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 and Thai Software. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve. But we are back with another episode of Freight Friends with our favorite Grace Sharkey. So, Grace, how are you doing travel's over?
Grace Sharkey:
0:22
Yeah, it is For now, For a couple of weeks, and then we head down to Kentucky for MATS. I'm really excited. For me that's a whole different experience in and of itself. So definitely different outfits worn at that one compared to the rest, you could say A little much more casual, maybe a wear a heel, maybe I'll get crazy with it, we'll see. No, I can't. If anyone's been to MATS, it's almost like it almost feels like a fair, like a fairground type of like atmosphere. It's like very, very casual. It's like what else do you better have jeans on type of situation. So I'm excited for that, if anything.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:04
How many people go to MATS? If for folks who don't know, what does MATS stand for?
Grace Sharkey:
1:09
The Mid-American Truck Show. It's in Louisville, kentucky, and I said Louisville, correct, you did. Yeah, yay, and it's how many people go to it? Thousands, I would say, um, what is it? Well, let's say, if they said Manifest was 5,000, that means much closer to like seven to 10 maybe. Oh, wow, yeah. I mean there's like there's two big rooms that have like trucking companies and all that stuff, and then in the there's another third room that's full of like just different vendors, and I mean even like companies like that sell just like kind of truck swag. And I mean everything will be there, from like people that sell different Chrome extensions to just lights, to speaker equipment, to a chair.
Blythe Brumleve:
2:01
And when you say Chrome, you mean like Chrome on a truck, not like Chrome the browser. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, like different.
Grace Sharkey:
2:07
Like I was like oh wow, that's interesting. Yeah, google's there front and center. No, yeah, no, it's like just, and when I say fair fairground, like it feels like if you go into a fair, you know, like you have like all of these like stables full of like animals and stuff like that. Like it's kind of like trick or parry truck. I was the animals now, but it is like that. I mean, there's kids, they're like people bring their kids because all the trucks are there for the truck beauty, competition and everything. So, yeah, it's, it's a lot more. It's really fun and I'm excited. I think we're going to be doing some stuff with sounds like Charles Gracie over at Hot Seat Services and a truck parking club and Lost Freight with Reed too. So I'm going to have like some fun dinners, excited to see Adam Wingfield. He put on a really cool kind of like teaching lesson while we're there, so that was fun. I don't think I'll be ghost hunting this year I don't think I have time for that this time around but because there's a really cool insane asylum down the street.
Blythe Brumleve:
3:18
That has told me about that because I might my dad's side of the family all sort of. We have this family history book that you know five brothers from my immigrated over from Germany over to Louisville Kentucky. And yeah, but my dad has been there and he said that there's like this shoot, like a laundry shoot. Yeah, he was crawling up and he crawled up and they didn't do like official tours back then, so it was just like a neighborhood, you know kids kind of thing. But he's he's been in it and he didn't. He didn't see any ghosts, but he said it was absolutely creepy and the moment that he realized that he was in over his head was when he was climbing up. That shoot, yeah.
Grace Sharkey:
4:00
It's funny. They tell you like, if you go down the chute, like it's much more of a walk up than you think it is, and I remember like dude, because the shoot like has like a regular like ramp going down, and then like, yeah, you're on your way back, you're like I think it's like close to like a half mile, it's not a full mile down. Yeah, so, yeah. No, that's fun. So, yeah, I won't be doing that this year, but I actually an article by the time this comes out. It's the article will be out too. I'm not going over everything. Today I actually, uber freight, is doing a really cool initiative with a photo book project called Sisters of the Road, and it would say a woman from well. She actually grew up in United States, she lives in Britain now and she basically met with a number of female truck drivers, took some really awesome photos of them and told their stories through a photo book. And now, starting tomorrow and this is March 1, when for whenever this airs March 1, they're starting in San Francisco and an Australian woman who's a truck driver in the United States will be hauling a 53 foot trailer. That inside the trailer is the full like exhibit of all the photos Cool. So they're going to start their March 1 in San Francisco and they'll be ending the tour on the 22nd or 23rd at maths. So if you guys do go to maths, go check this out. Sam Hollick over at Uber freight's marketing team she's just so good at what she does. I always tell her like you, come up with the smartest stuff for this. These things used to work at convoy as well, but yeah, so you'll be able to check it, that out at maths too. And Uber freight for anyone? Perfect there it is. Yeah, they're perfect. There we go. So for anyone, yeah, anyone who wants to join them as a convoy, because they already have like a couple of people who will be following this truck for the next month to Uber freight and their power loop will hook you for the trailer and help you find loads that you can make the most out of it as well.
Blythe Brumleve:
6:13
So, yeah, good freight marketing right here, right, taking the show off right. This was very unexpected, so, yeah, this is awesome.
Grace Sharkey:
6:22
Yeah, maybe sign up Sam for one of your episodes, because she is very, very good at what she does and coming up with these things and finding these really cool stories. And it's funny too, because actually the Australian woman is that girl right there in the photo, that woman in the photo there, and when I was interviewing she said that in order for her to get to San Francisco from North Carolina, uber even found her alone, like so she didn't have to like drive. I'm like there we go Uber like finding capacity when you need it most. You know. So, yeah, so we actually she actually was able to make some money while doing this. So, yeah, it's gonna be really cool and again, you'll see an article too on some interviews I did with them for the first day of women's history so awesome.
Blythe Brumleve:
7:06
Heck. Yeah. Well, that's a good segue into going into speaking of, I guess you know, honoring carriers and talking about what their impact is. Yeah, let's talk about this story that you just had. I guess maybe I should give a roadmap, because we kind of just jumped into it?
Speaker 5:
7:26
Yeah, we're gonna talk about this.
Blythe Brumleve:
7:27
We're gonna talk about a few other different topics, to include Baxter Bailey, which is a company that I is very new to me, but barely not new to the industry, so we're gonna talk about that a little bit later on. Then I'm gonna talk this new cool business not or newish business, new concept I guess this is. This is gonna be a show about new to me. So another manufacturing company that has been around since 2020, hadrian is, I believe, how you pronounce it so I'm gonna talk a little bit about them. Then we're gonna get into the makeup supply chain, which is something that we sort of talked about a couple episodes back, because for me, to be new here, grace and I do this show once a month together and then, if we're at a conference, we will typically record together on site too. So if you've seen our recent video from manifest, there was a show that we recorded live at manifest. Shout out to Zell Logistics for hosting us. That was a. We were able to get that content and post it up and I believe you know, depending on when you're listening to this, it was posted earlier this week, so the 27th of February. You can find that on YouTube and different podcast players, but we did the show once a month and we talk about basically whatever we want. That's going on in free. But we also really like to highlight not just for women's history month, we'd like to highlight it throughout the year of women doing cool things. And freight just freight marketing in general, some of the bigger topic stories and then also I we each pick a source to porch segment, and for this week show we're actually going to cover the greater topic of the makeup supply chain and some fun facts that you may not know. So now that you have the roadmap for the show, let's get back to the article in hand, and that is isometric technologies, which we talked about them a bunch before, which is pretty much like a credit score for freight brokers. Shippers and carriers can also use it as well in order to find those great broker relationships. But they honored the 50 transportation providers with service awards, so set this one up for us. Why is this a big deal?
Grace Sharkey:
9:31
So this is cool because it kind of showcases to you, like the, the long term effects. It's funny Thomas brought this up to me. You know, clearly this isn't going to include every single carrier in the industry because you have to be connected or at least, like the, the companies you work for need to be somehow connected to ISO in order to qualify for this. So clearly, if you haven't run a load for a shipper or someone who uses ISOs technology, you probably won't show up for this. But it is interesting to see this kind of like third party review of what carriers and logistics providers are truly doing for their customers. And it's all data related. Right, it's not how you feel, it's not just a nomination based off of you know a quick thought, it's actual. Like. Here is the statistics behind the work that you do. It's an actual grade and I thought it was pretty interesting, especially like looking into some of like retailer statistics. If you click on I think I put a link into their blog there too they dive into a lot of this directly as well, for instance, like getting into on time deliveries. For instance, walmart hit 87.7%, which you know kind of. It's interesting to see that, especially from the point of view that, like Walmart, just recently dropped their on time and full performance levels down to 90. So they're getting closer to like what actually is happening. And if you as a service sort of Walmart, are saying you're trying your hardest and you're only at 65, 70%, well, now you know, maybe there's some some ways that we can improve if everyone on average is getting close to 87%. So I think that's cool. It's like a way for you to actually judge your, your business and your solutions and your actual quality of service, based on your peers in a way right. So of course it's interesting as well going into some of the winners, like especially for best carriers for retail. I mean, statistically wise, jat of Fort Wayne was number one for Walmart and sometimes you sit back and think can I be a carrier and not be like Schneider or some of these big guys and still compete? Yeah, you can. Kroger was Buchanan, holland and Reggie, which I've used before, great company. I love this one. Ch Robinson had the best service awards for Amazon, which is just like funny to me, like a one of the biggest, one of the biggest public logistics companies is being serviced by another large public logistics company. Right, very well. So it shows you how fragmented this market really is and how much we need all the players in it. So I just think it's kind of cool to even see like, for instance it was brought up, uber freight right had the best service for the Southeast region.
Blythe Brumleve:
12:34
So it kind of like shows you.
Grace Sharkey:
12:37
Like when we all pick up the phone and we call people and we say, yeah, like what lanes are available today? Like at some point you know it's going to turn into a conversation of like this like where, what region are you best in? And can you answer that question as an organization? One of our good friends, brandy Trailer right Trailer Transpo I really love the work that she does, because if you go to her website or if you are even like listen to some of her sales pitches and content that she makes, like she's never like we go everywhere. She's always constantly. Like we are very good at the Southeast and if they start to gain traction in another lane, she'll bring that up. And I think that's like that's where we're going to start to see some of these calls going to and for shippers out there might be watching and listening. Like have that type of discussion with people. If someone calls you and says, hey, what do you working on? And you just and they just say, well, like we've got carriers everywhere. Like put that to a halt. Like start sticking up for yourself and the freight that you have and say, listen, like what, what lanes are you good at? Because we both know that you're not good at going everywhere. So I, like, I think it's just going to set a bit more of a standard, a bit more transparency right in terms of what our peers are doing, and I also love the honorable mention of convoy.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:02
I did notice that.
Grace Sharkey:
14:04
Yeah, because they wouldn't make it said they would have been a nice little winner. So RIP, I guess.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:12
Yeah, I don't know that award now transfer over to flexport to right.
Grace Sharkey:
14:16
Yeah, you did it again. Peterson, you know that you did it, but you did it so.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:21
I guess I have a. I have a dumb question what's our DD appointments?
Grace Sharkey:
14:27
I think that's a double check because I had it in in some of my notes that they can't remember now.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:40
Sorry, I know I put you on the spot there.
Grace Sharkey:
14:42
No, no, no no.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:43
I'm trying to see if they actually explained it in the post, because I think that these numbers are pretty interesting, because it says who was responsible for 23% of missed RDD appointments. I want to require delivery date. Oh, okay.
Grace Sharkey:
14:58
Yes. So it's like you got there on time the day you're supposed to you and say, hey, like, ooh, something happened will be here tomorrow, because a lot of times like, if you work with Walmart and stuff like that right, they'll say get it here as long as it's no later than the state. So that's likely like they might have delivered a day early or something in those lines too.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:18
And so it's pretty interesting to say you know before the ISO workflow, here's the responsible party. So 64% of folks were blaming the carrier. But then, after ISO gets involved, or after you start working with ISO, only 44% of late deliveries were the carriers fault, and so I think that that's super interesting, because the retailers both jumped retailers and shippers jumped after that, and so I wonder if customers the same as retailer, that you can compare those to the same here. So that that's interesting to see that you know before. Maybe you know the shippers and the customers were blaming the carrier, whereas if you dig a little bit deeper into the data and some of the benchmarking items that you were laying out, that it increases the blame and the failure on the retailers and the shippers. And so from that lens, maybe it's almost like putting up a mirror to some of these shippers of you're the reason why you're experiencing some of these problems that you're going through, instead of always just blaming the carrier.
Grace Sharkey:
16:25
I truly think that, like I brought them one more earlier, and I think that's why they've brought their service level requirements down as well, because I think for them, learning about why some of these hiccups occur and how all of this gets to you know why that bad behavior is happening, is something they care more about than just having a perfect, perfect supply chain right, like, for instance, let's say, let's say they're working with a popsicle manufacturer and whenever that popsicle manufacturers logistics company goes to make appointment for Walmart, there's nothing within 24 hours. So it makes it very difficult right to find a truck who's going to be there perfectly, without anything spoiled or sitting over the weekend or putting the shipment at risk. So, like knowing, like listen, we need more lead time in order to move some of the fresh produce, and I think that's what they're looking for. More is like okay, as long as you're near the 90,. We don't care what happened, we want to know what's happening in that 10%. That's not getting us there, right? So I think, they're being more open than they ever were before.
Blythe Brumleve:
17:36
Yeah, I think that that's super interesting. So that's a great breakdown. And we've talked about ISO before, you know in the past on this show about it being you know sort of why. I wonder why it took so long for for people to start getting these benchmarking insights from brokerages, because it's been such a battle over the last what year or so. When you refer to like broker transparency and things you know that is something that carriers are really pushing for. I'm just just a little shocked that it took this long for something like this to come to market.
Grace Sharkey:
18:07
But, you know, thankful it's here regardless, I think a little bit has to do with how you're making money off of it. I'm just gonna come from wish for that out there. I think that question comes up a little bit right Because you want to make sure you stay avoiding pay for play type of situation. But I think the way that there's I've seen like the platform and I'm kind of sat in like a selling situation, if that's what you want to call it, and it's, it's valuable, it's, it's worth, I think what they're they're selling it for, it's just kind of we're not going to get into it. But again, are you training your teams to use this data on phone calls, in conversations, to actually be worth the ROI at the end of the day? So it's not that bad, to be honest with you.
Blythe Brumleve:
18:58
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Grace Sharkey:
20:58
Yeah, yeah, it is America, you know, and it's our holiday, so I did try to keep it Black. American history in that regards, and so, yeah, it's most the tough part about it is it's it's more global right Because of wherever one came from.
Blythe Brumleve:
21:17
But still, yeah, focused on American history through the black perspective and then with these posts, what you're doing is is really highlighting the contributions from black Americans into Freightened transportation and so a lot of this stuff. I mean I would imagine a lot of people do did not know until you started making these posts. So I'm curious if you have a couple favorites that that stand out.
Grace Sharkey:
21:43
I Do and one of my favorites is actually I just want to pull it up so I make sure I'm talking about this one, correctly is all perfect. I Actually learned about this from a TV show, to be honest with you. So it's a. It's basically called the Was originally called the Negro motorist green book. It's called the green book. In particular, over time I learned about it through an HBO series that actually comes stems from a book series which won't get too much into because a Long story short. The author doesn't have the best history, but it's an old, old book Lovecraft Country and they made it into a really interesting like if you like sci-fi history, like kind of like. Like if you like Atlanta, atlanta or like kind of these, these Stories and shows that make sci-fi with like real life, go watch it. It's, it's incredible. It's one of my favorite shows I've ever seen. They. They highlight one point Well, pretty much every episode has something to do with black history and but in like this weird sci-fi way as well. So it gets really interesting. But Outside of that, there's an episode on the show called sundown and it's about there's an overarching theme of all the episodes when they're trying to kind of travel across the country and learn about someone's history at the time. But in order to do so they have to go with. I want to say it's like the uncle whose main job in In time and this was a real job back in the day and he was a black man himself his job was to. He was like a travel agent. He would help black families travel across the United States, and so it actually stems from this actual green book which Black Americans would use to go to cities and know which bars, restaurants, hotels would be open to them. We'd, oh wow, would be safe for them to to walk into, because at a time and there's actually One, I don't want to say Infamous, I guess the best word to use more in Michigan was one as well there's a lot of towns back in the day that were called sundown towns. So Basically you were free to and free is there stated very slightly in the sentence you are free to roam around in these towns until the sun went down, and once the sun went down there it's like the purge there was no rules. So and they talk about this also in the show too so again, the show kind of gives like, teaches you in a fun, interesting kind of way. But yeah, so he highlights a lot of these sundown towns so that when you're driving through the country, or let's say You're going from Mobile to Chicago, you know what cities you have to get through during the day and what cities you're fine to stay in overnight, and I think it's just, it's a Think, it's pretty impact one. It's, it's our transit, it's how we're moving from one place to another, it's how tourism, you know, came to be. Especially the interesting thing is like that's how a lot of these cities out west more really grew right, it's from tourism and people traveling through them. So they didn't want to say no to this part of the population, but they also didn't want to accommodate it as much as they could. So it's the screen book was like basically an Almanac for Black Americans for a good, good period of time and it's it's kind of it's just crazy. I again, I really highly suggest that you watch the, the locale County episode, because you just like kind of no, I'm a big road trip girl, like during the summertime, if it's I have nothing to do on a Saturday. I'm getting my car and I'll drive like four hours up north just to like go to a diner that I heard it's really good, you know like that and it, and so, watching this and I kind of seen this historically in context You're like, wow, I am so privileged, and my ancestors are so privileged, to be able to just be like I'm gonna go wherever I want, whenever I want, right now, and not have even a doubt in the world that I'm not gonna be safe, and to like travel through towns and and realize like there's One diner you can go to and another one you can't, and doors you can knock on and others you can't, and some cities that you just can't even drive across, like the county line, or else you'll be in some Very, very, very bad troubles. Then I just think it's, it's a good eye-opener for those to kind of see okay, now imagine our ancestors going through that. Where would I be today if they had it, didn't have that privilege to just travel wherever they wanted to? So, yeah, it's very interesting stuff and you can actually there's a lot of pages online you can read of the green book. That's even more eye-opening to just kind of the way that it's written in this form of like, not even like oh, this sucks, that we have to deal with it. It's like no, hey, you want to travel, just make sure that you take these steps. And as Honestly, as a white person, I'm like it's insane to think that there's a Large portion of our population who are just reading this and was like this is fine and this is normal, right? So, yeah, learning from our past big part of that for sure.
Blythe Brumleve:
27:22
No, that that that's definitely. Obviously it's super interesting, but in a way that you know, hopefully we can reflect on and then nothing like this hopefully happens again. No, but you've been doing a great job with some of these and I didn't know that that show, I didn't know it was actually a show. So that that's. I'm gonna be bookmarking this and and saving it for later. Any other stories that that come to mind, that that you really enjoyed highlighting yeah.
Grace Sharkey:
27:49
I think the other one too that I touched on prior to that one, and it comes up a little bit in an article I just published today for those watch, you can go check it out. I'm right, feed of all my articles is just realizing how our roads were built in, like the crucial role that I'm Black prisoners in particular played laying our roadways, I mean there was. So there's movement at a time called the Good Roads movement, and it stems from a, it stems from a reading, I believe, where basically the thought is From Good Roads will will output good people. So the prison system was like if we put our prisoners on our roads and have them build them, they'll come out of that experience fixed or or less of a criminal than they were before. And it was a way for especially Georgia was like a big proponent of this for them to kind of like say like this is the way that we're gonna use this labor. And it was. It was at that time period where it was like what are people's rights right? Or like, kind of like in this period where there's like Jim Crow era, where there's certain rules and certain unwritten rules that you have to follow, and and I would say even to today's Prison structure. I mean a lot of prisoners, just like now are. We're, unfortunately, black Americans. We, we have spent a whole episode on the systematic injustices in this country. We won't get into that too much, but those chain gangs and the systems that actually helped build a lot of these roads Were these individuals and so it's like it's interesting to kind of like drive around, especially if you are in Georgia, like some of these old roads, like your Possible ancestors helped out of their own, will build these and they weren't treated nice. It was of course not their own will it's yeah, I got, yeah, exactly out of their own will. Yes, uh, and it wasn't. I mean, they're prisoners. They of course a lot of uh, the beatings that came with slavery and the treatment of During slavery went right into to this movement as well. Uh, it did get to a point where, uh, I think they realized there some of these could be good jobs for people who weren't in prison, and so they it started to go from like more of an economic problem and like a A racist problem, and then, of course, the civil rights movement helped kind of end it a little bit more. So clearly, at some point we started using actual construction companies to build their roads, but for a very long period, I'd say at least a couple of decades, especially the early 1900s, late 1800s a lot of that was laid by past slaves or those who had unfortunately fallen to the the prison system as well, and it's again like just something to consider. It's these small things when people, I'm just gonna say this stuff and it's like that. Clearly I'm saying this on behalf of gray sharky, not representing freightways or anything like that, but I truly I don't want to say believe, because I think it's Sorry, it's historical at this point. It's well, well, verse, but the systematic injustices in this country and the the Uh, the privilege aspect that people want to avoid in conversations like that's there and that's real and these people went through these things and and is it not a positive thing? Like I was covering a lot of inventors, black inventors and people on those lines, but it's like I want people to also understand like a lot of our infrastructure and the way our cities are. When it comes to gerrymandering and the way our cities are laid out, we're redlining and, yeah, exactly right. Like if a lot of it is from segregation, like there's reasons I can't remember what, uh, comedians said this like every mlk road or something is like Like there's reasons that some of these streets are where they are, um, in cities, right, and why some school districts are where they are in some cities as well, and I think until we can accept that fact, right, we can't change it. So, uh, yeah, that's. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just covering Incredible inventors and and individuals in the space who have done good things.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:23
But like the sunshine stories, there's also gotta be the the other side of it, naturally as well.
Grace Sharkey:
32:29
Yeah, right, so that way it's like okay, maybe I need to consider, you know, something much deeper and much more historical, uh, that that's impacted Society is over time than just what's happening and what I'm doing today.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:48
Do you have you, and I don't know if you you've done this yet, but I know that you you're you're pushing these stories out on on x slash, twitter and also linked in. Do you do you have um, and I don't know if you've done this, but maybe you know? Just a suggestion, because I would love to be able to share all of them, but maybe throw them all in like the same thread or something like that Would be really really helpful, because then I could, you know, I would link to each one of them, of course, but, um, I think it would be really cool to be able to have like one thread of like all of the stories that that you, um, put out over the last month and be able to to use that as almost like a bookmark To be able to refer to the future.
Grace Sharkey:
33:27
I honestly haven't, but I love that thought and so today I will do that, I'll make sure I post, I'll post a thread of it on twitter so everyone Could check those out there. Then, if you're like on my linkedin, if you go to my recent post, it's most of those too, uh, so you can see those there. Uh, I believe actually we've also been sharing them a little bit in our freightways classic newsletters. So if you guys get those, uh, you've seen at least a couple of them through there too.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:54
Perfect, I'm making a note, um to myself, to, to, because when this show, we typically recorded the thursday before the tuesday release, just, you know, sort of housekeeping notes for her folks out there. And so Next tuesday, when this actually posts, hopefully, you know, we can have a link to that thread so you can go through and you can read, you know all of them, um, in order to, uh, really get the full digest of everything that you missed over the last month and probably missed over your entire lifetime Not knowing these stories. So, good, kudos to you. Great job on that. Um. Now let's move into um. I don't know how to segue into this next segment, um, because, uh, I guess we're gonna. No, I don't know how to segue, so I'm just gonna do like a hard shift into, exactly, yeah, I don't know what story you're gonna go into yeah we're gonna go into Baxter Bailey yeah okay, cool yeah so it was a little bit of a difficult transition. There I'm not I don't have the words to to say that we're not offensive. Um so this is typically when we talk about cargo crime.
Speaker 5:
34:55
Um so, yeah, so uh, the seriousness.
Blythe Brumleve:
35:00
Yeah, of course I definitely want to be um serious, but moving into you know sort of um, I don't, this isn't even really like lighter topic. Um, because this is, you brought something to my attention last night night Before we start recording this show, and I had never heard of this company before. Um, but it's called Baxter Bailey, and why don't you? You tell us a little bit about who, what this company is and what they do?
Grace Sharkey:
35:22
Okay, so they are. The best way to explain is they are collections company. So carriers who are have unpaid in voices and can't Are aren't hearing from bond companies a lot of times. Right, the carrier will start with a bond, they'll go there for having problems there, then they'll go to Baxter Bailey or some type of collections Company. Baxter is the one I've probably dealt with the most in my career and I'm and I'm gonna tell you how I know them, because I don't want you to think that the company I worked for in the past Does the pay their bills, because that's not what happened. I'm sure a lot of you might have dealt with Baxter Bailey under the same preference or situations that I have. Uh, but they, for us and for me, was a. They were our cue that we were dealing a lot of times with a double broker situation. So, uh, for all those, yeah, baxter Bailey is a, a collections agency, uh, but they an incredible website I'm just gonna bring up because they have the dollar bill just burning in flames and they just they, they, oh, I can swear they don't give a fuck dude like I, I, I started I, when I first figured out who these guys were, hated them. I was just like you bastards. But the longer I worked with them and this is like brokers out there listening, here's some like tips, if you are already doing this the more I started to realize like, oh, these guys like know who the bad guys are in this industry. They know who's not paying their bills. I mean, let's just, let's just shit on them now. Okay, go to uh, I think it's the top debtors, right at the top oh, which is just yeah, incredible.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:01
Call out so for I, you know, for those who are just listening and that you're not exactly sure, like what? What we're showing on the screen right now, it's a dollar bill that's going up in flames. Um, it's Baxter Bailey's website, um. But they have a few different service offerings. They have a flash alerts, debtor profiles, broker trends, um, basically they. They have almost like a membership model where they give you a little bit of information For free and then you got to sign up in order to get the rest of it. So, from what you're saying and then kind of you know how I'm sort of deciphering of how they're making money, um, is they basically will help carriers and shippers avoid the bad brokers? Am I understanding that correctly? And more so the carriers?
Grace Sharkey:
37:41
so they're the, the trucking focus exclusively. And so basically a carrier will come to them and say, listen, I've got $2,000 in invoices I can't collect from these guys. I will give you 10% or so to collect it for me. So at least I'm not fully out of pocket. And there's someone who I mean we all know trucking companies, especially mom and pop shops like you don't have the time to be berating some of these Uh, and you're probably not getting anywhere. That's a lot of times people turn to Baxter when it's like I've had no choice. This is like these guys know what they're doing, so we're gonna jump into it. Uh, and they do. They do know what they're they're doing. Because once you hear from them, it's like basically, like here's what's happening and Tell us ASAP what you want to do about it, or else we're just gonna keep this. Uh, I don't want to say bully train, because they are collecting from the, the representing carriers, and, I think, in a really great way. There have been some complaints, I think, from carriers. Right, that they take a margin, but that's kind of the point. You have to run a business, right? But uh, from my experience, uh, the first time I I learned about them. I actually heard about it through my shipper. So there was a customer of ours who reached out to me and said hey, grace, you know all these like six loads you did for us in this lane. I'm being told that our the carrier was never paid for any of them. And I'm like, well, that's crazy. Like especially if I remember it happened like a year prior. So I'm like there's no way that we've gone 365 days without paying anyone. And so, like I go to pull up the load and Get the paperwork and I get the email forward from me Because, as you all know, at the end of the day, if broker doesn't pay, who was ever on that bol? Uh, the shipper can be looked at, uh, as the payee to the carrier. That's why Ikea is suing convoy, right, because they're like no, we already paid you for this. And so my shipper sent me all this info over and and basically they couldn't figure out exactly who had brokered the load. They couldn't figure out as I was a part of it. So that's why they went directly to the shipper. And then they came to us and said hey, you know, we have all these invoices that are unpaid. Uh, it's. And then I came back and said you know, we paid this carrier, ended up being a double broker situation. So the carrier, who I thought we paid, of course actually didn't move the load and and it's actually sold it for like a lot more than it was supposed to be. So like the invoices were like double what they should have been. Uh and I, you legally don't have to pay the higher amount, you have to pay exactly, you only have to pay what you actually charge the double broker, uh, so that kind of sucks for the carrier. But like there's multiple times where you know, even if it's Even sometimes, when carriers were in the wrong. They would turn it back, started and be like hey, we're gonna go after the shipper if you don't get us this information. Or like they will attack you and go after you and they have no problem calling your customer and being like these guys are doing a bad job and and at first you know there were bullies. But then after a while, I started actually using them and their resources For our own account accounting department. So if you do work with them, I believe it's everything, I believe it's every. I want to say it's weekly, like every Friday or something. They send out a list of new debtors and top debtors to everyone and I would forward that list over to our accounting department. They would go through and they if those carriers or those brokers or and honestly, sometimes there'd be shippers on there too Go through and we mark them off as do not use so that at some point we don't get ourselves stuck in a situation where we paid the wrong carrier along wrong logistics company and From there. So I, as much as they are bullies, I I think the way that you like spin it on them is is Use their resources and if you want to bring up that top debtor list. I mean it's funny going through that and like knowing, like thinking what we've reported at freightways, like a lot of One of them.
Blythe Brumleve:
41:52
Well, well, there's a real quick, because I you know, with you mentioning the, the, the bully aspect of it, there's this part right here that says a broker warning on the site is, I think, from a marketing perspective and from a collections perspective, very powerful. Um, if you're just listening, this is uh, basically you have a typical website landing page, but in the upper right hand corner in bright red, they say new and it lists, you know, uh, a trucking company and their dot and their mc number, their address, their phone number, and, uh, they tell it, you know they. They basically say this is the new broker warning. Call you know this phone number for more info. And so they're basically, you know, just put this broker right on, blast, right in front of for everyone to see. But then, to your point, they have a another page. That is just, um, it almost is like guns a blazing, because they have a list of the latest top debtors and they have how many companies? They have 20 companies that they're going to show you for free, before you got to pay for the rest of the list. And, uh, it's interesting to to watch this list move up and down, especially for you know some companies on here that um look a little familiar.
Grace Sharkey:
43:04
Yeah, a couple. Oh, my god, one did move down right from me even last night. That's funny because. So yeah, we're going over this. Yeah, especially because, like my favorite yellow is in there right yellow convoy surge. Somehow surge is still doing worse than yellow, which is like crazy to me. Right, convoy's on there too, yeah. So it's like so for any brokers out there, like If you're trying to avoid double brokering or any issues, like I would go through and, uh, it's all damn, sees are right there, but have your carrier I'm sure you one of you guys got a carrier intern have them go through, mark them as do not use, say they Are known for non-payments, and then you save yourself a headache down down the road. And, trust me, during this top 20 list, we all know how many companies are in here between brokers and, of course, all the fraudulent ones out there. Like, yeah, they're probably not the best to use at this point in time.
Blythe Brumleve:
44:02
And I'm curious because, if you so what? My favorite part of it yeah, I'm talking about the pool one, yeah, so they it's not. Yeah, so I clicked on the top one. So inline brokerage has the top spot as a recording for this. Because I was curious if they actually like show the amount that's owed or any kind of further information. But they just give sort of the general overview information of their address, their phone number, dot, mc, you know some CTAs, you know to join, and so you can see the rest of the information. But then they have a map of the listing of where this company is and they even put a caption on the image and it says why the map, if one book's a load with a broker, a nice house with a pool, might be a clue that something is not right. So I'm assuming that that's referring to, you know maybe, sort of brokerages that are run out of a house or you know maybe a different brokerage situation, but I am curious as to. So this solution is more for after the effect. So, like Carrier Sher Highway, these types of companies are more for before booking the load. And then Baxter Bailey is, you know, after you've done all you know, everything's been moved and so you got to actually collect on that bill. Am I understanding that right?
Grace Sharkey:
45:21
Yeah, that's what they make their money off of. At the end of the day is the actual like bill collecting aspect of it. But it is like funny to kind of like look at all of these resources they have and it's like I mean.
Blythe Brumleve:
45:34
Like thundernichon. Ooh boy yeah.
Speaker 5:
45:36
That's a good niche.
Blythe Brumleve:
45:37
For sure.
Grace Sharkey:
45:38
I mean it's like it should be a step in. Here I go again giving out good ideas to people I mean for, like the highways and the Carrier Sher's, like are you linked up with them? Like, all right, do you have an API connection with them so that people can know? Okay, like they don't pay their bills. Like this is probably the easiest way to figure that out, because they're being sought after by bill collectors. They're probably not paying their bills right. So there it is.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:07
That's a really good idea. Yeah, yeah, you should probably yeah, if you see any of those folks.
Grace Sharkey:
46:14
I swear to God I can't. I told someone I was like sometimes these interviews I just like give these guys great ideas and I'm like, nope, there we go again.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:26
Yeah, just played myself, thanks, yeah, exactly. Well, while we're on the topic of you know sort of, I guess, identifying like good freight brokerages and how they should you know good carriers. That's sort of been the theme so far of this show, I did want to highlight Carrie Jablonski. She is a CEO over at Trucker Tools and she's been dropping some really great insights, some really great knowledge over the last few weeks. She's really like stepped up her social media game, like she was on these you know, linkedin and Twitter, of course, but she started really like focusing in on you know the insights that she's getting from a lot of different customer visits, and so I'm bringing up this LinkedIn post here and she says I've talked to over 100 brokerage leadership teams over the last six months 100 brokerage leadership teams over the last six months and wanted to share some common themes, along with the most successful, that have allowed them to scale growing net revenue, despite the abysmal freight market we're in. And so a few of the different takeaways that she has from those 100 brokerage leadership teams is number one the riches are in the niches. Number two KPI driven hiring. Number three, focusing on carrier reuse. And number four outsourcing technology. And then there was a lot of really great comments that really highlighted a lot of the different things and further commenting on what she's seen throughout the industry. So it's just really cool insight, a really interesting insight, as you have a CEO and carry that is obviously really dedicated to truckers and then just trying to figure out how to make that relationship a little bit better with all of the partners that these different carriers are using, and so with her in particular. I thought that it was really great insight to hear and to see that she's dropping this knowledge not just on LinkedIn, but she's dropping it over on Twitter, slash X as well. So if you're on the fence about joining that platform, I would highly recommend joining but also giving her a follow, cause, you know, this is just one of several posts that I've seen from her where she's dropping this kind of insight, where we don't really have this sort of collective insight, and there are companies like ISO that are trying to solve this. Kevin Hill's brush pass research is also trying to solve it as well from the brokerage aspect, just shining a light a little bit more into that sector of the business where I think for even myself, just working inside of an asset based broke pre brokerage for years, I never really knew about any of the other silos within logistics, and so maybe that's the case for other folks that are working at, you know, within other silos within the industry. But I just thought I just wanted to share that. As you know, we're kind of like talking about you know ways to improve so far with, you know, just highlighting different stories that probably need to be highlighted that this was one, too, that I wanted to shine a light on.
Grace Sharkey:
49:14
Yeah, you know that especially I will say her third point too like focus on carrier reuse. That I for, especially like all of these spot brokers out there, like I think, when we talk about risk in this industry, when we talk about like, of course, like dealing with these ups and downs and flows of the market, I've noticed like that being pushed around a lot recently on LinkedIn, just as like an overall thought, and I'm like 100% behind it. I think a lot of people aren't don't look at those metrics or even know how to pull those metrics. I mean, it took when I was working in the space like years for me to realize that, first of all, our TMS could pull that. But secondly, like what that meant, and I think at like some point we realized like 86% of the carriers we used, we only used once and yeah, which is like kind of crazy because what you want to start well, at least my brain starts to go then is like okay, so what's that adding to the jobs of the AP department and having to set up a new vendor every single time.
Blythe Brumleve:
50:27
Carrier relations Carrier relations.
Grace Sharkey:
50:29
how much time are we building? You know where it's like. You wanna know how RXO is automating so many of their loads. You wanna know how Convoy's automating so many of their loads? It's because they're giving the carrier the same load, the load to the same carrier, every single time and much like anything else that you do like. The more that you build that relationship and work over and over again, then that's when on time numbers start to go up, that's when your customer is happy because they're seeing the same friendly face every single time every Monday morning, right Like it's. And so I just I really wonder and like hope that companies are starting to look at that a little bit more and realize, like, what stems off of that too and not, of course, trucker Tools benefits off of you having that conversation a little bit, but still, it's like so many problems I hear in this industry and daily problems, problems that we're trying to fix with automation. It's just like get off these load boards and start building relationships with carriers.
Blythe Brumleve:
51:35
Geez, well, that's what you know. Read over at Lost Freight that that's what he says, that you know, the best freight never makes it to a load board, so send a truck list instead. So that's, it's all. It feels like we're sort of in like an infom, not just a technology renaissance over the last handful of years in freight, but also an information renaissance where it's just sort of combining and the greater information, that sort of the thought process of well, we've always done it this way. Well, maybe that way is it should evolve into adopting some of these things that you know, if you make as much as people make fun of convoy. They really brought the digital freight brokerage concept to the you know sort of the mainstream, and so a lot more companies have been forced to update their technology and it's probably for the betterment of the overall industry. Now we have a slew of podcasts and email newsletters and shows that are dedicated to shining a light on these different solutions and different ways of thinking. But I just love that it comes back down to you know, someone just having the conversations talking to a hundred different brokerages and this is what she's seeing, and so just, you know, kudos to her and you know it's a good way to you know, by the time the show airs, it's a good way to kick off. You know women's history month is Highlighting you know the women who are doing the work behind the scenes that are doing the work first and foremost. That just also happened to be a woman, so I always want to give women their flowers, you know, 12 months out of the year, but that's definitely a good way to kick off the month.
Grace Sharkey:
53:13
Yeah, she's a really great one. I think that's I don't want to say up and coming, but like really starting to feel like get into her groove of like taking, becoming more of like a figure in this space, a thought leader, and you know she's putting in the work, which I love.
Blythe Brumleve:
53:28
A lot of people will go out there and they'll spout off their expertise before they put in any work, but she's the one doing it behind the scenes and she's been on that CEO job for about what? Two years now, so she's only just now starting to really speak on the industry, so that I think it's really cool to see.
Grace Sharkey:
53:46
Yeah, good job, Good hire Prasad.
Blythe Brumleve:
53:50
Yes, coside that one as well. Okay, so let's get into the next segment, and that is favorite businesses that are going on in freight. It could be SaaS, it could be a you know sort of a side quest, it could be a company that we're seeing. We've already kind of mentioned a few of those. I'm not sure if you have one for this particular segment, but I got a good one in case you want me to get that started. Oh, let's, yeah, I'll let you go first. All right, let me find the video, and I am because I have been on a little bit of a kick on, I guess, to sort of set this up properly. I have been, and I guess you know, sort of echoing a little bit of what I just said about, you know, working in this particular 3PL asset based silo. This podcast has really afforded me the luxury of talking to experts from throughout a variety of the silos within logistics, and that's sort of the goal of the show is to break down those information silos and to really spread further awareness. And one of those aspects that I haven't done a really I haven't really touched on is the manufacturing side of logistics, but there was a video that I watched recently. It's about the future of American manufacturing, because obviously we all know that in this country it was really within the 90s and the early 2000s that we had a really before that we had a really strong manufacturing hub within this country, but then a lot of it started to be offloaded and offshored to China, to a lot of East Asian countries, and that's where a lot of our manufacturing still lives. Well, covid was a big eye-opener and that we shouldn't probably consolidate all of our manufacturing within one country, within one government. It should be a little bit diversified. There was, you know, an example that we had here just it's sort of like closer to home, a few years ago, when Hurricane Maria I think that was the name of the hurricane but that Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico manufactures anywhere from 85% to 90% at the world's supply of IV bags, and so when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, it wiped out all of that manufacturing, and so you have a situation where one country is affected and it impacts the entire globe in a very serious way, and so I've just been sort of fascinated as to how that could possibly happen from just a business standpoint. Why I mean, I guess, from a business standpoint is the reason we got into this mess is. You know they're thinking of well, let's just consolidate and put it all in one place, and then you find out why that's such a terrible idea. So now, with all of this talk of manufacturing coming back to the United States, what does that look like? Is it going to be the steel mills that we saw in sort of Pennsylvania, west Virginia type places, or is that coming back, or is it sort of a new way of thinking about manufacturing? And I tend to lean more towards, especially after watching a few internet educated YouTube videos, I tend to think that it needs to be the newer version of what manufacturing looks like. And so this company called Hadrian is really, really fascinating, because what they're doing is they're trying to implement the software side of things with manufacturing. I know you're probably people who are in manufacturing and here they're going to roll their eyes about trying to add technology into manufacturing, because it's probably what we hear about when it comes to any of these industries. But with the Chips Act coming here, we have the infrastructure bill. There's a lot of different ways that we should be sort of investing in our manufacturing, how we're just thinking about what that process looks like. So this company I'm going to play a short clip of what they're trying to do and I think I'm going to play it from right here, so hopefully we can hear it.
Speaker 6:
57:39
So I saw something and it zooms out to the earth so that it comes back in. I have one of those moments and I was like, oh God, this is how the whole thing works.
Speaker 4:
57:47
This is Chris Powell. He's the founder of Hadrian Automation, a young company based in Los Angeles that's aiming to change how manufacturing works in America. He's already built one automated facility, but that's just the start.
Speaker 6:
58:00
I'm going to put a cool machine, in other words, putting the factory. Hadrian is trying to build the factories of the future. The real problem is that America's greatest companies are resting on this house of cards of 40,000 small business owners propping up the aerospace and defense industry, and now they're just old and retiring, taking all their knowledge with them, and there's no one to replace them. American manufacturing has a huge problem. Primarily because in the 80s and 90s we outsourced manufacturing. We decimated the Midwest. Now it's called the Rust Belt for a reason.
Speaker 4:
58:27
But Chris has a unique strategy for how to solve it. Our task has been to rebuild the future on a stronger foundation than we had before.
Speaker 6:
58:35
So Hadrian's vision is to basically reindustrialize America, and the way we're doing that is building automated factories for space and defense. I don't think you get the Jetsons flying car future in a Western-led system without something like a Hadrian, and we're trying to build it as fast as possible.
Blythe Brumleve:
58:50
So that's just a little bit of a snippet of what they're trying Look at Gene's energy, by the way. He's a and we talked about this beforehand it's very much a. I'm currently obsessed with a CEO by the name of Palmer Lucky and when I have been watching a ton of his videos, he's like aerospace manufacturer, department of Defense trying to be a Department of Defense contractor, co-founder of Oculus. Also co-founder of a new company called Andrewle Not really new, but they've been around for a few years now. But he very much reminds me of that and so, with knowing all that, I wanted to pull out a couple more quotes because that video is really really long. It comes from John Cougan, who really has he has a ton of really really great sort of documentary style YouTube videos. He's a former VC kind of guy. Now he's making content and covering a lot of these different types of stories, and this one is just really fascinating to me because he says you cannot put SaaS software into industrial companies. You need to vertically integrate a software company within the industrial company, and so when he started up this company in 2020, it's to with the goal of building automated factories. And you can kind of tell by the accent that he's not from the US. He's actually Australian based, but when he was working for an e-commerce company, he moved to the United States and basically this is where he sort of got his feet wet when it comes to manufacturing and sort of the inefficiencies that are involved in that process. So he started DMing on LinkedIn, cold calling A lot of different manufacturers all over the country. He said that he would call 100 in a day, he would visit three per week and he just did this over and over, sort of going back to what Carrie did Doing that due diligence and having the conversations. Stuff like that is not scalable, but he's doing, he's having those conversations in order to build something that is scalable. So what he heard whenever he's having all of this actually let me take that back He'd call 10 per day, not 100. He'd call 10 per day and visit with three per week, which is still impressive numbers, especially visiting in person three per week. And he was doing this in high to COVID and he says during that sort of that video is that he was flying in airplanes when there was one other person on a Delta flight at a time. So he was willing to. I wish His thought process was is that either COVID will kill me during this process, but he was so determined that he was willing to take that risk in order to have these conversations and really focus on what he was going to build next. And what he heard is that from all of these different folks is that the supply chain is fragmented, the customer experience is terrible, everyone is 55 to 65 years old and it's a highly technical industry, and there's no real reason why software robotics hasn't been put into place. These were the concepts that these companies were telling him, and so that's the reason why he started his manufacturing company, but he wanted to pick a lane that was high margin and high precision, and so he picked aerospace manufacturing as far as his entry into the manufacturing world, and so he said, starting here can lead to revenue to fund the next manufacturing facility. So he starts realizing the need to partner with existing suppliers and he uses them as the way to vertically integrate software and automation. And what I think is the coolest part of the way that he's doing this is that they have different teams that are set up throughout his automation facility. And if you missed it, in that clip Elon Musk is talking about. He's a very brief clip, but he says the problem isn't necessarily building the product, it's building the machine that builds the product, and so that's what he's really focused on is building the machine that builds the product. And so what they do is they take an industry veteran that has been. They have all of this subject matter expertise all up in their head, and so what they're doing is they're pairing one of those guys and they're pairing them with a software engineer, and so the software engineer and them work in tandem on different aspects of the manufacturing process, and so that if something is able to be automated, they can do that through software. And so what I mean by that is building the machine that builds the machine, but also building the process in which you find out what contracts to even go after. So they started building that kind of software Asking. Basically, it would sort through and it would scan all of these different government contracts that were put out for suppliers to try to bid on, and so what they would do is they would filter through all of those different things. Then they would build it into a system of can we build this ourselves? What does that look like? What does the revenue look like? And it spits this kind of information out in minutes. And so you're then combining those tandem software plus industry expert. You're pairing them together in order to bring that product to life, bring it to fruition, so that it's not only the product that you're building but you're developing a supply chain ecosystem. Where these factories are located in the United States, you can have a lot of safeguards from a security perspective. It was just really, really exciting in order to see the approach that they're taking with it and little things that I would have not even thought of. So the machine that builds the machine, they have different tools that are on the machine that builds the machine, and after every time that that little part is used, think of like a giant Phillips head screwdriver that's designed to do something. I don't know the extent of that part of it, but that Phillips head screwdriver is normal. Wear and tear will happen after you make a long period of products or a certain amount of products, I should say and so the wear and tear on that device will affect future products that you make. And with aerospace engineering, you have to be like a fraction of a hair within a hair, making sure that these parts are good enough to go into these different types of machinery, different type of weapons, planes, systems, stuff like that to keep the country safe, and so what they do is they scan the tool before it starts the manufacturing process, and then they scan it afterwards, and so then that way they can have a realistic timeline of how long that tool that's going to help the machine build the product so that that tool doesn't go down, because currently in our manufacturing system that does not exist. And so being able to scan it before, what would happen is that the tool would just go down. Then you would have to find a supplier that builds the tool for the machine that builds the product. So, as you can see, if there is a problem with the original tool, then it's going to create this downstream effect where you get the products later, takes months in order to fulfill some of these tools within the machine that builds the product, and so it's just a recipe for disaster. And so what his machinery does is it actually scans the tools in advance, before and after they've been put to work, in order to figure out what that lifeline looks like and get that product in before that tool goes down. So then that way you have a more efficient supply chain and that you can kind of keep all of those a little bit more contained. Then there's also, from the standpoint of American security, going off in a little bit of another tangent, there's all of this sort of colonialism that's going on on the moon. So on the moon you have. Yes, I know we're going to know it's funny, though.
Grace Sharkey:
1:06:46
No, keep going. I do have something to add to this, but no, I love this. I love this.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:06:51
A switcheroo, though, okay okay, so moon logistics Basically, what is going on on the moon is that the global order of everybody who essentially goes to the moon has set up different rules and parameters where if you set up a base on the moon, nobody else can set up a base within 500 miles of your base. So once you sort of claim it and you put your flag in the you know the dust of the moon, then nobody else can build that within 500 miles of that. And so right now there's just a race to get to the moon as quick as possible to lay your sort of stake in the ground, and that's your area and no other country can come in and take it. Because what happens is that when you land, when you take off, when you're doing experiments on the moon, it kicks up a lot of moon dust, and the justification behind it is that we don't want your dust interfering with our experiments over here. But the other problem with it is that on the moon in particular, there's very limited sunlight at any given time, just because of the nature of the rotation of the moon relative to the earth, relative to the sun. So there's really a very small window of time that we, that you, have light on the moon, and so what happens from a national security perspective is that a large the dark side of the moon is is. You know, they made a song of it for a reason. And so you have the dark side of the moon where a lot of these different rovers, apparently a Chinese nuclear powered rover in particular, can operate on the dark side of the moon and no one knows where it's going, no one knows what it's doing, it can essentially just operate in silence. And so his you know, going back to Chris Power of Hadrian, you know he's building this sort of you know aerospace, you know manufacturing automation, in order to not only help American manufacturing, but also from a national security perspective, where we should probably know if there's, you know, a nuke rover running around on the moon or running around on the moon. And you know, maybe we should have a little bit more intelligence to that, or maybe we should have our own in order, you know, to sort of combat this. You know, the best deterrent to war is essentially making sure that that doesn't happen, and that's by showing off your weapons and showing off your capabilities in order to deter other opponents from thinking that you are a weak party. So it's really like this grandiose thinking not grandiose, but these big problems that I'm faceted by when entrepreneurs are trying to solve them and so the big problems like that. So I think that that is really just sort of cool that, you know, we have these entrepreneurs, like a Palmer Lucky, like a Chris Power, that are seeing these big problems and, instead of going through the normal sort of government bureaucracy and the normal way of doing things, they're coming in with a fresh pair of eyes, they're having the conversations and they're coming up with the solutions in order to combat some of this, in order to sort of you know, because obviously you know, with America, we have you know, we've talked earlier we have obviously our issues from a historical perspective that we haven't been the best leaders that we should, but the American exceptionalism is something that should still be revered and still be something that we strive to is to get better as a country, and so I that's why I wanted to highlight this company and to talk about sort of the greater ethos of just just trying to solve the big problems and doing it in a really fascinating way. So that's, that's my spiel. So kudos to them.
Grace Sharkey:
1:10:30
Yeah, you know I don't have my own, but I'm gonna piggyback off this and when you're talking, I was trying to figure out the companies because there's, I completely agree with this problem. I think it's in this is you know, by the time this comes out and people already kind of know about? Anyways, just to let people know, kind of out there, I'm gonna be lowering my radio time here shortly to only a few days a week, and part of the reason I'm very excited about that is just because it's gonna give me an opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into some of these technology providers. I mean like this one in particular. This is really cool. I'm gonna, I want to reach out to this guy, but a lot of these technologies that aren't as flashier, maybe like behind the scenes more than people, that people understand. What's really interesting about this is that he's 100% right and especially you bring up right is like how are we building these, these robotics? Is automation, these automation tools that are going to even be there to help build a lot of these things? And a big part of all of this discussion is something that I mean I don't want to get to the political side of this, but a lot of this has to do with employment and a ton of jobs that I need to be filled in order like. That's why we're looking to automate, in particular, a lot of these manufacturing sites, because their jobs that people just don't want, or I don't want to say this is older too and you don't
Blythe Brumleve:
1:12:01
want to lose that knowledge that these skilled tradesmen who have been doing this for a long time. So how do we pair technology in order to solve that? Because his argument is that we need to speed up the lead time in American automation and manufacturing and we need to do it like yesterday or it's going to remain a problem for both supply chains and, more importantly, national security.
Grace Sharkey:
1:12:23
Yeah, so there's. There's a few companies I've written about in the past that I want to bring up in this discussion, one of them to go to like more of the automation side, right. So like the work that he's doing, let's say that he gets these robots going. Or even, let's bring up a few of the robotic companies that are out there that we we write about freightways, right, like Locust Robotics, six River Systems, things of that nature, so like there's a huge demand for that kind of stuff in warehouses in particular. Now, a lot of the problems is and this goes into, I'm sure, the work that he's doing in these calls he's making too is that, like they're, they're not easily in, they don't easily integrate into the same systems together, right. So it's kind of like, and if you're more of a broker person in here, it's like you make all these investments to still have 20 hundred tabs open on your computer, right? Well, that's not really helping the problem. There's a company I covered a while ago Again, now I'm going to have some more free time to like follow up with these people called SVT Robotics, and they were looking at themselves and their platform was called, I think, soft, the soft bot and their main goal was to make the integration of these automation systems easier. Right, like that alone is a big problem part of all of this. And they were basically trying to become like what they call like the USB of of automation integrations. Right, so long history we can talk about a different time. But the USB was created to make it so that computers were easy to have and easy to invest in as a normal computer at home person Like. Back when the computers first came out, there was a different cord Funny how Apple's making this happen again but there was a different cord for every single application, every different one, for the mouse, a different one. So you had to spend a lot of money to get a computer. So as soon as they figured out how to make the USB, now you can plug every, all of your tools, even this microphone, right into your computer. And now it made sense to invest in one because it's easier to use. And so that's kind of what they're doing with. Automation is like a big part of. It is like who are these integrators going to be? We don't have enough people to fill those jobs with. How much people want to invest in it, and I'm sure hire someone like him to to help with their manufacturing, but we don't. We don't have enough people to kind of like what, who's going to guard the guards? Like who's going to run the robots right, and so making that easier so that investment becomes better as well. Another company, in particular because you're bringing up even like being able to take photos and like understand when this equipment is going to be down a company called Go Expedi G O X P E D sorry, x P E D I they're they're doing the same exact thing for heavy industry equipment. So it was started by a guy who, like worked for a huge Chinese, like some type of like energy company and like, for instance, right now and thank God we've got enough inventory but like right now most US oil factories are down because this is the time for the time of the year where they're replacing their equipment oh, perfect, got it. And so what they do is they kind of they work with companies to create a very fast supply chain so that when that manufacturing equipment goes down, they can easily bring in some new ones and get things fixed faster. And because they realize, like the downtime or, like you said, like knowing prior to when that screw is going to like actually stop working and your line would be shut down, like they want to be proactive about that and get that done faster. So it's like we talk about like everything is logistics right, like there's so many. I love stuff like this because it's like okay that you're solving a problem that's definitely out there. That downtime and any heavy industry is like we're talking GDP dollars disruptive. So to see how quickly you can get like a big part to you not only before something happens, like that proactiveness of a lot of like what he's doing that you just went through is pretty huge. So, yeah, let me know if you want to talk to these guys.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:16:48
Yeah, that sounds super cool and this is I mean these kinds of conversations like I just don't think that are happening enough.
Grace Sharkey:
1:16:56
I especially like we just did a bunch of trade shows right, it's like our industry shows and it's like how much did this come up like?
Blythe Brumleve:
1:17:05
not at all not not one conversation this come up. And to go back to Hadrian for a minute now he's focused on, you know sort of the high margin and high precision right now, and so his goal is to take this model and apply it to other types of manufacturing within the United States. I believe he has two facilities right now, but he's also planning for, he's also planning for demand as well, and so he's he's planning on opening up more facilities in the future. But I just think it's one of those things that you don't even think about, like nobody even talks about that side of the coin. And so you know sort of going back to you know the ISO scores that we were referring to earlier, where you know a lot of carriers were getting the blame on you know loads being delivered late when come to find out it might be on the retailer or the shipper side of things. And so if you have, you know, sort of greater eyes on these problems that have downstream effects, you know, maybe we can start to set some baselines on on what to expect in the new era of American manufacturing. So I thought you know obviously shout out to to Hadrian for for that part of the process and trying to fix. You know sort of the the broken supply chain or the fragmented supply chain, and then also you know just sort of the the big thinkers out there. I just have a couple.
Grace Sharkey:
1:18:29
I want to say quickly, too big lesson from this story is if you are a young woman or you have a young daughter right now, put that girl in engineering or manufacturing. Yes, that hurt a like science, okay. Yes, I, I couldn't get physics to work in my brain because I hated it. But, like we just listed off four different areas where you're going to make a lot of money one day if you just focus on that engineering aspect.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:18:58
So this women in STEM and that's yes, absolutely co-sign that. And I, and I think you know, anytime we talk about automation I, you know, I there's always the caveat of like oh, you know, everybody's going to lose their jobs and things like that. It's like no jobs evolve, they're going to lose their jobs if this job isn't filled you know it's exactly. You know we're losing our jobs already, you know, to overseas manufacturers and things like that, but you know for, for the, for the betterment of American exceptionalism, for the betterment of, you know, sort of your neighbors and you know just the overall future of your children and things like that. And now I definitely agree, start investing in some of these careers that especially from a trade perspective, because that's going to be the most safe from any kind of knowledge work AI work that's going to really consume a lot of us in the next you know, sort of probably two to five years going to come a lot quicker than than you think, but as jobs are replaced or evolve, then you can stay ahead of it and you can learn these things and see these market shifts and be able to evolve with it. A social media coordinator job did not exist 15 years ago but it is very prominent role today. There are a lot of other different roles Autonomous truck driver I know it's going to piss off some people that I said that, but autonomous truck driver did not exist 10 years ago but that role exists today and it's paid very well. So if you're looking at where the trends and sort of these different, I guess industrial type industries are concerned, like tech is here, it's not going anywhere. The the cat is out of the bag, and so either you want to learn with it and grow with it and evolve with it or, you know, probably not going to have a good time. Yeah, I guess one more little thing that I did want to bring up because it's a little bit more of a lighter one. You know just, we're talking about like existential crises and a lot of different themes throughout this show, but I did want to also give a shout out for another source to porch segment that I was going to do. That's on the company called Gold Belly. Have you heard of them? No, gold Belly is. They saved me on Valentine's Day because I was traveling, I had to go out for a conference and Gold Belly I definitely have to shout this out because they saved me with a food delivery company but they specialize in restaurants and shops that you have visited and you have ate at before, maybe in New York, maybe in Detroit, maybe in Chicago, some of these different places. Philly is another one. Maybe you've had went to one of those really great shops and had a famous meal like a lobster roll or a salmon bagel or a Philly cheese steak, something like that. Maybe you've had something from one of these places and you really would love to have that again. Well, this company can help solve that problem for you. They helped solve it for me. I just did my first order with them. I ordered the New York Bagel brunch package for six. What you do is you order from this company. They deliver it the same day. You place your order a couple days in a day. I placed it on February 11th. I was like because me and my fiance we've been to New York before. We had an amazing trip there. One of my favorite moments from that trip is us sitting on a bench overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. We're eating a salmon bagel. It was a really great moment For Valentine's Day. I was like it would be great to send him a memory from that trip. I sent him this bagel box and it includes the salmon, it includes the bagels, it includes the cream cheese and they're all from the New York, new Jersey area. You know they're legit. I can't find a good bagel in Jacksonville. To save my life, we're really anywhere outside of New York like New Jersey area. I was able to ship this out to him and he had it the day before it took. They ship it the same day. It's not like you're worried about quality issues or anything like that, but if you have a craving for maybe a filly cheese steak from Pats or there's also like the Detroit style pizza, yeah, you saw Barefoot Contessa, you can get one of her cakes. It is. I mean, it's really incredible and it was, you know, to put it in. It's obviously a little bit pricey because you're shipping next day air, but from a gift perspective, I think that this is so genius that you can get a deep dish pizza mailed to you the same day, and they have different instructions too if you wanted to. You know, obviously, like pizza, it's not going to come hot like you're going to have to heat that up, but they partner with a gold-bellied partners with these different restaurants in order to ship out the local food to people who have maybe visited the city before or maybe just never tried it and heard about it and want to try it. So I just thought that that was a really cool concept. So, from a logistics perspective, that's a lot of moving parts and I think that, oh, that taste in New York. That's actually awesome Taste in New York Weekender Box. They're going to send you it looks like cheese, cheesecake, pizza and then also bagels too. So that's and that's for $250. So it's a little pricey, but that's a lot. That is a lot of food. Well, it's not Shake.
Grace Sharkey:
1:24:27
Shack eight pack Shake Shack burgers from. It says New York 60 bucks. That's not bad.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:24:35
And especially considering you're getting it the same day. So yeah, your pulmonary spending 20 bucks. anyway, it says one person, so it was funny we had Dan Reese, who is VP of sales over at Manifest. We had him on the show recently. We bonded a little bit over New York bagels and so when I posted a clip from it or I should say, shout out to Lindsay if you're listening. She's my marketing assistant in case you are tired or maybe you really like seeing all the video clips that we've been posting out to social media. She is the one responsible for all of that. So thank you to her. But one of those clips that she posted for me was talking about that bagel clip from Dan Reese, and so one of the commenters, wasi Munair, who owns Munair Group, which is a supply chain sort of talent recruiting company. He's from New Jersey and he was talking about oh, I would kill to have one of those bagels delivered to me. And I told him about this company and he ordered the same day, and so now, just a couple of days later, he has a craving for some food from back home and he's able to get that delivered, which I think is just astounding that we can do that in this day and age.
Grace Sharkey:
1:25:46
Did it deliver? Did you already get it?
Blythe Brumleve:
1:25:48
Oh yeah, we already got it. So. I ordered it on February 11th, thinking hopefully it gets here on time. But it got here on February 13th and it was shipped from New York first thing in the morning and it got here in the afternoon Like quality was so like. Quality was incredible. So we actually just polished off the last of the bagels and the cream cheese, because they send you six of them, so you can even like customize your order. So you know, I got like two of the everything, two of the plain, like two.
Grace Sharkey:
1:26:15
I've never heard of bagel before and I've always just like doubted that they're that much better it is. It is Now like I mean I got to play open and I might be buying some bagels later, dude.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:26:27
Well, it's not just the bagels, it's also like the cream cheese and the sour cream from New York, for whatever reason. Well, I've heard it's actually the water up there, that it's really good Water, and so that's the basis of why their pizza is so good, why you know sort of the doughy type products are good. So pizza bagels, also like their creams and cheeses and things like that, are just really really good. And yeah, so I did. They didn't Interesting. I wish I was getting paid to sort of pump them out like that. But looking at this menu again, I'm like, oh God, I've got a, not an ad.
Grace Sharkey:
1:27:05
Not an ad, but I am yeah definitely scrolling through. So I mean it's kind of cool because it's like I feel like these days just like even ordering food just is like so expensive so I avoid it. But it's like I mean some of these prices are pretty decent, where it's like, well, maybe I'll just start like ordering one of these like once a week and now I'll have I mean like truly honestly I mean some of these prices for like how much food they're sending you. Like this one is like like weigu filet mignon two pack, and like I'm not going to eat that whole thing, no way, and one sitting like 150 bucks. That's not too bad.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:27:45
I mean you can't single girl.
Grace Sharkey:
1:27:46
Clearly I've got no kids or anyone to worry about. She like murderous.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:27:52
It's like a treat yourself or a good way to, because I was going to like, send an edible arrangement or something like that and I just didn't have quite the. You know that I was missing Valentine's Day, so I wanted to make sure that the gift I send has a little bit of an impact, and so I think you know that we form a lot of memories around food, and so if you have, this is a great way to, you know, relive that memory, support local businesses and, you know, be able to, to you know, have another memory with that same food, so in the comfort of your own home too, which is you can't really knock that. So some, maybe some of your favorite places that you visited, like the, you know, or maybe places that you've always wanted to visit, because the Philly cheesesteak that's on there too, I'm like that. I'm a little curious about that, because I've never been to Philly, I've never had one of their famous cheesesteaks. So maybe that would be an option to you know in the future. But I just think, from an e-commerce, like logistics, perspective, that's, it's a really cool initiative, and so they've been around apparently for a handful of years, but they're always adding new restaurants to it. So I just think that was cool. So shout out to them for a little like bonus logistics of story.
Grace Sharkey:
1:29:02
Love that? Ok, shout out to them. I'm going to order food from here. We've lost Grace oh she's.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:29:10
I know I'm like.
Grace Sharkey:
1:29:11
I'm just I'm cruising so hard on this right now. It's not even funny.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:29:16
Well, awesome, hopefully we will. We'll send them and local businesses some more business. Ok, moving into our final topic, that's the, the makeup supply chain. So very similar to, like source to porch, which we pick out you know a favorite, like logistics of story and we sort of track the entire supply chain. So, moving into this is something that we talked about, I think, back in December, about just having an entire show featured around, just like the makeup supply chain. But you can, probably, we could probably knock this out in you know, 15, 20 minutes. So that's it'll be. It'll be a good part. Good part of the show Are we good. Yeah, so I haven't really dived. I know you do, so I'm going to go to you in just a second to break this down for us. But my lack of knowledge around makeup just in general and the overall supply chain is very lacking. I have covered in the past the logistics of lipstick and sort of the lipstick index around that and for folks who may not know, yeah, lipstick is a good economic indicator of where we are at in our sort of performance wise, of people how they want to spend money. We studies have shown that if we are headed towards a recession or if we are in a recession, then lipstick sales dramatically increase. And that's because people start cutting out different luxury items, but they won't cut out a luxury lipstick. It's sort of a thing you think of like a woman coming out of a bathroom and putting on lipstick. It's a sign of wealth. It's a sign of just a perception. You're communicating that wealth. And so lipstick sales tend to increase whenever there is economic downturn, because if you're going to spend money on something, especially from a female perspective, you're going to spend money on a really good lipstick, and so that's where the sort of the lipstick index comes from and then it sort of evolves into how do we even get like red lipstick? It comes from the Carmine Beetle, which these beetles are red in nature and that's where a lot of food dye red food dye comes from, too is from the Carmine Beetle yes, an insect that they crush up and use it to make the red pigment that you have in food dyes and also red lipstick. So there's a really that's the. That's the extent of a lot of my knowledge when it comes to makeup supply chain. But since you obviously, with hosting the stock out, you've been covering this for a while, there was one account that you sent over called the Lipstick Lesbians account, and do you want me to play the clip first or do you want to kind of set it up for us? Well, let me set it up, really quick.
Grace Sharkey:
1:31:55
So what we're kind of going to go over today is like more so like the sourcing of your makeup product and I just opened up something that's playing in my ear, sorry. So, and actually I got into this like a while ago when I was in college, because I have a girlfriend who is she's pretty big on YouTube. Her name is Faye, she's a little bit more known in Korea as well, and she she has actually a makeup line that comes out of Korea. So there's a lot of really great Korean makeups and skin care that I've used in the past that she's put me on, and so I always found it interesting to like where all of our makeup comes from, where some of the products come from. I think in the past episode we talked about like one of Jeffrey Star's lines. There was a couple of years ago. He put out a really cool palette that I had preordered and it ended up changing at some point because there was a specific green color in the palette that had a specific ingredient that was a specific color and it ended up like removing that color and coming out later and everything like that. So I always found it interesting. Like you know, it's powders and all these like different chemicals, like how do they come up with these formulas and how do these things actually come up with these different products? And I think that's really interesting and I think that's really interesting. And I think that's really interesting and I think that's really interesting how do they come up with these formulas and how do these things actually, you know, play when it comes to pricing and quality and things of that nature, as the US even one of the top places, and so to kind of give you, before we show the clip, to give you kind of like an outline of different countries and what they're known for, because a lot of this goes into the proprietary technology that a lot of these makeup manufacturers own right. So some areas and some countries are better at other formulas compared to maybe a different country, just because, like, the patents are in one country compared to the others. So quickly here to kind of go over it for you guys. So a big one in particular is a skincare. A lot of that comes out of Switzerland. That's what they're most known for and that's for a couple of brands out there that you might know of. Beauty Pie comes out of Swiss Labs. A lot of really high-end skin care comes out of there. Italy is really known for high-end, premium makeups like Dior, some of the more expensive ones in hair care too. Again, pat McGrath actually comes from out of Italy. Charlotte Tilbury comes out of Italy as well. Beauty Pie has some of their hair stuff comes out of Italy. Devines or Devines, it's probably the shampoo line out of Italy too. Japan, known for skincare Tatcha is a Japanese-made product. That's probably the biggest one that people really know about. And then Germany we're talking about Germany earlier really known for their pencils, eye pencils, especially the precision ones. They have a special patent. It sounds like a certain warehouse does in Germany and so, yeah, so, like Victoria Beckham's, pencils come out of there, a lot of those high-end pencils. Mac pencils also come out of Germany too. Korea is really known for just overall innovative formulas. They have a lot of manufacturers out there that are on top of trying different things.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:35:47
The sunscreen is the best.
Grace Sharkey:
1:35:51
Yes, yeah, yes, yeah, right. So a lot of that's of hourglass comes out of Korea. Rare beauty, a lot of their matte liquid liners come out of Korea too. So a lot of like kind of the new inventive formulas that people are trying will come out of there. France is known a little bit more for the fragrance side of things, so Chanel, of course, comes out of France, a few other big ones as well. And New Zealand, known a little bit actually more for the sustainable products, like the organic products that don't have a lot of man-made chemicals or anything like that. And I think there's one more on my list. Yeah, oh, australia really known for SPF and Suncare products, to Clarins I think it's a big one that you probably heard of. Kate Somerville's another one too. So it kind of showcases. Oh, last one too Body Care UK. That's what they're kind of. Le Mer is another one out of there. Aromatherapy products come out of there too, and so, yeah, it kind of showcases to you like, okay, there's different places across the globe that people will to watch, but in this clip here there's a group and actually like just came around like a list from last year, it's one of the top like 10 for, at least for ads or for like pushing products, one of the most interactive TikToks and Instagram real accounts out there. But it's because the main girl that you're gonna see talking actually spent years in makeup manufacturing. So a lot of times she'll go through, and one of my favorite things she'll do a lot of times is like tell you what companies own certain things. So you know like those are probably the same formulas You're just buying more for, like Dior, when it's actually might be owned by L'Oreal at the end of the day Right. No I don't.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:37:45
I have Dior, a liquid foundation and concealer on as we're talking right now.
Grace Sharkey:
1:37:49
Yeah, I think it's like L'Oreal owns what's the? We all have it. The like setting spray. Okay, infallible. No, no, no, the purple one that's like.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:38:03
Oh, urban decay all nighter.
Grace Sharkey:
1:38:06
Yes, so it's like I mean, you know. So you kind of think, okay, well, what am I when you're talking about your money, right? What am I putting it towards? And now, even though they're owned, a lot of times it's like one ingredient more that makes it better. But, yeah, so she. They educate you on a lot of the stuff and in this video you'll kind of see how you can read labels and how you should interpret them and their supply chains too. Oh, hold on In USA. Assembled Dominican Republic.
Speaker 5:
1:38:34
I love that we have our creators engaging in the mating content. She's saying two things that I was a little upset with Dominican Republic never heard of shadows coming from that place If you are gonna engage in it, definitely dig a little deeper. When you see something that says bulk made in the USA, the batching of the powders, the raw materials, that would happen in the USA. It means they mixed up all those powders and they pressed them in the case of eyeshadows in the USA, and then they ship those pans out to the Dominican Republic to glue and assemble in the Dominican Republic. That's what she read anyway. Right, she read it, but then she said that she's never seen eyeshadows made in the Dominican Republic. The eye shadow is not made in the Dominican Republic, so that tells you this is not the same formula as pretty much any other shadow palette out there. There are many, many, many other eyeshadows on the market that do the exact same thing. She also did share some commentary on how eyeshadows are typically made in China, and Italy. All shadows are usually from China or Italy. Of course, china, italy do lots of shadows, but let's not forget Canada. They were some of the first to develop certain proprietary technologies as well. I just want to make sure we're all getting all the nuanced information. I've done the full tasting menu in the beauty industry. I've worked on the manufacturing side, I've worked on the brand side and if we're gonna be talking about where things are made and we're not sure, fam, send the videos to us. We'll make sure to do all the research needed to get all the good information to you. The last thing, make up by Mario's ethereal eyes palette that just launched Christmas made in the USA, assembled in the Dominican Republic.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:39:56
Super interesting because a lot of people.
Grace Sharkey:
1:40:01
The girl that she's talking about is reviewing Kim Kardashian's new makeup line, and a lot of people are saying it's just the Mario palette, and so that's what she's kind of pointing out. At the end it could just be the Mario palette, because they're likely probably made at the same facilities and shipped together and then, once they get to the Dominican Republic, they just stamp them differently and put them in a different packaging and then send them back to us, right? So, yeah, definitely. There's another one in here where she gets into oh, who owns who at Sephora? That one's really cool if you want to click that one, because it also kind of goes into what I was talking about, like who, if you go up a little bit more, that that white one to the left who owns who at Sephora? This one's funny for, like, where you want to kind of save your money as well, all right let's play this clip.
Speaker 5:
1:40:52
Basically, lvmh is gonna own 30%, probably, of the store, because LVMH stands for Louis Vuitton, moye, tennessee. Really, yeah, holy shit, did you just have an epitome? Yes, let's do it. Benefit LVMH. Look up by Mario. This is privately held. They've actually raised capital, so that means they're backed by venture capital. Nars is still owned by Shiseido Beauty Blender, to my knowledge, privately held company. Who to Beauty is private equity owned, I'm pretty sure. Merritt is owned by venture capitalist Urban Decay. L'oreal, say, I want to say, is venture capital. Long home is L'Oreal. Clinique is a say lauder, too faced a say lauder. Rose Ink is owned by Blalalalala. I know this. It's a biotech company. Amorous Tarte is owned by Jose. Luxury brand partners is the incubator that does. One size For a collection is, of course, LVMH. Lani is owned by L'Oreal. Hourglass is owned by Unilever. Good cheese, this is gonna stump me, I think. Cody, cody, cody. Yeah, yes, valentino shocked me. I remember researching this. It's L'Oreal. You are LVMH. They have a really big stake in ownership 40% of the LVMH stock. Wow.
Grace Sharkey:
1:41:59
Which is really large.
Speaker 5:
1:42:00
You're gonna be doing something right. I think we forgot this little gondola section which is, like the LVMH Island. Spente is owned by LVMH. Well, technically, miss Spente is owned by Kendo.
Grace Sharkey:
1:42:08
Kendo is owned by.
Speaker 5:
1:42:09
LVMH, so is KBD and so is Mica Forever Glossy. A is venture capital, where Beauty, I want to say, is private. I think we're good, I think we did the work. Good job. I think I got like 80-80%. That's the mirror, no idea.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:42:27
How'd you do it? Lvmh? That is super interesting because you wouldn't think that. I guess it makes a lot of sense of the manufacturing process, of where it's being created and then how you can attach that to the label, depending on where it's being assembled. I think we need to do a deeper dive on packaging insight, because I remember being in Belize and they have one of their number one exports is Citrus and for a lot of Citrus companies so like Simply Florida or Simply Orange Juice or whatever, like you think that it's coming from Florida but it's coming from Belize and they can put on the label that it's made in Florida or that it comes from Florida, because a certain amount of the manufacturing process is done here, which is like it's crazy that it also applies to makeup as well.
Grace Sharkey:
1:43:26
Yeah, Well, what's kind of cool about that as well is like for those people trying hey, women's history month, right? When are you trying to get into the stock market more? I mean, Cody is a tradable. Lvmh that she brought up is tradable too. What's the other one in there? I think L'Oreal actually is too. Elf is one of my favorite stocks of all time.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:43:50
L'Oreal is like the biggest makeup conglomerate, like they own almost all makeup.
Grace Sharkey:
1:43:55
I mean she listed Dior Armani, like all of the high-end ones you would think are like not owned by L'Oreal right.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:44:08
Which is super interesting. Yeah, no, that's great insight and I like that account. It was like an immediate follow for me. There was this other video that I found and it kind of sucks that I so this. All right, let me back up a minute, because I got to set this up properly. So this woman I was, you know, just doing anytime before a show like this. I always look up on YouTube to see if anybody's done any interviews so I can sort of listen to it while I'm getting ready, while I'm doing my makeup, and one of these ones that I found is from. It's called Green Beauty Conversations. It's a YouTube channel called Formula Botanica and the episode title why Beauty Logistics Are Not Boring it feels like a weird title should be is so moving on.
Grace Sharkey:
1:44:57
Yeah, they're pluralizing. Yeah, for sure.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:45:01
Maybe that was a Grammarly mistake there. Not exactly what that was. Yeah, so this YouTube channel called Green Beauty Conversations it's the host is called Gemma Ortega Perez and she's interviewing a woman by the name of Rachel Whitaker of Indie Beauty Delivers. Now I tried to look up Rachel on LinkedIn. I found her LinkedIn but she doesn't post ever. And then I tried to look up her company, indie Beauty Delivers. What she is is she's essentially a logistics consultant to Indie Beauty brands and so she helps them think about their logistics processes before they can really start scaling. So she talks them through you know, like the packaging and the things to think about with your packaging, how it's going to sit on a shelf, how you're going to ship it, you know the ways you can design your packaging and that it's also efficient for shipping. But one thing that a couple of the moments that she brought up as she said, the logistics is the only time you physically touch a customer. So if you're an Indie Beauty maker, like an e-commerce product maker, manufacturer, then thinking about it from the end consumer angle that is the only time that your customer or you're going to touch your customer is from your product itself when it arrives on their doorstep. And so for a lot of folks or a lot of businesses, and what she was explaining is that you tend to think about the website experience, the marketing experience, all of those different things, but then they don't think about the aspect of shipping the product and then what that looks like in the box that it arrives inside, of the actual beauty packaging itself, what that looks, what that feels like, what that experience is like, and even from the lens of the tracking notifications when people are expecting their package, like, what does that process look like? Are you going to be handling those? You know those different queries and things like that and how you know, maybe if you're selling 20 units a day, that's one thing, but when you start thinking about scaling, you really have to think about it from the lens of you have to scale everything. And so she helps these beauty or I think she did. I don't know if she does any more, but she was helping these companies think about the logistics process before by saying it's never too early to look at your logistics and fulfillment and that a lot of 3PLs also will integrate. So basically, off of a good relationship with your 3PL, if you were to establish that with them as you're growing and as you're scaling. She said a lot of the 3PLs will integrate their tracking tech and customer service related items to shipping right on the brand's website, which I thought was super interesting. That if you're dealing with like a Sephora or like a Ulta or maybe some of these other smaller beauty companies that aren't in a big retailer like that, that if you are chatting with them about where's your product and where because the majority of customer service inquiries are tracking related, where's my product, and so for that you're actually communicating with the 3PL and not the company itself, which I did not know and I thought was pretty interesting as well. And I want to play a really short clip because I think it's really fascinating from, like, the consulting standpoint of how she's consulting these Indie Beauty retailers, to think about your logistics partnership, and I think it's really valuable for the carriers and the brokers out there to think about this as well. So, yeah, I'm going to pull up this clip.
Grace Sharkey:
1:48:34
I'm not going to lie as a shopper. Like half the fun is opening it up in the box and like how it's looks and all that stuff.
:
1:48:40
So that's awesome, I mean where do you even start to find a fulfillment partner? How do you get in contact with people? Yeah, yeah, and this is the biggest challenge and actually a number of brands put off finding a fulfillment house because it's just like what do you do, and a number of established brands who are unhappy in the warehouses that they're in, put off finding a new supplier because it's just too overwhelming to even start with. So there are a couple of things which I always recommend. So the best way of finding anybody it doesn't matter, does it Whether you're doing fulfillment or contract manufacturer or anything is that we are all part of the most amazing community. We're all part of these amazing Facebook groups, your mastermind group, my Facebook group. There are hundreds of entrepreneurs in there who are doing this and a lot of them have done what you want to do. So put some feelers out, because recommendation is a great place to start. So, you know, put some. You know, really go to your contacts, rinse your contacts, rinse your groups that your members are and find out who people are using, and that's a really, really good place to start. If you're UK based, I have a free service, which is wonderful, where I will consult.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:49:58
Well, a lot of that I don't know that exists anymore, so I'll sort of stop that right there. What I thought was interesting about that is that it's essentially word of mouth is how she's referring different beauty suppliers or beauty or indie beauty manufacturers to 3PLs in order to find out the fulfillment and their warehousing services. And so my thought process is like wow, so you're using not only just word of mouth, but also these different Facebook groups and just different communities that are online. So if you're a freight broker out there, I would be hitting up and Googling all of these different Facebook groups for the different commodities that maybe you specialize in moving that freight because, they really talked about how, in that in that whole show about how the relationship with your 3PL will help you get into larger retailers. And so if you're working with a 3PL, even if you are small, you know, even if you're not in makeup, if you're in somewhere else if you're thinking about scaling, you need to be thinking about what that end to end customer feels whenever they're opening up your package, whenever they're experiencing your product, and then a 3PL will then be able to help you not only get those relationships with different retailers, but say, but be able to help you sell with that relationship to that retailer of hey, we're using a 3PL partner that is already experienced and shipping this kind of freight, so it's going to be a seamless integration from the retailer's perspective. And so, thinking about it from that lens, if I'm a freight broker, I am going to be researching all of the different Facebook groups, all of the different online communities, in order to find out what these customers, these shippers, are dealing with, and use it to offer insight on the logistics process, because this woman was a consultant and so she specializes in just beauty. And so, if you think about it even a step further, if she's saying like, word of mouth is king, which it always will be like. Why not develop a relationship with some of these logistics consultants and they can be the relationship builder for you, so you can kind of have this multi pronged approach, so you're not hammering out, you know, 100 cold calls in a day. Or you know, downloading a bunch of quote unquote leads off of zoom info and mass emailing everyone. Those things don't work. They have a very low success rate. So why not do a little bit more online research? Two minutes of research, which another you know sort of podcaster I guess kind of still in our space, matt doll. He just recently moved from the brokerage side of things to the shipper side of things, even made a comment on this earlier today on Twitter about how he's gotten so many different cold calls and cold emails, and it's just clearly, very clearly spray and pray. So I thought that that was a good insight into the, the logistics side of things. And if you're looking for new customers, you know, maybe forming these relationships and building in these different communities might be a really good angle for folks out there.
Grace Sharkey:
1:52:59
Yeah, love that and I think you're. You're absolutely right. I mean, the referrals, right, are like the the best way to sell yourself and if you can you brought this up like, if you can, let's say you're delivering at a retailer for one of those suppliers makeup brands, etc. Right, and they have, your trucks are always on time and your packaging is always ready, good to go, easy to unload, that that is going to get around. And when the time comes for someone to say, or maybe there's like that retailers getting a new brand into them and they say, hey, who's someone we should use, like your name's going to come up first. And I always think that's that's how you really grow organically your business in this industry too.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:53:46
Yeah, Any other, I guess, facts about the makeup supply chain that you want to shine a light on?
Grace Sharkey:
1:53:52
I think we kind of covered a lot, yeah not now, but I'm going to do some deep diving, so maybe the next one we can do a good like 30 minutes and dive even more into like some of the problems that come up, because I think that'll get interesting. So research will be done. Audience, don't worry. Yes.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:54:08
Well, we're. I think it's one of those topics that the more you dive in, the more you realize that there's still much more to learn. Like I would love to learn more about just sort of the, the, the packaging process and how they determine where a product is actually made. If you're sourcing goods from all over the world, you know our makeup companies taking the same strides as clothing companies. You know a lot of the pressures that are put on clothing companies of where those ingredients or those, the source of the source, is sourced. Is that happening in makeup too? And I just wonder. I don't know that it is. I think it's more of the focus on makeup has just been like is it tested on animals? Is it tested on human? Like you know more of that level of visibility into the supply chain, I don't know that there it exists yet for that other aspects that a lot of that pressure has put on clothing.
Grace Sharkey:
1:55:01
Yeah, we'll see, we'll get into it, we'll go for, we'll figure that out, for sure, this is part one, so maybe part two, three future parts are coming soon.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:55:10
But as we sort of round out this episode, we couldn't really let the show go off or really finish before we give kind of like a final shout out to some women that are making moves. I say, when you're listening to this, it's obviously women's history month has kicked off. We are recording this on February 29th, so leap day. But we want to give a little bit of a not a little bit a very large shout out to Shelly Simpson, just recently named CEO of JB Hunt. I know you are a huge fan of Shelly, You've interviewed her before, so so early thoughts and obviously kudos to her, but early thoughts on this move.
Grace Sharkey:
1:55:51
Yeah, she, kaylee, and I got to interview her at a freight waves event and I really started crying because she was like so cool and so nice and so no, actually, you probably can watch that video on our YouTube page if you want. But it's just an incredible person. I mean, she's even it's been times where she just like reaches out and it's just like hope. Everything is great. She's really really about not only here's. The thing I like about Shelly is, if you follow her career path, she has led some really great change initiatives when it comes to JB Hunt 360 and using technology deeper to, of course, make sure that they're. They're automating a lot of their booking processes and I've talked to nice thing about going to like maths and some of these like conferences where they might not know who I am Like. A lot of times I'll talk to those individuals and be like how do you like it? You know they like really love the way that not only was the technology introduced to them but integrated into their work and and used to like propel their own honestly financial success at companies. So she's led a number of those type of initiatives. We saw quantum just come out too, so we're going to see rail, I think, become huge in this next year, especially as companies start looking at is there ways for me to to bring my carbon foot print down but also save money by my more positive rail experience? Jb Hunt as a whole, I think, just leadership wise, everyone, frazier, everyone there just seems very, very team oriented and has everyone's back and they promote from within. I mean the roles that she's held there and she's worked her way up over time as a female and is now with her and Mrs Hunt like holding down the. The fourth there it's for looking for once again publicly traded as well. Got two twins, incredible twin daughters, two and just an absolute force to be reckoned with and constantly looks like that, just a smile across her face. I don't think I've ever seen Shelly frown and maybe I don't ever want to, but I'll tell you this, just an absolute authentic. She's very authentic too, like very humble and just wants to give advice if you ask for it and not trust me. Everyone in this industry is not like that, especially as they get into that CEO level. There's a lot of that kind of like arrogance, a lot in this industry of you have to earn the right to meet me and she is like not that way at all. So shout out to her big fan and excited to see. I mean, I've been waiting for this, so it's funny. When I saw I'm like there we go, here it is I had a lot of feelings that this was going to happen soon and happy that it finally has. So we talked about what a way to jump into women's history month. Right, it's the day before we get into it. We announced this JB Smart.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:58:51
As all of you, Heck, yeah, no, I think it's great that, especially your point about promoting from within, because she opens up this LinkedIn post and we'll have it linked in the comments in case you want to check it out. But she says in 1994, I started my career as an hourly customer service representative. I knew quickly I had joined an innovative company, a leader in the transportation and logistics industry, and she goes on and on about you know sort of her career. But she is being the fifth individual in our organization 62 year history, to assume the CEO role, which I think is just incredible. And she looks in this picture. She looks very presidential, like this is like an oval office type photo. So we'll definitely put that in the show notes so you can check it out. But it's a heck of a way to kick off women's history month and I think for a lot of folks, if you've followed her on LinkedIn or seen her speak and at any of the conferences, it was just a matter of time. It felt like until she was given this role, because it feels like this has been something she's been you know sort of working towards and training for her whole life. And I don't even know her on the level, obviously that you do. I just know her through. You know some of her speeches and social media posts, but it feels like a role that she was born to have, if that makes sense.
Grace Sharkey:
2:00:07
Yeah, it's funny I have I might be right here. I've got like just the nicest card from her that I don't think it's right here.
Blythe Brumleve:
2:00:16
But the fact that she is out her busy schedule, that she reaches out to you regularly and says like hey, how you doing is awesome Well.
Grace Sharkey:
2:00:26
I like a handwritten card from her somewhere in here. That's just like so happy and motivating and awesome, so like who even writes with their hands anymore these days, right?
Blythe Brumleve:
2:00:40
So you wouldn't be able to read it, even if I tried. It's very terrible. That's why I learned typing in ninth grade, so people would be able to read what I write. But I think that that's a really good place to sort of end in this show. I heard a calendar notification at 3.30. So I'm assuming that you have something going on here in a couple minutes that you got to run to. We've obviously been recording for close to two hours now and we talked for about an hour before we hit record. So, yeah, that's that's usually how these Thursday shows roll. So, grace, anything you want to leave the audience with, you know any last remarks or where to find more of your work stories working on all that good stuff, which, real quick, I did. We will have a link to your interview with Shelly Simpson in the show notes in case folks want to check that out.
Grace Sharkey:
2:01:30
Love that and no, I, just like I said earlier, I'm happy I'm going to have some more writing time in front of me now moving forward. So there's a couple of things. I'm going to start doing a Friday free tech roundup so we'll get a little bit more info out there on some of the really cool investments and raises in the space. So, yeah, there's a lot of cool things I'm working on with our editorial team I'm excited to bring to the table. So you guys will see all that soon.
Blythe Brumleve:
2:01:58
Awesome, hell, yeah, now that great stuff and congratulations on on the role. I think that that's going to be something that you're you're going to be able to have a little bit more free time to invest in longer form stories and really go in depth, and I think that that is something that we really need, because it feels like there's a lot of industry podcasts out there. But, as both of us can attest to with going to manifest recently, there was about 60 of us on that media PR list and we were swamped. Every single one of us were swamped, inundated with PR requests of companies wanting to meet, have stories written about them, you know, recorded with them. All that good stuff, and we can't cover it all. So if you're you're on the fence about, you know, sharing your perspective, please don't remain on the fence. Obviously, go for it and your career could evolve just like Grace has. So, all good things. Thank you, guys also for tuning in. We will be back next month with another episode of Freight Friends, but until then, we'll see you real soon. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in Freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B, subscribe to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everythingislogisticscom. 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 build started 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 digitaldispatchio. Just 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.
