Building a Logistics Technology Lab with Ryder’s Nate Robert
Episode Transcript
DD Spotify DD Apple Podcast

In this episode, Blythe and Nate Robert, founder of logistics startup Baton, discuss how his company was acquired by Ryder to build out their new Silicon Valley-based technology lab. The goal of the 40-person lab consisting of engineers, designers, and product managers is to solve pain points identified through engagement with Ryder operators. This includes tackling the driver efficiency issue of only 6.5 productive hours out of an 11-hour driving day.

LINKS:

———————————————

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!

Are you experienced in freight sales or already an independent freight agent? Listen to our Freight Agent Trenches interview series powered by SPI Logistics to hear directly from the company’s agents on how they took the leap and found a home with SPI freight agent program.

Tai TMS is designed to streamline your brokerage operations and propel growth for both FTL and LTL shipment cycles. Book a demo with the Tai team today and tell them Everything is Logistics sent you

Maximize your website’s performance as a sales tool with Digital Dispatch’s website management.

Show Transcript

See full episode transcriptTranscript is autogenerated by AI

Blythe Brumleve: 0:05

Welcome into another episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI Logistics. I'm your host, Blythe Brumleve, and we've got an amazing guest for you today. We have Nate Robert. He's the founder of the startup Baton and now one of the chief technologist leading writer, Silicon- Valley- based technology lab. So welcome to manifest. This is your first time here.

Nate Robert: 0:28

First time here. You're going to be on the show.

Blythe Brumleve: 0:29

Absolutely Okay. So you have a really interesting story and I remember hearing you know because I did a lot of I've done content for years for freight waves. I remember hearing a lot of your story from them, especially around Baton. So can you kind of give us a little bit of insight as to how the hell you find yourself in the supply chain industry?

Nate Robert: 0:47

Yeah, so no, no, no. It was an interesting story of how we got there. So I, back in 2018, I met up with one of my buddies from grad school, Andrew, who is now my co-founder, and we decided, okay, we want to start a company together, but we don't have a specific idea that we want to go after. So we we spent nine months part time looking at ideas in different industries, or really just researching industries in general to see, okay, what injuries, what industries are in the verge of some large technological shift. And at the end of those nine months, we we realized that freight and logistics is an industry that okay, with the ELD mandate of 2018, 2019, everything is suddenly becoming connected. So at that point, it was five or so years after Flexport, Convoy, Uber Freight, Transfix all of them started getting into the industry, and so it really was the beginning of this big tech wave that that we believed at the time and I think has proven to be true, was about to take over the whole industry and and create a lot of change. So we decided to try and jump into logistics. We had no idea anything about logistics. We we went to Atlanta for Freight Waves Conference, which was incredible, and met Craig. Craig then drove us around Chattanooga. We met a bunch of people, we, we, then we, we. Through that, we, we interviewed over a hundred different executives in the freight and logistics industry. We we also drove around to a bunch of the of the truck stops in the Bay Area and interviewed truck drivers and and all of the time asking okay, what are the, what are the pain points that you feel in logistics industry, like, what are the hard parts of your job? And we kept hearing this, this, this pain point around a, an inefficiency or a lot of waste being created with how you figure out what loads to assign to what drivers when you're managing a fleet of trucks. And so that's, that's where we initially targeted in and and what we started to what we started Baton around.

Blythe Brumleve: 2:42

And it was almost like a creative parking situation, right? Is that how I remember it correctly?

Nate Robert: 2:47

Well, so actually yeah, I'm. I'm simplifying the story. What actually happened is we started with this, with this long haul relay network, so the idea was okay, long haul trucks are coming into the LA area the worst part of their journey is in LA they're dealing with traffic, wait time at the warehouses, so instead they we set up these drop zones outside of major metro areas, where long haul truck would come in, drop off a trailer, and then we would use a local driver for the final delivery. Well, we realized, though, is even within the final delivery piece, there is still a massive optimization scheduling problem, and so we ended up building technology to to optimize our local fleet of trucks, and then that technology is eventually what we realized was much more valuable than this, like long haul relay service, and so we started focusing on the tech, and then the tech is eventually what got acquired by Ryder in the end of 2022.

Blythe Brumleve: 3:43

So it's interesting that you did all of this legwork to talk to all of these founders. You know, talk to a bunch of people in logistics and then you launch a product and then you figure out that we've got to adjust it too. So how did you go? How did you work through that process? It was basically just customer feedback, just a constant customer loop.

Nate Robert: 3:59

Yeah, constant customer feedback and, I think, a just a recognition that when startups begin the, the percentage of successful companies that do the exact same thing that they started on in the first place is very small. Like everyone goes through massive like pivots and changes. I mean, at one point Airbnb was selling breakfast cereals, for example, and like they were selling breakfast cereals, yeah, and there was a way for them to make money on the side during the Obama and during Obama's first, the first time he ran for office, and they were making Obama O's and it was a yeah, they had to make money on the side while they were doing these other things.

Blythe Brumleve: 4:36

So was it like a marketing ploy to push Airbnb? It was.

Nate Robert: 4:39

I believe it was. They were trying anyway to make money to keep themselves afloat, so that was one thing they did, and the point being, though, they're like all of these, all of these companies like nobody ends up being exactly what they initially thought, and so, just being aware of that, I mean open to okay, we need to take feedback from our customers and from the market to better evolve our product, and we realized, after we had this relay network and then we built all this technology, we were using the technology in sales calls to show people how awesome our service was. People kept saying, hey, okay, your service, whatever, but how do I get the technology Then? That's what led us to okay, let's focus more on this.

Blythe Brumleve: 5:17

Yeah, how do you get to the point where you launch the business? You have a startup, you shift gears a little bit as far as your focus is concerned. Then all of a sudden you end up at Rider, like fill in those gaps for us, yeah.

Nate Robert: 5:32

So we met a bunch of the Rider folks even before we incorporated the company and we had some back and forth with Mike Plasencia, who now runs Rider corporate venture group. We had some back and forth with him on ideation, so we were really close to Rider the entire journey. Rider started their own corporate venture group right before we raised our series A which was the beginning of 2021, and we were either their first or second investment, so they were part of our series A. Then, after that, we worked even more closely with them. Calls every now and then, with some of the leadership team eventually starting to talk to them about hey, if we were to sell this technology we have, would you want to buy it as a SaaS product? Those conversations led to it's not enough for us to buy this as a SaaS tool. We need to buy your entire company so that we can take what you have and then build upon it and customize it for Rider's specific use case.

Blythe Brumleve: 6:29

So really a sleeper as far as they have this almost like a tech startup hub component to their business and most people just think of them as like truck leasing, correct.

Nate Robert: 6:41

Yeah, that's been an interesting transformation where a lot of people especially people outside of the business, who are outside of the industry, who don't know about Rider's supply chain solutions group or their dedicated transportation group only see Rider as a hey, this is like a 90-something year old company that does truck leasing and maintenance, but really internally, rider is building out this core competency of technology. They've invested over a billion dollars in the past five years in tech forward companies and straight up technology companies like Baton. They have their whole corporate venture group which has done a ton of investments across the industry. So they are really trying to be one of the technology leaders, even though they're a 90 year old company. So it's like it's an incredible evolution that they're going through.

Blythe Brumleve: 7:25

So we're here at Manifest the Future of Supply Chain and Logistics. Now, by the time people listen to this, it'll probably be a month later, after this is over, but I'm curious as to what you're speaking about here. I think you're talking about AI. It's obviously the buzzword everybody is talking about over the last year. So how do you see AI fitting into this industry?

Nate Robert: 7:50

So I'll summarize some of what we talked about in the panel this morning, but when our team talks about the development of AI, we talk about it in three waves. So the first wave is these initial foundational models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, google's Bard, facebook, lama. That was the first wave, where now people have this interface that they can text, and it's trained on a bunch of publicly available data. The second wave is this shallow horizontal layer that is built on top of the ChatGPT, so it's things that still use publicly available data primarily, and it's things like okay, now I'm going to create a chat bot that uses ChatGPT as the backend, or I'm going to create a plugin sales tool that I can write emails with, or I'm going to create a tool that helps marketing people generate content better. That's a shallow horizontal layer. Supply chain companies should be looking at these as tools that they can plug into their sales team or their marketing team, etc. The third wave, though, is when you have companies with massive proprietary datasets. We can then use those datasets to train on top of the foundational models. Then, if you have a company like Rider, with all of the transportation and logistics data that we have, you train like a Rider GPT. You can ask questions not only like hey, what's the status of this load, but you can say, hey, how can I most efficiently move all of these shipments from A to B? How can I design my supply chain to better account for weather disturbances like hurricanes? That's when you get a much deeper and more intense value add from large proprietary supply chain datasets.

Blythe Brumleve: 9:35

What does that look like from a user perspective? That maybe Rider? Is it like a SaaS product? Is it you already a customer, rider? It sits on top of, maybe, a back-end system that's proprietary to Rider. What does that look like?

Nate Robert: 9:49

There are a lot of different ways it could manifest. I think the easiest one to talk about is okay, you've got a chat bot that, as a customer of Rider, you're using Rider Transportation Services. Can you use this chat bot to answer questions about your existing freight? That gives you faster answers than if you were to go through an operator or something, but still having the customer service representative there to help with more complex questions. I think a big piece of all of this is when AI comes in. We do not see it as replacing jobs. We see it as augmenting jobs and allowing people to be way more powerful. But with the specific interface it's like okay, maybe it's a chat thing, maybe there's other ways to do it in the future.

Blythe Brumleve: 10:35

So it's really customized for the customer, whatever their preferences to live on top of the tool that they're already using.

Nate Robert: 10:42

You can even say okay, in the future, are there ways that we can connect with the customer system and build this functionality into their TMS instead of them having to come to Rider system, things like that.

Blythe Brumleve: 10:53

I think that there's a lot of companies that they're just almost like tech fatigue, especially with AI, because there's so many tools. That feels like every other week that there are more and more tools coming out, so it's almost like I don't know where to start because there's a million different ways that this could go. And how should I choose to invest my time and energy and budget into something that I don't know that actually going to work for me?

Nate Robert: 11:12

Yeah, and I think it's interesting with. You're totally right. There's a ton of noise around okay, this new AI tool, this new AI tool and I think for business leaders, the important thing is to think about okay, what are the pain points that I'm feeling right now? And then, from that pain point, what is the best way to solve the pain point? Don't just blindly go look at here's all the AI tools, because you need to actually be solving a pain point that improves your business with these things in life. So, and a lot of times, ai might be the solution, but I think more frequently, ai is like overkill for the specific problem you're trying to solve.

Blythe Brumleve: 11:52

How are you using AI and your work life?

Nate Robert: 11:55

So in work life I would say the or personal life too.

Blythe Brumleve: 12:00

Yeah, it's helped me on the planning.

Nate Robert: 12:03

We'll give personal life like I go to chat GBT instead of Google now Work life. I think the biggest tool, that the most important tool for our team, has been GitHub Co-Pilot, which is OK, so GitHub has all this talking again about Wave 3. Github has all this proprietary data on code and so they've been able to train their own Co-Pilot using all that data and so now that Co-Pilot can help engineers write code way faster Like if I'm writing a bunch of test cases, I can just use Co-Pilot to generate them much more quickly than me slogging through a bunch of repetitive code.

Blythe Brumleve: 12:34

Oh, that's interesting Because I was listening to a tech to prep this morning for our conversation. I was listening to your interview with Cassandra Gaines about a year ago. And she had asked that question about how are you the developer team or you have engineers that are working on your team? So now it sounds like and you answered in that question that you have a team of engineers, but now it sounds like you're able to almost to code yourself. Is that accurate?

Nate Robert: 12:59

So, yeah, so the Baton team, which is now the writer technology innovation lab we're about 40 people in San Francisco, oh wow, and it's mainly engineers, designers, product managers and a recruiting team. But, yeah, out of the 20 or so engineers that we have, they are now developing with Co-Pilot as a part of that, and so that, just again, we still need all these engineers, but they can now be more efficient and develop code more quickly by utilizing Co-Pilot.

Blythe Brumleve: 13:28

Is there anything public, I guess, that you can share as far as what they're working on or maybe some products that are coming out in the future?

Nate Robert: 13:36

So one of the things that we've talked about before are one when we were acquired, we had this big optimization platform, and one of the big projects we're working on is taking that existing technology and then converting it for writer's use case. We're no longer managing 20 trucks, now we're managing 10,000 trucks, so that's a massive revolution.

Blythe Brumleve: 13:57

Scaling problem yeah.

Nate Robert: 13:59

And then the second thing that we talk about is, especially when you think about the, how are we going to leverage AI in the future? The most important first step is making sure that your data is structured in a unified way that you can leverage with these AI models. So one of the other big projects we're working on is OK, how do we take data from all the different systems that writer has ingested into one place, standardize and normalize it into our what we call the atomic model of freight? It's like a single data model that can support data structures for everything from LTL, the truckload, to brokerage, to intermodal, to warehousing, and get all that data in one spot so that we can leverage it for the products we're building today, as well as AI applications in the future.

Blythe Brumleve: 14:46

Are you in freight sales with a book of business looking for a new home? Or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called the Freight Agent Trenches, sponsored by SPI Logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, IT and sales. But I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI's freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI? Hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations or, if you're ready to make the jump, visit spi3plcom. Are you a broker, ready to level up your business? Well, I've got a game changer of a solution for you because, let's face it, your TMS choice can make or break your company, and that's where having the right ally becomes key to success. Meet TIE Software, an all-in-one platform with user-friendly automation that makes your day-to-day operations smoother and smarter. Whether you're running a big brokerage or a startup, TIE's got your back through every phase of your domestic freight. Gear up because your logistics journey is about to get a serious upgrade. Experience it now by heading over to tie-softwarecom for a demo. So, being here at the conference, I want to get back to your panel a little bit. You know, obviously AI is the topic that we could just, you know, go on and on about. But I'm curious as to you know, were there any takeaways or any lessons that you've learned from that conversation with other people that are working on some of the same problems you are?

Nate Robert: 16:33

So it was interesting that I would say that the panel did a good job of bringing people from a bunch of different angles on the industry. So there was a guy from Microsoft, there was a guy from Rail, for example, and so actually it was more interesting for me to see how, like, there wasn't any overlap, so it wasn't like, oh, I learned something about my specific way of thinking about AI, as much as it was interesting to hear, okay, how are they thinking about AI within Rail, which is tangential to what we're doing right now, but like, maybe in the future valuable, or like how Microsoft is thinking about it as a provider and a supplier of technology to the industry, that kind of thing.

Blythe Brumleve: 17:11

What kind of key takeaways were that really resonated with you?

Nate Robert: 17:15

I mean, I think from Microsoft's perspective, there's and this makes a lot of sense there's a lot of when people think about creating their own, like their own models on top of the like their own LLMs. There's a lot of people that are worried about security issues and so like, yeah, privacy and all that, and so the mic from Microsoft just talked about that and how, how forefront that is in Microsoft's mind to make sure. Okay, like, let's make sure that people are comfortable with this, even even if, like, potentially, the actual security risk is maybe not that high, but we still need to make sure all of our customers feel completely comfortable with this.

Blythe Brumleve: 17:59

Because that's their perception.

Nate Robert: 18:01

coming to this, it's all about perception in addition to any like actual, real risks.

Blythe Brumleve: 18:06

So and so with being sort of, you know, baton is such a great name, I love that branding, and so when you are having this team now, because it really translates really well actually, if you think about it from the technology standpoint, I'm sure you've thought about it plenty but from that lens of like the things that you're trying to build to better a future of the 90 year old company, I guess my next question is what is it? What do those next products look like? Outside of optimizing the data that you already have? What are those big problems that you guys are trying to solve?

Nate Robert: 18:40

Yeah, and I so, without diving into specifics too much, but like there's, it is interesting that Ryder has so many different divisions within I mean. I mean there's Ryder Brokerage, managed Transportation, dedicated Warehousing, fleet Management, all of these different things, and so, from a very high level, we're thinking, okay, how do how do all of these things fit together? And, like some of that is obvious, like there are a lot of warehousing clients that also need a dedicated transportation service. Some other ways might be okay. There may be other ways that things can work together, but only if you have the right technology in place, and so one of the things we're working on right now is a broader strategy and vision across all of these different departments. And how can we, how can we optimize and use technology to leverage it across all of Ryder, not just in, like the dedicated group, which is where we're focusing right now?

Blythe Brumleve: 19:35

And so with all of you know, sort of. I think it's really smart and also tough for founders to be so hyper focused on their own product and the problems that they're trying to solve, and then you come to an event like this and it's like wow, there are so many more problems that actually need to be solved as well in addition. So I'm curious if you've had a chance to, you know, meet other people, meet other startups, meet you know, some folks on the expo floor. Is there anything that you're seeing here or hearing here that excites you? Or you know, it was a really like thought provoking moment.

Nate Robert: 20:03

Yeah, I think there's a lot of some conversations around warehouse automation and wearables for warehouse, like front line workers. The Moonwalkers yeah, it was like super interesting and there's a couple of companies in that space that I think makes a lot of sense, like like okay, the person who's walking around the warehouse that's not connected at all with like a gun scanner that they're using. That's a very old way to think about things and there's so much more that we can do today with warehouse connectivity and like giving warehouse workers like better tools for this kind of thing, which is interesting, because I haven't focused a lot on the warehouse inside at all.

Blythe Brumleve: 20:45

And that's what's so fantastic about this conference is that I've been to. You know plenty of. You know logistics conferences, but this one is the first one that I've been to that really brings a whole supply chain under one roof and you can see these robotics in action and all of the complex things that they're solving. But then you know from a, I guess, a pick and pack perspective, but then you have the down to your. You know your point is the warehouse worker and how they're being optimized. I mentioned Moonwalkers earlier, which helps you know sort of the warehouse workers cut their steps down from 30,000 steps a day to half. And so that's amazing, there's also another. I don't actually think that they're here, but I've talked to them before but, they has pro-glove, where, instead of a barcode scanner, the scanner is actually in a glove that they wear, so they don't have to.

Nate Robert: 21:28

You know the couple of seconds that it takes. You can do it on hand instead of like getting this thing out. It's almost like Ironman, like it's an.

Blythe Brumleve: 21:33

Ironman glove that you're wearing so you save. You know those half a second. You know when you're doing something. You know a thousand times a day that half a second adds up. Yeah.

Nate Robert: 21:42

Yeah, yeah it's, it's very cool and like, yeah, I totally agree. Other, a lot of other conferences I've gone to. I feel like we're more focused on like trucking and brokerage and like just that piece of things which makes sense because that's what we've optimized for. But, yeah, being here seeing the entire gambit of like the entire supply chain like supply chain is so much more than just trucking is a very cool thing.

Blythe Brumleve: 22:07

So Absolutely so. I guess what's next for you and the team Like, what, what? What are you excited to be? You know, maybe you're launching something soon. I know we kind of talked about you know some new products that you're working on, but I guess maybe I'll switch my question to what does that a day to day look like for you, as especially as you've shifted into Rider?

Nate Robert: 22:24

Yeah, so, um, as we've shifted into Rider the before Rider when we were as a startup, we had a whole ops team, we had a whole sales team, and so my time was very much divided amongst a lot of different things within the business. And now it's like, okay, we're focused on building technology that provides value to Rider and Rider's customers, and so I get to be a lot more focused on working with the product team, working with the engineering team Okay, what is our product strategy? What's the product roadmap look like and then working with Rider's leadership team to communicate that, make sure we are addressing the needs of Rider leadership. And then also there's a huge chunk of my time that's spent in the field with Rider operators, because I mean, we want to make sure we're building something that works for these operators, and so we go to the field, we show them mocks, we interview them on their pain points. Okay, here's V4 of the product that we've built. Tell me all the ways that it doesn't work or that it sucks so that we can improve it for V5. So I'd say that's also a huge chunk of it.

Blythe Brumleve: 23:26

So sticking with your roots of getting that customer feedback and it just never stops Because you're always evolving. This industry is always evolving. Now for this show. We started off as like sort of a marketing great marketing focus podcast, but then it shifted about a year ago into more global supply chain initiatives. But I still like to ask a few marketing questions, just because I think personal branding is so important.

Nate Robert: 23:48

I'll do my best. Yeah, let me know.

Blythe Brumleve: 23:50

I think this is a good marketing tactic, as well as hearing on podcasts, spreading the message organically and having these kinds of conversations. So I have a set amount of questions that I like to ask each guest that comes on the show. So first question is how do you think about marketing when it comes to you and your company?

Nate Robert: 24:07

So within, I'll give well, let me know if this is answering the way that you were hoping, but within us, because we're running a technology group within Rider Rider's a 40 plus thousand person company the products that we're building. There's actually almost like an internal marketing component within this massive company, where we can't just build products and then throw them over the fence and expect people to use them. We do have to think about okay, what is? How are we perceived within Rider? How are we making sure to get the word out about our team within Rider so that the operators are excited to use the tools that we're building? That's our version of marketing.

Blythe Brumleve: 24:59

I love that because it's internal marketing. I spoke to a guest about a year ago and it blew my mind that that's how she initially starts. The marketing conversations is that she starts internally before they ever go externally. So I think that that's a really important aspect.

Nate Robert: 25:13

I would say it's not like we do think about it, it's not like we're running massive campaigns and everything, but it's okay. There are internal ways to post on our progress. We can do that when there's larger events, like my co-founder and I will speak and give an update on okay, here's what we're doing. Then a lot of it really is just being in person with the operators and then knowing that the operators will talk to other operators.

Blythe Brumleve: 25:36

So that's how it ends up we're at a map on steroids Exactly, especially if you can utilize 40,000 workers that are already internal and already a fan of the company and invested in you're the best interest of the company, all right. Next one what's your favorite social media platform and why?

Nate Robert: 25:51

So I hardly use any social media Really, so it would be LinkedIn.

Blythe Brumleve: 25:58

Yeah.

Nate Robert: 25:58

Because, I mean, we're growing our team very quickly right now, and so I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn looking at people's profiles and going through that as parts of interviews. But that's basically the extent of my social media process.

Blythe Brumleve: 26:09

Is it conscious by choice, or you just never got into it?

Nate Robert: 26:13

I don't think I ever. I never really got into it. Yeah, which is maybe for the best. Yeah, I'm probably missing out on some things, but for the best things, my siblings will send me stuff and then make fun of me for not being on. Yeah, yeah.

Blythe Brumleve: 26:28

Well, that's actually I think about it every day quitting social media but we're kind of in it. Yeah, once you're in it, you're in it, it's necessary evil at this point with podcasting, but it has this frozen con, so I'm sure you know that. But what is your favorite SaaS tool that you use every day? That isn't your own.

Nate Robert: 26:44

It is not our own. I really like there's an email client called Superhuman, or not an email client, it's like a. You use Gmail but you can plug it into Superhuman and then you do your emails through Superhuman, which is it's the like best UI UX, I think of any, like any tool that I really use every single day and I think it like the value of this is I get through my emails 30, 40% faster. Wow, it's great.

Blythe Brumleve: 27:16

So I highly recommend checking that out. Mental note has already been made, because I'm already an email hell, so I'll be stealing that one. All right. Next one is a favorite freight business that isn't your own.

Nate Robert: 27:26

Freight business Interesting Freight business.

Blythe Brumleve: 27:33

Or supply chain.

Nate Robert: 27:34

Or supply chain. This is a good question. There's some interesting things around the EV space. I think that I think unknown challenges coming up with. Ok, now I've moved over my entire fleet from diesel to electric vehicles, it's actually a massively different fleet management problem. Ok, I'm doing electrification charging overnight. How do I manage the different levels of battery levels of each of these trucks? And so there are a couple of companies working on that EV fleet management problem.

Blythe Brumleve: 28:23

I think TerraWatt is here and they're trying to solve that problem, I know there's a couple, and so I'll say that is a category I think that's really interesting. That's a good answer, All right. What is a book or podcast that changed your perspective on something?

Nate Robert: 28:44

There is a book called Extreme Ownership. It's written by two former Navy SEALs and one of the cultural components, or one of the cultural values that we have at Baton, is extreme ownership, and it's the idea that it doesn't matter from what angle you are touching a problem. You should feel extreme ownership in trying to solve it, and I think that's made a big impact on our. That idea has made a big impact on our team of everyone stepping up and proactively trying to solve problems, and nobody, like you, get rid of people making excuses. You get rid of people playing the blame game. Everybody just wants to solve the problem, and when things go wrong, everyone takes blame on themselves, and so when that happens, then everybody just works together so much more effectively. So it's called Extreme Ownership and that's a great answer.

Blythe Brumleve: 29:33

All right, and last one what is your favorite supply chain or logistics fact?

Nate Robert: 29:38

Favorite. I would say so the the. The average truck only gets six and a half out of the 11 drive hours. So so trucks can drive, long haul trucks can drive for 11 hours a day by DOT regulation for their hours of service. The average truck only drives 6.5 productive hours out of that 11. And that is. A lot of people talk about a driver shortage problem. I think we have a driver efficiency problem and if you can, if you can move that 6.5 hours up to seven or 7.5, you've solved the driver shortage problem.

Blythe Brumleve: 30:14

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of drivers that would would say that there, you know, we have no shortage. It's actually a retention issue. It's an issue, it's an efficiency of life Optimization efficiency, yeah, and so when you, I guess from from that lens, what are you seeing as far as, like, what's affecting that efficiency time? I imagine wait times at ship locations.

Nate Robert: 30:33

A lot of it is the stuff that we initially set out to to try and solve. It's OK. How do I, how do I coordinate the exact right appointment times when I'm driving across the country? How do I? Even when I get to the warehouse, I'm now waiting in detention for four hours before I get unloaded, and then after I'm after I'm done unloading, I got to wait around another until the next day before I can do my next pickup. And so all of these things together are what contributes to that like 6.5 number. And if you have an optimization platform, that's, that's better matching drivers to loads and it and it like knows average wait times at warehouses, that's how you can increase the number of actual productive hours.

Blythe Brumleve: 31:15

Yeah, yeah, that's a great fact. So All right, nate, cool, that was that. Where can folks follow you? Follow more of your work.

Nate Robert: 31:25

Again, we I think we so, but on, we have a.

Blythe Brumleve: 31:27

Oh yeah, I guess I can't really follow you on social media because you just covered that.

Nate Robert: 31:31

So the baton has a link to page also. Batonio is the is the website for our specific team and we're hiring a bunch of different positions right now and then otherwise. Anything rider related is for the broader team.

Blythe Brumleve: 31:46

For sure, we'll put all that in the show notes just to make it easy for folks. But thank you so much for joining the show and appreciate your time in that site. Thank you very much, thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in that freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from pointy to be subscribed to the show. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logisticscom. And in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let y'all know about another company I operate and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co-worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009, but we're also early adopters of AI, automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as $1,500, along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatchio. Check out the pricing page once you arrive and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags.

About the Author

Blythe Brumleve
Blythe Brumleve
Creative entrepreneur in freight. Founder of Digital Dispatch and host of Everything is Logistics. Co-Founder at Jax Podcasters Unite. Board member of Transportation Marketing and Sales Association. Freightwaves on-air personality. Annoying Jaguars fan. test

To read more about Blythe, check out her full bio here.