TIA chief: In tough times, strengthening broker-carrier ties is vital

Anne Reinke of the broker trade group tells 3PL Summit about the value of trust

This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ 3PL Summit on Wednesday.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: How maintaining broker/carrier relationships is essential in a down market

DETAILS: Anne Reinke, the president and CEO of the Transportation Intermediaries Association, talks about the natural tension between brokers and carriers and how it can be overcome.

KEY QUOTES FROM ANNE REINKE:

“There’s always a level of distrust. So how you combat that in a down market is particularly interesting because brokers are suffering and carriers are suffering.” 

“I think that there are those in the owner-operator space who are willing to talk and want to have a conversation about it, and then there are those who are just committed to the distrust. Right now, gross margins for brokers are about 12% to 14%, and many brokerages that I know of are much less than that. And yet you have people who don’t believe it. That’s a tough place to be.”

“Some brokers are concerned about the carrier’s bottom line. They are concerned about giving them regular business, that they trust each other and that they work well together. So it’s incredibly valuable for a broker to have those kinds of relationships.”

Discussing combating fraud: “The last piece of this is sort of the hardest, which is the enforcement piece of getting state and federal actors really to start prosecuting.”

More articles by John Kingston

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.