All right, we are going to start in three, two, and one. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of coffee with the freight coach. My name is Chris Jolly. I am your host, and I am the freight coach. Before we jump into the episode, as always, thank you guys so much for coming out and listening to this podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen. And I said 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. I do have one small favor to ask. I know you will. But if you get value on what you hear here today and you're not subscribed, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there. Dear network, because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. All right, I got very special guests for you guys here today. That's right. That's plural. I have two guests that are going to come on today. They are the co founders of Dre Insight. And you know, dreams industry has been all over the news these last couple of years, especially during 202-021-2022 the ports, all of that stuff. And it's really kind of got a spotlight on it.
And we, I got a couple of guys here who are going to break it down. So I got the co founders of Dre Insight, like I mentioned, towns Agnew and Jonathan Senton on the show. So, fellas, thank you guys so much for joining me.
Hey, Chris.
Chris, we're going to get to balance out that fun part of who's going.
To answer the question.
I love it. I love it. So let's get why Dre insight, what happened? What brought us today here? How did you guys start this company?
So I'll get all started out with that. And then, towns, you jump in. We both have been in the industry. We've been in the industry for a long time. Most of it's been on the shipping line side, different and different entities. And we understand a lot of the issues that happen in drage, especially on the customer side. But then also with the dynamics within the drayage scope, it's much different than you over the road. It's very fragmented, it's very regional. There's different dynamics. It's very private. And were both looking at what's that next opportunity and having some conversations and how do we want to get into this, and where could we actually create a company?
And so we got together and started having some conversations on what we want to do, and ultimately came to an idea that we thought could be valuable for the industry and towns. Why don't you jump in and elaborate a little bit more on that part of it?
Yeah. John, thanks. And Chris, thanks for having us here. As John said, we've been around the industry, I guess now with the combined 36 years of drayage experience on a couple of different sides, both as the shipping line. Personally, I've also been on the railroad side and on the digital brokerage side of my last company. And one of the things that John and I have seen throughout our experience is there's just a lack of real support and tools for small to mid sized carriers. And we felt that with our backgrounds and our experience and kind of the timing in the market, that right now would be a good chance for us to jump in, try to make an impact, and try to help people grow and manage their businesses successfully.
I think that, yes, the small to mid sized carrier, which, it doesn't matter whether it's OTR, Dr. Drayage, anything like that, it is the overwhelming majority of the trucks that are on the road, but it's seemingly, there's products for them, but I feel like they're almost overlooked. I think a lot of small businesses are overlooked from a technology standpoint, what you can bring down there to them. And one thing that I think is, especially in the drage industry, because, you know, like, were talking before we started recording, like, we're moving it, but we're just starting to kind of like dip our toes back in it. And I highly recommend everybody check out moving drayage freight, but really do your research before you fully jump in because, you know, there is some current legislation that's being passed out there.
The, I mean, the FMC is kind of reworking detention and demorage and everything else. But, you know, again, there's a lot of moving components of this. You know, I think I did the math the other day, and fortunately, I went to public school because it was easy to add up. There's like six different parties involved in one container. When you break down, if there's a broker, freight forwarder, drage, port, steamship line, receiver, customer, whatever you want to do, there's like six people that are involved in that and then keeping all of that stuff in line and then especially bringing technology out there that is easily digestible to. To the end user, you know, because, like, I remember, you know, when we first started moving a bunch of these, I'm just like, wait, you know, keeping this straight and this straight.
Fortunately, my business partner writes everything down. I don't. I usually just talk a lot of shit, and he just. He organizes it all.
Yeah.
Is spot on. I mean, one of. One of the things that makes it even harder is like, yeah, Drays was one of the few segments of the industry where you're actually delivering somebody else's cargo. So even though the shipping line or the BCO is your customer, you're delivering on behalf of somebody else, which is kind of a wild concept, when you think about it, that a shipping line contracts with a third party to deliver someone else's freight to their door. I mean, when you say six people is involved in this loop, we've also got the insurance providers. We've also got the factoring agencies. We've also got the chassis pools and the direct chassis providers. So, I mean, the number of people that touch any one shipment is kind of astronomical.
And I think there was some research a number of years ago by mayors that said for every international shipment that you do, there's something like 46 parties involved to deliver a container from point a to point b. I can only imagine that's grown as we started layering on more technology and more financial products. So people getting into the industry, like, just the number of terms that you need to learn, the number of parties you need to engage with, it is a steep learning curve, and it leaves a lot of room for mistakes that can be really costly, especially around that detention to merge concept.
Yeah, no, I agree. And I just look at it as, how do you keep all that stuff organized, too? A lot of people, no knock on Excel spreadsheets or anything like that, but I think a lot of people rely on that or Google documents and everything else. But again, it's like, if you're out there and if it's at, you know, if you're renting a chassis on this move or if it's pre poll or whatever it looks like, how do you keep all that stuff organized? And especially if you're moving 10, 15, 20 orders in a day? And I think, like, that's one of the biggest things that, like, that was like, the first thing that I noticed is, you know, we created our own little system, and our process to follow just to make sure everything was being done.
And then if there's a drop yard that's involved, because a lot of these, port, your drainage carriers, that it is they'll. They'll have drivers down in, say, Savannah, and then they'll have a drop yard, you know, 100 miles outside of there that then disperses out within the, you know, their. Their delivery radius that's out there. So there, again, you added another layer of complexity. You have the port runners that are out there, and then you have the drivers who are actually grabbing the containers from their yard and deliver them out there to the receivers.
Yeah, and that's. That's one of the things that we've discussed, one for our own history. But then also talking with companies is there's not a standard across the board for the US. It's. It's. Everyone does it a little bit differently. People using different tools, Excel, Google sheets, someone maybe use a TMS, maybe they have a homegrown system. They built it out, but it's. There's nothing that is universal that's out there. And what we're trying to do is help to bring in that information so that we can actually provide the visibility so people don't have to go to four or five different tabs or different sheets or I have this on my drive, and someone's made a mistake, because you have to transfer something, information from one sheet to another sheet.
So how can you actually make that consistent so people can use to make their lives easier? Because the market is fragmented, like their company shouldn't be and the processes shouldn't be. So if we can help to provide a little bit of stability in their parts to make the decisions, make better decisions or smarter decisions, that should lead to more efficiency with companies being able to actually execute more efficiently. Efficiently with what they need to do for the customer's cargo and the different entities that they're dealing with.
So is there, like, is Dre insight like an operating system? Is it kind of like, how would you compare it? Is it compared to, like, a TMS? Or what does this look like?
Yeah, John, I'll take that one. So, Chris Dreinsight is a financial tool that I'll kind of break down. What I mean by that. Most companies in the drain space, I think you mentioned right before we got on the call that you just feel that a successful bid yourself. But most companies today, whether they're five trucks up to anywhere up to like 50, they're fielding 100 plus rate requests every single day. And the win rate for these is extremely low, as I'm sure you know. I mean, you know, if you take, if you do 100 rate requests a day, you're probably winning maybe five or ten of those in a good day, which, and those are still going to be one or two shipments alone. So what we put together is a tool to help people get out of what we call spreadsheet.
Hell, stop quoting business out of a spreadsheet, putting it into a system, and responding to your customers in a structured fast manner. And what I mean by that is today, if you get a quote, your dispatcher is probably going to look at a price per mile or a rate per hour or a local tariff that says, if it's local, Savannah, I'm going to charge you x. But what happens is once it leaves that file, it goes into the ether and email, there's nothing to keep a hold of. Like what did I quote for fuel? What did I quote for chassis? What did I quote for all my assessorials?
Drainsight helps consolidate that all into one location and it brings in your underlying cost base so that you know on every single shipment what your walk away point is and what your actual margin is going to be, not just your direct cost, but your indirect and your opex on top of that.
Okay, so yeah, because thats one thing too. Youre talking about all the additional assessor out there. If its pre pool, if theres a chassis fee, if theres detention, whatever that looks like, Im breaking that down. And I think keeping a lot of that straight because, you know, if you want to just have a set price that's going on out there, that's one thing, but not every one container is in the same right. You know, some of them you're gonna have to provide your own chassis. Some of them, their chassis is provided for it and then there is a three day drop at the receiver and stuff like that.
So I mean I could see how that would be extremely time consuming is another thing too on top of it to keep all of those bids straight and then to make sure that you are assigning and dispatching out the proper equipment in regards to those moves. And why is that win rate so low, do you think? Is it because theres so much competition thats out there? Walk me through that.
Yeah.
The win rates low because thats what weve trained the industry to do. I mean, John and I both come from a procurement background and so our hands are not entirely clean on how do we manage this. But if you look at supply chain, its traditionally seen as a cost center. And that means that the managers at these big companies, they have one object or two objectives. If were being positive, one is to keep the cargo moving, but two is to do it at the lowest possible rate. And the only way to do that is to have good intelligence on the market. So they're going to send out a rate request to as many carriers as they can find, and then they're going to take the lowest handful and then try to drive those even lower because that's their objective.
That's what they're incentivized to do, and that's what their companies paid them to do. So we as an industry as a whole have really set up this negative, like, non virtuous cycle where big companies are paid to save as much money in supply chain as they possibly can, which leads to low win rates because everyone's competing for a commoditized lowest bottom dollar quote.
Yeah, no, and it definitely seems that way out there. And this isn't just drayage that's affected by this. I think in today's overall freight market, you're seeing that at a lot higher percentage than you kind of have in years past. And I truly feel like, and I'd love to get your guys take on this because you guys have been in the industry for a long time as well. I feel like we're still dealing with the after effects of 2020, 2021 and 2022 and the fact that a lot of these companies budgets were blown out of the water by 2300% for transportation.
And I think, like we're still kind of dealing with them trying to make up some ground because, I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, our, you know, shippers and you know what, a lot of people out there in our industry, shippers, customers, whatever you want to call them, they're trying to protect their end users, their customers from any price hikes and anything else because I think a lot of people tend to forget that. You know, if you look at a, say, like a bottled beverage supplier, they got competitors, too. And if their price is $1.50 a bottle on the open market and their competitors are a dollar 30, there's a huge segment of citizens out there in our country who are going to go for the dollar 30 beverage purchased at the store and everything else.
So it's like there is that overall trickle down effect that I think sometimes when you're in the thick of things, you tend to overlook because, I mean, obviously you have a p and l to manage as well in this situation. Yeah, that's right.
One of the things that I always like to say about procurement, or at least cost savings, is a dollar saved out of your. Whether it's your direct cost or your indirect cost, it flows directly to your p and l, right? So if you save a dollar on your transportation cost, that hits your p and L as a dollar. Now there might be some taxes in there, but let's just, for the sake of argument, just say a dollar. Conversely, if you want to try to win that additional dollar through additional sales, you'd have to ten x the amount of sales that you do at a 10% profit margin. So you can see the power of saving $1 versus increasing your sales by ten x. So there's a reason these companies are so focused and disciplined about saving money.
In supply chain, it flows directly to the bottom line. It's their cost to serve, it's what they compete on. So if you look at a company like a shipping line, say it's an MSC or Maersk or a CMA, they don't have a lot of distinct characteristics. So the biggest thing that they can do is compete on cost to serve and their rates to their customers. If they don't, they'll go out of business. So saving that dollar is extremely important, and that's what they're internally focused on is avoiding cost at all, at any and all opportunities, whether that's improving operations or directly reducing the prices that they pay to their vendors.
Yeah, and then just want to add onto that is there's a direct correlation to service and service failures. So when you have these kind of irrational swings, either on the upside or to the downside, people try to chase or they prioritize cargo. So if it goes on the downside, you have individuals or companies will say, I'll take that, but then it's too low and they actually can't deliver on it. So it's because the markets have gone too low. So then you have service failures if it goes too high. It's the same sort of thing where a company is like, well, you're paying a lot, but I can actually get more on this lane, so I'm going to dedicate my trucks or power to that lane. So you create more service failures.
So I think part of the industry is we're trying to drive it from a low cost or increase profitability. But then what really hurts is the service execution in the market, which is ultimately the end customers that are moving freight and making sure that the product actually gets to the end consumers. And that's where, if we can provide some insight, learning or education to help some of these companies make smarter decisions and be able to have that back behind them so that they can actually have a conversation with their customers on what they can do and can't do. It should help overall profitability in the market for everyone and also service delivery for everyone in the market because you're able to move what you actually say and promise you're going to move.
Yeah. And I think one thing that a lot of people might tend to overlook in this is not all two shipments are the same. And, you know, and then, like, you're breaking down a couple of, you know, really good examples. There is, you know, I think of some of these moves where some of these guys are bidding, and when I say guys, I mean these drage carriers, they're bidding on a container, and then what they don't realize is there was a service failure associated this. It's, it's outside of the free time, for example, and now they're going to get pinged when they arrive at the port to pay the, you know, the demerit or the detention fees that are on that container because they missed the last free day and everything else.
And I think a lot of these guys are walking into a bad situation beforehand for whatever reason.
Right?
Like, I'm not trying to pass around blame or anything like that, but if I was a drayage carrier, I would ask so many more questions on the front end before you agree to send in one of your trucks to go grab a container out there. I would find out all of that stuff, and I would challenge brokers to do a better job of informing the drayage carriers about the status of the container and what's going on out there. Now, I can't speak for freight forwarders because I've never been a freight forwarder before. I've never worked at an ocean carrier before.
But I can only speak from my stance and I'm noticing that just with a little bit of, you know, because, like, again, I said, man, we're going to be, after this next wave of orders are going to come through, we're going to move 60 drayage moves here in the last, you know, 40, 50 days or whatever that looks like. And I just looked at it as like, all right, we got up to speed really quick on this stuff where it's like, you know, fortunately, we have a phenomenal drayage carrier that we're working with on this who's really helped us bring us up to speed and therefore we're able to identify a lot of these things and then pass that along to them because otherwise you're just going to get caught in a tough situation there.
And, you know, like the art, the profit margins are slim enough for asset owners out there. And then, you know, a lot of these guys, I'm assuming, are paying for everything on credit cards and everything else. And Lord knows how if they're even going to see that money and stuff like that. So I think like that's what's so important about conversations like this is, a lot of it is the education piece about what people need to look into before they accept or even bid one of these shipments to understand what their true operating costs are.
Yeah, that's right. And part of it is if we can help to give them that on the front end so that they can actually make smarter decisions on which cargo to carry, what they can carry, then it should beneficial overall. And that's where, part of the hardest thing in this industry is that it's just, there's, it's all private. There's no visibility to any, you know, market information or sharing of information because everyone is worried about everybody else. So we want to say is, can we help these companies so they can make better decisions? And then that should in turn help out the industry as a whole.
So how are you guys working with your customers on setting up pricing for their moves? Because it's, to me, it seems like it's a lot different than your standard OTR move from, you know, Atlanta to Chicago, for example, because there's a ton of data that's out there about what people are getting paid, what rates are at and everything else. So it's like, are you working on a pricing structure with some of your guys, users? Like, hey, you guys need to clearly identify, like, this is what you should be pricing your assessorials at is because, you know, is there any standards out there that people need to follow?
Yeah, I think we're actually trying to help educate small to mid sized carriers on how to level up their game. Most people will think about, I need to make x per day when I run my truck or I need to make x per week plus fuel. And so what we're trying to do is give all of our users and people that are currently beta testing our tool the kind of like a step by step process, like paint by numbers, if you will. So when we do our onboarding, we walk through their back office costs, like what is your. What is your payroll? What is your headcount? What is your insurance rate per month or per week?
So we try to collect all this information, centralize it into the DRE insight app, and then when we go through and do their actual shipment pricing, what we're looking for is this going to be an hourly rate? Is it going to be an owner operator? That's a fixed rate. And we try to get as detailed as we can on their actual costing. And then we take all of that. And rather than looking like zip code to zip code or city to city, we actually look at address to address, so that we get as precise an estimate of all of their operating hours, all their mileage, all their fuels we can. And that gives us what we call the break point or the walk away point. If your rate from the market is below this number, you need to walk away.
And the reason for that is, if you do this shipment, and let's just use $100 for round numbers, your cost base is $100. The customer says, I'd like you to do it for 95. If you do that shipment for them, you're actually giving them $5, right? You're not just getting cash flow, you're actually giving up $5 that would otherwise be in your bank account. And we want to help people understand, what is the point where you should just say, you know what, this freight is not worth my time. This is not worth it to me, and walk away.
And as a result of that, what we hope is that the market as a whole will be a little bit more rational in its pricing, and we will be able to set an actual floor, because all of us are paying for truck leases, we're all paying the same fuel, we're all paying the same insurance. There's a hard floor to how little we can charge. But I feel like, John, I think you were going to jump in there.
Yeah. And the overall onboarding part is pretty easy. It doesn't take long at all for us to actually get an account set up. And the goal for that, what towns was alluding to is, can we get enough of that done in preset so that when people actually get requests, they can fire them off as quick as possible? So we've heard from different customers that it can take ten minutes to do a quote, plus, minus what? Our goal is to try to get down to a minute or less than a minute, and we've been able to be in that range. Of course, every company is different, every situation is different. But if we can get all of that information in and baked and set.
So then it all pre populates, and then an individual only has to make a couple updates, then they can easily and quickly get a price out to their customer. The customer gets it fast. We know that people that get it to the customer the fastest usually get the award. So it's to try to see how can we help them be more efficient in actually quoting while capturing all of that cost so they make the best decisions.
I think a lot of, you know, especially small business owners. And again, this is just what I've learned, you know, in being self employed now for four years. I'm not an expert. I'm just learning, just like with everything in transportation that I had all the experience, just learning a lot of what not to do. And I think that's sometimes the best teacher out there, and sometimes when revenues are high and you want to think that it's always going to last that way. And one of the benefits of working for a large company early on in my career was I had that in the back of my mind of, hey, is there is a cost per transaction associated with every single shipment that you run.
So even if you have a $100 profit margin baked into your load for example, if it costs you $75 to process that invoice, you're actually only making $25. And then on top of that, it's like, how are you structuring out your business? You know, are you building out, like, you know, like you said, you're taking in your overhead, you're taking in your employee payroll. Are you factoring in taxes as well on top of that? Because that's another thing that gets a lot of small businesses in trouble, is you think you make $10,000, and, you know, you spend $10,000. Well, it's like, now you need taxes. You need to set money aside for that. And you need, you know, because, like, you're right. Speed is everything in these situations.
And I think bringing solid business acumen down to, you know, because, like, I talk about this a lot. Like, there's no playbook to entrepreneurship at all, and there's a lot of trial by fire, but there are steps you can follow to set you up for success out there in the market. And I think knowing your costs and getting that back to people right away, because, again, from a broker standpoint, sometimes our customers are coming to us and, like, hey, listen, we're. We're putting in a large bid right now. We just need a general idea on what our transportation spend's going to look like. And the faster we can get that over and they can get that process, the better off that we are. And I think, like, from, you know, a, you know, a small carrier or a drayage carrier, same thing.
Like, I understand you're. You're. You're tossing out a bunch of different quotes and everything, but we all are. At the end of the day, our customers, the shippers, at the end of the day, they're throwing out a ton of quotes as well as we are. So it's like speed is everything in these instances.
Yeah, Chris, that's right. I mean, we talk. John and I talk about this as one. We're trying to democratize some of these big company trainings that you've gone through. John and I have gone through. I was talking to a gentleman that works down at the gulf today that we used to work for Everett, and he had a fantastic pricing program. And it's. It's very similar to what we do inside of Dre insight. And by feedback, it's like, look, I don't think I can.
I can necessarily level up your game, but I can certainly take away a lot of your pain points that you mentioned to me about operating in, like, 15 different spreadsheets and having to go into Quickbooks, which we all know is it's its own special thing, but the name of the game is its speed, but we also have to be fast. Or actually, what I mean by that is accurate. So speed and accuracy. So it's one thing to be quick out the door, but you want to make sure when that quote lands on the customer desk, it's something you can also stand behind. And you don't need to go back and renegotiate it because you fudge the number or slip the zero somewhere here or there.
And to me, the other piece is we all get a little bit starry eyed if somebody throws out something like $100,000 book of Business. We get pretty aggressive in terms of how we price it. But end of the day, it comes down to individual shipments, and we need to understand the profitability at that level so that we don't get ourselves into trouble of chasing volume, but at the same time, losing more money than we thought were going to. And it's complex, right? If you're responding to 100 quotes a day, you're trying to put together pricing across 50 different zip codes or 50 different addresses, there's a lot of room for error there. So if you just picture this world where all that pain, all that time and stress of responding to these is done for you.
And you can flip it around and focus on driver relationships, customer relationships, making sure you're collecting on the bills that have already been invoiced. To me, that is a much healthier business than staying siloed and just staring at your screen and punching in stuff into Excel. You're a freight broker. Those customer relationships are key. We really want to free people up to focus on that part of the business rather than working this inbox flow that doesn't necessarily generate sticky or durable relationships.
Yeah, I mean, operational efficiencies are key. It really is. And you need to build. I mean, I'm not the biggest process guy that's out there. I haven't, like, I just don't write stuff down at the end of the day, but I follow an internal process, you know, and I think, like, that's one of those things that, you know, I would highly stress everybody out there is to have that process in place, document literally everything. And I know that it's kind of counter everything of what I just said, but it's true, and it will truly hold you back out there in the market. And then you're spending. Think about it like this. How many quotes are you missing because you're spending too much time trying to get caught up on work that should be streamlined, should be automated right away?
Like, again, there's a lot of great software that's out there that helps keep all of this stuff highly organized, even from, like, a billing perspective. Quickbooks, all of that stuff, you know, expenses, because that's a whole other side of business that nobody talks about as well. Right? And it's like, how many keeping your expenses in line? I mean, if you're thinking about it as a dream driver, you got fuel, like I said, you got port fees, you got all that stuff. Is that all being itemized properly from a tax perspective? Like, again, there's a lot of different stuff out there, but there is also a lot of technology at your disposal now to help keep that where you can be a solo operator or a small business and execute as a large, like you're a large corporation.
Yeah. And Chris, I mean, I think building on that, one of the things that's kind of been the classic trap of, I think especially of drage, but I think also some of the international shipping world is in many ways, we get the processes right, but we never invested in how do we streamline them or automate them. And so we've just kind of thrown additional outsourced resources at these things. So to really run that effective, flexible company, I actually think that these small to mid sized carriers have a huge leg up on their bigger brethren because they can make those decisions faster. And I actually think that a lot of them are starting to see that you can adopt technology now that will actually put you on a more competitive edge than their bigger competitors.
I'm happy to see it happening because I think everybody that gets started into the trucking business is an entrepreneur at heart, and John and I just want them to be successful in the long run.
Yeah, I mean, that's literally the whole point of, you know, putting together, you know, this podcast. At the end of the day, it is just to provide education and insight for people out there in the market. Right. Because, like, there is a massive opportunity for, you know, I truly think, like, trucking in particular is one of the last front, you know, frontiers of small business owners that you can get into it without necessarily needing a four year degree or any additional education and, you know, hard work, you can make something of yourself in this industry. You know, that's what I love the most about it, is it is creating that platform.
Like, I mean, a big push for me with this podcast in particular is, you know, my dad was an owner operator for 40 years, you know, and it's in, it's, you can't shut your business down to go to a trade show, you know, and when you're in a lot of these situations, a trade shows can be extremely expensive. But on top of that, you're going to lose out on all that revenue of running your business in that time where it's like, I look at it like this. A lot of these drivers and, you know, operators and entrepreneurs, they got a lot of screen time in front of them. Like, let's call it what it is. We're never, we're never as busy as we think we are.
And if we can put together a platform where people can just come in and listen to this stuff and get some value and apply to their business, like, that's what it's all about. And I think, like, that's the whole important and like, that's just the biggest piece for me with all of this.
Yeah, and you kind of hit it on the head there, Chris. Is that in drage? Most people started as truckers or they've started in the industry and they kind of built, they're experts in operation, they're experts in what they do. And people that have built companies have built it up and they've been successful, but because they are so focused on the operational piece and the, and that knowledge is sometimes those processes on the financial part, on quoting, may not get the attention that you need because they know the business. And so if we can help give them the tools to not have to focus so much on that, because we make it easy and they can continue to do what they love.
And I think Downs could say the same thing is it's been so much fun over the last couple of months just talking to people of different size companies, from 100 plus trucks to one truck, who's an owner operator and he's trying to run a business. It's great to hear the stories, it's great to hear some of the struggles, some of the pain points. And if we can provide something that makes their job easier so that they can actually execute the business and do the things they love, then that also gives us joy. Of course we want to make money and of course we want to build a business. But if we can help make other people easier in what they do, then it's an added benefit.
Robert?
No, definitely. I think that's always the clear differentiator out there about who really makes it in business or not. Is what's your intent behind what you're trying to do? Is it to actually add value to your customers? And like you said, man, we all want to make money at the end of the day. But like, if it's coming from the standpoint of just you guys making money or me making money, you're not gonna be in business very long. And you have to put a product out there that benefit. Like, I look at it like this as a freight broker. Like, my customer has to win, the carrier has to win, and I have to win. And we got it. We got to keep that balanced up. And then again, like, I like using the same carriers on a lot of this stuff.
Like, I was talking about all these drage moves that we're doing. We're using one carrier on this. We found one that, you know, fortunately, through this podcast, I've met a lot of great people. And I met a really solid person out of the Savannah area that they have this, that they're a drayage carrier, that those are the only people I want to work with. I want to find the right people and I want to keep doing business with them. I don't want to go out and send out a hundred different rate requests to a hundred different providers. I want to find one really good carrier and then I want to have a couple of backup options in the event that they can't come through.
And then I want to kind of spread that wealth out there because, you know, it's, I've been doing this for a very long time. I've been a broker for like 15 years now. At this point, 14 years, whatever it is, seems like 30. But it, you know, I've been doing this for a long enough time to know, like, when you find quality partners, you got to do everything to keep them running with you. And especially out there from a smaller carrier. Like, like, I look at it as, like, their relationships that you can have out there are worth a, their weight in gold. And a lot of people overlook that because who's going to bail out your customer last minute as a broker? It's going to be that core carrier that you work with time and time again.
Like, I've literally had drivers postponed their vacations to go pick up loads for me because there's so much business that runs through now. Like, that's not all the time, but, like, for the most part, you get those up there. There's that sense of ease that comes along with it because it's a risk no matter what, whether you're a carrier, a broker, shipper, forwarder, it's always a risk. When you start working with somebody for the first couple of times, and when you find somebody who performs at a high level, man, I want to reward them with all the business that I get.
Yeah, and that's one of the things that differentiates drage from an over the road where drage. That's why I think a lot of people have struggled to get into that side because of those relationships. And your story, working with one drage provider is the story of a lot of different companies that are out there. They know what they're going to get. They know the individuals they've worked with. They know that if they need something to be done, they're going to be able to get it executed. And so how can we help more companies be in that role?
No, I think that's out of towns where you say something there.
I was going to say, John and I were talking about this the other day, and I don't know if this will resonate with you, and I hope nobody checks me math for this one. But, Chris, one of the common setups you see in the drayage world is that if you do more business for me, I want to progressively lower and lower rate the classic volume discount. But the point you're making now. It would almost be interesting to see if the industry flip this around and said the more business you do for me we should actually reward carriers for you. Get one more load, I'll give you one more dollar and your margin just keeps going up because it makes my life easy. It means there's no service failures and it means you're servicing the customer.
Well I would love to see the day where we can actually kind of flip the script on how these discussions go.
Yeah, I think that we're going to definitely work our way back there as an industry. I truly do. I think that the market that we're operating in right now as a whole. I'm not just saying drage but you know, OTr another area, it's very price driven right now. This is probably the most price driven I've probably ever seen it in the entirety of my career. I, as a broker, yes. I, I like to make money but like I really want to balance that consistency piece out where I don't want to go back to my carrier and constantly ask them to reduce their rate. I actually walk away from freight because I don't want to insult my driver. I really don't. I don't want to go back because somebody came in $150 less than me.
That's clearly below market and I, you know because again like a lot of brokers, carriers, whatever, they always throw out their introductory pricing, right. It's just like buying a vehicle, it's like you got that introductory APR and then it just spikes up at some point. I like the opposite approach with a lot of my pricing. I like to go in with a rate that I know that's going to move it for twelve months out of the year and I want to keep a carrier at or above market and I'm not going to push back on them. I mean I really don't want to do that. I'm not saying that I can never do it but you know at the end of the day I want to keep carriers rates the same.
If they, if they come to me and say hey we need a $1,000 on this lane, I'm going to quote my customer, I'm going to do my markup on there and then I'm going to try and keep that rate the same. And then if a customer comes back to me and says hey we need you to do it for a $1,000 I'm going to walk away from the freight. I'm not going to go back to my carrier and say hey, I need you to do it for 850 now or $900 now. I'm not going to play that game because I know eventually that low rate is gonna work itself out because they're not gonna be able to service it at a high level.
And that's the big thing is it's like, you know, cuz there's that thing out there in freight that says like oh, if you want good fast and cheap, you know, you can get good but you can't get cheap and fat. Like that's a complete lie. You can be cheap, you can be fast and you can be good. But it's also missing that fair component because you need to get carriers fairly compensated. And I see a lot of brokers that post that out and I because some brokers think that they're worth, you know, 25% every single shipment that they move and that's just not the case. You know, you can communicate at a high level, you can take care of your carriers, you can take care of your customers and you can make a fair market rate out there and then everybody's happy.
It's amazing how that works out that way.
Totally. And it's I mean, you know, we can clearly all solve this here around the coffee table but I mean there's a lot of stuff on LinkedIn that's probably worth what it's printed on, which is pretty much nothing. So it's, yeah, it's great that we have some like good resources, like, right.
No, you know, and that's exactly it, right at the end of the day, I'm not perfect. Like I said, I know a lot of what not to do because I've tried a lot of the B's, you know, at the end of the day I've tried it. We were all young in our careers once, we all thought we had it all figured out and we all learned the hard way that we're not as smart as we think we are. And then after a while you kind of develop this thing where it's like damn, if I just focus on bringing the most value that I possibly can to my carriers and my customers.
As a broker my life is kind of cool, you know, like it's not that it goes without stress, but if you don't withhold any information, if your mission is to make your carriers and your customers win, as a broker I think your life is a lot easier overall and then especially getting back into that repeat carrier mode. As a broker, I want to work with the same drivers time and time again. I don't want to use a load board. I don't want to send out 100 rate quotes. I want to find a couple of core carriers and I want to work with them repeatedly time and time again.
And, you know, and I think you guys, with what you guys are building and have built so far, is going to help elevate those right carriers at the end of the day because, you know, I think having your stuff in line is very, a very positive step with a lot of the real freight brokers and real customers out there.
Yeah, and maybe just to give a little bit more intel on that. I mean, I love what you're saying about like, look, if you just have good conversations, ask questions, and generally care about the person on the other side of the table, you're going to come up with some way to help each other out. John and I have talked to plenty of people so far in our entrepreneurial journey that we've been on for a couple months now, and we've even offered to like, look, we don't need you as a customer. We just want to talk through this with you just to see how we can help you out, poke holes in what you're doing, kind of give you some advice, and maybe it'll come back, maybe it won't. But at least you did the right thing as a human.
And I think that's probably the most important thing that we're doing here, but kind of circling back to the product itself. So, so we talked about what we call the pricing bench, which is inspired by the types of tools that you would have at a Fortune 500 company. They have these things called FP and a software, they have pricing software that when they create the price for your Pepsi Cola can or your Coca Cola can, they are looking at all of these elements. They have whole teams that come up with this can is worth two pennies. And so we wanted to make that available for the trucking world and give that level of sophistication without it being something that you need 18 years of college to figure out. So it's very simple to use. It's intuitive.
I think anybody that gets on like logs into the system@dreinsight.com, by the way, will have no problem figuring it out within five to ten minutes. Now, we do on board people, we like to spend an hour to 2 hours just to kind of answer questions, help do some education, which we think is very helpful. And again, the idea is that we want to democratize how finance works, but some of the other features within the system are things like, okay, we mentioned, how do you respond to a bunch of different rates in dreinsight? In the app, you can go in and build out a tariff so that you can have all of your thousand lanes pre quoted, regardless of whether it's an owner operator, a company driver, maybe a brokerage operation.
And that way you have the right tool in your arsenal for any specific lane that you need. So the example were talking about earlier with Savannah, your fleet might be partially company drivers on a w two and a company truck, and it might be partially owner operators in their own truck. You need different rates for both of these things. Now, you might give the same rate to the customer, but you need to be able to know what your cost base is for both. We give you that flexibility and then building from that. Once a trip is created in our system, it's become something kind of like a Lego.
And you can actually snap those Legos together to build weekly, monthly and yearly p and l forecasts in the system so that you as a fleet manager, you as the company owner, you as the driver will know ahead of time based on your costs and your revenue estimates. Am I going to make money at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, or am I not going to make any money? And how many of these shipments do I need to do? What do I need to change? And like I mentioned, with big companies, this is typically done in the FP and a team or the financial planning and analysis team.
These are highly paid individuals on the pathway to be CFO's at major companies, and they get paid a lot of money to do these what if analyses in our tool. You can do this for yourself. You can do it quickly, you can do it easily. And you should know ahead of time as my company going to make money or is my company not going to make money? And at the end of the day, as a business owner, that is the question you need to ask yourself.
Robert, that right there, having an idea and a grasp of your finances as a small business is like I obviously, it seems so simple to say out there, like this is the make or break style methodology that keeps people in business or not. But again, I think like financial literacy is probably the most overlooked aspect of small business. It really is. And what you're talking about there is having essentially data is key. Knowing your cost is key. Being able to properly project forecast, all of that stuff. And again, if you've never done it before, it does, it sounds like a foreign language, but there is technology. Like, what you guys are developing and have developed so far is. It makes it simple, you know? Cause that's like, that's the biggest thing.
Like you said, a lot of these guys are going to hear the term CFO and overpay. All that high paid individuals are going to be like, how easy is that going to be for me? You know, like, I'm one trucker, I'm ten trucks or something like that. But again, like, there is, you brought up that, the beverage and the can, there is data out there where you should know essentially how much it costs you to start your truck, how much it costs you to pop it into gear. There is data and there are tools out there at your disposal that will help you tell a story.
Dude, I love it. And our goal here is that we will share what we learn with fleet owners, with company owners. Like, are you charging your truck thirty cents a mile for tires and maintenance? Are you charging your truck ten cents a mile? Whatever you settle on, based on whether it's going to be different if you're going slightly longer haul versus, like, a shorter haul, the types of tires that you're using. But at the end of the day, don't be surprised by these things. You should not be surprised that you need to put new tires on your truck. You should not be surprised that you need to do preventative maintenance and repair. It should not surprise you that you need to change lube and oil and things like this. The truck is how you make money. You need to take care of it.
And if it surprises you at the end of the week and you have to ask the question, do I have dollar 800 in my banking account to pay for that blowouthe? I don't want you to be in that situation. I want you to be sitting there sitting pretty because you had a CFO in your pocket eight months ago that said you need to put $0.10 away per mile to save up for this tire just in case it happens.
Yeah, dude, I'm right there with you. I love it. I'm excited to see how this stuff all rolls out. And I'd love to have you guys back on here in a couple of months and continue to push this and really help, because these are the tools that I love to see succeed out there in the market because I'm always going, no matter how big my companies ever get, helping the little guy out and helping out because I was a bootstrap founder. I am a bootstrap founder. I want to bring these tools out there to the masses for individuals out there. But how does anybody reach out to you guys to find out more?
Yeah, so our website is just www.drainsight.com. You can also email me directly@townesrayinsight.com. John's email is jcintonrayinsight.com. And you can also just give me a phone call if you want to. My phone number is 713-679-8472 give me a call. If I'm not calling customers. I'm happy to pick up the phone. I know John would be too. And I'm sorry, John, I just don't know your phone number off the top of my head.
70 four speed dial. I got it. I know. 704-910-9926 and I, we communicate that out to anybody. So I mean, text calls, email, I mean, we're here to help and ask questions. We know that sometimes it's hard to get a hold of people, so we want to make it as easy as possible.
You can also send us an email directly through our website. We have a contact us. And Chris, I love the idea of maybe coming back on. This has been a lot of fun. I'm enjoying getting to see your eyes light up a little bit. It makes me feel good about what we're working on. So thank you. No, as an idea, I don't know if anybody ever writes in with questions for you, but that might be kind of interesting to see, you know, what is your audience interested to know about in terms of like drayage finance? Maybe we can do a Q and a session and try to do something like that.
Yeah, we actually do Q and A's on my live show and we could definitely do that. And we can gear it more towards it. We'll talk more off air about this, you guys. But if you guys need help finding towns or John and you guys can't find it for some reason, hit me up. I will gladly put you guys in contact with them. And if you guys made it this far in the episode, which I'm sure you did, because there's a ton of valuable information in there, you guys, and you're not subscribed, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there. Dear 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.