Ep. #27: Rob Haddock + Coca-Cola’s Supply Chain and Logistics Journey

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We look forward to working with you To our listeners . That's it . Let's get the show on the road . We are back . Welcome back to another episode of FreightPod . I'm your host , andrew Silver .

I am joined today by a special guest by the name of Rob Haddock , a gentleman who spent most of his entire career on the shipper side of the business , working for the very esteemed Coca-Cola , a company that is very near and dear to my heart , as I will get into during the episode . Thanks for joining us today , rob . How are you doing ?

And I remember as a new guy , new kid , I'm thinking , hey , this is kind of cool , I'm working for Coke and then all of a sudden , four decades passed by and it's like , okay , it's time for me to spin away and hand off all of this fun to younger folks who've got the energy and they've got great educational backgrounds and I've done what I can .

It's time to move on . But you'd be surprised how quickly the decades can go by when you're enjoying what you do .

So fortunately , during breaks when I was going to school I would do some part-time work at the local Coca-Cola foods facility up in Ohio and I'd work for six , eight , 10 weeks at a time over the summer . Over breaks I would do whatever menial job that was available and when I finished in 83 , market was still soft for management type folks .

So I rejoined the organization as a day laborer , working as a union associate , which was a great learning experience because I was working on running machines or there was a time where I was the blender operator for making the batch as a product before it went on to packaging .

So for the first couple of years of my career I was doing all of those fun jobs that are basically the ground up roles , really knowing the inside . I was part of the first manufacturing team that was making the little 250 ml drink boxes and talk about a workout because I was the palletizer .

There was no automated palletizer , I was hand stacking cases as they came off the end of the line . So do that for eight hours and you can see how many calories you can burn . But one thing led to another .

Eventually an opportunity in the warehouse operations opened up and since I'd had the experience of what the manufacturing was and the economics and the management background , I another Andrew , until I got a shot to get into corporate office in Houston at the time and then eventually found myself in Atlanta at the Coca-Cola world headquarters , all supporting the North

America business unit which makes the juices , the teas , the waters , the powerades , minute Maids , et cetera .

But what I had was the attitude that if somebody came to me with an opportunity , I said , well , why not ? I'm open to that , let's give it a try . I may not know much about it , but I'd like to learn .

So , job changes I started in Ohio , went to New Jersey for a larger role , then down to Houston for a centralized planning role , which eventually led to Atlanta as the Coke Foods separate entity was absorbed into what eventually became Coca-Cola North America and along the way the size of the organization just allowed new opportunities .

And I don't think it's the same way where people are bouncing back and forth . You seem to be more stuck in a pyramid or in a silo from what I can tell in today's world . But back then logistics supply chain was all relatively new and there was , I believe , a lot more flexibility because we didn't have specialized degrees in supply chain .

You came out with a management degree or an economics degree or maybe an operations degree or procurement . So the less people knew about what the skill sets that were required . We kind of made them up as we went , which allowed for more flexibility .

It went from Coke North America to Coca-Cola refreshments , which was the absorption of Coca-Cola Enterprises and the rebranding of franchises , which then split out , basically dismantled Coca-Cola Enterprises , made all the regional bottlers bigger , and then North America re-emerged , probably almost 10 years ago .

At that time I was responsible for North America's supply planning and logistics , which was a really interesting role because I got to see everything from SNOP to demand shaping , to warehouse management to transportation execution .

And then , as I got into probably my last five to six roles , additional org structure changes led me to just focus on transportation , which started with kind of rebuilding the transportation department within Koch North America as we came out of the most recent reorganization .

And then when I finally graduated into transportation strategy , kind of to wind down the last year of my time with the company and that was really trying to capture everything that I had learned about transportation and how it integrated back into the planning and the SNOP process and making sure that I left some legacy documents for the future generations to follow .

So it was a great run , andrew . I still can't believe it's been a year since I stopped .

Perhaps I can help somebody else fast track them , reduce their learning curve per se .

That's when there's a clear pivot in terms of what our brain is best at , and up until 40 , we're best at being in a business , operating and executing , and then after 40 , we are way better at teaching and delegating and passing on information .

And it's kind of this journey of happiness where people who spend in their 50s , 60s , 70s continue to try to operate and execute . It gets harder and harder for them to find true happiness , whereas the people that make that pivot tend to find happiness more quickly or more easily when they're focused on kind of what you're doing now .

So I don't know , that's just from a professor at Harvard as a side note .

But then , as you start to mature , your intelligence becomes a little more crystallized and that crystallized intelligence adds value back to others who were earlier in their journey . If you realize that that is now your role . So I've really embraced that role of hey , if you want to pick my brain on stuff , just give me a call .

I'm out there on LinkedIn , cell phones out there . I'm always open to talk supply chain and logistics .

No , that's pretty cool . I did want to ask , though you mentioned the organizational changes that Coca-Cola went through and they seem to be every two , three years where there was another huge kind of organizational change what was driving , what was the catalyst for those changes ?

There's acquisitions of different brands that slowly become integrated into the larger entity and sometimes the work doesn't necessarily change , but the org structure supporting the work might be better aligned this way , might be better aligned this way .

And I think where we left it and I think it's still in place is that logistics and customer service were very closely linked together , interacting very closely with the manufacturing folks and bringing it all together through SNOP processes with senior leadership , and that seemed to make sure that sometimes logistics doesn't get heard , especially when you might be in a

sales and marketing organization . And that structure seemed to help give us a voice . Because what I've told folks a long time ago is that in logistics is that our job is to make the sales and marketing streams come true and not to give a customer a reason to go ahead and buy another product .

So we got to make sure that we know what we're doing , we have the product available and we can get it on a truck and we get it to a customer and we keep the cost on budget . If we can check those three or four boxes , we're going to be okay . No one's going to want to help us run the operations .

The moment we start to falter from that , we're going to have a whole lot of help that hasn't been asked for . And I think the structural changes you have to be nimble in an ever-changing marketplace .

The changes aren't draconian but they're enough to say , okay , we're going to do it slightly different until the next market requirement dictates that we do something slightly different .

those big changes tend to happen .

I know other organizations aren't as fortunate . They have some leaders in logistics , that kind of pass through , and maybe folks are trying to make their mark quickly and that may not be the best behavior for the long-term in a carrier-shipper relationship .

But that's part of my advocacy is to try and change that mindset is that we're in this business together and I hate to see all the hard work of everybody upstream in the supply chain and all the you know called the advertising , the on-shelf marketing , only to have the truck not show up and have the customer upset . It just seems like a waste .

So , you know , tight collaboration with your carrier partners is just essential to just to continue to keep that product moving and meet all the customer expectations .

How do you think about that and what kind of challenges could that create or how do you navigate ?

And it starts all the way upstream , perhaps in product development , to make sure that if you're going to launch a product , make sure that at least the origin and the destination are in close proximity .

I can remember so many times where we're going to manufacture something in one part of the country and guess what the test market's on the other side of the country . But you got to keep inventory low , cost in line and service high . It's like well , sometimes those things aren't going to align very well .

So you have to let everybody know that here are the risks , here are the costs to achieve those types of objectives . And then you just want to monitor how well things are going and try and pivot as much as possible . A lot of times supply chain maybe doesn't get the credit that it deserves for making things happen .

I teased everyone during the pandemic that for years my family had no idea what I did .

They just knew I was in Coke and I was in supply chain and then , when things failed in terms of delivery in the US and we didn't have all of our stuff on shelf now folks knew that , oh , you're part of the problem , because apparently you don't do your job very well .

What it emphasizes is that most supply chains are running just on razor's edge and sometimes a long holiday weekend or a winter storm would be disruptive enough that you're not getting product to where it needs to be . Try having that type of pressure over a pandemic that lasted what 18 , 24 months and a lot of supply chains were resilient .

A lot of supply chains really struggled to get the right product on shelf and it took them a while to recover .

I would say that the supply chain that I was leading , we did fairly well from a transportation perspective because we learned a great lesson in 2018 when the ELD mandate really caused capacity to shrink and we put in a lot of technologies and processes and incremental people during that time period , which we fared better during the pandemic than I think some of our

peers did , and I did something a resiliency roadmap where I look back over time and I said , all these little small things that we did over this last five-year period since 2018 really helped us weather some of the most toughest challenges with moving freight during the pandemic period .

We looked at our carrier base and started to focus on fewer is better and help start building strategic relationships versus more transactional .

We also had the opportunity that we really didn't have a wall between the procurement and the operations team within transportation , because restructuring basically the procurement group got restructured to another part of the organization , so we were on our own .

So we didn't have to worry about that one group getting it for low cost and then the other group trying to figure out if this is going to work from a service perspective . So we learned by implementing better technology .

We got a lot smarter when it comes to industry insights , leveraging some companies like DAT and FreightWaves and even TransPlace's tools that were available to us . So we really knew what we were talking about when we were looking at what should a lane cost .

We focused on shipper of choice and were some of our issues self-inflicted because our facilities were not doing a very good job of honoring appointments and delaying carriers , and then everything kind of ended when we were facing OTIF fines . So a lot of retailers said , well , if you're not going to be here on time , we're going to penalize you .

That really gets your attention when it starts to add up fast . So , andrew , you get really creative on what technology and what processes and people you need to stop some of that . And the investments were far minimal compared to the penalties that we may be going to be faced with and the lack of sales .

That kind of resulted when it made it difficult for a salesperson to go in and sell a new item when we were having trouble delivering the ones that we had promised last time we were there . So when you bundle that all together , that you know that resiliency roadmap became very clear as to .

Here are the multiple steps that we did and it it paid off in the end .

It was serendipitous . Resiliency , I think , was the title .

But thinking about the sales team at Coca-Cola and is there truly an impact that they might find in trying to get this next SKU sold , but the last one in their relationship with Walmart or Target or whoever , there were serious delivery issues and product not getting there on time Does that actually truly impact their ability to make the next sale ?

And when you hear words like that , that resonates just how important it is to focus on the service segment , especially with you know we deliver to a broad grouping of different customers , so grocery retail is very sensitive to it .

If you deliver to food service accounts , those are very sensitive , because if it's not at to food service accounts , those are very sensitive because if it's not at the food service distributor , there might be a up and down the street outlet that doesn't have the product .

So it really hits home that for sales and marketing to be able to do what they do , you've got to have a good service record , and the customers will tell you that if you can't deliver what you promised last time , why should I buy anything else ?

Because I think it's cool to hear that you would actually go to the sales meetings top to top and be able to sit in that conversation and have a voice . I'm just curious if there are other things that you saw that really worked or created better strength within the business .

I think what helped me is that I was able to communicate up and down the supply chain and the marketing teams , knowing the marketing side of the business and interacting with the sales folks , if not daily but at least weekly .

One of my early learnings in the Minimate company was that we would have a sales and operations execution meeting every Monday morning and we would talk about where supply was and then what's coming up with that sales and what the failures were . And this was probably a room of 50 to 70 people , mostly senior leader , manufacturing , supply chain sales and marketing .

And it was just having the ability learning the ability to speak to them in terminology that they understood and given perspectives as to what is real , what's not real .

Terminology that they understood and given perspectives as to what is real , what's not real and get to the point of what do we need to do to fix stuff so we don't have continued failures Great learning experience . I'm not sure if everybody who's been in my role has had that opportunity .

But sales and operations planning and sales and operation execution meetings if they're done well they can really build the collaboration between those various groups .

And I'm curious if you could share some perspective on what you think the ideal working relationship looks like between procurement and operations and maybe where you've seen things go awry when they're misaligned .

And folks would look at those independently and not really pull them all together to say okay , independently , and not really pull them all together to say okay , this is not working well and then go back and fix it .

What we were able to do was to look at those different balance sheets and kind of meld them all together and say , listen , this is a high-profile customer . I need service expectations of Y .

The only way I can get it is to pay a slight premium perhaps to carriers X and Y , and I'm not going to go out and bid it to everybody who says that they have capability and get caught in this paper rate death spiral . You need to work with carriers who know the business and who can tell us if we're doing something wrong .

That is prohibiting their ability to be successful . So taking that more holistic view of the actual cost to deliver was very helpful to make sure that we could in the areas where we needed premium service . This is what we're going to spend .

If there were maybe plant-to-plant moves , where I know I have inventory at another facility , maybe let's go ahead and find something that's a little more reasonably priced spend . If there were maybe plant to plant moves , where I know I have inventory at another facility , maybe let's go ahead and find something that's a little more reasonably priced .

But you'd have to stratify your customer service expectations , which then led to what's my potential primary tender acceptance ? What's my potential on-time delivery . Put that all into a big math equation and then work with a finance team to say , okay , we're on budget , we're not on budget .

I think the other thing that the organization did over the last decade was build out some of the most robust reporting tools that sat on top of the TMS system that I think even today they're probably well ahead of what other companies have to work with .

Come back when you have something that's a little more sophisticated than what we have today .

Because I think your point was kind of spot on and it was exactly kind of what I thought you would head on to or speak about was kind of the notion of the paper rate and I really think the challenge is when procurement has all of the bid power but operations has all the day-to-day insight and if they aren't working collaboratively enough , procurement just will

put carriers on that have the lowest rate on paper and the after effect of that is generally not good .

Because if you're on December 31st , that rate looks fantastic and you're all high-fiving because your budget for next year looks beautiful , and then on January 1st your failures start to add up .

It can be very expensive to go back to the market and try and find capacity , and then you live with that all year long and carriers and brokers don't necessarily have a short memory with respect to that so

At the hard part , they're going to tack on another 30 , 40 , 50 cents a mile and in the end you're paying way more than you thought you'd be .

And what I'd coach people is that I'd love to go and just tell the finance team and tell the marketing team that it's going to cost us this to deliver the freight with a high degree of accuracy and if we're a little bit too bullish , we'll give you some money back .

That's a much easier conversation than having to go to finance every month and explain why you overspent again and ask for more money , Because it doesn't just grow on a tree , it's got to come from somewhere else in the organization . Yep .

I think that was during the ELD mandate period , and then I distinctly remember seeing stuff on LinkedIn and really articles everywhere , whether it was wall street journal or or whoever , and this was mostly during the pandemic , where it was like all of a sudden everybody knows what the supply chain is and knows about the chief supply chain officer , like things like

that . Um , and I'm just curious like do you feel , like you know , with all that's happened in the last five years , that finally transportation has a voice within a business that gives it the kind of power it needs to make the real impact ?

In fact , I was looking at just some information this morning where Atri just put out their operational cost of trucking report for 2024 , and it was somewhere around $2.25 a mile was the number that stuck out . And then I was comparing that to freight waves rates where folks are paying $5 or less per mile and I'm going that's going to be a problem .

Yeah , the math doesn't math . Yeah the math , it's not sustainable . And that just leads me to going okay , we're getting a great rate , is fine , but if all of a sudden there's a mass exodus at capacity , then we're right back in the mass again .

It really should be that plus 10% or whatever , so they can make some money , whatever a percentage , so they can make money . But we have been in this extended period of time where the rates being paid are below that minimum and people refer to kind of the war chest that carriers were able to build up during the peak of the pandemic .

And maybe that's just the cyclical nature of this industry . But what I don't see ever happening are those minimum costs for the carrier going down .

So I think overall between this year and last year , the Atri report shows like a $0.03 per mile increase . Whether it's insurance or EOM parts or the cost of new equipment , that has been inflationary . Any business knows that if you're selling stuff for less than it costs you to make it it it's not a formula for success .

So a wise transportation organization will understand when it might be pushing the procurement process a little too hard . Kind of leave some meat on the bones , if you will .

They were running a little bit late and we did the best to get them in and out as quickly as possible .

Yeah , it was a small operation so I had the freedom to keep a few folks over and say , hey , let's stage the load as soon as the driver gets there , let's get them on their way because they're beat and let's just at least give them a Coke smile at them and get them on their way so they can go rest and that kind of stuck with me .

Because that job as a driver is tough . Not many people want to do it Fewer and fewer want to do it day in and day out and those that are doing it want the runs that are perhaps getting them home every night . So the long haul driver , which a lot of freight , still requires that those drivers are aging out to influential roles within transportation .

I thought there's two things we got to do One we have got to be good stewards with our carrier partners . In the management team , in the management space , let's really behave like business partners . And then , when you get over to the interaction with the drivers , let's make sure that it's a welcome center , not a guard shack .

Let's make sure that we smile and show them where the facilities are and there's vending machines , and let's not let them sit around all day . Let's get them on their way and if we can do that then there's opportunity that we can be a shipper of choice . Now I've done a lot of research .

A shipper of choice may not get rates any lower than anybody else when it comes to a cost perspective , but they will get capacity when times get tight because the carrier management team wants to deal with somebody who's in a partnership relationship . And the other thing is that drivers talk amongst themselves .

And the other thing is that drivers talk amongst themselves and we've seen that facility ratings have merit and the lower the facility rating , the chances are that the driver is going to say there's no way I'm taking that tender because I know I'm going to sit there for three hours and it's not built into the rate . You've got to raise the rate .

I've seen a couple of locations within the network that had basically low ratings and there was a strong correlation to a higher rate per mile than perhaps that market would indicate . And when you dig into it , dwell time wasn't being managed very well or appointments weren't being managed and they didn't have a drop yard .

So a little bit of investment went a long way to smooth out the operations . So I mean all of that kind of speaks to . This is a limited resource that we all share across the industry . Let's make sure we keep the drivers moving and let's be professional about it .

And then I worked with the Uber team for a while who put out a facility ratings dashboard or tool where drivers were providing feedback as to what their experiences were like . And then I worked with the Uber team to help them say listen , you've got to quantify what a two versus a three versus a four means to really get the attention

. Because I think there's two costs associated with the ratings , andrew . There's the obvious cost which is a detention because you kept a driver late longer than the two-hour gratis Yep .

There's also an inconvenience factor that is probably built into the rate up front because the carrier may want to take the load but they know that there's risk that that load or unload on that OD pair might not go as efficiently as possible .

So you might have on a $1,000 freight bill there may be $100 of inefficiency penalty built into the front end and if the driver faced a tension on either the front or the backside , you may have another $100 . So when you compare this OD pairing versus what should be a $900 rate , why am I paying 1100 bucks as a shipper ?

It's like , well , you've got some inefficient operations , so it challenges the shipper and the receiver . Probably all falls back on the shipper because they paid attention on both ends . To really understand am I doing what I need to as a shipper to make sure the drivers are moving in and out quickly ?

I mean , I think there's some digital things that have moved that part of the business forward , but one of the things that I thought was really cool that Uber did was the facility ratings concept , and I thought that was very new to the industry and the way they were able to do it , because all of their drivers were already on the app and it was something we

were all familiar with . I really thought that was a new and value-added insight that shippers were able to get through them , and so I was curious if that's what you were going to say when I asked that , and it sounds like it clearly was something not only that they did , but you helped them with and clearly added value .

So if some of the different companies combine forces , all in the spirit of reducing dwell time and providing awareness to what's going on out there , I think it might change the mindset a little bit easier . But that's probably another hour-long discussion with some of the folks that are in that space folks that are in that space .

I got my startup in the industry with Coyote , and the first five years of that I was a carrier rep and I was tasked with working on our freight inbound to the Southeast , and this was 2007 through 2011 or so , which is right around the time that Coyote became a very big carrier for Coca-Cola and , frankly , Coca-Cola was essentially the most important customer .

Not every customer was extremely important , but we were very all in on making sure that Coca-Cola's freight was taken care of exceptionally well . And so what my dad essentially told me was you're going to make sure these Coke loads move , and so you better find carriers to cover them .

So I worked with a lot of owner operators uncovering your loads from Atlanta into Florida and then some loads back from Florida out into Alabama , Tennessee , whatever , but I distinctly remember some of the time there were one or two facilities in Atlanta that were a real challenge for drivers back then Yep , and I remember Peter Achukwu , who was an owner operator .

When I would offer him a Coke load out of Atlanta , he'd say Andrew , come on , man . You know I don't like going to that place . You're going to have to give me an extra 50 bucks to go . Deal with that please . And that was a front end thing .

Regardless of it , we didn't know if he'd be there for an hour or five hours , but just to get him to commit I was paying a little bit extra . And to validate your thoughts there , there's truth to that .

And that's where you build in that little bit of that inefficiency penalty , just because you don't know is it going to be a good day or a bad day .

Bit of collaboration there should also if you're an enterprise shipper or you can afford to do it , you should have an annual carrier summit .

The Koch system does that very well brings in everybody , outlines what the expectations are for the upcoming year , some inside scoop on what's going on with the business , and it just builds that relationship , that collaboration , and it closes out by awarding carriers for their efforts from the prior year .

So it's really nicely done and I know a lot of large enterprise shippers do that . So that's a great practice . But it's talking about when you do get in the quarterly business reviews . I'm big on .

Something that the Coyote team started to play around with and did some research on was around shared metrics and I've even had a call with them just recently to talk about where are we with these five shared metrics that are ? Some of the accountabilities are the shippers , some of the accountabilities are the carriers , some of the accountabilities are truly shared .

So if you were to look at five metrics , I think a shipper is very responsible for giving the carrier a good demand signal , because we know without a good demand signal , a good forecast , how can anybody plan for success ? And then shippers should be very conscientious about dwell time and detention time , and not only at the shipper but the receiving location .

So that would be on the shipper . Primary tender acceptance and on-time performance would be on the carrier , and then you got to get to some type of cost improvement model .

So if you are currently shipping it for X per mile , is there anything in there that's inefficient that together the two individual companies can work on to help reduce the cost on that particular lane ? So when I think about what does a great relationship look like ?

It's quarterly business review , a little bit of talk about the past , but what are we going to do going forward ?

I think when you put that together it aligns the vision of the two organizations to get the mutual goals accomplished .

And they're all interlinked , when you think about it , andrew , because if I , if I've got a bad forecast and you're throwing all kinds of crazy volume at me , well , how , how am I going to tender at the level ? How are you going to keep the cost on that lane accurate ?

Or if I'm delaying trucks , so , or or if if I , as a carrier , overcommitted but I wasn't willing to commit or own up to the fact that , yeah , I told you I would take 10 , but I can only do five . Well , let's go back to the table . It's okay to tell us that you can only do five because maybe something else in your network changed .

Give us enough warning that the shipper can recalibrate and maybe partner with somebody else who has more strength in that lane . But you can't have that without the business reviews and trust .

And then the fifth week you send me my 20 , and then you're hitting me like why was your tenderor acceptance down ? It's like well , my capacity went elsewhere when I was only giving them five a week . So I get how they're definitely linked and there's got to be mutual accountability there .

Who would have thought we were going to have more charcoal around the 4th of July ? We know stuff like that is going to happen well in advance . Let's go ahead and plan for it . Alert everybody . One of our big initiatives , which is still in place , is making sure that lane volume management is something that is monitored very closely and shared with the carriers .

As to what are the upcoming expectations over the next 30 , 45 days ?

Does the delineation even matter anymore , or is it this kind of hybrid model ?

If you've got a business that has call it peak season , most of the time the brokerage networks are able to flex better to cover peak and you tend to go ahead and lean your volume towards that .

So we really understood , between our different business units and our different temperature control , what was our optimal carrier base mix between brokers , dry brokers , refrigerated , and then asset-based carriers and then asset-based carriers , the service expectations and the interacting a lot of times we were getting better performance out of our broker community than we

actually were the asset-based community , which led to different questions as to are you with us or not ? are you with

us or not ? I know when I started , the business was much smaller and there were four times the number of carriers involved . Andrew , it was all transactional . By the time I left , the business had doubled and we dropped that carrier base down to about 25% of where we started , your base down to about 25% of where we started .

So it's much easier to manage quarterly business reviews when you have only a handful of people to have to go talk to .

It's like , well , you should already know a little bit about our business if you're reaching out to us . But we historically did , and still do , invite new carrier prospects after they've been vetted to the annual bid process .

I would tell you that if we try 10 or 15 , maybe only one or two will be around after the first quarter because they didn't really understand what they were getting into .

I just don't think my love for this industry came from Coca-Cola and just the competitive nature of wanting to stand out and , again , I think it was a timing thing .

Also , I think being the CEO's kid at Coyote was a situation where the way Coyote wanted to stand out and develop the relationship with Coke was anytime you called , we were going to answer and we were going to show up and execute the business .

And I distinctly remember it was maybe , I think it was 2008 , 4th of July weekend , your Memphis line shut down , and do you remember that by chance ?

It was a lot of shuttles from Memphis to West Memphis and then a ton of stuff either from Dallas to Memphis or Memphis to Dallas . We just sat there and covered all of them . It's like that hero mentality of showing up when others won't was indoctrinated in so many coyotes and it , I think , was what drove a lot of us .

And then that's kind of what I instilled into my business at Molo and it was a big reason why I credit Coca-Cola so much for what I've learned now in my career learned now in my career . But I understand how it's . Just , you're probably getting hundreds of carriers wanting the opportunity and it's really hard to stand out and get that chance .

I'm just curious from your perspective , how do you even know which ones to give a shot to , when I think people are generally saying a lot of the same things , that we're going to work our butts off to service for you and execute and we'll communicate very well and we'll do all the digital tracking requirements . It's hard to stand out .

I know I was invited to a conference once and I was up on stage and it was a conference with freight brokers , and somebody asked that question how do you get into Coke ? I said , well , you've got to be able to differentiate .

Either you're superior at your tech , you're superior at your service , but you're still going to be able to offer a market attractive rate . And then we can have a conversation . And if you're unsure of that , keep in mind that the Coke system is very large . There's regional bottlers , there's the North America group , which is quite large .

Maybe we'll give you an opportunity on a small plant-to-plant lane just to test whether you have the capability . In today's world , there is a procurement group that does a lot of that vetting up front now , andrew , before we even start the bid process .

So they'll go through and they'll filter through all of those requests to take a look at our capabilities and then they will invite a number of them to see if they first they can manage the bid process . And if they do get awarded , then they're coached as to what they need to do right and then they're given some time to make sure that they can execute .

Sometimes it works out . Many times it hasn't .

North America can be very dynamic , so know what coke you're talking to as a carrier and then understand who's on either end and what's the volatility of the volume and what are the characteristics of the shipping and receiving .

Either ask directly for insights into the facilities or you know , I always , as a default , before we had Uber helping us out , I would go Google a facility to see what are carriers saying in terms of you know , one to five , one , one to five feedback .

I got early in my sales career , which was essentially before you're going to go call the big boss , the director of transportation or whoever it may be , call the facility , call several facilities and just talk to whoever picks up the phone and try to get some information , Ask them about their job , how they're impacted by carriers or brokers , what challenges they

have , what works , what doesn't . And the worst that you get is told hey , I don't got time for this and they hang up on you or whatever . But there's a lot of information you can get if you do the research the right way . That puts you in a position to be way better educated .

So , on that first email , like you said earlier , I'm not emailing you saying , hey , Rob , can you tell me about your business , Because that's not going to work .

Prove yourself on a few lanes and then grow from there .

So I want to pivot now a little bit to a concept that I'm curious your thoughts on , and that is collaboration among shippers . So I know you've been a member of a number of the big organizations that play in our industry CSEMP , food Shippers of America and some others .

I want to understand , first and foremost , what you think is possible in terms of collaboration among shippers , and then , based on that , I'll ask a second question that's maybe a little separate .

There was 30 , 40 of us that were getting together quarterly to talk about what we could do to smooth out transportation A lot of focus on dwell time management and track and trace management there in the room . But we all knew the rules of the game and it was really saying listen , we're all sharing this very valuable resource .

If we don't figure this out , there's going to be cost implications and service failures . So let's do what we can . So we started to do some task force , make some N-words , I think , out of that .

If you're familiar with the freight logistics optimization works flow that the USDOT is currently running , that came from some of those consumer brand collaboration sessions . Now it flows at its infancy , but it really speaks to starting to collect data that shows where the bottlenecks are and through visibility those bottlenecks can be addressed .

They're working on the ports right now . In a couple of years they'll start to work their way inland to ground transportation . So things like that take time , but that's where shippers were kind of saying listen , we share a valuable resource . Driver community is getting smaller . Let's not waste it .

The curiosity I had was if it would ever be possible to create almost like a network of networks where , rather than just Coca-Cola having to find capacity for its own network , just Coca-Cola having to find capacity for its own network that probably has a lot of OD pairs where it's Atlanta to Miami , which I'm sure there's a ton of volume that ships on that lane

, but there's not a ton that's shipping from Miami to Atlanta , but I'm sure there's some produce business that imports a ton to Miami and ships up to Atlanta .

And so it was almost like if you could get 10 or 20 or 30 shippers who created a unified network and was able to bid out their freight in a way that made it a lot more efficient for the carrier and for the shipper . And it would be hard given demand and how that changes and volatility there .

But I'm just curious if that could ever play out or you see a path where that could ever play out , where it could work .

And I never forget we were visiting one of the large terminals for UPS up in Chicago and it was four o'clock in the afternoon and the trailer to the Poughkeepsie was leaving , regardless of what freight was on there . And UPS runs pretty efficient operation and we run airlines that way and we run these other transportation industries with a set sale .

But with truck transportation we are highly variable . So rather than say you know , there's a truck available at any time , night or day , let's just say that okay , from Atlanta to Miami every day there's going to be X loads and then the inverse coming the other way , and if you want to be on there , just like you book an airline ticket , you get on there .

That's one idea that I've had as to why haven't we tried to take this resource and make it uniform , back and forth versus totally variable .

So those two areas there really are where a lot of waste is incurred .

One last question here for you , and it's another advice one so kind of what advice would you give to just kind of industry professionals , as you've had a long , illustrious career in this space and you've learned a ton , and now you've gotten to the point of career where you're teaching a lot , what kind of advice would you give to a young professional in the

industry , regardless of what side they're on , whether they're a shipper or a carrier or a broker provider ?

And then that's when they come looking for advice or they've fallen on their face and they're looking for a hand up . If you're a young professional , don't hesitate to say listen , I don't know it all . There's a huge amount of stuff that's out there , of course , on the internet .

Sometimes it may not exactly make a whole lot of sense and I know there's a whole lot of folks with that crystallized intelligence that might be interested in in giving back a little bit . Um . So , you know , seek out mentors or , um , you know , I'm , I'm always available , uh , but you don't think you have to do it on your own .

There's a huge community out there that has some of the inside track .

One of the things I think is starting to happen a little bit with colleges and universities is that they teach some great doctrine based on theory and based on some reality , but it doesn't necessarily always play out well when that associate gets into their first new , that graduate gets into their first job and it's not exactly what the book said .

I think that's the biggest frustration that maybe the company has with a new hire , or that new hire has with why didn't I get exposed to this ? So seek out that additional insight that that you know could be out there , readily available , if you just realize that maybe you don't know it all on day one .

That was one of the things that I always lived by , and then another one was that I think there's always a better way , so that's helped me get through my career . And last thing is , I don't know everything .

So you know , build the relationships out there with the folks that maybe have a little more insight as to how this all comes together , and , you know , things might work out fairly well for you .