I worked at a scrap yard for about 6 months and logistics was super ****ed up. Where I worked was kind of a **** show, but we were selling to nation-wide operations who handled their own trucks, and their side was just as ****ed up. I applaud you for making sense of all of it, because it wore me out in just a couple of months.

Where I work now is struggling with the marketing aspect as well. We just send out a letter/e-mail once a year and if the president has time he will make a phone call to potentially juicy prospects. They get the same letter/e-mail/phone call from every other competitor.

This isn't some unique idea, or revelation, but face to face interactions at trade shows / conventions is where the difference is made, from what I've seen. We have a broker who is a complete trainwreck, but he has a massive book of business because he travels a lot of and can schmooze with the best of them. At our yearly conclave the marketing expo focused mostly on personal interactions with big prospects and it was all handshakes, cocktails, and golf.

That is where our resources have been going, but we wont start anything until the summer, so I don't have any personal knowledge on how that can/can't work out.

Calling on the specific day when one of your competitors has dropped the ball is primarily how sales get made.

This is a very good thing for freight brokers lol. The median freight broker is pretty weak. The 80/20 principle is in full effect in my industry.

I've tried it. The sales cycle is way too long to sustain them and the hit ratio is too low. Obviously compensating for that is the fact that a single customer can easily put hundreds of thousands of dollars in our collective pockets.

The standard industry models are the standard industry models for a reason it seems. I've tried a bunch of alternative stuff and it just doesn't seem to work particularly well. Could easily be me though.

Yeah that's a decent part of why I moved to Austin. The networking opportunities here are significantly better than they are in the midwest.

I do plan to get out of my apartment more now that I've got a full time sourcing guy. Freeing me up from herding trucks has really opened up my schedule a lot.

Hey as someone that also works in this industry (Logistics, though not in the brokerage side), this thread is relevant to my interests.

God what a **** show this whole thing is.

That is every industry. Yet the world keeps turning.

Working in logistics, and specifically seeing how much and what types of freight are dependant on brokerages like OP's, blew my mind when I stared. The idea that "the world keeps turning" gets harder and harder to believe when you see how the sausage gets made.

It gets better lol. A huge part of it getting better is realizing that the ****ty people you're dealing with aren't just unnecessary, but are actually poisoning your life. It only seems like you need them. Once I cut them all out and refused to work with any more of them I did better than ever.

Seriously fire the worst 25% of your carrier base and reassign all their freight to the competition.

As someone that works for what I can promise is one of your bottom 25% of carriers, I resent that lol.

I'm actually very interested to see where shipping goes in the next 5-10 years, the time between now, when we have a serious shortage of drivers, and when self-driving trucks become commonplace. Obviously SDTs will require drivers to ride alone and handle PU and Del at first, but I imagine those jobs will be more attractive. We're already having serious issues getting asses in seats and customers are clamoring for people to pick freight up, I can't see this getting better (barring a serious recession) any time soon.

The shortage of truckers isn't because people dislike the things that automation would remove from the driver's plate.

You generally don't hear from ex-truckers that the reason they left a job is because of all of the troublesome steering that needed to be done.

I will pose the contrarian view that we will not see automated trucks for at least 20 years, if not 40. We can't even automate trains yet, which ought to be several magnitudes easier.

Self driving technology will take longer to develop than most people currently believe.

I agree and was going to post something similar.

The CEO of Waymo has said things in line with this. The Pareto Principle applied pretty strongly here and I think that is what is tricking people into thinking it will happen sooner than it actually will.

Thirty years ago, I was working on developing ceramics for use in fuel cells that would "power all vehicles within the next ten years."

On the other hand, voice recognition was going to take longer to develop and was maybe impossible.

I hope you're right, but since my livelihood depends on it not happening, I freely admit I'm predisposed to believe that side of the debate.

It's interesting that you say that. I work for a larger, "budget" carrier and we see a lot of newer, younger drivers many of whom wash out quickly.

A lot of them leave for the typical reasons (i.e. lack of freight, hope for better pay, hope for regional jobs, etc.) but we've seen an uptick, especially in younger applicants who start and leave that list a dislike of the boredom of trucking as their issue. Older drivers never seemed to have this issue, but new drivers in their 20s and 30s are giving that as a reason for their departure more frequently (and we often don't get a VoE on these guys, so it seems genuine).

As a younger guy myself, I can't imagine having to drive my clock out each day with nothing but podcasts to keep me company, but if the job was to babysit an automated driving system and be present but not truly attentive, that might be doable. It's obviously not a panacea, but I can only speak from my narrow corner of the world.

I feel like it would be significantly easier to just create a central routing system that controls all cars at once rather than a driving brain that can react to human elements.

That creates it's own issues with implementation, but ultimately would be the superior choice

Work for an equipment rental company. I keep telling them to use brokers as we spend $10Mil+ on trucking every year. I"m guessing we could save money using a broker?

Yeah... driver pay is going up. It's going to keep going up until it stops going up. It'll stop going up when the recession finally hits. Until then I wouldn't be super scared to ask shippers for more money if you work for a larger contract carrier. You're not the only one.

I agree about full self driving trucks. Highway auto pilot on the other hand will be here in 5 years or less. The main impact is going to be that it should make it possible for every truck to make more miles in a day, which will impact the cost of trucking.

On some of it yes. Basically the loads you have to plead with your carriers to take that cost a lot of money you're shooting yourself in the foot not using brokers.

If your freight is going to random places all the time because your customer base is national and your orders not regular at all then yes you should save a ton of money moving to brokers. It's way cheaper to hire a truck that wants to go a place than it is to pay a truck to go to a place. You switch from being the guy who helps them get where they need to go to the guy justifying the whole trip. The second guy pays 15-25% more from what I've seen.

Also if you're doing a lot of flatbed partials you should be using way more brokers. Any larger LTL shipments actually are generally cheaper in the spot market for the same reasons.

Is Amazon going to succeed in disrupting the freight brokerage market?

I think Amazon is going to succeed in going 100% in house for freight brokerage. There are multiple other large corporations that ship lots of truckload freight (JBS, Pepsi just to name two) that have gone 100% in house for brokerage.

I don't think the business will generate the kind of metrics that makes Amazon want to spend any money on customer acquisition or competing with other brokers for other accounts though. For starters it's going to be hard to sell a lot of companies on letting Amazon into their supply chain any deeper than they already are.

I think Amazon is going to be a large in-house freight brokerage that belongs to a company that will often force people to use their brokerage to route incoming shipments... And this won't be happening with their larger vendors who already regard Amazon with significant suspicion (for excellent reasons to be fair).

I think they'll have a small but noticeable impact basically. I think the margins available for the difficulty required to figure it out don't make much sense for Amazon to waste much time on making it bigger than just moving their own stuff though.

Have you read the book "Changing How the World Does Business"? By Roger Frocke

I'm not trying to sell the book. It's a good read and he was a friend of mine.