Came back with a bank hey oh 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 blame moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them hate them make a bigger.
Balls 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 meaningful difference in your business and your life. Happy Tuesday everybody. I hope you guys all had a safe and happy Memorial Day weekend there. You guys disconnected and did not think about truckloads at all and spent some quality time with your loved ones because that's really what it's all about. But I got a very special guest for you guys here today. I'm going to pull him up in just a second. I do got to give you guys our weekly reminder. The Freight Coach newsletter drops tomorrow. Okay. Drops on Wednesday, every Wednesday. And I don't auto sign you up if I have your email address. So if you want to get in on this, I need you to go to the freightcoach.com it will auto prompt you to register up there.
And again, you guys, we only talk about freight on there and talk about diesel prices, rates, all of that stuff. I just need you to go to the FreightCoach.com to register for it. But with that being said, you guys, I'm really excited to talk to this guy today. The more I've found out about their company and everything, I love it, right? Like I love honest reviews about people out there in the industry, whether it's a broker, a carrier, getting to know your shippers, anything like that. And there's a one stop shop source out there. So I have Mr. Rob Light with Carrier Source on the show today. So Rob, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm excited to be here now, same.
Here, man, and I love it because if there's one thing that I think has been massively missing from the industry is inability for carriers to rank brokers and to give that information out there to the trucking world on who's legit and who's not. So it's like, from my perspective, man, there needs to be that kind of equal playing field out there with that. And you know, we're going to get into all of that here, man. But, dude, how'd you get your start in freight? Rob, what brought you into trucking?
I stumbled into it. I feel like a lot of people stumble into it, right? But my background is really in the tech world. I was an early employee at a company called G2.com, which is the largest software review website out there. And around the time of one of our later funding rounds there, I had a buddy who's been in brokerage for 15 years now come to me and was like, yo, G2 is raising a lot of money. What do you. What do you do? And I explained, we collect reviews of software products so buyers understand what they're purchasing. And he was like, man, if I had reviews of carriers, my life would be a lot easier. And it stuck with me for a long time.
And what really kind of convinced us to dive into it was talking to the other side of the market, really talking to small fleets, owner operators, realizing how big of a portion of the market they made up, how little of a voice they had in the industry, how they had no online presence. Right. 90 some percent don't have a website. And we kind of realized that this Yelp G2 business model could benefit both sides of the industry. And kind of like you said, as we dove further and further in, we realized there was opportunities for reviews to go both ways as well.
And I mean, dude, that's what needs to happen, right? Like, I think that there's. I'm not going to say everybody, but there are some large groups of people in this industry who kind of don't think that they need to be held accountable for their actions. And I feel like that's just kind of like a natural progression in life, right? When, when you're younger, you kind of think you have it all figured out and then eventually reality starts to set in and you. But, you know, like, I, I look at it as this is the only way we actually improve the industry. And that. That's what I'm all about.
At the end of the day, I want to raise the barrier to entry I want to level the playing field that's out there because I feel like that's really the only way to kind of fight. A lot of the nonsense that we face in the industry is like it's got to be harder to be in business in the sense of like, man, everybody needs to be held to higher standards out there. And I feel like that's what's going to eliminate or minimize a lot of this stuff. Because one thing that I've discovered, and again, take this for what it's worth, but I actually broker freight, ladies and gentlemen. I'm actually talking to trucking companies every single day.
A lot of this stuff that we find ourselves in can be avoided if you slow down in the sales process of actually selling a shipment to somebody. Because a lot of the people out there who are causing some of those headaches, man, they're only concerned about one thing and that's money. Right? Like, they're like, hey, what does it pay? What does it pay? What does it pay? They don't care about anything else. Right. So it's like. But then again, on the flip side, man, there's the, the brokers out there who aren't actually brokers, right. The ones who are double brokering that freight to that unsuspecting mom and pop carrier that's out there, or small fleet that's out there, who's hauling these shipments that are, they're stuck here, right.
Because they're not going to get that air quote, five grand that they were told was going to happen. That, that doesn't come their way. Right. So they're the ones who are ultimately hosed. So it's like, how do we have something out there where people can be made aware of this stuff so they can just buy a quick search, go and find this out to hopefully, you know, minimize their risk exposure to being in one of these situations.
Yeah. And I think what we always wanted to do that helps with that is create an open and free to access platform for those reviews to live. Right. That are public forward facing. Anybody can come in to carry source and do that quick research to see what your peers have to say about the companies and the partners that you're looking to work with. Right. I think, I mean, you know better than me that it's a tight knit industry. At the end of the day it's really big. But you know, a lot of folks know each other and everybody's always looking to their peers for opinions and feedback. And I think that crowdsourcing that information in an open, free to access website, you know, hopefully leads us towards that better standard for the industry.
Yeah. So I mean with that, how are you guys going out there? Because I know, you know, one of the things on your guys website is, you know, get stand out to shippers and that's everybody's big thing, right? How do I stand out in a crowd to shippers when they're getting, you know, tens of thousands of outreaches a year month, whatever you want to throw out there. But how do I stand out in a crowd? So how does that work?
Yeah, so it's a very traditional kind of. I keep going back to Yelp because I think they created this concept. Right. But we allow you to market and build a brand reputation that is very forward facing from that standpoint. Right. So you can go out, it's free to gather reviews from your customers as a broker. It's also free to gather reviews from your carrier partners as well to paint a more holistic picture of your business. Right. And I think more and more, even in recent years, right. Shippers are also very much looking as to how you treat your network as a broker. And, and so I think reputation from both sides is really critical there. But we have a really large audience of shippers who come to carrier source regularly and the way that they find carrier source is through organic search traffic.
So they're just going to Google.
Right.
I was listening to Andrew Silver's podcast, he had the shipper panel on there a few weeks ago and they mentioned if they can't find a truck or a broker, at the end of the day they turn to Google and they'll go grind and find somebody themselves. They often come to Google, find carrier source and that's where your opportunity lies, right? That's where your reputation can come into play. Where if you stand out there, you're more likely to get that phone call or that outreach or to be invited to the next project or to the next bid. And so we aim to help brokers and carriers who go direct to shippers as well to stand out and gain that business.
Yeah, I mean, it's the truth, right. Like, I feel like there's a massive opportunity out there right now, Rob, to truly create your digital footprint. You know, it's modern day advertising, right. Like there's no need to take out an ad in the Sunday paper or you know, get a billboard on the side of the freeway or anything like that. To advertise your services, right? Like, you have so many free tools that are at your disposal. And, and you know, two things kind of come to mind here. If you are who you say you are, your digital presence will have a phenomenal rating out there. It'll have phenomenal reach, whether you're getting into SEO, because obviously you can pay for SEO and stuff like that out there.
But again, ultimately you want, as a broker, you want your carrier speaking your praise, you want your customers speaking your praise that you're currently working with out there. And you know, at the flip side though, not everybody's going to be happy with your services. Not everybody's going to be happy with the way that you traded them. That's, that's just part of it, right. So how are you. What. One complaint out there that I have seen or heard from a lot of people is especially on the driver community, like, hey, if you put this review out there against my company and it's not true because broker A had a bad day and, you know, thought you were lying to them, do you guys have an opportunity, Rob, where people can go out there and kind of tell their side of the story here?
Because again, their digital reputation could be tarnished from a negative review.
Yeah. So there's a few different layers to that, right. We, we have a really thorough moderation process for our reviews in the first place. Right. So we ask in our review form for some sort of proof that you actually worked with that company, whether that's a redacted rate con, a screenshot of your tms, email correspondence, something that ensures that you did business together. Right. And we have a human being read every review that comes in and if we think anything's fishy prior to us, publishing will reject it. So it actually never goes up. Right. So we have that layer to start. I think two negative reviews happen. And I mean this space, nothing goes flawlessly 100% of the time, right. Even 80% would be a really good hit rate.
But at scale, if you are actively taking control of your reputation, right, you can kind of control that narrative if eight out of every 10 reviews that comes in are four or five stars, right? Like, that's a pretty good online reputation, right? And then to, we do give you the response, the opportunity to respond to a single review, just one response. It's also public and forward facing, right. So we encourage folks to put their best foot forward there. But it could be a really good opportunity for, to show that you care about the service that you offer. You know what I mean? If someone did have a bad experience with your business, whether that's on the carrier or broker side. Right. Respond and use it as an opportunity to say, hey, we're really sorry about the negative experience you had.
We'd love to make that up to you. We've changed our processes or sorry that we had mechanical issues and we had a breakdown and we had to send somebody else out there. Right. There's so many things that you can say that show that you're real, show that you're legit and show that you care and hopefully win that business back.
Yeah, no, and you know, I, I, what I really like what you said. There is there has to show proof that you actually worked with them. And, and I would even like to go as far as seeing like you actually had to have hauled a load with them, you know, because like that's one thing that I saw because it's like, you know, there's a bunch of, you know, I'm trying not to mention any of these companies names out there, but there's a bunch of stuff out there where it's like, oh, carrier fell off of load, you know, before picking up and all of this other stuff. It's like, all right, well, based on what I'm seeing on your review that you wrote, you did not call that carrier at all.
Why are you waiting until the time of pickup to reach out to carriers to find out what's going on and stuff? And again, things happen, man, people fall off of shipments, delays, all of that out there. If that happens and I'm giving enough of a heads up, I don't care, man, it's no harm, no foul at the end of the day, right? It's when you've accepted a load and you told me like, oh, hey, this is going on. And it's like, oh, turns out that the driver is not actually empty. All right, that's a little fishy. But again, I'm not going to go out of my way to ruin anybody from like one bad experience. Right.
And I feel like that's, it's kind of childish, but it's like if it's an in transit thing that's kind of inexcusable, that's a problem at the end of the day and you see a lot of those reviews that are out there is, it's like, it's a, I think most of them are like highly avoidable if you would just do your job as a broker. And that is, you know, asking a Lot sometimes it seems.
Yeah. We really tried to ensure that they actually did business. Right. Falling off a loaded. Happens on both sides. Right. And it happens all the time. And so it's just not really an accurate representation of the service that somebody offers. Yeah, maybe it hinders their, you know, they're not the best communicators or who knows what the issue is there. Right. But I don't think that one fall off and if you have one negative review because you fell off a load, that should be able to directly impact your ability to do business with everybody else out there. Right. And again, not to names, but historically that's kind of the way it was, Right?
Yeah.
And again, kind of at scale, right? If you've got 10 reviews, nine of them are four or five stars. One of is you fell off a load. Like, okay, you know, I mean, any kind of reasonable broker or shipper who comes in and looks at that is going to say, all right, like that happens to everybody. You know what I mean? They clearly perform a high level of service and I'm going to take a chance and work with this carrier or broker.
So it's, you know, because I think, like, at the end of the day, man, it. A lot of the situations, and again, they're not all avoidable. And again, it's always easier to sit here and talk about this stuff, Rob, when it's a controlled environment, like, hey, we're doing great, we're drinking coffee, we're having a good time and chatting about this stuff. Talking a lot different than, like, when you're in the heat of the moment. And I think a lot of individuals, like, if I was out there and when I build my company up, like, I think the person who's directly involved in the shipment cannot be involved in the review being left about a company. I truly feel like there has to be a degree of separation that comes with that stuff. And that was one thing.
You know, I worked for one of the very large brokers early on in my career, and that was how it was done. Where it's like, hey, if you're going to submit a report on a provider, you need to email it to compliance. They need to independently review it. They will be the ones to administer said report if it's done. And I love that policy. And I think that's what a lot of individuals and companies out there need to do. Because again, you take this stuff personally, right? And you think it's a personal attack against you.
And again, sometimes, like, just happens, you Guys and you don't want to go out there and go through that, get all fired up about that when you know, it's not necessarily, you know, like could it be said yes, but like remove it away or even worse if it's a smaller company, 24 hours, give yours sleep on it before you go out and do anything. If you wake up the next day and you're still upset about it, maybe it's warranted at that time.
Yeah. And you know, more and more companies are doing that. We see a lot of compliance managers as the one leaving the reviews on carrier source. So like that is happening more and more. I do, I will say like we don't mind reviews that do come in from the end rep because oftentimes those are the places you find the positive reviews as well. Right. Like compliance isn't taking time out of their day to be like hey, you know, carrier broker provides a really strong service but the reps will do that. Right. Because they're the ones that at the end of the day are working with them. Right. They're the ones who understand their level of communication. They're the ones that are staying on top of their timeliness or their just generally the quality of service that they offer. Right.
And I think early on something that was misguided that were told is like hey, carrier reps are never going to share who their good carriers are because they don't want other folks to find them and take them. Right. And that's just not the, that's not reality. Right. And you know we encourage so many people like hey, if you've got really strong partnerships, promote those folks externally, scratch their back and they're going to scratch yours. And so we've really found that 80 some percent of our reviews are four or five stars. They are positive reviews and that does largely come from the reps. So I will say there are a good handful of brokerages out there with those policies where the compliance managers are the ones to leave that feedback. But we see plenty of reps coming through too and we'll take either.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Right. And I mean I will always share my top carriers information out there to people at the end of the trusted people. Right. Like if you're somebody who I know and you need help with, hey we have this Conestoga or this flatbed or this step deck, I will gladly give you carrier information out there for our core carrier group. If you're just a random person DMing me, probably not going to happen at the End of the day, because I don't know the way that you operate. And I'm not going to give my that information to carriers who we work with on a daily, if not weekly basis and then set them up for failure. Right?
So it's like for me, man, like when we're out there doing that stuff, I want to screen my good carriers names from the Martin Mountaintops because they are that like, quality out there where they need to be rewarded. And if I know you are an ethical broker out there and you have real freight and you're not going to waste their time, I will gladly put you guys in contact with them because we don't have the freight volume to give them to keep their trucks rolling 100% of the time.
Yeah, very few folks do, right. And I think that feedback largely came from the mega brokers, right? Where the reps are largely competing against the people sitting next to them, right. When it comes to booking loads. And so I think it was misguided from that standpoint. But you bring up a different good point too, right? In terms of taking control of your reputation, it's not that hard to ask the folks that you've built relationships with over years take five minutes out of their day and write a review on your profile, you know what I mean? And I try to encourage so many brokers and carriers to do that, especially if they get one negative review. It's like, okay, so you've gotten one star review and that's your only review on your profile. Do you have 10 customers that you work closely with?
Great, go ask them for a review, right? Because again, if you get back to that at scale where 9 out of 10 reviews are positive, that's a really good profile, right? And a very realistic profile. So. And when were at G2, we did a lot about, like, what is a realistic profile. We did a lot of research on people's mindsets when they're looking at reviews. And I think this is a side effect of Amazon, right? But if you go to a product on Amazon, you see that they have 205 star reviews. 04 star reviews. 03 star reviews. 02 star reviews. 01 star reviews. You're like, well, this isn't real, right? And, and in logistics, right, nothing is perfect, like we said earlier.
So, you know, really encourage folks that having some mixed reviews in there is good and you can take control of that reputation at the end of the day.
So let's talk about that, right? Like, because I feel like that's a Good sign for people like when they are out there say, you know, it's the shipper community or the broker community or the carrier community. When you're out there trying to vet and verify some of these people that you're trying to work with here, explain that right? Because again, Nobody has all 5 star reviews out there. And I'm going to tell you guys this right now. If they are, they're paying for that, right? Because here's one of those unknown secrets about like I'll just tell in the media space here, you guys, you can pay for downloads, you can pay for followers, you can pay for engagement, you can pay for all of that.
And like I've always said, and I'll say it again, I will gladly open up my books to show that I've never done that. All right, so every review that is out there, every follower that is out there is organic. I haven't paid for any of that stuff. And that is one thing that you see out there, right, is people will go out and they will pay for a service and then they'll go in and just five star reviews on them and stuff like that. So you need to be aware of this stuff to show who's legit and who's not.
Yeah. And to be fair, I'm not saying that incentivizing for reviews is a bad thing, right? I think incentivizing for only five star reviews is a bad thing. I think that's a really poor practice and like you said, that happens a lot. There's review farms overseas and whatever else. I will say, you know, one strategy that we do suggest to folks is like, hey, throw them a $5 Starbucks gift card if they take 5 minutes out of their day and leave you a review. It doesn't have to be a five star review though, right? Like maybe it's a four star review, maybe it's not flawless and maybe it's very realistic, but everybody's busy. You know, you do see better results if you give somebody a little incentive. But yeah, always be wary of what you're looking at.
I think our moderation process hopefully helps to drive that trust with our reviews there, right. That this is not somebody who's never worked with these folks before. So. But yeah, there's a lot of shady stuff out there that goes down.
No, I want to talk about the moderation process a little bit more because I was just thinking about this when were talking. There is the AI dialers and the AI. It's only a matter of time before there's an AI review system where you can pay this service and they're just going to blast stuff all over social media. So how do you do that? Right, because again, when we're talking about shippers going out there to vet these brokers and these trucking companies, they're going to probably rely heavily on that review. How are you guys authenticating that, especially with the rise in AI and bot farms and everything, to show that like, hey, if this is a shipper who moves high value cargo, that the people that they're going after like are legitimate?
Yeah. So from a review moderation standpoint, we do a little background research on every reviewer that comes through. Right. If they're a broker, they have to sign up with their MC number. If they're a shipper, we ask for a business email address, we'll try to find them on LinkedIn. If we can't verify the reviewer themselves, the review doesn't get published. Right. We reject it. And then I mentioned earlier, right. We also take a look at the actual loads or relationship that they're talking about that they're reviewing. Right. And if we can't, we don't feel like, you know, if we feel like something's off, we feel like we never, they never actually work together, we'll reject that. And if we don't have good proof, again, it won't get published. And I think the human factor in that is really critical.
I think everybody's like, hey, you know, use AI to moderate reviews. And it's like, well, maybe we use AI as a tool one day for our human moderators to quickly flag highly suspicious reviews based off of the criteria. Right. Or, or things of that nature. But I think having a human being read every review and look at every reviewer is going to be really critical to the future. And so, you know, we do kind of similar things to when folks are claiming their profile page. Right. You know, we're making sure that they're legit, they have to be verified. We use very similar processes on that side too.
Okay, so how are you guys, like, how does this, like what's the next steps for something like this? Right? Like how do you guys plan on getting this out there to the masses? Right? With, you know, there's obviously, you know, it's two part question here, Rob, like with fraud and everything really being a thing. And you know, you kind of talked about that vetting of like, hey, we need to make sure that this is a real business that's going on. How are you guys kind of taking that two pronged approach to really get your brand out there as much as possible, but also kind of remaining like, hey guys, we are locked, you know, we're Fort Knox on our security system inside of here.
Yeah, I mean it's obviously hard, right? The space is super ripe with fraud from all angles. I think as part of the compliance process, we'd love to be just one step. Right. We've never really positioned ourselves as a compliance tool. I don't think reviews should be the end all, be all. Especially not in logistics. Right. There's too much other stuff that's going on and there's a lot of really good tools out there that help with that. I will say I think from a quality of service standpoint we should be one of those steps in there. And the way we try to push that is through, like I said, organic search traffic. Right. If you're just googling for a carrier, you'll probably come across carrier source. We do about 400,000 visitors every month coming to our site.
About 80% of that is driven by organic search. Right. And so that's been always our number one kind of marketer, how we get out there. And so I think we want to continue to push that. I think we're always keeping an eye out for folks that aren't legit. We do things like we publish a double broker list every month of any reviews that came through and indicated like, hey, this carrier's double brokering. That we have proof of. Right. And we put that out. And that's very public and forward facing on that though.
Is there a, when you're saying this carrier, how are you guys doing? Like the brokers, right? Like the brokers who are out there for double brokering. Because again, I want to put stuff out there for that small fleet and that owner op who's just. How do they ensure that the people that they're working with, like this is another great tool that they can use. So is that like, hey, double broker list, like are you guys listing it like, hey, they were a trucking company or they're a freight broker. That was double brokering.
Yeah. There is delineation in there, right. And we delineate really clearly between carriers and brokers. To be fair with you, we get less, we have a lower volume of reviews from carriers reviewing brokers. It is a relatively, you know, we only stood up those profiles probably about a year and a half ago. We've had carrier profiles now for over four years. Right. So we've just amassed more information on that side. But the broker audience is also very passionate, as you might imagine, in terms of their. The carriers that they work with. Right. So we see a lot more organic reviews flow in from that side too. But we're always looking at different ways to push carriers to provide feedback too, to their peers because they frankly have less resources at their disposal.
Yeah, no, I mean, and that's the thing, right? Like some people, again, I'll always say this. The majority of the reports I've ever seen out there, highly avoidable. If people would just do their job, pick up the phone, make that call, don't hold out. I know it's awesome that you're making a big rip on a load or whatever the hell they want to call it internally, but at the end of the day, man, like, there's a lot of red flags that you see in some of those reviews that are out there. And it just makes me wonder, right, like, and you can just tell right away that clearly they were motivated by the money and what they thought they were going to be making in that moment and stuff like that.
But again, man, like, I think with the opportunity that is truly at our disposal right now inside of transportation is you got to own every front of your business from a review standpoint and from like the legitimacy of your business and putting that out there. And there is no better spot than something like carrier source where you can go out there, have your customers put those reviews in. You know, I could only imagine how something like this could evolve into like niche specific, where it's like, hey, this guy just moves dairy product. And now we have a dairy category of brokers and carriers and stuff like that. Hell, that might even be a category already, Rob. I'm not sure, but I look at it as like, dude, this is going to be another way where again, you can stand out in that crowd.
Because ultimately when it boils down to it, nothing you're going to sell to a shipper on the front end, they've heard it all. There is nothing you're going to say where they're going to be like, oh my God, we've never heard that before. It's going to come when, after you're working with them and ingrained in their operation. And then once you're in there and you're working with them, have them scream your name from the mountaintop because they will truly be a brand champion for you out there.
Yeah. And in my opinion, right, brokers live on their reputation even more than carriers. Right at the end of the day, that's all brokers really have is their word in their network. And I think we can really help influence the good brokers to stand out, the brokers who specialize to stand out in their niches and to attract other similar shippers. And that's really, it's probably a conversation for another day, but that's really kind of where we really monetize is we help you identify when your prospects are actively looking for your services. Right. From a. We can tell you when shippers are on our site and exactly what they're looking for and provide that back to brokers and carriers.
But it all boils down to your reputation at the end of the day and you're not going to get that visibility, you're not going to get seen unless you take control of that reputation.
Well said, Rob. Rob, thank you so much for joining me. It looks like one of my Sonny Sharma is already on your guys's website checking you guys out, man. He's a longtime viewer of the show. How does anybody reach out to you guys? So to find out more about what you guys are building at Carrier Source.
Yeah, so like I mentioned probably a few times now, right? Carrier Source open free to access website. It's carriersource IO if anybody's interested in learning more, they can reach out to me directly. It's just robarriersource IO always down to jump on a call and chat.
Perfect. Rob, thank you so much. That is going to be it for today, ladies and gentlemen. As always, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. You guys, if you're feeling really ambitious after this one, which you should be, as Rob said, free. You guys, he's got a great free tool for everybody to go out there and check out and that's always a good price. But you guys check out what they're doing out there. And as always, you guys, I appreciate you. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon.
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 get to the back hey got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moves fast hey let them all cross if they hate then let them hate to make a bigger ball Hey.