[00:00]
Alright. I'm excited for this next episode of the Freight Show. We've got a good one for you folks. This interview is with Chad Eichelberger who has had a pretty amazing run-in the industry, was, you know, an early seller, I think, kind of, like, first 10 employee at Access America, you know, famously one of the brokerages that really scaled and sold to Coyote out of the Chattanooga area where he climbed the ranks and was president there and then stepped out. And similarly, like, at early stages, played a leading role in building Reliance Partners, which is now one of the largest I think the largest insurance provider for the motor carrier industry. Works with a lot of the big brokerages and many small trucking companies. It's a really amazing conversation about a lot about sales and how do you, like, win as an individual seller, and how do you build successful sales orgs in the logistics industry. So enjoy this one. Super excited to have you on the show and to be chatting today. Thanks for being here.
Chad Eichelberger: Yeah. Thanks, Jesse. Appreciate you having me.
Chad, I thought a good place to start or an area that I'm curious to start is going back all the way to the Access America days. And maybe tell me a bit about, you know, such a feels like that business has played such a big role in the lore of, obviously, this sort of Chattanooga area, but I think sort of in freight more generally. And we'd love to just kind of take us through the early days. Like, you know, you played a really big role in that success story. Yeah, maybe tell that story for us there.
Chad Eichelberger: Yeah. Happy to.
[02:00]
Chad Eichelberger: You know, so the quick background on myself kinda leading up to Access America. I went to the University of Tennessee, graduated with degree in business, majoring in logistics. So ended up down in Atlanta for probably the first year. Wanted to get back a little bit closer to home. Home is near Knoxville. So landed at this start up, Access America Transport, kind of, you know, I would say kind of a rougher section of Chattanooga, very industrial section. Certainly not in the office building we're in today, but basically the top floor of a brick distributor in the Alton Park neighborhood in Chattanooga. So very, very humble beginnings. Joined. I think I was maybe the seventh or eighth employee.
And you joined just as a broker initially?
Chad Eichelberger: No. I was just, you know, probably less than a year out of college. And, you know, frankly, when I got to Access America, it was like, wow. I can make, you know, uncapped earning potential and started learning it and just became really obsessed with the business. And so, you know, I went from kinda entry level freight broker to managing a team and then eventually, you know, director of sales, vice president of sales, and so eventually was running sales for the organization. Following that, you know, became president of the company in 2009, and, obviously, Ted, Allen, and Barry founded that business. And so it was super fun ride. In about 2009, I became president of the company. Ted Allen and Barry, they were serial entrepreneurs. They started investing in other businesses and kinda left the business in our hands. And so Ronald Ramsey, who still works with me out here somewhere on the floor today, and Steve Cox and myself really got to take over that business in 09, and it was an absolutely fun ride.
[04:02]
Chad Eichelberger: The business, I think, we're around $56,000,000 in 2009. And, you know, if memory serves me correct, it was 56,000,000 to $1.80 to $3.65 to $4.85. And then when we sold to Coyote on about a $6.75 run rate. And so it was just an incredible time. I mean, we were very, very entrepreneurial, obviously, cradle to grave model. Of course, you had kinda in Chattanooga before that. You had US Express. You had Covenant. You had Kenco. But outside of that, there was not a, you know, really extensive logistics industry that was present in Chattanooga. So we were the first kind of pure play freight broker come out of here at scale. And at that point in time, we're one of the largest privately held brokers in the country. Coyote, of course, also was one of those, a bit larger than us. And so as we started contemplating things, you know, it just made a lot of sense with the investments they had made in tech. And I felt like we were really strong with sales, and we had a very large customer base.
[06:03]
Chad Eichelberger: And we were very meticulous on processes, on measuring. We concentrated a lot on little minor things that over time we felt like were key indicators of success. You know, if somebody came in the door, we looked a lot at, okay, are they scared to get on the phone? If they're scared to get on the phone, it's not gonna work. So if somebody wasn't a fit, we would make a decision pretty quickly. Hey. This is not the role for this individual, but we would measure talk time. We would look at phone calls. We also would measure their pipeline. We were really big. We were just dialed into what our CRM looked like in terms of they had rules they had to follow in order to keep leads in their name, and it was very competitive. We were a team, but it was also incredibly competitive.
Chad Eichelberger: We just were dialed in and very focused on customer acquisition and on execution. And so there were times where we lost, I think, at one point, the record was not a proud day, but we lost $32,000 on one shipment because we had to go and charter a plane to move it, but we got it there. And so there were a lot of things like that. It was a focus on quality, but also on executing, but we were very diligent on sales. I would say just incredibly aggressive. I think we ran with 90 plus Fortune 500 companies at the time of our deal with Coyote. We really worked hard to instill, you know, in our leadership team and our next group of managers, teaching them how to go out and sell and spinning up teams and really empowering people to honestly kinda run a business within a business. Had incredibly low turnover.
[08:05]
Chad Eichelberger: Almost, I think all of our growth largely was organic. And so it was just a really fun time. It was fast paced. You know? Bad news is so much better than no news, and the people that you do have something inevitably in this industry, things are going to go wrong. A brutal truth and delivering that as quickly as possible, whether you're communicating with a motor carrier or shipper is just imperative. And the people that did that well and that could go and execute, that could go and, you know, proactively communicate, it just felt like it set us apart in a big way.
[10:12]
So it sounds like yeah, a lot of this is about how do you create a pretty fun but aggressive and competitive environment. Were there like a training program, or was it more entrepreneurial?
Chad Eichelberger: Yeah. It was very much I would say not the, you know, we very much at Reliance Partners today pride ourselves on our training and getting people acclimated. I think in the early days at Access America there really wasn't one. It was kinda off to the races. And what we liked to do was six months in, we would actually make sure that every individual, Steve Cox would come into town from Minneapolis, and Ronald Ramsey, myself, and then Ted may be present too, especially in the earlier years. And all of us are sitting, and we do these simulated sales exercises. And they're having to cold call us. And we're like, hey, we're gonna purport to be a small shipper, a midsize shipper, a large shipper, and you gotta navigate. And so we actually enjoyed it. Kinda got out frustration. You're like, get to hang up on people. You know, it was kinda battle tested, but we wanted people that understood the business. You're going to get hung up on. You're gonna have to be thoughtful and creative to figure out how to get through a gatekeeper, how to get to the decision maker, how to get an opportunity.
[14:17]
What was your hot tips for how to cold call well?
Chad Eichelberger: Oh, it was just persistence. We were all about leaving voicemails, logging that call, but also trying to find other ways. You leave a voicemail, like, I wonder if I can get to them a different way. You know, depending on the size of the company, there were different gatekeepers, different titles you're gonna look for. If you can't get directly to decision maker, try to get to somebody in the department. If you can't get to them, hey, maybe they have a dial by name directory. You still can't get to anyone, try somebody random in the company. Brown and Smith are great last names. I called a lot of them through the years. Hey, I'm sorry, got you wrong. Could you transfer me to so and so? And you would be shocked how often they would pick up. One of those shippers turned into a top five customer that had kinda been dodging calls. And we would try to lock down calls if we traveled. We're not putting somebody on a plane to Seattle to go see one account. You better fill out a whole day. It was all about, hey, it was just competitive and fun, and we celebrated getting hung up on too.
[16:19]
Chad Eichelberger: Some of the wildest times I can remember are when two individuals, completely separate teams, even separate offices, would get the same RFP, and we're like, oh gosh. Who do you decide to give it to? Who's worked it longer? Who had the right contact? So most of the time, we were gonna pick a clear winner. First, we were like, hey, you guys work it out rep to rep, then sales manager to sales manager. If that doesn't work, office manager to office manager. And if not, they would get kicked to us, and we would have three of us, and we would just have to make a decision at the end of the day. Where does the company have the best opportunity to win? Who's got the best relationship? Who's worked it longer?
[18:20]
Chad Eichelberger: It really emphasized contact. They needed to be making progress. You can only lock it out for so long. There was a requisite that you had to get a visit if it were a certain size shipper. You needed to have a face to face relationship. The big thing is you have to be making progress. We would say always be advancing. If you're not advancing on a shipper and it's just sitting in your name, we're gonna move that to somebody else.
[22:23]
Chad Eichelberger: On the small shippers, it was very much kinda cradle grave, eat what you kill. Again, it was cradle grave operating model overall, but on some of the really large enterprise shippers, naturally, you had to have things organized by facility or lanes or regions. We really like the Chicago model. I think it works incredibly well for dry van and reefer freight. Maybe a little less so on flatbed because that freight tends to be more regional in nature. And certainly on heavy haul, we had that split off as its own kind of unit.
[26:25]
Chad Eichelberger: I was there fifteen months at Coyote. Yeah. And we knew that the probability of either IPO-ing or flipping to strategic would kinda be where it was gonna be one way or another. We got the companies together quickly. We're operating on their platform within thirty days, which was really record time. Was traveling way too much. I had a young son at the time, and I wanted to be home more. And, frankly, I knew it was inevitable. One of the parties we were gonna potentially sell to, obviously, it ended up being UPS, but I knew that was inevitable too. And so I, you know, at about ninety days prior, just said, hey, I'm gonna transition out. I'll work to hand off everything and did that. And then I planned on taking three months off, and I took about two or three weeks off and was like, nah. I can't do this.
Chad Eichelberger: And so Andrew Atabashay at the time had always been one of my best friends in the world, and he had invested and kinda backed to start an insurance brokerage. The thought is, hey, we can really scale this and take this from regional in nature to national in scale. And so, you know, after the three weeks, I jumped on, was happy to get in the office again, and started humming along. And we started going and trying to find talent. We hired a lot for bilingual skill sets because of the way motor carriers in this country operate. There are lots of different languages, and we wanted to be able to be a place for them to buy insurance.
[28:27]
Chad Eichelberger: And we started bringing folks in our office. Very much looks like a freight brokerage. And just, frankly, the company started growing very quickly. And before we knew it, we turned around, and we insure more motor carriers than anybody in the country today.
What were the sort of numbers when you joined, and what does the business look like today?
Chad Eichelberger: I mean, back then, probably around 10 employees. And the feedback I'd heard was, hey, it takes two years for an insurance salesperson to validate, to cover their expense. And I thought, okay, what have I done? If it takes two years, we're never gonna be able to grow. And so we started going after talent, built a really great CRM, found some really talented people, and we put the expectation out there with very lofty goals. And then pretty soon before we knew it, we're like, hey, it is very possible to validate insurance salespeople in as little as three or four months.
[30:31]
How big is the team today?
Chad Eichelberger: Yeah. Onshore, around 300 employees, and then offshore, a little over 100, and heavily involved in lots of automation initiatives. We've been able to build technology for trucking and logistics insurance by being a specialist where a lot of the competitors, while some of them are much larger multinational companies, they're more generalist in nature in that they haven't been able to tailor what they build to the trucking and logistics space. Every tool we've built is really oriented and focused on that marketplace. So I think it's been an absolute advantage being a specialist.
[32:44]
Why is it so fragmented? Why isn't there a really big dominant player?
Chad Eichelberger: Well, I think a lot of it is you've got totally different categories of buyers. You've got small fleets, which could be a one person owner operator that's purchasing the coverage for themselves and their truck. It could be a very large fleet with thousands of trucks, which is gonna be much more of a sophisticated buyer, or it could be a mid fleet. And so a lot of our competitors that are out in the marketplace, you've got the multinational firms that really are only interested in the mega fleets and the really large freight brokers. And then you've got the small mom and pop agencies that may be in a little town somewhere in the middle of Idaho. When that motor carrier goes and needs insurance, they walk in the door, and they Google truck insurance. But as that carrier grows or their risk needs change, that's where we really come in. And on the freight brokerage side, we insure all sizes of brokerages as well, but we're very much top heavy in that top 100 freight broker range. We touch, I think, over half of those in some way, shape, or form.
[38:46]
Chad Eichelberger: Generally, in brokerage, you may be able to get a piece of the business. You get your foot in the door. In this, oftentimes, it's all or nothing. You win it all or you get nothing. Sometimes we split it, but you're not gonna have four or five insurance brokers on an account. You usually have one, maybe two. In the freight brokerage world, it was, hey, I just gotta get a piece of this. So in a lot of ways, the sell side of it is more complex in this because you gotta get it all and you've gotta convince them to buy with you. But on the flip side, if you take care of people, it's almost like an annuity and the business really builds and scales, and I love that.
[42:48]
For brokerages today, in what ways are there insurance requirements and risk? How is that shifting at the moment?
Chad Eichelberger: I would say ten years ago, if you looked at this marketplace as a freight broker, your number one risk was a catastrophic claim. And that kind of claim generally would be a liability claim, which is, you know, a broker becomes liable either contractually or generally through negligent hiring or vicarious liability, hire a bad carrier, control the motor carrier. That's generally how they become liable if they unless they sign a bad contract.
Chad Eichelberger: What changed then back in the day, primary cargo was not very common, but becoming more common because you were starting to see this increase in thefts. But most of these thefts were just thefts of opportunity happening at a particular truck stop or area or shipper where trailers left unattended. And now where everything has migrated towards, that theft still exists, but to strategic theft. And so cargo back then was not necessarily at the front of mind. It happened. You had to be cognizant of it. But you just had to really focus in on the quality of carrier you were hiring, and you didn't have to think about all of these scams that are being perpetrated today.
[44:58]
Chad Eichelberger: And I would say today, an outsized share of the losses that freight brokers have, whether they're paying out of pocket or through an insurance policy, they're coming via the cargo side of things. So the risk on the liability side has certainly not gotten less, but cargo is really overtaking it because of the frequency and some of the severities of these thefts. Multiple instances I'm aware of of 50 plus loads being taken. A lot of times, it's over a period of time, and they're pilfered and the bill of ladings are doctored. Maybe they hit a broker all in one day and just steal a bunch of loads that day. And so in a lot of ways, the risk profile for a broker has expanded as has the percentage of revenue that a broker attributes now to their insurance policies because of the risk.
Is that number, like, two times?
Chad Eichelberger: My best guess and just kinda what we hear out there is insurance as a percentage of overall revenue has more than doubled over the past five years. So we know it's out there. I don't see it slowing down a whole lot. And oftentimes, we see when there's an exception made, nine times out of 10, somebody can do everything right at every turn, and you make one exception to the rule, and that's someone that can turn around and burn you. And when you get in, often, they're gonna hit you repeatedly.
[49:08]
Chad Eichelberger: The insurers generally, specific to freight brokerage, they are not necessarily giving the broker guidance on how to run their business, but what they are doing is they're evaluating your carrier vetting process, which vendors you are using. They may provide a policy credit, or lower price if they see you're using two different entities. They obviously heavily weight historical losses. They also look at the commodities that you're moving. They'll want generally some examples of some of your larger contracts to see the type of risk that you might be assuming. If it's a newer entity, they want to understand what's your background, what's your risk protocol, what's your compliance team look like. So there's really a multitude of factors that go into underwriting.
[51:09]
Have you noticed any sort of trends or patterns between best practices and areas of exposure?
Chad Eichelberger: Well, I think one of the things that we stress is having, you know, one, understanding your shippers, understanding the values and the commodities that you're moving. If you have something that is repetitive, building relationships and using repeat carriers, it's always preferable. But you gotta be diligent in that even because there are times with nowadays with the authorities being sold on Facebook Marketplace or wherever they're being sold at, accounts getting hacked. I mean, you've gotta have ongoing surveillance, and there's so many good tools that are emerging and present today. You've really gotta surround yourself with tools that are gonna indicate, hey, this truck has never been seen in this region before. The phone number looks the same. The email looks the same. But what's going on? You've gotta ask questions.
Chad Eichelberger: Obviously, the targeted goods are the goods that can be disposed of quickly and not just high value, like energy drinks, soft drinks, beverage, anything like that, produce, anything that doesn't necessarily have a unique identifier. That stuff can be offloaded and consumed quickly. So any type of food and beverage product, that's always gonna be there. If you steal a load of cell phones or computers or televisions, that takes some time, and there's some ways to track some of that. And so they're getting smarter about what they steal. So the mix of commodities that you're hauling and just generally the protocol, we see a lot of teams that have high value teams. If it's a high value load, it is going to go on a carrier that absolutely is gonna be tracked.
[53:09]
Chad, I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm curious, we're rolling into 2026. What gets you excited for the next year and for the industry?
Chad Eichelberger: Well, it feels like the market's getting better. It feels like our clients are we're hearing more positive sentiment than we've heard in a long time. We feel like talking to our fleets, they're starting to see increases in contract rates and spot rates. And so I'm one of the people that's gonna be on the side of optimism and say that the industry by the end of this year is gonna feel a whole lot better barring some broad economic change. It feels like we're moving in a positive direction. It feels like companies are getting healthier, and there's just generally more optimism in the marketplace than what we've had in a while.
Yeah. I love it. Chad, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Chad Eichelberger: No. Likewise. I appreciate it. Thank you as well.