Completing the Capacity Stack

123Loadboard and Direct Freight are coming together to build a single, stronger independent freight network. The two platforms will continue to operate as customers know them, but behind the scenes they’ll increasingly function as one connected system, letting a broker post freight across both networks from a single workflow, and giving carriers access to a combined pool of freight opportunities.

For Carmelo Messina, Vice President of Sales at 123Loadboard, the logic behind the combination starts with a simple observation about how brokers actually work.

“Freight takes a network. That’s really the starting point for us,” Messina said. “Brokers already have carrier relationships, a TMS, and usually one or more load boards. We’re not pretending those tools are going away. The problem comes when all of those things still don’t produce a truck.”

123Loadboard is closing that gap not by replacing what brokers already use, but by adding another layer of capacity for when the usual network comes up short.

Messina calls this the “capacity gap,” and says it matters more than raw coverage percentages might suggest.

“It’s the load you still can’t cover after you’ve exhausted the obvious options,” he said. “And those loads matter disproportionately. Your customer doesn’t really care that you covered most of their freight. They remember the load that didn’t move.”

Internally, 123Loadboard uses what Messina calls the “90% idea” to illustrate the point. “You wouldn’t tell your customer, ‘Don’t worry, we’re 90% covered,’” he said. “You need confidence that you have somewhere else to turn when the normal options aren’t working.” The company’s shorthand for that idea has become something of a mantra: don’t live and die on one load board.

Messina says that there’s an important distinction between relying on one platform for full coverage and taking advantage of multiple networks. 123 Loadboard isn’t interested in replacing established load boards as a sole provider. 

“Brokers don’t need us to tell them to abandon tools that already work for them,” Messina said. “We think the smarter model is additive.” 

The approach, as Messina describes it, is to layer 123Loadboard and the Direct Freight network on top of existing carrier relationships, TMS platforms, and load boards in order to catch what falls through a broker’s primary workflow. 

“If you’re already getting most of your freight covered, great,” Messina said. “We’re interested in helping with the freight you’re not covering.”

At the most basic level, combining the 123Loadboard and Direct Freight marketplaces simply means more listings in one place. But the bigger opportunity comes in terms of timing, i.e.,  surfacing capacity before a broker is scrambling for it.

“A broker shouldn’t have to wait until they’re desperate for a truck and then start searching everywhere,” Messina said. “We want to make it easier to see potential capacity earlier, reach more of the right carriers, and ultimately give brokers more confidence when they accept freight from their customers.” It’s a philosophy he sums up plainly: cover all bases.

Confidence in your freight network, according to Messina, is more important than an individual load board’s platform. 

“A load board is a tool,” Messina said. “A network is the people, relationships, information, and activity around it.” The fundamentals still matter, he added. Posting the load, finding the truck, and making the connection are mandatory parts of the process. But 123Loadboard’s ambitions extend further. 

“For brokers, it’s about coverage and confidence,” Messina said. “For carriers, it’s about having enough information to decide whether a load actually makes sense for their business. And for both sides, it’s about trust. Who am I doing business with? Can I rely on them? Is this a relationship I want to build?”

One early glimpse of that network-first thinking is Capacity Radar, a concept Messina describes as a look at where freight matching is headed next. Traditional load boards, he noted, are built around explicit signals, such as a posted load or a posted truck. But there’s more information available than that.

“A carrier may have searched a lane, operated there previously, indicated preferred lanes, or generated other signals suggesting that they could be relevant to a particular load,” Messina said. “The idea behind Capacity Radar is to start making those signals useful to brokers.”

Instead of only answering “which trucks are posted right now,” Messina says that the goal is to help brokers answer a more useful question: “Where might I find capacity for this load?” 

The carrier side of the equation gets equal weight in Messina’s telling. More freight opportunities help, but he doesn’t think volume alone solves the carrier’s actual problem.

“A carrier has to work out whether the load is actually worth taking,” Messina said. “What’s the rate? What’s the deadhead? What happens at the destination? Can I find a backhaul? Do I trust the broker? Does this move get me closer to where I need to be?” Those decisions, he said, determine whether a carrier is running a healthy business, which is why 123Loadboard treats the carrier side of the network as a question of decision support and not just listing volume. “More freight matters. Better information about that freight matters just as much.”

Even as 123Loadboard leans into matching technology and data, Messina is emphatic that freight remains a human business. 

“A difficult load isn’t just a row in a TMS,” Messina said. “There’s usually a broker trying not to disappoint a customer and a carrier trying to make the economics of their week work.” Technology, in his view, should clear away unnecessary friction, not substitute for the relationships that freight runs on. “We want technology to make the people in freight better at their jobs, not remove the people from freight.”

That extends to trust, which Messina describes as foundational to the network 123Loadboard is building, particularly as fraud has become a bigger industry concern. 

“There is uncertainty on both sides of every transaction,” Messina said. “Brokers want to know they’re dealing with legitimate, reliable carriers. Carriers want to know they’re dealing with legitimate brokers who are going to pay them and treat them fairly.” 

Scale for its own sake isn’t the goal, Messina added: “A bigger network isn’t automatically a better network. More capacity is valuable. Capacity you can have confidence in is much more valuable.”

Messina says that the combination with Direct Freight is an important step because it strengthens the network. “From there, the opportunity is to make that network smarter through better matching, capacity intelligence, trust signals, and decision support, while keeping real people in the loop,” he said. “We’re not trying to build another place where people stare at more listings. We’re trying to build the network brokers turn to when they need to close the capacity gap, and the network carriers use to make better freight decisions.”

His message to brokers, distilled to three lines: Don’t live and die on one load board. Complete your capacity stack. Cover all bases.

123Loadboard and Direct Freight operate under a shared network, One Freight Network.

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