Software Solutions for Industry-Wide Problems with Bek Abdullayev

Ilana Shabtay here, host of Inside Auto podcast where we interview top dealers, GMs, marketers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in and out of the automotive industry. And before we introduce today's guest, this episode is sponsored by Fullpath.com Fullpath is the automotive industry's leading customer data and experience platform. Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional hyper -personalized customer experiences.

To learn more, visit Fullpath.com Today we're welcoming a very special guest, Bek Abdullayev. Bek, how are you doing? Great, Ilana thank you.

Doing great. Happy to be here. Awesome. I'm happy to have you.

Did I butcher your last name or did I get it right? Awesome. I appreciate that. I don't say it as beautifully as you do, but I tried.

I definitely tried. Thank you. I'm excited for Bek to be on the show today. We're going to talk about something that we haven't really spoken about on Inside Auto podcast yet.

Bek is the CEO and founder of SuperDispatch a fast-growing logistics startup based in Kansas City. SuperDispatch serves as the logistics layer for the automotive industry with its end-to-end shipping platform for cars. Founded in 2015, SuperDispatch is now the leading software platform for vehicle shipping in the US and Canada. So first of all, congratulations.

So excited and looking forward to this conversation because I know I'm going to a lot. It's a space that I don't know a lot about. before we get into the nitty gritty of SuperDispatch and the challenges that you're solving for automotive, how did you get into automotive? How did you get into this space?

Yeah, it was very random, not just automotive, but a very niche sector of automotive that a lot of us don't even think about. We see these trucks on the road transporting cars, but we don't think about, know, we drive cars every day, we don't think about how they got there or what happens with them after we part ways with them. It was super random, you know, I've started six other companies in the past. I'm a serial entrepreneur and there was a break in between one of my companies where I was looking for something to do and I was actually interested in transportation sector because having gone through, know, our generation is going through so many recessions and a pandemic now, having gone through a couple of recessions myself with having businesses, I was looking for a more recession proof sectors and transportation stood out as one of them.

So I had some interest in transportation and I also saw a lot of inefficiencies there, but super randomly I got into automotive through my cousin who came over one day and I learned that he became a car hauler while in college as a side hustle, he started transporting cars. This guy borrows 30,000 from his ex-girlfriend on a napkin, goes and buys a truck and a trailer and starts transporting cars. So I learned a ton from him and I became really fascinated with what he was doing.

He basically gave me a job. He gave me a job being his dispatcher. So my job was finding him cars to transport and making sure it gets paid and making sure people are notified. And I started doing all that.

I set up this big setup in my basement. I had like these four screens and three phone lines. And, you know, four or six weeks later, I was doing that for six other drivers transporting cars around the country. And it was fascinating that everything was so manual, everything was so phone-based.

And I had a fax machine and printers and all this coordination. And I couldn't believe it because, you know, technology was becoming a lot more advanced and we were in the mobile age. The mobile apps, cloud technologies were becoming prominent, but this industry was so archaic. And the more conversations I had, I could not believe how old school everything was, how manual everything was, and everyone's always so frustrated and stressed out because of all the hassles.

So I decided to go on the road to actually see for myself how these guys move cars across the country. So I spent a couple of months riding along with truck drivers watching how these guys move cars and why exactly they're always frustrated. So yeah, I just couldn't believe it. These guys are walking around or driving around the country with stacks of paperwork.

They're always frustrated. Everybody's angry. Everybody wants to know where their car is. This is a high value asset, whether it's an individual or a dealer or an auction.

Some of these companies are moving thousands of cars across the country all the time and nobody knows where they are. and they have massive teams of people. This, it's actually crazy because I remember when I was living in Miami and I needed to send my car back to New York. I was like New York registered and I needed to do a test.

I don't exactly remember what it was, but like I had no idea when my car was coming and where it was and I had no way to track it. This was like in 2017 and I just like got a call one day and was like, pick up your car. It's like an hour away from Miami. Like it's here, you have to get it today.

That was it. Wow. I couldn't believe it. And I thought as an entrepreneur, I saw a massive underserved market and I decided to solve that problem.

That's incredible. So you're working with the transport, the suppliers, the dealerships directly and like straight to consumers or do you work with like a specific type of client and transport for them, cars? Yeah, we work with all the companies involved in auto transportation process. So if you think we think of it as more of the whole automotive ecosystem.

If you think about the whole automotive ecosystem for it to function, all this inventory, all these cars need to move around from the manufacturer to dealer to dealer, consumer to auction and back all the way to salvage yard. The vehicle continues moving throughout its life cycle. Every car will be transported five to six times in its life cycle. So without this robust transportation network, the industry can't truly function.

So it's a really critical aspect of the whole automotive industry. And the companies that are involved are manufacturers, these are dealers, these are wholesale auctions, these are fleet companies, these are banks, financial institutions, and a huge part of this ecosystem are also brokers. These managed services, you small to large managed services, they piece it all together. So we work with all of those companies.

That's super impressive. Question for you, the pre-order surge that happened in automotive. So I would say like a year after COVID hit, inventory shortage became a real problem for dealers and they started to... basically set up systems where they were the car wouldn't even hit the lot and it would be out shipped to a customer because there was such a surge for pre-order because there was such a backlog, low supply high demand.

Did you see that spike in your business? Like did you feel like SuperDispatch played a big role in that because I'm assuming there was just like so much more transfer going on and also the velocity was probably like much faster. Yeah, great question. What an interesting time.

COVID was actually great for software, a lot of software businesses. We saw automotive in the beginning of starting this company, even maybe 10 years ago, I saw automotive going digital, but the pace was kind of slow. But COVID significantly accelerated digitization. As we all know, NADA last year was all software, probably 99 % software, all tech, all software.

So I think we're here. We're now in the digital world. What I saw during the pandemic was fascinating as online car sales increased, people's ability to access wider inventory increased. So people were accessing cars all over, especially with a shortage, you're now more willing to buy cars further out.

So you're accessing more regional or national inventory and that increased demand on the logistics layer of the automotive space. And we saw a lot more people buying cars from longer distances and people, we were transporting a lot more cars during COVID. Was there something specific in your software or in your like product roadmap that you had to change based on on those events? Or did you feel like you were built for success?

Yeah, yeah, I feel like it it probably like just up throw out the roadmap, rework it. Yeah, you know, you're always adapting and to our approach to building technology for this space was to take everything that it takes to move a car and combine it in a single end-to-end platform. And that was really key to a lot of our success that everybody involved in the transportation process, they could do everything from pricing the car and moving it and tracking and paying all in the same place, right?

And a big part of that is the driver that's transporting your car, the carrier as we refer to them. And the whole touchless thing, the whole social distancing, remember that? It feels distancing prevented people from collecting signatures. So you need a signature on your phone to get a confirmation of a pickup and delivery.

And the drivers couldn't like, people didn't want to touch each other's phones, there was social distancing. created Touchless Signature. That's cool, that's way better than what I was gonna suggest. That's awesome.

part of pandemic was probably sanitizing my groceries. Touchless Signature, and that was ahead. I mean people really resonated, it resonated well and people, adoption curve went poof and it was great. That was probably one of the things that we had to adjust.

We realized that people couldn't be in close proximity and we adapted quickly to that. Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. And with this technology that you kind of have now put into one platform for basically the entire ecosystem, like you mentioned, two questions on this.

My first question is, who do you consider your client or is everyone your client? Like you have such different point of contacts. So when you're thinking about the platform and thinking about your business, you're serving such different personas. I'm just interested in what that's like as the entrepreneur and as the CEO.

Is that a challenge? Is that exciting? Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Of course, yeah, we serve three segments of customers.

We serve carriers. These are transportation companies that transport the cars. And then we serve brokers. These are managed services that service a lot of clients.

They service both sides. They play a critical role in the whole ecosystem, managing the whole logistics network, solving complex problems. So we serve brokers. And then we serve shippers.

Shippers are companies. These could be larger dealer groups. This could be auctions. This could be online digital marketplaces or wholesale platforms.

These could be fleet companies. These could be financial institutions. But the key here is that these are companies that manage transport themselves. Because the company that has, and they're all B2B, we don't serve any individuals or smaller companies, but these are companies that have a lot of cars to move.

So they will either outsource it to a brokerage, it handles everything for them, or they will do it in-house So we serve as either brokers that service them or we'll service the companies that do transport themselves using our software. And there's some complexity as an entrepreneur you think about when you're serving three sets of customers you have three sets of needs and demands and combining and meeting all of that all of those on a single platform can be a challenge. But you know a lot of successful companies are successful because they're solving complex problems.

So from that perspective I think it's a blessing and a curse. It's a great opportunity to build a successful large company by helping a lot of people. And sometimes you do that through solving complex problems. Thank you so much, Bek.

And we're noticing an increase of fraud specifically in automotive. I'm wondering if SuperDispatch fights that or has any kind of solution for reducing fraud when it comes to auto transport. I'd love your take on that as well. Yeah, happy to.

It's a big topic. It's a massive topic the last year and a half, maybe the last couple of years. Freight industry, so transportation as a whole has been hit hard by fraud. A lot of lost freight, things that are being shipped, they're getting lost, things being stolen and people being lied to.

Unfortunately, it's touching automotive as well. Normally, you wouldn't care so much about it, except a lot of cars are being lost. A lot of cars are being lost in transit and that impacts the whole ecosystem. It impacts dealerships, auctions, brokerages, everyone involved in the ecosystem.

You one or two cars being lost, you know, can take out a small business altogether. But last year, I was talking to a law enforcement agent down in Texas investigating a case where over 300 cars were stolen in the span of few months. It's a big deal. Yeah, in this case is coming down.

I'm sure we'll hear about it in the news soon. But you know what happens is it's impacting dealers and consumers and buyers and auctions, everyone involved in automotive ecosystem. And what happens is some insiders in the industry have figured out how to take possession of cars and ship them across the border into Mexico, which is where a lot of them go or take them to the ports and ship them abroad. And at SuperDispatch, we've actually helped recover a lot of these units because the platform being end-to-end we're able to track a lot of the aspects of transportation and early detection of suspicious activity that could flag things, that could stop cars from being stolen.

That's cool. And I feel like that's obviously like a selling point as well, because when you're speaking to your customers, you're like, this is something that will protect, you guys can actually track that, so it protects your customers. Yeah, if you think about how we used to do business, it's all handshakes, right? Trust, you have to see people face to face.

In the digital world, you're pushing a button, you're going to a website or an app and entrusting your highly valuable assets, especially if you're moving high volume of cars. So trust is a huge part of being able to live in this digital world. And if you think about companies that don't take trust seriously or security seriously, are really aren't going to be relevant or be in business. for long.

So security and trust have been really integral parts of how we built the platform from the start. So to give you an example, we have a team, massive team, a compliance team, making sure that everybody's verified and being monitored. We have some, you know, phone call and identity verifications going into that. We've dedicated, last year we dedicated a fraud investigations team.

You know, when I started the company, I didn't think I would have a fraud investigations team, we now do and they're constantly preventing companies from suspicious activity or from fraudulent activity. They're banning companies for suspicious behavior. It's just a reality that we live in. And to be honest, I think the industry as a whole might be a little bit behind.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really great that you guys are putting an emphasis on it. And I do think that it's the unfortunate reality. And every company should be looking at this from this angle, having a compliance team, having a data security team. I mean, this is something that we obviously talk about a lot at Fullpath but I think automotive should really have an eye on data security and fraud in general because it's just such a sensitive industry.

So thank you so much for sharing and thank you so much for sharing with us today. I learned so much about SuperDispatch and your impact on the industry. So I really appreciate it. I think everyone should check you guys out.

Where should our listeners find you? What's the best place? Yeah, so superdispatch .com, super, S -U -P -E -R -D -I -S -P -A -T -C -H .

com. And you can also reach me directly as well at superbek@superdispatch.com. That's S -U -P -E -R -B -E -K at superdispatch .

com That's cool. I love that you guys do that. Well, thank you so much. And for our listeners, this is Inside Auto Podcast.

You can find us on all your favorite streaming channels. Bek, thank you again for joining. Thanks, Ilana It was great to be on your podcast.