Details That Save Loads | Episode 353

Today we're talking about the importance of details and accurate information. We just wrapped up a good episode there. We kind of went down a few different uh rabbit holes, Ben. What are your what are your thoughts?

To me, this is one of those discussions that like if you focus on these things, like these are the things I get you, I think you get like the most return on your investment of time and effort in your day, right? Like where and why most people are overwhelmed, don't get to more prospecting, or whatever it is that they feel like they should be getting to and they don't get to every day. Like that's really what we covered in this episode. This is probably one of the better ones I think we've done even in a while for just like everybody probably could get something out of this that would save you some time and avoid some problems.

Yep. And we give a lot of good examples too of of things that we've dealt with internally in the past and just you know, through interactions with other people on um, you know, where things went wrong and could have been prevented to save time, money, and a lot of frustration. So with that said, let's hop into it. Welcome back for another episode of the Freight 360 podcast.

Ben, we're gonna get into a good discussion about why details are so important in this industry. Um, but first, if you're brand new here, make sure to check out all the other content. We've got hundreds of long form podcasts, lots and lots of hours of short form cont of content for just about anything you could think of. So make sure to use that searchable uh library on our website if you're looking for you know any kind of training material.

It's all in there. And if you are looking for a full educational option for your team, we got the Freight Broker Basics course in there. Share with your friends, like the channel, all the things that help us uh get in front of more people. And this episode is brought to you by Ascend TMS.

So if you're looking for a new TMS, Ascend is the recommended TMS for small to medium-sized brokers. So if you're new or growing, check them out. Ben, what's going on with you today? Welcome to August.

I knew, dude, I'm super excited to be rounding the corner into fall. I'm just trying to enjoy the warm weather while we got it here. So fall is fun though. And we got football right around the corner.

It's uh it's a good time of year. So that we do. Very much looking forward to it. Actually, like last night was the first random day that like the humidity fell enough that it was like noticeably cool.

Like, not like cold, but like I we I was we go out for bike ride a lot, Ava and I, where we're just like, it was probably like 7 30, and like I was like, it's like not muggy. Like it was so noticeable that like we both looked at each other and we're like, is like the weather change or something? Like it literally felt like fall, like last evening. I'm like, it's the first time like we like literally enjoyed running around and playing outside where it wasn't just like we were soaking wet 15 minutes later and both went like, okay, we have to go back in.

So yeah. Nice little nice man. She's gonna be able to do that. What's going on up in New York, man?

Uh, beautiful weather. And um, it's crazy. The I drove past the um the new Bills stadium yesterday, and it's right across the street from the old one, which is now a flattened pile of rubble. It is completely torn down.

So I was shocked at how fast they ripped down the jewel table. Did you get anything from it? Did you get any memorabilia or anything? Like they were they were selling, like you could buy your if you were a seasoned ticket holder, you could buy your seats.

Um but they were charging like a ridiculous amount. Like even you can even go, like our local grocery store, Wegmans, bought up a bunch of the inventory and they're selling it like in the grocery store. Um, you can buy like a seat for like 300 bucks or something stupid, and it's like, yeah, I don't know, no thanks. So I remember I had a piece of like for the Sabres, they they built a new arena like in the late 90s, and they sold pieces of limestone, I think it was from the old arena, and I got like a commemorative, commemorative one of those as a kid, and I don't have it anymore, so I guess I just I don't know.

I have a piece of turf from the stadium. I guess that's kind of cool. Yeah, and also it's like and you move and things don't transition over time because I'm like I I thought about that because like they did that at Three Rivers, obviously, a long time ago before they built Hines Field and PNC Park. And I remember going to the demolition and they were doing the same thing, and I'm like, I always thought I'm like, it would have been kind of cool to have like a seat from a place like I saw my first baseball game at.

But also I'm like, I would have nowhere to put it. And I'm like, it would just probably sit in my attic anyway. There was something I had that was like my favorite piece of memorabilia that I lost somewhere in just moving and getting older. Was if you go to, I can't remember the name of the building now, but there's one building at Pitt where I had most of my business classes.

It might have been the business school building, I think it was. But in that building, when you walk in the entryway, every day when I would go to class, home plate from Forbes Field was still there. Like it was a glass thing with the home plate there. And like I never went to Forbes Field, like that was before I was even born, I think it was gone, because they built Three Rivers in like the 70s.

But it was so cool, like literally walking past that every day. And above it was the it was the picture from the cover of Life magazine where they were looking down on the baseball game during the World Series when the Pirates won from the Cathedral of Learning, which is the other like iconic building at Pitt. And it was just super cool because it's like you're in college there and you like know this was like one of the most famous sporting events that happened in Pittsburgh.

And it was signed by Bill Masarowski, who hit a game-winning home run. And one of the guys I worked with at Dollar Bank, actually, I didn't work with him, he was like somebody in another business, I can't even remember, that I did a lot of business with. He knew that I used to talk about that because it was like one of my favorite things at Pitt. And I was like, I would love this for my office because like you could get that picture, but I'm like, I can't find it, and like I couldn't buy it anywhere.

And this guy just randomly showed up at my office and like gave me this, like, and it was huge. Like it was like four foot by three foot picture from the cover of time. And I went and waited in line when Bill Masarowski was still alive and did a signing and got him to sign it in the same place it was at the building in Pit, and I lost it. And it's like one of those things where I'm like, I definitely really wish I still had that, but also like I don't know, you get older, you move, things go into storage, things get lost.

But anyway. Um, that's crazy, man. That's cool, though. So, news, did you hear about this $86 million nuclear verdict?

No. So I'll I'll read it off. I put it out in our newsletter this week. Um, here's a little blurb.

Um, Freight Waves put a really good piece out on it. So um I'll just read it verbatim, kind of how we put it out. So, freight veterans David Parker from Covenant Logistics and Max Fuller from UX Express sat down with Freight Waves and delivered a wild mix of good news and horror stories. The scary part first: an $86 million verdict just landed against QXO, um, which is a carrier.

Formerly, uh, they had acquired a company called Beacon Roofing, but they're based out of Utah. Said despite the jury finding the carrier wasn't even negligent. Parker says his insurance costs have jumped roughly 300% in three to four years, while coverage got cut in half, and he's made half a dozen trips to DC, plus two Trump meetings, pushing for tort reform, which he now pegs at a 20% shot of passing, up from basically zero his whole career. Translation is carriers are winning cases and still losing, and the whole industry is bracing for the next nuclear verdict to drop.

So there was the jury said that the carrier was not um was not negligent, but the verdict was to hold them, you know, at 86 million. It's I think it's like one of those where you know the initial lawsuit amount like is kind of glaring, right? And then it'll go through a pellet and probably have a different outcome. But it I just think that's insane.

Um how do you how do you find somebody, how do you hold them financially liable when you determine that they're not negligent? Not only is that like it kind of these things like like kind of don't surprise me anymore. Once you're like running businesses and you start to like see these things, you realize like insurance like doesn't cover most of what you think it does as you get older and you just realize that, right? The second thing is like most of like the entire court system is like inaccessible for a lot of things, like just average everyday people that like should be able to like use the courts to hold people accountable, like that just like doesn't exist.

Like whether it's like construction on your house, doing improvement, or like it's a $20,000 claim in freight brokerage, like you can't go and you can't go to court because you need to pay an attorney to do that. And the attorneys cost more than the money. So it's just like you just get stuck eating these things. And on the other end, you have attorneys that just like sue over things that make like little to no sense, but has like some little detail and some regulation or some law or some case law that they're able to justify like massive amounts of money.

Then the other people have to spend a whole bunch of money on attorneys to get that number reasonable, and it's like just a giant waste of resources. Like there's literally no value created at all. There's no protection whatsoever. And like tort reform is one of those things that like I absolutely think should occur.

And I kind of don't understand why anyone would be opposed to it, right? Like, who thinks we should all be paying attorneys more to argue with each other to create nonsensical problems where they just we each pay each other, pay attorneys to fight with each other's attorneys? Like the whole scenario in system to me is just like broken and needs resolved. Yeah, pretty crazy, man.

Pretty crazy. Um, let me see if there's anything else in the news noteworthy. There was some like the market update from Dean was really good that I put out. Um let's see here if I can give you the uh warehouse robot robot shock.

The FCC blocked new foreign-made ground robots, creating a major sourcing problem for U.S. warehouse automation. Um I got a billion dollar port goes quiet.

Charleston paused operations at its Leatherman container terminal amid weak trade demand and high costs. And truckload prices reached a four-year high as fuel costs rose and capacity tightened, potentially feeding consumer inflation. Yep. And to add to that, um the manufacturing uh posted its best month since 2022.

So if you think back to what Dean said last time he was on the show on the uh demand set, is demand side is that he said he can keep an eye on that. That is it, the manufacturer something index about uh um, I think they do it either monthly or quarterly. It's gotta be monthly if they said it's the best month since 2022. But yeah, that's a good indicator of of shipping demand.

And then so you kind of pair that with capacity tightening. That's kind of a two-sided uh flip from where things were the previous years. So it's enough. All right, well, um anything else in the news or sports?

No. All right. So uh we're trying to pick a topic for today, and we we were talking through why details are so important, and we can go down a lot of different rabbit holes here in um you know as it re as it relates to freight. Um I think whenever I look at any of the issues, the majority of issues that I've seen or dealt with in my time in freight, a lot of the times the there's miscommunication or a detail was, you know, incorrect or missed or something like that.

And it really is like a um, you know, kind of the source of a lot of problems and and issues. So I'm kind of curious where your your thought process came from on this topic, and we'll dig into it. Yeah, like most of the stuff and the training I've been doing for like a lot of the clients in the past month is like very, I would say like literally business communication 101 class. Like how you write an email, right?

How you respond to an email, right? Using proper subject lines, keeping all communication related to a shipment in one email thread. And when your customers start a new thread, you reorganize them by going back and taking what they said, put it in the other thread and keeping it in one place, right? Like those things are like very simple, but avoid so many of the problems that occur later, right?

Like I do feel like freight brokerage is one of these jobs that like I always laugh because I always say it's like that ounce of prevention is worth like a pound of cure, which just means like a little bit of effort, making sure your details are right in the beginning, saves you hours and hours and hours on a weekly basis that you waste going and fixing something later. So whether that is like reading an entire email before you respond, like I can't tell you how many emails in the past two days I've been involved in, where two or three people are asking a question in an email thread that was answered in that thread, but they just didn't slow down enough to read the whole thing before they asked another person.

And I'm watching like this one company, I'm like, five of these people are complaining, they have like way too many emails to get through, but they're all self-induced, meaning like they're creating this work for themselves because they don't slow down, read the whole thing. Instead, they just reactively ask a question to three other people, and that creates three more emails that now they're gonna have to read to come back to them. And like email is one of those things that's like super simple when you think about it.

Every time I send it, I will probably get one more if I ask a question. And if I ask a question to three people, I will probably end up with three more emails that I will have to read later today. So if you just slow down enough and ask it all at once, you might only have one email come back to you instead of seven, or keep asking six questions that you could have asked all in one email. Or putting a subject line of like your load number and your customer's PO in the subject, so both of you can search your number in your system to find that communication.

Like those things reduce so much work and so many problems, but nobody ever wants to slow down. And the funny thing is they'll tell you they can't slow down to do this because they're too busy, but they're too busy because they don't slow down to do this, right? That's actually a good point. And something that we did at Pierce to try and like, and this is just a a you know, a very specific example, but we created a um we call it a help desk.

It's it's really it's a kind of like a form-based ticketing type system where whenever a specific kind of request comes through, so let's say it's um a credit increase or an initial credit line being requested, or um a request to approve a carrier that's on um you know, needs an override for compliance rules or whatnot, or any you know, any other number of you know, standard requests that a broker would have to their support team. We created these forms that have all the pertinent information.

Um, we try to only put in there what's required and not make, you know, we have a lot of optional fields, but we just we require only the minimum basics. And then it takes that information, it creates an email and it titles the subject line in a very specific way so that it creates a thread. So it'll be like, you know, the customer, if it's a customer um credit increase, right? It could be like the name of the customer dash the amount of credit.

If it's for a motor carrier, it could be like um the order number dash the DOT number dash the carrier's name. And it creates this thread that gets automatically sent to the correct department, which is a group email, and then CC's the actual requesting broker on it. And then all communication stays in one thread and goes back and forth and has the pertin information right up top, along with the entire form is going to be embedded into the original email that goes through. But we found that to be massively helpful because originally, if you go back years and years ago, it was like, yeah, you know, if you need this, just email this person and let them know X, Y, and Z.

And it's like, well, if they forget to include something, then it frustrates the support rep who's like, well, I need to know the load number or the carrier's MC number. And it's like, all right, well, now that we've created a form that's foolproof and it requires you to fill out the minimum required information before you can submit it, um, that solves that whole problem. The issue still can come down to people putting the wrong information into the correct fields, right? And we've that's human error.

Yeah, and it's not like a hundred percent, but like where I'm running into this in a lot of places is like, well, one, because there's lots of different clients, and I have a lot of different emails for different things. So it's like somebody will call me and be like, hey, I sent this to you and I'll try to find it. And I'm like, well, I put your name in and I found 45 emails. Which one is it?

And by the way, all your subject lines are the same, right? I'm like, so like I literally can't find the thing you need help with. And the other thing is like when I'm talking to somebody and like, well, I'll need something or I'm trying to help with something, they're like, oh, I'll just send you this in an email later. I'm like, no, like I don't want more emails.

Like, let's just fix this now. Don't send me something later. I don't need to see this. I'm calling you to help you with it, right?

Or like uh like running the brokerage. I'll jump on for like an issue with a load, whatever, a claim, a missed delivery, whatever it is. And you're like, oh, I'll just copy. I'm like, no, no, don't copy me on any of this.

I don't need every email between you, your carrier, and your customer. I'm just telling you how to resolve this. If you have an issue, let me know. I don't need visibility into your shipment level data.

Put your notes in the TMS. If I need to see it, I'll find it there. And that's this other thing that, like, again, very 101 level. Like, why you put everything in a TMS is because everybody can see it when they need to.

Nobody needs to see every email you've ever had related to every load to help you with a problem. Put the stuff in the load, right? Like, then it's in one place where everybody can see it when they need to see it. Yeah.

Same premise. Agreed. Yeah, I think the uh the email overload is is a it's like a personal maybe pet peeve that I have where I'm like just trying to uh stay caught up on an inbox when probably 90% of the emails that come into my inbox, I either don't need to be CC'd on or I just end up deleting because I'm not the one who has to action something on it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Um yeah, I uh copying you in for visibility. I'm like, don't do that. I don't need that visibility.

I have so what I what I do now is like the ones that I know I'm copied on, and I know, like, for example, like those ones that are pre-formatted in a certain in a certain way. Um, I have those auto just they go right to a folder. So I never see them in my inbox. So I can if I ever need to go see them, yeah.

I'll see them. But so great point, right? Like this is another thing that like is very simple, but like not everyone kind of knows this. But like, okay.

So let's say you're a small brokerage and you have like an operations email, right? Because sometimes maybe you need your team to see issues and you want that copied on. And like there's lots of customers that then forget to copy the rep. This is one that I've run into in the past month a lot.

Okay. So what happens is everybody says to their customer, send the email to me, I'm your account manager, and copy operations. But then someone else at that company knows they want to use your brokerage, right? Like they want to use White Shark and they're like, hey, here's another order.

But it's not the same person that always sends loads, it's just somebody else there that needs help. They just send it to operations because they don't actually know the account manager, right? Well, that inbox might have 800 emails in it from like everything that's in there. So you kind of need visibility, but you never will ever be able to read everything in there.

So then what happens is the customer will call the company, be like, dude, I emailed over a load, either a change or a new load, and nobody got back to me. Like, what's going on over there? And then when we find the email, we go, like, oh, well, they didn't copy the person, they just sent it to operations, right? So the solution, right, is really pretty simple.

It's exactly what you said. Create a rule and a folder for each customer. You create the rule for the domain of your customer. So any email that comes from this is important, the customer at acme supply.

com, right? That rule directs every inbound email into this folder that you call acme. Supply. So now the count manager can just look at the operations box and there's a folder for every customer.

And if there's a new one, there'll just be a number next to it. One, two. Now I don't have to read 800. I just look at that folder, just like you said.

And this is like some stuff that like I think is pretty basic, but oftentimes people forget that you can do this or just don't do it. But like these are things that are immensely helpful for organization and being able to not lose track of stuff communication-wise. Yeah. Yeah, agreed.

Little uh little work hacks there. I like it. Um curious, have you ever done? I'm thinking back to like the email threads and you know being copied on stuff.

Sometimes what I'll do because I I use my inbox almost like a to-do list where in basically an email will not stay in my inbox when it's when I'm done with it. It'll either get deleted or file it if I want to, you know, keep it. You call it inbox zero, right? Like you work down to zero.

Yep. Yep. And then I have my emails also said to be in a threaded setting where like any replies with the same subject line kind of live grouped together in a thread. And sometimes what I'll do is if like, you know, like I'm doing a lot of like uh data work prep for a TMS transition right now.

So I might spend an hour or an hour and a half like buried deep in data heavy mode, and I'm not looking at my email at all. And then I'll hop back in email and I'm like, okay, well, there's a thread with you know 20 different emails here. Sometimes I'll just take the most recent one, copy it, the whole thing, throw it into like chat GPT or whatever, and say, hey, can you summarize what's going on here? Let me know what's going on.

And it'll just spit out everything. And it's usually very good. Whereas like Outlook's built-in copilot, I don't really like. Use it this morning.

And it's the same issue. So two or three things. I literally did this this morning. I was researching a load where there was an additional layover, but I couldn't find in the TMS because nobody put notes in there, right?

Where the layover occurred and there was a multi-customer shipment, right? So I'm like, well, the additional layover charge needs to be applied to the customer that had the layover, right? Like why they couldn't unload or load, why we had to pay this. That goes to that invoice.

No notes in the TMS, no ability to find this. Go and search operations, find at least 15 different email threads about this load. Tried to use Copilot, literally gave me nothing. Told me what I was already able to see.

Tried it again. That didn't work. And then I did exactly what you said, which is I now right-click those emails in Outlook, save them to a PDF, and I will move all the PDFs into either Claude, mostly Claude now, and I go summarize what happened here, and I can ask it questions that I would want to know, like where did this occur? Was this approved?

Who approved it? When was it approved? Which customer was it associated with? Did we ask the customer to go and find or pay this charge at the time it occurred?

Right. All of those things that should have been recorded in the TMS, I can do that by saving the emails and putting them in there. The other way I've been able to do this, and this is a hack I found on emails that works pretty well. When you have multiple emails, okay, like addresses across a company sometimes, right?

You cannot connect multiple into Claude or GPT. You can only connect like one Microsoft account. So it can't search over them. And there isn't a native Outlook plugin to do this across all of your inboxes, right?

So it's kind of surprising at this point. Shocked. Correct. I'm trying to work on one just personally.

I'm having engineers put it together right now so I can do this across like a whole company to find things I need to when I need to help people instead of them sending me emails. I just want to ask it a question. However, the workaround I found is if you put a Claud plugin, for example, into Chrome and you open all of your inboxes in Chrome, you can get it to use cowork to go into every inbox and do the same thing and summarize all of them. Interesting.

Got it. So details, unless you got anything else on like the email, that whole bit. I I kind of had a couple things I wanted to point out. The one last thing on emails that I think I use and not everyone kind of uses in the way you can.

And this is like native to Outlook anyway, which is like if you pin an email for your to-do list, it'll stay in the section at the top. So it's not necessarily read and unread or inbox zero. But if you have like six emails that you know you have to get to later, you can pin them and they will move to a different section until you unpin them, which again has been there forever, but not everyone really uses that function, too. I think what you can.

I used to use the different flag colors too on emails back in the day. Yes, I used to do that. Every one of them meant something different. So kind of shifting gears a little bit, but still kind of focused on details and having things organized.

I would kind of just sum or kind of categorize this into like running a very tight operation is having accurate information in your TMS kind to your point before, but like whether it's a PO number or a rate or an accessorial or a customer. Like I was telling you uh off air about a situation where like the wrong customer is listed on the TMS for a bunch of loads, and like, you know, we're getting customers kicking back saying, like, this one's not ours, and then you look at it, and the BOL is for one commodity, and then the customer clearly has nothing to do with that commodity.

So we're trying to figure out like, you know, you know, how do you prevent that or fix that? And should a, you know, should a billing person recognize this when they see it or not? Um, but just having accurate information there, because to your point, like the TMS, we we tell everybody, like it's it's it's gonna be as good as the data that you put into it. So like, just like your CRM, like if you don't put good notes or accurate information in, um, it's gonna be, you know, it's not gonna do its its best for you.

Like a lot of times, you know, people use the phrase like uh garbage in, garbage out, right? If you put bad information or you know pour quality information into a a system that's supposed to do work for you, it's not going to have the information it needs to properly give you the best output. So um that's why I think like if you and this is it's actually really cool because as I'm going through this TMS transition right now, and we're we're going through and identifying like, hey, what custom fields might you want, and you know, what regular fields might you want to require?

And where do you want things to be laid out in a way that procedurally will make it as easy as possible to reduce any kind of like human error? And you know, like oftentimes I think people get into a, you know, they get in their TMS and they're at a brokerage and they're just like, oh, this is just the way it's always been, so we're gonna keep doing it this way. And it's like, well, do you have the ability to change it? Do you have the ability to improve, you know, not just the the way the tool is used, but also procedurally how you guys interact with it?

So like required fields, and then even like on a required field, hold on. I did this today, this morning for this. Okay. So another one that like this is a people thing and a field thing, and you need to address both, right?

So, and for this client, they do a lot of high value shipments, but they're not getting the load values all the time from their customer, and it wasn't a required field in their TMS. So before I turned on required load value for everyone, I wanted everyone to know you're not going to be able to like finish a load without this number, right? So they don't all just start yelling at everybody going like my load can't get built. And they're like, Yeah, because like that has to be there.

But what they also needed to do from like the personnel standard load value, just required load value. So you can't like the value of the cargo. The value of the cargo, yeah. So I said, guys, like I need everyone to put this number in here, but what I absolutely do not want to happen is everyone just puts in 100k to get the load bill.

Because like that defeats the whole purpose. So, like the people have to do it correctly and it needs to be required, right? And then I always get the same pushback every time I do this with any client. Well, my customer doesn't give it to me.

I ask, they can't tell me. I'm like, okay, fair enough. But like, you know what you're shipping, right? Well, yeah, do you know how much you're shipping?

Yeah, I got the weight, I got the case count, or I got the palette count, and I got what it is. Okay. Well, can't you just put that in Google and say what is the approximate value of this today? Like, well, I guess.

I'm like, okay, we'll do that. Like it's at least better than nothing, right? Yeah. Like, we just need to know if it's over 100, do we need more insurance or a carrier with more insurance?

Like, that's really what you're trying to figure out. So if it's 125 versus 135, like that's not the end of the world. What you want to avoid is the bigger issue of shipping. I found this with somebody two weeks ago.

They moved $500,000 worth of cargo in an LTL network that has insurance at 50 cents per pound. I'm like, realize that like you have like literally no insurance on this. Yeah. What do you mean?

I'm like, well, guess what's gonna happen? If there's a claim, that customer is not gonna pay a half a million dollars worth of invoices to us because they think contingent cargo covers it. It doesn't. Your job is to make sure you protect this, not that your customer knows what to do.

That's not their job, that's our job, right? Yeah, exactly. Another um thinking like data, um, and I've I I like usually recommend this depending on how your customers are, but having a field that prints to the customer invoice that is like the customer's reference number, right? It could be PO number, order number, you know, whatever the case might be.

And um, you know, that way when the customer gets an invoice, if there's a high volume, right, they then know right away, oh, cool. Here's our number. We know exactly, you know, which shipment this is related to. The problem to your point though, the people side of it, the problem I've seen is that like when people know that a field is required, sometimes they just like put anything in there just to satisfy it, like you said, like the 100K for the value.

They'll put like a period in there or the date. Um, and I guess you know, something's better than nothing, but um having it inaccurate is is bad. Like I I had one, I was trying to figure out a um we had a guy that's not with us anymore, and we're trying to get one of the loads closed out. And I'm like, all right, cool, let me go and see what like the the customer PO number is, and it was just like zero, zero, zero, zero.

And I'm like, that is absolutely not what the customer's reference number was on this load. Um so it gets messy again, garbage in, garbage out. So when you have bad information and like a carrier invoices you, right, and they're on, you know, let's say they're on net 30, or better yet, let's say they took a quick pay, right? The longer it takes you to figure out the billing information for your shipper, the customer, that is delaying payment to come into you, which can dramatically hurt your cash flow.

So that's the kind of stuff that, like, not to mention if you're not invoicing daily, if you have bad information, or if the customer has a special billing portal or something like that, and you don't have the right attachments in there, or whatever the case might be, I've seen just absolute headaches. I remember we worked with a customer, this is like probably 10 years ago, and the c the company was uh it's technically Spencer's, you know, you know the store, like the shopping mall stores, Spencer's that have like gay gifts and stuff like that.

Yeah, but it's I guess they're they're affiliated with spirit Halloween stores, I think. But it was all these pop-up Halloween stores. So like the project every year would be like they take all the stuff for the Halloween store, they send it out to whatever location is gonna be um set up as a Halloween store, they stage it, and then they tear it all down and they put it back. But there was a there was like a some kind of like billing requirement that had to be done, and the one year it like got all messed up, and there was like it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It might have been like millions of dollars worth of like invoices that were being tied up, and it was the biggest disaster. And um, yeah, I mean, one one small preventative action or fix could have prevented, like you said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of uh cure, right? So here's something a big pain in the butt. So this is like super interesting to me, too.

So I'm trying to build out like a pretty comprehensive like financial reporting tool where basically I can search across multiple companies that are owned by one company and understand how one is doing business with the other. So like a brokerage and trucking company, right? Hey, this brokerage created an order and the trucking company ran it. Well, did it get into this TMS and is it done correctly in both?

And was it done correctly in the accounting system, for example, right? But across all of these. So a workflow I created to like learn and how to do this is I'm like, I need to do it correctly, but I need to protect it and to make sure the security is correct. So what I'll do is I'm like, I go and create a deep research report that's like 50 pages long, and I'm like, I want to know everything that is available right now publicly.

What can go wrong? What are the vulnerabilities? What are the best ways to do this? What are the other ways to do it?

And put it all in one place. Then I put it into Notebook LM and I have it create a 30-minute podcast where it debates all of the points in it, and I can learn so much so fast from like a conceptual standpoint. Can actually like read it to you? Like, no, it doesn't read it.

It it literally will, it's like me and you. Like it reads the whole thing, and it there's two different voices. It's like a woman and a guy, and you can have it debate the points or give you analogies. So for like the tech stuff, I'm like, use a bunch of metaphors so I can remember this.

It'll be like, oh, this tool, confluence, is like um that's like the waiter that brings you the information. This tool where your data is held, that's like the walk-in freezer in the back of the restaurant. And this tool, Excel and Excel Power Query, that's like your chef. This is your sous chef.

And it used a restaurant analogy, and like I can now mentally visualize how these things work together. And then it goes, well, hey, this is where this can really go wrong. And if your data is not correct, you can be making decisions that create like millions of dollars in liability and risk because this one thing over here wasn't updated correctly. And I'm like, oh, like this is super interesting to me on like how you kind of have to do these things because it's like what we were talking about, but like a little bit of a more in-depth use case.

And every single time I'm doing these, because we're building out a WMS system too, is it like everybody we're interviewing to run the new warehouses is like, dude, everyone I've worked at, this guy I talked to last night, he's been in the industry for like 40 years, opened warehouses all over the Northeast. He's like, dude, every one of these companies, the big ones, small ones, medium ones, they buy these crazy expensive WMSs and they use about 10% of it. And he goes, here's the funnier part.

Not only do they only use about 10%, but when I go to the management or ownership and say, like, hey guys, like can we use this feature in here? They discourage it because these tech companies charge them $150 an hour to discuss how to use the next thing. And then the company doesn't want to pay the additional charges, like McLeod does. And then they just keep using less of it because they won't pay to get the rest of the value that they're already paying for, which is this crazy ironic loop in the entire process.

I found that's funny. So I guess to to kind of wrap on this, when it comes to like the importance of details and accurate information, what is practical advice, in your opinion, for either a company or a leadership or an individual? Because what I think what I found is, you know, and it's probably no surprise, but some people just really it's not a strong point for them to be detail-oriented and organized and you know, kind of running that tight chip. Where others, like for me, for example, I feel like I'm very detail oriented and I get frustrated when I deal with somebody who's not, and I find it as like an area that I want to coach them on and you know help them get better at before anything else.

Because, you know, in in the grand scheme of things, like how how well can you, you know, grow somebody if your basic interaction and communication with them is is messy and confusing and and garbled. So what what's kind of your take from a leadership standpoint? How do you how do you instill that in your company or in your team? I always start with giving people the reason why they should want to improve this or do it better, because then they remember.

And when you have a reason, you're more likely to do it, right? I literally parent this way too. It's like if I ask my daughter to pick up her toys, I'm like, well, hey, honey, the reason I don't want your toys near the stairs is because if you fall and it's very dangerous, you would don't want to have something bad happen or whatever that is, right? And then you could literally see the light bulb go off.

It's like, oh yeah, okay. And then we'll do it, right? And it was always the thing that drove me nuts as a kid because like parenting in the 80s was like, do it because I said so. And I'm like, yeah, like what that's ridiculous.

Like, I'm just doing like random things just because you say it. Like, why am I doing this? So it's the same thing I like use with adults. I'm like, well, here's why you want to slow down and make sure these are correct.

Because you're wasting hours later fixing it anyway. So would you rather spend like 30 seconds to read the rest of it and make sure it's correct? Or just have a random problem that's gonna happen today or tomorrow that takes you an hour and a half to fix and cost you a bunch of money. Oh, well, it makes way more sense to just do that.

Okay, that's what we're talking about. That's the whole thing, right? So slow down, and your goal is to be a hundred percent accurate on everything. Now, the expectation is that you're never gonna be a hundred percent, but every time you do anything, that's the way you should be perceiving it, right?

Is like reading it and making sure it's all right. And I have some people that on the other end, they move so slow because they read every detail. And I'm like, okay, like you kind of just need to get to the high points. You're already detailed enough and need to speed up, and then you guys are moving way too fast.

And this is why you're here 11 hours a day fielding phone calls to fix problems. It's because yesterday you didn't slow down enough to do this. And you gotta just keep reiterating this over and over and over. And then you have to be able to see when it's happening to catch it and to slow them down and be like, hey, just saw this, just saw this order go in there.

Well, I don't see a load value, I don't see a PO, I don't see this. Like, can you make sure that's in there? And it really is a lot of work. Like, that's what you get paid for when you're like leading and managing people.

But like that's really how I kind of implement it. From like a tech perspective, I'm trying to build right now a tool that gives me visibility into all these things so I can just ask it what was missed in the TMS this morning, what needed to be added, and by who? Give me a summary, and then I can just message them directly in Teams, right? And I can do the same thing across all the emails.

So little by little, I think I will literally have this built to be able to do this faster and with more people. But from a personal side, like it's the way we probably learned brokerage 10, 15 years ago. It's like your manager is just looking at the board all day, and then he's messaging you on IM like, hey, do you need help with these loads that aren't covered? Hey, looks like these loads were like half built.

Do you need something? Hey, looks like a bunch of loads are delivered with no paperwork. Did you get to that? Like, you still need the person to do it with the person.

The thing I think will get better is the system that allows you to do this without clicking into 12 different pieces of software to find these things all day. Well said. Well said. Well, that puts a a bow on it.

So final thoughts, Ben. Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. And until next time, go bills.