Quick180 expanding to Savannah

“Street turn” enabler said it has plans to enter the Montreal and West Coast North America markets as well.    Quick180, a company that helps container drayage companies do “street turns” so that their drivers can be more productive, is expanding to Savannah.
   Rick Knapp, the CEO of Quick180 and former chief operating officer of Virginia International Terminals, founded the company a year ago, to serve customers moving cargo in and out of Hampton Roads.
   Quick180 helps exporters of containerized cargo connect with truckers who have empty containers available because they are moving import loads to their vicinity.
   Street turns – which allow the transfer of an empty container from an importer to an exporter without the need to return to a shipping terminal with an empty container – can help reduce costs and pollution, and make drivers more productive.
   Knapp said the company has already hired a person to do sales and marketing in Georgia and plans to begin operations in Georgia within two or three months.
   “We will begin a concerted marketing campaign to get beneficial cargo owners signed on to the system,” he said. “We’ll have some meetings with the industry in Savannah in the next 30 days, and once we get that critical mass set up — and I think the critical mass is probably in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 exporters and maybe 75 to 100 motor carriers — we’ll actually begin doing transactions.”
   He said Quick180 has gotten funding from a private equity company that will “allow us to go forward on a very rapid basis” and the company is planning over the next year to expand into the Montreal, Oakland and Los Angeles/Long Beach markets.
   Knapp said the Quick180 system begins with a request from an exporter or his motor carrier or 3PL who needs an empty container. They enter their booking number into the system and ask for a specific size, height, and type of container. The motor carrier responds by putting the actual container he plans to provide into the Quick180 system and the company screens that information to make sure that it’s not been taken off hire and meets the customers spec.
   Once the request is entered, “we already know the specifics of the container necessary to fill that booking and then we fan that out to motor carriers that we know have those containers in or around the zip code location of the exporter,” said Knapp.
   A pre-agreement is consummated, and there is a texting system in which motor carrier can direct the driver where to bring the container. The system allows the driver to take a picture of the container to establish that it is damage free and has no dunnage.
   The exporter or its driver will also look at the box, inspect and take a picture of it and “then we send out our EIRs (equipment interchange receipts) exchanging the container between the import motor carrier and the export motor carrier,” Knapp explained.
   An exporter can use the system to indicate his need for an empty container tomorrow or even weeks in advance.
   Knapp said the company has arranged thousands of moves, and noted that while Quick180 was launched last April, it was not until last October, after several revisions of its software and several marketing efforts that “we really got something that had traction and was scalable and presented the kind of value that we wanted to bring to the industry.”
   While truckers have long done street turns using trucks within their own organizations, Knapp says Quick180 eliminates the peril of doing street turns with other companies by giving them approved equipment interchange receipts.
   Until now, truckers have had to use the phone to call shipping lines, chassis providers, and rely on phone calls and emails to document what Knapp calls a “tremendous liability exchange.”
   “That’s full of peril. Ours is different. We provide a uniform intermodal interchange document that is approved by the industry. It is the document that is used by every marine terminal operator out there, and we give exactly the same EIR which transfers liability from one trucker to the other. We transmit that information to the steamship lines. To the motor carriers and to the chassis pool provider. It is a fully integrated system,” said Knapp.
   He believes Savannah will be an attractive location for his company to do business, both because it has handled increasing volumes of cargo well and because it is a large market for exports.
   “Every export load that goes through any port has to start with an empty delivered to the exporter’s door,” added Knapp. “If you do a statistical analysis of the imbalance in the flows in each one of these ports you’ll find that in most cases, there is an overabundance of empty equipment out there in the hinterland trying to find their way back to the port when in fact there are exporters who are crying for these empties.”