#13 Fura CEO Jeff Dangelo on Why Most Freight Transformations Break

[00:00]

Jesse Buckingham: Go by what works, and you might miss some diamonds. Right? You might miss some of those people, but you gotta scale it that way. One of the big buckets that we do when we buy is companies that are losing money or breaking even, and we give those owners an outcome that they wouldn't have normally gotten. Our job is to almost take them from manual to digital within a couple months. Technology to me is can bridge that gap. And the adoption problem, in my mind, can start to shrink with AI because you don't necessarily need to engage somebody to get adoption. You can just turn it on in parallel with the people.

Welcome to the Freight Show podcast. Today, we're joined by Jeff D'Angelo, a freight industry veteran with over twenty years of experience across brokerage, technology, and M and A. Jeff helped scale TQL and Megacorp Logistics, founded the freight collaboration platform Turbo, and now leads Fura as CEO. Jeff shares hard earned lessons on scaling brokerages, building sales and ops teams, and why most digital transformations fail. We dive into tech adoption, culture change, and how Fiora is acquiring and modernizing underperforming brokerages through automation and execution. Alright. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Vooma, the back office automation platform for freight brokerages and 3PLs. Learn more at voomah.com.

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Speaker 2: Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Freight Show. I'm very excited to be here with Jeff D'Angelo. Great to have you here, Jeff. Jeff, am I pronouncing your last name correctly? I should actually just ask that. It's it's D'Angelo,

Jeff Dangelo: but I knew I I knew I'd f'd it up. Every time I French. Every time I say that, people are like, is it d e apostrophe capital a? Is it d I a? Yeah. But it's spelled D'Angelo, but it's pronounced D'Angelo.

Speaker 2: It's great to have you on, Jeff. I'm excited to for having me. Yeah. Excited to chat. Jeff, maybe just from, like I I know a little bit of, like, of your journey and your story, but I would love to just kinda hear it again. Take us through the, like, broad brush strokes of your, like, career in and around logistics. You've done a ton of stuff both on the, like, operating side and the and the technology side.

Jeff Dangelo: First of all, before we start, thanks for having me on, Jesse. You you obviously, you're building a great name for yourself and for your company, so I appreciate the the opportunity just to, you know, just to talk. So I appreciate it. The other thing I I wanted to apologize for not doing dinner the other night at the TIA. Most of my nights are spent doing work when I'm out of town. So but thanks for the invite. Guess on me, my background, twenty three years that I've spent in this space. I was one of the early TQL employees. So back in o two is when I started. That business was started in '97 by by two founders. They were in the produce business. Ken Otis was a produce buyer. Ryan Legg sort of managed RWI, the trucking company, and they got together and they spent most of their time in the beginning on produce. The day before I interviewed was the day that I saw the movie Boiler Room. Don't know if you know what that movie is.

Speaker 2: Is that the Ben Affleck one?

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. When I walked if you own the company, right? And so when I walked in and I saw,

[04:00]

literally, were in this horrible office space, a drop ceiling, you had guys standing up shouting and yelling at each other, and at the time I was working for Nielsen, the market research firm, and so they were two completely different organization types. And I was just excited about the energy. And so I started there in o two. Within a couple years, I was a top salesperson. I saw that run from 30 to about 700,000,000. I did a lot of things there. I was really one of the early group sales managers. Even before that, I was training brokers, actually had a broker. And I was so young, I didn't know what I was doing, right, to lead big teams. I had 75 people reporting to me.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Jeff Dangelo: But I was always the guy that I think people were like, Just stick to the script, right? And you're scaling companies, stick to the script. And I was like, Why do we do it that way? Like, I don't understand why we're doing it. So I would do all these projects on the side. A lot of them were pretty successful. Some of them were sort of hindered by the model that we had, right? You wanna network the sort of freight under a big company like that, it's really hard to do when each team acts as an individual organization almost. And so, you know, those are things that, you know, I was thinking through. Back in 'five, 'six, I started a conversation with a friend of my wife's. He had built three companies in Columbus when he was at Ohio State. He went and worked for Steve Ballmer. He was his chief of staff at Microsoft. He became a, just a big product guy in the Microsoft And we were just talking about logistics for years. And then when Ken bought Ryan out

[06:02]

in o six, Ryan called me like the next day and said, hey, when I start up in March, do you wanna come along? So I saw that run to about a 150,000,000 mega corp logistics, both both now obviously are billion dollar companies.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. And then in '14, after years of talking about this with who became a a buddy of mine, I moved the family to California and founded Turbo. And the whole concept of Turbo was we have all of these sort of people and organizations working together to move stuff and no common tool set to do it. And when we first sort of approached the architecture, it was years before that. And companies like LinkedIn and Facebook were starting to get a ton of traction. As a matter of fact, I remember being on the floor of TQL calling what would have been my co founder at Turbo and saying, what is this LinkedIn thing? And he's like, well, it's a social network. I'm like, well, why don't we build that? Right? Because that inherently solves a lot of the issues. If you give carriers the same tools you have, you give customers the same tools you have as a broker, then you don't have the repeat work that's being You know, we we probably hit above our weight class early on. We we raised a ton of capital, but we closed companies like Ryder and Lineage. And they were they took a lot of our, you know, a lot of our engineering work. Like, they you know, our capacity had shrunk significantly even though they're amazing customers. And, you know, we kinda paused on a lot of onboarding. And then sort of over the years, you know, one of couple of our biggest challenges were, you know, trying to get people to adopt a new way to look at the world, which is what obviously you're trying to do at Gemma, and I've got questions for you about how to do that,

[08:10]

is really hard in teaching the people that the world is around. Inherently, that area, as you know, in SF, you've got so much money and so much brilliance and so many people that are trying to change an old industry and that goes against how the industry works today, you know, because it's so people centric. So, I left, I don't know, about three and a half. All these years are running together, three and a half years ago, maybe. The business sold the lineage.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Jeff Dangelo: And I met Phil. Phil's one the founders of Fira. Yeah. Actually, my first job with him was to to onboard a company that he acquired. Before that, I was doing a bunch of research on the industry, say, how can we buy up organizations and sort of digitize them? But he just have to be doing it. So I was helping him onboard a company and then he asked me to be CRO. And then when the debt market sort of went through the roof, we had to change our strategy to more organic. Then we kind of came back to M and A last So that's as you know, fast as I can probably do that story.

Speaker 2: I love it. There's so much here that I wanna dive into. I'm super curious to go back to the beginning. I'm I'm always very interested to, like, hear more about, like, the origin stories of some of the, like, biggest pro so you were, you you started at TQL in o two, and you mentioned like, how how big was the organization at that time? About 30 employees. Yeah. Wow. Wild. And what do you think made, sounds like you have personally, like, a really good run there. It's got, like, TQL obviously has, like, a very famous culture. I'm curious, like, how would you just describe it? And, like, why was that is that business so successful and why did it why what sort of enabled it to, like, grow in the early days? And then I'm curious about you specifically. Like, what enabled you to be

[10:15]

successful there?

Jeff Dangelo: So the I learned a lot at TQL. I mean, it was a a great learning experience on what to do, but also in some ways what how to change it. And which I think helped us when we started Megacorp, and it helped me with Turbo, and obviously, it's helped me with with Fura. And in the early days, and and still is, it's a cultural organization. Like, is they got really refined on defining what are the successful types of people in these roles. And, you know, I used to interview four or five people a day as a sales manager, and we had a checklist. Right? And that checklist was playing the percentages of what makes the best broker. That's that's sort of one one part.

Speaker 2: I think this How did you how did you figure out what those things were?

Jeff Dangelo: So it's funny. You know, over time we played the percentages of what, like, works and what doesn't. Yeah. And we took personality tests. We got the the actual interview is funny. There were diamonds in the rough that didn't do well on their on their test. Yeah. However, you know, if you really want to scale a company, you know, you have to, go by what works. You might miss some diamonds, right? You might miss some of those people. But you gotta scale it that way. I would say the second thing is just a cultural focus on sort of a tenacious experience from the brokers. Like, you know, the people there are, they just don't stop. Right? They, I remember fitting in really well because I worked all the time and I love it. I love to work. I would say number three that most people don't talk about was their understanding of how the numbers and data work, right?

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So at a certain number per employee from a revenue perspective, they add ahead, right? So on and so forth. It became this organic model that grew very quickly. Obviously, with challenges, we took advantage in the o four, o '5. There were there were hurricanes and Kenny had the foresight of hiring a 110 interns, which I managed that program and all they did was cold call. So you could imagine shippers saying, we need trucks and we didn't have enough people because they were managing their own business cradle to grave to go hit those targets, right? And so he hires 110 interns and they're each making 100 calls a day to these shippers that are like, Hey, I need help. The hurricanes and DOD and the market was different then. So they grew very, very fast. I think the challenges, was always, even though I did well, again, it was probably, I wanted to take steps back to take more steps forward just to learn. The technology we had, I wasn't excited about it. I'm sure they've done a lot of work and Kenny's put a lot of money into it to make it better. But for me, was like, Hey, how can I go do something different? Doing the work with Ryan, it was a great experience. I learned a lot about building from the ground up. We tweaked the model a little bit, so we were able to sort of get more out of each customer than I think, you know, the TCOs of the world were getting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I was gonna ask, like, what were the sort of differences in the Nuance in a pro? I I know a little bit less about Megacorp and their, like, perspective. I'm curious, like, what the sort of what was some some of the differences and the insights that Megacorp was built on? Started the same way. So, you know, we started the same way. The the problem is

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Jeff Dangelo: the customer experience was not great because every time we had an assistant or, I forget what we call it, L A E T or something like that, that came into the business. After three to six months, they would go on their own. The customer who would deal with both had to almost help train the new person. So the biggest difference is we kept teams together and we almost gave them their own P and L, right? And kinda had a set amount that that team could make revenue wise as a percentage of revenue, and they could manage it however they want. So instead of hiring, let's say, a carrier salesperson, they wanted to hire an admin to keep costs low, they And could do that, so you had some interesting dynamics of sort of building that culture, but at the same time, that culture was very similar. And this one was very family, I would say more family oriented. Whereas the other one was like, how are we tenacious? How are we excellent? And so they were different. Both have a lot of positives. I would say Ryan has a great following in terms of people because he really takes care of them. I would say Kenny has a following because you know, he wants to win. Right? And and he's still in that business even he's a billionaire, and he's still he's still jams every day. Right? So,

Speaker 2: you know, I learned a lot from there. And then, yeah, obviously Can I ask the I I'm curious? There's one piece that I just wanna make sure I followed. The the model that, you said at TQL, people would transition out, and that would be not a great experience for customers because what they their accounts like, why why were they shifting out and not staying with the accounts in that model? Well, you had the main broker.

Jeff Dangelo: Right? So you had a cradle to gray broker. And once once they got to 4 or 5,000 in net revenue per week,

[16:26]

then you had someone supporting them so they could get from 4 or 5 to 8 Right. Or And after three to six months, you would spin that person out into being a broker themselves you would have to replace them. We started to add sort of dedicated people because we knew that was a problem, but when we built Mega Corp, we just said, hey, let's just start it that way from scratch. And if we wanna incubate people, now we incubate them with four or five different people on a team. So you don't have to rely on that broker to train all the time. You have a team of people that they can sort of help. And I learned a lot in both. Some stuff, you know, I'm sure we've taken from that. Some are completely different. We can get into that if you want a little bit later.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'd love to. At the right time. Super interesting. What do you think about, so MegaCop ended up being some sort of version of cradle to grade, but a little bit more sort of team based so that there was customer longevity. TQL, you would own the account, but then somebody would sort of come in and support, but then kind of branch out on their own. And so you had customer chat. It seems like what do you think about the the different approaches for scaling brokerages? Because it is interesting. Like, I think the thing that maybe I didn't fully appreciate that a lot of scaling a brokerage really quickly is about it's about how, bringing on sellers and getting them productive quickly. And you can almost, like, start to model this stuff out. If you're very good at identifying that talent and you've got that path, like, the market is so large, especially in the spot market where it's kind of like a jump ball every day. Like, you can ends up being a lot of this kind of, like, hiring capacity model in a way, doesn't it?

Jeff Dangelo: Well, it I think it's I think it depends on how you

[18:27]

how you look at it. You know, you have CH cargo model, which is sort of a bifurcated model. You have sellers and you have carrier sales. And I think from a scalability, you know, part of that is really good. I think from a service level perspective, I'm not saying anyone's bad or good. I'm not saying that. But what I've heard from customers is that service quality goes down in that scenario. Now, it's because they're asset focused and not shipment focused. I think the hard part about cradle to grave is that it's shipment focused and it's hard to get utilization of assets across all of your cradle to grave people. If you're gonna do it right, you have to have some kind of horizontal service called care sales to support. The problem is that broker might not wanna take less commission if someone else books that care than them. Team based models are great, but again, you have your own mini P and L. And so one team might not be helping another team, you know, sort of with a carrier. And on the sales side, it's one of the biggest thing I learned from actually doing Turbo. And something we brought here was I thought I was a pretty good seller before. And then I had to sell technology. And I had to learn what really what problems I really had to uncover, what were the business cases of the organization. How many different people in the org did I have to sort of sell to? And who you know, a lot of times in brokerage, you have people that are just great hustlers, and they could be great sort of relationship people. But for the most part, they're just really good operators, right, if you think of cradle to great people.

[20:29]

And what I didn't wanna do here was replicate everything because I wanted the first person to talk to the customer to really stand out in their approach because it makes the customer feel like, wow, this person not only knows their stuff, but actually does proper discovery across my whole organization. Because most of these companies, they don't do business cases. Target companies without budget for tech, so they're typically under 30,000,000 in spend. And we do that because we give them our tech as part of the service offering. But in order to do that, we have to understand what their problems are. And what I found, and I'm generalizing, I don't mean to generalize, there's a lot of great salespeople, But if you play the percentages, taking up an ex broker to sell this way is really, really hard. It's just a completely different DNA. Now, my CRO has, and what we look for in a, first, a VP of sales, is someone that's lived both. Right? Someone that lived on the freight side, but also on the tech side. So if you go to a recruiter and you ask for that, it's really hard for them to find.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It is, it's always been an interesting there's a lot of very talented, hardworking people in brokerage. And many of them like, people are not often one way or, you know, like, really good people can kind of adapt, but it is it does feel like a little a little different. I'm curious, maybe like a good moment to, like, tell us a bit about Fura and what you guys are doing now. I'm also curious about the name, because kinda I I love it, and I wanna know where it, where it came from.

Jeff Dangelo: Well, I'll start there. So Fira so Phil's from Eastern Europe. Yep. And, you know, originally from Moscow, and Fira in both Ukrainian and Russian means truck.

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So one of the things that we were you know, he was trying to do originally before I joined was, you know, when you're starting a tech company, kinda like we did Turbo, is we're trying to find, you know, sort of a two syllable name that is kind of really easy to remember and, you know, have the.com for that. So he bought the .com really early on and now obviously Kira, you know, the branding was really good. Our chief product officer, just an amazing branding guy. If you've gone on our website, he built the web, like just really, really good flow in creating our brand. Know, Fura, when I took over, actually when I started, I think one of the things that I was always obsessed about was not necessarily how to get rid of people, it was more of, there was so much work that's manual, right? And you're doing this work today, right, to automate a lot of the minutia that people do And every so I came in and I was like, Look, we have so many people, this business is not gonna scale, especially if we do M and A, right? So think about, Hey, we're gonna add way more people and we're still not applying tech and we're still not automating. So we kind of put this roadmap together of how do we create sort of zero waste? Some other people have said this, right? But we had to do it on a shoestring budget, you know, early on. Like, if you think of Convoy, think their early days were like zero waste. But and they you know, Dan did some great things. But at the same time, you know, we didn't have that kind of fundraising to do that work. So we had to do, like, piece by piece on top of something out of the box, which Inter was kind of our baseline product. The other thing that we felt is over the next couple years, there was gonna be massive consolidation in this industry, which you're seeing. And I think we have a window of twelve to twenty four months where you're seeing a lot of brokers struggling,

[24:35]

a lot of 3PLs struggling, and they just don't know what to do. Right? They're like, know, do I stay on and hopefully the market comes back? They've been saying it for a couple years now that the market's gonna come back. And so one of the big buckets that we do when we buy is companies that are losing money or breaking even, and we give those owners an outcome that they wouldn't have normally gotten, right? A lot of times those companies have all offshore or onshore teams, they have old technology, They're very inefficient, right, across the board. And our job is to almost take them from manual to digital within a couple months. Right? We do have our buckets. Like, we're we have a pretty big pipeline of companies that one one bucket is, you know, owners that just wanna get out, that want to allow their people to, you know, make it to the next level. Maybe they're not struggling, but they they're like, like, just need someone that's sort of tech forward in the way that they look at the world, but also get a piece, second bite of the apple. Right? Get a second piece to make money knowing that we're growing. I'll give you our revenue kind of growth. You know, we've, in a second. And then the third bucket is owners that just wanna be a part of something. Right? They wanna be a part of something great, and they can't they don't know how to do that. And so typically our size is under 50,000,000. Really, that 5 to $20,000,000 sweet spot is kinda perfect for us, but we'll look larger. We have a pretty good pipeline and some good stuff going on right now from a mergers and acquisitions perspective. We did a deal last December that was really good. It was Pinwheel and owner, one of the owners of that is still with us and adds a ton of value, Johnny.

[26:38]

But they were struggling. You know, if you you sort of check all the boxes and we've made that integration very, very successful.

Speaker 2: That's awesome. It's not it's not easy to do that. So it sounds like the things that a lot of it is around, like, sort of fit, you know, because that's often one of the hot you know, the hardest things in actually getting deals done is like, what, you know, what why would somebody sell? What is the scenario? Is it a good fit for them? And so it sounds like that often is a case where I'm curious how you, deals that are losing money, those can be hard from a capital and financing perspective. Are you just willing to sort of absorb those losses for a while because you you have sort of believed that there's some path, or is part of the underwriting that you have a clear like, you know what operational plays you're gonna implement to be able to get it to, like, cash flow breakeven or even sort of positive? Or how do you sort of think about

Jeff Dangelo: that piece of it? Oh, it's a great question. Without giving up too much information about the playbook. Yeah. We We try to do deals where there's no debt upfront, right? And sort of try to support that owner to get to that point one way or the other. From a fit perspective, it is important that the owners are really aligned to what you're trying to do as an organization. Otherwise, as you know, like, think of what you guys are doing at Vooma, which is like, you're gonna go sell a CEO on digital transformation, none of their people wanna change, Right? Yeah. So it's it's kinda the same mindset Mhmm. In in terms of fit.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. How do you what have you learned about navigating

[28:38]

some of the cultural and organizational change that is often required? You know? Because prior prior to starting Boomer, I think, you know, I, we would acquire technology businesses. Yeah. And I think at least for me, there was a lot of things that were hard about that. But moving culture is maybe the hardest thing, you know, because you wanna, like, honor a lot of the things that are really great. But often there's things that need to change or, like, need to move forward. And so I'd say, it's it can be delicate, and challenging to, like, move businesses. What what I'm curious, like, what some of the learnings that you guys have Oh, man. Had on how to do that successfully or maybe even some of the It's a

Jeff Dangelo: big it's a big one. I mean, the first three to six months, we have a motto. Like, our job is to earn trust.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Jeff Dangelo: And engagement, engagement, engagement. So like the last one we did, Ryan, our CRO and I, we went up to Chicago a lot. We met with a team, we do surveys, we do all hands, we try to get them engaged. We're a fully distributed organization, so like we don't have an office per se. And so doing these calls all the time and really being open to them teaching us stuff and vice versa, like how did you guys do it then? And really spending a lot of time and education on both sides. There are some things that you kinda might not be perfect, right? But you also wanna honor the success that some of these folks have had and you wanna support that, which is the first thing we do to earn trust. We actually support and help them grow their businesses. And we provide executive sponsorship to their customers.

[30:40]

We really try to educate them on the tech and how it helps the client. But we don't say you have to do this overnight, right? It's more of an organic thing. We have to earn the trust over time to be able to do that. I heard a quote and I wanna make sure it was right, but it makes sense. Brad Jacobs used to say, It takes about two years to do an integration. And it took us a lot less to do this one, the last one, But at the same time, you know, obviously, when you get bigger deals, it it does. It's gonna require one to two plus years to actually get people excited about being a part of a different journey.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That was about the amount of time I found it took me as well to sort of get to the point where it felt like, okay, the big like, the organization is sort of, like, moving in the direction that one wants, and the thing is just takes a lot of time, for sure. What about, like, from a technology perspective? Are you guys so you you you guys use turbo. Do do you will you switch the TMSs so that everyone's on a common, like, technology stack, or how do you approach that?

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. It's it's the It's the best thing to do to earn trust, honestly, even though people are like, oh, switching's really hard. So some of our target market is either, you know, really old platforms where the people are like, hey, get me off of this thing. I need something to give to customers. Or we look at Turbo customers because it makes the integration easier, right? And the one thing that I learned from doing Turbo that I learned a lot was that it's really hard to get organizations to change behavior. So when I would step in front of a CEO and say, You need to give this platform to your customers, their vendors, the carrier, they look at me like I've got three heads.

[32:41]

And I always felt, wow, if I just did that, I would build a really successful company. And that's part of what we do. We really spend a lot of time with clients and their vendors onboarding them into the experience so that we add value. It's all based off of a discovery that we do. It's really hard to do. So if you're a brokers leader and you wanna do this, it's hard because you gotta change the behavior of your whole team. The second thing we've done is we built or bought technology to fill in the gaps, right? So, whether it's algorithms to auto bid and auto price to carrier sales automation, AI voice, we've been engaged in that for a while, which is great. And there's a lot of other stuff we've done with a small team, but the speed at which we're able to do it is is like, we never had that speed when I was building Turvo. But a part of it is because the tools are so much easier to use. Right? Right. Than it was, you know, 10 ago.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. What do you think about the you guys are obviously going down the path of partnering with technology vendors and being very good at the, like, the change management, the integration, the understanding of how to get the value versus the, like, going and building everything yourself? I I you know, presuming that's been accomplished. We do both. You do both. Yeah. Yeah. So you decide what you build versus where you partner? Like, what's your framework for thinking about Yeah. We have a matrix. It's like speed,

Jeff Dangelo: business case. We actually do, you know, product one pagers. We have a, you know, sort of a tech. So Phil, myself, Maria, Ryan, like, we kinda all sit in here in finance and we look at it and break it down and say, you know, is it an e like, is it easier to outsource it? Is it is it cheaper and easier and quicker to build it?

[34:45]

Do we wanna own that IP because it differentiates us? If it doesn't differentiate us, like like if it doesn't help us one day if we wanna sell the company or go public in valuation, we'll go with a third party that's the best in class. To us, that's really important. Me, building it, I just wanna make sure we can build it better than anyone if we're gonna do it. I wanna stand by our product and say, Oh my God, that's the best thing that I've seen ever. And that's hard to do, as you know, because you have to upkeep it and continue to maintenance and just all this stuff. And then your tech team starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger, it's more complicated. So, we pick very specific engagements for external buys, or we do it ourselves.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And being selective there, makes a ton of sense. As you as you think about the actual, like, operating model of your brokerages, which aspects of your experience from mega corp and TQL are you sort of bringing into how you guys operate the brokerage today, and what are the areas that you're sort of thinking about it differently?

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. So the first thing is sales. I think I mentioned it. Having real true sales reps, 100% laser focused on a target market, so we're not doing spray and pray. We're getting very specific about the network approach to selling. Once we get a customer, how do we spread that across their vendors and customers? Because the connected ecosystem for us is really important and it speeds up adoption, it speeds up sales.

[36:46]

With two salespeople this year, we've added almost 100 customers.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Jeff Dangelo: And in this market, you go ask anybody, especially the brokers that we're looking at acquiring, you know, like, maybe it's a hand a handful with ten, fifteen. Like so so we've really taken that approach. So so can you say more about what you mean by, like, a network approach to to sales? I think I kind of understand it, but I'd love yeah. Bring that to life for me.

Jeff Dangelo: Obviously, I don't wanna give up the playbook. It's it's actually not complicated. What's what's complicated is you have to connect sales and operations in a way where we maximize digital impact. And when you maximize digital impact and you're you're sort of making the customer, we're solving that problem with the customer, whether it's visibility or automation or whatever, then they're gonna tell their friends and family about you, right? And so we try to focus on what we call nodes on a network. So the customer is the initial node, we close them. We look at vendors, customers, suppliers of that node. We map it out very scientifically. We try to understand their spend. And we use that we leverage that customer to, like, make introductions. And it works out really well because we've added value in business cases. Look what we did with X shipper. This is what they were able to automate and it's a true business case. But that's what we did. It's harder to do that on tech, especially when you're focused on 3PLs and brokerages because they're like, I don't to want go to this company, right? I think you guys work with Zen, but I don't want you to go to Zen, I want you for myself. So that's a lot harder, and that's what I learned at Turbo.

[38:46]

So sales is one thing. Operations, what I didn't want is like the freight, the traditional cradle to gate freight broker to focus on selling because they're not focused on executing. Right? If you're trying to do both, it's really hard. Like, the end of the day, you're broken freight and your sales manager's like, I need you to make X number of cold calls. You're like, I'm spent, I'm tired. Like, I can't do that. And so when they don't put their best foot forward, they're not as prepared and they're talking to drivers and carriers all day. So we don't expect them to do that. We do keep teams together, very similar to how we did at Mega Corp. I think it's very valuable. Another thing we do is because we have sales handing off to Teams, we can actually change the customer to different Teams. And so one of the problems that a lot of brokerages have is when their main person leaves, they take the business with them. And so what we try to do is we try to, you know, make sure that we have the best service and we won't change unless there's an there's an issue for sure. But but we try to we try to support that customer as if it was a Fiora customer, not just a one person customer. We try to make the whole team engage and the executive engage in that client, which is why I think as a percentage of the business we get from each customer is higher, than traditional brokerages.

Speaker 2: Because of the depth and you're bringing executives to the table and just sort of showing up as, like, sure the business is supporting you and that earns the the right to, like, be able to handle more and more of their freight.

Jeff Dangelo: Think think about what you do at Booma. Right?

[40:47]

You have salespeople, you have you as a sponsor, like you and I worked together, like for a while, you have your customer success team, you have your product team, and think about how that insulates your organization within a customer. It's really when you're managing freight and you're having QBRs and you're training them on technology, it's really hard for them not to say, wow. This is a different experience than what I'm getting someone else. And so that's kind of the goal is to to really focus on the problems that we're solving with clients and engage top down. Actually, top down and bottom up, like, on both

Speaker 2: There's something interesting in your story and approach, Jeff, where you've you've had a very interesting career in freight in that you've, you know, been at the ground floor of these scaling these brokerages that are really, like, you know, pretty hard charging. Like, tech is maybe not the first thing that you would sort of think of and then sort of founding a tech business. And it it seems like there's, yeah, lessons that you learned about what the nature of a technology sale is, which is a little bit more sort of, hey, what are your strategic priorities? Where are you trying to move as a business? How do we help you to, like, understand the way that we can help you get to those? How do we, like, help you through this process of transformation? And even the yeah. We call it's like multithreading accounts. Right? Like, you know, Yeah. What are okay. What are the executive relationships? What about the operators on the ground? Who are the IT people that are connected? And how do you make sure that you really understand what's going on and sort of earn the full trust of the organization. And you're almost bringing that to, like, a freight buying cycle. But then the other piece, you know, I think the thing I always think about the the turbo was quite unique. It was sort of thinking about this how to tackle this collaboration problem and can you know? And I I still think the vision of, like, if you can get everyone on a common

[42:49]

platform, there's real magic that can happen. I think the the challenge in freight is, like, getting everyone on a common platform is is really, really hard. But it's almost like in the kind of current mode that you're thinking about this is is you can actually kind of realize that, and that can almost drive the the expansion of the of the biz. Mean, it's a very smart sort of and thoughtful go to market, and I can see it as being this, like, extension of a lot of the, like, unique experiences that you've had over your career.

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. It's very insightful. I think, you know, we've grown 500% in the past three years and a lot of that is organic and it's because we've kind of taken this approach. You know, you go back to your point, my journey, I don't know if I was just naive, but at every stop, you know, I left a really well paid role to go take nothing or take less to go learn and say, how do I And like Turbo, I didn't get paid for As a founder, you're like, how do I pay myself? You're taking that risk, but you learn so much by doing it that you have to take things from each journey. But you think about all the really smart people that don't take that leap, that are making great money, that actually could have done amazing things building, but it's just that So I think I was naive. I'm like, oh my gosh, like starting starting Turbo, I didn't realize that you had to raise a lot of money to build software. Like, like, takes longer. It always takes longer. Right? It always costs more money, but you don't realize that stuff. I moved all across California and I was like, Yeah, we're gonna do great. And you don't really realize the kind of effort and money that goes into it. But, yeah, I I I think I think I've always had this you know you know Tony Fidel. Right?

[44:55]

I actually don't. No. So Tony Fidel,

Jeff Dangelo: basically, he built the iPod, and then he built Nest and sold Nest to Google. Right? Cool. He's a brilliant product and technologist guy. And, actually, they were trying to build the iPhone many years before the technology was even available. I forget what the movie's called, but they talk about it. And he said something, he was an investor in Turbo, and he said something that was really simple. He's like, Sales is really easy. It's what's the pain and what's the pain killer? And that's it. And so our team, every time I talk to them, and Ryan will say this, I think he said this on a podcast the other day, was I'm very adamant that this is a lot easier than people think. It's what is the problem that they need to solve and what's the impact? So like our discovery is like how many customer service people do they have? Like how many touches does it take? How many phone calls do you have to make? Like just stuff that you would do on the software side that no one's doing on the brokerage side. You know, it's how many loads do you do a week? Well, I don't really care. I can I can go figure figure that out through some technology and database? I really care more about the problem I'm gonna solve for those people.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think where we're headed is that you guys are very early to this, but I think it's actually gonna be pretty important to evolve that way, in brokerage, over the next kinda, like, five five years to be thinking and trying to develop more of a strategic relationship where you're really sort of thinking about it's maybe not quite managed transportation, but, like, starting to trend towards that of, how do I help you sort of think about network design? And sure. Well, like, we'll execute this stuff for you as well, but it kinda needs to be more than than that. It feels to me that that's, like, gonna gonna be part of what's required to succeed in the in the next chapter. I saw your interview with Chad Olison.

[47:08]

Jeff Dangelo: Yeah. Think you said it right. And he was talking about them becoming a consulting company, which, you know, the business model, like, you know, it's hard when your tech company becomes just a consulting company. But, you know, when I used to look at this, I'd say, you know, brokers are really good at executing. Just very good at focusing on that shipment, at least from the world that I came from. 3PLs are really usually good at planning, but they're not great executors, and brokers are not great planners. Technology to me can bridge that gap, and the adoption problem in my mind can start to shrink with AI because you don't necessarily need to engage somebody to get adoption. You can just turn it on in parallel with the people. And so I think the way the supply chain universities are going, a lot more smart people in this space like you and people I just met, the founder of True North, MIT grad, brilliant, and those really smart minds are looking at the space in a much different way and looking at other industries to apply those same methodologies to it, and I think the model will change, Right? It has to change.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna see this, and, it'll be brokers are really good at understanding how to move freight, you know, and I think that that's that's gonna be be really critical even to be successful in, like, implementing tooling to go and make that happen. Like, there's so much nuance here that I and we we've already seen so much money lit on fire by, like, underestimating how difficult, like, a a task that that actually is.

[49:10]

But I do think it will start like, we're seeing early signs of it now. And and but that's what's exciting. I mean, the thing that isn't going away is that, like, shippers need freight to be moved and, like, you know, exactly what that looks like, you know, in five or ten years, I think it it has changed a lot. It's gonna change a lot, but it's an it's an exciting time, I think, for the industry. And, Jeff, we're, I I promise to let you out at the top of the hour, so we're coming up here. But I've, I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's been super cool to get to, like, go back to the the beginning and hear all of the there's a really I mean, I I really appreciate just generally the arc of your career and how it's, like, clear that sort of each of these phases have created this, like, richness to the fabric of who you are and how you approach, you know, the problems that you're facing in a novel way. Thank you for the time. Thanks for having me on.

Jeff Dangelo: I feel like I'm now the old guy in the room. Always You're fresh and young. You know? You're like Jeff's just the old guy. Right? Jeff's just the the old guy that tells old stories.

Speaker 2: Well, I don't think so. I just think you've you've got some accumulated wisdom, you know, but you're, like, still attacking this problem with youthfulness.

Jeff Dangelo: I don't know. You gotta love what you do. Right? I think it's really important. You know, as a company, the people that work for you have to see that and feel it. I think you do a great job of that. You know, seeing you on LinkedIn, seeing you in person, In some ways, it's easy to do because you do love it. In other ways, you have to be consistent and you hope that people rally around your vision. And that's kinda, you know, vision is one thing, but execution is probably most of it. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Just kinda showing up every day, staying consistent. Yeah. But I agree. I mean, I feel very blessed. Like, I love what I'm doing. And I think, you know, it's it's not available to every like, I think, you know, there's a bit of a saying

[51:18]

professionally that, like, do what you love and you'll never work a day. Like, that's just not a reality for most people. Like, you've got kids in a mortgage. Like, you're gonna do what is required to, like, move your life forward, and not every job is, like, awesome. I feel very lucky. My job is awesome. I really love what I'm doing. I think it's, like, a very interesting industry with a lot of interesting problems with great people in it, and we get to build cool stuff that hopefully, like, contributes to moving it forward. And it's like this endless process of just, like, improvement of self, the business, the product, hopefully the industry. Yeah. And you're you've got a version of that as well. Yeah. It's been awesome, Jesse. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, Jeff. Good to see you.