Ep. #8: Cameron Ramsdell

I thought Zach and Ryan and John Marison did a great job , so I'm just happy we pulled it off .

What types of guests do you want to hear about ? What types of questions do you want us to answer or our guests to answer ? Let us know , reach out to us , you know where to find us and let's make it happen . So , before we get into it , I do want to make a call out .

So we do have access to some of the data around the podcast and we've been , you know , digging into that and I was shocked to find out that we've got one listener in Uzbekistan . How we feel about that . The reach is far and wide . So how do you feel about that ? That's pretty epic , right .

So along those lines , we're kind of just joking around with you know , we're getting to the point where we've got some tremendous following and you know it's time to start thinking about names , for you know , are the followers for us as a group , as a community , and so we threw the names into chat , gbt and just ask for their suggestions .

Right , we got Freightys , which almost sounds like a Greek god of some sort . We got the cargo crew . We got the FreightPod squad Andrew mentioned on the last episode that you're the Legion we got the Freight Posse and we got the Podsters . So lots to work with there , andrew . But what are you leaning to at this point ?

I think what I'm really excited for the audience in this one you know , paul and I have tried to we're trying to give a well rounded view of the industry and bringing in different people from different , I guess , generations and most of our initial guests were , I guess , one generation above where Cameron comes from . Cameron is more kind of my generation .

He's mid 30s . I think that's being generous . I appreciate that . But Cameron started his career at coyote logistics in 2008 and was hired as a national account manager .

So I think for those of you I think the majority of our listeners probably started in a similar role to Cameron , so I think his story should resonate with a lot of you , should be , I would think , inspiring , given where he is today versus where he started , he could quickly go through his background .

Cameron again started at coyote logistics in 2008 as a national account manager .

His journey through that company is quite impressive becoming an ops manager before becoming a senior ops manager , before becoming a you know , a VP , svp and finally CTO in 2017 , and then he started his career before moving on to US Express where he became the president of variant , which was a brand new division , which , which we will jump into a little bit .

He then moved on to emerge where he was the COO before taking on his new role as CEO of Armstrong transport group . So really excited to kind of go through Cameron story here . And I will add , cameron is a good friend of mine . I grew up at coyote and started working there at 16 .

Cameron was , you know , six or so years older than me and kind of like a big brother and helped me so much throughout my career . So I'm just this is awesome to have him on and get to kind of have a nice conversation here today . So welcome Cameron .

I actually started my real career truly a coyote . But my intentions prior to that were I went to work for a senator on Capitol Hill and thought moved a deep DC the summer before I graduated and actually had a job at a consulting company in DC . I fell out of love with politics very , very quickly over the course of that internship . It was incredible .

Actually this map behind me is signed by the senator I worked for . But I realized very quickly that wasn't what I wanted to do , wanted to get out of Chicago . So I had a job at consulting company and spoke to a high school friend of mine who had just gotten a job at coyote and read a cranes article .

Coyote just made an acquisition , made an acquisition of IMC based in Atlanta called Integra and Jeff Silver , ceo , was featured in that article and I was just reading about him as if this is seems like an incredible guy to work for and a company that's really kind of getting off the ground pretty quickly .

They know if they were two years old or so by the time I joined and ended up declining that offer in DC , moving back to Chicago and started at coyote .

I didn't necessarily encounter that firsthand , but I did see Just a very , very slow process to make change . And you know I've I've always been . I think a lot of people would characterize me as fairly aggressive at times and you know I tend to want to go , go , go and there was not really a lot of that .

What I would imagine is a complete departure from that . So , indeed so , how do you go from you know , being in that environment into the Coyote environment ? You know what types of adjustments did you have to make and just the , just the transition over ? How did how did that go for you ?

I was like , oh boy , this is okay , I don't know what I'm giving myself into and I hated my resume . And then they called me a few days later . So I started , I think in August , of a weight and I mean immediately , was addicted to it . That the people were incredible .

You know we were sitting in a training room at the time and I think to this day I've been with Coyote since 19 but they still have a month long training program , which is phenomenal if you come right out of school and you have literally no other training , practical experience for doing the job that that you know any 3PL , really any company , does .

The training program was incredible . It was very appealing to me but the people were great at a great trainer and I met just a lot of people that I really just resonated with me and I saw an incredible opportunity to make money in a fast growing business and a gigantic industry and it just seemed like the best kept secret .

You know , in 2008 , freight brokerage . You know it certainly wasn't nothing , but it's , it's very . It looks very , very different today .

But the landscape , I think there was one other billion dollar plus player at the time and see a Robinson , and Jeff had had a history with them and sold this company and taken some time off and there really was no alternative to Robinson . They were , you know , the quote unquote evil empire .

Some of us referred to them and it became our mission to create an alternative to that company and since then you've had a proliferation of companies . Today I don't know how many billion dollar plus brokerages there are in the the industry , but certainly over 10 , probably less than 25 somewhere in there .

I've lost count of it over the years and COVID certainly distorted some of those numbers , but there was no scaled alternative to see it . So we're still , you know , thousands of brokers , but it was predominantly , you know , as it was a mother of all long sales .

In a lot of ways maybe it still is , but you've seen , you know , over that course of time , to where we are today .

I think there were , you know , only you guys might , and you might know the number better than me , but at the time maybe 10 companies over 100 million and only one over a billion , and today we have probably close to 100 over 100 million and you know , 15 to 25 over a billion .

Like why was , why did we feel that way ?

I just got such a high off of a customer saying they work with CH and they're not happy and taking and just eating their lunch , and it was so much fun to speak to customers that wanted an alternative and then just focus all of our energy on just servicing them to the best of our ability and proving that there are good brokers out there , there are

alternatives , and we did that and we ran that playbook . They still , I assume , run it to this day , but there's a , you know , proliferation of other players , but it there was just . There was an incredible camaraderie that came out of that .

And just having that common enemy and , frankly , having customers come to you and say that they're not happy with something and you being able and in a position with all the tools and resources that coyote provided for you from the culture , with that , mary Ann , was really a pied air of the technology and the process that really implemented .

We were well positioned to be that alternative and I think that's a tremendous amount of you know what should be credited with coyote success .

I mean we , I mean it was everyone , it was not just me , it was not just you . We had this . I think it was one of the things that my father did exceptionally well was bring us all together under this common goal or mission to just absolutely beat Robinson .

And I think that one of the things that really helped there was that kind of customer validation , that there were customers out there who felt like Robinson wasn't doing a great job for them .

And I've heard and maybe this is a little bit biased , but I've heard from from my father and from even some customers that it changed the way Robinson had to run their business and I think it changed the way they had to kind of elevate their game to keep up , as coyote was was kind of taking market share from them .

There was a tremendous opportunity on the other side of the market for our carrier reps to service the customer , the carriers , to the same exact way that our philosophy was applied to shippers . And so having that kind of counterbalance on the other side where we did what we said we were going to do , you know you don't screw carriers over .

If you tell them that you're going to do something , you do it . You don't take loads back from them like coyote . You know , I think at the time it was really novel to not give freight back and you know , no excuses service the customer . If you miss quoted and lose money , go lose money and don't give it back .

We did the same thing on carrier side where you know carry might sell a load for too much money and a customer up gets upset about it . We didn't take that load back from that carrier and that that philosophy is pervasive now and I think why you have so many different folks that have a lot of success . But that was quite novel at the time .

Right , having been on the other side , I recall thinking to myself OK , I'm signing all these agreements , these contracts , I'm putting it on a piece of paper , both parties are signing it , and then , you know , when it becomes unfavorable , might as well put it in the shredder and throw it away . It's not , it's not worth the paper that it's on .

And that was it blew my mind , also being new to the industry , you know , back in 2008 , in that era , and just thinking to myself how is this even , how is this possible ? And then to see that transition maybe Coyote was one of the earlier parties to start doing that and then you see it become more prevalent .

Obviously , now you see a lot more carriers that really stand by their rates , but that was a transition that happened over a decade or so to where it's become more normal , but just going away back and reminding everybody that there was a day where that was not the case . And so it's interesting . I haven't thought about that in quite a while .

I mean , the company was only two years old at the time , so we were not very big . I mean , how many employees at the time ? Maybe 50 .

But certainly from one of that I don't know if it was 50 or 100 , but somewhere in between there and I don't know if I can really track it back to a singular moment in time .

But I think it was the combination of like the market dynamics made a lot of sense to me , like they made no sense to me at all , at the same time making a ton of sense to me that like there was a great amount of opportunity , like I just the industry was just so big . It was , you know , almost unfathomable .

You didn't have freight waves or data sources . There was . There was nothing else to really help you make sense of how big it was , but you could feel that it was big and there was a tremendous amount of opportunity . That was really exciting . Taking freight from Robinson was really fun . I had a blast doing that . Like that motivated me for years .

And then you had other players kind of come up , you had copycats and we kind of redirected that energy and everyone else that was trying to compete with us . And I'm just , you know I'm a pretty competitive guy .

I always have been , and I just liked being in an environment with other like-minded people that had a common mission , vision , values , and I was hooked from day one . But I don't know if there was a singular point in time , but I knew it right away .

You know we had , you know , over the course of time Coyote evolved and I'll say that you know I attribute a lot of where I am today and what I've been able to do just to the incredible talent that was there . I mean , andrew , we learned a lot from each other . You know we were competing with each other , we were mentors .

But you know I've had incredible mentors in my career and almost every one of them came through Coyote . I mean , jeff and Marianne are absolutely at the top of that list and obviously worked very closely with them for pretty much my entire tenure there .

But you know we brought in Eddie Leshin at some point in time , who was from Robinson I guess he was from Backhaulers before Robinson .

You know we brought in Jim Sharman , darren Cockrell , so we just had access to incredible leaders and that happened over a period of time and it just each one brought their own experiences and philosophy to that business and really helped continue to drive Coyote forward , and that was just kind of a constant motivator for me , as well as just having and seeing us

start attracting really impressive talent to come to this organization and help us on the mission

.

Who are some of the people that you know you looked up to , that mentored you , and how did that help facilitate the rapid pace with which you were able to grow your career ?

Don't mistake your peers or also your mentors , and you might look at them differently in real time , but that is a having the right peer group and having surrounding yourself with people that are high achieving or very ambitious , but not to the extent where they , you know , you don't have the sense that they're gonna try to step on your neck on the way to the

top . But having a good , just peer group and just people that you like working with , whether it's within your own company or folks that you've gotten to know outside that are in similar walks of life , that's really important .

And I find that in most you know literature that gets kind of overlooked as being something , whether it's a support group , but a lot of the time those are the folks you turn to when you're faced with adversity . You know , top of the list , jeff and Mary and I don't mean to bundle them together they are remarkably husband and wife duo .

That couldn't be more different , right , and what they bring to the table . You know , I grew up with a single mother and so I didn't have a real father figure in my life . And Jeff , you know , was that very strong personality .

If you know Jeff , you know he's got a very strong personality , he's got a very specific way that he wants things done and that , to me , was fantastic , like I loved that . It was extremely clear what the mission was Like . There was never , it was never unclear and if you , you know , if you messed up , you heard about it from him right away .

You know , service , the customer , service , the carrier , but Mary Ann as well , I mean that was , I mean there's not enough , I could say .

I mean they have been such a big part of my life for so long that , you know , it's kind of a it's tough to like pinpoint the singular point in time or the one issue that they helped me with , cause , frankly , they helped me through my pretty much my entire career .

I I attribute a lot of the philosophy that I have today , the philosophy I tried to apply to to the business now at Armstrong , to the way that they taught me to think about the industry and the way that they taught me to think about you know , what does , what do you do in certain situations ?

And the answer is generally always the right thing for the right reason , and that usually means it's the tough thing , and that was something they just beat into us . Beat , beaten into us , beat , beaten into you . You do the right thing for the right reason . Physically beaten into us . Wow , if you didn't do that , you were gone , you .

You were gone Like you were out , you were out the door . If you didn't do that , no , that was true .

It was figuratively beaten into us to the point where it didn't matter who you were , whether you were a kid who had just been hired two months ago and you were booking your first load , or , you know , you were a C level employee . Everybody it was .

It was thoroughly understood that every decision the organization was going to make would be made with with the customer and carrier and employee in mind of doing the right thing . I think it's interesting .

Cameron , you mentioned the peer group as as mentors and I think it's a great point , but I also think it's an interesting one because of your specific peer group , the group of people that came into coyote within a year or two of you all at the bottom level , as you know entry level employees hired as trainees with zero experience .

If you look at where that group is today , they are very much leading the industry . There has been a I hate to turn , I don't like the term brain drain , but I just remember an article written about coyote after the UPS acquisition where the guy used the term brain drain and it's been in my head since .

But there has been this , this talent movement , where I think it really started with the digital broker movement in 15 , 16 , 17 , where all these companies had a lot of cash and they wanted to hire talent and everyone looked at coyote and said I need to hire someone from there to figure this out .

I feel like there was a big movement in the industry for a few years where it was like if I wanted to figure out how to be a broker , I had to hire someone from coyote , yep . And now , as you look around the industry , especially the ones that you know took a lot of investment .

Whether it's VC or PE , the leadership group at those companies you can find at least one coyote person within each of them . Why do you think that is ? How do you , why do you think that happened the way it did ?

Like , how did they go from zero to a billion in five years ? I guess I don't know maybe six to two billion three years later , or I guess two billion , I guess , the next year . Frankly , I think we hit a billion in 2013 . We bought Access America for five .

We were a billion , they were 500 million and we turned that into a $2 billion company together in 2014 . And then I think we then redoubled the by the time I left , in 19 , we were four billion and I think that was just that's just such an unprecedented growth curve that people were looking for others that might know how the hell to get it done .

And again , like I've said it and every time I've talked to somebody , is that like what we've just talked about , about just caring a little bit more than everyone else , or maybe a lot of cases , a lot more than everyone else that comes through on the phone .

Shippers get it , they understand , they can hear that and when you have that philosophy like that is , it's not again . It's really simple . The business overall is quite simple , right , you buy at one price , you sell for another , you make money on the spread and 75% of your costs are your people . Like .

There's not many more simple businesses , but it's not easy . And that concept of being obsessed with your customer and doing the right thing , no matter what , is what they're hiring these people to do . But that's really what the secret sauce is .

A lot of companies are because it feels like it should be more complex , but it's just not . I mean , it's just not . It's , at the end of the day , to have a successful brokerage . It's a math problem , right ? And then it's just how you approach the customers and who you think the customers are .

I think is important , because I think a lot of companies miss that so Great .

Well , you went from a project role and then into a CTO role and I find that fascinating because it's not often you see somebody go from operations to technology and just to kind of piggyback off what Andrew said .

It could be the case where I see you kind of have to have that operational background to then go into the tech space and know what to build right .

I think where a lot of these companies were running into issues is you have people from outside the industry coming in trying to build tech that they've never operated , that they really don't understand the nuts and bolts of .

So can you talk to us a little bit about what facilitated that transition for you into the tech space and how your operational background served you well in that ?

How did you make that jump ? And Coyote ? I think it started as a software company . Jeff's intention was not to be a broker , but I think he wanted to sell it to brokers . This was before my time . This was back when he started it in 06 , but I ended up saying , screw it , I'm going to actually just build a competitor to Robinson and use this technology .

So it had that foundation as a company , right , not a tech company , but certainly had at the time the best technology . To this day I think it's probably still one of the best TMSs out there . It was built before the cloud . It was built before mobile computing . Part of my challenge later became how do you modernize some of this ?

But I spent in operations but I tend not to put . I don't really I'm not big on self-promotion , so it's kind of if you look at my titles and stuff , it probably just seems really odd , but if you understood kind of what I was working on and asked to do throughout the course it may make a little more sense . So I did spend a lot of time in operations .

Operations at Coyote is another thing that's not understood . That's really .

There was a clear delineation between hunters and farmers , right , hunters going out and knocking down doors and getting new accounts , and farmers were the operations folks that were taking a single customer , a point of contact with the customer , a lot of the time large Fortune 500 enterprise customers and just growing it , trying to get in there , understand the planners

, understand their business , and that was , it's not like binary . So you worked in tandem with the more traditional sales reps and hunters . So I did that for a few years . We landed the Heineken account in , I think , late 2000, . Maybe 2010 or so , and that was a full outsource .

So we that was a really epitom moment in Coyote's history that Chris Pickett , who's now the CEO of Flock Freight , was , I think , the champion of and we started an entire kind of four PL division around that and so I mean , I was kind of expecting you to point to that moment when I asked you the question earlier , because didn't the company double in size that

day when that was announced ? essentially , yeah , and we got us . It was a single source , so they were hiring us to be an extension of their transportation team and so we were moving . What started us every Heineken , heineken light , amstel light that was inland distribution .

So come over on ships into six US ports throughout the country and their warehouse providers would drain the loads there and then we do all the inland distribution to their distributors . And that was a massive undertaking for us and really launched what became known as CTM or Collaborative Transportation Management .

And when we got that account my job was to get it onboarded and there was obviously a ton of high volume freight on that , like dense lanes , and we had some of that from some of our customers , but never this magnitude , and so a huge amount of it was how do we go procure the underlying capacity at steady rates so we don't get clobbered playing the spot

market on this and have a higher level of service ? So it was the first time we really had like a dedicated capacity effort behind a major shipper and that morphed into a lot of other things down the line .

There's way more depth , and so I do think this is a contributing factor to how Cameron got where he is today , because a lot of Coyote is the employee works their butt off and then gets just thrown into a situation because they had earned it through the hard work they'd done and the situation did not have a pre-planned solution . That was set for you .

It was hey , yeah , you're a 24 year old kid , but you've done great in your previous role . Now you're gonna take on this whole new thing that is gonna double the size of the company . It's never been done before within this business . Figure it out .

And there was just such a level of accountability and passion and drive . You just figured it out .

And I think that that was such a driver for the ambition , for the accountability for really all of it , for building people like Cameron into the you know kind of executive they are today .

You're on this extremely accelerated learning curve and so you know that becomes really attractive to outside when we talk about you know , how did all these other people end up , you know , being attracted to other organizations ?

It's probably because , yeah , the resume says they've got 10 years of experience , but reality , they've got 20 , 30 years of experience because of those types of situations that they were thrown into so early on in their careers .

What we were doing at that point in time is taking our brokerage software , which was a client server configuration and it was all pre cloud , and we essentially just created an entry point for Heineken on the web and said come on in and you can get access to our TMS via the web . And so I had to figure that out and I had to be credible .

I didn't do that , but I got to see how that was done with Chris another another lady who is incredibly smart and still in the industry named Mick , and I got to work with some really good technologists Bill Drigger at the time and figure out how do we do this , and I got to really observe .

But I was on the other end of it of , okay , I'm on the delivery side of this and I'm going to figure out . You know how do we make sure this works for the customer . And then you know there's a bunch of other things in my like the rest of the time there that that were always centered around like some intersection between operations , sales and technology .

You have this passionate culture of people who are trying to take on the world and now we're saying , okay , we're going to bring these three , four , 500 people and bring them into our culture . Talk a little bit about what that experience was like , what you learned from that .

I remember I walked in on January 2 , 2014 , and Jeff came over and trapped me on the shoulder . He's come here and that's always that's never like a great thing and he's very stoic and like , oh , like day one , what's happening here ? And he goes we're going to go do this thing . I think this makes a lot of sense .

Go work with Cisler , jonathan Cisler , who was our CFO . We're going to buy this company and we want you to run it . And I'm like Jeff , I like I was an English major and I like know how to do ops and like run CTM , like I have no business in M&A and it scared the daylights out of me .

So what I did , what anyone else is doing , I'm looking at the book right now . I went and bought a book called Murders and Acquisitions and I went home and I read it that night and I was like , okay , I guess this is what I was , what I'm supposed to do .

I spent the next kind of three months doing diligence on the deal and that we assembled a team internally , a bunch of folks from the within Coyote that we're going to pair up with people at the access side , which this was all still silent for the first quarter . I think we announced the deal on in March of 14 .

And the challenge there is you also have you have customer overlap and I think you know the two businesses were remarkably complimentary . So Coyote was heavy food and Bev enterprise grade shippers fortune 500 . It's not to say that we didn't have a presence in the small midsize markets . Access was largely small , midsize .

So the overlap was actually not as bad as we thought and that is in brokerage transactions typically the most important thing to get right and the hardest thing to get right . And so we spent a lot of time understanding that overlap . Who should get the account ? How do you deal with that ?

I think the other thing that was really challenging is they had this incredible business they were so kind of is a billion . They were 500 million very , very profitable , but they had a completely different operating model . So Coyote had been since day one a split by cell model , right , split , carriers and customer sides , and access was a cradle .

The grave model Ted has been on the podcast I think he's talked about this a bit and there's there's a tremendous amount of strength in that model that I got to learn about . But the mission was to you know , I think they felt like they were seeing the upper bounds of what their growth could be under that model .

They were getting constrained on their growth and they I think their leadership , and Chad Eichelberger , ronald Ramsey , ted who exited in that transaction , and Chad and Ronald stayed on .

But they saw the same thing and said , ok , we're going to move to that model , and so the job was fix a customer overlap , but also we had to change the entire operating model of their 500 million dollar business overnight . And that Jeff is next . I'm not . I haven't been told that . I'm a very patient person , but he is definitely not .

He's the most impatient person , and so the mission was do this in five weeks , he said . I think the first one was do it . Do it in one week , and I think when we assessed how much needed to get done , I asked him for five weeks . I think I asked him for two months and he laughed at me and said no , and we ended up at five weeks .

And so there was a lot of like really good I hate this word but good synergy between the groups , and that was that's really what those things were .

But the real difficulty of that transaction was the customer overlap was minimal , it's not to say there was none but how do you get a bunch of people that work in a pod model to trust a carrier up with their freight ? And that was one of the harder challenges and I'd say the overall the transaction was . It was a huge success . I mean the company .

You took a billion dollar company , a $500 million company , and then same year you shoved them together in five weeks , trained 450 people on a whole new way of doing business , changed their commission structures and we ended up being a $2 billion company at the end of that year .

So both companies hit their organic growth goals and it's because I think you had to Andrew's point earlier , you just had on the other side , at Access you had a bunch of the same type of people that were at Coyote . They were , you know , hungry , they wanted to do well , they were excited , they were , you know , bought into the to the combined mission .

But you know it didn't come without certainly some challenges as well .

So I guess , for those out there that say , hey , these mergers and acquisitions , you know , and integrating companies can take a long time , you're demonstrating that that , hey , that's , there is a faster route to this .

So I guess , other than Jeff , kind of being there in your ear saying , get this done immediately , like , how do you actually execute at that speed ?

So make sure that all the pieces like think through all the things that need to get done and make sure that something like either you're doing it or you need to find something to do it , and I think you know the other thing about Coyote that's amazing is we would just take other people and , just like you've never done this before , we need to train 500 people

. Go do that . Coyote had a great training program , so that part was maybe . That was maybe one of the things that was a little simpler but we had to . We also were hiring our own people , so we had to add more people to the entire training function . We had to have someone lead the training effort . You know we had two or three folks .

I mean , frankly , we we got the entire organization rallied behind the cause and I was just a benefactor of the guy that got to say I'm the orchestrator . But the work was done by a collaborative team on with one person at Coyote . One person at Access owned a functional area .

So training , sales carrier , sales those were all people that were , you know , on the team trying to get the same thing done together .

I'm going to this group of people that are lazy , stuck in their ways , corporate . No , you're like , these people want to run , they want to sprint and I want to sprint with them .

And then I think the other interesting piece is just the system at Coyote and the foundation was so strong that , like you know , cameron says you didn't want to get tapped on your shoulder by Jeff and , like , I think , part of everyone didn't want to get tapped on their shoulder , but the other part of everyone did want to get tapped because when you got tapped

you were going to get thrown into a situation you were completely uncomfortable in and you were going to grow through it , you were going to learn through it and it was going to be a new opportunity . The same way that Cameron got tossed into this M&A thing without any experience , that happened for hundreds of people because the company just .

This is why I think growth is such a good driver for buy-in , because growth creates opportunity and , at the end of the day , when you just try to break down what does an employee want , how do I make an employee happy ? The number one thing on every employee's list , right next to money , is opportunity , especially because opportunity ties into money .

So I just think that growth maybe creates challenges , but it can solve a lot of problems in keeping your employees engaged , happy and bought into what you're doing .

You know , I certainly face that challenge as well and , like I said , many people have . So I'm curious what was that , what was going through your head and what was that decision like to make the decision to move away from Coyote and , you know , seek other opportunities yeah it was tough .

want to leave . At the time , right as you said , I was as a CTO at the business and loving my job , helping drive the strategy of the business . We were doing incredible things . I got to work with a bunch of incredible people and I got an inbound linked in sometime .

I don't know that time has distorted you know my understanding of the timeline here but at some point in time I got an inbound from Eric Fuller , ceo of a publicly traded trucking company , saying I want to do something different , let's have a conversation .

And when I got it I was like kind of rolled my eyes and I was like you know , it was a publicly traded CEO , I'll take the call , but like I'm not going to go work for a trucking company , and I said that to him when he called and I was like , hey , like I just want to let you know , like I have no interest in working for a trucking company .

So if this is a solicitation , I got to want to waste your time . And he's like well , why not ? And I said , well , none of you are growing in any meaningful way and I'm looking at your stock prices , you're not growing and you know none of you are investing in technology in any meaningful way , and it's just .

You know I'm pretty passionate about both of those things and it's probably going to be a pretty bad fit . And he just laughed and he , you know we talked for like two or three hours and we had a very similar outlook of the industry .

You know this is across a backdrop of you know , certainly that's quite topical with the news this week , but you know convoy and Uber coming out , and you know I'd been working with trucking companies , obviously throughout my entire career and I always had felt like there was a better way to run those trucking companies and , you know , modernize some of them .

And so we talked , yet with a very similar outlook , and he said , listen , I want to go start a division here that will cannibalize the rest of the business over time Should it be successful . And it's really .

You know how do we leverage technology to drive , you know , a better , you know operating margins and create a better lifestyle for drivers and better service our shippers . And to me I was .

This is a problem I had been thinking about in Coyote and been thinking about for a while , like we've talked about , you know other things that we should do adjacently to the core business for a while and I ended up thinking it was an interesting opportunity .

I ended up moving to Atlanta , so US Express was based in Chattanooga , but there were two things that Eric said , that and this all happened over the course of like 30 days . I was like , all right , I think this is . This is interesting enough . I've always been entrepreneurial .

I always wanted to take a bet on myself and I just to me it seemed like and this was a problem that I had a good idea , I think I knew I could solve , and I didn't know how to solve it , but I knew I could solve it and I ended up moving down and we moved to Atlanta for two reasons One instead of Chattanooga .

One was because and this was , this was Eric's but one was that you just couldn't get the tech , the really the people , that you need to do what we're trying to do in Chattanooga . Chattanooga is a great town but it's , you know , 300,000 people and so you have a somewhat limited talent pool .

And secondly , that you know he had been trying to make change in his business for a couple of years now and you know he would . He was pretty clear he said this publicly multiple times back in 1920 that you know the culture just wasn't conducive to radical change and so he didn't feel like he could put it there and have it survive .

He had been trying to do that and it had been squashed out a few times . So we put it in Atlanta , kind of away from the mothership but close enough down I 75 that it was easy to get back and forth .

I think some of that is just that I've been generally underestimated , underestimated my whole life , and so I have like a rational chip on my shoulder that I want to go do something that you know other people think is impossible or haven't done before , and try to figure it out . The number two isn't like I don't think about title necessarily .

You know I was I never really , until really becoming a CTO it wasn't really ever about the titles , it was about like what's the problem and you know what ? Again , it's just like a bunch of lateral steps to try to that you don't make as much money in .

But it's really about like in that world , I knew I needed a big title because I was , and this was later . Why I think we failed was the change management was going to be . I underestimated that profoundly , but I knew that I wouldn't .

We would need some clout to move within a company , and at a $2 billion trucking company that's been around for 30 years there is a lot more . You know , wait to put behind certain titles .

I had never seen a company that things happened because somebody specifically said it , not because like somebody else that maybe didn't have the title had an idea that was the right thing to do and so that was important . But it was a , it was a second , it was really the second in that kind of pyramid there .

And then comp I don't know comp I need to make enough money to support my family . It's important , but if I'm excited and doing what I want to do and that tends to follow , so I don't know .

So I'm kind of in line with you in terms of scope of work and so , yeah , it's just fascinating to hear your perspective on that .

You Don't just look at it as going from , you know , a sales rep to a lead , to a manager , to a senior manager , to a director . That kind of path . It's not to disparage that path , that's perfectly fine and a lot of people take that kind of linear route . I just found it .

I found a lot of power in just taking on different challenges that were more lateral in nature .

I'm not in that camp . I mean , I went from building coyote to basically trying to rebuild in a different setting , but not trying to solve a new problem . I thought it was really fun to kind of re-attack the same one .

So I just think that's a really interesting point to call out is , like you know , it's just easier and less challenging to stay the linear path . If I'm really good at this job and if I keep doing it , I'll get a promotion and be able to manage people doing this same job . It's just easier that way .

Like of transitioning out of this place that the only company you've effectively ever known into this new role .

. So just on the personal side of things , we were moving down from Chicago to Atlanta but the business was in Chattanooga and so I spent the first six months commuting while having a two-year-old at home . So most of my story can be attributed to a very , very strong woman , my wife behind me , tolerating my nonsense for as long as she has .

But on the personal side it was tough because I was gone five days a week for six months nonstop , and that is . There's a ton of personal sacrifice there . Having grown up with a single mother , I have two little girls six and three now and they're the most important thing to me .

Like people ask me what I do outside of work , it's like I mean , I have other interests but I generally hang out with my kids and I read . It's a pretty boring life at this point . Like I work , I hang out with my family and I read . That's like all I have time to do . There's only so much time in a day .

So that was six months and I was just going back and forth . I had an apartment in Chattanooga . We hadn't put the office down in Atlanta yet because there wasn't anything there . We had to kind of incubate this thing and it made a lot of sense .

But I'd say the day I walked in , there was a target on my back because we were transparent about what I was doing . But there are like people internally like , if this is successful like we were , and Eric specifically was very honest about like hey , our model isn't working .

I think the stock had gone that IPOed in 18 at like 16 bucks in the stock , I think like a month . Sometime mid year was that like $4 when I came on board . So he's like listen , we were like it's not going well , we're going to do something different . We believe in this , we're going to go invest in this thing and we were transparent about it .

And he was transparent about saying to the employees like when it works , it's going to cannibalize the parent company , the asset-based side , right , there are three divisions of US Express .

Or every other night or a few times a week , that's a much more serviceable lifestyle .

And long-haul trucking you are gone , you are away from your family and there is a limited population of people that desire that or don't have roots somewhere or a significant other they wanna see or children that they wanna be back with , and so being on the road for two weeks to two months at a time is just .

It is an incredibly taxing thing to put somebody through psychologically and emotionally and I think that that creates some dynamics that have natural turnover , but the bigger and that is something that I don't think you can necessarily solve , although I'll come back to that in a second , because that's the core part of the job .

The other part of it is they tend to not get . We did a study let me say the thesis , and I'll come back because most of what we were doing at Variant was trying to solve this problem . But the thesis was , if we can solve .

We use technology to solve two problems One , that the trucking , what a trucking company is trying to do , is actually a very complex math problem . It's exceedingly complex . It's known in academic circles as a traveling salesman problem and it's essentially an optimization problem .

That says , and it's combinatorially explosive and it's very expensive to compute at times if you don't do it the right way . So if you think about just the how many combinations of one driver now all the talking points from Variant days are flooding back into my brain . I mean , I haven't dusted these off in a while .

But if you just think about how many different permutations you have with one driver and five trucks or one driver and five orders , there's a handful of ways to do that . But if you add two drivers and 10 trucks you have another . It's a factorial , that's like 90 , it goes up to 90, . I think right away I've lost the specific talking points .

But if you get to where Variant was at the end , at 1,500 drivers and roughly 4,000 available loads , the number of combinations of which , in what order , given the constraints , can you assign that driver to on those loads , the number is so large that there is no word for it and there are thousands of zeros behind it .

And so if you think about that , like how did trucking companies solve that problem today ? Well , they constrain the problem .

They say we have a regional paradigm and we have a planner who is usually a human , maybe with some lightweight technology that says I plan for the Northeast , and so I'm gonna only look at Northeast freight , either on an inbound or an outbound basis . Almost never on either never .

Almost never , both bidirectionally , and I'm just gonna assign the best next load to that truck . And maybe it's not the best mathematical outcome for that truck or for the company , but it's the way that I understand it .

So rate per total mile is just what's the revenue per mile , but inclusive of deadhead , that's rate per total mile . That's a very important metric to a trucking company .

And then driver utilization drivers are paid per mile , and so you could have really high revenue on a really short haul load and the company makes a lot of money , but the driver doesn't , and so you have to have a balance between utilization of the truck and how many miles they get paid .

Now drivers also get paid on deadhead , so it's all that balloons that part of the equation for most trucking companies . So you wanna constrain the deadhead , certainly as well , but those are the two kind of objective variables that you really need to . That's really the heart of the optimization is rate per total mile and truck utilization .

I actually had a guy running my optimization that was from Delta and he wrote their algorithms to essentially redesign in real time when they have massive disruptions .

And when he came to variant he's like this holy shit , this is the hardest problem I've ever seen , because when I before I could just in my optimization when the plane took off I just kind of assumed it was gonna land and I knew it was gonna be at O'Hare , but when the driver leaves the facility , like all hell breaks loose .

outside of something terrible happening in the air like that thing's gonna land generally on time or maybe a little late , and so the constraints are just fundamentally different . But the math is the same .

It's just the amount of things that you have to figure out that could be disruptive , and to the extent that you can get that information in real time from the driver via our app or from the ELD on the truck , the better that you can plan the next part of their journey .

And so we were planning drivers two or three loads in advance , so we were giving drivers better visibility to where they were gonna be a few days from now , which usually this is one load at a time and a driver doesn't know where they're gonna go , sometimes eight hours until they're about to leave for it or , frankly , sometimes like two or three hours .

So giving them a little bit more line of sight to where they would be in the future also helped us plan to get them home on time more regularly and on time . So we did a study when we started to figure out one of the benefits of doing this for a company like Express .

Frankly , if I could have gone back in time , I would have just done this myself , but to do it with Express is I got access to all these drivers and I got to see and talk to them about why do you quit . Why do you think your peers quit ? And the general reasons were not what you would expect . Number one is they quit when they get disrespected .

Number one reason why they quit like something bad happens . The dispatcher or the fleet manager , which is another job in the trucking company , yells at them and they just had enough and they quit and they say the grass is green or I'm gonna go somewhere else . The second is home time .

So not just am I home as regularly as I wanna be , but did you get me home on time ? So if you , we found that we could actually predict driver attrition very well by the time I left if you missed their home time . So they said I need to be home . My son's got a football game at 9 am on Saturday morning and they got home at noon . They quit .

But if so , yeah , you got them home on Saturday like they asked , but you missed the time and so , and that's kind of on the best case scenario . A lot of time they say , okay , you have approved home time , you can be home this weekend , and then all of a sudden their home's in Omaha and they're in Maine on Thursday night .

They're not gonna make it , and this infuriates drivers .

But the people that worked with me on that problem don't get a lot of credit for what we did . We had 1,500 drivers in that fleet in two years and 75% of that was organic growth .

The problem that I think that precipitated the departure I think was twofold and there's , by the way , about 400 things that I've learned from that experience and I wouldn't change it for the world . It's amazing because you think how do you go from $0 to $300 million in two years break even and still fail and get fired ? It's crazy , right , absolutely .

And the reality is that we just grew too fast . One and we had a tremendous amount of like . The US Express was public and I was on the earnings calls and dealing with these analysts and investors and we needed to pump the brakes and digest . Like we got way too big , way too fast . And it's not like in brokerage , like in an asset-based trucking company .

You have physical constraints in the real world , right , whether or not you can get trucks and , by the way , we did this during COVID . So , like , trying to get new trucks during COVID was , you know , difficult , so we were converting , but the physical constraints do put a limitation on what ?

On growth , right , you can go in a brokerage from $0 to $300 million and probably be okay , it's gonna be a little sloppy , but you're not gonna have the same physical , real world constraints . And so you know , number one , we grew too fast . We needed to pump the brakes and say let's just digest , let's take a couple quarters and digest .

There was no aptitude for that , right , there was no . We needed to grow faster , because $300 million versus a $2 billion company that has not been historically very profitable . They were saying , you guys have been telling us that this is the solution and now you're telling us to wait , and just , it wasn't so .

That was one , and that was just part of the complexity of it . The other is just internal change management , and that was just . It was a really hard thing to try to bring a company along . So , andrew , to your question earlier , you said how can you talk about why cannibalization , and what does that mean ?

Well , as variant grew to 1,500 trucks , the over-the-road department , the legacy department , had shrunk to like 200 . And so we were net bigger than they ever were , with new freight , new drivers and some of the same freight .

We certainly needed to read like part of what I wanted to pause on was to re-engineer the network of freight because we had just kind of hit the upper bounds of the available freight pool that we needed . We needed to go out and find new freight , but the change management was just incredibly difficult and it's , you know , no one's .

If it's anyone's fault , it's mine .

Like I was a I was a bull in a china shop there and you know I had a huge mandate and I had a tremendous amount of expectation , very public expectations , but there was you know , this is a hard thing to try to bring people along in and that say and this wasn't the case Like we had plans to actually migrate people into new roles , different parts of the

business . A dedicated division was great and had been profitable for a while , but there , you know , there was kind of this existential crisis in a lot of people's minds of the more and more success this thing has , the worse and worse my future is , and I think that that change , all the change management to do that really well , became completely overwhelming .

And I think , you know , in retrospect there are things that I could have done and said and that I think Eric could have done and said to make that part easier . But that was never gonna be easy , that was never gonna be a simple thing to do .

And so , you know , at the end of the day I think I walked into the office and Eric and the attorney , who was a very close buddy of mine , we were working together on a lot of different parts of what I just said and he's like it's over , done and we're gonna keep going , but variance , not over .

I still see the potential here like but you're not the guy that's gonna run it anymore and I was out and then 30 , probably I walk out and not but an hour later why my mug shot is plastered all over freight waves , which was very , very fun .

Having gone through something similar different scales and different circumstances , but something quite similar myself Like that is it's the most humbling thing that can ever happen to you , especially when you don't see it coming , like I had obviously known there were .

You know we had started to erode some of our core metrics , which again was , I think , growth related . Like let's pump the brakes , this is gonna happen unless we can slow down . So I just didn't expect it to happen that way , that abruptly , and for me it was just like it's a gut punch right , you walk out , you're in shock .

The way it went down I thought was pretty poor , because we were a public company and as soon as I got terminated you have to file an SEC with the SEC .

And I thought , like without a really good communication plan and if you're talking point is this is still the future of the business , just Cameron's not the leader anymore like that needs to be very well thought out . And so I was like hey , like do you wanna stay on ? You want me to ?

Like I'll go away , but like this is not going to be received well because it's gonna to everyone else . It's gonna look really abrupt and there was no appetite for that , and so part of it was I was incredibly frustrated because there was a .

I felt like there was a better way to do it , not to say face for me , but like it was a pretty confusing story for a lot of people to hear and I think everyone . Like they are investors . This is a publicly traded company . This isn't just some private entity . This has been all over the news .

We've been talking about it , probably , frankly , too early , too fast and over hyping it . We should have a good communication plan here . And so that part was really frustrating to me because I had built this thing . I was really proud of it . I saw a path to make it work .

It required slowing down , it required a lot of other things , probably a change in how I was managing different components of things , but that was really difficult . And then what it did is the next few months . It kind of launched a what next ? What now ? There's obviously no going back . I had everything is always in a public company .

When you're a what's called a named executive officer , a NEO , everything is public . So like the termination is public , like everything's public . It's a brutal world to live in . But so this is out there and I'm thinking , okay , I got two little girls now , and what do I wanna do next ?

But also I have a pretty strict language around what I can and cannot do next and for how long I cannot do those things . I think I'm still under for another two months , some of those restrictive covenants . So I can't , like Eric felt so strongly about the model .

He said you can't touch this thing for a number of years because he was , I think , afraid that I was gonna go rebuild it . Frankly , if I wasn't contractually out like limited from doing it , I would have done it , because now I know how to do it and do it way faster .

And so the question for me was like all right , you need to get over your ego and really figure out what you're gonna do next , because you got a family to provide for and it was probably one of the hardest parts of my entire life .

I mean it was really challenging and meanwhile my phone's blowing up because , like Andrew , like everyone knew about it , like it was sitting out in the front page of freight waves for two weeks and I was like is this a slow news cycle or something Like ? Let's talk about something else guys .

And to see like there's a lot of people in Chattanooga they're really good people at US Express and a lot of them have their wealth tied to that stock , and to see it handled that way , I was just .

I was just like man , there's just such a better way to do this , but so I take no pride in that happening , but it was a , and certainly a lot of my wealth was tied into that . So I was also like , come on , man , it's like a double whammy .

So I went from Coyote , which was , you know , warburg , back private equity to UPS acquisition , being part of a public company , to going and being one of the public company at Express and starting having like a pseudo startup pseudo but also having all the pressures of a publicly traded company down it back all the way down to , like , startup VC world , which is

pretty different , for a different set of skills . It's a different set , it's a different life cycle . I know you spent some time there , I think . When did you leave , by the way ?

.

I mean it was like word for word what my experience was like , and so you know for me to jump ship , there had to be a really compelling story there , and this was during COVID as well .

And when I saw what Andrew and you know the Emerge team were building , I was like you know , being a procurement professional my entire life , I said this is incredible , right , and I've seen hundreds of technologies come through my door and I got to look at that platform . I'm like this is , this is special , this is something different .

And so , you know , for me it was . You know , after talking with Andrew for a while , it was a no brainer . There's a lot of apprehension , obviously , because , again , I'm leaving a place that I've , the only place I've ever known really , and to make that leap was really tough .

But yeah , I know we didn't cross paths , but curious if you saw the same thing that I saw and yeah , yeah I .

And so you know , luckily I had enough really good people that I had worked with over the course of my career that came out and we're certainly trying to support me any way they could and we're empathetic to whatever it was that precipitated that , and you know it was . I was immediately like I've never been known to like sit around and wait .

So I immediately like I spent this . So I got fired on December 13 of 21 . And so it's right before Christmas and New Year's and you know that is also at the peak of all of the markets . That was , you know in retrospect , that was a real interesting time in the capital markets and the stock market VC is going crazy .

All these deals are launching and I just got to work . I literally picked up the phone on dissent . I got a call actually from a guy named Jack Holmes on December 14 , the next day , and Jack Holmes is a guy that I knew .

We didn't cover this part , but after the access deal I went and was was part of Coyote's IPO , we were taking it public and ended up selling to UPS and so I was running that transaction because after after the access deal , I was homeless , like the TMS group didn't need me or the T the CTM group didn't need me back , and that integration was done .

But I got to know a lot of really great UPSers as a part of that and Jack Holmes was the chairman at Emerge and he called me and he said hey , I saw the news . You know this is incredible timing . We're looking for somebody right now and I know you and I spent a lot of time in Richmond , virginia , with him during that UPS transaction .

And so he reached out the next day and I got to talk to him and I was like hey , jack , this is like I really appreciate you . I really appreciate you reaching out so quickly . This is a little fresh for me . Let's talk after the holidays , but you know I'm really interested . And he told me a little bit about Emerge .

And then I got to know Andrew and he I see his vision , I got to see the product it is . It is just incredible . What that does for shippers is truly incredible and what they need , and they were having a ton of success in the shipper side and still are , and you know , I think they have 15 to $20 billion of shipper freight on that platform this year .

But the side that they hadn't really figured out yet was the carrier side .

The platform itself , the RFP platform itself , is really very user friendly and easy to use , and I think they were just trying to find a way that basically says look , shipper , you only can work with so many carriers . We can connect you to the long tail of carriers out there and give them access to your freight .

And then , from the carrier's perspective it was hey , you would never have access to this shipper freight on your own , but through our platform you can get that access Would you characterize it more closely as a competitor to Jager , who specifically does RFPs , or Transplace , who does RFPs , within a full transportation management solution .

They can do it same day and then you can run your bid , put a duration on it for the end of the next day , assuming that all your partners can actually call all that freight but just let me just speak to the capability of it and then they can get all those results back .

They can run their optimization scenarios and make awarding decisions and be done with the entire annual RFP process in hours , maybe days if , depending on the duration , how long you're going to give your network partners or your carriers and brokers the chance to bid .

But if in a fully optimized world you could be done in hours with your entire annual bid process . And if you look at , you know , koopa or Jagger or Transplace or any of the other folks that are running these processes for shippers , they can take months and they're done in spreadsheets and they're it's .

I mean , paul , you're next , you do procurement , so I'm not going to tell you . You know how laborious that could be , but they figured out an incredible mousetrap and a way to accelerate that progress .

I think Jagger is looked at as kind of one of the creams of the crop that's the way to say that phrase correctly in a plural form but in any case , not a great , not a great system , not great for the user in terms of the broker or the carrier , but also shippers get endlessly frustrated by it .

Just talk us through that from a personal perspective .

, but how do we monetize this thing ? And so I start . You know we go back and forth for a few months , like I don't start until March . I want to take a little time off .

I needed to reflect on what I had just done over the last two and a half years and where it went wrong , and I needed to , you know , focus a little bit on on what I could learn from that . So I started in March and it was . It was really interesting .

So we the agreement that I had with Andrew Leto I'll make sure I keep saying his last name so we don't confuse with the go ahead- Not to be confused . Right Was hey , you know , we we do need to diversify and get different talent pools , and so we actually ended up starting an Atlanta office at a merge .

Because I was not open , I wasn't going to put my wife through that type of move again , so any of my next opportunities were going to we're going to keep me in Atlanta . I did not want it . That was a tumultuous move and just not something I really wanted to put us through .

We just had we had just had a , I think at this point in time , my , my little girl was I had two little kids and one was a baby , so it didn't want to go do the you know the tumultuous move again . So I did .

I did travel back and forth a lot , but we set up an office in Atlanta and started building out the team there and set off to to try to figure out different monetization paths and it was a very interesting time .

Now , you know , like I said , I went from PE to public with UPS , public with express , but startup with variant to true startup with a VC backed money , which was I'd never done that before and this is in March of 2022 .

So last year , right and the entire VC world and arguably all the the entire world melts down six weeks after I get there , and so it's a very interesting time to be part of a VC back company , and so it's like what ? Like what am I going to do ? When I got there on day one was a very different thing six weeks later and there was just a .

There was a new world order , and I have to give Andrew Leto and like a tremendous amount of credit . He went from being a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO overnight and and he had to and you have to fight to survive I think we're seeing some of that in news this week , which is incredibly tragic .

But there were things that had to happen right away to ensure the company's survival , and those were again another incredible learning experience for me , but certainly quite unpleasant at times , but they , they did it with grace , they did it the right way , we did it in a very measured way and put the company on really secure footing , but it was that was a .

For the companies that didn't realize the magnitude of what was happening . In April of last year and May of last year , the most important thing was to take immediate action , and a lot of folks didn't , and the folks that don't are going to be the ones that get hurt the most , and those are very unpleasant things .

. Some of it was a lot of . It was just performance-based stuff . Like there was just coming in here and I came in , there was no one . There was no one in my role before I got there , so it was some basic stuff that just had to do to clean up the operation and get it moving in the right direction .

But it's about like , how are you going to spend money in the future , how much money do you have , how much are you burning and how much are you going to spend in the future , and that those are just a series of trade-offs , right . Like , are we going to invest in this thing ? Like , if you talk about Jager , like well , they're a great multimodal solution .

That's a lot of the reason why large fortune 500 shippers would use somebody like that , because they can also put their ocean RFP out there . When I got there , we were going to go get into that market and go do that , but you know you don't want them .

You don't make those same capital allocation decisions If you don't think that you can raise more money on the back end , right . And so some of it was just like a ruthless prioritization and that requires getting an entire organization of people rallied behind the cause , right ?

Not all of your employees don't realize what's going on in these capital markets to the extent that you do , and if you play that soundtrack out over the next year or two and what you're really trying to do is just do the right , responsible thing to make sure that you don't have to shut down your operation , and so that means that the people that are super

excited about building the ocean you know , advancing the optimization or building the ocean component of the procurement software are going to be a little disheartened by the fact that we're not going to do that for a little while .

That Do you think was really interest , would be really helpful for an audience to understand , like what were the right moves made there , whether it's how he communicated or whatever it was to get everybody bought into these moves that were being made .

But certainly I think you know there was a lot of kind of data we applied to what's happening in market cycles and how do we better understand them and predict them and navigate them .

I saw the downturn in the freight market and we didn't have a lot of truckload expertise within Emerge at the time , like there are some but not a lot , and I saw that downturn coming a mile away . He saw what was happening in the capital markets and both of us were like oh boy , and we got .

I mean , he got with the executive team and it was kind of this like it was extremely fast but also somewhat gradual , like hey , guys , we think it's going to get really nasty in both markets that we need .

We need the freight markets and we need the capital markets and if both are going to yield really unfavorable circumstances for us , we're going to have to get really serious about what we do .

We did put the customers first , we put our carriers first we stayed true to the vision , but it really it was one of those things where it was like all right , what are we going to do ? How much life do you have when you're VC and you're not working to get to profitability ?

We had visibility to profit , we could see where we were going to get profitable , but it was not on a timeline that we were comfortable with , given the uncertainty of the moment . And simultaneously you got what's going on in Ukraine .

We had development in Ukraine and had to get off that dependency and our CTO and the rest of the executive team did a great job , kind of staying true to good partnership but diversifying .

So there was a lot going on in that business and the leadership of that company just said we acknowledge how ugly this is and frankly , if you remember , not a lot of VC companies were talking about this the way we were talking about it in April and May and we were saying this is going to be a long , long period and maybe a bit of a drought from a

capital standpoint and really we just we talked to each other every single day and we made those tradeoffs and those decisions together and ultimately , as unpleasant as some of it was .

It was the right thing for the company and it wasn't like the headlines that you see that you saw a lot of companies go through eight months later earlier this year where there's these massive rifts .

Like we didn't need to do those massive rifts because we kind of just took a really measured approach really quickly and I think the companies that responded really fast in April , may , june , july of last year will be okay for the most part .

But if you didn't take your medicine at that time , I fear that there's going to be more of what we saw this week with other players .

Let's focus on the one , two things that we know are going to really catapult us and just get narrowly laser focused on that .

So we were going to LTL , we were going to do multimodal ocean and all of that stopped overnight and that saved millions of dollars in capital . But it was tough decisions for a guy who was so excited about his vision .

I think of any VC firm , any VC back company that I have seen in our space , ruthlessly practical , measured and just taking their time , even though , like Leto , is another one of us , that is not a patient . He's not a patient bear .

Like that guy wants to go a million miles an hour , and so I think it kills him a little bit inside to have to slow down . But he gets it and he's doing it .

This is actually incredible roundabout story and really takes the story that you guys wanted to focus on earlier in this around Access America and that transaction , so the way that I got plugged into this company we're a private equity back , so Carousel Capital owns Armstrong Transport Group and they also own Reliance Partners in the industry , which is a large insurance

player that a lot of people know , run by a bunch of former executives from Access America , and so when my predecessor at Armstrong stepped down and wanted to focus on things for his family and just step away for a bit , they needed to go launch a CEO search and reached out to Chad and Ronald at Reliance and said , do you know anybody ?

And they threw my name in the hat , and so that's really how the opportunity came about , and when I got reached out to by the headhunter who had gotten my name from them , I actually had not heard of Armstrong Transport Group , which is pretty unusual for me because I've always been a student of this industry and it's unusual that I don't know a billion dollar

player in it . I learned later why I didn't know , because the company's exploded . We went from roughly 80 to $100 million in 2018 to over a billion dollars a few years later , and so it's a tremendous growth story . But I think the question was how and why . When I got here and I got to see , I went in really skeptically and I'm also like I'm not sure .

I don't really want to relocate again . That's not going to be the primary driver behind the decision , but I really don't want to have to relocate again and I know my wife doesn't .

But when I got in and saw the company and I got to meet some of the team and meet the people , I was blown away at just the quality of the people , the performance of the business . How did this thing get from where it was four years ago to where it is now ?

And the more I learned about this company , the more excited I got about it , and we have incredible partners .

I knew a few things that I knew I wanted was , after having been part of a VC-backed company and private equity and public , I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my career in private equity-backed companies for a litany of reasons , but that was where I liked the governance structure . I like the ruthless pragmatism and corporate governance that comes with it .

It's just there's a different . They're run very , very differently . And when I got in here and I met a great partners , like we have in Carousel , and then I met the team that I would be inheriting , I was like this is really special , this is very different .

We have all of our own proprietary technology and I just said this is something I think I have to do . But I went home and I drove up to Charlotte , which is like a three and a half hour drive from Atlanta . I was driving home I was like , ok , that's a really cool business . I like it way more than I thought I was going to like it .

But I was like I'm probably not going to get that job was how I came home to and my wife and I was . She was like how'd it go ? And I was like , yeah , it went well , I really liked it and it would be really fun , but it's probably not going to happen .

And I didn't hear anything back for like three or four weeks and I just went back because I was super happy to merge and didn't want to leave there and enjoying the mission . And I got a call back and they're OK , it's down to you and some other guy who I have no idea who that was , but I ended up getting it and same story again .

We just packed up the family . I think I accepted the job and I don't know April late March and started April 24th and just moved the family June 1st . So another tumultuous personal decision that I'm very grateful to my family for , but been off to the races ever since .

And you know that's again just another example of you know I would never be where I am without those mentors and frankly , I don't know if we're . You know it's only six months in , so you know still a lot to tell here . But that was the first thing .

I did Call them and you know , give me some of these mentors that were CEOs at different points in time and so trying to really understand , you know , what advice do you have for me ? And you know what's unique about this transition , or what it was , is that there wasn't something like on fire .

So it's , you know , a lot of CEO transitions happened because their predecessor was failing or like the company's on fire .

And that wasn't the scenario here , which you know , in a lot of ways is quite nice because it's not , like you know , in case of emergency break glass and you got to come in here and be like kind of a reckless you know , come in here and , just you know , make major , major change overnight , and that just wasn't what was necessary here .

So in a lot of ways it afforded me and the opportunity to come in and just kind of have a listening period . So I spent the last , you know first , 90 to 100 days traveling around , getting to know everybody and understand the business a little bit , but it's been an incredible transition .

The business is , I think , frankly and I'll maybe give you guys a quick plug in an elevator pitch on Armstrong for those that might not know who we are or how we do- it .

We're actually launching our next generation and Q1 and Q2 of next year , which is it's an entirely new platform and will enable us to go a lot faster on some of the things that we want to do .

But the agent side of the business , these are effectively small business owners . So these are people .

When you hear 10,000 brokers in the US and you're like I just can't figure out where all those folks are , a lot of them are agents and those agents are traditionally probably former W2 employees of large brokerages or just people that have always just been brokering freight on their own .

And when you do that , you can do it the way Andrew Silver did it and you can go get your bond and you can invest in finance and accounting and then the TMS and you can go do all of those things to be a company like Molo is and has become , and they're more of like a traditional brokerage .

Or you can sign up with a limited group of partners , armstrong being one of them , global Trans being another worldwide express priority one . Those are the kind of the big ones out there .

You can sign up with them and what you get with Armstrong is a incredible TMS that you can run your business on on day one and all of your back office , so you have all your finance , accounting , everything that you need to run your business , as well as a brand that you can do business , as that has a lot more credibility than whatever your small businesses .

But these are really good freight brokers that understand the philosophy that Andrew and I spoke about at the beginning of this podcast , or on just being obsessed with your customer .

I have never seen and I never understood this part of the business until I came here more like-minded people to what we described during the early days of coyote than these freight brokers . It's their entire livelihood . They service their customers 24 , 7 , 365 .

They may not be as big and scaled as coyote , but a lot of what they get is the benefits from Armstrong , of a scaled provider .

So they get the tech , they get the support and so in a lot of ways you can think of Armstrong as really a 3PL on the front end and a BPO on the back end , so a business process outsourcing or business process optimization that's really what Armstrong is on the agent side of the business . And so we have a couple hundred not even a couple hundred .

We have 150-ish agents that are freight brokers with great deep relationships with different shippers throughout the country and they use our platform to enable them to service them .

So agents typically have a very high risk tolerance and it's usually a lot higher than somebody that's in a W-2 job , because they're 1099s , they don't have a salary , they do not have benefits , they eat what they kill and that is not something that , depending on where you are in your life and if you're starting a family or what your own priorities and objectives

are , or maybe you're just not looking to take that type of risk you should stay in a W-2 model and that's great . But if you wanna take the risk and bet on yourself , then that's where a lot of these folks come from . They're willing to take the risk and they see a reward for it . But there's a profound trade off there . It's not for everybody .

I resonate with the idea that you're walking into a good situation , that's kind of working , so you're not having to make wholesale changes and so you're not necessarily eroding confidence or buying .

But how do you come into an organization like that as the CEO without necessarily I mean you've got a phenomenal pedigree , but not necessarily like hey , I've been CEO of a brokerage before . How do you get people to buy into Cameron as their leader ?

Like I came in here saying like hey , you guys are not , I'm not here because there's something really messed up . So try to disarm people that I'm here to like make waves or a lot you always hear like CEOs come in and they wipe out their leadership team and bring in their own people and that just wasn't the mission here .

And so the first thing I need to do is disarm people and like I'm not a threat , and the best way to do that was just kind of own and just praise what has been an incredible trajectory for the company to date , like this company has been doing really well . That's because of all of you .

I got no credit for any of that and hopefully the actions over time really show that I'm being very real about that . The second is helping people realize that there will be change , but it's gonna be measured and it's gonna be changed . That we all agree to as a team .

I wanna understand this business and so the first thing I did was ask everybody to be patient with me , because I'm gonna ask you a ton of stupid questions and it's only because I wanna learn , and that is . It's not because I'm trying to figure out . If I'm not like evaluating you and please just be disarmed . I'm gonna ask you , like , how does this work ?

I've never been part of an agent model before . I wanna understand it and I wanna understand how our core brokerage really works . And I asked for their patience . On my very first town hall , my very first day , I kind of gave my background , a bit of what we talked about on this podcast and a few other tidbits . But I asked them .

I told them we're gonna go into a hundred day listening period and , like I am going to listen and learn , travel around and meet all of you and I just want to know , like , what's working , what's not working , what do you think ? What's one thing Like ?

The one thing I asked every single person in the company is what's working really , really well , what's not working , and what's one thing that no one wants to tell me ?

And I find that when I do this with small groups , I tend to get really , really good , genuine answers and sometimes the you know I get a lot of feedback when I ask it in a certain way , and so I just I kind of just took all of that feedback and I did my own assessment on you know , where does where do we make money ?

Where does this , you know , where do we have kind of special sauce , what are we really good at ? And kind of took it back with the team and it just it's been for the last few months . After that hundred days , we're actually going to go offsite early next year and take the team offsite and really put together a bit more of our plan for the long run .

But it's been one of those things where I just solicited a lot of feedback from the employees and I listened to the things that aren't working If we're , and I told them if we're doing things and things are working , like I have no interest in disrupting that , but if things are not working , we are going to run through and and bust through those barriers and

we're going to stop doing them or we're going to fix them . And that's really been what the last six months has been about is just listening to the employees . They know what's working and what's not working Right . So if you just listen to them and help them solve those problems , it's that's really been the first six months here .

But I do want to kind of close the loop here on Armstrong . I don't feel like we got enough time on it . But where are we taking this business Like ? What is the plan ? What are you wanting to accomplish in the next three or five years ? What are we trying to get people to buy into ?

We're in the process of launching and scaling LTL right now , which is the fastest growing part of our business , and giving that and enabling our agents to sell different services than they ever could before .

But we're trying to get scale because we know that scale gives a lot of benefit back to the agents , and so our traditional brokerage is growing and we can offer services to our agents from that , as well as to our direct shippers .

And so a lot of what we're going to be doing over the next few years is a lot of what we've been doing for the last few years , which is enabling small businesses to grow and continuing to service our shippers and our carriers in the way with the philosophy that's been articulated on this podcast I think it's somewhat ad nauseam that is what we're going to do

. We're really good at it today .

We have some other things that we need to clean up , but overall , the service mentality in this business is incredibly high and , frankly , we just want to continue to find new shippers that we can impress with our service , find new carriers that we can delight with doing what we say we're going to do and doing it better than anyone else .

And I think , should that happen , and as that continues to happen , I don't see anything that stands between us and 2 billion , anything besides us and 3 billion . But that's all kind of a byproduct of just doing the right thing for our shippers and carriers and agents .

Two , if you don't know how to do something , read a book . And three , just get out of your comfort zone , right , go , do something you haven't done before and learn something new at an accelerated rate . Did I capture anything else you want to leave us with ?

You're not sure . Are they coming to try to enforce their will or what are they doing ? And they come and they just say , hey , can you tell me what's working here ? Can you tell me what's not ? Can you tell me something that nobody else would tell ?

I mean , it's just you're building trust that way and that's such a challenge , the role you're taking on and coming into a billion dollar business as CEO . So it's just cool . We're gonna have to have you back on in six months or a year and hear about how things are going . So , yeah , appreciate you coming on .