The Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora Metafora

In this episode, hosts Adam Perlmutter and Teresa Ronquillo chat with a very special guest, Sean Santiago, SVP of Technology Platforms at TI/NTG. Sean shares about his journey to freight tech, the highlights and challenges along the way, and the exciting advancements he’s seeing in the space. 

Background

Sean brings nearly 20 years of experience in the industry, with a diverse background encompassing various roles and responsibilities, primarily in the 3PL space. He began his career at a small mom and pop 3PL in Florida, specializing in refrigerated freight and backhaul optimization, which provided him with invaluable niche market experience. From there, he transitioned to a larger brokerage where he spent 11 years in a variety of positions from carrier sales to operations. It was during this time that Sean’s career took a techie turn, as he became more involved in automation and discovering ways to enhance productivity without increasing workload.

As Sean’s interest in technology continued to grow, he gradually shifted towards the IT side of the industry, ultimately landing a role with UPS Freight’s LTL department. There, he worked on developing a digital supply chain before joining TI/NTG in 2020, where he currently works.

What First Interested Sean about the Tech Side of T&L 

When asked about what sparked his interest in the tech side of the industry, Sean shared that for years, colleagues had been suggesting he explore the field. Despite his lack of technical background and training, he was often the person who caught mistakes before a release went to production. Eventually, he took the advice of others and decided to try his hand at tech. It turned out to be the best career decision he ever made.

When asked about some of the most notable advancements Sean has seen in freight tech over the course of his career, Sean commented, 

“I think some of the biggest advancements of the last couple of years have been advanced analytics, the ability for NLP, which is natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. All that has brought pricing, route optimization, and freight matching to a completely new level. That is really, really exciting and I think it still has a ton of improvement to go.”- Sean Santiago

Sean Comments on TI/NTGs Biggest Accomplishments Since 2020


Digital transformation: TI/NTG started a digital transformation in 2020 and they’re  wrapping the initial part of that program up this year.


Beon Shipper Platform: This is focused on small to medium size shippers. It can handle everything from spot quoting and shipment generation and tendering loads, not only to NTG but other carriers or providers.


Beon Carrier platform: This application is geared toward dispatchers and managing their interactions with the brokerage.



Build vs Buy: It’s The Hybrid Approach for TI/NTG

At TI/NTG, they have a strong belief in the proprietary approach, which involves acquiring or building unique solutions that set the company apart from its competitors. For industry standards or other basic requirements that do not provide significant differentiation, the company follows a “buy” approach to accelerate the process. Integrating purchased solutions is often simpler and quicker than creating something from scratch. By adopting this hybrid strategy, TI/NTG can focus on creating truly innovative solutions that drive their business forward.

TLDR: Buy what you can. Build what will differentiate you.

Learn more about TI/NTG at https://tiholdco.com/ and https://ntgfreight.com/ 

Sean Santiago can be found on LinkedIn here. 

How Sean Stays Connected to the Needs of the Business Sean’s Comments on Notable Advancements in Freight TechSean Notes Three Things He is Bullish About for 2023Interested in chatting with a SME from Metafora? Request a free discovery call here!

Welcome back to The Extra Mile Podcast! In this episode, our hosts Adam Perlmutter and Teresa Ronquillo chat with a very special guest, Ed Burns, President of Burns Logistics. They have a deep conversation around the importance of building relationships with customers, industry peers, and colleagues.

Background
Ed is a relationship builder who connects shippers and carriers to keep freight moving. He oversees the operations and profitability of Burns Logistics, positioning it as the premier relationship builder in the transportation space.

In his free time, Ed enjoys spending time with his family, reading books, and writing zany LinkedIn posts. He also has a passion for building sandcastles. What does he mean by that? Keep reading to hear his inspiring explanation.

Ed grew up around trucking and freight. His dad, “Big Ed”, was an LTL sales guy, so Ed quickly became familiar with sales calls and manufacturing facilities. While working in marketing for a while, even starting his own digital agency, Ed stayed involved in his father’s industry, attending conferences and offering his marketing services to trucking and freight businesses.
A few years ago, he sold his agency to start working with his father at Burns Logistics, a transportation sales agency that is always connecting people.


What inspires your content and fuels your creativity when posting on LinkedIn?
When he posts on LinkedIn, he tries to combat that by posting intentional and thoughtful content. He mentioned: “One thing that I think is desperately missing from the world today is thoughtfulness in our conversations. There's a desperate need for cordiality and thought provoking content that engages in conversation, and I believe that social media should foremost: be social… you're establishing relationships with other human beings who are living and breathing and have thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes and dreams and failures.”


The Theory of Building Sand Castles
If you've ever built a sandcastle, you know that eventually, the waves will wipe it away. There's all these things that want to destroy your sandcastle could be a dog running along the beach or a tractor that comes along to break it, or kids trying to kick it down.

Similar to how ocean waves come in and out, affecting the sandcastles that we work to build and rebuild, the economy ebbs and flows in ways that can destroy your business if you're not prepared.

“If in our work we can build something that's inspiring, and other people can see the good in what we do, and they can have a takeaway from that… we can inspire them to try to build as well. Then we're touching on creating something of significance, which is what we all want.” - Ed Burns


Connecting with Others
Ed believes that having a big network, relationships, and conversations are valuable in the transportation industry. If you start asking yourself, “who can I help today?”, “how can I help them?”, “who can I connect with?” or “what are their problems?” it starts getting a little bit easier. You have a point of critical mass where you can just start connecting dots together, but that takes a long time to build it. Don’t try to force it!

Ed Talks Freight Tech
Ed mentioned there's something extraordinary coming on. A few years ago it was ‘TMS’, I would go to these conferences out here: Big Data, IOT: These were just buzzwords. But the conversation around tech in transportation and logistics has come a long way.
The issue now is that we have two main entities creating freight tech.
You have the industry-specific legacy tech. This was created by industry vets who have a good understanding of what tech needs to do, but this tech is often unappealing and tends to be less user friendly. There is also room for innovation since tech is so rapidly evolving.
You have people from outside the industry coming in and sharing their own freight tech solutions. This stuff looks beautiful and it's super i

A new season of The Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora just started, and it is full of great conversations, awesome guests, and more surprises! We kick off this season with an exploration into the importance of quality customer service.

Our hosts Adam”P-Mutt” Perlmutter and Teresa Ronquillo chat with an expert on the topic… Pawel Wencel, Customer Service Manager at Metafora. From what customer service is to what it isn’t, why it’s important, and how to measure its success, we dive into all things customer service with Pawel.
“People Never Forget How You Make Them Feel”- Pawel Wencel
Pawel’s Background:
Born and raised in the beautiful country of Poland in central Europe, then he moved to the United States when he turned 10. During his professional career he worked in a number of fields. He did recruiting for a staffing agency and then transitioned into healthcare manufacturing through a variety of roles and positions. He found Metafora through Shanna Greathouse with whom he used to work with at the healthecare manufacturing firm!

What IS Customer Service and what ISN’T?
Customer Service is not about solving unique problems. Customer Service is about fostering relationships through an ongoing collaborative experience that continuously delivers value to your customers or clients.


There are many ways to do this, including personalized onboarding, identifying and exceeding goals, recommendation of features, proactively asking for and implementing feedback, as well as celebrating each other's success and milestones.

From an organizational perspective it creates loyalty, strengthens reputation, and supports growth.

What it isn’t:
It is not thinking by yourself in a silo
It's not providing limited myopic solutions to problems.


Why is customer service important?
“It's if you're operating a business and if you're looking to maintain your customer base, providing customer support/ Customer service is an incredible way for you to retain customers”- Pawel Wencel

Pawel explains that customer satisfaction directly impacts customer retention, which directly affects revenue:
Strong Brand Loyalty
Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Decreased Brand Abandonment
Retention ROI versus Cost of Acquisition

#FACTS:
Did you know companies with a customer service mindset drive revenue 4 to 8% higher than the rest of their industry?
Roughly 80%, 81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
Your favorite brands are the ones that treat you well and that you have a good experience.
It's more cost effective for a company to retain existing customers than to acquire new customers.

What has led to Metafora’s Customer Service success?
Team Leadership and Teammate Autonomy
Teamwork Buy-In and Collaboration
Setting Realistic and Clear Goals
Defining and Tracking Success and Performance
Going Above and Beyond User Expectations
Fostering Client and User Relationships
Effective User Onboarding and Ongoing Training
Establishing a Hierarchy of Support
Capturing and Implementing Feedback
Having the Right Tool For the Right Job

“Customer service it's not just a function, but necessarily it's just this little amoeba-like thing that touches everything in a good way.”- Pawel Wencel

How do you coach the team on how to handle customer service scenarios that are difficult in nature, e.g. angry customers?
Our team touches base regularly about our experiences/ We review what worked and what didn’t. We’re encouraged to have these courageous and challenging conversations that we can learn from..
Pawel coaches the team on empathizing and taking ownership and responsibility for the solution.
Pawel also coaches the team about taking accountability for driving each solution.

“Anything that's never happened, happens all the time.” - Pawel Wencel

Are you ready for a new season of The Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora? We’re beyond excited to bring you new topics, new guests, and a new… co-host! You know her as Metafora’s Marketing Director, and now she’s adding podcasting to her list of fave things about her job… Introducing: Teresa! Ronquillo. Listen now to catch a sneak peek into what’s in store with Season 3, and get to know P-Mutt’s new co-host.

Host Adam”P-Mutt” Perlmutter puts his new host in the guest seat in this short teaser episode for The Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora. He chats with Teresa about her career, her hobbies, and why she’s excited to be joining him as a host on the pod.

Marketing Background
Teresa started her marketing career in New York City, where she did marketing for children's books at Simon & Schuster. After five years in NYC, she took a big leap from NYC to Austin, Texas to join the marketing team at IBM. She credits her expertise in the buyer’s journey to her time there.

In 2017, she decided to take a year off from office life to teach yoga and work at a spa. YOLO.

When she missed the marketing life, she jumped back in to do content marketing for a small media company in Philly, PA. Then, mid-pandemic, she learned about Metafora and their need to build a marketing function. The opportunity sounded amazing and she joined the wonderful Metafora team in November of 2020. Since then, she is proud to slowly but surely be becoming a SME in all things transportation, logistics, and supply chain. (Yes! Ask her about buy vs build or capacity strategy!)

Always on the Move
Teresa has lived all over the place. Cities she has called home? San Antonio, Miami, New York, Austin, Philadelphia, to name a few. Most recently she has moved to a little town called Los Angeles, California.

What else is fun to know about Teresa?
She is a passionate yogi and vegan, and an amateur comedian. In her free time you might find her performing stand up and improv comedy in LA. (What!?)

Marketing at Metafora
Teresa spends her workday managing all things marketing for Metafora. Along with her amazing marketing coordinator, Valentina Hoyos, (Lean Solutions Group shout out!) Teresa helps plan Metafora’s conference presence, develop and execute content strategy, build campaigns, manage agencies, and so much more. She is particularly proud of the Metafora blog and all the downloadable content that Metafora has published over the past couple of years.

“There's so much research, preparation, interviews, writing, and editing that go into our content.”  - Teresa Ronquillo

What has Teresa learned during her time with Metafora?
“I've learned so much about employee engagement and retention, both in the content that we've created and shared via our blog and social media, but also just from our own company culture.”

Teresa adds, “...I learned a lot this year about capacity strategy, and pretty much anything that we've put out content on. I genuinely feel like I learn so much in the process.”

A Look Ahead: Season 3 of The Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora
We’ll continue to focus on training, training-as-a-service. We’ll dig deeper into buy vs build and a hybrid approach. Agile improvement will also be a spotlight topic for 2023. All this and more so be sure to like, share, subscribe, etc.

Have you been hearing us talk recently about… training, training, and more training? Did you hear our recent announcement about Sync Logistics training? Well, the hype is still going in this episode of the Extra Mile Podcast by Metafora. Also, did we mention… it’s the season finale!!!! Don’t worry though, we’ll be back in 2023 with more great guests and conversations. Our host Adam”P-Mutt” Perlmutter and guest host Teresa Ronquillo chat with the one and only Ryan Schreiber, VP of Industry and Growth at Metafora. They discussed a very interesting topic: training and training-as-a-service. What’s the moral of the story? There is a business cost to not doing training or to doing training poorly. Conversely, if you train your people the right way, it’s an investment rather than an expense. This way, your employees will be trained based on what you need for the company and, more importantly, what you need from them. Training-as-a-Service: Sync Logistics Training Ryan shares the origin story of the brand name for this new training-as-a-service solution. Sync made sense for so many reasons, largely what it represents as the root word for many other words. To illustrate: Some of the training can be done synchronously. Some of the training can be done asynchronously. Sync is synchronizing the learning, as in standardizing it. Issues with the Current State of Training We dump too much on people early on, and then they often remember a bunch of stuff they don’t need to remember yet, and they don’t remember a bunch of stuff they do need to know at that point in their training. Companies don’t do enough training early on and then don’t have an opportunity to come back to the basics for many employees. Setting this foundation is crucial. Companies don’t do a good job explaining the “why”. Without the why, you’re simply just training your people to become automatons. The training sticks and becomes true knowledge when people understand why they are learning it, why it’s important, why it is the way it is, why the knowledge will help them in their role, etc. The focus tends to be on new hires only. There needs to be an equal focus on ongoing and developmental training. Consider: First time managers. How to have difficult conversations. Advanced capacity strategy concepts. What challenges does Sync Logistics Training tackle for transportation and logistics companies? Challenge: It’s hard to avoid management burn-out on training Challenge: It’s difficult to make digital training engaging Challenge: It’s hard to ensure that shadowing time for new hires is valuable, impactful, and not a waste of time for all employees involved Challenge: Improving a training program is costly Challenge: It takes too long to get new hires to a place where they are valuable contributors. What’s the thesis of Sync Logistics Training? The concept here is to take employees on a learning journey, beyond new hire training. It starts on day one, yes, you need to build a better new hire training program, but equally important are ongoing and developmental training. What type of companies would benefit the most from implementing a quality TaaS solution? Ones that want their employees to ramp faster Ones that want their customer and carrier experience to be better Ones that want to build a deeper bench Want to check out more of the content references in this episode? Well, then, here you go: Official Sync Logistics Training Website Pain Points addressed by Sync Logistics Training Metafora Holiday Gift Guide More training content on the Metafora blog

In this episode, Robert Bain chats with Curtis Garrett, Senior Vice President at FreightPlus and the founder and Chief Creative at Understand LTL. They have a deep conversation around the evolution of LTL, where it came from, where it is and where it's going. What is LTL? “LTL: it's easy to plug in some zip codes, some weights and a freight class, and get a quote. It all looks real promising and you just pick who you want to use. But it's often after you hit the book with that carrier, things can kind of go awry from missed pickups or the carrier not having enough capacity when they back into the dock, or literally space on that trailer to the black hole that is sometimes the line haul process, and just going by, scanning in and out of terminals, but not really knowing where the freight is exactly.” - Curtis Garrett LTL Complexities It is segmented and each segment doesn't always communicate as well as it should. You either have an empty truck or trailer in position or you don't. Freight Classes Density: NMFC (The National Motor Freight Traffic Association) items are moving towards just being full density based. If you have the weight and you get the cube of the freight, you end up with that pound per cubic foot, and then that's gonna fit on the scale until you know where the class needs to be. Packaging: Example: TV’S. Those are shipped in the box that's gonna be put on the shelf. So the box itself is a product as well. You have to make sure that it doesn't get scuffed or pierced or damaged.Configurability: How the freight loads into a trailer and utilizes space to then play with other freight. LTL Landscape About 55 to 60 billion a year as far as the true LTL market If you look at the top 25 to 30 carriers, they make up the 99% of that revenue going up to the top. The biggest, FedEx Freight, they're gonna be over 8 billion this year. The second in size is going to be Old Dominion, they should pass 6 billion this year. So there is quite a gap between first and second. And then you've got The Yellows, The XPOs, The T Force and Estes, etc. There's a lot that is tightly packed, they're always changing and leapfrogging. Then you have some very solid regionals, which are very good options to use. They're big enough that they have the resources, the capacity, the technology, but they are tightly focused on a certain region in the country with usually quicker transit times. Why would a shipper or manufacturer, anybody that utilizes LTL services, why would they want to utilize an LTL carrier? It depends on how much you are shipping at a time. What's the average pallet count or weight of orders that you're sending out?, LTL allows you to be nimble and strategic with getting your product to your customers or bringing raw materials or different products into your own facility. LTL Pricing Misunderstandings around pricing It needs to be simplified. It's complicated now because the carriers have a hard job. Managing the labor, the equipment, the facilities, the fuel, to account for all that and run some shipment data through your cost model. There's a lot of moving parts and a lot of variables. Curtis Garrett mentioned “I think, to simplify this, it's going to be a collaboration, a community effort between companies and people willing to experiment, take a chance, try something new, document that, turn that into a new pricing product, and just kind of move slowly there…It's just gonna have to continue evolving.” LTL Future Build a community Everybody from different party lines or different silos, can come together and share ideas and collaborate and get better. Learn more about FreightPlus at https://www.freightplus.io/