Walter Mitchell:
0:05
The most obvious first step would be to start exploring TMS providers that meet the criteria. But I would say the most important step is the step before that of looking at your business and figuring out where your current product is not serving you well enough. Like, what are the objectives of having a new TMS? What do I want to gain by having a new TMS? Why am I going through this process? If a broker comes to us with those criteria in place, we'll tell you whether or not we're a good fit for you or not right away. You know, because then we can take those things be like, All right, we can help here. We're not going to help here. We can help here. We're not going to help here. So understanding what you want to achieve is, for sure, the first step.
Blythe Brumleve:
0:53
Welcome into another episode of everything. It's logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly sponsored by SPI logistic anti software. We've got another great episode for y'all today speaking with the CEO of Tai is software, and that's Walter Mitch Mitchell. We're going to call it a Mitch for the rest of the interview. And you probably know that already if you've listened to any of the previous episodes, because Tai is really great about appearing on a variety of shows and making their own content. And so for this sake of this episode, we are going to be talking about sort of that baseline status quo of freight brokerages in 2024 and how to build and how to grow for 2025 So Mitch, welcome back to the show.
Walter Mitchell:
1:39
Thanks for having me back on the show. I always appreciate it. It's a pleasure talking with you. Blythe, so looking forward to our conversation
Blythe Brumleve:
1:45
today. Absolutely now. Now, before we hit record, we were talking about, you know, sort of the entrepreneurial struggle of how to or, you know, not necessarily how to build a business, but dealing with the day to day business, and all of the sort of Whack a Mole problems that come up that you got to kind of solve and put out those fires every day. Give us a sense of what Thai software looks like today. What is, sort of the company size, the, you know, the team size, where are y'all all located? Because I don't know that we've ever really set that status quo. Yeah, that's
Walter Mitchell:
2:19
a great question. So Tai software was we rebranded right during COVID, and that's where we became Tai and really started growing the business and in the way we have been over the last few years. So it's been about four and a half years that we've been really out making sure everybody knows who Tai is. Our product's a little more than 10 years old, and continues to evolve as well. But over the last four years, since we came out of kind of COVID time frame, we built a remote first company. So we are at about 65 employees. Build up the Thai team. We got some really cool people on the team, and we're really fortunate to have such a great team. But we also have a very diverse team. We have people in three countries. We count Canada as a separate country up there, but we only have one person on Team Canada, so but we're still counting it. And then I think we have employees in 17 states today, so we have team members all over and it's kind of a change that's was really hard for me to take on because I prior to COVID, I was definitely the in office guy. You had to be in the office like I didn't want any remote workforce. And now today, the entire team is remote, so it's weird and different. But one of the things that we've learned about being remote is you can take if you're going to have a remote team, you have to take advantage of it. And so we hire people with brokerage experience. And if I was to try to hire people local with that brokerage experience, it would be difficult, but being that we're looking nationally and hiring people all over the US, we can find some really talented people that really specialize in what we're doing, and so So technically, we're all remote, but we do have an office in Southern California. I live in Southern California, and so we do have an office here, and that's where I am. In fact, this picture behind me is in Huntington Beach, California, where our office is, and it's that pier is actually right in front of me, about a quarter mile. So that's a little bit about Tai's size and staff.
Blythe Brumleve:
4:27
Oh, that's awesome. What was the, what was the, I guess the cattle not, maybe not a catalyst, but a moment that, because you mentioned that you weren't necessarily a believer in remote work, but now you've seen the benefits of being able to hire that top talent all across North America? So what was sort of that first moment that you said, Oh, maybe this remote work is actually a good thing. You
Walter Mitchell:
4:53
know, candidly, I was forced into it, right? COVID made us start working remote. And I'm like, Look, we're a technology guy. Is, you know that for our team and we're we understand technology, so let's see if we can do this. And what we did was we just had to change some of our management styles. We had to re adapt some of the things that we did and make sure that we have ways to hold remote people accountable to their daily work and make sure that they have reporting and connectivity. And so there's a lot of chat messages, I think, like just this week, every week in Slack, we send about 15,000 messages amongst our team. That's a lot of messages, but those are how we stay connected, right? Because you can't walk by somebody and say, Oh, hey, how's it going? Blythe, you know that doesn't happen. You can't meet somebody up for lunch. You have to be more active in connecting. And that was one of the things that we learned, is as we started embracing the remote methodology, it works as long as you don't try to manage remote people the same way you manage in person people. You have to lead your team differently, and now we kind of have the opposite problem of even the people who are close enough to come to our California office, they don't very often, because when they come in, they spend their entire day on video calls with the rest of their team who are remote. So it takes away some of the value that they used to see by coming into the office. So it's interesting how that dynamic has changed and, and how we kind of evolve and, and I think it's a sign of kind of progress that we have to think about as business leaders, is things are going to change, and even if we're uncomfortable with them, they're going to change. How
Blythe Brumleve:
6:39
do you deal with maybe some communication overload. You know, if you're in meetings, kind of a lot of the time, 15,000 slack messages. How do you? How do you, how do you get the good work done?
Walter Mitchell:
6:52
Oh, way to go. It's like you're finding all the buttons to push today. That's a good one. This is something that I get a lot of passion around right? And the thing that you hear is, Well, we need good communication, and we need, you know, communicate more. And you often hear where it's more and good are the terms around communication, but it tends to be a little bit more emphasis on more. Communication is better, but it's really not, you know, it's better communication, or thoughtful communication, or pointed communication, are the things that matter. And you see this even with an email to a customer or an email about a shipment, if you put in 200 words about the status of a shipment, that's not good communication. That's more communication, but it's not good because you've actually hurt the recipient of that communication. They have to go through and read all of this information, and all they really wanted is appointment scheduled 2pm today. That's all they wanted, right? That was what they asked. Where's my shipment? Appointment, schedule, 2pm today. Done. You've given them the information they need. They can consume it now. It doesn't mean you can't add a little bit around it, like, Hey, thanks for the shipment. You know, if you have any other shipments, hit me up, but now still, I'm only at 30 words, but I've accomplished all those objectives, and so thoughtful communication is the key to it and a never ending battle too, right? We have to talk about it and think about it all the time. Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:
8:27
and that that is a professional at work, ladies and gentlemen, because that is a perfect segue into shining a light on freight brokerage, communications, and all of the different aspects of running a freight brokerage in 2024 going into 2025 as you know, a lot of companies are maybe thinking about starting up their own business, or maybe have started one of the crazy people that actually started a business in in 2024 which is, you know, good on you if you did, because you'll probably be one of the stronger companies out there in a few years. But what does sort of, I guess, the status quo of a freight brokerage look like today? Is it the massive amount of communications and, you know, software over loan? What does it look like to start a freight brokerage, I guess, in this day and age? Yeah,
Walter Mitchell:
9:17
well, if you're willing to start a freight brokerage in 24 and even to the more seasoned veteran freight brokers who are out there running a freight brokerage in 2024 is a practice and resilience, right? It's showing the important parts of running your business. And the interesting part is when we see all the freight brokers that use our product, and that's one of the advantages, is, over the course of of my career, I've probably seen over 1000 freight brokers operate in their in our TMS, in various stages. It's amazing how much different each company is, but also amazing how you can see because even though, I mean, we're all freight brokers, right? So. You would think there's a lot more commonality than there is, but they're all very different. And it's also interesting to see the difference in how successful some are to others. And I'm not going to pretend like I have a magic wand here, but in 24 we saw a significant number of our brokers using Thai grow and expand their market share, and, you know, not a lot of them increased margin. In 24 a lot of them had a little bit of suppressed margin, but shipment count grew, and that also turned into improved revenue for the year and improved overall margin. And I don't know that there's a magic component that goes to it, but what I do know is you can, you can kind of feel it when a company is looking to be good at what they do. And those guys who you feel like, Oh, these guys really know what they're talking about. They really understand the business. Those are the ones we saw grow. You know? Those are the ones that we saw bringing in new business for the year and being more and more successful,
Blythe Brumleve:
11:02
is it? Is it, when you mentioned the companies that grew, are they growing their existing account base? Are they getting new business, or is it, maybe more efficiently running their their current business?
Walter Mitchell:
11:17
So when they came to growing, we saw both, where some of our customers had brought on new logos, and some of our customers expanded in their current with current customers. However, in both cases, I mean, these are both sales activities that they're doing where right where they have to be proactively going out there and building more business, and looking at both sides and and you bring up a great point, if, if we're looking to build our business, and even at Tai, we do this the same way, there's really two key aspects to building, can I grow with my current customers, and can I go get new customers? And can I keep from, along with grow current customers? Can I keep from losing my current customers, right? And we can look at those two things are very different. We operate differently with them at Thai as well as a software provider, and that a customer that we lose that's terrible, right? We don't want to be losing customers, but growing our current customers and supporting them and being good partners to our customers to enable them to grow, and make them aware of places they can be better, so that they can spend more time out selling and outgrowing their business rather than doing operational tasks. That means ties being a good partner, and we're enabling them to grow, which helps us as well. So all three of those aspects, I think are places that a freight broker, a technology company, a marketing firm, we can all use to be effective in challenging markets and strong ones.
Blythe Brumleve:
12:54
Are you in freight sales with a book of business looking for a new home? Or perhaps you are a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called The freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, it and sales, but I would much rather you hear it directly from spies, freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations. Or if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI3Pl.com so with a lot of I would imagine there's a lot of inefficiency going on in freight brokerage probably, you know, they're no different than, you know, a lot of major companies as well, where they probably have inefficient processes and things like that. But I'm curious if there's, when you say, assisting the freight brokerages or or helping them understand how they can grow, what are some of maybe those things that they could be looking for inside of Tai or inside of their their TMS, of those, those growth opportunities? Because I'm sure a lot of companies are thinking about this right now. They're planning for 2025 so what are those maybe little signals that they should be looking for,
Walter Mitchell:
14:21
yeah, that's a it's also something that's a great right now is a great time to be doing it, because while we're in a challenging market, we probably do have a little bit more free time on our hands than we would in a growing market. So this is the time to be thinking about those processes. But the number one thing I would say that a freight broker should be working on. And again, stuff that we practice in our business is to make sure you're spending that time doing the strategic work, right? It's that Eisenhower box right that we've talked about a lot, where the important urgent and making sure that we take the time to go in and look at. That all right, what can be done better in my business, where do I have inefficiencies and fine tuning each one of those places by just five or 10% when you add up five or six of those, you have a really meaningful change in your freight brokerage. So we go through and in fact, we have a white paper that we produce. It's like the eight steps or eight places you can find efficiencies. I definitely recommend going to check that out. But they talk about things like managing emails. You know, if you can go in part of your processes for a broker and say, Okay, how do I manage my email box more effectively? How do I reduce my emails by that I'm dealing with by 30% that's a huge difference in your day. Yes, use Tai. It's easy, yeah, and it is a joking aside like that is a one of our pieces of functionality that is really valuable is if you receive an email in your mailbox. Tai can look at that email and see that there's an attachment class by the attachment as a pod, figure out what shipment it goes to and automatically attach it for you, and then that email gets archived away so you don't have to deal with that email at all. And that's that's where we can start reducing some of that workload and let you as the broker then go back and say, All right, well, I'm not going to deal with that pod because that's done and I don't really need to be involved in that process. It's pretty trivial. What do I need to be involved in? And the answer to that is, when that customer that we were talking about earlier on, where we instead of sending them 200 words, we sent them 10, we can follow up with them on the phone call at 4pm and say, hey, just making sure that the driver dropped off your freight. Okay, wanted to make sure the appointment went well. Oh, and got any more freight for tomorrow? We get that opportunity to be a little bit more on the sales side, right? We get an opportunity to grow our current customer base, because I'm not spending that three minutes importing that pod
Blythe Brumleve:
17:03
so outside of so for a lot of the inefficiencies, I imagine it's one of those things that you don't know what you don't know. And so for Thai customers, I'm sure that they already recognize, you know, the value in 30% of email reduction, because who doesn't want that say I'm working at a freight brokerage and I don't know that I'm wasting time on email, or maybe I could approve, you know, XYZ process. What are maybe some red flags or some yellow flags that I might need to be looking out for and paying attention to if I'm thinking about making that TMS switch.
Walter Mitchell:
17:42
That's such a good question. I was just talking about this earlier today with one of the teammates on here, and one of the things we were talking about is that we do things that are maybe not very good or ineffective, but we're not doing them wrong on purpose, right? I don't think anyone has gone out and been like, all right, I'm gonna put together this process. It's gonna suck, and it's gonna be super slow and waste everybody's time, right? Like, that's just not the way it works, right? But we end up with those processes. We end up with that, and sometimes we don't even know why. So what I'd recommend in that case is, again, it's where taking a step back from the day to day operations and thinking about like, Okay, where can I improve my business? Where are people spending time and looking at it from a different lens is really helpful. At Tai we have team members who you can call and consult with and and we'll talk to you about your processes. We'll talk to you about what we see in the way that you're using our product, just to kind of influence that conversation and see like, Okay, what should you be doing, or what shouldn't you be doing? And that way you can kind of get some ideas. But at the end of the day, it's up to the broker to really fix and to find out. Like, you know what? Maybe I'm not being very efficient. Talk to us anytime. We love these conversations too, because there's it's so much fun to to explore how to improve businesses and how to help when, especially when somebody wants to help right then? Then it's even so much more exciting and so much more fun.
Blythe Brumleve:
19:27
We, we had an episode drop a little over a month ago, maybe two months ago, that had the CEO of SiO logistics, Ali Shafi, I think this, yeah, think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. Sorry, Ali, if I'm if I'm mispronouncing that, but he said that he regularly, and he's a Thai customer, and so we had more of, like, a, you know, a customer interview with him on how he uses Thai, how he first found out about you guys. And what I thought was really interesting is that he said that he sits in regularly on on tech demos, just so he can try. Stay ahead of the curve. And so when he was shopping for a new TMS that he just sat in on a demo. And then that was one of the bigger reasons why he shortlisted Tai into being where he was going to transition his TMS to. And he said one of the biggest selling points for him was that he could call you personally and just talk to you and figure out what he's doing wrong and things like that. How, I guess for other maybe brokerages that are thinking along the same lines as him, I imagine that you have to go through some of these like trials and tribulations. Is it normal for a freight brokerage to try out a bunch of different TMSs before making the decision. Or do they kind of hone in, like Ali did on on maybe like two or three before making that decision? Yeah.
Walter Mitchell:
20:51
So typically, the discovery process in transitioning to a TMS does involve a good number of of explorations, but the actual transition doesn't happen very frequently, right? So the the actual switch to a TMS is something that it takes some work, right? It requires change management. It's a lot of effort by the whole team to transition. So it doesn't happen as often as it probably should, because we also get a little bit kind of set in our ways, and that, well, I have other things that I got to work on. Is transitioning my TMS really something I want to deal with. The answer that has to come from the same thing that Ali was saying, is that, how much more value am I going to get out of this is the change that I'm going to go through and the work I'm going to put into for the next two to three months worth the longer term payoff. And usually the answer that ends up being Yes, as long as you pick the right TMS, because putting in that extra work up front will pay dividends, as long as you start implementing it the right way. But something else that Ali does that's really cool is he still looks around, and he's still exploring the market, and he's still checking out new technologies, and he'll ping me with these ideas like, Hey, can I do this? Or what do you think about that? Or how about this? And that exploration and that thoughtfulness of, how can I keep progressing? Is this worth my time, or is this a little bit challenging and and that that idea that I want to keep trying things is what will help him continue to build a to continue to build on the great company he already has today. It is continuing to evolve and continuing to learn new things.
Blythe Brumleve:
22:38
Yeah, I think that that's super interesting and also great for you to be able to have, you know, somebody who's in that role exploring those different tools. And then you can kind of pick his brain a little bit on, you know, what features to add to your own roadmap, which I know, Ali specifically said that he hates the word roadmap, so apologize to him if he if he hears that, that I could think of another phrase to use it in that regard. I think it's embedded in my brain for after that conversation. Yeah, because roadmap
Walter Mitchell:
23:04
just means you don't get it today, right? But yeah, as a technology provider, it is one of the interesting components. I don't move freight and I'm not a freight broker. I have to rely on my customers who are using it every day. And so when we lean in on somebody like Ali and say, Okay, well, you were talking about implementing this, you know, going back to email, the email functionality to pull documents in, how's that working for you today, and analyzing customer usage, and then taking, what we try to do is take the feedback from Ali and others to say, Okay, well, this is how it's working. What you tell us about it, and then we use that with the analytics of what has actually happened in the system. And combine those two things together, we can continue to elevate and build an even better product and make sure that the product is delivering at the highest level. For a freight broker,
Blythe Brumleve:
24:00
brokering success demands a battle ready strategy. Tai TMS equips freight brokers with the ultimate battle station for conquering a tough market. With Tai, brokers gain access to a comprehensive platform where rate intelligence and quote history converge on a single screen. It's not just a page, it's a strategic command center designed to help brokers win. Thai equips your team with all of the data they need to negotiate with confidence and allows them to communicate directly with carriers and customers from a simple control base, revolutionize the way your brokers perform by giving them a competitive advantage with Thai TMS. For more info, go to Taisoftware.com backslash battle stations, and we also have a link for you in the show notes to sign up for a demo. Do you have a favorite feature of Tai that you guys have added into the platform based on a customer recommendation?
Walter Mitchell:
24:55
That's a tough question, because literally, every single thing in the product is built. It's off customer recommendation. Oh, true.
Blythe Brumleve:
25:02
That's great.
Walter Mitchell:
25:04
The it's all of it, but the the one of the things that pages that we're the most proud of is we call it our truckload quoting page, and it's a spot quoting page for, I mean, any truckload shipment or anything that needs spot quoting, but it incorporates all of the information that a freight broker needs in one place. It includes historical data, it includes customer data, it includes pricing from partners, like green screens. It incorporates the load boards, the digital freight matching. All of this comes in together so you can see the entire process without having to move in and out to different pages and and it just gives you a holistic view of, how am I going to quote the shipment? How am I going to do the best to win? So that's one of our favorite pages in the system, and we continually involve it and continue to grow it all the time. In fact, I think there's more updates coming for it this month as well. So
Blythe Brumleve:
26:03
don't say roadmap, because Ali now for maybe for other CEOs like that are maybe in a similar position to ally, and they're thinking about shopping TMS providers and looking at at new solutions. What would you suggest as being one of the first few steps that they should take? Yeah,
Walter Mitchell:
26:27
the first one of the first steps that I mean, the most obvious first step would be to start exploring TMS providers that meet the criteria. But I would say the most important step is the step before that of looking at your business and figuring out where your current product is not serving you well enough. Like, what are the objectives of having a new TMS? What do I want to gain by having a new TMS? Why am I going through this process? If a broker comes to us with those criteria in place, we'll tell you whether or not we're a good fit for you or not right away, you know, because then we can take those things and be like, All right, we can help here. We're not going to help here. We can help here. We're not going to help here. So understanding what you want to achieve is, for sure, the first step. Now, if you don't know what you want to achieve, you can also call us, and we'll help you identify some of the things that you can achieve, you know, as well, and then you can help build up that list of, why am I doing this, or what's the value of switching to a new product?
Blythe Brumleve:
27:31
So say I am already a tight customer, and this is, you know, the time of the year that everybody's doing their budgets and everybody's planning strategically for 2025 What do you think are maybe some of the the lesser known items that somebody should think about when it comes to planning the strategy for the next year?
Walter Mitchell:
27:52
Yeah, so in 25 I mean, I'm really hoping that we are walking out of this freight recession. You know, I'm optimistic. I don't know that I have a crystal ball, but I'm optimistic. I want to see us coming out the other side. So what I think's going to be coming around in 25 from a technology point of view, is we're going to continue, and Thai customers already do this a lot, but we're going to continue to focus on the operations people. And when I say operations, I mean both accounting ops and freight ops, but continuing to focus on what job are they doing every day. How are they doing their job? And how can we make their job even better? So when we're looking at Thai customers, places that they should be thinking about is, where am I taking advantage of afraid automation? Where am I taking advantage of streamlining my communication with customers? Where am I taking advantage of custom workflows that a specific customer might need, bringing all those together to help dial in those efficiencies in different places and and make sure that the TMS is bringing you value every day. So that was a little general of an of an answer, because it really depends on each broker, on to where those dials are. But again, like reaching out to us and talking about some of the places where maybe I have challenges, what can be done here? Is this a problem that I need to solve from a business where I need to change some process, or is it something where the technology isn't serving me the well? Or is it both? And often, the answer is both, where you can change something in the technology, but also change a little bit of your process and take exponentially higher gains from it.
Blythe Brumleve:
29:44
Now, when I think we had Sean McGillicuddy, who also works at Thai, on a previous episode, and he was talking about the things that are involved when you're migrating to a new TMS, so what I thought was really interesting is that he said, I believe that you guys only use. Is the previous year's data from a freight brokerage, because it's probably the most reliable, the most indicative of the current market conditions, things like that. I'm curious as to what happens after the migration is over. You know, you've completed your onboarding. You know, what does I guess, regular communication with tide look like after you you've completed the migration and onboarding process.
Walter Mitchell:
30:25
Yeah. So at Tai, we want to be partners with our freight brokers, right? We want to be your technology partner, and that's important to us, because what we find is, when you're talking about like email, for example, we're probably, most of us, using some variation of Gmail or Outlook or office, you know, office 365 I think is the right name for it. We're probably using some really large vendor there, and that's fine. They do their job, okay, but then your TMS is really kind of the foundational component of the technology infrastructure for your freight brokerage, and we recognize how important that can be for a business. So we want to make sure that we're here to support you and make sure that we're your technology advocate. Because also, what we know is a lot of freight brokers aren't the greatest with technology, right? You want they want to be focused on moving freight. They want to be focused on customer relationships, care relationships, but technology is kind of a secondary thing, and we want to be that trusted advisor. You know, that place where you can call up and be like, hey, what do you recommend? How should I be doing this differently? And so we do that in a bunch of different ways. One, you can connect with us via chat right in the application. Second, you can email us. Third, you can call us, but then fourth, we also do business reviews with you, and that's where we the conversation switches the other way, where we want to be asking our brokers like, what's important to you over the next three to six months. How do you how do you plan on growing your business and hear what they have to say, so that we can offer suggestions as to, Oh, great. So you're planning on bringing on this new customer that does manage trans? Do you know how managed trans works in Thai? Have you done that before? Is this new territory for you? Or maybe you say like, Oh, I've been trying to get LTL rates with Saya, and I'm not going to pick on Si, sorry. Let's I'm trying to get LTL rates with some carrier, and I don't have any reason to pick them, by the way, wasn't met, but I've tried to pick some LTL rates with some carrier. I need to go out and get them, but I'm having a hard time getting these rates. What do I do, you know? And so that's a challenge, you know. And let us offer some suggestions, like, oh, you know, we know some ways that you may that we've seen other people solve this and and offer that consultative kind of interaction where it's really just, we want to listen to our customers, and then also, that's where a lot of our roadmap comes from. And I just got roadmap in there for you. Is during those listening sessions, we're like, oh, okay, this is something our customers are bringing up frequently, and we can use that to help guide the next things that we work on.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:12
And you also have a user conference as well. How? How did the, I guess, the first user conference come about? And I imagine that's probably where you get more things for, you know, drink every time we say roadmap. But, you know, imagine that's where you're getting a lot of Feature Ideas too. Is maybe from those users coming together, from different companies, kind of collaborating with different ideas, where it's, you know, it's the rising tide lifts all sales kind of mindset, yep. Yeah.
Walter Mitchell:
33:39
That's a fun story, actually, is that the user conferences have started out where I wasn't sure what it would look like to bring a bunch of competitors together and say, like, hey, let's talk about how your business runs. That felt like an awkward thing to do. But then a few of our customers called and said, Hey, I just wanted to let you know there's about six of us that are going to meet up and we're going to talk about your software, and we'd love it if you showed up too. And we're like, that's weird. And there's still customers, all of them, by the way, they were like, That's kind of weird. Like, how about I mean, we love that idea. Can we just host it? And they're like, yeah, that'd be even better. So that ended up being our first user conferences. It was arranged by our customers more than us, and I think it ended up with about 20 people in a room for a couple days, and we talked about the good things and the bad things in the product, and we talked about how we can make it better, how they're using it. And then the really cool part about it is more of the conversation ended up being between the brokers who were competitors, talking about how they use the system differently, rather. Then just Tai saying, like, this is what we do. And that was really cool. It was super inspiring to see these guys working together and helping each other, even though they have no vested interest in it, and telling each other how to use our product in ways that maybe we hadn't even really considered. But we got a ton of great feedback from it too, and helped us plan for how we want to improve the product moving forward. And then, since then, it's evolved. And in a few months ago, we did a user conference with just over 200 people. I want to say it was, I don't know exactly how many, but a little over 200 people that were all different kinds of freight brokers. And the it's changed a lot, but it's really cool to see and get all these people together to help share ideas, talk with partners. We had, I think, 16 vendor partners that were there to help talk about their products as well and how those products work. With Tai, really cool to share all that information. And it's exciting to see how hungry our customers are to to get that information and to learn about what they can be doing to improve the way they're using our product and the way they're running their businesses. So we can we look forward to continuing to grow that and and share all that collaboration.
Blythe Brumleve:
36:18
Do you have? You know you mentioned all of the vendor partners that came to the conference as well. And from the what I always love about tie is the fact that you have so many integrations and that it can really help, you know, almost like give your TMS steroids in a good way. And so I guess steroids,
Walter Mitchell:
36:40
I'm good with this or
Blythe Brumleve:
36:43
something. And so when you are thinking about, you know, what would make for a good partner, a good vendor partner, is it companies that already you kind of have a relationship with? Or is it suggestions from the users of what you know, what kind of tech partner that they want to see integrated next. Or do you kind of have a we'll work with any one kind of mindset,
Walter Mitchell:
37:07
yes, yes and yes, it's a it's a challenging component too, because there are a lot of partners out there and there's a lot of vendors out there providing additional technology services that add a lot of value to freight brokers. So it's difficult. We can't say yes to all of them, and that becomes a little bit of a challenge. So our customers do drive that. If we see that a lot of customers, or more customers, are asking for an integration, then we push forward on that more so than others. But also we pay attention to the market. We we have people that go or we go to all the trade shows and make sure that we're there, and we're familiar with emerging technologies and emerging strategies, because what we know is that you can't run a freight broker with just a TMS. You need more than that. Now not all brokers need all products that are out there, however, payment management tools and factoring tools and freight management tools. These things add a tremendous value to a brokerage if they're integrated properly to a TMS. If they're not integrated well to a TMS, they still can add value, but it's so much harder, and that's something that we know is required for the next generation of TMSs, for our generation of TMSs, that integration to these tools is critical to be in context to the person doing the job every day. And so if you're trying to make these tools separated or not work together with the TMS, you're just fighting against yourself. You're adding friction where you don't need it. And at Thai, we try really hard to make sure that those products are represented really well in the TMS, and represent so that 80% of the time you never have to leave the TMS to get the advantage of the product. Sometimes you do, and that's okay, but most of the time it's right in there ready to go, so that the broker can do their job the best they possibly can without having to fight against their technology.
Blythe Brumleve:
39:08
Yeah? Two of the two of the big, I don't want to say buzzwords, but I guess Top of Mind technology solutions and freight over the last thing, say probably year, year and a half is AI and freight fraud prevention. Yeah, so how does do you see those issues going away next year or in the coming years? Or is it just going to be something that kind of evolves as those two I think I don't want to say incidents, but two factors of book and freight and move and freight in today's logistics world. Do you see those things still playing a role in the coming years,
Walter Mitchell:
39:44
100% and it's You said it right, evolution, right maturity of those products. And we're seeing it a lot, obviously, on on both of those components, on AI and on fraud prevention, where the products available are maturing are overall and. Understanding of how to prevent fraud is maturing, and those products are changing all the time, and so is our integration to those products, you know. And we see some emerging winners coming through that are doing really, really well, like, I think, in the last year and a half, like highways, just been unbelievable, and some of the things that they've done and the way they're messaging it, and and we're really pleased to be good partners with them to see what they're doing, to be a part of that and make sure it's integrated really nicely to the TMS. So that maturity on that side is moving along very nicely. But then also on the AI side, I think that's where we're going to be seeing a tremendous amount of change over the next couple years, but the change will be moving the hype and moving the promise into reality. And so I used an example earlier with our document processor, and we've had that document processor for years. However, the document processor today is built completely differently than it was even a year ago, because we rebuilt it with a lot of the new AI functionality that's available. It's better, it's faster, it's more efficient, it does more. But it's an underlying technology that changed. So our Thai customers went from using an older style document processor to a new document processor that's built on these AI functionalities that make their job even easier and better without even knowing it. And that's where we're going to see AI mature and evolve. Is we're going to see it being used in context to our daily life, in a lot more ways where we don't realize or we're not actively being like, oh, I need to go use AI. It's just going to be AI is here, and AI helped me move this through the flow,
Blythe Brumleve:
41:41
for sure, I think you hit the nail on the head, because I AI is kind of just uses a blanket term on a variety of different functionalities. And, you know, it's the, I guess the fear of AI is going to take my job, or, you know, especially from the trucker perception or the broker perception as well, with a lot of calls getting automated with AI, and you can't tell the difference. And it's kind of shocking at at times of how fast this technology is evolving. So it's really cool to see that you guys are at the forefront of this. And you know, even if you don't necessarily have to make it update to your document processing, that you're still doing that on in the background, and making the tool and the TMS system better for your customers overall.
Walter Mitchell:
42:27
Yeah. On the AI side, I love to mention to the like, it does amazing things, and it's super powerful, but AI is not going to replace jobs, but the people who know how to use AI will replace your job and and also, AI doesn't have intelligence. Ai requires guidance, and if you're smart enough to guide it, then you're the intelligence to help drive the artificial side of it, to drive the automation. And it can be a tremendously powerful tool, and we need to learn how to use it appropriately.
Blythe Brumleve:
43:00
What would be the, I guess, sort of two or three takeaways if you were going to advise a freight brokerage and, you know, Ali's brother or or something, if you were going to advise, you know, any kind of freight broker CEO out there, what would you tell them to focus on, two or three things that will help them grow in 2025
Walter Mitchell:
43:24
I think a couple things that are super important is one, make sure you're taking the time out of your day to look at your business as a whole and be strategic about the way that we're working through the business. And write down those objectives. Write down that strategic plan, and what is my strategy around this? How do I want to scale my business? How do I want to please my customers? How do I want to retain those customers? So I think that would be the first thing, is take the time to look at your business and how it's operating. That would be the first thing number two, this one's going to be a little bit shameless, but I'm going to throw it in there anyway. Don't be afraid to switch your TMS if it's not serving you well, even though it can seem like a daunting task, we're professionals, you know, and the transition team is there to help support a transition. So don't look past short term pain for long term gains. You know, I think that that's something else that I would say. And then third, throwing a little optimism in, let's prepare for an upside next year. Let's make sure that our businesses are ready to grow and that we've got the things we need. So when the freight market does turn, and it will, who knows when, but it will that we're ready to grow with it, and then we're ready to succeed. As things lighten up a little bit.
Blythe Brumleve:
44:47
Well said. All right, Mitch, is there anything else that you think is important to mention that we haven't already talked about
Walter Mitchell:
44:54
we covered a lot of ground today.
Blythe Brumleve:
44:56
Any road map? Possibility? Road Map?
Walter Mitchell:
44:59
Yes. Love talking about roadmap. Well, we're really excited to be part of the show, right? And really excited to that everybody's listening through this as well. And I think that's the key thing that I would say, is a takeaway is we're all building businesses together. And I guess it's kind of what we were talking about at the beginning, is building a company, running a business. It's hard. It's always hard. It was hard yesterday, it'll be hard tomorrow. It's hard today, and but embrace the moment. You know, let's, let's tackle these one brick at a time, and we'll solve these problems one at a time and move on and build great things and do great things, and hopefully have some fun doing it.
Blythe Brumleve:
45:41
Yeah, it's like what Tom Hanks said in, I'm blanking on the movie name, but it's all the girls who play baseball. But he says the hard is what makes it great. So that's the beauty of running. The beauty and the pain of running a business is it is hard, but it can be very, very rewarding. Yeah? So I guess. Well, last couple notes here, where can folks follow you? Maybe sign up for a demo of Tai. You know, all that good stuff.
Walter Mitchell:
46:08
Yeah, you can find us at Tai software.com, that's the best place to find us. I'm also LinkedIn is a great place to follow what we're doing. Join us. Join up Tai, follow me as well. We'd love to communicate with everybody. So always reaching out. We're always available on both LinkedIn and at Thai software.com.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:28
Yes, and you guys put out great content. I don't just say that because you're you're a sponsor of the show, but it legitimately like you're I was checking out the the LinkedIn page earlier, and it's just so much good content out there. So even if you, if you're not a Thai customer yet and you feel like checking them out, head on over to the LinkedIn profile. We'll put a link to it in the show notes, but there's tons of great just free information that's there that can help you run your business. And then when you're ready to make the jump, you can always call up Mitch and we'll help walk you through the process. We'll be here. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This is great.
Walter Mitchell:
47:01
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
Blythe Brumleve:
47:06
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 everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let you 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 coworker's child, a neighbor down the street, or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place, to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast, you can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, 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. You.
