This transcript has been lightly cleaned for readability. Speaker attributions reflect the conversation as recorded; some crosstalk has been condensed.
[00:00]
Jesse Buckingham: In general, I really think that the supply side of things, how many available drivers are out there, it's really the input that has the most influence on how tight or loose market conditions are. Providers that have delivered high levels of service. And so we are seeing some of our customers make shifts within their own procurement processes and going deeper with a smaller subset of non asset and asset based companies that they feel are providing high levels of service and capacity to their business. I think we're now out of this cycle where rates are just dropping continuously, where that risk reward is as obvious.
Host: Welcome to the Freight Show podcast. Today, we're joined by Jay Gustafson, executive vice president at Echo Global Logistics to unpack how freight has evolved and where it's heading next. Jay shares a pulse check on today's market, why shippers are consolidating carrier networks, and how Echo continues to grow market share despite a soft environment. He reflects on how brokerage life has changed, from carrier reps faxing rate sheets in 2005 to managing over a 100 loads a day with automation and AI. We also explore Echo's continuous movement and drop trailer programs, how they create stability for both drivers and shippers, and why the best freight relationships are built on trust and long term consistency, not short term pricing. Alright. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Vooma, the back office automation platform built for freight brokerages and three PLs. From AI powered document handling to streamlined workflows, Vooma helps logistics teams move faster and scale smarter. Learn more at voomah.com.
[02:10]
Speaker 2: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Freight Show. We've got Jay Gustafsson on with us, who many of you in the industry will know. But Jay, it's great to have you on and appreciate you joining. Yeah. Thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to chatting today.
Jay, I always kind of like when I chat with executives like yourselves, just starting with a little bit of, like, pulse check on what you're seeing in the market right now? You know, a lot of pieces in flight, and it's been an interesting time, and I'd be sort of curious to hear what you're seeing out there.
Jesse Buckingham: Yes. I mean, I think that, you know, the last three years have been, you know, what many have been referring to as a, you know, the freight recession in terms of just supply and demand characteristics. And I would say we're continuing to see more of the same demand has generally been, you know, soft. We're seeing, you know, shipment volumes steadily growing across our shipper base, but it still feels like the oversupply of capacity is just creating, you know, those looser market conditions. So we're still seeing an environment where routing guides in terms of primary acceptance are very successful, rejection rates are low. With large shippers, we're seeing utilization of the spot market, but it's more opportunistically around low volume lanes or areas where maybe they could capture better pricing going spot versus contract. But we're generally seeing you know, pretty stable conditions. You know, that might change, though. You know, the discussions over the last week around new ruling around non domicile drivers is driving a lot of dialogue within our organization. We're having a lot of conversations with both shippers and carriers that we work with. And I think there's a belief that this will have some impact on capacity, certainly more of an impact than
[04:12]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): the English language proficiency kind of enforcement that was marketed pretty aggressively earlier this year. So, in summary, things are pretty stable, but there's a belief that changes in supply may start drive a different freight environment. General, I really think that the supply side of things, how many available drivers are out there, it's really the input that has the most influence on how tight or loose market conditions are.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's really interesting. Coming back to the volume piece, are you so it sounds like volumes have been steadily increasing. Some of the data that I was hearing at least was that truckload volumes are down, though, over the last year. And so I was like, do you think that you're taking share then? Because I have heard volume growth
Jesse Buckingham: you know, from folks. Or Yeah. I think that there is volume overall, macroeconomic standpoint, I think August and and September have been data's come out around some year over year declines within the last sixty days. Think up until that period of time, there was a bit of a pull forward in freight in advance of some of these tariffs that made the year over year comps more positive. Last sixty days, though, macro view volumes are certainly down. But to answer your question, market share, increasing share of wallet with existing customers, new logos that we're adding into our mix, those two things in parallel are definitely allowing us to drive
[06:14]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): some internal volume growth. You know, these loose conditions often allow shippers to reassess their carrier network, refocus their awards to the providers that have delivered high levels of service. So we are seeing some of our customers make shifts within their own procurement processes and going deeper with a smaller subset of non asset and asset based companies that they feel are providing high levels of service and capacity to their business. And so our story is more about market share than Excuse me, share of wallet growth with our existing and new customers as opposed to
Speaker 2: this windfall of freight just hitting the overall market. Yeah. Well, kudos to you guys. That's what I've sort of been hearing, which is then I guess it kind of depends on what side of that equation you're on, what the kind of net impact to you is. Why are shippers going through a process of looking to sort of consolidate providers, and why does that sort of happen during a
Jesse Buckingham: loose market like this? Well, I think if you kind of rewind a little bit and you think back to 2020, July 2022, shippers were really struggling to just get their freight picked up and delivered. During that COVID boom, there was not as much of a focus on price, cost to serve, on time delivery. It was more around, can I get freight off my dock? And given the state of the market, their incumbent providers at that time weren't necessarily getting the freight off their dock. And so many shippers added new carriers at a really aggressive clip during that COVID boom. And so now I think what we're seeing is a little bit of
[08:18]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): culling of those networks that really, you know, ballooned. And I think what shippers are realizing is is there's a opportunity for more strategic solutions to be developed for higher levels of service to be delivered if you're working with a bit more concentrated, consistent carrier base. And that doesn't mean shippers are going from 100 partners down to four partners. It might mean they're going from 100 down to the 60 that can strategically service their freight. And so I think the current conditions are just allowing our customers to look at the data a little bit more objectively and think through, all right, who are the partners that can handle my business today and who of those partners can scale if conditions do get tight again. And I think that that's influencing a lot of the network redesign discussions that we're seeing shippers have on a fairly regular basis. Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: When you guys think about one of the lenses here is what is optimal for a shipper. When you're talking with shippers, what would their optimal network design look like in terms of density, range of providers? If they had sort of like a perfect well, what do you sort of see as the North Star from their perspective?
Jesse Buckingham: There's such diversity within the shipper community. It's challenging for me to give just like a black and white answer to how the shippers are thinking about that. So I'll probably give you more of my perspective on what Yeah, but imagine there's segments and different types, right, as well. Exactly.
[10:18]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): So I think that, you know, in general, what I've seen, you know, facilitate the most successful procurement process, both from a price and service perspective is, you know, deep focus on contractual sourcing activities. And, you know, I think that we appreciate the shippers that are giving us business for a twelve month period of time. While we're nimble and are willing to do quarterly or monthly RFPs for our shippers, my point of view is that it makes it very difficult to secure consistent capacity where every three months that business is up for grabs. And so I really appreciate when shippers come to us, look for that twelve to twenty four month commitment and have great upfront metrics around what lane density looks like, what volume looks like from a predictability standpoint, that really allows for us to give the most compelling value prop from a price service standpoint with those RFPs. I also really appreciate the shipper relationships, when that contractual business is up for renewal at that twelve month, that twenty four month time period, that there's a discussion with the incumbents around where pricing needs to be to retain that business as a 3PL. As I think about some of the shippers that we support, that we started out doing a few dozen loads a week for and now are doing a few 100 shipments
[12:20]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): a day with. These are shippers that we had that ongoing dialogue. We weren't blindly bidding out RFPs every twelve months. There was this snowball effect, I'll call it, where every year we built on the success of the previous year. And so I really appreciate the shippers that look at their consistent moves and go to 3PLs with transparent opportunities and dialogue to build upon the previous year's success. The service is there, I think the 3PLs often deserve an opportunity to you know, keep that seat at the table the next year. It's not only going to be good for the 3PL and their relationship with the carriers and that specific shipper, it's going to help that shipper maintain service levels by working with a consistent three PL or carrier base year over year. That shuffling of the deck I've seen create havoc when you're just looking for that bottom of the barrel price. And so we really appreciate that that approach. That's how we've built our business long term. And from the shippers we interact with, it's the shippers that approach things that way are typically the ones that have the best service and don't have these wild swings with pricing from market cycle to market cycle.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah. That's that's interesting. So it's because I imagine, you know, when you have these, like, longer contract terms, you build up a network that can deliver that freight at good prices, but those carriers also learn how to move that freight very And so when you've got that consistency, you get better relationships on your side. I was speaking with an executive at another large brokerage who was saying that for some shippers they've seen this shift in terms, whether they're running
[14:26]
Speaker 2 (cont.): shorter RFP cycles. And I didn't fully appreciate that dynamic of how that can make it really challenging from the brokerage perspective because you're not actually going to be able to deliver very well on those short
Jesse Buckingham: time periods because there's so we saw that trend really start to, like, as the market in Q2 of twenty twenty two really start to begin to loosen and we began seeing what now is forty months of declining and then stable market conditions, we saw shippers taking their freight out to bid every six months because after two years of ballooning transportation costs, they couldn't afford to leave money on the table. I think we're now out of this cycle where rates are just dropping continuously where that risk reward is obvious. And I think we're starting to see more shippers shift back to biannual or annual pricing. And so, again, there's such diversity in the shippers that we work with, and their own customer needs drive different pricing strategies. And so I think that there is going to continuously be this population of shippers that, you know, gravitate towards quarterly or even like real time pricing arrangements. But I think the stability over the last few years is is getting more shippers back focused on those long term high service relationships, which typically are delivered with a bit more stability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I wasn't sure if that trend was just almost this march towards like shippers have access to real time pricing, they have tools that enable them to manage complex RFP processes a little bit more easily
[16:35]
Speaker 2 (cont.): than they did before and therefore if you can do things on a short term basis, why wouldn't you? But it sounds like that there is this sort of like that that actually might be a good strategy when prices are very volatile. But once there's more stability, you're going to get a better sort of price quality trade off with longer terms.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah, think that there are some tools that have made it certainly for some shippers a bit easier. But feedback I get from, you know, some of the the shippers that I've interacted with is like it's a lot of work for their their teams to run these. It's a ton of work. Yeah. And and not even just from, like, the admin side of running the bid event and analyzing the data, but even from a vendor carrier relationship standpoint, it's a high friction activity. And so in certain businesses, it makes a lot of sense. And there were certain shippers that were getting, you know, were overpaying. And so I think they owed it to their financial sponsors and their accounting organizations to really sharpen the pencil. But I think it's now at a point where that shift we're starting to see a shift back to more long term strategic kind of pricing arrangements.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I've heard was that increasingly folks are seeing that procurement teams versus operations teams are playing a bigger role in the decisions about carrier partners. I'm wondering, is that something do you agree with that? Because the trend there is that then things start to look a little bit more like a spreadsheet and they're not really thinking about all of the actual supply chain impacts that it could have on their operation. Or do you think that that's more just a function of freight was really expensive and so there's pressure to kind of bring things down into
[18:40]
Speaker 2 (cont.): price points that feel a little bit more stable and then we return to kind of a world where it's, okay, there's reasonable stability. Let's kind of go with whatever's going to be the most effective for moving the freight. Yeah, again, I would say I think there's
Jesse Buckingham: certainly shippers that fall in both camps. I think if I was to make it an overtly general statement is like we've seen more of that traditional procurement process, maybe with larger shippers that we're not working with today that are thinking about new vendor onboarding through a pure price just price standpoint. But I would say most of our business, most of our share of wallet growth comes from our existing customer base and they're certainly making decisions with an operational lens in addition to the pricing piece. Pricing obviously is critical and it's the objective thing you can often point to from a value standpoint. But that service, that proactive communication, that understanding of a shipper's business, it's still, I believe, critical to a carrier or a 3PL success. And we see shippers acknowledging that and taking past operational deliverables into consideration, not just looking at the rates that were returned in an RFP and banking on what they see on paper.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That makes sense. Shifting gears, Jay, you've been in this industry, you know, kind of like started kind of coming up as a carrier rep as I understand it. Right? Yeah. I started
Jesse Buckingham: back in 2004 at a company called AFN as a carrier rep. Nice.
Speaker 2: Take me through what it was like as a carrier rep in 2004.
[20:42]
Speaker 2 (cont.): What I'm interested in understanding is a little bit what did the job look like then? And then what does it look like today? And what could it look like in five years, do you think?
Jesse Buckingham: Well, I'll say from a just tools and technology standpoint, you know, was very, very different than than it is today. If I think about, you know, the freight management process, which is the one that just is so vastly different. You know, there was no cell phones. Drivers did not have cell phones consistently in 2004. If I got an update from a driver while they were in transit on a shipment, it was when they were at a truck stop fueling up. Yeah. They went home or stopped in a terminal. I would get an update. But that tracking visibility, you know, for the vast majority of the carriers was, you know, nonexistent. I was one of the earlier carrier ups at AFN, and so I had a couple larger trucking companies in my name. And around 2004, 2005, a few of those companies started to provide online portals where you can go like look up a load number, see the current tracking location, you know, use that to, you know, get access to visibility. But this concept of knowing where a truck was at any given point in time, being able to see that truck on a map from a breadcrumb trails, you know, you know, vantage point, knowing if a driver arrived at a pickup because of geo fencing that existed, all things that happen on almost every one of our loads today that that didn't exist. And so you had these like checkpoints where you expected to talk to the driver.
[22:45]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): But if a driver had an appointment at 01:00, you might not hear from that driver until 03:30 when they actually went to the truck stop to fuel up and find their next load. And so like the flow of information and, you know, the ability to get in front of issues proactively was, like, not even remotely data driven. It's kind of every carrier rep for themselves to provide their own curated customer service experience. But you are operating just off of relationships and hope that a driver called you with updates or when there were problems. There just wasn't a great flow of information. And so as I think about, you know, this very, you know, old school way of communicating back in 2005 really, really has totally changed from a visibility standpoint. Rate confirmations were faxed at the time. Might have had a load board like the DAT. At the time, there was a platform out there called Get Loaded that you could use to post loads and strip out freight. We were mostly working through historical data and backhaul city searches to find trucks for loads. Like, the visibility across all sides of the spectrum was just not there. And so, like, the good brokers were the ones that, you know, were able to build up tribal knowledge pretty quickly, see a load, instantly know exactly who to call. I remember, like, at nighttime, my first two years of being a carrier up, I would sit on my couch, download reports of loads that got booked that day and just like go through load by load
[24:45]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): and be like, all right, Chicago to Los Angeles, dollars 7,100. Oh, this Chicago to Los Angeles went for $2,900 Maybe 3 grand's like the price I should offer my carriers on that load moving forward. It was all about tribal knowledge. There was no data at the time. And that's the way from my point of view, like the business really operated from 2004 to call it like twenty ten, twenty eleven. Twenty ten, twenty eleven, you started to see some technology really hit the scenes to support truckload brokerages. I think the two things that come to mind that really started to help us evolve the way we do our business was one appless tracking through third parties or cellular triangulation started to become a thing. And so back in like twenty ten, twenty eleven is when that that tech, from my recollection, became available. That was a game changer to the earlier conversation I mentioned. You could send a driver a text. They could click a link. They could then opt into tracking on that load. It totally changed. Didn't change overnight, but it it changed the way you started the, you know, tractor freight.
Speaker 2: Another And was that one question I have on that is, like, it obviously sounds a lot better to be able to know where the truck is. You do hear some folks sometimes say though that the level of visibility that we now have is actually not required to be able to move the freight super well. I'm curious, given that you sort of operated at in that environment, I'm sure the answer is a little bit more gray than it is black or white. But I'm curious, like, is are we just, like, scratching our, like, itch to sort of, like, have all of the implement? Like, did that help you to provide
[26:54]
Speaker 2 (cont.): better server? Like what sort of been the impact of a lot of those evolutions?
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. So I think that this concept that got really hot a few years ago around, like, you know, people often reference the Amazon effect, you know, knowing where your truck is every minute, every day as a shipper. I've yet to see a shipper use that information in any type of actual way. We've got customers that we're pushing updates to every two minutes. It's feeding into their TMS or ERP, but like, I don't really get the sense that anyone's doing anything with that information. It's more of a metric, I would say, to hold carriers and brokers accountable for providing that real time visibility. On the flip side, though, within the brokerage space, like we don't need that data every two minutes, but getting that data every five, every 15 like we do today, it's allowing us to intervene with problems much more proactively. You know, now we know if a driver hasn't moved for a period of time and is at risk of making a delivery appointment. In the past, we would have called that driver four hours before delivery and we would have learned about the problem then. Right. They didn't call us up themselves. Now we have the ability to learn about that days in advance. And so it's helped me. And when I'm making these comments, I'm talking more last five years, not back in 2010. It's definitely helped us set up an organization where our people are focused more on the exception management than tracking every load to basically meet the SOP that we've agreed to meeting on internally into that client.
[28:58]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): It's gotten us away from, like, tracking a 100 steps to only having to track the 15 that need to be actually addressed. So we've definitely seen benefit in how it's helped us streamline our operations, improve productivity,
Speaker 2: deliver Yeah. One thing I was curious, can you remember like, what if from, like, say, like, 2,005 to now Yeah. The the productivity like maybe it's like loads per like carrier rep per day or whatever. Like do you know what it was back then roughly and like what it is today? Like how far we've sort of come?
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. So I think, you know, every organization's a little bit different, but, like, here the way I'll describe it, it is this way. Like, almost I think the average is probably less of an interesting story than, like, what the extremes are. And back in 2005 at the organization I was at and even at in 2008 when I joined, you know, APCO to lead their truckload carrier sales organization, if somebody was doing 15 shipments a day, they were like a top producer. You know, they were like a top five rep at most freight brokerages. Today, that's like the average, you know, you would see across a department. We've we've got carrier reps within our organization that are booking over 100 shipments a day now. That certainly is influenced by very sticky strategic relationships. But the automation with with tracking, with carrier verification, with load sourcing, inbound offers, those are all things that have helped, you know, allow for new heights to be reached in terms of what a carrier rep
[31:03]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): could actually manage in a ten hour, you know, work work day. Yeah. There was just like there was true scale that you could not overcome in the earlier days because almost everything was over phone. You couldn't blast out emails to 100 carriers first thing in the morning. No one was booking freight that way. And so there's just been a number of inputs that have allowed these carrier reps to really scale as a loads per day metric. And if I would just think that's like this kind of popped into my head when when we were, you know, just having this conversation. Like, in 2005 AFN, six, seven loads a day was probably the average across the department. I now expect the carrier up to be at that level within their first ten months of employment, you know? And so the ramp is just it's just so different than it was twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: What do you so it sounds like a big part of the evolution here has been, okay, we can get on top of exceptions earlier. There's presumably more data. Part of it's the strategic relationships you have where I imagine you can book 20 loads at once in some scenarios. Crystal ball, what do you think this looks like in five years or maybe even ten? How do you think the role of the carrier sales rep is going to change as higher and higher levels of automation come through AI and other things?
Jesse Buckingham: I think what we're going to see is a continuation of what like the digital freight marketplaces have enabled over the last five or six years, which I would describe as
[33:04]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): high levels of booking automation with, the long tail of carriers within our network. That today is done through mobile apps and web portals in the future. I could see more and more of that long tail being interacted with through agentic AI. And I think, as we free up our people's time to not have to worry about these lower volume transactional carrier relationships, it allows them to focus more of their energy with that 10% of our carrier base that moves 90% of our freight. We are very, very relationship focused at Echo, not just from a philosophical standpoint, but from an execution standpoint. We really avoid working with carriers on an infrequent basis. I've seen and looked at other 3PLs that 40%, 50% of their volume might move with carriers that move one load a quarter or less. You know, that is a fraction of a percentage of how our volume moves. We are very deep with carriers. And I think what we'll see is time get freed up to focus on getting even more strategic with those carriers, getting more into a groove where we're working with them on contractual opportunities, ways to move their fleet on a continuous basis and not have to worry about this, you know, 15% of our freight that requires
[35:06]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): a lot of activity today, I think we could focus our people more on on strategic relationships as opposed to these transactional bookings.
Speaker 2: When you think about the segmentation of the carrier market and then even your customer base, how do you think about it? What are the big buckets? And maybe in terms of it could be like how you interact with them, what the nature of them. I'm curious when it sounds like you guys do a lot of consistent freight with that same group of carriers. Are these folks that have five trucks, or do you find that you're able to build better relationships when there's sort of more like 20 to 50, but they're not at 4,000 trucks? How do you guys how do you sort of think about that segmentation and how that plays into your carrier strategy?
Jesse Buckingham: I mean, I think we think about segmentation a few different ways. You know, I'd say like the first layer that we really look at is fleet demographics. So how large a trucking company is, and we've got, I believe, six different groupings from, you know, owner operator, which is defined as two trucks or less up to national, which is 500 trucks or more. And so we look at across these different demographic segments within the carrier community, how much of our freight is moving with these different populations. And what we've definitely we work with fleets of all shapes and sizes, and there's certainly owner operators that we're running every single day and are booking more than a fleet that has 100 trucks. But in general, we skew a bit upmarket, I would say. And that 50 to two fifty truck fleet count is where we typically
[37:08]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): see the most volume moved, the most strategic placement of capacity, and from the ways that we measure things, most, you know, share of capacity that we're actually getting from these these different fleets. So we look at it, you know, from that view. The next view would be how the carrier likes to be, you know, interacted with. Our philosophy is while digitization and a digital freight evolution is definitely take has been and is continuing to take place in our market. We recognize not every carrier operates the same way, and we want to meet the carriers where they want to be met. And so we understand how much of our traffic is happening through our mobile app, how much is happening through our web portal, how much is happening through relationship based selling, how much is contractual, where we're just auto tendering the freight to the carriers and letting them accept or reject. So we look at it from that vantage point. And then I would say the the third piece would be transactional versus contractual. Like how much of that carrier's capacity is being brought to Echo for repeat regular moves versus us constantly helping them reposition equipment across a large set of markets. And so transparently that, you know, how we view our carrier network is constantly evolving. I think as Agentic AI kind of takes shape, that'll probably be another input that we'll really be focused on trying to understand. But booking by fleet count is really where the analysis starts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. I've sort of heard this that the it sounds like almost that there's this kind of, like, sweet spot, right, where you've got
[39:13]
Speaker 2 (cont.): carriers that have enough vehicles where you can develop a real relationship. And then in a lot of ways, you sort of become an extension of their go to market team, they're not quite really big enough to In a way, it's the perfect fit, whereas you probably It's almost where you get the most returns as well to your time in cultivating that. If you've only got a few trucks, it's very hard for that dynamic to
Jesse Buckingham: play out. Definitely. That's the right way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2: When you think about the you mentioned wanting to meet carriers where they're How much of that do you think is genuine, like just people have different preferences versus that there is these shifts happening towards something? I'm curious of your perspective on do you see There's been a big shift I think from phone to email, for example, as one trend. There's a lot of apps available, but I'm curious what do you think optimal Where is this trending, that makes sense? Where's the pull over time and how's that shift mix changing? Yeah,
Jesse Buckingham: I always refer to email as like the universal technology in transportation. The amount of our people spend in email, our carriers spend an email, our shippers spend an email. You know, right now it's outside of the TMS, probably the medium where the most activity is taking place. And I think what's driving that is, you know, no carrier in the market is getting all of their freight. You've got a small
[41:13]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): group of carriers, 20%, let's call it, that only leverage a third party load board like the DAT to find their freight. Most carriers are working with a portfolio of brokers and shippers. And, you know, they're the top 20% of that portfolio that maybe gives them 50% of their volume. They're likely interacting within a platform like an EchoDrive or that shippers, TMS, the spot price freight and get access to it. But then there's this like, not long tail, but there's this group of other 3PLs and carrier shippers that they interact with. We're just easier to send an email to 10 of them or, you know, respond to emails when they get sent over as opposed to logging into 10 different other portals. And so I think there's a little bit of a reality of app fatigue across your entire portfolio of customers that end up resulting in email being where a lot of this work gets placed. And so I think there's like this natural, you know, just reality that very few companies are working with one or two sources to get their freight and your time is gonna be best, you know, engaging with those top digital platforms and then using email, you know, for the rest. So I think there's just like that natural reality. And then there is still just some level of tech adoption or resistance. Might not even be that you don't like the tech. It's just it's easier for me to be an email. That's how I want to do things as a trucking company. And that's what makes me the most excited about, like the next five years with digital bookings. Because in the last five years,
[43:14]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): you could offer a mobile app or you could offer a web portal. And those were the mechanisms to drive digital bookings. With the reality that, you know, a lot of the time is being spent in email, that always left this void where there wasn't a solution. I think that's changing quickly with Agentic AI. And I think that there's going to be ways to offer carriers shipments, automate the booking transaction for those carriers that still want to operate via email to do most of their work. And so I think that there's another tool in the toolkit now that's going to start to help continue to drive growth within that digital booking realm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, super interesting. One of the things that when I think about my own view on the answer to that question, which I think is basically what you're saying is the thing that's unique about transportation is that everyone's optimal strategy is usually never to fully concentrate with anyone. And so if you imagine from a shipper's perspective, this is part of the reason why there isn't this kind of take off marketplace dynamic. A shipper doesn't want 1,000 carrier partners, but they don't want one either, right? That's not sort of an optimal procurement strategy. And if you're a carrier running 20 or 100 trucks, you're the same way. You don't want that concentration risk, right? It's only really the smallest folk that are willing to say, Hey, I'm just going to basically commit myself to one foe. It's just a lot of business risk. So if you accept that, then it becomes about, what's my optimal way to interact?
[45:17]
Speaker 2 (cont.): Going to a bunch of different that's just time consuming, so it's never really going to be the right answer. Phone call is useful because you can get onto people, but email like it's more the text based communication. You can manage multiple threads simultaneously, right? So you can only be on the phone with one person at once, but you can be emailing like many people sort of all at once. So I think it's almost like I agree that there's this sort of it's got some unique characteristics. And by the way, that's probably true of what WhatsApp and stuff as well, but not everyone's on it. Everyone has an email address. Exactly. So there's this sort of it's very interesting. Mean, that's what I think gets us excited about that opportunity as well, that it's been this unsolvable piece of the puzzle that is now solvable. And I think there's this opportunity where you can kind of have your cake and eat it too, in the sense that you can meet people where they're at, but also provide experiences that are efficient. Very cool. Jay, I want to touch on we've got three minutes here I just would love to hear a little bit more about your drop trailer program and your sort of continuous movement programs, maybe just like what those are and what they're sort of in response to. What's the opportunity you guys see there? Yeah. I mean, the way I would describe it is like we see those programs
Jesse Buckingham: being valuable in different ways to the two stakeholder groups that we support, the carriers and the shippers that we move business for. So I'll start on the carrier side of things. I think this continuous movement program is something that's been in place at Echo for about eight or nine years now. And the way I would describe it is it's essentially a dedicated fleet that we operate. So we've gone to a few dozen strategic
[47:25]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): carriers that we've got relationships with. And we've said to them, hey, you know, ACCO has enough density on a nationwide basis to keep your drivers busy. And what we do with these carriers is we negotiate a weekly minimum COGS or revenue per truck that we commit to paying regardless of the number of miles that driver moves. And if they drive over a certain threshold, there's a per mile surcharge that is added on top of that weekly that fee. So it looks very similar to a dedicated program an actual shipper would develop. And what it does is it helps us give carriers a consistent revenue stream. We take on most of that driver communication and operations. And so their own driver managers can focus on other drivers within that fleet. They can add on new assets directly into this program with essentially guaranteed revenue. And it's been really successful from a capacity standpoint on our side, you know, lining up a few 100 trucks a day to use on strategic loads is, you know, opportunistic. It gives us a set of capacity that we know we're going to always have access to. And, outside of the expected revenue, we've heard from our carriers that it has resulted in very low driver churn within their four walls because of that stability from, you know, the running similar lanes every week. It's it's really allowed for like a more professional driver experience
[49:25]
Jesse Buckingham (cont.): where there's consistency, not the uncertainty that many drivers face on a daily basis. So we see it as a value add to the carrier community. And on the flip side, many 3PLs look at brokers as transactional sources of capacity. And I think we've already began to change. We've already changed the perspective there because we're handling large volume awards from our shippers and servicing that business at the same level that national asset providers are bringing to the table. Drop trailer work that we do, this continuous movement program, that's allowing us to bring solutions to our shippers. That isn't just about transactional movements, but more strategic procurement of capacity. And so we look at both of those as differentiators in ways that we can build stickier, more strategic relationships
Speaker 2: with the shippers and and the carriers we work with. Super interesting. I have a lot more follow-up questions, but we're out of time, Jay. Thank you so much. Been a really Yeah. Thank you. Great conversation.