Check Call: Don’t stake a claim

Claim nothing. This week on Check Call we have Phillip Lamb, claims master extraordinaire, to talk about all things claims — most importantly when to shut up and let the claims team take over, which coincidentally is the second someone mentions an issue. Make no promises and immediately call your friendly neighborhood claims team. While claims are sometimes cool to see pictures of, things can get out of hand quickly. 
Know your worth. The real trick to not having a bad time is when the RFP for a new customer first rolls around. Before that bad boy is sent out to the carriers, check all the liability limits that you’re requesting with the claims team, for both full truckload and LTL, to make sure that they are adequate levels. No one wants to get to the claims process and find out that there isn’t adequate coverage. Also, while in the discovery phase for a prospective customer you run into someone being a little less forthcoming with information, that’s a red flag. Run as fast as you can, cause someone that isn’t going to give you claims history is someone you do not want to be hanging out with. Check out the episode for the full scoop on claims.

Like a broken record. “This is a good quarter, but not record breaking” is a sentiment that almost all full-truckload carriers are echoing throughout quarterly earnings calls. Less-than-truckload, though, is having a bit of a different earnings season. It seems no matter where you look, revenue is up and things are never better as LTL continues to be the one unfazed by the downturn in the freight market. Recently the CEO of Forward Air taunted a recession: “Bring it on,” he said, as the company posted its highest-ever quarterly earnings. It doesn’t stop there. ArcBest reported a record quarter as well. Yellow and XPO followed suit. It seems that LTL carriers cannot be stopped. 

Enter the partial truckload. LTL took the brunt of a lot of e-commerce deliveries at the beginning of the pandemic. But as consumer demand for e-commerce goods waned, LTL rates and demand did not follow suit. As the overall LTL network contracts with acquisitions and carriers stopping service, the same issues of employee and driver retention plague the industry. Capacity is still tight throughout the entire LTL network. Shippers are less likely to switch carriers for fear of freight not getting picked up. LTL demand will not be going anywhere anytime soon. So for those shippers facing double-digit rate increases, unfortunately I don’t think there will be many negotiations on the pricing front to try and get those general rate increases lower. 

Market check. The Weighted Rejection Index for Cincinnati has dropped since the beginning of the month. Capacity is starting to loosen in Cincinnati, but it isn’t a whopper of a freight market. It might seem daunting that the weighted rejection index has dropped 2 index points in a week, it’s not as significant of a change due to the size of the market. However, if you have a customer that does a lot of shipping out of that market, it is extremely relevant to the spot rates and pricing power as now pricing power has slightly shifted toward the carrier. 

Who’s not with whom. Turns out not paying your employees, trying to buy a soccer team, flying to celebrity golf tournaments on a private jet and allegedly retaliating after being suspended from work is a pretty good way to get yourself kicked off the board of directors at the company you founded. Chris Kirchner, former CEO of Slync.io, reportedly has doubled down on his antics, creating quite a negative outlook for the company he started. Slync.io has been in the news for all of the worst reasons, making it extremely difficult for the company to rebound and right the sinking ship. The company now will likely be sold to the highest bidder for the technology or just fall by the wayside. 

Quotable moment from Clarissa Hawes’ article: Prior to the firing of former CFO Samar Kamdar, Jason Selvidge, the former vice president of engineering, said Kamdar “told him the company only had $15,000 in its operating account and that Kirchner was the only one with access to Slync’s investment account. The [wrongful termination] lawsuit claims Kamdar was fired after he complained to investors that Kirchner was ‘misrepresenting the amount of annual revenue the company was making to investors by a factor of at least 30.’”

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