Lightning like Steve McQueen I'm in the fast lane when the light turns green and I built tough I ain't nothing but grit cause I made rugged blood, sweat and spit yeah, like a horse I fly better put yourself in for a bumpy ride. I like to play hard but I work harder and I weather the storm cause I'm built stronger.
What is up, ladies and gentlemen, we are back. We are live. It is the furry coach morning show, the top morning show in transportation coming to you guys every single weekday, 830 in Pacific, 1030 Central, to break down some industry headlines and most importantly, 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 SATA freight, ladies and gentlemen, and I say that before every single show. And what I mean by that is I will only speak to transportation professionals on this show 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 all of this information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. Cory Buchan, happy hump day over on YouTube. Dylan Turner over on YouTube. As well as Tony Darnell, my man. Good morning to you, sir. He's also over on YouTube, you guys. I go live on YouTube because from what I've been told by everybody who tunes in that it's exponentially better stream quality over on YouTube than over on LinkedIn. But I. Enough about that. Enough on my soapbox, you guys. I got a very special guest for you guys here today. We're going to talk about assessorials.
We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff and kind of streamlining a lot of these things because accounting gets you in a ton of trouble with your carriers and your customers, and it just can be extremely time consuming. So I have Marina Brown on the show, ladies and gentlemen, to talk about all this. Marina, thank you so much for joining me.
Oh, absolutely, Chris. I am super excited to be here today. Thank you for having me.
No, I'm looking forward to this because, you know, assessorials are such a pain in the ass sometimes and, you know, keeping them all in track and everything. But, you know, before we get into any of that stuff, like, how'd you get your start in freight? Marina, what brought you into this industry?
Actually, my first. My first experience with transportation, I got a job at Warner Enterprises. I'm sure you guys know the freight carrier who also has a logistics division. And so I led part of their development, product and data science teams on the logistics side, working very closely with carrier and shipper reps, very close into the whole logistics experience and operations, and got to see a lot of what we're doing right now firsthand.
Yeah, no, I think that is like that. So what happened? Like, what experience did you have where you're like, all right, I got to go out and start this up, and I got to get after this and do this on my own?
Yeah. So after I worked with at Warner, I also ended up working with an awesome startup that specializes in factoring here in Lincoln, Nebraska. And one of the things that was on that we frequently did was having to call carriers around different accessorials and additional surcharges that we got on from the invoices from different carriers. Our goal was to pay within 24 hours. Oftentimes you didn't know whether certain accessories were going to get approved or not. And so we wanted to make sure that were going to get paid for those. And so my role wasn't necessarily to be helping people or as part of the operations and to pay, it was different. But because that needed to get done, I had to just pick up the phone and call a lot of logistics companies. Hey, was this detention for real?
Was this liftgate really happened? And at the time, I remember thinking, like, there has to be an automated process in which you can actually communicate all of these charges and actually validate those with different freight brokers or shippers. And there wasn't. So one day myself and my co founder were like, we should do that. Spend some time actually validating whether or not this is a real problem. Turns out that there's hardly a supply chain company out there that will tell you that they do not get beat up by accessorials. One, with all of the additional charges they end up paying, but two, all of the human talent that actually goes into literally sitting on the phone arguing with carriers, arguing with shippers, just dismissing business operations purely because of those surcharges.
Have you found that carriers, and I'm not blaming carriers for this because I think, to me, assessorials is something you shouldn't mess around with as a broker. It doesn't take much to send a revised rate confirmation with a lumper fee or any of that stuff immediately in it. More times than not, I would argue 99% of the time, you know, if there's going to be an assessorial charge prior to the load, even picking up, because a lot of these facilities, marina that people are delivering into that have lumper fees, it's not a surprise that there's a lump or fee there. The amount might be different. But again, like, it shouldn't take much to do this because customers, shippers always pay for that stuff. In any broker that's out there that's trying to make it a challenge. They're just trying to pad their own pockets.
I'm going to call a spade here. This is not as challenging as a lot of people make it out to be.
I, you would think so, but I have found that not to be the experience. So first of all, like, if you think about it, like when you're booking freight, conversations happen so quickly, right. The negotiations with the carrier, what gets communicated, what is communicated from the shipper to you as a freight broker, right. And that's one of the other things that actually we believe is a huge problem, is the multi channel communication that really doesn't happen between carriers, freight brokers and shippers. But like, what gets communicated to you is ultimately what you're trying to get communicated to the carrier in a very fast paced environment. And sometimes all of that information does not come through or you just don't know.
Like one of the things I would like to think we know is what you said, Chris, is that, hey, like, you deliver freight frequently to these facilities, you should know that there's a bumper, you might not know what it is, but there's no tools, really. A lot of that information is in the back of our minds. Right. There's no tools today to say, hey, you're driving into that facility and it's 99% certain that you're going to have a lumper or that facility frequently delays carriers two and a half hours or there's lift gates associated with that, right. And because of that, we forget to put it on and then the carrier gets there. Now they have a lumper that needs to get paid, but they need approval.
And that approval now initiates a very manual process that we found through our research actually, that for one accessorial to get approved during transportation, it literally takes six people across four companies touch it.
That's insane to me. Like, I like to me when it comes down to it, and again, what you're doing is very beneficial because when I'm out here moving freight, because the joys of people listening to this podcast, I don't talk in theory, you guys, this is shit that I actually do every single day that my day job is a freight brokerage. I own a freight brokerage. That's my day job. I've been doing this for a very long time. And more times than not, when it comes to assessorials, when it comes to lumpers, it's a failure on the broker to notify the carrier that there's going to be a lumper or the amount, because it is as simple as this, Marina. A customer just needs to see the lumper receipt and they're going to approve that amount. That it's as simple as that.
The broker just needs to, hey, dollar 55 at Food lion or dollar 55 at Krogere. Hypothetical example. But we all know that Kroger charges lumpers, that you submit that to your customer approves it, you add it to the rate confirmation, you resend the revised rate confirmation with a lumper on it, and you're done. And that's as complex as it needs to be. But laziness starts to creep in, Marina. Laziness is what it boils down to, in my opinion, Chris Jolly's opinion is it is laziness by the broker to not add it to the rate confirmation to send that revised number over. And then who knows? Maybe these guys are just hoping somebody forgets about that amount and then they just make extra money on the load.
Well, and you have to think about it, right? They, they don't make money. Hopefully they don't make money off of detention and lumpers, right? You're making money from booking loads. And when you have goals to meet on a daily basis and you have to book like 11, 12, 13, however many loads you're booking on that day, you're not thinking about the lumper, right? You're thinking like, how am I going to get that x load on my queue taken care of? So. Yeah. And that's where systems come into technology. At the end of the day, we want carrier reps and shipper reps to be focused on bringing that revenue, not necessarily to deal with like, manual activities around booking or taking care of accessories. And so why not leave that to technology to handle?
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And this is another one of those steps in the process that should be automated right. At the end of the day, like it, and same thing when it comes down to, like, detention and, you know, pre approvals of chart, like, a lot of this stuff, I just look at it like this from it. From my perspective, if a carrier has a layover for whatever reason.
Right.
Their relationship is with me, the broker, their relationship isn't with the shipper. So if there's any additional fees there, they just need my approval. And then for like that, added additional steps in there. I just think that it's a giant waste of time from some people's standpoints where, because I just look at it as if there's a detention on a load, I'm going to send over a revised rate confirmation right away. And then if my customer doesn't pay me for it, I need to question, do I want to work with that customer anymore at the end of the day, you know, so I think though, that like, but then again, you know, when you're looking at, we'll, we'll go reefer freight, for example. There are lumpers, there's pallet exchanges, there are additional assessorials that get add on, added on.
Right.
And it can get messy if, you know, maybe a driver forgot to submit the receipt or had lost the receipt or something like that, then things can kind of start to go haywire.
Right? Yeah. And you know what? Like I actually am working, or I was working last week with a shipper out of Colorado, actually, and they move freight from overseas and think about like the pain that such as oreos exert on shippers as well. So they ended up with about 30% on top of what they had originally contracted in the marriage and detention and other like poor taxes and such. But they, it wasn't their fault that the freight sat there because of the lack of coordination between, you know, their freight forwarder and the carrier that was supposed to pick up the freight, but the freight sat there for close to two weeks and I, they ended up with a lot of charges. Now obviously, it diminishes a lot of the profitability on their freight. And that's not a single example. Right. This happens every day.
Ultimately, we want to avoid that surprise, both for shippers and for brokers. Let me, let me tell you that, hey, you are likely going to experience additional charges and I am going to help. You know what those are. And the better part is, when they happen, I will be letting you know about it in real time. Right. So not handing you a bill either, like right before I deliver the load and demand that you pay all of these stories same day, or I will hold your load hostage because we've seen that happen as well. But I will let you know as your freight sitting at the board that, hey, today your detention or your demerit is going to be $60 here's the total bill so far. Right.
Least you're giving people a proactive financial update to where when the final bill actually arrives, they know what to expect and they can plan financially because at the end of the day that's their life. Life and blood and they want to make sure that they have the opportunity to plan ahead.
No, I agree with that. And I think like, because that's a, you know, when you're mentioning talking to a shipper, for example, like, you know, if there's a co packer out there and, you know, they're making for multiple brands and they're handling all of the transportation and everything for those multiple brands and each individual, you know, distribution center all has different accessorial charges and lumper fees and everything else that go on to it.
That the data behind that I think is because like I would want to know that is, hey, FYI, if you, instead of sending out a 220 pallet loads, you know, you should send out, you know, excuse me, 210 pallet partials or whatever that looks like it costs you less to ship one full truckload, you know, and you can make better transportation decisions at that point to get it in there. And then again, cleaner invoices. Because I think one thing people like manufacturers and stuff, they judge, you know, different warehousing on overall fees, what's coming in there? Are they loading them fast enough? Are they offloading them fast enough? They want to know these things. That's why the KPI aspect of things are so important to that decision.
Because a lot of companies, they don't want their brands to have a negative connotation out there in the market. And if they're using a third party co packer, a third party warehouse to manufacture, label, whatever that looks like, they need to know that data. So this is like where that helps. So it paints such a clear picture.
Yeah, yeah, that and you know, we started talking about the carriers at the beginning, but think about the impact on carriers as well. It's not just about that. Hey, you have a detention, but that detention may be stopping you from getting your next load right. And that, you know, people, carriers pay fines on those. It ruins customer relationships or great broker relationships. And it's like in our day and age with the technology that we have, it's avoidable. And either carriers ought to get paid for a mistake that was made or they need to be warned so that they can make proactive decisions. Like from conversations that we've had, about 70% of detention in the industry actually does not get paid out to carriers. And if you at all actually, yeah.
And if you said at the facility for six, 7 hours and you miss your next load, and you are a mom and pop carrier, then that cost you know, dinner at the table for the next week.
No, I agree with that marina. And you know, again, I'm not going to sit here and advocate for anybody to do anything, but I will put it this way. If I was a truck driver and I sat somewhere for six or 7 hours, whether it's a shipper or a receiver, we'll call it Chris Jolly trucking sits there and the broker says that there was no detention paid on that load. Chris Jolly, the trucker, is going to call that facility and ask them about that. Hey, I was informed that there was no detention paid on this. I sat there for 6 hours, Tim Thomas fictitious name signed off on my bills that I was there from eight in the morning until 07:00 at night. What's going on?
I think some truckers might be, you know, at least Chris Jolly trucking would make a point to find out if there was actual accessorials paid on that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we're looking at doing at Moneva is actually providing that three and sometimes four way communication channel between carriers, brokers, shippers, and including factoring companies in the mix. Because at the end of the day, they oftentimes have to pay the bill to the carrier. But to me, it's a matter of being proactive and being on time or real time. Right. If I can get the Information from the carrier that they have Detention, pass it on to the broker, and without like two or three different handoffs happening at that broker, actually present that Information to the shipper in real time as well. Sometimes you can alert the right personnel so that they can say, so she can say, hey, you're about to start, you know, this is going to start costing you.
You are now paying an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours of detention. Do something and prioritize the unloading of that carrier. That is information that today we don't get, or it's information that's very manual. Right? Because the carrier has to call into the brokerage, someone has to pick up the phone or read the email from there. You actually have to communicate with the shipper rep. The shipper rep has to sometimes get an approval from their manager, and then you calling the customer, but then it's an hour and a half later. Simple to automate those workflows. I mean, I say simple. There's a lot of actual decisions and intelligence that has to go into all of this, but it's doable. And by providing people that type of information, you actually facilitate the later payment flow between the carrier, the broker and the shipper.
So how do you see, are you guys using? Because obviously AI comes top of my mind when, with a lot of this stuff, right? Because like I'm of the old school. Like I want to automate everything to a point, right? Like I don't ever want to automate a carrier's experience with my company or a customer's experience with that comp. My company, I want them to talk to me. I want a human emailing them back. Yes, I understand both sides of this. I don't need to hear how AI is going to, you know, make everything better, but I actually want to build a company with real human beings in it, not bots.
But there are certain components of my job that technology and AI should be doing that because again, billing accuracy, I think, is probably one of the biggest hindrances of most organizations that they're not even aware of because they just go back and forth via email and everything else where I feel like you could use AI. I mean, and I'd love to get your opinion on this, Marina, because I know you're very passionate about Aih. How can AI come in and help clean up people's billing, do you think?
Yeah, I mean, I would say that. First of all, by the way, I'm in the process of putting together a whole series of articles that hopefully I'll turn into videos as well around how AI is going to be applicable in supply chain, anything from obviously billing and accessories. But we're talking to routing optimization, network optimization, telematics, fleet management and all of that. So stay tuned for that one. But specifically, to your question, one of the things that I absolutely agree, right. A lot of brokerages think that technology is their differentiator, right. And I don't think that's necessarily a true statement. You often hear people or brokerages say like, hey, I, our business is very different from everyone else, so we're going to build our own TMS or we're going to build our own insert here the technology.
And I think, you know, recent events over the last year or so have shown us that you can have the best technology and still not perform well. Right? Say that again, people.
Can you say that again? Sarcastic. Sorry.
Well, but it's the truth, right? It's the people that at the end of the day, build their relationships and these relationships build your business. So we don't want to remove that relationship building from your business, but what we want to be able to do is there's mundane and mundane experiences that you don't necessarily. It's not a relationship building opportunity, it's a trust building opportunity. And when I say trust, it means the carrier needs help and you're there to help them.
And if that help means that you have, for example, a voice assistant that picks up the phone for you and it helps that carrier with whatever issue they have without necessarily involving your human counterpart and helps that carrier in the moment, and the carrier leaves with, hey, either I now have an approval on that lumper, or I know what my next steps are in order to get unload or whatever, then that is the trust that you need between the carrier and the broker. Because at the end of the day, job gets done and communication is there. So yes, absolutely. Like AI is not there to replace humans. You still need those relationships. But for example, understanding some of the rules and applying those rules that exist between a shipper and a broker.
So that when you approve a carrier lumper at a facility or other permits or whatever, right. You're moving alcohol or specific foods, and you know what the agreement is between a shipper and a broker. And you don't need two or three people to actually say, yeah, I rubber stamped this and you're a high counterpart co pilot, actually understands the rules, knows what has been decided in the past, and can now take all that information and make the decisions and present it either through the carrier or to the shipper automatically. I feel like that's beautiful and that's simple, right? It does nothing, but it's not necessarily the relationship building part of the experience.
Yeah, no, I agree with that, Marina. And I think like, one thing that is often overlooked is when you're building a business, you understand this because you're a co founder. I've been bootstrapping for the past four years. It's not as easy as making a social media post about how you're just crushing it out there. You guys like, yeah, I think people tend to forget that, you know, it costs a lot of money to do things. And when you're really trying to formulate your company, you might not have the capital to spend us buy into higher six figure salary, you might not have that capital. You need to find workarounds to get to that level to build your business up. And that's where I think technology can help expedite some people's journeys because human, you know, like, the human aspect of business, it's very challenging.
It's very challenging to do that because, you know what? You got human emotions that come into it. And, you know, the reality is it's dollar in, dollar out. You know, you guys, when you're actually building a business, all right, if you make $10,000 in revenue, you know that's all you have to spend, unless you want to get into copious amounts of debt via credit card, because line credit don't just miraculously get thrown at you when you're building a company up. And you know, you're gonna have a lot of personal guarantees associated with your business. So how do you elevate your game? How do you, without driving yourself nuts? Because that's another component of this as well. That comes in because you could sit there and stare at a spreadsheet all day long with assessorial fees and charts about what company is getting paid.
This, what customer got approved on that. You could do that all day long. And guess what? You look up, you didn't make any sales that day. You didn't move any that day. You didn't make any money that day.
Yeah. Like, back to the point of actually humans, right? Like, there are revenue generation activities that we all do in our daily jobs, and then there's those that are not. And to me, like, you look at all of your processes that you do today. I tell people often, like, anytime when you touch a paper or you're manually entering information into a spreadsheet, that's where you need technology, right? For sure. That's a. Like, that's basic. You have to build up from there. But, like, how you're differentiating yourself is by implementing technology where you have non revenue generation activities, you're saving. Like, at the end of the day, I tell people, our AI agent, we call it, funny enough, surcharge. Surcharge doesn't sleep, right? And surcharge doesn't leave you. Like you said, people. People leave, right? Yes.
Like, you don't have to spend $20,000 afterwards looking for your new employee because surcharge is always there. And with all of the training and data, it actually gets better over time. Overnight hours. It's. You're not going to, you don't need to wake up people in the middle of the night because surcharge is there. It will make decisions for you. And in the morning, it will provide you information on all of the decisions. It's made all the conversations had. I think, like, every time I feel the next in the age of AI that we're in, the businesses that will ultimately succeed are going to be the ones that optimize all of their non revenue generation workflows and implement that technology. And it's not realistic for you to think that I'm going to build that technology myself because technology these days moves so fast.
I always tell, I always tell brokers, like, leave the technology to technology companies who live and breathe that, and you focus on what you do best, which is moving freight.
So, yeah, I was gonna say, I think it boils down to the build versus buy model that's out there. And sometimes it is cheaper to buy something that's already established and already had all the kinks work out. And, you know, I look at it because, you know, I tour warehouses, I go out and visit places. And, you know, recently I saw a couple of warehouses that now have a robot that, like, actually, for, like. Cause the boxes are shipped in not, you know, obviously put together. So they have a robot that actually starts the packaging process right there. And it picks, it's like, for an order picking process. So it's like, who out there? And again, I want you to take. Take stock for the anti technology people out there.
Who out there is going to apply for a job where your job is to put boxes together and tape them. You're not going to do that, right? So I think, like, that's where you can leverage technology for the future in those non revenue producing roles that you're talking about there. It's not that you're looking to replace a human being now. You can get that person out of that mundane role and put them in a job that actually moves the needle for them. I think AI's big, or like an AI company's biggest issues, Marina, is they have a. They're terrible at marketing. I like, I think the way that they're marketing it is bad. It's not what it does that's bad, it's how they're marketing it. And that's why I'm telling them all, every AI company out there, talk to your boy.
I'll make you guys not sound like such uncompassionate assholes, but I love your point, right?
Like, think about the carrier sales rep that you're hiring. Like, is like, are you presenting the job to them as, hey, 20% of your time you're going to sit there and talk to carriers on any of the extra charges or, you know, conflicts that come up during transportation. Do you think they're going to like, that's the fancy part of their job.
Yeah. Nobody, nobody's told that at all. But, Marina, how does anybody reach out to you to find out more? We're already at the top of the hour here. These shows always fly by. How does anybody reach out to you to find out more about what you got going on?
Absolutely. I look me up on LinkedIn. Marina D. Brown is my LinkedIn tag. Or you can also get us on our Moniva website. It's M o n e iba. Ask me next time when we talk how we came up with that name. But yeah, those are probably the best ways to get on me.
Perfect. Marina, thank you so much for joining me. And if you guys can't find Marina for some reason, just hit me up. I will gladly put you guys in contact with her, as always, you guys, if you guys got value in what you heard today, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there to your network, because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys. And we'll be talking to you soon.
Thanks.
Yeah, that's how it's done. Marie.