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[Music] hey everyone and welcome to our dat in focus interview the topic for this interview is going to be all things business intelligence and analytics and to help discuss that topic i'm joined by david spencer who is director of business intelligence at arrive logistics welcome david hey ken nice to be here thank you very much yeah i really appreciate you spending the time so i'm ken adamo chief of analytics at dat and in my role i'm responsible for data science data analytics and industry analysis i care to give the viewers a quick overview of your role david well i'm director of business intelligence at arrive logistics and in my role it's it's everything from reporting analytics and supporting our our data science efforts to uh understanding our uh understanding what's going on in the industry in terms of market conditions and helping communicate that with our customers and carriers through our platform arrive insights awesome yeah so i'm going to jump right in um and i have a little bit of a personal connection with arrive i know your ceo matt piatt he's a fellow uh mid-american conference grad right miami of ohio if i'm not mistaken from the northeast ohio area i think i met you david a few years ago at a d.a.t event oddly at torrey pines it it's hard to believe that we were actually doing those things back in those days right i know knocking down birdies at tory was fun yeah beautiful weather too so for those less familiar with arrived you care to give you know a quick overview it's a tremendous story rapid growth but i'll let you explain it better than i ever could sure yeah well founded in 2014 we have come a long way over the past you know six and a half years in 2020 we we crested over 815 million in in revenues um you know and ended the year with about 900 employees we're headquartered in austin texas we have offices in chicago and chattanooga as well and uh primarily focused on full truckload for van and driven and reefer those are our core strengths full domestic across the entire domestic united states i'm myself located in the chicago office but but it's been great getting a chance to go down and visit austin especially in these winter months lately it's been a little cold up here kind of jealous so one question we get a lot especially since a lot of our content has an analytics focus is what's encompassed in roles and responsibilities and i understand that you know your role is more of a senior role but can you take a few minutes to just talk about in your role kind of what an average day or you know your roles and responsibilities but also you know some key members on your team what their roles and responsibilities might look like sure yeah well i think it depends on the function right but myself one of the things i'm doing every morning right away is looking at the the updated data i think one of the um one of the best things about recent advancements in the industry is is all the new uh more high frequency data that's available day to day and helping inform us at brokerages or shippers or carriers wherever it may be on what the conditions are so that's a huge focus for me staying on top of those conditions communicating that with our team you know our sales team our carrier team where are the areas that they might struggle today that they weren't yesterday those are all really important things to be paying attention to on a day-to-day basis and communicating through those throughout the business has been really important for us from an analytics perspective and reporting perspective uh really it comes down to making sure that our dashboards are up to date and refreshing um you know we're addressing ad hoc reporting requests you know when it comes to our data science efforts we're thinking about what are the areas of the business that are have some inefficiencies right now how do we want to think about applying some analytics to help inform those making decisions of the information they need to make the best decision really it's just it depends on what what the core function is that we're talking about and um you know day-to-day activities here yeah i feel like and i'm curious to see if your perspective aligns with this the more data you acquire right whether it's through purchasing or kind of scraping it off of government sites the more important distilling it down in actionable insights become right because you can get way overloaded with the bits and bytes and i think that really brings the the role of business intelligence to the forefront right yeah you have to know what's a short-term data point and what's a long-term what what has long-term implications in terms of forecasting right i think you mentioned some of these government statistics right or consumer spending patterns these are things that may play out over longer periods of time say new truck orders uh it was just released for for january right preliminary data right well that's not going to have a huge impact for you know six to nine months down the road you have to have an understanding of the the timeline of the impact of some of these data points as well i think that's an important piece to it um but to your point what is the action what are the actual insights that matter um that's what we're focusing right what are the things that have the biggest impact on our business where can we have uh where are we seeing the greatest series of inefficiencies in our customers and our carriers businesses um and we have to prioritize those efforts first right because those are the biggest areas of opportunity for us yeah and that's really i think that you've outlined a really great success plan for really concrete business intelligence you know not spending time on stuff that doesn't matter and for a novice organization that can take a while to learn right everything seems to be important when you have all of this data at your disposal and i think the more that you do it right the the more you can suss out uh signal versus noise and what's important yeah our our business plan is the core to how we think about data right first and foremost um when we think about our staff and our head count it's it's all planned specifically based on um the goals that we've seen our new hires hit over the you know based on their tenure at six months at one year at 18 months at two years you know where are they most likely going to be we we understand our rates of attrition unfortunately nutrition is a part of every business but um you know making sure we're hitting those goals and staying on track that's how we keep a balance between you know our supply side and our demand side within our own business right how much rate are we putting on the board and we have that right capacity to support it so really for us it's at the core of our data you know we're really focused on um you know keeping our business on track and making sure we're hitting our goals and data really is at the core of making sure we're functioning you know functioning properly and optimizing our performance then you start peeling back the layers and thinking about okay we're hitting our goals or we're not where are there is to improve where are we spending more than we should be in terms of over market purchasing um where are areas of opportunity where we have strength where we purchase on our market how do we utilize those to support our customers and carriers um you know it all flows downhill from you know our business being so reliant on on data just to function and optimize our performance i think there's a great segue into my my next question and i know it's been beaten to death and coming on the heels of what you described is a really great year you know over 800 million dollars i'm sure you and the entire executive team have that yeah the billion dollar number in sight how did you through the lens of how you view the business manage the volatility of 2020 yeah well i just want to give a shout out to our rit and our technology teams that arrive i think the pandemic had a lot of businesses off guard uh it kind of forced our hand to launch our proprietary tms brand new internally it kind of forced us right but we were very successful with that launch immediately which allowed us to send you know at the time more than 800 employees to work from home in a matter of days i think first off right off the bat having sort of a continuity of business there was important for us important for our customers from that point forward it really was about understanding what are they trying like what are the trends affecting supply and demand in the industry i think this year we saw consumer demand and the changing consumer basket really play a big impact into what we saw in terms of how that translated to truckload demand right so what are these data points that that matter and following them closely and being able to react quickly i think in a time of uncertainty like the pandemic we really really had to be agile and move quickly and be forecasting and adjusting our forecast constantly what are you you know seeing so far this year that is surprising that is playing out how you expected sort of early assessments on 21. obviously it's really too early to tell what what the year is going to look like but we did expect to see things kind of cool down in terms of the ratio supply to demand here as we moved into q1 there was a lot going on in q4 with retail peak season and we expected as we transitioned into q1 here in 2021 that we would see more of a normal seasonal pattern or a softening and i believe we did start to see that through at least the first three weeks of january i i think the last week of january saw some challenges in terms of the end of the month but also the snowstorms that really affected large portions of the country that kind of shook things up a little bit and we've seen uh the extreme cold cold follow that uh and and how that's affected reefer capacity and just capacity in general uh that's something that we're still trying to understand how that's gonna play out over the course of the quarter but that's been a little bit surprising you can never count out some bad weather to be disruptive in q1 and i think that's been the wild card thus far yeah i mean polar vortex was 2014 i believe right which kicked off it was late 2013 early 2014 they kicked off that boom um so weather is always the wild card for sure all right david so now that we've covered 2020 in the first month and a half of 21 i wanted to circle back and ask you what's one thing or a few key things you learned over the last year that you really hope to employ at arrive moving forward yeah great question i think one of the key things that i've personally learned over the last year has been how sensitive truckload demand is to changes in consumer spending patterns you know in the changing consumer basket in this past year we saw a dramatic shift away from services and entertainment and travel to goods durable goods furniture you know everything that people need for enjoying life at home right and i think that had a tremendous impact that that stress capacity with that huge surge in demand for durable goods and i think that just having a good sense of awareness as to what the current consumer spending patterns are and how they're going to be applied going forward that's definitely something that's going to change potentially even the normal flows of seasonality that we're used to seeing in the past right if you look at what happened in the retail peak season this past year amazon doing their prime day in october pretty much just stretched out that whole holiday shopping season and i think artificially bought shippers a lot of extra time to get the goods into position for fulfillment for christmas you know that's a pattern that we might expect to see going forward changing the way that we've seen q4 seasonality uh be in prior years on a go forward basis these are all things that we're paying attention to as to how things might change going forward really interested to see what you guys have been seeing what are you what are you thinking about i think to echo your point i'll have two things one's industry related and it's just the remarkable how integrated the shipping industry specifically the north american truckload industry is with all of these other parts of the economy right so you look around the room and dean croak on our team that makes an excellent point how many more desk chairs and desks and bookshelves can you buy right so there because you know we think about all these things that at least when i was in industry weren't ultra front of mind it was pretty much all industry data that we studied and some of the big macros when looking at future trends the other part is it's been a great year and something i couldn't really do much when i was in industry but just connecting with other folks in the industry i found that with freight more so than other industries you could be the fiercest competitor day in and day out but still you know hop on a webinar with each other for the sake of educating your carrier base or talking about major concerns facing shippers and just getting out and connecting via social media via virtual conferences and finding ways to still connect that's something i don't want to lose once things kind of go back to you know air quote normal and i think it's been really great i mean this is a perfect example of things we may not have done two or three years ago right but all in the sake of increasing awareness and education and just being kind of gregarious about data and analytics i think has been awesome throughout the year so i want to pivot us into the next question and like like i said i've had the i've i've been lucky enough to to know you and some of the senior folks over at arrive for a while and see you guys grow one thing that was always remarkable was that how much you put data and analytics kind of as a priority at the forefront and scaling it as you grow i really want to hear from you what it's like living that every day and how arrive prioritizes that and ensures it scales with the business if you know matt you know he's always kicking the ball down the field a little bit further for us right so we set our goals um we go out we achieve them and it's on to the next goal and i think we've applied that mentality to what we do with data and analytics you know as i described earlier our core business model depends on the success of accomplishing and hitting certain goals um you know all the way down to the per rep per month you know of 10-year perspective and so once we start to have those type of core we call them table stakes data tools in place then we start thinking about you know how do we start you know squeezing more juice out of this right the way that i think about applying data science to what we do as a brokerage being a high transaction business running you know almost 2500 loads a day at this point every single load is an opportunity where small improvements can lead to big returns over the course of a year right dollar two or five dollar income you know incremental returns really add up and so we start thinking about um really where those opportunities exist and how we use data to help us accomplish some of that right one of the mindsets we have is i know it's probably one of your later questions here but about uh you know how we deal with those that are experienced and and have for the longest time relied on gut instinct well in in reality the goal of us with data science and analytics is not necessarily to perform better than those that have been around the industry for 20 plus years right you know with arrive looking to hire a thousand new bodies in 2021 how do we artificially inflate their intelligence using data analytics to get more out of people earlier and increase their experience levels the right data in front of the p these these reps at the right point in time for decision making that's huge right and so as we grow our challenges and change and our objectives change and so do our priorities for analytics you have an interesting viewpoint right when you're in a rapid growth business you don't have to think back decades to think when you were the size of a small broker right um no less than a few years ago um you were considerably smaller right that's kind of the double-edged thing of rapid growth what's one bit of advice you would give the arrive of five years ago as they embarked upon this journey of both revenue growth for sure but also data and analytics maturity you know to speak on what has been really beneficial for us over this growth is thinking about scale right um if we're currently a company of 900 to a thousand in a year we're going to be a company of 2000 well we need to be thinking about solutions at scale as our head count grows and we've gone through process improvement and and changes in our workflows new technology our data sources have changed um flexibility in our analytics platform is key right so um we talk about building logic upstream and focusing on data quality and um you know you can't go back and replace bad data um you know as it's being created so focusing really on clean well-structured data early is going to enable as you bring analysts in over the course of time to go back and have a history of data to work with right and that's something where we've been successful and um you know is is in scale and in building a a good history of data to support analytics right those are the fundamentals that i believe have really made us successful it's i feel like it's a constant struggle in transportation because it's such a blending of the new and the old especially in the ltl space in my history i found that you find a lot of conversations start with well in my ex years of history and usually whatever is going to be said after that i'm usually bracing for impact because i found that some of the most savvy and sophisticated operators that have that experience don't tout it right so the question i have for you really gets around you've established that arrive is using data and analytics as a competitive advantage but how do you internally deal with the sort of human push and pull against gut instinct and experiential learning yeah um well like i said previously it's not necessarily about trying to to have your analytics or your your your forecast be better than those that have tons of experience and really that know-how but um for us the focus has been like i said on you know how do we raise the water level for everyone within our organization right and i think that's been the focus but a big part of that is also building trust within the organization those that have that experience um they're they're more reluctant to rely on technology or data or you know the output of a machine learning algorithm because they have that experience oftentimes they find mistakes or errors or things that that a human being maybe would not have predicted or forecasted um you know and one of the ways we combat that is through visibility and transparency right we have a a cost prediction model and uh one of the things that we do is we provide visibility into how it's performing by a lane by region by customer in it predicting our actual costs on loads so that people have a really good understanding they can always go back in and validate okay where is it strong where has it had you know not necessarily the greatest strength in its performance invisibility and transparency is key we want people to understand what's going on with the data not just you know dealing with some form of black box where anything could be happening within it i think that builds trust that kind of gets us over that but having a good culture of data at arrive has been really helpful and and thankfully we haven't dealt with too much opposition to what we've been trying to do with our analytics the first part of what you said nearest my experience exactly right your average broker coming right out of college hasn't had much experience at all on the trucking or transportation sector six months on stipend and then on full commission how do i get them a baseline package of institutional knowledge through data and analysis in bi and then also i think your other kind of low hanging fruit is how do i inc very very small incremental improvements in how your top performers manage their books can have some of the biggest impact to your business because they're already performing at a high level and they're already moving a lot of freight so if you can sharpen the pencil with them by giving them tools right it's the the sky's really the limit on on how you can uh run more throughput through that machine so i'm going to put into the future as we start to to wrap things up here i usually ask this question to all of our guests but what are some big advancements you see coming in freight specific to analytics if you don't mind over the next one to three years i think that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the industry right largely been untouched as we start to think about what are the areas of inefficiency whether it be trying to understand uh dwell time at warehousing um whether it be on the brokerage side um like i said earlier overspending or or um you know against market or market rates i think that in general there areas of opportunity just come from a continued advancement of analytics and i think leveling of the playing field i think more and more brokerages and more and more carriers and shippers are going to start building out analytics focused teams and i think having a level playing field uh is really what's in the future yeah i agree with you um transparency and data access the data removes friction from markets right could you imagine trading stocks without a stock ticker like they used to do you know only people lucky enough to have a physical ticker tape machine could see the most recent trade prices and for the first 30 or so years of deregulation that's kind of how our industry operated right so i think you're going to see this tremendous catch-up period i think i truly believing on the foothills of that right now where our industry's going to catch up and i think airlines are deregulated in 78 trucking in 80. i don't think anyone can make the case that the airlines aren't significantly more ahead of trucking in terms of technological innovation so i'm super excited to be part of it because i think the next one to three or even five to ten years is just gonna be remarkable in our space yeah the um the access to data and information externally has grown tremendously over the past you know even like past year but i would say in the past two to three years it's been tremendous advancements in what's accessible to us as we're looking to invest in analytics there's a lot more potential return there for us because of some of the providers in the industry very much like yourselves you know making the data available to us you know not only more data but more frequently more regularly easier to connect to all really really big gains for the industry for sure so i'm going to bring us home here with a bit of the tip of the cap to the content marketing and your your team david as well over at arrive i truly think not just because you're on the virtual line with me here today you guys are putting out some of the best monthly content out there as it pertains to market updates i think there's some really i'm not going to name anyone else but i think there's some other you know as a whole i think our industry is doing a really really great job of democratizing these data and insights um in a way that's easily accessible by everyone but i wanted to give you a couple minutes to maybe talk about that then also point people to where they can find it because again i would highly recommend that anyone watches this goes and checks it out um because i think you'll learn quite a bit thanks yeah um really appreciate the nod there we put a lot of effort into making sure this is something that um those that we work with will find valuable and and we put it out there for free um and and we put it out there for the entire industry i think there's been a huge shift to that uh this year as you alluded to that's been part of the benefit of us working from home and going through this situation is the communal nature of sharing of information uh and insights right but the core of that is you know we've been using this data and this information to drive our strategy for for years right and and if now we're used taking this and putting that in front of the the shippers that we work with primarily shippers that we work with but exposing it to everyone and saying hey here's what we think is is happening here's how we're making our decisions around contract pricing and here's all the data to support that right that's full transparency um you know we're making that available to our shippers so that they can plan they can forecast um ultimately we want them to be more successful the more successful they are the more freight when they're more successful we're more successful because we're on the same page and so that's really the root of why we're doing this and why we put this content out there but for those that are interested you can always check out arrives linkedin page we post that there right away every single month you can reach out can get you added to a district list or you can find it at oriologistics.com arrive insights and the latest updates should be available for you right right when you go there so thank you so much for the plug ken um we get a lot of det data included in there um so so appreciate the call out yeah a couple things i'll just wrap up with as it pertains to that is one i love when we disagree or anyone in the industry i love when i see disagreeing reports right because most of the folks from the blue chip brokerages and data companies are out there the data is good but i mean there's a there's a what we do is we're here to interpret it right if all that was just the data i don't think either of us would be employed right it's a big part of what we do is interpreting it and gleaning the insights so um 2020 and so far in 21 has been a great year for healthy debates about what the metrics mean and where we're heading we've we've tilled a lot of new ground which has been right for that debate um but what i also appreciate about your report and what i've been striving to do here as well is it's pretty much agenda free i think for the most part it's sure you'd love people to ship with arrive we'd love people to you know become part of our customer portfolio but i think in those formats it's very important to be as objective and agenda free as possible because i think that's what resonates the most with the folks reading it and trying to derive value from it does that kind of jive with how you approach it yeah absolutely i mean for those that read through it there's we're not touting awry we're putting the data out there and saying this is how it is this is our interpretation and this is how we're making decisions based on this data you know i think we've seen that response from the shippers that we work with to be honest our engagement with shippers has improved dramatically if we're willing to put this content and this information out there and take this stance and drive these conversations you know it really puts us on that level of those top tier brokerages um you know doing these types of things because this information is table sticks being able to talk through this being able to have these types of strategic conversations it's been incredibly important for us and it makes me vulnerable i remember the first time i did it with my new job was like is it okay to post it i mean i'm having this debate internally right um it makes you vulnerable because it puts your thinking out there in the public domain to be challenged but then i think you come to a point where you eventually realize that the best thing that can happen is that it gets challenged and debated and um and it helps you arrive in a more well-defended thesis of what's going on in the market whether you're using that to the end to run a brokerage or to create data products i think that's ultimately the pressure test that you're looking for um to really make sure that you're going down the right path with that i think i've taken enough time of your time today i do greatly appreciate arrive for lending you to us for the past couple hours to get this set up and shot um again i encourage you to check out the the monthly update they put together and again greatly appreciate it and i hope we can talk soon thanks so much karen been a pleasure always love chatting with you thanks for tuning in to our dat in focus podcast with david spencer from arrive logistics if you enjoyed this podcast i recommend you check out any of our other content such as the dat freight vine podcast with chris kaplas or our weekly dat iq market update thanks again for listening and we hope to see you again soon [Music] you