Auto-transcribed via Deepgram nova-3. Speaker labels are approximate; light cleanup applied.
[00:00]
Jordan Strawn: I'm a firm believer to be good at sales, you have to have a process. And that process doesn't mean that you can't be creative or you can't be nimble, but you have to have something to fall back on. The customer gives you either a curveball opposition, something that you weren't expecting. Oftentimes, salespeople can get derailed and not have a landing place to go back to. And so for me, it was taking what I learned in operations from a process perspective, applying that over into the sales side, and just leveraging the fact that there's always another play no matter what the conditions are, no matter the freight market, what the customer's doing. There's always a play that you can run down. And so I think that for me, was the way I was able to transition from the execution side and over into the sales side.
Jesse Buckingham: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Freight Show. I'm excited to be chatting with Jordan Strawn from Werner. Jordan, it's great to have you on. I'm excited for this conversation. I know we've been trying to get this in the calendar for a while.
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. Pretty happy we were able to make this thing connect and get together today. So appreciate it. It was good to see you at the TIA last week looking incredibly strong and fit, you know, putting us other working parents to shame. But, where are you at in your triathlon cycle right now?
Jesse Buckingham: Okay. We're gonna go that direction at first. We're going straight in. We're going straight into the hard hitting topics. For those that don't know, Jordan is a freight broker by day and a pro athlete by night.
Jordan Strawn: I would say far from pro, but, as you mentioned, a parent that still likes to train a little bit. But I've got an Olympic race coming up this weekend. It's Olympic distance. Not I'm not trying to be an Olympian here. Just what they call it. But it's Saint Anthony's. It's a pretty large event. There will be real pros there. I will be far behind them, but we got that going on. And then yesterday, I committed to a full Iron Maiden in November. So the training will continue.
Jesse Buckingham: That's awesome.
[02:07]
Jesse Buckingham: Well, I'm excited to chat, Jordan. I thought maybe where we start this conversation, you know, prior to joining Werner, you were the COO of Reed TMS acquired by Werner. And I'm really interested to kind of hear that's the story of like, you know, you entered and was sort of like part of the growth story of that business and what led to the acquisition? What was it like being acquired? How did you guys decide to sell? Why did Werner want to buy you? I'm sort of curious. There's a lot of folks I think in the audience like there's a very sort of acquisitive market and I think like that journey is really interesting and I would love to learn more about it. And I don't know much of the story, so maybe sort of take us through it and we can start there.
Jordan Strawn: Sure. So I'll yeah. I'll probably start kinda way back a little bit about Reed and then maybe somehow how I got involved. So, you know, Reed was started by Jason Reed's dad back in 1996, Mark Reed senior. Jason Reed quickly joined the company, fresh out of college, went to University of Tampa, was a baseball star, and he needed a job. And his dad had this thing kinda going, and they just wanted to move a few shipments a week in the brokerage space and make a little bit of money for themselves. And so that obviously grew to something much larger. His older brother, Mark Reed Junior, joined the company ten, fifteen years before the acquisition. A little before I joined the organization and it just kept getting bigger. It was really a family business that grew. And so around 2014,
[04:09]
I was still working at UPS Freight on the operations side and doing a lot of traveling. I was terminal manager in the LTL world, and I heard about Reed, and they were here in Tampa. At the time, they were like a $70,000,000 brokerage operation. They had just acquired an asset division, TMS Logistics, actually. So Reed Transport Services was the brokerage. TMS Logistics was an asset company, a trucking company. So I joined the company in 2015, on the sales side. And I say ironically because all of my time at UPS Freight was all in operations. I actually started driving a forklift in college there and just worked my way up. So I joined the Reed Company in January 2015, and we had a goal, you know, and that goal was to build an organization that was full of process, solid service offering, in the brokerage world along with continue to grow the asset division. And I think we were pretty successful in doing so. We got right there at $400,000,000 right before acquisition. So we had some pretty good growth and, you know, the acquisition happened in 2022. So it was a really fun journey along the way and we're gonna continue that fun journey now here as part of Werner as we have been for the last three and a half years now.
Jesse Buckingham: And did Werner have a logistics division like a 3PL? And how did that tell me more about why what they were sort of looking for in the acquisition.
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. I think, you know, at the time, I can't speak
[06:12]
to what was said behind the closed doors there because I wasn't on the Werner side at that time. There were several acquisitions that were being made around right around the same time, couple of asset companies, Final Mile. And I think we were part of a growth strategy to just continue to fill out a service offering that, you know, Werner's been doing for seventy years now. There was a logistics division, and a pretty good one for sure that we've been able to continue to build upon. They had a brokerage. It was operating very well, autonomous, but as part of the enterprise, for trying to build out that full service suite. But I think what was unique about Reed was our ability to execute in the food and beverage space which was a nice layer in to what Werner still does today. Also, we had a really heavy produce presence and a refrigerated presence. And I think that was where it was an in addition to what they were already doing. Same, similar, but also had some differences there in the refrigerated space.
Jesse Buckingham: And you're still in Tampa. Right? You basically run multiple offices now.
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. We do. And both footprints, so the logistics team at Werner as well as Reed, we had multiple offices and we've had some consolidation there for good reason to bring the groups together throughout the three and a half years. But for the most part, we would look at Tampa, which is where Reed headquarters was. It's kind of the headquarters South of Werner now. A majority of the logistics folks are down here in Tampa and then across some of our other locations, Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, and then obviously Omaha too, is where
[08:14]
our headquarters is.
Jesse Buckingham: What did you learn about so you were on the sales side. It sounds like coming from like an operations background. I'm always curious to ask, what do you think it takes to be a successful seller on the customer side in brokerage?
Jordan Strawn: I think why the transition was, I don't wanna say easy, but I was comfortable with it is I'm a firm believer to be good at sales, you have to have a process. And that process doesn't mean that you can't be creative or you can't be nimble, but you have to have something to fall back on. The customer gives you either a curveball, opposition, something that you weren't expecting. Oftentimes, salespeople can get derailed and not have a landing place to go back to. And so for me, it was taking what I learned in operations from a process perspective, applying that over into the sales side and just leveraging the fact that there's always another play no matter what the conditions are, no matter the freight market, what the customer's doing, there's always a play that you can run down. And so I think that for me, was the way I was able to transition from the execution side and over into the sales side.
Jesse Buckingham: Why do you think process is important in sales?
Jordan Strawn: Well, so I think you have multiple personalities in sales. There's the very outgoing, easygoing, that's typically the person we want in sales that's able to just be a chameleon and talk to anybody. But that person often is not the most organized. If you feed them a good process for them to rely on, they can leverage the fact that the hard part for some is having that conversation. It's not work for them. The hard part for them is staying organized. So process works for them. Conversely, somebody who's maybe shy, maybe wouldn't take this call, Jesse, to sit down and have a conversation. They need the process to give them the confidence to ask the right questions,
[10:19]
to continue a conversation and not let it be awkward and really just kinda die out.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. So it's a way to just have that mental model. And I think point too for why did the sale fail? You know, let's go look at it. Like, what did we miss in the cycle or in the process? And, if you don't have one, then it's hard to go back and analyze where did we get stuck, what went wrong, what could we have done differently. So if you're not reviewing that and have something to review it with, I don't know how you go forward. Looking back on the process of getting acquired, what was that like? Because I know that there's a courting phase and there's a whole period where there's diligence and you're still operating the business. Take me through what it was like to be on the field during that period. Like, what were you thinking about?
Jordan Strawn: It's hard to say where to start. For myself, this is the first time going through it, especially at that level with Jason and Mark, who had a desire to sell the organization and for good reason. And I think it was for the betterment of the company long term. But being that other executive at the table, my goal was to continue on with whoever the acquirer was and as I have. And so I think initially you're like, what does this look like in the future? So you think a little bit about yourself, and then you gotta think about the future of the company that you've been part of building and
[12:24]
take all that into consideration. And then there's some excitement that, okay, this could be really, really good for us, and here's what it means for our team and our people and for whoever the acquirer is, what it could mean for them. And so you gotta manage through that excitement. And I think the hardest part is realizing that you're gonna be doing all of this all the while you still have a business to run. Can be pretty daunting. So the things that you have to do are really on the outside, meaning after hours, not in the regular business time, which is something all of us in logistics do anyway. And then I think what was kinda nice for us is there was a lot of interest in Reed. We had options. So we got to take a seat and sit down and talk about what was the best option and what are we looking for and what type of an acquirer do we want? I think, you know, at the end of the day, no doubt about it, Werner was our primary. Who we wanted.
Jesse Buckingham: Why was that?
Jordan Strawn: So I think the main reason was when you built the place and you poured your heart and soul into it, the last thing you want is for someone just to buy it for the business that you have and not for the people, not for the culture, not for the atmosphere, not the things that made us special. You know, I do believe and still believe today that Werner wanted to be part of that success for the future. So I think that was the main reason for us where we just felt right. It felt good.
[14:36]
Jesse Buckingham: You guys grew the business a lot, but I'm curious what were the things that you guys did that put the business in a place where it was compelling for a lot of different people?
Jordan Strawn: I think what was compelling about it is we didn't grow our business for growth's sake. The people that knew about Reed were either competing against us for the same customers, working against us with the same customers and knew that we had a good business plan. We had a good process and we had good culture. We had good people. And so it wasn't something that was intended to be sold. We weren't just trying to build revenue. We built a good offering to our customers. And we were hard to compete with in our space. And I think that's what eventually was compelling for someone to want to purchase because it was obvious that it was intentional and what we were trying to do was just build a good business.
Jesse Buckingham: And do you think the fact that you guys were quite focused on an industry and had developed a specific capability was part of the story as well?
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. I think so. It was going back to the intentional piece. At Reed, we avoided distractions. And what I mean by that is we didn't try to grow in areas that we knew weren't gonna be long term. We didn't try to take advantage of certain situations or markets or a little special project that didn't fit what we were trying to do on the daily regular. And so if you were to look at us from the outside and dig in on due diligence,
[16:39]
you didn't see weird growth spurts. You saw just consistent growth in recurrent client base and then complementary clients wrapped around those as well. And so it wasn't just like we were trying to grasp for straws and beat everything to a market. We knew what we were good at, and we just developed into that and continued to lean in. We knew we were good at truckload. We knew we were good at refrigerated. When we ventured out, it was if we could use what we learned in that space to be good in the new space. If we couldn't, and it didn't fit, we just kind of avoided it.
Jesse Buckingham: Can you say more about that? I'm sort of curious what would be an example of you developing a capability that then had you guys sort of slowly expand the circle of who was like a good fit for you?
Jordan Strawn: Well, I'll use a really weird example. You know, to be really good in the produce space and just the refrigerated space in general and hauling commodities like that, you've gotta have great communication. You've gotta have end to end visibility. You've gotta have a team that's willing to work around the clock and do the things on the front side to ensure that things don't go bump in the night, if you will. And so, we fell into moving football equipment for college football teams. Mark Green and I both are University of South Florida alum, and so we recognized that they had a need to get their football equipment moved one year. And so we were like, well, we can do that. And we quickly leveraged our service process that we had in place for some of our boutique
[18:45]
capability into moving football equipment prior to a game. So a game could be 1,200 miles away, and we had a team, wrapped truck, the whole deal. Our drivers would travel with the team, obviously drive in advance for the team, take all the equipment to the stadium. Something unique about college football is in the pros, most everything is available to the opposing team. In college, you have to bring everything that you have from the coach communication devices, all the things. And so what was in that trailer was extremely critical for the game to happen on Saturdays. And so, we did it that year for South Florida. And then within their conference and even outside their conference, other teams started calling and just asking us, hey, can you do it for us? And it was pretty unique and cool, and we still do it to this day, for Tulane and South Florida and actually at Florida Atlantic as well. We had a few more teams in the past and just haven't renewed that cycle, but I think that's something where completely different freight, we were able to apply the work ethic, the team that we built here, to that process but the same.
[22:52]
Jesse Buckingham: How did you think about for yourself the acquisition? Because when anyone's going through an acquisition, there's always this question of do I want to stay with the team, do they want me to stay with the team?
Jordan Strawn: You know, I don't know that I thought about myself as just myself. You know? What does my future look like for myself? I'm really cautious in the fact that we were a team. You know, we were a group of folks that had done something special. And so I know that sounds like the way you should answer that question, but I think that's legitimately the way that I looked at it. I think looking at it that way is the right way, is to what's best for the whole group and be part of that and continue that on. And so, I knew that if we stayed together as a team, we were gonna be able to do some really great things and that's still the way it is, you know. For the most part, the team's still 100% intact with the addition of some of the Werner folks that were on the logistics group that you spoke to before and together now all working in unison.
Jesse Buckingham: How would you describe the culture at Reed?
Jordan Strawn: Well, you know, we had a mantra and it was there's a book, 212 degrees.
[24:53]
Water's hot at 211 degrees Fahrenheit. 211 is hot. But 212 degrees, it creates steam. You can move a locomotive. You can do a lot of things. And so our culture was always going that extra degree. Like don't just stop hot, go the next level and figure it out. And so we had that belief and we still try to operate and execute that way. And the Werner team was just like that and go back to it was a good marriage that that was their mantra as well and, you know, we don't stop at well, you know, we can't figure it out. We figure it out and then we try to have fun along the way while we do it.
[26:55]
Jesse Buckingham: What are the things that have changed through integration?
Jordan Strawn: Well, think what's changed is the obvious. You know, you're not thinking about yourself anymore. It's just like getting married. You can't just think about yourself. You have to think about the other parts of the team. And so I think that was the first change. And then there's benefit to that as well. You gotta learn the benefits of that. What are the things that they're doing really well that we could adopt and how can we lean on each other? And we had this theory of one plus one equals three, and that's what we wanna continue to do. And so I think that was the biggest change. Going from a private organization to now a publicly traded one for the Reed folks. And then, course, for the Werner side at that time, acquiring a private organization that didn't have to live by the same rules. How do you bring all that in together? And what do you do with the technologies and which process wins? So there's been a lot of change over the last three years. And the most difficult part of it is probably the market that we did it in, the cycle that we did it through.
[29:00]
Jesse Buckingham: How do you guys now sort of think about the brokerage offering within the context of a customer?
Jordan Strawn: It's kinda hard to explain because there's only now a few of us that can do what we can do. We're not the biggest brokerage, but we're large enough and we're at scale to compete with the biggest brokerages out there as a brokerage. We also have 40,000 trailers and 12,000 trucks and a final mile offering and an asset based intermodal offering. So when we think about who we are to a customer or how should we sell into that customer or how do we work with that customer, we now have a lot more offerings to give them and try to meet them where they wanna buy. And that's really where I think we think about it. It's not just
let's go sell brokerage or let's go sell one way drop trailer asset programs or let's go sell dedicated. It's how can we go into that customer and give them something a little bit different that meets their needs better than somebody else that can only service them in one offering?
[31:04]
Jesse Buckingham: How have you guys structured the sales team?
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. I mean, going back to the acquisition, some of the even what changed. So, you know, Reed at the time had a solid sales team. And so that question got posed right away. How do we do this? What should the sales org look like? And so over the next couple of years, we adjusted that from an enterprise wide perspective. We've created an account management team that is able to now handle all things for the customer. We have outside sales still in regional areas, as you would typically see in an asset based organization. And then we have specialists. So to your point, if our business development team or account management group or anybody identifies that there's a final mile opportunity or a complicated opportunity, we pull in those specialists to help facilitate and guide that conversation. And then the execution team who's responsible for that service offering is able to engage and that all filters through that one customer account management group. And so the point there was going back to being able to do multiple things for a customer. We didn't want our customers to have to go to multiple divisions to work with. We wanted to be easier to work with and meet them where they are.
[33:25]
Jesse Buckingham: I've spoken with execs at other large brokerages who found when they had the account manager model that practically speaking, those account managers would actually be very good at one mode and feel very comfortable in it. Is that something that you guys deal with at all?
Jordan Strawn: I think you'll always see that. I'd love to tell you that we don't. But what I will say is going back to having folks that have been in the industry twenty plus years, worked in different parts of the industry, for the most part, the folks involved, the groups have a pretty good understanding of how the execution works. And then when it gets very granular, you bring in the specialists just as you said, and it fills that void. So I think that's an area we'll continue to lean into as an organization. I mean, when you think about what we do with Final Mile, that's the one that gets very niche, very specific. You're opening customers' doors in the middle of the night and making delivery. There's a lot of process mapping that takes place there. So to expect as an account manager to fully understand that, that's not realistic. But that's why you have that specialist group there to help and assist in that process.
[35:32]
Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, your world of responsibility now. Walk me through it.
Jordan Strawn: Sure. So I oversee, if you think about our title, senior vice president of logistics, but specializing in our PowerLink and truckload brokerage. So if you think about PowerLink, it's our power only product where we work with carriers that pool our trailers. We have programs with them. It's a consistent business, very sticky. Those carriers are able to say regional over the road, but leverage our trailing capacity, pulling our trailers, and then the traditional brokerage as well.
Jesse Buckingham: Can you say more about the PowerLink? Has that space been growing a lot? The sort of power only and like why is that?
Jordan Strawn: Sure. So if you think about our business, we are trailer intensive. We've got a lot of trailing equipment. A lot of our customers require it. And so being able to add capacity from the third party market is beneficial to our customers. We can do surge business. We can maneuver quickly. We can add capacity that maybe we wouldn't be able to have for that customer. And it's really just about meeting their needs and their demands. There are spikes. It's consistent. It's a market that maybe we haven't been able to grow into in the past. It's really about just trying to build consistency in both our network and then also our carrier's network.
[37:36]
Jesse Buckingham: Those trailers are part of the same pool that your asset side may be hauling as well?
Jordan Strawn: That's definitely the end goal. And everything we do is the utilization there and that's what I mean by efficiency. So sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. It just depends on the situation and the operation. But it is a shared pool in most cases. Something we've leveraged is that the PowerLink model on the dry side is now we're doing in the refrigerated space. We've had a refrigerated fleet and we have built up a nice trailer pool. And we've got customers on our brokerage side that look for that trailer pool and wanna do our trailer programs and now we can offer that through our refrigerated PowerLink. And so that's something I would say relatively new as a division we're building out underneath the logistics arm.
Jesse Buckingham: Do refrigerated trailers have their own generators on them? Like, do they stay cool if there's no tractor?
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. They've got what we call a reefer unit. It is a diesel engine on there. And what's really cool about ours is the technology that we have. Just continuous tracking. So we know when they're on, we know what type of cycle they're on, we know what temperature they're running at. And that's something that not every brokerage can offer when it comes to connectivity to that trailer. So when we think about sensitive commodities out there, by putting it on our trailer and leveraging third party capacity,
[39:39]
we get all of that information and can just try to offer out what we think is a premium service offering.
Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, what are the core building blocks of a world class logistics operation?
Jordan Strawn: I'll go back to that word process. That's really who I am. And maybe that's why you started the conversation around triathlon, because that itself is a process. And I wake up and do nearly the same thing every day. I think that at its core is what makes a world class operation is you've got work instructions built, the team knows what to do, your technology is intuitive, meaning that if this happens, it's obvious what should happen next. Your team knows that. They're trained to it, not to the point of being rigid in the fact that they only do those things, but that you have going back to a process to rely on and fall back to. And you know, at the end of the day too, it's let's get the job done. We've done a really good job in this industry recently of adding a ton of technology, whether it's AI driven or what have you. And I think sometimes, some operations fail at just being completely reliant on the technology and not really understanding what we do and what the customer's expectations are. So everybody should use technology to complement that, but also know, hey, this is what actually has to get done regardless of what happens.
[41:48]
Jesse Buckingham: When you think about being really good at process, what are the actual things that you are doing? Is it documenting what to do and then training people on that?
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. Sure. And think it just happens the more mature of an organization you are. Mature meaning like documented, not necessarily age or time you've been doing it. But mature in that. You know those behavioral pieces and what each position and role's responsibilities are. A lot of folks talk about accountability. Accountability isn't somebody saying do this and you didn't do that, therefore now this. Accountability starts with people being trained appropriately and knowing each step of what to do. I think people wanna do the right thing. And so just having a northern star, this is what the right thing looks like. This is what good is. You paint that picture of good for them and then allow them to follow those steps. And so some of the little things just, like I said, knowing if your lagging indicator is this, what are the behavioral pieces, the steps, the things that they need to do to get to that lagging indicator? It could be margin, it could be service, but if you wake up and say, we need 98% service.
[43:48]
Well, that's great. But where does it start? Probably starts with order intake. How did we get it? What's the lead time between getting it and when it needs to pick up? And how did we do the appointment and who set the appointment? Does the appointment match and make sense for the length of haul and the commodity? And can we put these two commodities together when we think about produce? It's all of that along the way and having a clear blueprint that people can lean on to make the right decision.
Jesse Buckingham: And how do you make sure people are following the process?
Jordan Strawn: Yeah. I think this is where technology helps. We've got to have something along the way that gives you an indicator that something's gone awry. Something doesn't make sense, with some form of an alarm. And then you've gotta have data on the back end as well. Be able to review and look at what's happening daily in your business. Did they make the right decision there? Why did they make that decision? Could we have done something differently? It's a constant daily routine that you have to be looking back at what happened yesterday of how can we prevent it today. What's on the board today? Plan the work and work the plan. Still works to this day.
[45:53]
Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, we're coming up on time here. What are you sort of excited about for the industry over the next twelve months? What are you nervous about?
Jordan Strawn: I think what I'm excited about is, you go back to the time where everybody was sent home to work from their house, there was a lot of attention on logistics and nobody really knew what it was. It was an unfortunate time, but the positive that came out of it is a lot of people learned how important our industry is for the economy and for just life and well-being. And I think that there's a lot of events happening right now. There's a lot of eyes and attention on our industry for negative things, but I think it's gonna improve us tremendously here in the coming year. It's gonna shine light on maybe the bad, but also forces some things to happen for us to get better and be just better stewards of doing the right thing out there as we go through making deliveries and moving freight. So excited about that, actually. The nervousness part maybe of the future is, man, it seems like every day there's a new battle out there. That's probably what keeps me up a little bit is, like, what's next? And so just trying to keep our team not only prepared from a technical aspect, but also just prepared from an awareness that there's gonna be something. Something will pose a challenge. And as soon as we think we have it figured out, something's gonna change. And we've grown accustomed to that, I think, over the last decade in our industry. That's what probably keeps me up at night too the most is what's next.
Jesse Buckingham: Jordan, thanks so much. Great conversation. Really enjoyed it.
Jordan Strawn: Appreciate it. Thank you for the time, Jesse.