[00:00]
Jesse Buckingham: Alright. I'm excited for this conversation with Will Kerr. Will was one of the cofounders of Edge Logistics, which he grew to north of, I think, a $150, $160,000,000 of revenue and is now the president of Price Rite Transport. So he started on the dark side in brokerage and now has seen the light on the carrier side. This is a story. Very interesting perspective on the kinda inner workings of a carrier sales org and the psychology of being a carrier sales rep, as well as how to take some of those insights about building a trucking carrier with a bit of a unique strategy, especially in the current freight environment. Enjoy this conversation between myself and Will. Will Kerr, great to have you on the show, sir.
Will Kerr: Thanks, Jesse. It's an honor to be here. I'm excited.
Jesse Buckingham: Will, I'm excited for this conversation because you've got a very interesting story, starting on the dark side actually and then seeing the light. And moving into the carrier ecosystem. But, Will, I don't think I've had the opportunity to hear the full story. Maybe you'd like to take us back to the kind of beginning of your journey into freight, and I'm curious about what gave you the excitement to go out and build Edge Logistics.
Will Kerr: Yeah. Sure. So I graduated college in 2011 from DePaul University in Chicago, and I didn't really know what I was gonna do because my plan had been to become a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Nice. An institution that was open for a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty years, and then abruptly closed when I was a senior in college.
Jesse Buckingham: What were they trading? Commodities. That was where all the commodities pits were. So, like, pork bellies, lumber, corn,
[02:03]
all that kind of stuff. Dude, what's that movie with Eddie Murphy, The Trading Places? Was that the inspiration? Yeah. Hey. Something like that. Yeah. So I used to work there. I was a runner, which means you run around the different pits to all the traders on your team. You got their tickets. I was a clerk, which means you take the tickets from the runner and put them in the on the old school computer system. Everything was super old school.
Jesse Buckingham: That's what I wanted. Got to actually see that energy on the ground of what that was like. And that's what my plan was, was to become one of those guys. And then, like I said, when I was a senior in college, we had the financial crisis, and many of the Chicago financial institutions were in big trouble, and some of them, like the Mercantile Exchange, closed forever, and everything went online. Firms like Citadel and others have taken over all that stuff. But anyways, so I didn't really know what I was gonna do. Right? So I was interviewing for jobs, and at the time, there was only a few companies hiring in the market in Chicago. One of them was Echo Global Logistics. And I got a job at Echo after failing my first interview and talking my way back in for a second interview. They hired me as a carrier rep in their new truckload team. It was shortly after the Echo IPO, and Echo had predominantly been a LTL shop up until that point. But I got the opportunity to join an organization that had an incredible brand, incredible corporate structure, incredible culture, and really learn the business from the ground up and help be a part of that growing Truckload National Accounts team. So, basically, we took all of the big LTL clients and then opened up Truckload business with them. So it was really fast moving.
[04:07]
We had to build out these large custom freight networks, do really high level carrier sales deals. I think for the time, when I think most folks were focused on SMB business, I learned a lot. So I was at Echo for about two and a half, maybe three years, and we had a big change where I don't know if it was market driven. I didn't know enough at the time. I barely even knew that there was other freight brokerages besides Echo at that time. But we had a change in commissions. My manager got changed, whatever. So I ended up leaving the company, and I thought I wanted to go into financial services. So I sold life insurance, annuities, bunch of stuff like that for about six months, and that was the worst job I've ever had in my entire life. Why? What about it? Well, you're a sales guy. Right? So you're just kinda making cold calls all day? And the sale is something like, hey, Jesse. This is Will calling from, you know, x whatever the hell. Have you ever thought about what would happen to your family in the event that you died? And just trying to hit people with that all day long. Like, what would your wife do if you passed away suddenly? It's just not that fun all day long. So I did that for a few months, and I actually sold the hell out of it. You know, I'm a natural born closer.
Jesse Buckingham: Was that the line? Like, to the extent that you had success? Yeah. Yeah. And so I was just not having any fun with it. And I didn't really see a big future in that. And it wasn't exciting. You didn't get to learn a lot about anything.
[06:09]
Where in freight brokerage, you get to learn about how every company that you work with works, and what they do, and how their business works. And that's why I've always loved this business so much, is that you get to learn about how everything in the whole country works, basically. Anyway, so I leave back home, selling insurance. I'm like, you know what? Maybe that truckload carrier sales stuff wasn't so bad after all. Right? So I tried to get another job. I go into work. I work at Traffic Tech for about eight months. It was a very different shop than Echo was at the time. You know, I quickly rose up in the carrier sales ranks. I remember we had a few months where we made tons and tons of money because they had all the legacy Canada business, and we were just bidding on domestic spot freight and just ripping things all day long back then, which was back in the day when you made, like, 400, $500 spreads on every loan. The good old days. Yeah. But anyways, so I do it kind of again, build a big book of business there again. I felt like I really rose up and, you know, ultimately was knocked down with a comp change. So that's when I decided, you know what? I'm pretty good at this business. I understand the customer side, the ops side, the carrier side. And I was just like, you know what? Screw it. Let's go out on our own. So me and Jordan Lani and a few other guys, Sean's side, Chris Carr, Nick Edwards, all went out, left their jobs, went and moved to Brooklyn, New York, sat in a double wide trailer in the back of a parking lot that we were renting from my wife's father's company's business. It was on the East River. We had incredible views of,
[08:09]
Battery Park.
Jesse Buckingham: Sort of trailer are we talking here?
Will Kerr: Double wide. You know, like when the school runs out of classrooms, and they put extra classrooms in the parking lot. It's like one of those. Yeah. Yeah. We had electric and water over the parking lot to it, and we didn't have any bathrooms. We had like one of those higher end Porto Johns outside. But it was frat house. It was pretty funny in the old days. But, yeah, we started, and we started Edge. We went out. We started cold calling. We got our first load on our fourth day. We did a million dollars in sales in our first quarter. We did $10,000,000 in our first full year. We grew 100% a year for about eight years in a row. And then ultimately ran the business for about ten years. A lot happened along the way. A lot of ups and downs. But ultimately, we got into about $160,000,000 in revenue. I think we were ranked, like, 94 in the country one time on the transportation topics list. We had a ton of really big enterprise accounts, and it was a great brand name in the carrier market. That's where I was always most proud of. Our approach was always very carrier first because, you know, I came up in the business on the carrier side. So we always had way more carrier reps than customer reps. We were always looking for accounts that we could get lots of loads per account out of, so that we could really build density in the carrier market. And we were really focused on excellence in carrier sales.
Jesse Buckingham: And that's kinda how we did it. I'm curious. Because you spent so much time on the carrier side, it sounds like it was a big feature of how you grew Edge. Tell me about what made you successful as a carrier rep? What makes a successful carrier rep? How do you get really good at that? What are the best practices in being really good as an individual and then also as a function, building a really good carrier sales org?
[10:16]
Will Kerr: So I'll answer it two ways. I'll give you old time, old school, my era, and I'll give you what it's like now. Because the industry's evolved dramatically. Back in the old days, it used to be all about clout and charisma and just sales talent. And, you know, being able to talk on the phone, convince people to do what you want, convince people that it's in their best interest to do your deal. Sell your deals internally in the organization was a huge part of it. Getting the customer side guys to work with you instead of other carrier reps. And also getting your manager to take your option over other people's options. And all of that kind of hustle and bustle stuff was what being a great carrier rep used to be all about back in the day. You had to really understand your carrier. It was all about density. The best carrier reps would have a ton of volume with just a few carriers, and they would spend all their time working with those carriers.
Jesse Buckingham: And is that how you really drove high levels of productivity and commissions? Was figuring out how you could get loads per carrier? Yeah. And you did that through booking with a group that you knew really well and were able to cover a bunch and worked with every day. And then you'd go through things with each other, and you'd become closer, and you start to trust each other. And I always coached my guys to focus on three things. Right? They gotta know who you are. They gotta like you. And if you're doing a really good job, they gotta trust you. And if you can get the carriers to know you, like you, and trust you, then they'll listen. They'll do what you wanna do, and you won't have to battle as much on the transactional rating. There's more trust there. There's more lubrication in the deal process.
[12:31]
Jesse Buckingham: And so when you thought about which carriers to spend your time with, there's a little bit of tension in some ways, right, where if they're really small, very hard to book a tonne of freight because there's just not as many trucks. What's the right size? Who would you target from a carrier perspective to work with primarily?
Will Kerr: So if you're a carrier rep, you wanna be working with 50 to 500 truck carriers. That's the best way to run a carrier rep book of business. There aren't very many carriers in that 100 to 500 range. There are a lot of carriers in that 50 to 100 range, but those types of carriers can really bring value, and you could drive loads per day per carrier and get real density in lanes where you can have that repeat build on itself flywheel type business. The only problem is those carriers are pretty hard to get. Especially if you had a well established brokerage.
Jesse Buckingham: How does it work? Can everyone work that carrier? There's exclusive tags. How do you get it in your name?
Will Kerr: Any carrier that has any quality at a large brokerage will have exclusive use, or tags. It'll be tagged in some rep's name. Sometimes carriers are large enough where there'll be multiple reps working on them. But any carrier of value is typically fought over on a carrier floor.
Jesse Buckingham: How do you earn the right or win the account? How does that generally work?
Will Kerr: Brokerages have different parameters, but typically, in my experience, it's been something like you have to book a certain amount of loads with them in a certain amount of time and have it go well, and then keep doing it for a certain period of time, and then you earn it. And it's tiered based on the size of carrier. So a 10 truck carrier would be easier
[14:36]
to get locked up than a 500 truck carrier in terms of minimum booking. And there's a place in the business for every carrier. Not the scumbag ones that steal your loads and stuff, obviously. But every legitimate carrier will say. There's always that one load here, one load there, where you need to really reach down into the long tail of your capacity to find a truck that matches up that day. In the same day market and the next day market, those 10 truck or less carriers can really shine because that's kinda how they operate. When all your higher quality capacity has been spoken for already. Great carriers don't have trucks available same day. Because they're booked. So if you have a same day load, you're oftentimes reaching down into the long tail. So when I say 100 to 500 is where you really wanna be, that being said, there's a place for every carrier. Carrier is valuable. Brokerages should be very flexible about which carriers they work with just because you never know who you're gonna need. Covering freight's hard. A lot of folks outside the industry don't understand that every day, at these big brokerages, they're coming into dozens of loads that are uncovered that need to be sold that day, where they're trying desperately, dozens and dozens of people trying desperately to get them covered, oftentimes taking sizable losses just to save face with the customers and get the loads off the dock.
[16:38]
Jesse Buckingham: How does the commission structure work where if you're a carrier rep, if there's a difficult to cover load that there's just not a lot of money on it? Is there a minimum fee that a carrier rep gets for booking a load?
Will Kerr: So there's a minimum so then even if there's the market terms, the return to work. And then that would be slid over to the customer side where they would have to eat that loss in excess. So say you lose a $100 on a load, if the fee is $10, you lost a 110. That kind of thing. So the customer side does need to make sure there's enough buffer to pay the minimum required in a way. Look. We're all trying our best to gamble on what the rates are gonna be in the future. It's not the easiest business. Yeah. So I never wanted to be — the customer side is responsible for this, the carrier side is responsible for that. It's more like we're all one team working together, trying to make as much money as we can while at the same time doing as well by our customers as we can. You kinda have a dual charter as a broker, right, where you're beholden to your shareholders, your owners, your bottom line, and you're also beholden to your customers and all the promises that you made. And you gotta balance that.
Jesse Buckingham: If you're a carrier rep, what do you have responsibility to make sure that a specific customer's loads get covered?
Will Kerr: We've tried it in freight brokerage in the Chicago model. We've tried it every way that you could possibly think. Try to assign responsibility for loads that don't go. That's the hardest thing we do as freight brokers — lose money on freight. It's excruciating.
[18:40]
It's brutal. You second guess. You never know if it's the right thing to do or not. You never know if you're cutting your losses, or if the right truck is just right around the corner. You're watching the clock, you've got the customer breathing down your neck, and you gotta make, ultimately, the call at some point to either fail the load, reschedule the load, or take a loss, or book a miracle truck at the eleventh hour. And that happens.
Jesse Buckingham: How do the miracle trucks come in?
Will Kerr: A load that you can't cover for a week. It'll be picking up in two hours. You'll be completely panicked, and then all of a sudden, the phone will ring off a post load, and they'll call in, and they'll be like, hey. I'm calling about that load you got right over here. And you're like, no way. This guy's calling about the load we can't cover. And everybody on the floor is like, don't let that guy off the phone. Yeah, dude. Get him down. But usually, carrier sales doesn't get to go home until the loans are covered.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Is that a cultural thing?
Will Kerr: Yes. We just gotta get these off the board. There's the push and pull, and the blame game happens. So, cameraman is just like, you guys suck, and you should have covered it. And you're like, there's no trucks, and they're like, there's always trucks, and they're like, don't tell me there's no trucks, you're a carrier rep. You know, all that kind of fun stuff.
Jesse Buckingham: When things get really tight, presumably there are situations where there just actually is not enough capacity at some moments?
Will Kerr: You would think, but if you have enough money, you could always pull a truck. Usually. Then at some point you might have to deadhead, you might have to pull trucks from elsewhere to get in there. So there's usually enough. It's just you gotta find it.
[20:51]
Will Kerr: It's usually that the amount of money you have in the loan is usually what it is. But people say there's no bad loans. There's just bad rates. That's very true. And then another great freight broker once said, good loans go.
Jesse Buckingham: What did you love most about being a carrier rep?
Will Kerr: Definitely the win. A challenge, right? You've got a dollar amount on the loan. You've got a target rate. You could win in excess of the target rate. You could book higher than the rate. You could miss entirely. But that intensity and that challenge of being able to book the load for the rip is what's really fun. And when the whole thing comes together, it's kinda like playing golf where making a birdie is really, really, really hard. And even a great golfer will only make one or two or three birdies per 18 holes. And when you make a $500 rip, that's your birdie that day. All the stars align, everything comes together, and you have this magic moment where the business works. And it's like, yes. This is what we're here for.
[22:55]
Jesse Buckingham: And you and I maybe met at the BGSA a couple of years ago, and I remember having a conversation about your sort of framing in building Edge of almost as an extension in some ways of the carrier network that you built up where you would kinda become their sales team in some respects. Right?
Will Kerr: For some carriers. Yeah. We had some really deep relationships. When we did our job the best was when we worked with a relationship carrier, we drove high volume truckload business. And when you're in carrier sales and you're trying to win a carrier account, who are you cold calling into?
Jesse Buckingham: Who are you building relationships with there? Is it all of their dispatch?
Will Kerr: It's size dependent. But typically, your carrier of size, 10 trucks or greater, will have some sort of centralized booking system, where there's one or two or 10 or 50 dispatchers that are responsible for either booking the whole fleet or booking a segment. And as a carrier rep, your job is to make relationships with them so that you become one of their brokers of choice. Our data showed that most carriers worked with about 60 to 80 different brokers for the vast majority of their business. But of those 60 to 80, they got like 60 plus percent of their freight from like five brokers, typically. So your job as a carrier rep is to make your brokerage one of the top five brokers that carrier works with. If you can accomplish that at any size of carrier, that's when you have a real relationship carrier.
[24:57]
Jesse Buckingham: And how do you earn that position of broker of choice for a carrier?
Will Kerr: You have to serve them well. You have to bring them loads they like and they wanna take. And then most importantly, during the life of the load from tender to dispatch to pickup to leaving the shipper to tracking in transit to getting it delivered and the POD retrieved, you know, throughout that whole process, you have opportunities and at bats over and over and over again to show what kind of rep you are. And to show them, this is how I do business and how I'm organized and how I run my operation. And if you find folks that are like minded, all of a sudden, you get this momentum. Anytime we saw a load from Illinois to Minnesota, I'm calling my buddy Tom. And Tom's gonna take it. And then you start to build out these one call books all over the network, and then boom, you start to get density, and then you have a real freight brokerage operation.
Jesse Buckingham: There's a lot of talk of the best reps, they have a lot of tribal knowledge accumulated in their heads, and that allows them to be very productive because they kinda know exactly who to work with on a specific load. Bring that to life. What happens there?
Will Kerr: So knowing your carrier market, and knowing your carriers and where they're at, and where they're gonna be, and the predictive capacity that isn't even there yet, is really, really important.
[27:02]
But the most important thing is getting the tribal knowledge of your organization, and getting to know how the freight flows within your brokerage. Because all day long, freight hits the board, flows through, gets booked, gets covered. Nobody ever sees it. And that's where all the easy money's made. In order to get that business, you gotta be in with the right people within the brokerage. And you have to have the capacity in place for the loads before they happen. That way, when the load comes over, they're like, this load's going to Will because Will always books it, and we're not gonna risk any thrash on this account because it works, and we're making money, and the carrier does it, and they all know each other. There's no reason to screw this up. So it just starts going. And as a carrier rep, if you could start to build out a portfolio of that type of freight, where it's like auto book freight, all of a sudden, Jesse, you're walking in the morning and you've got 20 loads booked already. And then all you gotta do is book five or 10 more, and you have a great day. Or if you're a really good rep, you walk in the morning, you got 50 loads booked already. And then you book five or 10 more, and you have a great day. And, oh, you're making $200, $300,000 a year. So understanding your org and knowing where the freight's coming from and being well positioned to get that freight that is the repeat consistent winners.
Jesse Buckingham: And so how do you do that? You're building relationships with the customer side, and you're sitting there understanding the patterns of how things work and trying to set up a network of carriers that's a very good fit for that freight?
Will Kerr: Yep. And having capacity in place.
[29:06]
You'll get a load from a shipper that doesn't pick up for two weeks. You know, you might not know for sure that this carrier has a truck available there on that day, but you know they're gonna. So you book it. And then it's up to you, carrier rep, to make sure that that capacity realizes. And you have to manage that process.
Jesse Buckingham: Capacity realization is a really important thing.
Will Kerr: Really, really important. A lot of people. Say more. So you're like, if you've got a load that's booking two weeks out, I mean, theoretically, anyone could kinda be like, look. Carriers will call rookie reps, and they'll say, I'll take this load for this cheap rate for Friday. And then that carrier will shop that load all week trying to beat that rate. And then all of a sudden, Friday morning, guess what? That carrier's not picking up that load anymore. And now you've got a day of load where you coulda had that load available all week. And that day of load could have been a dedicated load, and that dedicated load could have needed a low priced truck. And now all of sudden, you're the day of market trying to book a dedicated load on a day of truck when the rates are thirty, forty, 50, a hundred percent higher. And boom. You take a load that was, best case scenario, gonna make $80 to $100 bucks if it picked up and delivered on time, and now it's losing $300 to $400.
Jesse Buckingham: Is that the carrier rep gets dinged for that?
Will Kerr: Sometimes, but it's hard to enforce. Because it's like, whose fault is it?
[31:08]
You can blame the carrier selection. You could say, well, you should've never booked that carrier. That carrier sucks. They've had unrealized capacity for us in the past. Those could be data points that would be against the carrier rep. Or it could be, look, this load is underpriced. We try to get it booked. We have to reach into the long tail to get it booked, and those long tail carriers realize at an 80 rate. And if this load doesn't realize in the same day, then it's screwed. And that's the game we play. And that's why you took a thousand of them is because we'll book it right eight out of 10 times, and then there's two other times it's gonna go wrong. And that's the deal. So you just kinda have to be able to talk it out.
Jesse Buckingham: And so and I guess in some ways, if you're an account manager making this decision, you kinda know if you get smoked five times out of ten, I'm probably not gonna trust your truck.
Will Kerr: Yeah. I'm gonna say where the mark. That's where the internal trial. There's like an internal market dynamic. And there'll be things like, you screw up one time for some big shot customer rep, in a big way where it pisses them off, and all of a sudden, you're never booking another one of their loads again.
[33:10]
Jesse Buckingham: So tell us about your journey into Price Rite.
Will Kerr: We sold. Our ownership group made the decision to sell Edge, like, two years ago, and we went through a process there. Learned a ton throughout that. Ultimately, ended up leaving about a month after the deal, and I was on a non-compete for a while. So I went, and Jordan Graff from Highway is one of my best friends, one of my favorite people in the industry, one of the world's greatest guys, gave me an opportunity to come help them with some trailblazing efforts in the carrier market for some new products they were working on at the time. This was, like, last year. Those products ended up being Lowlock and the Trusted Trade Exchange. We were really focused on getting ELDs onboarded and trying to refine the rules that a lot of the brokers were using to really solve the freight fraud crisis that was going on. So I was talking to carriers, trying to get feedback, trying to see how they would wanna work with it, how they would wanna use it. And what I realized was that there was a lot of carriers that were struggling to make this transition to this new digital era.
[35:11]
There's a lot of carriers that I had worked with for my whole career, especially in the Chicago market, that were really struggling due to the environment. And all these changes that have been made by companies, frankly, like Highway, that were very broker centric and had a take it or leave it attitude with the carriers, which was very effective, but was difficult for many carriers to manage. So I started a consulting business where I help carriers manage this change. Mostly Chicago carriers. I worked with about 13, actually 14 different carriers over about an eight month period.
Jesse Buckingham: What sort of difficulties are you talking about?
Will Kerr: Stay compliant. Stay compliant with it in an evolving way. Getting like a fail rating, essentially.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah.
Will Kerr: Being compliant and being able to keep your freight flow going. And what changes you needed to make as a carrier in order to be compliant. In Chicago, admittedly, that's not all uncommon.
Jesse Buckingham: What sort of things? Assuming you're talking to legitimate carriers that wanna be operating well, what are the sorts of things that have tripped them up?
Will Kerr: The way that brokers report on carriers is very archaic. Highway's done a really good job of really transforming that, but for the last twenty years or so, we've pretty much just had Carrier 411. Legend of a company. They have a system called freight card reporting. Freight card reporting is very broker centric. It can lead to major reputational damage issues in he said, she said type of situations.
[37:11]
So these issues that I call soft rate cuts. And then you have companies like Highway that brokers are putting rules in place where they're looking at big swaths of data and analyzing carriers on the digital footprint. They're like, oh, you have two freight cards. You're disqualified. But those two freight cards could've been like, the guy mouthed off to my shipper, or he showed up four hours late for the pickup. Just different little things that happen all the time. Big brokers, and brokers of quality, don't do this. But there are lots and lots of brokers out there who do. Another thing could be driver fitness scores. Driver fitness scores could be a huge problem, especially right now with the height and visibility on driver quality, and English speaking, and all that kind of stuff. Another thing they can work on is working with the right brokers. There's a million brokers out there, and 80% of them have no value to a real carrier. They're just there to take transactional capacity and make their spread, which is fine. But those guys should probably be working with the five truck and less trucking companies.
[39:13]
The brokers that we at Price Rite like to work with are the biggest, the best, the highest quality, the ones with the most freight, the ones with the best customers, the ones with the most customer command, and the ones that we could drive customer density with. Not to mention they're much safer receivables at this day and age.
Jesse Buckingham: So take us — you started consulting.
Will Kerr: One of my clients was the owner of Price Rite. His name's Eli Ortikov. He's an absolute freight legend. Very few people know about him. He built six different trucking companies over a fourteen year period and owned them all outright. He had about 600 trucks under management across all the six different brands. But he was running into a lot of problems. People were calling him a chameleon carrier. People were accusing him of double brokering. Different things like that. Even though they never did anything that I would say amounted to anything like that. But they were having these problems. And I was trying to help them overcome them, and I tried to help them stake a plan because they're great carriers. We're talking about trucking companies that had well over 100 trucks per company. And ultimately, I looked at the deal. I made the recommendation to consolidate all the companies into one brand. And then to run a new go to market to the big brokers, as a broker centric truckload carrier. Because we were a broker. All six companies were broker centric. And just do it on this large scale.
[41:13]
And then hopefully we'll time the market, and everything will get better right at the right time. So we did that all last summer. We consolidated the trucks, processed all the trucks, repainted, redecalled, all that kind of stuff, pulled back all the leases, re leased all the trucks from Baldwin Company to the new operating company, rehired all the drivers, consolidated the dispatch teams, redid safety and compliance, put in a new operating system, put in a new TMS, all that kind of stuff over a four month period. And then at the end, Eli asked me to be the president of the new company, and I graciously accepted. I was kind of in love with the business at that by that time after going through all this fun stuff. And now, the last four months or so, I've been running go to market where we're kinda re-onboarding all of our customers, and trying to set all of our account opportunities up for success, and getting our team hyper focused on our business plan, and our areas of focus, and trying to stay disciplined, make smart decisions, and be as well positioned as we possibly can even though the environment is a little difficult.
Jesse Buckingham: The default for carriers is, hey. I wanna own my own direct relationships with shippers and brokers are a useful function for backhauls where I don't have consistent freight on those lanes. I'm curious the decision — what do you sort of say to that? How do you think about it?
Will Kerr: A few reasons. The first reason is serving enterprise truckload customers is really, really difficult.
[43:15]
They're highly demanding. The table stakes are really high. The days to pay are really long. The insurance requirements are very heavy. The compliance requirements are very arduous. The customer service is constant. It's just really hard. I think brokers of quality provide a very important part of this business where they can coddle the customer and provide the customer service that the customer expects, that has come to expect through this down cycle. You gotta also remember, people have been upselling on customer service over and over and over again for, like, twenty years. So the customer expectations and service are crazy, crazy high. And it's very difficult to serve the enterprise shipper right now in this current pricing environment. I believe that'll change. There used to be a huge premium for power regional carriers and having direct relationships with the assets from the shippers. Through this down cycle, that's pretty much eroded. And shippers have been chasing savings in truckload spend for what looks like the fifth year in a row now. But I find that brokers still have sense of urgency in their networks, and brokers still have different pockets in their business where the rate per mile is very quality. And what I've done is I've tried to build a company that serves those areas of business.
Jesse Buckingham: I guess one way that you could think about it is, what would be the cost for you to build the layer that would be required in order to have the sort of sale capability. And then yeah, it's thirty days to pay versus ninety days to pay.
[45:29]
Will Kerr: Which is a lot. That's a lot of interest. There's all kinds of stuff. The shipper contracts are tough. I'm not saying that we'll never sell direct to shippers. If the pricing environment changes, I will sell all my trucks to shippers. But until that happens, we're gonna focus on the broker market because we can still get the rate per mile that we need in the broker market. What do you want to do? Have to be well positioned. You gotta be able to talk to the brokers and tell them who you are and what you do. And if you do that, the brokers will use you.
Jesse Buckingham: What from your experience being on the brokerage side have given you a unique perspective in helping to run a big carrier?
Will Kerr: I think I have a greater appreciation for how hard it is to book the freight and how hard it is for the carriers to pick up. My insight into how brokers work, and how the deals flow, and where the what we call bags of money are, allows me to navigate it more effectively than folks who don't have that experience.
Jesse Buckingham: It's kind of interesting. You're in a lot of ways kinda uniquely positioned.
Will Kerr: When you're a commoditized business, it's all about positioning.
[47:37]
Jesse Buckingham: What are you sort of excited about going into the next year? What are the pockets of optimism and what are the things you're keeping an eye on?
Will Kerr: I've been having a really fun time on my broker roadshow, just going to all the different brokers and sitting in their offices and getting to see how everybody's doing and hearing from the management teams and all that. That's been awesome. But then, from a greater perspective, we're trying to get to a thousand trucks as quickly as we can. We're at six hundred and five right now. I have to create a revenue model that could support that. I think we're doing a really good job so far, but we still have a long way to go. So I work hard every day trying to build that flywheel that could keep the freight flowing to get us to a thousand trucks. If we can get to a thousand trucks, we'll be one of the best carriers in the whole country. And becoming the best is something that I get really excited about.
Jesse Buckingham: I love it. We're coming up on time here. I've enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, excited for what you're doing. Thanks so much for coming on.
Will Kerr: Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.