with a hundred. And then those other 5, 600 people, you can plug them into different roles inside of your organization. You know, like, one thing that I'm high on is, you know, I'm not going to talk about this publicly because I can't.
But, like, there's a lot of things that I envision my brokerage doing in the future that it's going to change the landscape where I'm going to be able to rely on the blocking and tackling that I was raised on, but also implement some of the newer version and the newer technology that's out there where I can service my customers and carriers at a level that most people can't even fathom.
Totally. Yeah. I think if you're a broker right now, I think you need to think about, hey, how do I hire the best people? How do I become Delta Force? Not, not, how do I become a mammoth army? Your goal should be, hey, how do I hire 10 people who are going to just go, absolutely crush it.
I look at it like this, Paul. How do you hire the right 10 people as opposed to bringing in 50, hoping 10 work out and identify themselves? I think this gets you more targeted in how, who you're going to hire. And this lets you be more picky, right? Because I feel like, you know, again, back to that example of like, hey, I just landed this enterprise account. We need to put bodies in seats now. It's like, no, no, we don't need to do that. Let's utilize Our tech stack, let's find the right 10 people now instead of bringing on 50 and then hoping 10 work out. Like, I think this is where it's like, the hiring and team building can fundamentally change for the better. So you're getting the right people in the right seats.
And some of you might, you know, take this the wrong way, but I believe in a meritocracy, you guys. Like, I believe that you are rewarded for the work that you perform, not because you have a pulse. All right? And I think, like, that is where things are going to inevitably shift, where if you're a killer and you're a high performer, you're always going to be employed. But I feel like the days of you floating by and collecting a salary are kind of limited from that regard because it's like if you and like. And that's why I say when it hire the right 10 people, if you're the right person for a job, you're going to flourish no matter what.
But if you're that person who's kind of like just floating by for retirement, I think it's going to be very hard to justify hiring those individuals anymore. Anymore.
I agree. And actually you kind of had me thinking is like, how might I, as a broker change? Like, the questions I ask when I'm interviewing people, I think a pretty easy way to even just get started to say, hey, tell me about how you use ChatGPT in your personal life or in your past job. I think assessing people's comfort and creativity with using AI tools, even something super basic like, oh, yeah, you know, I've. I've used it to rewrite an email or. Yeah, when I have a question, I, like, do research on ChatGPT. Right. Getting people who. Their first instinct is to use AI for challenges probably is a good way to start vetting folks.
I love it, man. Paul, I gotta be cognizant of your time. I know you got a busy day ahead of you, man. How does anybody reach out to you to find out more about what you got going on, man?
Yeah, so you can reach out to me. My email is PaulLeatWorks AI. I'm not going to give out the emails of my whole team, but once you reach out to me, you can talk to anyone on the team. A few of our customers have been on this show. A lot of our customers are listed on our site. So if you know folks at those companies, don't hesitate to reach out. I don't need to get in the way of that. We really have a lot of customer love and have had a lot of great feedback. So please chat with anyone you know in the industry using us and as always, you know we're here to help. So thank you so much for having me.
Chris. No, absolutely man. And if you guys can't find Paul or Fleetworks or for whatever reason, hit me up, I will gladly put you guys in direct contact with them you but that is going to be it for today. We got more guests coming on. As always, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. If you're feeling really ambitious after this one, which you should rank the show on itunes and Spotify because that's how your network is going to see value as well. Because if you saw it, your network's going to see it as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon. We don't have any cool outro.