[Transcript] Leveraged Supply Chains – Episode 5: Charley Dehoney (Upwell)

Andrew Stroup (00:06)
Welcome back to Leverage Supply Chains, the show where operators and builders turn AI and data into impactful supply chain results. I'm your host, Andrew Stroop, and today we're keeping freight brokerage accounts receivable, or AR, order to cash brutally simple, focusing on exception and dispute rates. This is timely as the logistics market is under pressure with bankruptcies in the headlines and a prolonged freight recession on operators' minds.

So we'll focus on what you can control today. That's why we're excited to have Charlie DeHoney join us today, co-founder and CEO of Upwell. We're going to show you how operators bring both numbers down without pulling on back office burden. Charlie, welcome to the show. For folks new to Upwell, give us the one-liner on the problem you solve and for whom.

Charley Dehoney (00:53)
Thanks for having me, Andrew. It was always great hanging out. And so at Upwell, we're the guys that are automating accounts receivable using AI in logistics.

Andrew Stroup (01:02)
And so in that, what's changed in brokerage building that pushed you to build up? Well, you know, was there a moment or a customer where exceptions and disputes spiked?

Charley Dehoney (01:13)
know that anything really changed in brokerage or the payments space. I think what happened was technology advanced and there's been some big unlocks over the last, you know, call it five to 10 years that have enabled us to be able to go out and plug in these systems and use AI to do the reconciliation and the adjustments that folks used to do manually. But I think it really, for me, it goes all the way back to 22 years ago when I started

career going door to door selling overnight shipping. And at Worldwide Express, we had this amazing sort of menu of items that we could go in and talk to the office manager about that was going to make her life easier. And one of those things was allocating costs on the invoice or splitting out the invoice and showing the number of shipments and the dollar amount that was attributed back to each department or purchase order or project or however they wanted to split out their bill. We had a way to do that.

And as I grew in my career and I eventually became an operator and an entrepreneur myself, I was constantly struggling with accounts receivable. And I didn't know exactly why or how, but as I would run out of money in my checking account and need to go back and backfill and talk to customers about why they haven't paid their invoice, I saw that we were chronically making the same mistakes. We were leaving information off of the bill itself or we were...

leaving out a certain document that that shipper required. And, you know, as the frontline sales guy or the sales leader, I was always sitting there thinking like, you know what, you're right. You did tell me that when we signed you up, you told us your invoicing requirements and we messed it up. So over the years, I just saw that that problem really continued to grow. as AI started to come into the accounts payable space and more shippers and payers were using automation to.

reconcile their invoices and validate their charges. It just was obvious to me that the logistics community did not have the AI under the hood running against their TMS and running against their accounting systems to validate these charges. And I just thought, you know, what a great opportunity to bring AI into the logistics work streams as these baby boomers are aging out of, you know, the workforce.

humans are not going to be doing accounting in tenure. So somebody is going to bring AI in here and do this and it should be us. So that's really was the impetus.

Andrew Stroup (03:30)
Love that. You know, I think it's absolutely true. And I'm sure you see this across your customer base is just like mine that everyone's talking about the AI mandate, right? But the reality is that it needs to be layered upon domain expertise, which I love, Charlie, that you have that because it's such a focused, unique segment, but such an impactful one for businesses and very large businesses who help move the world. Well, so I would love to dive into the exceptions and dispute side of it.

especially kind of the tactical pieces, because I'm sure a lot of people listening would love to know how you view the world with all that experience. You know, let's start with exceptions. Would love to kind of map the flow from your perspective on like the, you know, the ingest, the validate, the enrich, the route, submit, collect, reconcile. Curious, like where do you typically catch those exceptions

Charley Dehoney (04:14)
Yeah, I think as you and I were talking about this a couple of days ago, I started thinking to myself like paying a bill is paying a bill. So go back to your college self when you got your cell phone invoice and you needed to go pay that. I mean, you would look at the charges and you would wonder why was this $43 this month as opposed to 36 last month? And logistics is not different.

I would say the thing that makes logistics invoicing unique over other bills that companies receive is certainly at the enterprise level. Generally speaking, there's no purchase order cut against a shipping transaction. So if you're moving something in logistics, there is no ERP order to go back and reconcile that again. So the people in payables for logistics are looking at different systems of record and they're going back and validating charges, reference information.

Andrew Stroup (04:50)
Hmm.

Charley Dehoney (05:01)
those identifiers that might be the purchase order, it might be the job code, it might be the site location code. Every business is different and there's going to be five or six things that every payer is going to need to see on their invoice. And inherently as a sales guy, when the owner would take me to the back and I would meet Gladys or Peggy or Kathy in the back or Darryl and they would tell me, these are the four or five things you got to get on my bill. As a sales guy, was like, we got you, we got you.

Like totally gotcha. We're really good at this. And then back in the day, 20 years ago, you know, Darrell and I pick up the phone and say, Hey Charlie, I got your first bill. It doesn't have my reference number on it. I told you, we can't pay you without this. Get me a reference number. I'll get you paid. But after two or three times, Darrell's getting pissed. Like he's like, I told him, dude, I told him when he came. I told him later. I told him again, I'm not going to keep telling him what I already told him. And, and then they just stopped paying you. So

You fast forward to today, Darrell has been replaced. Like there is some automation layer of Coupa or open envoy or some platform that's out there that's ingesting these invoices and they're reading them on the payer side. And they're just saying, ⁓ you didn't give my purchase order number, but they're not notifying you as a logistic service provider, as a broker, a carrier, a freight forwarder. Nobody's calling you. Nobody's emailing you. They're just putting your money in a queue. And if you've got a 60 day.

term set in place with that shipper and you don't fix that issue until day 75 because the invoice is already called pass due. Well, guess what? Now you're getting paid a day 135 and you probably paid the carrier day 15. But now you've got 120 days of negative cashflow that you're basically as a business owner taking money out of the right pocket. You're not paying the daycare because you're paying the trucker. And that's the world that I live in that I grew up in.

15 years ago when I once had to sell my Mercedes in front of my freight brokerage just to make payroll, I felt so demoralized and dejected and my wife and my best friend, my business partner, my idol was looking over there and go, I fucking told you. I told you we needed the money. You got to tighten this up. And so I lived it the hard way and as an entrepreneur, the stress that comes from paying your people and your carriers over your personal

It takes its toll on your marriage. By the grace of God, my wife and I have stayed married now. We celebrated 20 years in July, but it was because of her patience and her grace, not because of my intelligence. so many years ago, we felt this problem ourselves. then, you know, fast forward to a years ago, I was working for one of the biggest transportation logistics companies in the world. And they were very kind to let me into the back office conversations of them and all of their trade partners. And I was able to.

go out and see that every large enterprise is having a harder and harder time getting paid by the shipper. And it's not because the shippers don't want to pay. I do believe the shippers want to be great partners. think companies like Freight Waves have shined the light on becoming ⁓ a carrier of choice and a shipper of choice. And I think that symbiotic relationship has never been more important. But the guy that hands you the freight and the traffic department is not the person that signs the check in the back office.

fundamentally different groups. you've got to keep the back office people happy because the transportation guy, you can say, sorry, you know, or the woman that gives you the freight. You can go to their home, you can hold their child, you can take them out to dinner, you can, you know, go play golf with them. And like, you can reconcile a lot of differences. If the freight's late, you'll be okay. If the bills wrong, you're cooked.

Andrew Stroup (08:22)
Absolutely. Well, definitely think that there's an aspect of being able to figure out how to tackle this problem, which I think exactly you're on the right piece. You know, it's interesting because you talk about Darrell, you know, the example of Darrell in that category and then the automated systems, you know, in that, that ultimately all is tied to not just the exceptions, but the dispute side as well. Right. And what can be prevented versus handled. And then to your point, the automation side of it, I guess like what

in that workflow and even with where you guys are with Upwell, is the human still in the loop? What do you guys cover? Like where's the divide and where is the real, you know, the flow of those things that really went.

Charley Dehoney (08:58)
think our vision and really what got me inspired to start this business was I started thinking like when humans are out of the loop, you're not going to have so many chugging a plug-in from a spreadsheet to a system and back, right? You're going to have AI and automation integrations doing those things. And what you really want to do is inform your smartest person in your department of all the problems. And then that person probably needs to one or two helpers to like go manage these issues.

The term disputes in billing and logistics is actually, it's like sort of inflammatory. Like it's like a polarizing term because shippers, I mean, they're pissed, right? They're like, the bill's wrong. I'm not paying. Like we're voting with our check. Like we're not giving you cash until you fix this invoice. But the logistics companies, like it's just a discrepancy, right? They don't call it a dispute. They call it a discrepancy or collaboration. The audit companies like to call it collaboration.

It's like when these two firms come together. But who's happy when they're reconciling a bad charge? Nobody's happy about that. Everybody, first off, and you have to pay money for anything, even if it's your company's money. Those people are pissed. It's not your favorite part of the day, is giving people money. in our industry, the invoice has to be accurate, thorough, and complete. And so if you can do that, then there's no emotion.

then the money just goes and everything's validated and, and accountants are being accountants and charges are validated and costs are correct and things move. But if you fat finger that purchase order number or that reference isn't on the bill of lading, but it happens to be on the PO and the invoice, those are the kinds of things that just completely gum up the system. And so as I started seeing this problem and seeing the scale of the problem that existed,

What was missing was that underlying intelligence layer. It was like, yeah, but I mean, you still need somebody with hundreds of years of tribal knowledge, like built into their head to be able to do this work. And then in October of 2022, ChatGPT 3 came out and was available to the public. And I was already ruminating on this problem and thinking to myself, somebody needs to build order to cash for logistics. This is a huge, huge opportunity. And then when ChatGPT came out, like I was already kind of, you know, in conversation with

my business partner, one of my best friends, my co-founder, Aaron. And we were talking through what the opportunity might look like. And we both were like, hey, have you messed around with chat GPT yet? it was like, aha, like this is going to be the technology that becomes that decisioning layer that allows the humans to step out of the loop and puts us in a situation where your best person can be managing exceptions on a dashboard. And then that team that they're farming that sort of busy workout to, that team could be anywhere.

They don't have to be in your corporate headquarters in New Jersey or Dallas. Like they could be, you know, in the Philippines, they could be in India, they could be in Costa Rica, they could be in Columbia. And so as you start to think about spreading that work out and letting those tasks, the busy work, the minutia, the stuff that people don't like to do anyways, the stuff that your child will not tolerate doing when they get into the workforce in 20 years, those are the type of tasks that

We just want to surface those to the top and let the AI run in the background. So if it's a simple fix of adjusting the cost on an invoice or transposing two digits on a reference information, that's the kind of thing that a human does not need to do. But AI is perfectly suited to do those things. And so I think, Andrew, to round out your short question, we really want to be the folks that don't need to make the AI.

I don't think my industry cares. Freight brokers don't look at me any differently if I made the large language model. Like if I founded Anthropic versus Upwell, like they don't give a shit. What they care about is did I get paid faster? Did I get to home on time to make it to my son's soccer practice or get my daughter to Girl Scouts or dance? And is my business running better? You know, did I need to go higher?

more people as I scaled my growth. Those are the kinds of things that actually like, this is why I love logistics. Everybody's so practical. It's so just down the fairway common sense. And so that's where I think we're really resonating with folks is do more with less, get paid faster, go home on time.

Andrew Stroup (13:08)
100%. And I think, coming back to prior thread that we just were talking about, not having a hammer and looking for a nail or a screw, but seeing a problem and using the tech to enable it is, I think, exactly well suited, especially as you know, in the industry of supply chain logistics, to your point. We live in a world where our customers are very practical. They want honesty and directness.

They don't have a lot of margin or excess to fluff around with things that are not mission critical. Thinking about customers though, I am curious, you know, if you're able to share, you know, whether it's directly or anonymized, just like an example case of like, you know, what baseline exception rates were, or, you know, the disputes that were occurring, like where they were before Upwell, where they are now. Just very curious to talk through that because I think that's a very visceral anchor point for also like, under like the listeners understanding how Upwell ultimately helps.

Charley Dehoney (14:00)
So thanks for the question, a fascinating sort of lens to look at that problem through. And I think it's the most obvious way to look at the issue at hand is, my invoices getting paid more regularly because they're accurate, thorough, and complete? Yes or no? It's a very binary outcome, right? Like many symptoms, it is not the root cause of the issue.

As we started thinking about exceptions and exception management, there's a whole business to be built on that collaboration piece of it. we're there, we're moving there. It's part of our offering. But really, when I started thinking about the root cause of the issue, it's further upstream. It's that bad data went into some system, that data got put onto this document that ended up delaying a payment somewhere.

We actually live upstream from the dispute. We want to sit in the workstream where the broker or the carrier is moving the freight and we want to be that underlying AI that's looking at all the data points inside of the TMS, inside of the accounting system, inside of the freight audit and pay portal. You've got to get those three systems synced up and talking together through Upwell. Then, and only then, can you start to address the root cause of these issues because disputes don't happen for no reason.

They happen because information is missing, you left out a document, something is wrong. And so that is the perfect use case for AI. So what we try to do is eliminate the human intervention and the human touch on those bills, let the AI do what it does. They do all the cost validation, all of the reference matching, all of the document validation, the invoice packaging, the building of the invoice packet, all of that needs to be done.

inside of the system. And then, and only then are you going to pass through an accurate invoice that's going to be automatically approved. So I think the best way to think about how we impact our clients would be

One recent example would be Arrive Logistics, like a fantastic broker out of Austin, Texas. Probably the fastest growing freight broker in the history of our industry. And I mean, just founded by just absolute, just maniac founders. These guys are dogs and they've just hit hard over 10 years. They've built an amazing business. Well, over the course of time, you know, they work with everybody. You name a big blue chip shipper and Arrive is part of their portfolio.

But that left them with 42,000 invoices a month that needed human intervention after the invoice was generated. So it comes out of their proprietary TMS, Arise made it, but there's 42,000 bills that need something else done to them before they can get presented. And that's the step right there, Andrew, where exceptions happen is between here's the data, it came out of the system. If that data was accurate, the invoice should flow out. If, but who's validating 42,000 a month, come on.

No humans doing that. It doesn't matter how many humans you have. But we took that 42,000 invoice count and we've automated down now 96 % of the presentation of those invoices. Leaving their team with only 4 % of 42,000, which is still a material number, but 4 % of those bills need to be reviewed or touched. So those are the exceptions now that that smart human operating that dashboard can now farm out wherever they want to. And they can share that work.

with whomever is most accessible at the time. You can have people working across your AR 24 seven, executing out of upwell, managing those exceptions, fixing the identifiers, appending the documents, making sure that invoice is complete, thorough and accurate before it goes out. And that's the type of impact that we're bringing to the table. And so that would be an extreme, you know, on the large enterprise side of the scale, you know, we work with big trucking companies, freight forwarders, ⁓

You name it. Like if you own assets and you're invoicing shippers in North America, we're probably representing somebody in your space. But we also work with the small mom and pop 15 person brokerage where the owners are running QuickBooks and they just want to get out of the day to day management of reconciliation and taking costs from this place and putting them into that place. So really like you can't just integrate the systems without that validation layer.

You need that intelligence that's better than human that can go through and match up the cost, match up the identifiers, make sure the information is accurate, thorough, complete. And that's really like what keeps your invoices out of exceptions. So managing exceptions important. Yes. Getting upstream and fixing the root cause problem. That's why we built up.

Andrew Stroup (18:19)
Love that. You know, I am a firm believer, you know, being an engineer that, you you have to go upstream to solve the actual issue because otherwise you're just whack-a-mole-ing all the downstream. You did bring up something interesting as well, though. You talked about, like, for an example, customer of, like, the 96 % automated, the 4 % left. I'm curious in that 4%, what are those typical exceptions look like? What is that piece of it? You know, the things that are outside the boundary layer.

Because that's, I'm sure listeners are curious, like where is that Delta they have to think about, plan for as they partner up.

Charley Dehoney (18:49)
some funny answers to this just because I've spent so much time in my career in freight brokerage and I think about

Think about that, you know, 23 year old carrier sales rep that is putting information into the system or the load builder in a, a logistics company. Like that's the lowest common denominator of your talent pool. So that's where the mistakes happen is somebody's going to fat finger something. They're going to leave the previous reference from the last order that they copied to create a new order. And they're not going to update those fields. And so.

It's just normal human stuff that people do or don't do. And I always think back to, ⁓ like the earliest days of my career, Amidine, who's the CEO of worldwide express. was like still one of my idols to this day. He would always say the easiest things to do are the easiest things not to do. So when you pass that work out to your brand new frontline, you know, X dollar an hour employee in

X city in the world. There's no guarantee that information's right. You know, there's a million reasons why people put wrong information in or they leave old information in or there's stale data. So, I guess where those exceptions come from is way less important than how they're resolved. And I think right now what's been commonplace in logistics is you leave those exceptions to people with an accountant's background.

because you can't trust the money with somebody who doesn't have a finance degree. And when you start to think about what is that person with 20 years of experience and a degree in finance in North America, forget what city. I mean, if they're on the coast, holy cow, but forget what city. I mean, even if they're in the middle of America, if they're in Omaha, Nebraska, where I live or Davenport, Iowa, or

Twin Falls Ido, it's still a material cost to have somebody with that experience in that degree. So the expense of managing these exceptions with a full staff accountant and 20 years of experience, and by the way, that person is the keeper of all your secrets in your business. They know where every stinking body is buried. They know where every customer's issue lies. They're the person you're not gonna go into an RFP without bringing her into the conversation. So like, that's your person that you got like,

Working on fat finger billing errors? Like, come on, man. Like, we're in 2025. Like, we're not doing this anymore. AI's here. Run it through the LLM. Let it spit back the exceptions. Get your smartest people working on those, you know, 3%, 4 % of the issues and let all the clutter and noise just run through the AI. Like, that's the world we're living in today, Andrew. I know that's exactly what you guys are doing in leverage. Like, that's exactly what we need to be doing.

as a whole in supply chain because there's too much waste. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry and many of those zeros are going to back office, stupid minutiae ⁓ and it's going away. You know it, I know it.

Andrew Stroup (21:38)
Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, and I think in addition to that, something that we've seen, I'm sure you're seeing also on the free brokerage side too, is the hands of the operating owners are changing as well generationally, right? I know we talked about Silva as well. And so the questions in which being asked are in a different lens, which I think is very critical, which I think opens up opportunities like Upwell and Leverage in that space, which has been great. We actually just came from a conference and we're chatting with some of the new owners, which

They're not new to the business. They're just new in their role because they've been groomed to do so over the past three or four decades of their life. And so it is interesting. I am curious though also, we talked a lot about the LLMs, the automation, the removal. I'm curious where that won't help, where you do absolutely, and we talked a little bit about, I'd love to click into this a little bit further, the pieces where, where do you recommend?

first diving into like patterns that you know that humans just inherently have to be there in presence, right?

Charley Dehoney (22:38)
Well, I think, you know, it's like addition by subtraction. So I think the most important thing is, and I've executed this playbook in my career, my journey is you've got to look at where's the the juice for the squeeze? Where's the bang for the buck? Like, where can we go get the biggest ROI? And oftentimes that ends up being in the kind of front of the house, you know, early stages of the transaction.

you know, whether it's document management, data extraction, load building, companies like Vuma and Happy Robot are like doing such an amazing job of just like taking humans out of the loop on the upfront part of it and really like bringing them higher quality data that's going to inform and arm the people in the back. And so I talk about the back office a lot because like that's where we've really drawn very, very tight guardrails around.

We don't want to live anywhere until the freight has been delivered and we want to stop when the money's in the bank. Those seven or eight work streams are exactly where we want to be because it gives us the most leverage, pun intended, and it gives us the most opportunity to shine the light on the problems that we're solving. So where are the humans most valuable? I think beyond this like

front end automation is, is it really goes into the exception management. goes into like the, the validation, the, the, ⁓ the human element, the communication going back in the, the collaboration piece of invoice resolution is where you want your strongest people working because they have the contextual knowledge and understanding of why the issue happened, where it arose, what the root cause was and how do we get past it? And so if you start to think about.

you know, where are these issues coming up? It's like generally around, mishearing complete information. And that information takes a human's touch to go back and get in touch with the broker, the carrier rep, the driver, you know, I'm missing this piece of paperwork. I'm missing this one identifier on the document. Do you know what that was? Can I just update it for you? Those are the types of things that you really want your best people working on because

They know how to fast forward through that whole conversation because they've seen it, they've been there, they've done it. And so that's where I'm seeing, you know, the new generation is coming in and they want the immediate solve, but they need the tribal knowledge and the customs, the traditions, the rituals that only your best people in your back office know. And I think one of the things that inspires me about Upwell is I'm seeing this like generational shift that you're talking about.

is I want to be that system of record that captures that data, captures that tribal knowledge, keeps those customs, those traditions, those rituals. It keeps them systematized and it makes that available for the next generation. And what I love about what we're building is there's a network effect of, I know that shippers traditions and rituals and habits. And they're, know,

and I'm working with them for one carrier, one broker, one forwarder. Well, I can take that same profile and I can cascade that across the rest of the network. And as more of that shipper, whether it's General Mills or 3M or McKesson or you name it, a big blue chip shipper, if we know how to get people paid by that shipper, that scales.

And we can take that exact same profile, that exact same set of rules, that exact same billing logic, and we can apply it to the rest of that shippers carrier network. And that's where we're seeing a lot of synergies. And that's where we're starting to see shippers leaning in, which is super cool because shippers don't want bad bills. They want to pay you. Like if you invoice the shipper, they want that to come through on the first pass. They want it to be approved. They want it to all happen in their Koopa or their Ariba or whatever they're using. And they don't want a human in the loop. Guess what happens if you have a mismatch?

then their person on their side has to take the initiative. They have to get back in touch with the carrier and it costs everybody time and money. So I think by just embedding this logic and keeping this next generation of super smart, super motivated business leaders that are coming in with like a world of context, cause to your point, like they've been groomed. And I mean, I, in just my, my, uh, years of knowing you, know, you're very respectful of your parents and like you talk.

highly about your parents. And so I know that you were raised right. And so you were groomed too, and you were taught how to do things the right way. But when you're growing up in a business like my children are, they have high expectations on them. And so I can only imagine building a generational business to where someday one of my sons comes in and starts to run it. they will bring their same like confident, know, swagger into the business. And they'll ask me just the same way they do when...

when I ask them to go do a chore that they don't think is efficient. I'm like, why? Why are we doing this? And I see this with the young people that are coming into Upload. They just are asking different questions. They're challenging every single assumption and they're challenging every single work stream and process. Why? Because they're smarter. Because they grew up with a phone in their hands. They're AI natives. They've been on chat GPT and working through their life using AI.

Andrew Stroup (27:12)
you

Charley Dehoney (27:38)
So those are the kinds of people that are just bringing these new solutions to the forefront and they're challenging. That's why leverage exists. That's why Apple exists because this younger generation is not going to come in and trade spreadsheets. They're not going to update your SharePoint. They're not doing that. They're not passing a clipboard back and forth. They don't know how to write cursive. A ballpoint pen is not their friend.

We need systems, we need integrations, we need data. And that's what the next generation is expecting and we're here for it.

Andrew Stroup (28:08)
Love it. Well, look, as we look to wrap up, always love to dive in a little bit more into some, you know, personal reflection questions, which you, you, Nellie, Charlie always like weave in anyways, which I think is one of your secret magical sauces about who you are as a person. But the first one always is, you know, what advice would you give younger Charlie or someone new to this space?

about focusing on, you know, this workflow or just generally the freight brokerage businesses.

Charley Dehoney (28:37)
Yeah, I I think the advice I would give myself is probably the creed that I lived by as a young person in logistics. And it's like, if you're curious, just keep showing up, keep asking questions, go to the event, like stay late, you know, get drunk, be at the bar, like ⁓ don't go up to your room, stay out, meet the next person. Why? Because they know something that you don't and this industry is infinite when it comes to.

the permutations, the opportunities, the, the just knowledge that's out there. So I think one of the things I'm happiest about, think one of the, the, the turns that I've made in my career was like leaving the big company at worldwide and going off and starting on my own. And I spent six or seven years just being a shipping hacker. Like if a, if a customer said, you as a yes, before they ask the rest of the question. And then I figured it out along the way. So.

If you can move it, I've probably packed it, shipped it, loaded it, driven the truck, sold it, dealt with the billing dispute, filed the claim. Like I've sat in every seat in this entire value chain. I fucking love every single one of them. And it's not because I love great and pallets and trucks. I love the people like the people in our industry are just crazy smart and.

What I love about being in this industry now for 22 going on 23 years is like, I guys like you and your partner. Like 20 years ago, you guys weren't coming into logistics because it wasn't called logistics then dude, it was trucking or shipping. And then it was like Amazon started calling it logistics. And then COVID happened. was like the supply chain. And it's like now everyone's a fucking supply chain expert. It's like, you know, like on my group thread with my brothers and sisters, when, you know, there's some supply chain issue, you know, my

sisters like to chime in. like, hey, thinking to myself, if only one of us was actually an expert in this and we knew what we were talking, wait, there is one of us. But you the bottom line is, is logistics is everywhere. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So I just love being around the youth of this industry and the people that are seeking and they're thirsty for the knowledge. like, those are the people I want to go grab a drink with. I want to like huddle up with them at the conference. I want to set up a Zoom call. I want to pick their brain more than

they could ever want to pick mine because I've already forgotten a lot of stuff that they are never going to learn, but they know stuff that I need to know now. And so I just, love this industry. love like inherently supply chains or networks. So if you're somebody like me who loves people, then you love to network and you love to get out there and understand, you know, who is Andrew? What did he do before this? Why did he get here? And

When I get to hear your story about running the supply chain through COVID under the Obama administration and dealing with that mess of an issue you were imposed with, it's like, yeah, man. These are the kinds of people that we need here. And companies like Amazon and Uber and you name it, I've brought that sort of.

that exposure to our industry. And that's why I get to talk to people like you. And that's why I love this business so much. It's like, we're getting smarter every day, not because we're learning more, but we're attracting better people.

Andrew Stroup (31:43)
Absolutely. appreciate the insight and obviously very much appreciate, you know, our connection a few years back and being able to build and nurture that relationship at the same time. Well, look, if as we wrap up, if today sharpened your path as a listener is to better freight brokerage, AR order to cash, highly recommend sharing this podcast and the notes that Charlie provided with your ops and finance leads.

Follow leverage supply chains wherever you listen and leave a quick rating. helps other operators find the show. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.