The short version
Greg Sanders grew up watching his father run an intermodal company in Northern California. When his dad sold that business to Landstar in 1994, Greg went with it, and spent the next three decades moving through Schneider, OHL, Redwood Logistics, and ITS Logistics before finally starting something of his own at 55.
RDS Capacity Solutions launched in 2019 with a specific set of conditions attached. Greg needed a brand to associate with, so he partnered with the family behind Rail Delivery Services, an intermodal drayage company operating out of Fontana since 1981. He brought in partners with capital and books of business, rather than hiring employees, because skin in the game changes behavior in a way that a paycheck alone doesn't. Jeremy Inkstrom, a flatbed specialist Greg had originally recruited at Schneider fifteen years earlier, grew his book fivefold after joining. The brokerage returned its entire startup capital in six months and was profitable in year one. Then the freight recession hit and held for three and a half years.
What kept RDS intact through that cycle wasn't any particular pricing advantage. It was the pod structure. Rather than splitting the floor into a big sales side and a big carrier side with limited communication, Greg built around field generals who own a specific industry vertical and a P&L, with a team underneath them doing carrier sourcing, ops, and customer service. They see the full load from quote to invoice. They know why a load is priced the way it is. When something goes wrong, there's no fence to throw it over.
Greg also has as much to say about what's broken in the industry as what works. He's been on the TIA board since the mid-2000s and has spent time in Washington on the broker liability case currently sitting with the courts. He thinks FMCSA has failed at carrier regulation and that the chameleon carrier problem is a foreseeable consequence of that failure. His framing of what brokerage actually does for small carriers — aggregating capacity for shippers who couldn't find it, and aggregating demand for fleets who can't afford a salesforce — is one of the clearest articulations of the industry's structural value heard on this show.
Key Takeaways
The pod model beats the split floor when communication matters. On a large split floor, customer reps and carrier reps rarely connect strategically. In a pod, the field general can explain to his team in real time why covering a load at a loss today protects a relationship that generates margin all year. That strategic context gets lost when the two sides are separated.
Skin in the game changes how people recruit and invest. Greg's partner model requires that incoming field generals bring either a book of business or capital, not just a resume. When a partner's compensation comes from contribution margin rather than salary, they hire carefully, they watch costs, and they are personally invested in whether the team actually performs.
Brokerage's value proposition is sales and marketing for small carriers. The top seven or eight truckload carriers in The US control less than 10% of market share. The remaining 90% is moving freight, but those fleets, often 10 trucks or fewer, cannot afford a salesforce. Brokers aggregate their capacity and surface it to shippers who couldn't find it otherwise. That is the actual structural value, not just matching a load to a truck.
Industry expertise beats equipment expertise in carrier-facing brokerage. Greg's advice to his field generals: don't specialize in a mode, specialize in an end market. Know a customer's acquisition plans, their capital expenditure cycles, and their growth strategy better than some of their own logistics staff does. That kind of knowledge creates relationships that don't reprice every quarter.
FMCSA's failure to enforce carrier standards is an industry problem, not a litigation problem. Greg believes the broker liability case has been framed incorrectly. The real question isn't how much liability brokers should carry; it's why the federal agency responsible for determining which carriers can operate has failed to keep bad actors off the road. Cleaning up that problem at the source removes a lot of the downstream liability exposure for brokers who are already doing their jobs well.
Notable Quotes
"I think what gets me really fired up is that I always thought that running a great brokerage is three components, and they're all equally important. Moving freight is obvious. You better be good at it. But what I really enjoy about this business is the movement of money. And then the third thing is the movement of information. Never more than in any time in my career over the next three to five years is I think it's gonna be a real exciting time."
"Our value prop to the shipper is we're gonna aggregate capacity that you don't have the time or energy to go find and aggregate yourself. And our value prop to the carrier base is, hey, man, you run great trucks, but you can't go hire a salesforce. We can be that for you, and we can get you into entities that you couldn't get in on your own."
"You're a hundred million dollar company, you probably got fifty people. And even that's changing. The big guys are driving that number down, the cost per transaction down. So we've gotta figure out how to integrate that technology allowing us to grow without people feeling like they're alienated and get them engaged."
"I just don't try to make a cat a dog. If someone is really good at one skill set and maybe they aren't as good at managing people, bring in someone just underneath them that offsets and really helps them grow their business. You can guide them with basic principles, but people are who they are."
"I tell folks, don't worry so much about the equipment. Worry about the industry. Become an expert in that industry because you wanna understand what their challenges are, what their problems are, and what their strategies are. A lot of times you'll have conversations like, hey, I know you just made this acquisition. No. I didn't know that. These field generals know more about the business than some of the logistics people in those companies."
Episode Chapters
- 00:00Intro: first live episode, filmed at TIA Capital Ideas on Freight Caviar's equipment
- 02:19Greg's origin: growing up in the family intermodal business
- 04:21Building the Southern California ITCO office at 24
- 06:22Selling the family company to Landstar in 1994 and what the Landstar agency model taught him
- 08:26Joining Schneider for "an MBA in trucking" and learning asset operations
- 10:26What pricing in an asset business actually looks like versus brokerage
- 12:31Why running a trucking company is harder than it looks from the outside
- 14:32The family decision that kept him out of Green Bay
- 16:34Joining OHL, running North American transportation, and learning private equity
- 18:42Selling the OHL brokerage to Brad Jacobs at the start of XPO
- 20:43What stood out about how Brad Jacobs transacts: simplicity and readiness to operate on day one
- 22:47Building the Redwood brand from a collection of acronyms
- 24:47Managed trans vs. brokerage: the trade-offs and why brokerage executes better on the carrier side
- 26:52Taking on consistent contractual lanes and when it starts to look like managed trans
- 28:54Joining ITS Logistics in Reno, becoming CEO, and the board situation that ended it
- 31:00The family office dynamic and why Greg and the board got sideways
- 33:02Starting RDS at 55: the brand, the asset partner, and the partner structure
- 35:08Why he located near Cal State and recruited from the athletic department
- 37:11Jeremy Inkstrom: recruited at Schneider fifteen years ago, now owns a 5x book
- 39:14What Greg learned about recruiting from Kerry Byrne at TQL: send executives to campus, not HR
- 41:14Why he recruits athletes and looks for emotional intelligence over IQ
- 43:18The pod model: P&Ls built around field generals, not mode specialists
- 45:25How contribution margin incentives change hiring and investment timing
- 47:25Why the split floor loses the strategic context that keeps accounts
- 49:34When leadership overrides a field general's reluctance to add headcount
- 51:47Industry expertise beats mode expertise: know their business better than their own logistics team
- 53:48Managing the tension between autonomy and adopting new tools across the floor
- 55:55Why Convoy's failure reinforced the wrong lesson: relationships aren't replaceable, but execution overhead is
- 57:58Integrating AI without alienating the operators who built the book
- 59:59The TIA, broker advocacy, and Greg's involvement since 1994
- 01:02:01Broker liability, the CH Robinson Supreme Court case, and what F4A protection means
- 01:04:11What's actually at stake: federal preemption vs. state-by-state liability rules
- 01:06:14The chameleon carrier problem and why FMCSA hasn't cleaned it up
- 01:08:16Whether deregulation created a safety trade-off and what the political dynamics look like now
- 01:12:23Why small carriers aren't cheap — they're just efficient — and why brokerage serves them
- 01:14:28What fires Greg up about the next three to five years: money movement, information movement, and AI
Full Transcript
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