Came back with a bank Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get 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 hate them Make a bigger boss hey.
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, 8:30am 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. 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 Thursday, everybody. I got a very special guest for you guys. I'm going to bring him up here in a second. But just another little subtle reminder, if you guys want to get in on the Freight Coach newsletter, go to the freightcoach.com sign up there. It will auto prompt you. As always, I don't just spam people with stuff. If I have your email address, I don't just automatically add you. I want you to be on it because you want to receive it. Again, we always talk about, you know, freight rates, diesel prices, all of that stuff on there. Again, it's all industry specific. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a life coach as well, just a freight guy at heart.
But with that being said, you guys, if you've ever wondered about the unicorn that is refrigerated ltl, we're going to get a masterclass on that today, you guys. It's one of those ones that I think I would get asked about the most is how do I. How do I find Reefer ltl? How do I quote Reefer Ltl? Where do we go with that? So I have Mr. Clay Kieran with Fresh X on the show today. Clay, thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
No, I'm looking forward to it, man. Again, it is like a unicorn in the freight industry about finding Reefer ltl and everything else on top of that. So before we break any of that stuff down, man, dude, how'd you get your start in freight? What brought you into transportation?
Sure, yeah, so it was kind of a windy path. My co founder and I started the business a little over two years ago and that was how we got into freight is we actually started out in the last mile space and were doing last mile package delivery. We started a business for last mile package delivery for food and beverage companies like meal kits, direct to consumer. And were working with them and we kept hearing about refrigerated ltl. They kept, they kept saying that's where the real pain point is and that's what we're really trying to solve here. And that kind of led us upstream and we looked into it more. We realized that this was a real problem space. We shut down the last mile package delivery business and started a freight brokerage.
And so we totally jumped into this like head first into the darkness, no background brokering freight ourselves. But we got some advisors that were really helpful who we just kind of leaned on and said all right, what do we do? You know, walk us through this and got things set up, got a few customers, but we really just jumped into it and just started brokering freight into, out of the blue. And we did that for about six months. We just got a few customers, had some recurring business, mostly refrigerated ltl, some truckload. But then we ended up shutting down the brokerage a little over a year ago and built the software company.
So I, how much did that play into your favor that you guys were kind of trial by fire in the freight space based like not having a ton experience as a broker, you know, because sometimes like I, I look at it like this man, like yes, I've been in transportation literally my entire life. I've been doing this job for a very long time. But I'm also a firm belief that like sometimes the best perspective is a fresh perspective. And it's having somebody come in who doesn't have any real like emotional connection to like there's no past in past experiences. And they're able to bring in like a fresh mindset into how things can be done. How much did that benefit you guys early on, do you think?
I mean, so if we had a freight background, I think we would have been less likely to start a brokerage that specializes in refrigerated ltl. I think that's something that not a lot of folks who know what they're doing willingly do. And we just jumped into it because we heard that it was a problem space. It's not a category that, that freight brokerages jump into because it's such a pain. And so nobody starts a freight brokerage for refrigerated LTL if they know what they're doing. But we did. And that kind of got us really knowledgeable about the space and it allowed us to kind of see what was needed in the market. And then were able to get that experience, build up those relationships with the carrier base that specializes in Reefer ltl.
And then from there we kind of had everything we needed to start the software company. So that experience was really necessary. Just understanding the industry and getting to know the carrier base and specializing in that niche gave us the right perspective to build the software that was needed in the market.
So is this something that carriers. And it's like connects carriers with shippers at this. Or brokers can go on there to find capacity for Reefer ltl. Kind of walk us through that platform, man. How does that look?
Yeah, the platform is pretty straightforward. We usually do demos in like 10 minutes or less. So it's instant pricing on temperature controlled ltl and we sell it as a subscription product to freight brokerages. So freight brokerages pay us a monthly fee. They get access to the platform and then they can run a search with pallets, weight, temperature, commodity zip codes and they get back instant price quotes from carriers that can run that exact lane, estimated delivery dates and then they can book with the carriers right there on the platform. So we're not a freight brokerage anymore. It's, it's more, we're more like DAT where we are once the connection's made, we're not kind of standing in the way or creating barriers to communication. Our customers, the freight brokerages are communicating directly with the carriers.
They're getting set up, they're establishing a relationship and they're working directly on the shipments. Okay, so we are, we view ourselves as a, a pricing platform next with like an inverse load board.
No, definitely, but just for reefer LTL at the end of the day, right? No, that's a. But dude, it is, it's an interesting space. Right, But I feel like it's also one that's, you know, really ripe for growth. Like there's a lot of opportunity that comes along inside of those niches, especially inside of transportation. I mean, you Know, like the CPG companies that are out there in the food space right now that are coming up, you know, like those are, there's new entrants coming into that all the time. And you know, having an ability to actually move their product off their docks and get that out there, you know, is, it's imperative. Right. Like I look at just like the downstream effects of this, you know, how much product out there.
And you know, again, a lot of it's always market driven but like, you know, if there's ever a capacity shortage that's out there and then if there's anything that's sitting on the docks because there isn't an access to capacity for, you know, especially inside of reefer LTL that is coming out there. I mean this is just like, this helps that small business kind of level up and help expand their footprint inside of their distribution network.
Yeah yeah. I mean it's definitely a trend. And I think every small business, every food and beverage company needs refrigerated LTL at some point. It's a lot of times not the biggest piece of their business, but they all need it and a lot of brokerages are turning it away. So we found that 80% of brokerages can't handle it today. And so they're just turning away that business. It's going to other brokerages but they're unable to kind of be a full service partner for those shippers. And there's trends, there's, you know, there's tailwinds for refrigerated ltl because there's more and more smaller businesses starting up. There's more suppliers coming to market. Technology is kind of enabling that and lowering the barrier to entry for suppliers. It's also lowering the barrier to entry for cold storage for retailers, the endpoints in the supply chain.
And so you just have a much more fragmented network where there's more nodes in the system and more of a need to ship smaller batch shipments. So tailwinds. And then there's also the, just on the brokerage side, there's a need for, for brokers to be that full service provider. And, and that's what we're seeing.
How much like how much reefer LTL capacity is out there? Right? Because like, you know, I was alluding to it was the show started like that is kind of like a unicorn out there in the market, you know, on. And so it's like how much Capacity is out there, Is it pretty much, is it dense, is it into certain markets? And then obviously the further and further away you get from major metro areas it's almost non existent. Kind of walk me through that.
Yeah. So there's more than most people realize. So we currently have 73 carriers on our platform who have all given us pricing coverage. We work with them on a consulting type of project where we map everything out, we map out all the lanes, the pricing, the fuel. We're at about 95% coverage across the US so if you were to go on our platform and run a search, 95% of the searches that our customers are running, we have at least one option. About 60% of the searches have at least three options. So that gives you a sense of like search depth and search breadth. So there's these. But the way that it works is all of these carriers are really consolidators. It's not multi stop, they're picking up, call it a hundred miles around their warehouse, they consolidate the warehouse and they ship out.
Usually they ship out on Fridays and they hit all their deliveries Monday through Wednesday. Now a lot of these, most major metros have like one or two refrigerated LTL carriers within that metro but each one kind of has like a monopoly. So they like, they pick up around that city and they ship out from that city wherever they go. And they might have specific lanes they run. It's all, it's all heavily lane based as well. So the pricing is going to depend on where that carrier is already going. Does that carrier already have a run from Chicago to Dallas? And if so then the Chicago to Dallas lane for that carrier is going to be a lot more competitive than even the Chicago to Houston lane. So it's all very lane dependent pricing and capacity.
Are you seeing more of like food and beverage based product being shipped on there or is there any you know, temp controlled hazmat stuff like that that is being out there on an LTL basis as well.
It's mostly food and beverage, I'd say 95% plus food and beverage. The commodity, the specific commodities that we see shipping, reefer LTO are like meats and produce, cheese products like dairy, frozen like baked goods is a big one. Juices and concentrate, just broadly beverages, even like sparkling water is something that we see a lot of. And like seafood, those are probably the broadest category. That probably comprises about three quarters of the volume. Just those categories and then the stuff that's not food is like there's plants, flowers, there's like paint and some like hazmat type of stuff. But that's pretty hard to do because you, it's hard to mix that with food grade products.
No, absolutely right. Obviously within cross contamination and everything else that comes into mind with that, but I feel like there are a lot of people out there who are offered, you know, if you're out there prospecting for any amount of time as a freight broker, you know there's going to be those scenarios that pop up, right? Like hazmat, reefer, partial, all of that stuff that comes in and you know, being able to know where to go in those environments. Right. Like again, like I talk about choosing a niche on this show all the time and a lot of it is for the majority of the individuals who are just trying to establish their book of business that's out there. And you know, I just find it as like knowing where to go is what.
Like I think brokers for the most part are so consumed on that next step. Right. And I get it, you need revenue, you need customers. But what if a customer asks you, can you do this right? How many times out there are people like everybody says yes right away to everything, right. I think that's like the, in a sales book, sales training 101 thing, this is line number one, say yes to everything, right. Like, no matter what, which I don't agree with. But knowing where to go and who to kind of, you know, reach out to in a lot of those moments is going to be crucial, right? Knowing the right carriers to reach out to for specific loads, right. Like I had my good friend Nate Ramsden on the show on Monday. Dude, they're just like specialized heavy haul, million dollar shipments.
They do other stuff as well. But like they have their niche, they double down on that and they do it. And then, you know, inside of my personal brokerage, when we're running like we have, we, you know, again, we do open deck and heavy haul, but then we developed out an expedited sprinter van network for a lot of those last minute, hey, we forgot a pallet of adhesives. We don't want to send it ltl. We need it next day or you know, some nuts and bolts, whatever that looks like. And then knowing where to go in those moments is crucial. Right? So I feel like if you're going to be out there and you're going to be talking to any customers, knowing what's possible, what's not possible is I think what you need to Think downstream when you're out there developing business.
And I'm glad you brought that up about like, hey, you guys, you need to be aware that like just because it's a reefer hazmat load, the capacity isn't going to be as plentiful as somebody who's willing to go in there and pick up some food. You know, food and bev, you know, that's going to be more consistent from a capacity base and being able to take that information and explain it to your prospects and your customers, that's what gets them to work with you long term.
Yeah, exactly. And it's about handling your current customers capacity. If you're a refrigerated freight broker, if that's your specialty, you have to be able to do ltl. They're going to go to somebody else that can do it if you can't do it. The other thing is if you develop that niche, which you've probably experienced, it's really easy to acquire customers. Much easier than if you're just like a vanilla truckload brokerage. We noticed that when were a specialized brokerage and we focused on refrigerated ltl. We heard about how hard it is to acquire customers as a brokerage. Meanwhile, we're calling up food companies and saying can we quote your referral tl and everyone's happy to talk to us. And so we're like, this is easy. What are you talking about?
But the hard part was actually getting the quotes from the carriers and managing the loads. But we, we've noticed that our customers have had a lot of success when they invest in our tool as a customer acquisition strategy. And they say, you know what, we're going to build up a sales motion around reaching out to food and beverage companies and asking to quote the reefer ltl. And that's led them to acquire new customers. We see it like daily almost where they say, hey, we just landed a new customer, 60 lanes a week using the tool because we reached out to them about refrigerated ltl. And it's just, it opens the door to those conversations.
No 100% man. And it went, I mean obviously it's find that pain point, double down on that and then you'll eventually work your way in. And you know, that's another reason why, you know, I preach that often on this show, right? When you choose one thing and sell in a singular focus, plant your flag there, plant your tree there, and then your roots, you know, dig into that customer's Book of business. Because I would all but guarantee if you start servicing their reefer ltl freight, it's only a matter of time before they're going to start giving you access to their full truckload and the stuff that you're really going after. And if you're able to do a lot of that's where it's.
You know, again, man, it's always about solidifying it and you know, like the opportunity that's out there in the freight market, right? Like 70 some percent of the freight, you know, somebody can check my. My math on this is like, you know, it's full truck, it's dry van and reefer for the most part, right? So, like, that's a massive play out there. But everybody does that, you know what I mean? Like, literally everybody does full truckload, drive in freight. Full, full truck row. Full truckload reefer freight. How can you stand out in a crowd, you know? And even the ltl space as well, man, Just standard ltl, dude, that's extremely saturated. It's really tough to compete with any of those legacy ltl carriers out there on price.
A lot of those guys have been working with the exact Same customers for 20 years and stuff like that. But, you know, again, where's the opportunity? What you're bringing up right here, Reefer ltl, out of the entirety of my career, has been the literal number one ask by most food and bev companies out there. Can you do reefer ltl? Again, I don't do it, so I don't really mess around with that because again, I'm in the open deck space. But if you're out there developing business, Clay is giving you a literal business development strategy right now as a broker, all right, to go in there and talk about this, and then you can go and use his platform. You guys go and sign up for that and you get your instant pricing. I'm not affiliated with Clay at all.
But when I see good products out there, you guys that can literally help you build your business, I want to get them on this show to talk about this stuff because this has been a literal problem, like I said, for the 15 years that I've been brokering freight. I could only imagine. I mean, look at what Clay was saying, you guys, when he was brokering, all right, Everybody got lit up and he's out there wondering, why are you guys talking like it's hard to develop business. We're getting all these guys on here wanting to help have us quote their reefer ltl.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, thank you for that. And yeah, it's, it's really a customer acquisition tool. We actually launched something recently which is enabling us to develop proprietary capacity in some markets which is especially good for customer acquisition. So we just launched nationwide outbound from Las Vegas, which if you've ever tried, there is no refrigerated LTL capacity nationwide from Las Vegas. The way we did it is we set up an interline with two carriers. One that goes from Las Vegas to Los Angeles every day. They just have this milk run. They do. And then another carrier in Los Angeles that goes nationwide outbound. So it's a highly efficient way for us to open up that map. And now our customers can get instant price quotes on Vegas Outbound.
They're calling up all their, all the companies in Las Vegas right now and saying, hey, can I quote your refer LTL Nationwide outbound from Las Vegas and winning all that business. So that's exactly what we're trying to help our customers do.
Dude, that's a solid play, right? I mean Vegas, I mean, dude, you could literally go to a lot of those, you know, even casino style cities that are out there. I mean all of them are looking for that stuff, right? You know, dude, that's, I really like that, man. So how are you guys working, you know, obviously with the, what you call it, the classification rules that are coming in, the changes that are coming in here for the LTL space. Are you working with your customers right now on that about the class changes that are happening?
It's, it's actually not really that applicable to refrigerated ltl. So reefer ltl, they don't really go off of standard freight classifications. The, the pricing is based on the rating and like how they think about commodities is really just based on broad commodity categories that can and can't be mixed with other categories. It's okay like apples can go with bananas and stuff like that or it has to do with the specific, sometimes more granular than the standard freight classifications. Where like a commodity has to ride at a certain temperature. It has to be. Mushrooms have to be kept 36 degrees. And so the carriers are more focused on what is the commodity, is it food, is it seafood, is it alcohol? And it's, it's just a little bit different than standard freight classifications. So I'd say it doesn't really impact us at this point.
Okay, now understood. How, how are you guys out there trying to Build up the capacity base on there. Right. Like you had said, you guys have, you know, what was it, 80, 70 some providers that are on there right now in there. How, how could a, a regional LTL reefer carrier that's out there that may not have heard from you or dude, maybe they're not even like there's plenty of like I look at outside in the state of California, for example, guys who run the i5 between NorCal and SoCal, they consolidate shipments literally all the time out there. How are you out there trying to expand out to try and find those carriers that are doing that stuff already?
Oh yeah. We're always trying to expand capacity and we, at this point we have, I would say that the vast majority of the refrigerated LTL carriers, but there's always more. We always, somehow we've been doing this for a year just like trying to grow capacity and we still stumble across new carriers that like don't have a website and they just have like a safer page and somebody tells us about them. So we're always coming across new folks and trying to expand capacity the way that we're doing it. When we started out we had some connections through the brokerage, so we had already some existing carrier relationships. It was kind of tricky. It was like, it's like a chicken egg problem, right? Like the carriers don't want to go through this work in this whole project to get their rates online until we have volume.
So in the beginning we actually got in a car and drove around the country and just met with a lot of the owners at their docks and just said hey, we're going to be in town, can we stop by and meet with you and tell you about what we're doing? And we'd show up and, and, and talk to them for an hour and get them to kind of see the vision and that we're trying to expand the pie here that you know, this is going to be good for the industry.
And then after were able to get call it like 15 to 20 carriers, then it started to snowball a little bit and we had more momentum on the supply side and were able to say to other carriers like hey, we have, you know, a carrier that you have a good relationship with, maybe you do some interline work with and get sort of warm introductions. And now we're kind of pretty well known within the space. Folks are referring us to their, their partners and folks they have relationships with. So but if they want to. If, if there are other. Any folks listening to the podcast that want to join on the carrier side, just feel free to reach out through our website. We have an inquiry form and we'll get right in touch.
No, definitely. I, I literally had a guy on my show a while ago. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'll dig through my notes here after we're done on the live stream and see if he's on there. Because he's a, he's a really good guy. He's based out of Dallas. I know that off the top of my head here, but yeah, man, I was, you know, I was just thinking about that because they're, you know, and then that's another thing for the drivers that are out there, you know, especially the ones who are just specifically hauling seafood and everything else to get that, you know, additional freight, additional opportunities that fit in with their pricing and everything. I mean, I feel like there's always an opportunity, you know, that there's. Even if there.
Are you primarily targeting those LTL specific carriers for your platform or are you open to speaking to somebody who. Maybe, maybe they have a fleet, Clay. Maybe they got 10 trucks or whatever and they're running, you know, the Texas Triangle. Right. Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and you know, they do reefer all the time. Are you guys open to something like that or you want that traditional LTL carrier to be on there?
It's really, it's. It's ltl consolidators. So the key thing for us is do you have a cold storage crosstalk or warehouse? That's something we always verify. Yeah. So we want to make sure that they're doing traditional LTL consolidation. Now if there were a warehousing company that like has trailers and they have a brokerage and they want to get into reefer ltl out of their city, we could help them do that and kind of show them how to set up one specific lane to start out. Or if they have like, extra capacity, we can work with folks and we've worked with a couple of folks to do that. I think that there are a lot of assets out. Like there are a lot of asset based folks out there that are capable of setting something up.
And it can be pretty lucrative if you know, like, which lanes to focus on and how to, how to do it. And so we have worked with a couple of folks to kind of get this set up on a couple specific lanes.
Yeah, no, exactly.
I think I Know who, I might know who you're talking about out of Dallas. Is his name Brian?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have, we have them on the platform.
Good. Perfect. Man. That's awesome. Yeah, dude. No, I mean, I think it's good to kind of put all that out there, right? Because I feel like no matter what, obviously carriers need freight. They're always looking to keep their trucks loaded out. But you know, again, if you don't have that established network that Clay is kind of describing, right. With your own cold storage facility or multiple cold storage facilities that you're using to relay your equipment between, you know, that might not be a fit for you as well, right? Going out there and seeing that. So dude, how does this expand out from here? Clay, where do you see this going in the next couple of years?
Yeah, so, so a couple things we're working on right now is one, API integrations. So we launched our API last week. We have all the docs ready and we're working with tmss to plug rates directly into those tmss for, for their customers. We think that this can really expand. If we plug into brokerages, big brokerages that have customer facing portals, that's a really good way to just get this capacity in front of a lot of customers at once. So that's something that we're currently working on with some folks. We currently. On the, on the brokerage side, we have 52 brokerages signed up. So they're signing up pretty fast. Cause that's only five months in. And then the other way that we see this, there's two other ways we see this expanding.
So one is on the carrier side we're starting to develop rate management tools because we've seen under the hood, we've seen the tmss that they're using and they're pretty bad for developing tariffs for ltl. Some of them can't handle weight breaks. They can't handle different types of commodities. They are terrible for like geographically based kind of rate setting where you have to like upload a list of zip codes. There's nothing map based about it. So we're developing some really intuitive rate building tools that we're going to start putting in front of carriers next week and hopefully get them to start using those and then we can kind of develop into more dynamic based pricing from there. That's kind of what we see on the carrier side is leaning more and more into carrier tools for managing an LTL operation.
And then the last kind of growth prong that we're working on is on the retailer side, and this is a little bit newer, but retailers have these vendor consolidation programs where they try to help their vendors consolidate their freight upstream. So that way it frees up dock space and makes their. Their warehouse operation a lot more efficient. Walmart has a big one. Target, Kroger have them as well. A lot of retailers don't have these programs. So we have the network of the consolidators of the LTL providers of the three PLs. We have the pricing. We only need to add a few more things, and then we could give them a tool to sort of create and administer these programs. So that's a little bit further down the line and something that we're. We're kind of just thinking about right now.
Dude, I love it. Clay, thank you so much for your time here, man. If anybody's going to be. You're going to be at the TIA next week, right?
Yep. Will be a tia.
Perfect. If anybody sees him there, stop him in person, talk to him about this tool, you guys. But, Clay, how does anybody reach out to you to find out more about what you guys got going on?
Just reach out through our website. There's a. There's a demo link. You can use that to just grab time. There's a inquiry form if you want us to just reach out to you. Or just send me an email@clayetfresh.com Perfect.
Clay, I appreciate it, man. That is going to be it for today, ladies and gentlemen. Reach out to Clay, you guys, especially if you're out there looking for a business development tool, because that's literally what they have for you guys out there. But that's going to be it. As always, if you got value in what you heard today, subscribe to the show. You guys are feeling really ambitious after this one, which you should because Clay is helping you guys develop business with his tool. Rank the show on itunes and Spotify, you guys, because if you see value, that's how 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. We don't do any fancy outro, Clay. We just.