This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Small Fleet & Owner-Operator Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Fuller Speed Ahead: From “Internet Truckstop” to Industry Leader: Kendra Tucker On 30 Years of Truckstop
DETAILS: Freightwaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller speaks with Truckstop CEO Kendra Tucker about the company’s 30th anniversary and its unique perspective on the evolution of the freight technology industry.
KEY QUOTES FROM TUCKER:
“We want to understand how our carrier feels about the work they do every day. What we got was optimism. Greater than half of our carriers expect the next three to six months to be better than it was last year, better than it has been in the last two years or so. Our carriers are saying Q4 for them didn’t experience the hardships they experienced in previous years. Our data is corroborating that as well. Spot rates are up 1.5% since Q4 and 8% year over year.”
“We are at the beginning of the recovery. I am cautiously optimistic about it. What we can all agree on is that this recovery will feel different than previous recoveries or previous markets. As we come out of the bottom, it will feel more tepid compared to 2021. Everyone agrees that it doesn’t feel like 2022 or 2023. It has more of an uptick than previous years.”
“There are a few things we’ve added this year that help to build confidence in the relationships that carriers can build with brokers and vice versa. One of the things we’ve implemented that we’ve had good adoption on is identity verification for both carriers and brokers. Anyone who enters our ecosystem, particularly as they come through onboarding compliance, they have multifactor authentication and a government-issued form of ID to make sure they are who they say they are. We are doing the matching behind the scene to verify that it’s associated with the authority on file. It helps build trust with technology.”
“One of the things we know for sure is just because you have a new authority or just got your authority active in the last six to 12 months, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have experience in transportation. Many of the new authorities have been drivers at other companies before. Being able to expose that to brokers to increase the level of trust that they might need to build at the outset of the relationship – that’s really important, and we want to be able to facilitate that further.”
