Industrial Insights Podcast
Industrial Insights with Hillary Drake
Episode summary
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Industrial Insights podcast. I have Hillary Drake with me of Aluminum Network. We're learning about APIs and modernizing how you connect your infrastructure with your clients. kind of as everybody is evolving today with AI and just the amount of connections and data.
Full transcript
Justin Smith 00:00
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Industrial Insights podcast. I have Hillary Drake with me of Aluminum Network. We're learning about APIs and modernizing how you connect your infrastructure with your clients. kind of as everybody is evolving today with AI and just the amount of connections and data. It's presenting all sorts of issues for clients and opportunities for modernizing. So Hillary is part of that movement and thankful for you to be here with us today, Hillary. And maybe, yeah, you can give us a little background for people who don't know you yet.
Hillary Drake 00:35
Good morning. Yeah, so my company is called Liminal Network, as you mentioned, and I started Liminal Network because I got so annoyed at how long it was taking for me to integrate with my trucking companies. Before I got into the software space, I was a shipper at Enterprise for 30 years. I worked 20 years, gosh. So I was working with big trucking companies, small trucking companies, a lot of sites, a lot of systems, and the most... Common theme we were experiencing was, where's my order? When am going to get it? I need paperwork. I need this information, especially because we're in the world of drop ships. Every distributor that I know isn't keeping as much inventory as they used to. is. And that means when it's shipping from the manufacturer straight to the customer, in order to get paid, you have to have the paperwork. And we've got to build self-service for that. to give people the same experience that they get from the online retailers they buy from at home. So I ended up not being able to buy what I wanted anywhere in the market and my husband told me either start a company or stop talking about it. So here we are, it's what we do now.
Justin Smith 01:53
Hahaha. Yeah, and I could imagine if your experience went through COVID and inventory and where's my inventory that was only exacerbated. And so you started a few years ago, 2023, if I'm correct on that. So you would have seen it like, I could see why it would be a problem that's so big that you're like, wow, okay, this is pervasive. Like there's a market for it and like I can address it.
Hillary Drake 02:27
Yeah, I might have spent a week in Excel with folks figuring out what we had on the water in March 2020, because we literally had to go in and look at every single shipment, which POs are on it and what part of what POs. But what really got me was actually what we were seeing later. A quarter of our customer contacts were, where's my stuff? And folks that I've talked to since then, a quarter is actually pretty low.
Justin Smith 02:51
Okay.
Hillary Drake 02:56
When we look at the research, from 70-80 % of customers now expect online self-service in the B2B space. And a lot of companies can't provide that at all. Some people don't even have e-commerce period for B2B.
Justin Smith 03:17
You get Marty in the warehouse if you can find him.
Hillary Drake 03:20
Yep, but you can't find him because it's three in the afternoon and he's shipping orders. So tomorrow morning, you'll email him again and then he'll respond with it. And no one wants to end a call with a customer, let me find out and get back to you. That just stinks. So let's build self-service, whether it's for employees or for customers, and get those hours back and actually help customers in that time.
Justin Smith 03:48
Yeah, without a doubt. With the size of people who need this, if you could like give us the lane or the like how you like contextualize the market of like, Hillary's looking for customers who's like the perfect fit for you.
Hillary Drake 04:01
Yeah. So who I'm looking for right now is B2B manufacturers and distributors and logistics companies. Generally speaking, they're going to be revenue 50 million plus, at least two people in customer service. And their product is large enough that it doesn't all ship parcel. So if everything goes with one of the major parcel carriers, that's pretty straightforward to do in-house. It's when you get into, I've got five LTL companies and five truckers and all of these people. I don't want to take the time to really implement and then maintain 10 different APIs for Where's My Stuff? Where we come in as one API that's easy to use.
Justin Smith 04:48
You just described 80 % of my client base, would say, which is where like shipping parcels and ecom like is a growing segment of the industrial real estate world, right? Like as ecommerce, like it gets larger and larger, but of the deals that like most brokers do and the rest of the businesses in the country that are not Amazon or like a fulfilling parcel delivery, like this is what it is. And that's in like the 50,000 square foot buildings or
Hillary Drake 04:56
Mm-hmm.
Justin Smith 05:19
the 200,000 square foot buildings or anything that's like sub 500,000 feet. Like this is the bread and butter of the market for sure.
Hillary Drake 05:27
Absolutely, and those are the companies that I worked for before I started my own thing. Whether it's third party fulfillment or in-house, it's those 50,000, 100,000, up to half a million square foot warehouses that are full of pallets, frankly.
Justin Smith 05:44
Yeah. And the person you usually work with is, of course, like IT is probably like lurking in the shadows or like, but is it the ops guy that's dealing with this problem that has become a pain point that then is like, man, we got to do something about it? Or who would you say you're usually like a finding is responsible for dealing with improvement for this particular issue?
Hillary Drake 06:13
Well, if they have a customer experience person, that is who it is. And if you haven't done a customer journey, yeah, yeah. If you haven't done a customer journey map, just like you would do a value stream map, starting way the heck back at discovery and going all the way to returns, I recommend it to everyone because it reveals so many gaps. think the best slide I ever made in my career
Justin Smith 06:20
This is where you were saying to customer support or more. Yeah.
Hillary Drake 06:42
was a customer journey map where I also plugged in all the systems. So where is everyone interacting? And it was surprising even, I'd been doing it, but I didn't realize where some of those gaps were. But it's interesting, can be custom, for me it can be customer experience, it can also be the CFO, because a lot of what we're doing ultimately can tie back to cash. and we can bring value pretty quickly and frankly we can make collections lives easier too. It might be the ops guy, it might be the IT leader who needs a win. It's fast and easy especially compared to other ways to do this in the market right now. Which is a horrible answer to your question. But basically everyone.
Justin Smith 07:07
Yep. Yeah, and everyone does it different, right? Depending on like your scale and if you're decentralized or decentralized. I love in business school and some of our accounting classes there was like, the CFO just needs to open his drawer and have some tool he can pull out to solve a problem sometimes. And like that always stuck with me of like, they do have a lot of issues a lot on their plate. And like this is one that like,
Hillary Drake 07:31
Yeah, exactly.
Justin Smith 07:56
seems to be like a small pain, big gain when you just think of like over time and like reoccurring and like maybe perhaps a no-brainer isn't so easy to say, like I could totally see how that's just as like once you can evolve that way, like you will continue to benefit.
Hillary Drake 08:15
And it's fun. lot of what we're doing that I really love and that I think really differentiates ourselves is we're building this to plug into the systems they already own. I believe strongly people don't want to go to other websites. It's hard to get people to change their habits and it's less efficient at the same time. So how do we plug this data into the screens that people are already using? And that's the real magic in this that makes it really impactful very quickly. is then users don't have to go look for it, it just shows up for them.
Justin Smith 08:49
Yeah, I want to dig into that before we do though. I've never heard anyone do this customer journey map. So I wouldn't mind if you'd take a few more minutes of like an example of like a one you done, what you learned from it. And I totally get that like walk a mile in their shoes, right? And then you're like, okay. Like I could totally see the conceptually where like a finding room for improvement. Like you're going to find it there.
Hillary Drake 09:12
Yeah, so let's take one of my former employer's satellite industries just because it's fun product, frankly. They are now the largest porta potty manufacturer in the world. So if you are thinking about, hey, I want to start a business. I want to get into that space. You're going to go into what's called discovery. So you're thinking about, I've got options. Who do I want to buy from? So you might start looking on the internet, you might start talking to people you know, you might reach out in your network, do I know anyone who owns one of these service businesses that I can talk to? So that's the first phase, discovery. What do I want to know about this? And that's one of the hardest places for marketing because you don't know who these people are. They're cold at that point. And even there... logistics and operations do play a role because people might be looking at websites like, so when can I get this? How much is it going to cost? How can I get it delivered? Can I get it assembled? All of those pieces feed into, even before the customer has said yes, I'm going to buy, much less made a buying decision. After that, it flows through journey. depending on manufacturer, distributor, whatever, it's Do I have the inventory? Do I need to make the inventory? When will it be available? Okay, then I ship it. What's the experience going with shipping? And then the last piece of the journey map, which is, think, the second hardest after discovery is what happens after it's shipped. Did deliver okay? Are there any returns? Are there any warranty issues? Because realistically, your responsibility to that customer continues at minimum to the end of the warranty. but also you want them to be a repeat customer. You want them to keep building relationships. Absolutely. So that means you need to be continuing to think about how are they interacting with you? How are they learning from you? And how can you help them? Even though the order is shipped, then delivered, then everything is going swimmingly, they might need parts, they might want more product. You have to maintain the relationship.
Justin Smith 11:08
Lifetime customer value, yeah. Yes, okay, I love it. Yeah, it's a... So many places for error or rather other places where like there's just feedback from the customer and areas of improvement that like if you don't map it, you're just not thinking that's an opportunity to like enhance the relationship or like the experience that they have. And then go ahead.
Hillary Drake 11:56
And you might not be thinking about places that your customers do interact with your systems. Like, does your customer interact with inventory? Absolutely. It might be through an ordering page. It might be through customer service. But even if you have a manufacturing system that customers cannot see, they're seeing the outputs from it. So you have to... really think about how all of those systems are talking to each other.
Justin Smith 12:28
Yeah. We real estate folks, just by saying it that way, not technical, right? When it comes to like being slow to adopt technology, like everyone's selling in prop tech, property technology.
Hillary Drake 12:45
What?
Justin Smith 12:45
like always loves this part. so half the audience, would say is like three PLN users and half the audience is like a commercial real estate brokers that know leases and like bricks and sticks. And so you had brought up how your solution like helps layer into the screens and the systems that people are already using. And so for people that aren't as technical, like maybe you can open that up a little bit as to like how that works. totally get like the benefit of why it works and then to some degree I had talked with Michael of Lowly who helps with pick optimization so like for travel paths and like it's a layer in someone's WMS that like you don't have to change your WMS in order to optimize your pick paths and like there's a lot of efficiency there and that's his business it's a not too dissimilar but just another part of that journey. And so I've had a little like introduction to that but I don't see that on the daily because I see where the systems go and that like there's enough space for enough inventory and for all the dimensions for the truck court for Dock doors for loading unloading for trailer storage and so I see all like the physical what I don't see is all the bits and the data and the systems that connect it so I'm always fascinated to learn more about that and that's probably gives people more insight into the systems that people are using and how you can make improvements like you do.
Hillary Drake 14:21
Well, and it's funny you say 3PLs. I know 3PLs who've lost deals because of these integrations, because they were too slow, because they couldn't get these things done fast enough, because frankly, we're still using 40-year-old tech in a lot of cases. I think the simplest example is probably something we've all done. When you get a package from Amazon, there's a picture in your email. And personally, I love it because that tells me, did they leave it at the front door? Did they leave it at the garage?
Justin Smith 14:35
Yeah.
Hillary Drake 14:50
Did they leave it at my neighbor's door, which they're...
Justin Smith 14:53
My door's not red. Yeah.
Hillary Drake 14:56
My door's green. The one on that side is blue. The one on that side is red. It's very handy. But at the end of the day, we all expect that. And what our integrations can do is create that experience into the websites, the systems you're already using. Because chances are most of the delivery companies you're working with have some kind of data that might be.
Justin Smith 14:59
Yeah.
Hillary Drake 15:24
the piece of paper that the customer signed, might be pictures. For some of them that have tablets, it might just be a digital signature. But what our APIs do is get that information back into the systems you already have. We have one customer who's a trucking company. They have a customer that makes windows down south, and they are very attached to their orders. They need to know everything has gone perfectly. and they were calling the trucking company within five minutes of delivery. They could see it had delivered. Is it okay? Is everything good? Now they can see that paperwork signed clear as soon as the delivery status updates. And it gives the customer that reassurance. If something does go wrong, it lets them address it proactively. There's nothing worse than getting a call from an angry customer about a problem you didn't know was happening.
Justin Smith 16:20
Yeah, that, that, let me get back to you. Yeah, I could see with B2B too, like the values are higher, the volumes are higher, and maybe the ramifications of each delay or problem are larger.
Hillary Drake 16:36
Yes, I've done a lot of job site work over the years and when you've got a crew waiting for this delivery, that is frustration and it's money. I I haven't shut down a production line since very early in my career. Actually, I came close. I didn't actually shut it down, but it was within a couple hours. And that's the kind of thing that we all want to be able to plan for better.
Justin Smith 16:57
That's good. Yes. Yes, smoothing out all the opportunities for disruption along the chain. And then delve more into tying into everybody's systems. This means you have a partner who is your technical wonk, if you will. Or how did you go from a
Hillary Drake 17:25
Yes
Justin Smith 17:31
just an industry player and like a participant to like, all right, let's create a technical solution that like knows what every system is and like compare with it.
Hillary Drake 17:43
Well, some of it I cheated a little bit because I was always on the business side. But my high school job was actually in tech and I never got all the way away from it. I had projects where I was implementing EDI. I was doing a lot of the older ways to do this data exchange. And I was also doing work in reporting in our data lakes throughout my career.
Justin Smith 17:55
Okay.
Hillary Drake 18:11
So I could see, I already knew that in the market these points of access already existed. And they weren't being leveraged the way they should be. And they're about to get a lot better. I'm actually on a committee writing standards that are improving these that are being released through NMFTA. But the, when I looked at this and was like, I can see how to fix this. I can see the architecture. I reached out to Josiah, my business partner, who I actually went to undergrad with. He moved out to California to get his PhD and, you know, the beach.
Justin Smith 18:45
Okay. I thought UCI, went to UCI, yeah I lived by there, that's my alma mater.
Hillary Drake 18:55
And it's, it is hard to move away from there. So after he did his PhD, he was working at YouTube and color was one, which is a testing company. So he was working on COVID testing data. Adley was another one for a while. So he really already understood the data exchange and the way this could work. What we needed was the business side of things. How do we actually make this work for companies like the ones I've worked with. Legacy Tech staff, we're working with older systems, we're working in very constrained environments with few IT resources. How do we make this actually usable for folks like them versus folks who've only ever worked at tech companies where you have more resources, you have more familiarity with this, and your systems are a bit more modern?
Justin Smith 19:35
Yes. Yeah. $50 million and up though is no slouch when you think of like companies with resources, right? Like I get that they probably got to 50 million because they've been there for a long time and that's part of the source of legacy and like a part of the challenge.
Hillary Drake 20:10
I think part of it too that you don't necessarily see if you haven't been in it is yes, there are resources, but you're always competing for them. And there might be two.
Justin Smith 20:17
Yeah. We need new forklifts. Are we doing warehouse automation? Are we going to hire more sales guys or? Yeah.
Hillary Drake 20:26
Yeah, or are we going to buy more equipment for the factory? Are we going to invest in better lighting? All of those things that come together and your project can be awesome and still not get funded because there's a better project. And that part is really hard to understand if you haven't been in that grind. It's a 24-month payback. It's an awesome project. It's a win-win-win. Why aren't we doing it? Well,
Justin Smith 20:41
Yeah.
Hillary Drake 20:54
There are two IT people who can do it and they're on this other project for the next 18 months.
Justin Smith 21:01
Yeah. Yeah, you had me a 24 month payback and then you're like, well, that's number nine on the list. So we'll get to it when we get to it.
Hillary Drake 21:11
Yeah, I've lost a 13-month payback a couple times.
Justin Smith 21:16
Yeah. And so the challenge is, the part of the solution is making it a lighter lift for the IT and a lighter lift for kind of all parties involved.
Hillary Drake 21:23
Yeah. Yes, and also making it approachable from a cost perspective. Our goal is to be firmly on the expense side. We're not a capital approval and we're targeting senior manager, director level approval for expense. Nope, just need a credit card, no long-term commitment.
Justin Smith 21:43
You don't need a loan. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of data do you need?
Hillary Drake 21:52
tracking number and a carrier name. That's it. So the data should already exist on the invoice table in whatever order management system, whether that's an ERP or a standalone system, but the data already exists in the system on the invoice.
Justin Smith 21:55
Okay? Yeah. Do you go back in time and help them see where their problems not came from, like, I'm sure they're riddled with like, here's where our delay percentage was, or like our service levels, and what we meant were, and I'm sure there's measurements that you guys have of like, that shows part of the proof outside of just like a better customer experience.
Hillary Drake 22:36
Well, it's funny you say that our solution is one of the only ones on the market that can go back in time. Most of the solutions on the market can tell you, basically you have to tell them you have done something and then they'll give you updates going forward. We can go back to basically anything that you have legitimate access to. Our structure is a little different so we don't do analytics for people. We help them do analytics in their own system.
Justin Smith 22:42
Okay.
Hillary Drake 23:05
One of the things that I believe really strongly is your data is your data. Doesn't belong to us. Therefore, we don't keep it unless you're paying us to. We want our customers to know that their data is secure and it is completely in their control. Because we don't always think about how much is out there with shipping data. But
Justin Smith 23:10
Yes.
Hillary Drake 23:33
We all know people target specific 3PLs because of who their customers are. We need that data to be absolutely secure because you don't want a bad actor to be able to say, here's all the shipments out of this warehouse because I know Samsung is in that warehouse. And that happens. Or for that matter, you don't want someone to be able to build a complete profile of all your customers because they can scrape your logistics data.
Justin Smith 24:02
Yeah. Well, I'm surprised that happens. That's people that just like are stealing shipments.
Hillary Drake 24:09
All the time.
Justin Smith 24:11
Yeah, I mean, I get that we have gates around our truck courts and our loading areas and there's for several reasons for sure.
Hillary Drake 24:21
Yeah, it's getting more sophisticated every year. There's a lot of impersonation, a lot of claiming to be the legitimate trucker, picking up a load and just stealing it. And it's always happened. It used to be a little more...
Justin Smith 24:37
The audacity. Yeah, let's put on a fake mustache and some glasses and roll up in a U-Haul and see what happens.
Hillary Drake 24:45
Well, I hope the shipping guy is going to be, wait a minute. But it's, they're getting more sophisticated every year and we have to try to be proactive about it.
Justin Smith 24:51
Yeah. Yeah. I would guess that then your system doesn't plug into anything of warehouse automation. Because just if you think of this journey like inbound orders are picked, that it's going to the dock. I guess they're not picked if it's like a parcel perhaps, right? Like a. Your integration starts once it reaches the staging area.
Hillary Drake 25:31
well, something that is not super public.
Justin Smith 25:34
Just as we're getting more tech in the building and more like a connection points, it's interesting to think like where one starts and stops and how they all play nice together.
Hillary Drake 25:38
Well... We are, something that we are looking for a beta partner for right now that we haven't released publicly is actually rate shopping. So as you get to, whether it's before picking or after picking once it gets to the scale and the measurements, you might be rate shopping. Who's the right carrier for this given, okay, this is how big it is. This is when it needs to get there. Who do I want to give it to? And doing carrier.
Justin Smith 25:51
Okay.
Hillary Drake 26:11
And that can be in the transportation management system or it can be in the warehouse management system depending on how you've structured it. And there are some very cool scanning tools out there that if you haven't talked to folks about that lately, there are some neat options coming to market for both dimensioning and getting a lot more pictures of your orders. But we can tie into those, okay, given that information, given this is the product. Here's the carrier, just based on rate shop. Here's my price with all of my carriers. Assign that carrier, we can print the paperwork off the bat, get a tracking number assigned to it immediately. You don't have to use stickers anymore. You can get one from the carrier, print it straight onto all of the paperwork you're already putting on the shipment, and then it becomes visible earlier in the process. If you're still using a book of stickers that the carrier gave you, You literally can't see what's happening until they scan it back at the terminal.
Justin Smith 27:13
Yes, I love it. This goes to more awareness, more visibility, more trackability earlier in the process.
Hillary Drake 27:22
and maybe save some money on shipping.
Justin Smith 27:24
Yes, of course. What's it tell me rate shopping and assignment how it works now versus what's like cutting edge or what's what you envision.
Hillary Drake 27:38
So an awful lot of the time how it works now is.
Justin Smith 27:41
Because I hear about it, I talk with folks about it, but again, we make sure we got the building set up for them. This is less the part that I see on the daily.
Hillary Drake 27:52
So I think of trucking as possibly the econ 101 perfect market. You've got a lot of choices and your partners also have a lot of choices. So your prices can vary pretty wildly because, well, this guy needs to get to Texas. He's going to give you a deal out of SoCal where somebody else, they don't need to get there. They're going to charge more because they don't really want to go to Texas. They want to go to Minnesota. So in practice, that means you can check the prices for all of your agreements. Who's the best price for this today? Worst case, what happens is the shipping guy just gives it to this buddy who takes them for lunch. It happens. Or they might be logging on to all the websites. Okay, here's the order characteristics. What's the price? This website is 100 bucks. This one's 120. This one's 110. Okay, I'm going with this guy. Or... we can put it in a system that does all of that automatically and either shows them here are your choices and your prices or you can auto assign it to well give it to the hundred dollar one and a lot of WMS's already have this functionality it's just a question of building the connections to enable it because that's what they do with Parcel already in a lot of them
Justin Smith 29:13
Yeah. Yeah, it's bringing the parcel, like, maturity to the B2B, where like they ship less quantity of items and like, yeah, they don't use all like the name brand people that are, that do parcels. Yeah, it's interesting that WMS systems are missing the connection, or like that's a part that's just our transportation management systems.
Hillary Drake 29:47
Yeah, it's something that historically you would build out inside the system. So you just load all your pricing. But that's what you do when you're at enterprise scale. It's always easier to just throw labor at it in the past. But now we're all running leaner. And frankly, it's annoying. So let's make it easier for people.
Justin Smith 30:12
Yeah, I could see how this can enable more shipments, right? Or like more streamlining, maybe cause you to turn inventory faster. Or as I usually get back to like, what's this mean for the sea levels making decisions with their VP of ops team of where they should be, why they should be tall or short or big or in what area. And so could imagine this could help say, hey, if we're moving faster inventory, we all need to bring inbound more often. So therefore, we may want to be value. being closer to the ports or the rail more or to certain customers that are key customers where product is coming from. And that starts to be a little bit bigger slice of the pie of the decision making of a smoother operations usually leads to a slightly different real estate decisions.
Hillary Drake 31:13
Absolutely. It's been a, I think it's the last five years have really been an eye opener for a lot of folks on how dependent we all are on port operations, on international operations as a whole, and just how where you're located can make such a difference to your customer experience.
Justin Smith 31:34
And you see customers that all have an existing system. Like, do you ever advise, hey, let's start from scratch? Or do you ever have an opportunity to help people build their systems from scratch? And if you did, how would you look at it differently?
Hillary Drake 31:52
So I'm actually working with a trucking company right now that operates on paper and QuickBooks. Yeah, and I am going to try and convince them that they need more of a system because they do have some awesome opportunities for growth with that. In addition to the APIs, we have a tool that's called Final Mile Photos that's
Justin Smith 31:58
That's as close to scratch as it gets. Yeah?
Hillary Drake 32:18
take pictures of paperwork and deliveries without making the driver download an app. Because I don't want another app on my phone. I don't think anybody wants another app on their phone. And the disk...
Justin Smith 32:18
Yes. Not really, Adopting a new system, yeah, is like a, yeah, people don't dig that.
Hillary Drake 32:37
So this dispatcher, it's literally, he gets an email with those pictures as the drivers take them. And what he said was, great, I'll get the paperwork before they spill coffee on it.
Justin Smith 32:51
Nice. Yeah.
Hillary Drake 32:52
And for them, it's, okay, we can get that.
Justin Smith 32:56
You don't spill coffee on your phone. Yeah, that's totally different. You protect that, maybe.
Hillary Drake 33:01
Well, I don't know. I've met a few drivers like these guys and I have my doubts on that part. they are, for them, it lets them get updates to their customers faster. Even, and we don't have a lot of automation in there yet, but now their customers can know, yep, this load, which is from two third party locations, they're not physically at either site. The customers know, yep, it happened the way it was supposed to.
Justin Smith 33:08
Okay.
Hillary Drake 33:31
we can leverage that to then build the case for, yeah, we need an actual system. We need a transportation management system so we can do more with, let's build loads for customers, let's do more planning, let's get the guys on more efficient routes so we can better utilize their hours. And frankly, it's great for the drivers because that lets them make more money. It's a win-win for everyone. And you just have to make that investment.
Justin Smith 33:55
Yeah.
Hillary Drake 34:01
on the software.
Justin Smith 34:03
Yeah, I could see the risk could be a big thing people are pumped about of like, here's proof. And not only in like the payment part, but just in like the returns liability, it was gone, who's owns it or who pays for that or who deals with it.
Hillary Drake 34:07
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when something goes wrong.
Justin Smith 34:23
Yeah, so starting from scratch, that would be one area where you wouldn't help them start. Yeah. You probably have people that you refer on occasion that are in adjacent lanes to you. Who might that be or what are some of your favorites that you find people are also missing that is helpful for customers for you and the overall like improvement and maturity cycle?
Hillary Drake 34:29
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I introduced more people to trucking companies than anything else. that's what I was around for a long time and got a big network. know a lot of guys and you need someone for, overnight store refurbishments. I've got a guy. His trucks will 100 % be there every time. you need LTL in SoCal. I've got a guy.
Justin Smith 34:56
Okay. You got a big network of that.
Hillary Drake 35:18
family-owned company that's been doing it forever and they are fantastic. And I really like to just put people together like that. I've been working on expanding that out into Minneapolis. But I've been working on growing that into other spaces, the other tech that folks need in their ecosystems and even
Justin Smith 35:31
I'll ask you for that SoCal reference. Yeah, that's a good one.
Hillary Drake 35:45
precision machining and plastic manufacturing and all of the other inputs that we don't necessarily think about because we don't touch them every day as consumers. The growing, just the networks of the people I know and helping people, like helping people find good people.
Justin Smith 36:03
Yeah, that's the best. Yeah, that's so tough to do.
Hillary Drake 36:05
Yeah, it really is.
Justin Smith 36:08
It's from Strategic Coach as a business coaching program I'm in and it's like, they call them who, like whose is like a person you like might recommend and you're always like think conceptually like you're one who away from that improvement or from that success or from that project that like you've been dreaming of or that you've been trying to cultivate. And like it's always funny to think of like how powerful that is, no doubt.
Hillary Drake 36:16
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting too, especially in the space that I've always worked in. A lot of folks, whether it's in shipping and operations, customer service, whatever, if you came up through that department, you've got some blind spots because you may not have experienced the holistic operation. One of the things I really love doing is helping people see how they're impacting the rest of the business and how they can help the rest of the business. I'm still working on what'll probably be a talk eventually that I call the people that I call hidden customers. The people that you're helping who you don't know you're helping.
Justin Smith 37:16
Yeah. You know, when you talk about hidden customers, it makes me just go back to like the customer journey map a little bit of like, that's another like a way to conceptualize that, like not only internal to your team, but the journey of the customer themselves.
Hillary Drake 37:34
Yeah, and there are a lot of folks in your company that are your customers. They're consuming your data, they're using your outputs, whatever they are, and we have to think of them as customers too, because it's not just your end users, it's not just the buyers, it's also everyone else who's using what you make.
Justin Smith 37:50
Yeah. What a great work environment you would have if everybody thought that way. Yeah, I love that. I'm curious, AI, right? Have you heard that word today yet?
Hillary Drake 38:01
Right? You probably didn't see the LinkedIn post that I, I think it went up, it was scheduled for nine this morning. Last week I was actually lucky enough to be on stage for a demo night as part of Twin Cities Startup Week. And it was seven companies, seven minutes, no slides.
Justin Smith 38:22
Okay. Okay, nice.
Hillary Drake 38:37
None of them were AI companies.
Justin Smith 38:40
Okay. Cause there's no slides allowed.
Hillary Drake 38:43
Well, my position on AI is it's a tool. It's like a programming language or AWS or all of the other things that we use to make stuff. But AI on its own isn't a feature and I don't think it's a product, frankly. A lot of the techniques that we're talking about with AI have been around a long time. Some of them actually since the 80s. And for me,
Justin Smith 39:08
Totally.
Hillary Drake 39:13
The question is really, what are we going to do with it? We don't actually use very much right now. We have a little machine learning, but not much else, because it doesn't make sense in our product and for our customers. That may change down the road, but today we can deliver the experience we want, frankly, with less computing power using different methods.
Justin Smith 39:40
Yeah, and people, it's so funny going to some of the trade shows for sure of like all the supply chains, like AI programs that are eating the world. I gotta imagine though, some do flow into your world and are on one side of your connection or on the other. Ultimately, like this part of the specific process, like... the connection is more important than it is. It's not changing the behavior so much of the decision that's being made with any given shipment,
Hillary Drake 40:15
Exactly. What we do is enable.
Justin Smith 40:17
The pricing maybe, I could see that be like a dynamic pricing like with airline tickets or something. There's probably some, yeah.
Hillary Drake 40:24
Yeah, people are doing that. And I've taken advantage of it in the past. it can be fantastic. Dynamic pricing has been around forever, basically. But the big thing with it is really our tools give you the data, whether that's to feed your customer experience, feed your data lake and your models. and whatever you want to do with them. One of the things I do really love for AI is that you can use it to summarize big data. You can use it to do analysis. And you have to check it, of course, like anything else, but you can use it to find insights quickly. And that can be really impactful when you get, say, all your actual delivery dates into your data lake. Because we think about... think a lot of people don't think about on time delivery with enough nuance. So on time isn't just, did it get there on time? Compared to what? Did it get there on time compared to what you first told the customer? Did it get there on time compared to what you told the customer when it shipped? Did it get there on time compared to what the trucker told you they were going to do? And then if it wasn't, why? If it didn't get there on time because there was a flood and the truck couldn't get through, customer still perceives it's late, but that's not the trucker's fault and I shouldn't dig in. So I think about on time basically three ways and being able to measure all of those gives you so much value and gives you targets, what can I improve?
Justin Smith 42:15
Yeah, I love that. That's wild. It's when you promised it, when the customer first was looking at when it could be delivered, when they placed the order, and then tell me the third one again was based on the...
Hillary Drake 42:31
what the trucker told you they were going to do. The one that in a lot of ways happens. Right. And from a customer perspective, what matters is what we called eye of the customer at one of my previous companies. They don't care why. All they care is did we do what we initially told them they were going to do? Because again, job sites, if there's a crew there, they have to be able to trust you.
Justin Smith 42:35
Yes. which is what people don't see, right? The customer doesn't see that part. Yeah.
Hillary Drake 43:02
and in those situations early can be just as bad as late.
Justin Smith 43:06
Yeah, totally. Doc's not ready. We can't receive it. You got to wait around. There's no spot for you. We're not open yet. Yeah. I'm sensitive to time. We made it to the end of our hour, but I did have one or two more questions if you have the time. The life of the startup and being an entrepreneur.
Hillary Drake 43:10
Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
Justin Smith 43:32
I am 20 years in, amazingly, trying to keep this boat afloat. And so I love the entrepreneurial mindset. I love building products and being in charge of being accountable to customers and the vision of the company. So you get to carry all that in your brain. And it's a lot to juggle, I'm sure. so... I'm curious how you think about what's next for you. Perhaps we don't have to relive the struggles that you've had getting to this moment. I love that you have this rate chopping beta is like this is stable. It's working. It's being adopted. People are getting value from it. What else can I add to it? So I love that lens and just thinking through like what's next. Is there anything else like in the industry you see that are challenges or like innovation areas that you have on your mind other than this rate shopping? Or is there anything else you're seeing that like sparks some interest as what could be next that you would add? Or we're just going to focus on this part and making it better? Or on sales and marketing and getting you out to the bigger world?
Hillary Drake 44:37
Well, the next... That is my daily. What's next in our roadmap is adding more partners and more modes. Because our goal is for our customers to be able to create an account and immediately connect to all their carriers. That means we need to keep adding carriers. Right now we support LTL and Parcel. We're going to add truckload. That's the next big piece, which is going to be a bit of a technical challenge. It's not the same as LTL. but it's so important for a lot of the people that we want to serve because that's even more sensitive for where's my order a lot of the time. That can be very high value, it's sensitive product. That's the big thing that's next.
Justin Smith 45:30
Why is it harder or more difficult or what's, is that just based on who you're dealing with?
Hillary Drake 45:34
Yeah, so when we talk, so LTL, we've got 13 providers right now and we cover about 85 % of the market. If we pick the top, if we do the top 100 in truckload, we're covering less than half the market. It's a lot more dispersed, yes, but a lot of them use the same software, thankfully. So it's a different, slightly different kind of work.
Justin Smith 45:52
More work, less coverage. Okay? Yes.
Hillary Drake 46:03
which is just going to take a different amount of time.
Justin Smith 46:07
Oh, your partner's got a lot of work cut out for him. Yeah, he's gonna be a guy.
Hillary Drake 46:10
Absolutely. Well, he's already dreaming about how we do more automation on that side too. So I think he's got a plan there. Beyond that, I really want to find someone who sells to Walmart. They've got a suite of APIs for the entire transaction set from purchase order, advanced ship notice, all the way through. I want to do those. And I need to find somebody to do them with me.
Justin Smith 46:16
Yes.
Hillary Drake 46:39
Right now they're paying probably a dollar per EDI transaction and I think I can do those APIs for under five cents per.
Justin Smith 46:48
You would think they'd be fired up on that.
Hillary Drake 46:50
Just meeting the right person for that one.
Justin Smith 46:53
I'm doing the supply chain masters at the University of Arkansas. It's like executive where you're doing it nights and weekends.
Hillary Drake 46:57
Mm-hmm.
Justin Smith 47:04
I would say like a third of the class and teachers are Tyson Foods and Walmart people. And like that are teaching it or that are like a students that are in it. So there might be a few hundred people over there that are worth like seeing who's who over there that might be able to help get get a call on the books. Nice. Okay.
Hillary Drake 47:09
Yep.
Justin Smith 47:28
I love it. Well, that's so helpful. I think we'll wrap here. And if I understand it correctly now, we're making an API that helps streamline shipments and brings visibility so that especially B2B shipments, people can know when it was picked up, that it made it on time, have a picture of it, and all within the existing systems that they already have so they don't need to learn anything new or download any apps.
Hillary Drake 47:57
Yep, and they don't need to buy anything new. That's the big...
Justin Smith 48:00
Yeah, love it. Yeah, they just have to trust, give you some data to start, only a credit card, no long-term commitment, and that's enough to give them a feel for the value that you can add so that they can try it and then expand it across their platform as they need. Nice, awesome. Hillary, thank you. I appreciate you spending time today.
Hillary Drake 48:19
Absolutely. Yeah, thank you, Justin. It was a great chat and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Justin Smith 48:29
Yeah, I'm off to Walmart. I'll see who I can find.
Hillary Drake 48:32
Awesome, have a good one.
Justin Smith 48:33
You too. Bye bye.