Stop Buying Trucking Tech Emotionally: The Better Way to Choose Software with Nate Johnson

Speaker A: The trifecta of people, process and technology kind of drive everything in our industry. And it, uh, goes in that hierarchy, right? Great people, okay, process and crappy technology, you still have a good business. But if you have crappy people, great processes and great technology, you're in trouble. Right?

Speaker B: Welcome back to behind the Freight. On today's episode, we're joined by Nate Johnson, CEO of GLCS and co founder of Freight Movement. Nate has spent years helping carriers and brokers modernize their technology, improve operations and untangle the messy realities of trucking, software integrations and IT systems. So before founding glcs, Nate has worked across transportation operations consulting just a myriad of experience in the trucking and transportation industry, really driving and giving him that firsthand experience with the pressure points that carriers and brokers deal with every day. So currently he's working with fleets and logistics companies to help them make smarter technology decisions without overcomplicating the business. So today we're going to talk about carriers, brokers, how they can evaluate technology without getting overwhelmed, which seems nearly impossible in today's environment. How to tell the real issue when the real issue is the process rather than the software. And what's the biggest mistakes that tech companies make and that brokers and carriers make while integrating tech across the industry. Welcome Nate.

Speaker A: I appreciate it. We flipped the chair. So that's the first intro from Todd Waldron and definitely appreciate it. Definitely appreciate being on.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Always great to have a good friend on. Um, so grateful for you being here. So recently I just saw, ah, a post that GLCs celebrated 10 years and you shared a little bit more on LinkedIn about the company, starting with this one customer, one commitment and this belief of taking care of people and that good things will happen. So I just love hearing this story and obviously hearing behind the scenes from you the legacy of GLCS and how it started. But how does that relate to the human nature that you see in the industry and behind every tech issue, is it driven from a people issue? And how do you see those two coinciding in your experience?

Speaker A: We have a trifecta of people, process and technology kind of drive everything in our industry and it goes in that hierarchy. Right. Great people, uh, okay, process and crappy technology, you still have a good business, but if you have crappy people, great processes and great technology, you're in trouble. Right. So people are the foundation of this business. And there's a lot of discussions today about how you can reduce staff, how you can do whatever, and the debate of that and the realization of that can be a bit difficult on the operator end. Right. But any of these solutions that are out there today are. Are reflective of people in process. So the foundation of it comes back to that. And in the statement you're referring to that, I think it was yesterday where I said GLCS is 10 years old. In the end of that statement, I did circle back to, no matter what happens, this always comes back to a business owner asking, how do I make my people more productive, make them happier? How do I make their jobs easier? Right. And as a solution provider today, if you are not keeping that at the forefront of your mind, you're struggling, you're not gonna do well. So that's been the core of our business since day one. It's hard to believe it's been 10 years. I don't know where 10 years went. I think when I started this, I still had black hair, so I'm definitely not that anymore.

Speaker C: So, yeah, this industry does crazy things to all of our hair. I'm getting those little, uh, white hairs popping through as well. I get it.

Speaker A: Next year is actually my 30th year in the industry, too.

Speaker B: You're going to be all white before

Speaker C: your 40th year, for sure.

Speaker A: Uh, absolutely. I'm in Trouble. I'm only 35, so I started when I was 5. I don't know where all the gray came from, so.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah, Yeah, I believe it. All right. So I also saw there was a post, and I think I've heard you publicly talk about where I think you coined it as trucking needs an intervention, where it looks like we're kind of struggling, or it seems that we're struggling to get younger folks into this industry to start driving. Why do you think trucking still has a branding problem, despite being obviously so important and relevant to really any and everything happening?

Speaker A: I've been saying this for my whole career, so this is not anything new. And this is why it's actually the intervention, because we're three decades into this and we still haven't resolved it. Lots of people are worried about, you know, what does their office staff have to do, what is impacting the office staff, what's making them happy, et cetera, et cetera. But we truly have a good job problem for drivers, and that's maybe gotten a little bit better over the years. But going back 30 years ago, when I first started driving, and then for the next 15 years managing and running fleets, we always created jobs that we would want to do. Right. So I think the gap between that and We've seen, you know, the over the road driver not disappear, but certainly reduce in size. So there is some of that. But also the ask for that role has changed even more, too. So 20 years ago, not being out for three weeks versus being home weekly was acceptable. Well, now today, maybe they want to be home every other night, you know, so that's a whole different change. The intervention in general, you know, our age of driver does not go down. Right. It's going up. And you have organizations like Project 61 that are identifying, hey, we have an issue with the age of a driver or, uh, the average lifespan of a driver. So you look at the average age of a driver being 40, late 40s, and the average lifespan of a driver being 61. And whether we want to call it a driver shortage, an issue, whatever the case might be, I don't care. You can say whatever you want. We need younger people behind the chair or, uh, behind the wheel, and we need to create a desirable job that they want to go and do this work today. When you graduate high school, there's no path to becoming a driver. You have to wait three years, you have to go work and do something else for three years before you're allowed to get behind the wheel of a truck. And that's kind of an issue for anyone that wants to take that path.

Speaker B: Um, yeah. It made me think of the Minnesota Trucking Association. Just did an article interview of Byron Buxton, the Minnesota Twins. Yep. All Star. I know that you're a big avid Twins fan and ticket holder and also the tie into technology, but he talks about that in the article about how he remembers his dad was a truck driver and remembers those long stints away from the house and just made me think about that as it. It's changed a lot. The expectations for home time and being home and work, life, balance and family has evolved significantly. But I thought you'd get a kick out of that article, but also relates to that point.

Speaker A: Well, what's funny is I just learned a lot of details about him over the last month or two, and then the MTA comes out with that magazine and he's on the front of it or whatnot. But, you know, Buck, when he's running around, he hits a home run, he's doing this around the base, and that's actually pulling the horn. Right. So that's in honor of his dad. And that's. There's actually a number of other Twins players that will do the same thing. So it's kind of a deal. I was really paying Attention for it last Sunday when I was there, and I didn't see it, but he had a bad game. But normally, you know, he's good for want a game or has been at least when I'm there. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, no doubt. That's great. Talk to us about Freight Movement a little bit. I know you have this really focused on, and not necessarily even just a conference or another networking event, but a movement. And so talk to us about how that came about and how you kind of see that going and how it's evolved as you really focus on bringing people together in the industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, so Freight Movement came about. Jenny Malfarin and I put it together, uh, a couple of years ago. Really. It sat for a year prior to that with us getting an idea. We crafted this idea around just getting people together from the industry. Right. No pretense around that. No. Anything but either augmenting a conference or just naturally getting together. So, you know, once a month we have gatherings here in Minnesota, and then throughout the year, we typically pop a little bit up. You know, throughout last year, I think we did 10 or 12 different visits. This year we're a little less than that beyond the monthly here in Minnesota. But it's really just a networking group at that point to pull people together appropriately. So it's been successful on that side. There's lots of interest around companies that want to get together in Atlanta, and there's just no medium for it. Or the discussions that we end up having are quite interesting too. So, you know, I think our largest one to date, although we've had some other large ones, we had a big one that was just on the side of Manifest this year. It's about 500 people. It was centered around Venture 53, and they were awarding some cash. They actually gave away $3 million at the event. But 500 some odd people that got together and talked for three hours, you know, and there's a lot of introductions. And everyone that was involved with that came back and said, wow, this was great. Let's do it again next year. We've had events in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, obviously Minneapolis, Denver, kind of anywhere and everywhere it makes sense to pull a group of people together. It's not like a major company. It's not going to have a. I mean, but the movement behind it is let's get off of the keyboard. Let's get out in front of people. I don't want a virtual experience. We want to be in front of people and get people connected. And a lot of other companies have Started doing this now, but kind of like what we used to do back in the day after work, you just go to the bar and there'd be a whole bunch of logistics people there, depending upon where you're based out of.

Speaker B: Didn't that happen a lot more back in the day? First of all, I can attest to the manifest event was awesome. And I've been to a few other freight movement events and really enjoyed them, but it didn't feel like that. Like, you know, I remember growing up in brokerage and it was a lot more common to go out afterwards and really develop deeper friendships with the team. And you know, I don't know if that's kind of evolved and changed, but it's a good point.

Speaker C: Good call out.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a hundred percent. And that's kind of what brought to it is I think Covid completely killed that. I mean, I think it's coming back in and of itself. But our first one was two, three years ago here in Minneapolis. We just kind of dipped our toe in the water. We had 50 some odd people come out. There's probably 20, 25 companies that represented themselves. We had some shippers, insurance people, trucking companies, brokerages. It's just whoever wants to come out. The only one that really didn't do super well was our Christmas one. You were there, Todd. I remember that. But I mean, we found out that you don't run an event mid December in Minnesota, so it's a little cold.

Speaker B: There's a lot working against you.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I do agree. I mean, we as an uh, industry need to be social and meet face to face with one another. And you know, a lot of this enhances business too. I mean, that's not the context behind it, but there's a lot of people that come together and they're like, hey, we have this, we have that. So it's facilitating that.

Speaker C: Yeah, I remember too, way back in the day, I'm going to date myself here. But early, early 2000s when I was at Swift Transportation, I literally remember deals getting done on the back of napkins and over poker games. Right. And that all seems to have changed, I think quite a bit over the last 20, 25 years were the good old days.

Speaker A: Bars, poker games, golf courses, all of that is less than what it used to be. So you think about every conference used to have a golf event previous to it. Now very few have them.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Did you lose as many poker games as you do deals? Holland?

Speaker C: Dude, I am undefeated.

Speaker A: Undefeated at losing.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you know Todd, way to take this and just derail me. Thank you. I'm actually going to switch gears because I don't like the conversation and where this is going right now. So I want to talk about tech. We can get back on track if that's cool. So we talk about trade shows and it seems like even lately like the amount of vendors, technology and all of this chaos around different platforms, providers out there and you in my eyes Nate, you're a guru when it comes to tech. When somebody comes up to you and asks you something like hey, what is the best tms or what should I be using, what do you tell them?

Speaker A: So there is no specific answer, there's no easy button there, right? I'll ask some follow up questions around, you know, their size because there's a couple, I mean if they're a 10 truck operator, a five person brokerage, whatever, I'm going to point them at one or two different products and wish them best and say give us a call if you need to. And those products are few and far between. So if you're a 10 truck operator and are thinking you need a TMS, there's very few in market that can do that. But a lot of the times the questions that are being presented are much larger organizations, sort of a mid market or enterprise level and there is no defined answer there. You need to understand the details of it. And anyone that just says, hey, this is the right one for you to go to is not representing you as a partner, as a customer, very well, but it is, there is a lot going on. I mean TMS aside, you know, the tms, there's actually, I think we were tracking at one point close to 900 TMSS. Probably 30 to 40 were applicable, were actually reasonably there. But at one point there was a ridiculous amount and heck, at one point we were tracking the same number of ELDs back in 2016, 2017. So we get in these moments where there's waves of tech that pop out, right now we have every AI vendor on the planet that you know, we're just labeling it AI. But there's 45 million use cases that they're actually targeting and not all AI is the same. So you mix that up with TMS, with asset maintenance, that's another one that's big right now and it's very confusing. So if you're a 500 truck operator, if you're a hundred truck operator, how do you stay on top of this today? And the answer is, is you're probably not going to be able to. So you're going to make poor decisions. If you're going to do things uneducated, you're going to take a variety of actions that you're probably going to look backwards and say, oops, we should have done this differently. But the difference between today and 20 years ago is actually very little. The company still made the same decisions back then. There's just less people paying attention to it. So, you know, it back in the day was very small and was not the foundation of your business. Today, technology, you know, in many cases, as I'll tell anyone, I'm going to be saying this shortly in a, uh, presentation, you're a technology company that moves freight. That applies to everyone today. And if you're not a technology company that's moving freight, there's something very niche about your business.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. That's the interesting component or juxtaposition is the technology versus the operational processes and how often companies might buy technology when an operational process isn't sound enough for the technology or is actual root cause of the issue. It's like, how do you navigate that, right. If someone comes to you and or is thinking, I want this technology because I had X, Y and Z problem, how do you dive in to start to uncover if there's actual operational process issues that might be underneath that or different cause?

Speaker A: We have a couple of different approaches to it, but you look at anything from a technology standpoint and you start with standardizing. So that could be standardizing process people, whatever, but it's not the technology, it's standardizing what you're doing, ensuring that you have that documented to some level. From there, you can look at automate or enhance. Right. But if you're not standardized in a process or a sequence of events, how are you going to put in anything effectively then ultimately when you achieve that, you can improve that further from a digital footprint. But that's kind of the process standard automate improve, right? Prior to that is understanding everything that you have. So if you don't understand your business case and know that, hey, this is actually going to work, and you'd be surprised how many companies think they understand what they're doing. And then you go in and dive in, they're actually taking an entirely different course of action. So the differentiator there is significant, but it starts out with understanding what you're currently doing, building that set of requirements around what you need in the future. Hopefully you can go out to a vendor and they're going to work with you on that. But the other component simply is just understanding what vendors are real out there today. So one of our first vetting questions to an AI solution is tell us all about your security. Because there are, I'd say 9 out of 10 AI solutions have just not built in. And so the moment they say hey, we're SOC2 or we're getting SOC2, they're in with us. If they're not saying that, we probably don't even want to talk with them. So that's an example of what a hundred truck fleet know to ask that question. Or are they going to field the 20 vendors that they need to go through and waste 10 days?

Speaker C: Interesting. Yeah, that's some good advice for sure. You talked a little bit about kind of broken workflows, understanding different companies workflows, those sorts of things. Where do you feel like the biggest operational bottlenecks are within the carrier and brokerages.

Speaker A: So there's a couple of questions there. There's where's the biggest and what's the most impactful today when it comes to laying in a new solution or a new process. So the back office suffers from the fact that we as an industry hire hard workers in the front office and they are not always in mindset to deal with a, uh, process. So dispatch operation may have people that will work 16 hours a day, but ask them to follow a process and good luck. Right. So the back office ends up having to deal with wildly inaccurate data and they pull it together. And by back office I largely mean invoicing and settlements. So there's a huge potential bottleneck and opportunity to optimize your back office. Especially leveraging an AI solution today there are only so many ways it can be wrong so you can fix that. So as a first off attack for an organization, you're going to look at the back office. Now there's a couple questions that we'll ask prior to that. Do you have fuel? What are you doing to manage fuel? What are you doing from an optimization standpoint? Do you have anything that's optimizing or automating your freight selection or your capacity? So we're going to look at that first. But most companies have something like that or they don't need that yet. Almost all companies can automate the back office, but the largest bottleneck is unstandardized processes which equate to dirty data. Right. That is the thing that will be a huge differentiator as people move forward. We're starting to see this more and more. You look at like a ch who's jumped way out in advance of everyone else from an automation standpoint. And yet you have a company that maybe has one or two automations or none and that differentiator is huge and that could be at an enterprise level. In one day I walked into an organization that had a significant number of automations and then I walked into a company that had zero. And it was horrible. I mean the difference was dynamically different. And why I don't have access or don't talk about the financials of one of those organizations. I do about the other. And I guarantee you there was a significant impact to the bottom line between those two organizations.

Speaker C: So what is it about those two use cases or examples? And we talked about, obviously you mentioned kind of the dirty data. When companies don't make a change, whether it's taking your advice or improving their operational inefficiencies, what is the reasons that they don't make changes? Is it cost? Is it the fact that they've been doing something for so long and it's part of their culture? Is it their technology or is it something else? I mean, what are your thoughts there?

Speaker A: So it's a lot of that, I mean to throw in another one, they have a uh, piece of technology that's difficult to integrate to or they don't know how to answer that question. That could be the case. But ultimately it usually comes down to culture fit. Not always. But I would say that the larger fails on modern tech has to do with not managing culture change and not managing the change management of the project. Right. Anytime you look at any sort of tech implementation, the vast majority of the reason why it fails is due to project management or culture. It's a huge percentage. So when you truly walk down that road, you can fix that by getting all those requirements set up ahead of time. Understanding why you're purchasing a product, right, getting your team on board before you even purchase it. There's a lot of companies that do that the exact opposite way. Hey, this product is all over the news, everybody's talking about about it, we gotta buy it. So you buy it and then it fails and then you're scratching your head wondering why I failed. Well, through requirements, once you get to that point, you probably should have never have bought it or you should have made a whole bunch of changes prior to that to ensure that you were going to be able to adopt. So those are largely the scenarios. Most technology that's out there today, especially stuff that's targeting your segment of the industry, most of them, they actually know what they're talking about and they can bring it forward, especially if they've gone to the point where they're advertising. What you really have to be careful about is those that are not largely advertising and are just coming to market with an idea, be very cautious on those products. They can cause tons of problems.

Speaker B: I just am fascinated by the evolution of transportation. Right. If you look back to when we started, you know, technology advancement was being able to take the act of sending a fax and putting it in the tms to click a button to send a fax and. Or receiving a fax into your email inbox with some of the technology advancements, right. But you had that simpler time. And then today, now it's. There's so many pressures on transportation companies, on drivers, where not only is there new regulations, there's new market dynamics, there's increased costs, there's different technology and different types of systems out there for your shippers and also with the carriers you might work with from a brokerage perspective, but there's an increased speed of connection through APIs and other ways of connecting that data as you like. Peel that back. One is at a high level. Do you wish we were back in the good old days? Aside from that, that you might make your living off of some of the technology challenges today, but just from, uh, an industry perspective. And two, how do you even start to peel back. One, the external dependencies in trying to bring about the value from technology, but then wading through all those different expectations, shippers changing expectations, et cetera. How do you wrap your head around that or how do you think about that as you look out to, uh, where we're at today and where this loose train is going?

Speaker A: That's a big question, Todd.

Speaker B: That's a big question.

Speaker A: So, you know, I was just having this conversation with someone else, and I was running a fleet in 2006. We sold it in 2006. Since then, my team or I have worked with over 2,000 trucking companies and brokerages. And that's between two different roles. Prior to GLCs and GLCs, that company that I sold in 2006, and we didn't sell because we were struggling. We did well. There's fleets that go past our technology that we were using there. But if you look at what we were doing there and how automated we were, most fleets today can't touch what we were doing in 2006. That's 20 years ago now.

Speaker C: Why?

Speaker A: Well, most of the revolutions that we've had in technology have been driven by some form of compliance change. And if you really go backwards. It's about 10 years ago with ELDs, right? Everything prior to that, there were still fleets that didn't have satellite tracking or cellular tracking on a truck in 2016. That's wild. If you think about what we've circled around that now we have all this noise that's come about and all this cost that's come about since then, but have we gotten better as an industry on time percentage? Have we gotten better eliminating fraud? Have we gotten better at optimizing our businesses? And I think we created a lot of noise. But 20 years ago, if you would have asked me that question, I would have said there's a lot of noise with tech. So today there's ton of noise. And we continue to change hours of service. We continue, you know, every think about every time that an hours of service change, what sort of systems have to be adjusted to handle the hours of service. And there's push for that right now. It's a lot of work to deal with this. So do I wish we could go back? If I could go all the way back and stop the invention of the pager, eventually the cell phone, I think the world would be a whole lot better. But we can't do that, Nate.

Speaker C: I remember the days when a check call, doing a check call was literally when a driver would come and you give them the paperwork and there would be either in an envelope or a plastic bag of coins, and a check call was literally that carrier going to a truck stop and checking in as a check call.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: That's all changed. Love those days.

Speaker A: Yeah, we didn't have satellite tracking until like 2003. And prior to that it was, uh, like a call in before 10 and call in before 4. Every driver, manager would mark their phone calls, and then we measured the time they were on the phone and whatnot. So there was anything and everything that when you go backwards. But heck, going back to 2006, the tech existed that when the driver called, you would have their information pop up in front of you. You had lifetime fuel data. You just had to make it work. You had imaging and ocr. Now we're taking a step beyond that with the introduction of AI, which that's part of that back office automation and making it much easier. You don't have to map all your documents, but, you know, those were some of the largest ROIs. How do you get rid of the paperwork? How do you manage your fuel? And they still are today. Right. So to circle back to the industry kind of needing a reality check, this is What I'm talking about, we were doing all of these things 20 some odd years ago, but we're doing them today. It's just a lot noisier. The other thing that drives a lot of this is customer requirements. Think about visibility in general. Right before, uh, getting a 15 minute 214 or something, you know, you needed a load status update within 15 minutes of the event. Heck, in some cases we're having bids that require rates within that timeframe, if not faster. We have some requirements from customers that are as fast as every couple of minutes they want tracking on an order. You get into the volume of data that you're pushing around there, that's hundreds of thousands of status updates in a month. Potentially for some customers, yeah, for a

Speaker B: while it was just on time in full and then all of a sudden it's EDI compliance and not only your check in, but your checkout times and your check call EDI compliance. And then there's your live visibility era of tracking and making sure you fill that and then routing guide compliance. It just keeps continuing to grow.

Speaker A: The cost of this is insane too. You get into this and you still have EDI vendors that are charging by character or by message, but the requirements from the customers are astronomically higher. So that leads you down the route of the API. And then you go through this discussion of what's best being a, uh, SaaS solution with API or having on premise and being able to customize it deeply. And those discussions are had every day here. And there's not a right or wrong answer, but there is by organization. So as an industry there's not a right or wrong answer. But as APIs continue to become flexible and build out, there needs to be more of an evolution there to ensure that they're all encompassing, especially for mature products. That's a whole nother side of it too. The mature product or the legacy product versus, you know, modern. Neither one is better than the other. We can't say once the mature product becomes more modern, we're going to see all the current products, not all, but a good amount of the current products just completely disappear. There is no massive wave for the mid market to switch to a different TMS or a different asset maintenance software. There's always these requirements and ultimately if you can get what you want out of the new product, that's wonderful. It's typically a cost reduction, but many cases the fleets and the brokers are not finding that. I would say more often than fleets, brokers are finding it, but the fleets are not finding A safe landing spot.

Speaker C: All right, well, I don't want to run out of time before we get to what my favorite part is, which is the lightning round. So the lightning round. Nate, just so you know, we've had people like Hutto who are very long winded in their answers, actually only get one question in. So these are designed to just give us a quick answer, whatever comes to your head, quick explanation, and then we'll kind of fire a couple off at you if you're ready.

Speaker A: I don't know if I'm ready, but I guess we're going to do this.

Speaker C: I get to do the fun one. This is my favorite one. Todd knows I'm going to ask this. So lightning round question number one. If you were an animal and you were to jump behind a truck and start driving a truck, what animal would you be? And what kind of animal would be the best driver?

Speaker A: So that's a couple of questions there. So if I was an animal behind the wheel, I'd probably be more like a gorilla or something. I mean, just big guy, whatever. So I'm out there. So the best driver, obviously is going to be that integrity of like a lion. So keeping things going. The king of the road sort of thing. Loyal.

Speaker C: Yeah, I like it.

Speaker A: I would say a lot of people probably say that most drivers are a hyena.

Speaker C: Uh, we haven't had that answer.

Speaker A: No, but most drivers are actually wonderful people. And it's an amazing, amazing industry that you get to work with. Those folks.

Speaker C: Totally agree.

Speaker B: Finish this sentence. The freight industry would be meaningfully better when.

Speaker A: When it stops changing, truly. I mean, we're moving so fast right now, I don't think people can even understand. I mean, if you have a good control on your costs, you're probably doing okay. But we just went through the worst downturn of my career, and it wasn't. I mean, it was significantly longer than all of us planned. And now we're changing, but everyone's tentative on it. So the one thing that we've always said since day one is if you don't like trucking or if you don't like the supply chain, just wait till tomorrow. But I'd say over the last five years, that comment largely equates to something that I like less. So ultimately, we just need to slow down something so we can get our hands around this industry again.

Speaker C: All right, Nate, two more. What is one thing carriers should stop doing immediately when it comes to their technology decisions?

Speaker A: Buying emotionally, that's probably the largest one. Uh, you heard me talk. Previously A lot about requirements. So understand what you're purchasing, understand why you're purchasing and what you're trying to solve. There's a lot of folks that just buy because they want to buy. That's the largest topic around technology decisions. I mean there really is a lot of missed purchases happening and there has been my entire career. But when you do purchase something poorly, it doesn't just impact cash. Right. In a trucking company, specifically a brokerage can be one thing. They're more nimble, less people. A ah, brokerage, let's say you buy an ELD and that ELD fails and it's rollout that impacts your drivers and that can create turnover. There's statistics out there about switching ELD or TMS can be a 10% driver turnover. I don't believe those numbers averagely. That's going to depend on the organization but, but you got to be able to understand why you're purchasing and that it's going to fit.

Speaker B: Awesome. Who's someone in the trucking industry doing great work that people should follow or learn from?

Speaker A: Boy, that's a good question. There's a lot of them out there. I think you probably should follow. Me?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say beside yourself. I knew I should have put that in there.

Speaker A: The ATA gets a lot of crap from smaller market fleets in a lot of cases and from certain people. Some of us have to put on our hat and use an 8020 rule. Right. Are they representing the industry? So, you know, following what is happening in Washington right now I think is extremely important. So following the advocacy of the entire industry and who's putting forth the effort there, I think is extremely important. Once again, I said if trucking would stop changing for a minute, we could all get our heads wrapped around it. And I think trucking, I mean we are proving it right now and have proved it over the last five years. There's companies that were profitable over the past five years. They have control, they know how to become cheaper operators. But if the target continues to change, becoming a cheaper operator is more and more difficult. You can't maintain your margin when the target continues to change. So I do think that, you know, we have to decide that we're going to be accepting of 80% of someone's effort and understand that 20% of the time we're not going to see eye to eye with certain people, but do follow the ata. There's a lot of changes that are happening right now for this industry. There's a lot of bills that are coming through that we would love to see happen and they impact everyone.

Speaker B: Great, great answer. Way to bring the thunder to the lightning round.

Speaker C: That's a line right there, Todd. Well, Nate, it has been an honor having you on. We really appreciate you what you're doing for this industry. Obviously all of your advice and talking points with us, we appreciate it. I'm John. Todd behind the Freight we're checking out. But Nate, thank you so much.

Speaker A: Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you guys.

Speaker B: If today's episode helped you think differently about your operation, share it with someone in your network who needs to hear it.

Speaker C: And if you're looking for tools to help keep your truck rolling from finding quality loads getting paid quicker, well, truckstop.com

Speaker B: is here to help. Go visit truckstop.com to explore the load board rate insights and risk management solutions built specifically for carriers and brokers.

Speaker C: Thanks for listening to us at behind the Freight.

Speaker B: Until next time, keep the wheels turning and the bad loads burning.