#1 Jordan Reber (ARL Logistics) on Building a Freight Brokerage with Offshore Talent, Automation, and an Agent Network

[00:00]

Jesse Buckingham: If the tech people would just sit right next to the business people day in and day out, you'll build a product pretty fast. You know? But it's that disconnect is where it slows it down. The idea was if we could train four super users in different pillars of our company to do be masters of the entry level work, we'll never have to train entry level ever again. I think what we found and what I've seen over my twenty years is that those two different roles have two different types of people. There is the small percentage of people that are really good at both. But for the most part, you're either super organized and structured, and you can execute as as a BDR, or you're kind of all over the place, and you're just a people person. Welcome to the Freight Show podcast.

In this episode, we're joined by Jordan Reber, president of ARL Logistics, who shares his journey from dispatch trainee to leading a fast growing agent powered logistics network. Jordan dives into how ARL scaled by blending offshore talent, automation, and a reimagined cradle to grave model, while keeping relationships at the core. We cover how he built hybrid teams in Colombia, why continuous training and small wins matter, and how ARL is now evolving its sales structure with a nod to the revenue engine framework. Jordan also shares lessons on vetting tech vendors, unlocking value from messy data, and balancing people with process. This episode is brought to you by Vooma, the back office automation platform built for freight brokerages. From AI document handling to ops streamlining, Vooma helps you scale without the growing pains. Learn more at Vooma.com.

[02:00]

Jesse Buckingham: Awesome, Jordan. Super excited to have you on the first episode of the Freight Show today. You know, it's funny, Jordan. I think back to the beginnings of Vooma, and you actually played a role even as the early versions of the idea was sort of coming to life. I think it was maybe Rich Casoli that introduced me to you. And he said that Jordan loves to try and chat about new technology. And so it's been fun getting to know you over the past few years. But I actually don't think I've ever fully heard your story and how you got into freight and how you got into your current role at ARL and would love to hear the story from the beginning.

Jordan Reber: Yeah. No. I appreciate you having me on the show. And just so you know, when Rich does that too, it just means he doesn't have the patience to deal with what he wanted to talk about. So hey, we're still working. Me and Rich are still yet to work together in a formal capacity. So I hear that. Well, it's interesting. So Rich Kussoli does go back to my origin. When I first got into the business, as a management training program at PGT Trucking in Monaca, Pennsylvania, had just like anyone else coming out of school. I got a business management degree, had no idea what I wanted to do. They just told me, hey, you gotta get a degree to get an interview. So I was like, okay. I'm gonna do that as fast as possible. But PGT had a cool program where you got to spend two weeks in every department. And when you were done with that, you picked what your top three were and then they placed you. And what I learned really fast was there was a lot of back office jobs that I could never do. Like I just remember sitting at my desk, falling asleep and watching the time go by. This is very administrative. I came from the restaurant world. So for me, everything needed to be really fast paced, high stress, people losing their tempers a little bit. Like you lose track of time. That's how I like to work. And so once I got into dispatch and I felt that environment, I was like, okay, this is where we need to be. And Rich had gone through that program four years before me. So he was already there. He was in a managing role. You could see him and some others and what the opportunities were.

[04:04]

Jordan Reber (cont.): But I was actually presented with a unique opportunity. PGT also owned Pittsburgh Logistics in Rochester, Pennsylvania. And they were doing fully outsourced contract solutions for large steel companies. They had about 16 customers at the time, and they needed to diversify. They offered my boss who was running the terminal and myself an opportunity to go start a freight brokerage in which we were just gonna call on all the customers that didn't wanna be fully outsourced and see if we could get any of their freight. And they actually had a proprietary TMS system. It was called eflatbed.com. It was really ahead of its time. Had waterfall tendering, dock scheduling, but it wasn't really built for transactional brokerage. So you could put things out to the waterfall tendering and then it would go to open market. And I was like, I just needed to go to open market right now. And so things were very manual. So at the early stages, we did have some technology, proprietary, that we could work with, but it just really wasn't built for transactional freight brokerage. And I didn't really know how to be a transactional freight broker. So as we were learning all that, we did build up the flatbed niche. Pittsburgh Logistics was sold, became PLS Logistics, we started to expand in other modes, other markets. I got to move to Jacksonville, Florida in 2011, and started a satellite branch, which was the blueprint for how we'd open up multiple offices. And we started to scale with that cradle to grave brokerage model. So ten years was great. Met a lot of great people, but it was just time to move on and do something else. And that's when I met Ron Farrity, owner of ARL, John Kellenberger and David Anderson, owners of US One Industries, which is our parent company, and told them, hey, I wanted to learn their side of the business because they do drayage, which I knew enough about, but I didn't know about the asset side of it. So let me learn about that for a little while. And then eventually we were gonna start a brokerage. And we did that in 2016.

[06:18]

Jordan Reber: I was able to bring on some guys that used to work with us at PLS that had been gone off, done some different things and were ready to get back in and do it a different way. Ironically, at the same time I met Robert Kadena and David Bell and Jeff Mazer from Lean Solutions Group. And it was interesting. I liked the way that the reps interact with the customers in a cradle to grave model. I don't like all the stuff that those reps have to do that slows them down from doing what they should be doing, just building relationships and working strategically with their customers. So I said, well, being in Colombia, setting up back office operations for our drayage entity, which was super manual processes. Back then we were still on paper logs. If you imagine we're doing that plus with drayage, there's a lot of paperwork. So I'm down there creating all these SOPs for the team down there. And as I was meeting some of the others around, was like, wow, these guys are college educated, bilingual, super talented. I could teach them to move freight. And I could do that at scale too. What was challenging was getting your sales reps to be successful. Was like, well, if I can get all this operations work off their plate, that should increase their chance of being more successful and decrease some of the stress that's going on within that cradle to grave model. So we got to create this hybrid staffing assisted cradle to grave model. And then as we were building, it always was: first we put this mundane process in Colombia, then we think of ways to automate it. Or we're working with tech providers that could plug into our systems and automate parts of this. The goal was never to automate everything from start to finish. It was like, if it was a 10 step process, and we automate seven of them, we automate six, we automate one, two, three, and then six, seven, and then the humans will fill in between. And I think that's when we first met, it was interesting to me because all our load building was being done in Colombia. And if we couldn't get it set up via EDI, you gotta build it. And in every TMS you can duplicate old orders, change things, you can create templates, but it still left a lot of human error. So automating the load building was where you came into play with that. And it's just been kind of always thinking like that ever since.

[08:18]

Jordan Reber (cont.): Just trying to tweak the model little by little, seeing where the industry's going. Since then, I have expanded to both sides of our company. We're operating nine fifty truck drivers across the country, still heavily focused on intermodal drayage. But that brings a whole slew of other issues running a trucking company. So we're balancing both, but what we've noticed is that there's a lot of opportunities that we can start to find between the groups and ultimately our salespeople shouldn't just be selling brokerage. They need to sell the whole network because there's a lot of different opportunities, especially for entrepreneurs. We're an agent based network. We're always partnered with different people that wanna better themselves and grow and just need that financial backing. They need the risk protection on the insurance side of things, and we can really make these strategic partnerships to help them grow.

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Very cool. There's a bunch there to unpack. I'm curious, starting — you started your career on the dispatching side. How long were you in that role at the beginning?

Jordan Reber: I think technically I got pulled out of the six month training program early. And then we probably did it for like six to eight months and then the opportunity got to start a transactional brokerage.

Jesse Buckingham: What's been the impact for you? Because not every broker has had that experience actually working on the carrier side. How did that shape your perspective?

[10:32]

Jordan Reber: Yeah. I mean, you're dealing with a lot of dynamic people. I got assigned to the independent contractors early on, which was like, oh, okay, cool. And didn't realize what that actually meant as you're dealing with these guys that, you know, there's no forced dispatch. So you had to convince them to take the loads. They're calling in every day asking about the one perfect load that they get once a month. And they're always shocked when it's not there. It's like, dude, we gotta do these other loads for the customers too. So you learn to negotiate with people and try to help. Eventually you just have to tell them: it's either take this freight or not. We have to service the account. And the drivers knew I was the 22 year old fresh out of college. Like, they could probably push this guy a little bit.

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. And you mentioned being very early with Lean Staffing and seeing the opportunity for using offshore. How did it become clear to you that you could extend that to more of the operational roles?

Jordan Reber: I think just from being down there. I wanted a hands on approach. Even some of the stuff we were setting up was pretty easy, but I just needed to feel them out because we have a lot of similarities in our cultures, but there's also differences. So just trying to figure out who were our people that could pick it up really fast and I could give them more, and who were the ones I needed to slow down. At that point, it was just a staffing company. So it was like, I wasn't gonna waste too much time. Was like, hey, I got four people here. These two are really good at these things. Find me two more like that and replace these. I could do that a lot faster if I was down there. And from being there, I just met some of the other people that were working on other accounts. And I realized, this is just where we start. We can build on top of this. And it really took our second or third year down there.

[12:47]

Jordan Reber: I remember jokingly sitting in a small brokerage office, and Keith Rear and Greg Morrow are two of my partners now. I said over to Greg, who was recently married, hey, I think we're gonna need you to go live there for like six months if we're gonna really get them good at this and then we can scale it. And Keith, who was sitting there single in his twenties, was like, I'll go. I was like, oh, I was just joking, but yeah, let's do it. So Keith ended up going down. He actually, we needed him there two months, but the idea was if we could train four super users in different pillars of our company to be masters of the entry level work, we'll never have to train entry level ever again. And that was what was really burning out our managers up in Pittsburgh and in Moon Township. Was just that churn of: you get an employee in, they're doing a pretty basic job. You can only pay them so much. Six months in, they get a couple extra bucks an hour somewhere else and they leave. And that was all the work we put into Colombia.

Jesse Buckingham: But if you never had to train entry level again — that's the training that nobody wants to do. So why did going to Colombia help you solve that? Was it the train-the-trainer model?

Jordan Reber: The train the trainer is definitely part of it, but ultimately these were jobs that people really wanted down there. It was a nice office environment. So they're not thinking I hate going to work on Monday. They were very appreciative to have this job. So they took it seriously. And then that bred the train the trainer type roles where anytime people would be with us for a little bit, we'd say, hey, I know you want other opportunities. You want advancement. Well, here's the deal. We're going to hire someone new. You're going to help interview them. And then you're going to train them. Until they are as good as you at that job, you will not move on. And if you do move on to another role and find out that they're not as good as you, you'll go back into that seat. So it really cemented in them that: train them to be as good as you are, then we'll release you to the next role. And that's how we started to scale it.

[14:58]

Jesse Buckingham: There was some amount of skepticism, I think, initially that it was gonna be possible to train folks outside of the US. Was that a concern for you guys? And what have you learned about where that model works very well versus where it's really important to have folks in the US?

Jordan Reber: Yeah. Nowadays, obviously people are very comfortable with training people remote and having remote employees. But prior to COVID, it was a different story. Could this be possible? I would just say like, look, it's just the same as if we have an office in Florida. We're not just gonna put them on an island. We're gonna go there, we're gonna train them, we're gonna work with them every single day. We're gonna treat them like they're our own. When I would go down there, I would bring Pittsburgh Steelers swag with me and teach them about football and get them all into the black and gold. We painted the walls red, white, and blue for ARL. We made them really feel at home. I think that was definitely a big part of it. And then post COVID, everyone was jumping on board on that. But the initial challenge was, okay, you're putting people into another country. Are they just going to get rid of American jobs? And then with our employees here, they had the same worries — oh, are you replacing us? I was like, guys, we are not replacing anybody. This is for growth. We don't have very big profit margins as a trucking company. So the only way to do all the things we have to do to stay compliant, we need to get it for cheaper labor. And these guys are going to take this minutia off of your plate so you can help us with the growth. We know you can make the donuts every day. We don't need you to make the donuts anymore. Someone else is going to do that. And it freed those people up.

[16:58]

Jordan Reber (cont.): So to address your question about where should what jobs be there and what jobs should be up here: we've always kept most of our sales roles up here. A lot of pricing and things that took a lot of industry experience, people all sitting in the room working together. But really everything else has always been down there. We have multiple levels of management down there as well. As you look at our org chart, you really can't tell where the US starts and Colombia begins, because it is kind of intertwined in the middle. But I would say just in general, there are a subset of the employees there that don't really challenge status quo very well, which is — I want people at every level always speaking their mind. So they tend to be people pleasers and we are technically the customers. They don't like to tell us bad news. I'm like, we've never treated you like a vendor or outsourcing. We've always treated you like employees. You have as much a voice as the people in Pittsburgh do. You have to use it. And for some they don't. But not every company culture calls for that either. We just like it.

Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, you were saying that you guys initially started the business with a cradle to grave model. There's conversations now about sort of thinking about transitioning it. What has been your experience? Why did you guys start there? What is good about that model? What are the challenges?

Jordan Reber: Yeah. I mean, like I said, we started with the hybrid version of cradle to grave. So we were able to put a lot of the administrative work down in Colombia — track and trace, load building, even inbound phone coverage, and all the things that usually entry level people do in those first six months of working in a brokerage. And we liked the reps and the customers having one point of contact.

[19:14]

Jordan Reber (cont.): But what we saw the flaws in: obviously we all grew through COVID, and then from 2022 to 2024, when things settled down, there's only one way to right size things and it's to start letting people go. Naturally salespeople have numbers, so they get it. And we're very transparent with that. So it's not like we came in and just whacked half the floor. It happened over time as people weren't hitting their numbers. But when you scale up, you need bodies. When you scale down, you have to decrease bodies. And everyone's doing everything, so no one's really specialized in any part of that. So as we look to make a transition: we're going to have a smaller sales team filled with what we feel we do really well at the BDR level. These business development reps will still be that contact for the customer. Another one's quoting and coordinating and organizing everything. But then backed by an operations team that'll be doing your carrier sales and your load building, your track and trace, put into three different buckets. And super important with our marketing strategy, which — we did read Kara Brown's book, The Revenue Engine, and we took a lot out of that.

Jesse Buckingham: What are the big learnings from that?

Jordan Reber: Well, I think marketing supporting sales and vice versa is a big deal. In the cradle to grave world, guys that are moving freight — if leads are coming in and we need sales to be jumping on them, they couldn't do it because they had three loads dropped off and they gotta cover those and a customer's calling. So you need a sales team that's free and available, so that we can put SLAs in place. When a lead comes in, we expect it to be responded to within fifteen minutes. And this is how we want you to approach it. Cause in cradle to grave, everyone's a renegade. They all know the best way to do it and they're gonna do it their own way. But there's no consistency in how they're selling.

[21:24]

Jesse Buckingham: So the big shift is: you traditionally had cradle to grave sellers that were supported by an operations team. And the person on the account side was the main point of contact, but they were also coordinating, dealing with issues and exceptions, responsible for booking freight. And now the structure is you'll have sellers responsible for closing new accounts, being the point person, but then someone else managing the execution of that load?

Jordan Reber: Well, the way we see it is sales is out there speaking to our brand and our service offerings and facilitating business back into the BDRs. And the BDRs, which are more like inside sales and customer service all in one, they'll be there to support them and eventually take on that relationship. Because we want them to really take it and run with it. They're the experts, and the sales guys, once again, have to hand off and move on to the next thing.

Jesse Buckingham: So it's a bit like in software sales, where somebody is out there winning new business, running demos, and then once somebody comes on as a customer, you have a customer success manager or account manager. It's splitting out. And your view is that this is a better balance so that you have sellers that are available and responsive, but then you still have a single point of contact from an execution perspective for the customer.

Jordan Reber: Yeah. And I think what we found and what I've seen over my twenty years is that those two different roles have two different types of people. There is the small percentage of people that are really good at both. But for the most part, you're either super organized and structured and you can execute as a BDR, or you're kind of all over the place and you're just a people person and you know how to get people talking and you're comfortable in the uncomfortable situations. Those are different skill sets. So yes, if you hire 100 people, you might find one that has both of them, but for the most part, those are two different people. And so we're really big on getting the right people into the company, in line with our core values, but then getting them into the right seats.

[24:03]

Jesse Buckingham: Is it like the hunter versus farmer model?

Jordan Reber: A little bit. I don't like the term farmer because — I mean, I guess they are growing the business, but we do want people that have that type-A personality still in those seats, that they're gonna take on that relationship, try to grow it, be incentivized to grow it. But yeah, in the simple terms, it would be farmer. It's a focusing of roles.

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Where are you guys at in that transition? Any early signs of what's working well and what are the challenges?

Jordan Reber: There's a lot. And so this is where Keith and I differ as leaders, which is good that we're partners because we really complement each other. I would've taken the idea, got the framework, gotten part of the way there, and then: let's just start going and figure it out as we go, because I want to learn from the mistakes. Whereas Keith is more of the architect on the backend planning, getting everything in place. He doesn't want to launch anything until we have every SOP in place, every rule defined, KPIs behind those rules, exactly how we're gonna measure them and how all this will flow.

[26:11]

Jordan Reber (cont.): So he was working with his management team, really building it all up, and we only announced it to the entire floor a few weeks ago. So they're all taking it in now. Over the next three, four months, they're going at whatever pace is needed. There's no gun to their head to do it faster. But I told them: let's not wait for the sake of waiting. Let's go a little bit. You've done a lot of work. Roll it out.

Jesse Buckingham: It sounds like a good yin and yang combo. You need a little bit of both.

Jordan Reber: A hundred percent. And I think his approach was right in this case. We made the transition, he's in charge of this one. Results will be everything. I think by Q1, Q2 of next year, the proof will be in the pudding. But what's interesting: we don't just sell freight brokerage. And this is where we were missing the boat. Like we have multiple audiences. Shippers are definitely one of our audiences, but agents are an audience that generates revenue for us. And then owner operators is an audience, and we need drivers to drive all these trucks. So I look at it like the casino host approach, where sales is the casino host. They're talking to a customer that's coming into the casino. They should know and understand all the games in the casino. But at that point, it's up to you as the customer to say, which game do you want to play? If you tell me you want to play blackjack, I'm not gonna force you onto the poker table. We're just gonna take you where you want to go. And as we build relationship, at some point it's like, hey, I've been interested in this other game. Can you tell me more about it?

[28:30]

Jordan Reber (cont.): So for us: if they're coming in the door, there are a lot of times shippers don't want to work with brokers. They're not adding new brokers right now. You hear that all the time. Well, okay. Where do we have our assets? Let's talk more about that footprint and who we have in those markets and the work that they're doing, how they could potentially fit. Maybe it's somewhere where we just gotta go recruit a new agent in that market to fill that need for that customer. So it gives sales — yeah, we gotta train them on all these things. They don't know how to code this stuff, but they need to know enough to be able to sell it, and then maybe do a short demo before they hand it off to somebody else. We gotta build out that training to train these guys on all the other aspects of the business so that, no matter what type of lead is coming in, they're equipped to be the casino host for that customer.

Jesse Buckingham: So the breadth of the offerings now: you have ARL logistics, the drayage, carrier as well. What does the portfolio look like today? And how do you view the role that each of those offerings plays in how you approach a customer through their life cycle with you guys?

Jordan Reber: Well, I think it's based on what the customers need, but ultimately what we're trying to work back to is how do they each complement each other? The brokerage is more truckload, flatbed, dry van, with some LTL. The assets is more drayage. So where can we take these dry van or flatbed opportunities to potentially recruit an agent over? Or where can we look to see a carrier that we're currently brokering freight to that would fit the profile of someone that if they came in under our authority, there's tons of upside and maybe they just don't know it yet. I look at carriers that are 10 to 20 trucks. They're on a scheduled vehicle insurance policy. They're factoring their bills. They're doing all these things and there's a lot of risk.

[30:32]

Jordan Reber (cont.): And the insurance side is only getting more difficult — don't get me started on plaintiff attorneys in our country and these billboards and commercials about the big bad trucking companies. It's driving up the cost for a lot of these guys. So I'm saying: look, if you can get over the fact that it won't be your company name on the side of the truck, come over here, look at the percentages that you'll give up to come under us. But now you no longer have to bill your customers. You no longer have to float the cash or pay a factoring company. You no longer have to worry about your insurance renewals every year. That can be brutal when you go to make that first payment, especially if you're on a scheduled vehicle policy — that's all covered under us. If one of your guys gets into an accident, you don't have to worry about us shutting down your company. You're protected by us. Then on top of that, we have other opportunities to help them get additional relationships they may not have, or maybe it's more unique business that requires drop trailers they haven't seen before. And we can work them through the network.

They still have to stand on their own two feet when it comes to getting business and working with their drivers. But we can also help. And yes, you have to have an ELD and a dashcam in every single truck. We are gonna do that. But that's where all of our best interests are: ours, the agent, and the owner operators. In the event of an accident and you don't have a dashcam, as your first eyewitness, it's their word versus yours. And the trucking company loses every time. It's just the way it is.

[34:45]

Jesse Buckingham: Transitioning gears a little bit — you've always been very early in testing out new technologies. And obviously there's a lot that's changing in freight at the moment with respect to AI. But I also know that at ARL, you guys are very relationship driven, on all sides, with customers and carriers. As you think out over the next one, three, five years, what are the areas of the business where you think it's going to be really critical to have people intimately involved in a process versus what are the things where you'll be continuing to be aggressive in terms of automation?

Jordan Reber: Yeah. I think we've always been quick to jump on something to give it a shot. I know newer companies trying to get off the ground need people to beat up the product. So we've always seen that as an opportunity. We're not going to be in a space where we're developing the new tech. But we'd rather partner with people that have the resources to do it and then give them the business side of it. Because we've seen it many times: if the tech people would just sit right next to the business people day in and day out, you'll build a product pretty fast. You know? But it's that disconnect is where it slows it down. So we've liked being early adopters.

[36:53]

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. I'm curious about that framing, because there are others that fall on the other side of the fence, who are happy to let everyone else go through that process first. What are the advantages or attractions to it for you?

Jordan Reber: I think earlier, when we were building up our side of the company, we did treat it like a startup, and we were watching our own P&L. Was like, okay, we can't go out and buy the best, most expensive things. And at the same time, the industry was changing and there was a lot of new tech coming. And it was interesting — you're connecting with the person to see if they get it. And then from there it was: okay, could this be integrated into what we're doing? Once those boxes are checked and it's like, okay, that is a problem we're trying to solve, we can help you. And my speech that I've given to everybody — I probably gave it to you back in the day — look, we're gonna help you, but not just for ARL. We're not gonna give you our niche type needs. We're gonna look at the 80/20 rule here, and the things that we're gonna give you are gonna help you build this product that's gonna help you get other customers. And we want our vendors to be successful. Because we're gonna be building around this in our tech stack. We kind of need them to be successful. So if we build around it and they collapse, that's gonna be a problem. But at the same point I was saying: remember who helped you.

I've had some of those that didn't pan out. We would hit two years, three years, just didn't fit with where we were. It seemed like it was a good thing then. And just nothing at this point. It's no harm, no foul. You just move on, as long as everyone's being honest with each other.

[38:59]

Jesse Buckingham: It's cool how you've figured out an approach that partners appreciate, because it is worth its weight in gold having folks that are there to provide feedback and are willing to tolerate something that maybe is not fully baked. But you've also figured out a way to play that to your advantage as well, as a business without developers.

Jordan Reber: Yeah. And then the key to it too is you gotta get your people on board. At some point I had to hand it off to some others and I had to bake into them: this is how we do it. This is how we work with a new vendor. Because now, as you would know, I'm not involved in any of that stuff anymore and you have to work with our guys. To be honest, you're probably useless to get feedback from me at this point. But getting those guys on board and selling it to them — they got to see it. I got to tell the stories of how we got to this point. Here's the origin of it. This is where it can come. And I think they got excited that they get to see the finished product too, and they take a little pride in it.

Jesse Buckingham: Where do you see things headed? What does the pairing of human plus machine look like over the next few years?

Jordan Reber: So I'm looking at it now the same way we looked at it ten years ago when we started with Lean. It was the same thing: what is that mundane task that we sent to Colombia first, and we figured out how to automate? And now it's like, okay, a lot of that work — they're super talented too. They don't need to be doing that. So now we're starting to look at what is it where you're taking data from one system and putting it into another system and you're just doing that over and over again,

[41:18]

Jordan Reber (cont.): and trying to figure out ways to automate that, whether it is through APIs or RPA, whatever it might be. And I think in the past three months, we've been really laying the groundwork for that, looking at the entire company and trying to figure out where is that low hanging fruit. Where is there some proof of concepts that we can go in where we won't really break something and screw it up? Because at the end of the day, we have to deliver a product to all of our customers and our agents. They're not gonna care that we're testing something new and we screwed it up. So I think we've identified some really low, low hanging fruit and mundane tasks that we can start attacking. Within the next month or two, we'll have some proof of concepts out there and start building off of it. Same thing: first things first. When I first put down in Colombia, it was just billing and auditing logs. The most boring work you've ever seen. And then I was like, okay, we figured that out. Let's add something else to it. And start building on top of it. You're gonna see a lot of roles that are augmented by AI, having the human that has to manage it and manage the quality of it. I think that question actually would throw back to you. My biggest fear is that I'm five years down the line. We've done a great job with this. Something breaks. And my goodness, maybe it's something I have running overnight as well, and it breaks and we don't realize it and we just cause a mess. And now we're not staffed with the humans to go fix it fast. That's my biggest fear right now.

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. It is an interesting challenge. It becomes really important. Reliability is so critical because if your systems are improving your productivity by a small amount, there's probably some slack somewhere where you can cover it. But when things become mission critical and you just don't physically have enough human resources because you've built the org around it, then that becomes a problem. So how do you think about managing that risk?

[43:21]

Jordan Reber: I think we'll have to have some level of redundancy within the processes. I think a little by little, we'll build onto it, but there has to be some slack that we can move around. And as we're learning more, I've heard of some that are using AI supervisors to watch what the bots are doing and it's catching things for you. I just don't understand enough about it yet. But what I'm trying to look at is: if it's a 10 step process and we can automate parts of it, I'm good with that. If there's an auditing function that kicks back exceptions and now instead of touching 100% of the loads, we only have to touch 20% of loads — that's a huge win. Even if it was half of them, that's a huge win. And so I think that's where we're gonna just start chipping away at this thing and take it in chunks. Our motto is small wins every day. Because you start building those up over time, it doesn't feel like you made a lot of change. And you look back after a year or two and you're like, holy hell, like, what we did.

Jesse Buckingham: I've seen you talk a lot about that.

Jordan Reber: I just think it's never settling for status quo. Always trying to better yourself. It's been always ingrained in me. You always feel like you could have done something better. But at the same time you take big swings, it's big risks. And when you're in charge of this many people, it's very irresponsible to do that. So there's just those small wins that we're looking to get and you add up onto them.

[45:24]

Jesse Buckingham: The framework for thinking about: when you look at the way that freight moves, there's a lot of opportunity to improve things. So having some mental model for where to start. It sounds like you guys have gone through a version of that exercise. How do you approach the choosing, where to attack?

Jordan Reber: The honest answer is just going back to shadowing: just show me. As we started to understand some of the processes and hearing some of the issues, we run on Traction, the Entrepreneur Operating System. And through that, it brings issues at every level of the company up throughout these Level 10 meetings every day. So Monday through Friday, different levels of the org, these meetings are going on. And through those issues, it comes back to: it's either a process issue or a people issue. And if we have the right people and they're in the right seats, then it's probably a process issue. And then you get into the process and you start seeing some of these things, you're like, whoa, I didn't know that's what we were doing. So now we go out on road trips to see our agents. We sit down and say, show me what you do from start to finish for the life cycle of a shipment, all the way through, from quoting to delivery, then the billing side of it. And then there's driver qualifications, all these things that come into play. And then you ask: why do we do that? They're like, I don't know. It's just how we've been doing it. And I will still hear that. I'm like, guys, why? Maybe we shouldn't. And what if we didn't? That would save you some time.

[47:26]

Jordan Reber (cont.): And with our agents especially, they're really the front office and we act more as the back office. I'll see things where they're being inefficient front office and we're being inefficient in the back office. Was like, guys, we just cut this out, or did this training to improve the quality of it, and this one enhancement would save us all a bunch of time. Get everyone to buy into that and then we move forward with the change. Sometimes we see an issue and we already have this solution and we just want to sell it. And it's like, no, no, no. Sit there with the users. Let them tell you what the issues are. And then just ask why. Why are we doing that?

Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. And how often — there's a framework, Elon Musk talks about it, for how he got his factories to operate more efficiently. Step one is understand the process, but then delete everything that doesn't need to be there before you start automating it. It seems like there are flavors of that in how you think about it. What about the size of the impact? How do you think about what to go for? You've identified pain points. There's probably a bunch. How do you think about what to start with?

Jordan Reber: Yeah. And I think we're having a lot of these conversations right now. I literally, I'm thinking of an email I was sending this morning — I want to look at an ROI tracker on these enhancements that we're putting in place. We'll make assumptions in the beginning: okay, this is the amount of time it's going to save us. And then once it's rolled out, what are those estimated savings that we can't really calculate? But at some point we need to have some true cost savings, whether it eliminated a technology that we don't need anymore, or if it took two people to do that job and now it's one, or there's an efficiency gain and now someone can do 30% more than what they were doing before. So as we grow, we don't have to add those people and we can track that cost. But that's still a work in progress. Still a little bit of gut feeling. But at the end of the day, if it's only going to be a small change to get a decent win, we're going to take those all day long.

[49:42]

Jordan Reber (cont.): If it's going to be a seismic shift and hard to measure, that's not necessarily a no, but let's table that for right now. Because there's so much change going on within the organization. We have this conversation all the time: when is it just too much change? And I have to remind people: some of these things aren't that big. Yes, it's a lot of change, but they're not that big. We can do a lot of those because we have a lot of talented people. And within their departments, they don't know about the ones the other departments are doing. So let them execute. But there are some that go across departments, those tend to be the seismic shifts, and we have to be very strategic: we can only do so many of those. Choose wisely.

Jesse Buckingham: Is there anything that surfaces as potentially a big unlock, but would be hard to execute against?

Jordan Reber: Well, there's one that we're always sitting on. Within US One Industries, they do have a proprietary TMS system. We're in the process — it's TM3, we're moving into TM4. That alone has been a big challenge. But then I sit there and think about all the data that is in the system that US One has. But it's dirty. It's just dirty. It came in so many different ways with so many different processes, too many free form fields. There are agents across all these networks that are putting this information in. They all do it differently. Man, if we could clean up that data, what we would be sitting on — especially from a drayage perspective. Like, no one has a drayage pricing tool out there. And we have a lot of it.

[51:43]

Jordan Reber (cont.): But as we look to build TM4, one of the things I keep telling them is: we also have to retrain all the users and we have to standardize how things get into the system, because it starts there. If it's coming in different ways, there's no way we're going to clean it up on the back end. So we've got to standardize the process to what we feel is the most efficient way to do the job. And look, as people challenge it, if they're right, then change it. Change the process. If it's an exception, don't. And then now we're sticking to this. But at the end of the day, clean up that data. We're gonna be sitting on a lot of drayage information that could be used internally or potentially monetized.

Jesse Buckingham: I do wonder if there's something with AI there — it's very good at dealing with unstructured data and turning it into structured data. I wonder if you could put an agent that just goes and reviews every shipment in that database and pulls out the things you want, even if they're in free form fields.

Jordan Reber: Yeah. It's gonna pull up a lot of exceptions as well. If you can get it down to a small amount of exceptions to manage, eventually it would just feed into our training. And that's really what I want to get better at: continuous training. We do really well on the front end with training. It's that continuous training that's the gap. And even if it's stuff people should already know, even at our agent level, they have turnover with their staff and then they hire someone new, they train that person on how they perceive they were trained. And there's just different variations. We have to standardize the training. And then maybe the AI could be kicking out exceptions that would trigger where we should do the next continuous training, to get the best bang for our buck.

[53:49]

Jesse Buckingham: To get us closer to that 80/20 rule. You might even be able to have an AI trainer that coaches people periodically as well.

Jordan Reber: Well, you'd love to have that as they're going through the system — a mobile popup saying, hey, did you know you could do this? Or this should be here. Hey, don't forget that's a required field. That's interesting.

Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, as we wrap up here, I'm curious — as you look out over the next twelve months, what are the things that you're looking out for? From a market perspective, what gets you excited about the next twelve months?

Jordan Reber: Well, first off on the cautious side, we're still worried about receivables. We have been for a while. But I think the longer this goes on, the longer this uncertainty is, and we're seeing it play out. We're in good standing, but it's just because we're cautiously taking the approach to the next six months or a year. But like, who's not gonna be able to survive some of these things much longer. So we're gonna keep an eye on that, because there's a lot of intermediaries that are our customers because we do a lot of trades. But I think, look, there's obviously tariffs — a big buzzword right now. I'm hopeful that this is just the shakeup to get it to where we'll be in a better spot for domestic freight. It's hard to really say it's a direct impact because things are just moving. Sometimes July wasn't a great month for us, but I'm talking to a lot of my peers in different modes and July wasn't a great month for a lot of people. Prior to that, we were actually doing okay. And I think it's just really hard to tell, and everyone's sitting back trying to figure out what's happening next. But eventually you just have to run your business and do what you do.

[55:53]

Jordan Reber (cont.): It'd be interesting to see: we always look at things through a different lens on the container side. When I got to ARL ten years ago, more of our revenue came from domestic containers — 53-foot containers going on the rail that were replacing over the road work. And less of our revenue came from international. Things shifted during COVID, a lot went to the international boxes at the ports. And then once the skyrocketing prices on truckload came down, intermodal pricing was pretty similar to over the road. So a lot of that freight went back to over the road because you can get it there faster. And so we've shifted. And I'm just wondering now, with all this push for manufacturing domestically, are we going to see that shift again — will we start picking up more 53-foot work? I don't know. But we're just gonna make sure we're agile enough to move to wherever the market's going.

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