Blythe Brumleve:
0:15
Welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and in this episode, we've got a special guest for you today, and that is the founder and CEO, Mitch Helten of SPI Logistics, and we're going to be talking about those good and those challenging times of the entrepreneurial journey, especially in the world of freight. And so Mitch, it's finally, I'm finally pumped to have you on the show, because it's been a long time coming. I'm
Mitch Helten:
0:47
happy to be here. This is great. Now,
Blythe Brumleve:
0:50
we were talking a little bit before we started recording, and I had mentioned that I was listening to your interview with Chris jolly. You guys had talked about a year ago, and you, I love the story that you gave when you said that you first started SPI, your business partner kept telling you to leave him alone, and that was how you came up with the initial idea of starting the freight agent program. I want to say was that probably the light bulb moment for you to start up the freight agency for SPI
Mitch Helten:
1:22
was it kind of just happened upon us, because you're referring to Jim Taggart. He was very good friend of mine, and unfortunately passed away last year in October. But as far as the freight brokerage was concerned, we were, we were co founders in that because he I had, it's kind of restarted the business from when we first were doing import, importing product, from 1979 to 8283 and then I was in the airlines now and I and I did almost Five years with my uncle in a travel agency. We were doing business travel. So my friend Jim, that was the end of May, beginning of June of 1990 came and I met him on the weekend at a barbecue, and he he called me up on Monday morning the following Monday and said, Hey, I'm coming over for coffee. So I said, okay, and he was interested in what I was talking over the weekend, and the trucking company he was working for didn't look like it was going to do, do too well. It was a flat flatbed, heavy Hall carrier here and in the West Coast. And so he was the, he was one of the sales or he was the sales manager for the company. And so he kind of saw the writing on the wall and and they were going to let him go, and he gave me a severance. So he said, How would you like a partner? I said, Well, okay, this is what I'm working on, you know, more import, you know, of goods. And he says, yeah, that's that's good with me. And so he started working with me, and then he got a call from one of his clients, who was an international freight forwarder in Canada, and they had a pulp mill that they were disassembling for for a company in the province of Quebec, and it had to go on hundreds of loads to the Port of Miami, and then it was catching a ship to go to Brazil, and they were going to reassemble it there. So I said, Well, that's great, Jim, where? Where's the reservation system for the trucks. And he said, there is there. He just laughed at me, because there is no such thing. So I got to work in the background, and I found out, you know, during that year, that you if you're your own freight broker, and you're booking freight, you're getting the freight, you're getting that relationship with the shipper. You're going out and finding a carrier or calling them up back then, and you're, you know, finding which carrier can move it between the two points that you have to move it with you doing all actually, you're starting to get enough business that you gotta do the invoicing. You gotta make sure the cash flow is right. You gotta get the financing in place. You have to do the payments to the carriers. Then if there's a you know, issues that come up, or you gotta deal with the carriers, there's you. Like it found. I found out 70% of our time was spent on the administrative side in the back office. So and he just wanted to keep working, you know, getting the freight and booking it, and that was what he loved to do. So I thought, Well, we tried getting more people to do that in the office, and didn't work out. We hired a couple of people didn't work out. So then we hired a guy, but on straight commission that new freight, kind of like Jim, and he started to work out. So I thought, I want more guys like Jim and I'll set all this up in the background. So we put together a model and a plan to do that. I built a database. We built our own reservation system, basically, and set out the care contracts from it, and it followed everything through. And in the beginning, I thought, how hard can it be, you know, pick up an A, drop off at B. Well, there's a whole bunch of things between A and B that happened. And so I built this system with off the shelf software. And then I thought, you know, we could do this for other freight brokers like Jim and so came up with a way of connecting people well before the internet was available. And back then, if you wanted a land, you know, a connection, direct data connection between two offices across the country or across the town or whatever. Those were costing about$100,000 for a line. So I came up with getting again off the shelf software where the if you want to be an agent with SPI, you had to have a computer, you had to have a phone line, maybe two for calls. You need to have a fax line, and you need to have a computer line, day line, or actually, you didn't need that. You needed the three lines, but one of the phone lines, the fax and the in the was used for also the computer. So we'd get them to get a fax motor on their computer, and I used a program called PC anywhere, and I set up computers inside our office, and they would just dial in and remotely control the computer in our office. So that worked through till the late 1990s and yeah, in a way, you're right. That's that's how it started. I just thought, let's leave Jim alone. Let him do his thing, and as much of these times possible, do it in that work. It
Blythe Brumleve:
7:55
sounds like with your business travel agency that a lot of those skills that you learned there kind of apply to freight. Am I off base in that thinking?
Mitch Helten:
8:05
No, that's true a lot of the things. And I found this as in business and as an entrepreneur, when you're creating something new, because that's often what ends up happening. You're creating a new model or a new system or a new way of doing things, and those are the things that are most successful, especially when you're doing something that's a need. You know, people need this. There's a problem, and always coming up against it. If you can solve for that, you know, you're you're on the right track. And so yes, my experiences in the airlines I was I worked in when I just got out of high school, I worked in the the aircraft maintenance side of things, but it's the parts department stores, they called it. So if an aircraft was down, I had to arrange to get the park in if I was on the night shift, and even hire a lujette or something to get the park over to where it needed to go. And then so I learned a little bit about inventory, warehousing, receivables, shipping. That's exactly
Blythe Brumleve:
9:17
where I was going to go after, after you mentioned that, I was like, Oh, wow. So you really know that side of it, too.
Mitch Helten:
9:21
So I learned a little bit about that, and a lot of customs, you know, paperwork and that sort of thing. And then I worked in the airlines, also as a baggage handler for a short while, and then I quit all that, and I my uncle was opening up a travel agency, and he's the guy that, you know, we had a reservation system. I went down to Dallas and learned to save her reservation system down there. And he's the guy that taught me how to sell because we were doing cold calls, and we're going. We're doing business travel. So we'd go and see we call them up, and we had our spiel. We had to make sure it fit on the back of a business card. Couldn't be talking too much. You had to listen. So we just call for appointments and we go see the people, and we'd say, we can book, you know, we can do this. We had all these things we could do for them to make it much easier to book their travel. And we ended up doing a million dollars the first year we opened the travel agency in sales, which was pretty good for the travel agency that back then, and the city we were in had 26 other travel agencies as well. So that was pretty good thing that we did, and the commissions were shrinking back. Then the airline were cutting back commissions percentages. So I stayed with that till I thought, I'm going to get back into running my own business. So that's where, you know, we got back into the freight brokerage at that point. And
Blythe Brumleve:
11:01
so you probably noticed the commission splits dwindling in this industry. It forced you to change careers, and it was probably one of the, I guess, maybe the lessons that you learned of keeping valuable employees or keeping valuable agents on your staff by not dwindling their commission structure. No, in fact,
Mitch Helten:
11:22
we've increased it over the years. We started out, I thought the fair way to go, you know, at first I thought this was totally in a vacuum. This is all came up in my head, yeah, because
Blythe Brumleve:
11:36
freight agents didn't exist until, you know, you were really one of the first people to create it?
Mitch Helten:
11:41
Well, there was American back haulers was but it was more of an employee model, and they were all in one big bullpen, right? But as far as the networking with agents, connecting on computer and using a system like that, I think we were one of the first, wow, if not, the first, to do that.
Blythe Brumleve:
12:06
And so you mentioned with the with the agent model, that that working with Jim was one of those sort of catalysts that said you wanted to get more employees like that, or more, you know, contractors that that worked like that. What were some of those early days of did you use your cold calling expertise to start recruiting some of those first agents for SPI
Mitch Helten:
12:30
Yes, and believe it or not, advertising in newspapers?
Blythe Brumleve:
12:35
Oh, wow, interesting.
Mitch Helten:
12:37
Yeah, tell me more about that. Well, so there's upbound, that's the cold calls, but we also tried some inbound marketing and and so, you know, I get people contact us. There was no email back then, so you get a phone call. And so I was the person that was record recruiter as well. So I pretty well did all the jobs in SPI over the years as we graded them. And our first guy that called up was a fellow in Portland, Oregon. Actually, Jim Parker was a name, and he was moving big telephone cable reels all around. And he he joined us. I did a business plan and and projections for 1992 to 96 and I grew us from, you know, showed growing us from, I think we were doing around 1 million at that point, the end of 91 that year, I had us growing from that to 7.8 million. And by the end of 96 we actually needed 7.7 and on the profit side, I was a I was 100,000 off on the overall, you know, gross sales. And I was 100 1000 more on our profit. I like to be conservative in our cost of things, right, really over. So that was pretty good to have a projection that worked out that close four year projection. And so Jim joined us, and and that was the first guy, and then we had others join us. And I think by 96 we had eight or nine agency working with us all working from either their home. Most of well, pretty well, most of them were working from home at that point.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:46
So very early on in the agent model, one of the first to do it, very early on with working from home, very early on with your own sort of, you know, custom built CMS, system and processes. I'm curious as to. What were some of those early challenges that you knew you had to address as you started to scale up?
Mitch Helten:
15:08
Well, remembering the difference between profit and cash. So we would, you know, the shippers, the customers would pay. And you want to keep them the receivables nice and tight. But you know, sometimes, especially at certain times of the year, like going into January, they slow down. But your carriers want to be paid. And to keep your carriers with you, you want to pay them fast. So, you know, today we pay a carrier as soon as that they're delivered, they can get paid if they want to. So back then, we were doing the same thing. So I found that we had to get some financing in place so that we could, as we grew, we could maintain our payments to the carriers as long as the the receivables were, were there to support it and coming in. And then you have to watch your costs. Now, the nice thing about freight brokerage operation, especially the the agencies, and that is, you know, it's quite scalable. So you know, any, any freight broker needs to keep their hard costs to a minimum, and so, in fact, that's one of the reasons why we've leased offices instead of purchase them, and because you can scale up and down. So we've been through a number of downturns. You know, 2008 was a big one. At that point, we're at about 60 million in that year, going into 2008 by 2009 six months later, we had gone down to about 38 million. Oh, wow. And there was a little bit of so slow growth from 2001 to two, you know, 2004 we we'd made it by 2000 we were around 25 million in sales, and we had, by that point, probably 13 or 14 agents working with us and I, we had developed a new software system in in 97 I could see the writing on the wall. They were talking about Y, 2k, I remember hearing about that. Yes, there are a lot of software database systems that were going to die because the date was going to go back to 1900 so we we had to rebuild so the system, I hired a software company under our design and my instructions to develop a new system. And we launched that in December 1, in 19 nine, a month before, why UK?
Blythe Brumleve:
18:11
How about you were sweating
Mitch Helten:
18:13
Well, we, we had to do it. I had all the operation side of things working. We could book the freight. We could handle all of that, and we kept all our agents going, but we still hadn't finished the accounting back. So we started with that, and we quickly got that going, going into January. So that system, I took that, and I thought, you know, this really works? Well, we had a meeting. My by that point we, there were three of us that that were this, and we had a meeting. And the the one guy wanted to say, we're spending too much money. We got why the.com crash was starting. We got a drop. We had an on, on in house developer. He said, We gotta drop, you know, cut costs, so we gotta stop working on the software. And, you know, we got what we need. I said to them, software's never done.
Blythe Brumleve:
19:25
Ain't that the truth? What
Mitch Helten:
19:27
if I find another project to help pay for our developers? So what I did is I went out to a friend who had a trucking operation, and they paid their carriers by a commission on the on what, how they that's how they got paid, instead of by the miles. And I said to the manager there, who was a friend of mine, hey, I gave you a system back in 1994 Would you like a new system? She said, Sure. So they looked at it, and I managed to get some money to pay to. Cut our the costs in half on the developer. And then I took that idea and I started a company called tailwind transportation software for that. And that was 2002 and we sold that in it was a client, server based system where you had the company, and we built it for carriers to start with, then carriers and brokers, but it was a system that was client server based, so you had to install your own server in your office and work within your network, but it would also work remotely, just with the Internet. So because that was the system all our agents were using, we used to switch with that, and that worked quite well. Then we grew that we converted to a software as a service in 2015 so those first number of years. What's that? 2014 2015 those first 12 or so years, we brought on about 460 trucking companies and freight brokerage companies using the system. And then when we sold it, we convert it. We had converted it from 2014 to 2015 we converted to a software as a service. It's all web based, and successfully did. It was very difficult for all the other TMS systems at the time to go from their legacy client server still is web based, and it still is for many of them, but we managed to do it. It wasn't our first try. It was our like a fourth try, because it was trying to do that. Since 2006 I could see that that would be an opportunity. But we did it. And within that marketing alone, we managed to by 2020, when we sold it to on Vasey technologies, who was two years later, two half years later, bought by wise tech, which is big tech company that has freight forwarder software and now all kinds of software under their belt. So tailwind is now part of Washington, and when we sold it in 2020, we had over 700 companies come on to the the web, a system. So in that short period of time, that was that, that was the we bought on, almost doubled companies in that timeframe. So it's a good, yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:
22:47
I mean, I'm listening to all of the you were really so early on in a lot of these different technological advances that are commonplace to today. Does it sort of blow your mind to see how far logistics has come, as far as technology adoption,
Mitch Helten:
23:06
yeah, there's, there's a lot more coming, really, I think with, well, with AI, there's, there's new things we've adapted to building software has changed a lot from the old ways you did it, writing code today at SPI. You know we were on tailwind. SPI was on tailwind up till 2018 oh, wow. We switched we switched over to rivanova because we could manage and configure more of it. We had outgrown tailwind. Is tailwind was good for middle, middle and medium sized companies, but by that point, we had outgrown tailwind. We've got a really good team, a management team, executive team, well, everybody tell was great, really good support so that we've developed that we invested in that I was working a lot with tailwind through the years, from 22,004 actually through till, you know, 2020 really. So I had hired Joe Chandler to join us back in 2015 and he was, he did an excellent job putting, you know, taking the people that were good to keep, and adding more people to the team. So we invested in that. We invested in technology, and that was one of the switchovers to rev Nova. Now it can't do everything for us. So today, instead of building a software or TMS where it does has to do everything and do all the integrations and. Today, we done something different. We've built an internal data warehouse. It's got its own API. And we take the best of breed of any of the systems that we want, like try and pay for paying carriers revenue for the basic TMS. We have an LTL system we work with. We got different tracking systems we work with for shipment tracking, and there's probably, you're probably aware of all the different things available to freight brokerage companies out there, but we've got at least 25 different systems that are all connected through our central data warehouse, and we built the the tools to be able to connect these different systems together. If they don't talk to each other, we make them talk to each other, but we get this all the data running through our central system, and we've got it so fine tuned to the point where with our internal dev team, where an integration with the complexity, where it took maybe three months to do three years ago, AI, we could do it in a week. So that allows SPI to provide exactly what the freight broker needs, the agent needs. So if it doesn't matter what mode of transport they're used to doing, or what kind of customers they have, what kind of freight they're doing, what, you know, the system that's best designed for that we can provide it to this,
Blythe Brumleve:
26:38
and that's one of the the because we've done, you know, interviews with a lot of the the SPI executive team and a lot of the freight agents. And one of the most popular episodes we've ever done is with as a Peralta who who works in it for for SPI, and he was talking about how that central database is so important because, you know, there could be freight agents that want to use ravinova as a TMS, or want to use another preference for maybe their CRM or some other different technology stack, but they're able to almost plug and play into SPI system, where the onboarding is really quick and they can stay on the programs that they're familiar with, or they have the option to upgrade to a tool like ravinova, or maybe some of these other systems that you guys have with SPI that they have been wanting, that these freight agents have been wanting to try, and so I think that that's such a unique approach that I'm not sure that other freight agencies are tackling. And I think that it sort of speaks to how the company was originally formed. You guys have always been, you know, kind of establishing what the baseline looks like, but then moving the goalpost to where it's, you know, even better and even better. And so I'm curious as to with, you know, over 40 years that SPI has been in business, you know, all of the advancements that you guys have taken. How have you avoided some of the more common entrepreneurial pitfalls of, you know, the the paralysis by analysis or decision fatigue of which way to go? Were there? Were there any times that you were weren't sure about which direction to take?
Mitch Helten:
28:21
I mean, of course, that's, that's happened, but you meet the challenges as they come along, and and, you know, business is really about not really seeing things as problems, but more as challenges, because there's and there's always a solution. So, and I've, I've always been that kind of a person is looking for the solution. So when I see a child, you know, problem, instead of getting focused on the problem, to know, you know, evaluate what the problem is exactly, but really with the facts. If you you look at it, you analyze it, if you can come up with a plan around it or to solve it, then everything's okay. It's not a problem. It's not a problem anymore. It's just a challenge. And now, now you learn something, and it helps to solve other problems.
Blythe Brumleve:
29:24
Do you think the, I don't want to say the Pro or the challenges that freight agents face today are drastically different from, you know, 10 years ago? Or do you think it's, you know, it's kind of about the same? It's, it's all solving problems.
Mitch Helten:
29:41
It is solving problems. They're solving problems for their their clients, you know, the shippers they work for. They're they're solving problems even when they're working in the partnering up with, you know, carrier, carrier partner who's is trying to to serve the broker. Get the. Thing done, and they're working together, so solving problems, you know, every hour, every day of the week, as far as the business side of things for freight brokerage companies, yeah, I think it is a little more challenging today, because there's a lot more coming at us. There's there's all this new shiny tech coming out. You know, AI is the thing and and there's AI that helps you with your emails and AI helps you with your phone calls. But you know which one, it kind of reminds me of the.com era, where there's all this new software coming out, and it was the greatest, latest, best thing, and new shiny object to look at. So there's those are challenges just making the right choice. And I think my experience with building or designing, I'm not a coder. Oh, how to code software, but I just know how it's supposed to work. I'm I'm good with systems and processes and, and that sort of thing, and, and I could tell when, you know, when there was a problem, where it was a people problem, you know, or this is not really, they're they're frustrated and they're at each other's throats, but this is really a system problem we gotta solve here so but for freight brokers today, then, compared to 10 years ago, there's, there's more choice. There's more to choose from. There are tons of TMS systems on the market now that weren't there before. Many of them, you know, young, new systems. So they, they, they've got they've got to mature, because there's so much more to designing a software, TMS system. There's so many different things that go on you have to account for, and we were lucky enough to have that when we started tailwind, from the experience of SPI so we were able to make an interface that was straightforward, simple, not too many clicks, not too many pages and all that, and get your job done fast. The challenges today are that the costs of, for example, load boards is escalated exponentially. Especially in the last five, five or six years. And I just see some of the, you know, these, these bigger load boards not keeping up with technology. Because technology today isn't the latest stuff that you had. It's it's now getting all these little apps and programs working together, and the whole industry is changing. The connection, the communication is changing. You know, you're now having direct connections with the driver. And can you know the the visibility on where they are, and being able to post out what loads or freight you have available is changing so it's and being able to see what's coming and seeing how that will apply around the corner is very difficult. So I think today, for a standalone freight brokerage, it's, it's, it's a difficult thing because your your technology costs have escalated. Getting the right system like you can spend a ton of the technology, but if you got the wrong system for your business, it's, it's, it doesn't help. It creates big problems.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:45
How do you know if you've chosen the the right technology, technology partner, or even just business partner? Because I'm of the opinion that, and this is slightly related, but I'm of the opinion that becoming a freight agent is one of the best pathways for entrepreneurial growth in all of logistics. But is it right for everyone, considering the technological investment that you have to make, considering, you know, maybe the brokerage that you have to work for to build up your book of business? How important are all of these things, and is it, is it ever the wrong decision to become a freight agent? Or maybe, what makes it the right decision for someone to become a freight agent? Well,
Mitch Helten:
34:34
all I can no do is look at the past experience and statistics compared to standalone freight brokers that we saw from the data from Tia freight brokers that do 16 million and under which is the vast majority of them so. Out there as standalone freight brokers compared to SPI agencies, our agencies do 40 to 50% better in sales and profit than the standalones, and I think there's some good reasons for that. We we work with best practice practices. We're continuously improving. We're investing the big bucks into technology, and of course, we're going to also get the most efficiency out of it. So we're going to, you know, we've got that experience to to pick the right things and apply the the the best for our agents and the you know, remember that thing about spending 70 or 80% of your time once you if Your standalone is administrative, the back office, then you know, what's that costing you, versus getting, you know, 30% or 70% right? SPI at 30% as far as if your margins are there and everything that's that's what you're going to get, and we do go up to 75% if the if their margins are good and strong and the volumes are so for that, we've seen a lot of our we've actually had offices that have converted from their standalone freight brokerage company to become an agency attached to the SPI logistics network, and they've thrived. I'm very proud to say many of our agents offices, this the even the standalone one person offices, earn more money than I do a year.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:02
That's awesome. You don't really hear that a lot in business in general.
Mitch Helten:
37:07
I just, I it's just, well, I'm proud to say that. I like to say that.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:13
Well, I think you bring up a good point, because for a lot of entrepreneurs, and I can, you know, speak this far from my own business, sometimes just having the help is such a mental release that it allows you to be able to focus, or have the energy and the bandwidth to focus on the things that you're really good at, communicating with your customers, talking to them, building those relationships. You can't really scale that, but you could probably scale, you know, some transcription services, or, you know, email overload and things like that, is, is that maybe a safe assumption that you know, well, not a safe assumption. I think it's a fact that you guys are, you know, providing this level of help to folks who started off, you know, wanting to do everything themselves, but then started to realize there is power in delegation,
Mitch Helten:
38:06
yes, and it's, it's, it's, you know, the services that we do for them, but we also provide, you know, the best of technology. We also try to provide the best service, you know, half of the staff we have here at the head office is just for supporting agents, so we're available to help them. And then there's the the financial support. In other words, you know, we're heading like the agencies get paid weekly. And they get paid after the job is done. As soon as the thing is delivered, it's counted. So the very next week, we get money, get paid for that. So there's the cash flow thing, there's the risk. You know, how many clients, if you're a standalone agency, you got to do the credit on your customers. And I learned back early on. You know, credit risk on your customers is the thing that will kill you if you don't manage your so we do all the checks up front. We take care of the credit approvals for all the agency offices, and that protects them, that reduces their risk. And we take care of the carriers paying the carriers. We deal with claims. You know you have a claim come up, or you have something that happens as an agent, if you have something that happens that you have never dealt with before. We've dealt with it. You know, we've got over 60,000 carriers as a resource in their database that we work with at one time or another. These are not just carriers. We brought them on because they work for us and so also in. Help in dealing with situations with carriers and and all of that, to make sure that they can service their their clients, the shipper clients the best, and they do because it's their own business. They're they're not going to hesitate to pick up a call from their client on Saturday night at midnight, because there's a problem. And you're not going to necessarily get that with a lot of employee based logistics companies, yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:
40:32
that the agents genuinely care about their relationships with their customers, because they know it's, it's, it's very much you can't eat if you don't kill and not to, you know, say you're going to kill your customers or anything. But it's one of those things where, if you lose a customer, especially as an agent that could make or break you,
Mitch Helten:
40:52
yeah, well, kill the problem. Yeah, solve the problem
Blythe Brumleve:
40:57
that you know. That's been a resounding, you know, sort of lesson throughout this, and when I was reading through our pre show document, you had mentioned the importance of goal setting. And I'm curious as to, what are the or the differences in goals, if you are sort of a newer agent versus a more established agent, are the goals kind of the same, or are they different?
Mitch Helten:
41:24
They change over time. But it's really, really important for you to have start with a vision, what you want to do, and and then set a goal for what it looks like. And by when, now, you know, people think, Oh, we got to reach that goal by that date. But the fact, the most important thing about goal is it sets action, sets motion. You know, your actions and a path direction. So quite honestly, if you're shooting for the stars, you probably going to get to the moon, right? So if you set a goal, you're actually going to start stepping forward. And if you you know you mentioned that analysis per paralysis, if, if you're just sitting there, okay, now, how do I get there and figure out the strategy? And you spend all your time figuring out strategy. You're frozen. You're not moving. So, you know that's in the beginning. That's the biggest thing. Is to set a goal. So if your goal is, you know, if you if you don't like where you're at right now, then say goal to will make the difference, at least it gets you moving and the action so for you know, I've seen over the years for independent one person freight brokerage, They've got to set those targets and their goals, and they're going to be at a certain level. You at a certain point, you hit a ceiling, and you know, we can help increase that the height of that ceiling with the services and support we give you know best practices and how to sell and best practices and Operations and Technology and the new system, the new things on you know that are coming out and managing your clients, as far as the cash and and all of that. But then there's the we can provide some support in maybe your operations, a little bit to help you get to the next level, or finding the right person to come in, and maybe they're doing the delivery and and those Types of, you know, follow ups with the carrier. Then there's the next level, whereas you're actually hiring people and you're growing, and that's probably going to go to three to, you know, four people with you. You start with one and maybe two or three more, and you get to another level. And then your your goals start changing about you know, I can get this, this big customer, and I need staff to do it, then get into being an office that's that's doing 1020, 30 million a year, and you've got a you've got a team with you inside your office, and they're all operations people, or a sales rep, awesome operations people. And so it allows you to dream when you can see a path to to getting to that first goal. And. Next one and the next one, and it allows you to visualize bigger things.
Blythe Brumleve:
45:05
And I think, too, it leads to failing faster, because there's no greater lesson than when you lose money. And when you lose money, you get better. And I think when you're setting goals, that sometimes you know it's you have to see the forest for the trees. And just because you know a couple of those trees didn't work out and aren't still living, doesn't mean that the rest of the forest is bad. And so I think, as if I'm reading between the lines of what you're saying is, is set the goals, set the action plan to get there, and your goals might be different than somebody who's been doing this for 15 years. But it doesn't mean it's not worth doing, putting in the effort and putting in the
Mitch Helten:
45:48
work. It's just as important. It's just as valuable too, and it's, it's there after that. You know what you thought in your head? Software's like that. Oh, we can build this in six months, no yet, but you're brave as you can I'm
Blythe Brumleve:
46:06
currently going through that right now with the project I thought was going to launch in August, and here we are.
Mitch Helten:
46:11
Yeah, so it's exactly not doing that in another business where I thought we up and running last March, and we're just doing it this one. But yeah, it's, it's trial and error. It's just the important thing is, the action is making those steps forward and heading down a path. Maybe you're gonna hit a tree. You'll figure out a way around it, you know, yes,
Blythe Brumleve:
46:37
maybe not. Maybe don't focus on that forest for the trees. Maybe go around that forest if you're skiing. All right now, now, Mitch, we've talked a lot about sort of the evolution of freight brokerage, freight agents, the technology that supports them both. I'm curious as to what sort of the market looks like in your eyes, as we you know, head into 2025, head into the new year, there it feels like there's much more optimism in the industry. Are you kind of feeling that and seeing that as well?
Mitch Helten:
47:09
Yeah, I would have hoped like I saw everything that happened through 2122 and things peaked, and then 23 everybody had jumped in the marketplace. Then they were failing, and that really brought freight rates down. And I would have thought they would have come back. Many of us did have thought that they would have come back, maybe this year, 2024 they did a little, but not to the extent that we thought. But I think though we're probably finally going to see some more improvement in 2025 I think 2025 is going to be a pretty good year and lots of opportunities. The marketplace is changing. I think you're going to see maybe a little more consolidation logistics companies in the marketplace, as far as independent freight brokerages. I think there's bigger, big opportunities for them to maybe join a network, and if they're considering a network, I'd really to check out SPI but you know, we've proven that they do much better. And they're still independent. They're still it's still their business, they're just part of the network, and they've got all of the they don't have to focus on what kind of software to get, or all of this stuff we're gonna we're gonna make sure that they get the best of what's out there and the service as well, especially
Blythe Brumleve:
48:50
because, you know, with the one of the past things that Anita, who is SPI, she's in charge of HR, and you know, more of like the people relationships within the company. And she mentioned on that episode about how, you know, SPI doesn't have to compete as far as or they don't have the agent saturation that maybe some other agent programs might have. And I think that that is one of those very important things as you're thinking about, you know, how are you going to grow in 2025 and I think that that's that's something really strong to consider, is, if you are partnering with a company, are they going to be able to grow with you? Because I think you also said, I had in my notes, that you said in the in the interview with Chris jolly, that yet you have to be careful who your partners are. And so I think that you, you have laid out, you know, all of the really good reasons of why, you know, SPI is a great partner to work with, especially, you know, within the freight industry, and hearing about all of the things that you guys invested in early on, or very new to the game and all of these.
Mitch Helten:
49:55
Yeah, I realized early, early on, and you know, the story now. Know that, you know our mandate is to help our agencies grow. That's it simple as that. We want them to thrive. And that's what we started out the very beginning with Jim.
Blythe Brumleve:
50:18
And that is, I feel like that is the sound clip that I want to start off the show with. That's going to be a sound bite that we clip in and throw it up on social media, because it has the ethos has remained true throughout the, you know, the 40 plus years that SPI has been in business now Mitch is, as we sort of round out this conversation. Is there anything that you think is important to mention that we haven't already talked about,
Mitch Helten:
50:44
well, we're, I think we've talked a lot things you brought up, things from the past, from other other interviews as well. Well, we're continuing to grow. We're, we're looking at ways we can help independent brokerage companies also join the network, and if they're interested, they can contact us. But I think it's good for the whole industry. The more that you know independent people are involved, running, the being that that go to person for in freight brokerage in the industry, they provide a very important role. I mean, when I started, I think freight brokers made up less than 2% of the marketplace, and today, I think it's getting close to 30, or maybe more, I don't know, but, but, you know, freight brokers going to focus off 100% on their client, the shipper, and no matter what kind of freight they're moving or whatever they have, whereas a carrier can focus, the carriers focus even though They they say it's on their customer. The truth is, it's on that truck, and where's that truck? And what, where can I get freight to put on that truck? Because they got to keep it moving full as much as possible. So I think it's good for the whole industry. And there's got to be integrity there and fairness in the marketplace.
Blythe Brumleve:
52:23
I think that that is a perfect place to end this conversation, because I'm going to throw up a bunch of links in the show notes to where folks can listen to your conversation with Chris jolly, where they can listen to our previous conversations with Eze, as I mentioned earlier, and then also to connect with you and SPI, if they're interested in growing their agency or even starting out to become an agent in 2025 can't speak enough good things about SPI and working with you guys and the support that you provide me as just you know, a podcaster, you know, working out in Florida versus you know that what you guys are all doing, you know, sort of north of us and in the United States as well. So I appreciate you. The audience appreciates you, and thank you so much for your time. Jay, well,
Mitch Helten:
53:09
thank you, Blythe, much appreciated
Unknown:
53:11
Absolutely.
Mitch Helten:
53:12
Thank you. Bye.
