Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hammer Down on the Market Scale Network. I'm your host, Mike Busch, and I'm delighted by today's guest. One of the cool things about working in supply chain and logistics is simply the size of this industry. We are a trillion dollar industry, and that's not like trillion dollar market cap where it's theoretical money. This is a trillion dollars literally being pushed through the supply chain and logistics world every year. And because of the size and scale of the industry, publications like Forbes often look around and say, hey. Who's on the cutting edge? So you'll see Forbes do the next billion dollar companies. And inevitably, there's gonna be a logistics company involved. You'll see Forbes do the next, you know, the the the, thirty under thirty, which is a prestigious list of founders that are doing amazing things. And every year, when they publish thirty under thirty, they have a couple of logistics or supply chain practitioners. And today's guest on this year's thirty under thirty, Justin Liu, cofounder of Truck Truck Media. Welcome to the show, my man. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. I love that intro. Thank you. I I try to do hype man thing for for everybody that joins the show. I'm like, I want people to feel pumped up, you know, and I want listeners and viewers to be excited about about, you know, learning cool things about our industry. And you, my friend, have done some cool stuff. Let's, let's get right into it. What is Truckpedia? Truckpedia, essentially, it's the tool I use to help my father grow his trucking company from three to fifty trucks in a little less than three years. Trucking, as you mentioned, is huge industry, but it's one of the most archaic industries out there. I out of frustration, during scaling the company from my attack from three to fifty, I built TruckVideo. Right? Essentially, it's a TMS, as a foundation to automate, streamline all the all the processes, but at the same time, that allow trucking companies to promote themselves to to, directly to have online presence. Marketing themselves directly to shippers, marking directly more to brokers that they work with become a little more selective on the freight that they haul. So Truckpedia, you can think of as Airbnb and Shopify combined, but for trucking companies to automate and optimize their operations so they can increase their revenues and profit margins. Okay. There was a lot that you just you just shared with me. So let me make sure I've got this right. So ninety percent of trucks on the road, when you talk about eighteen wheelers, are are part of a small fleet, so six trucks or less. So you looked around and said, okay. For those trucking companies that wanna grow from maybe six to ten or ten to to twenty, twenty to fifty, which is your background here. That's awesome. There are lots of relationships they need to have, but there's also lots of tools. So you created basically a one stop shop to manage operations, that was the TMS component Uh-huh. To manage relationships and attract new business on sort of a CRM component, and then the whole darn thing is automated to make it simple. Is that do I have that right? You eight ninety nine percent got it right. So we're not a CRM on that end, but it's a marketing tool marketing tool that allow them to trucking company build a website. Right? Now I can be searchable, visible online. Second part is I can do email marketing towards my customers, right, potential customers to get my business out there. Right? Having that online presence and mark yourself out there. And all of that is built, like you mentioned earlier, as a one stop shop on top of the foundations of TMS. Without the TMS automating everything that you need to run your business, you cannot make the online presence seen and felt having the impact immediately. So that's kind of what TruckVideo is, help people to do that, the one stop shop for trucking companies. Okay. So understanding you come from the trucking background and by the way, I have this theory that that that when it comes to trucking, ninety percent of people either, one, fell into it, direct quote, or, two, they come from a legacy. My mom, dad, aunt, uncle was in the business. So you're you you fall into my bucket, which I love. I understand kind of how you came up with this, but this is grandiose thinking, man. How did you pull this all together? How did you pull it off? Out of frustration. Out of frustration that scaling a trucking company, I still remember when I first joined my dad, he had three trucks, and he told me that, hey. You're young. You're fast. This is great for you because you need to go on DAT that. Right? You need to be if you want the hot loads, you need the first one dialing in. Right? So you're sharing the screen, scrolling down, refreshing, and you're gonna be the first one to dial in to get the hot loads. Alright? Game well. I'm fast. I'm young. You're right. I'm I'm competitive. I'm gonna keep on dialing. From doing that, what I realized later on is the hollows don't even pop up on the on the low boards. If you have good relations with brokers, they send it right to you, to your inbox. And if you have, working with shippers directly, you have that relationship, they wouldn't even make it to the open marketplace. Right? So out of that frustration realizing, you know what? I'm just taking leftover loads. Not a lot of people want it anymore. How do I get the actual hot loads? So from there, it's a win win. I need to build an online presence. I need to focus on not only working a hundred percent with freight brokers. Freight brokers are great. I'm never anti broker. What I think every trucking company needs to do is having a healthy balance. How do you have a balanced relationship with brokers and with your own customers? Market like today, where the last three years we've been in, Trucking Company went out of business for a reason because they relied too much on probably on the spot side and not have too not having enough shippers that provide them high paying load to stay in the business. Right? So I have the same frustration. We, several times, almost went on business when first joined. So I had to realize my profit margin, my dad didn't even know is less than seven percent. I had to figure out myself for him. Is profit margin less than seven percent? How do I get a number up? Well, I need to be you know, start becoming friends with free brokers I work with normally with. Right? How do I build that relationship? I need them to know that I need these lanes. This is what I want. So before they post loads to the public, to other people, let me build a relationship with brokers on that. And in addition to that, I'm surrounded. We're already sending me this straight at the time. There's so many warehouse nearby. How come I am not introducing myself to any of the neighbors when we're on warehouse right there? Right? Well, first, let me build my own online, website. So I have online presence. They will look us up. We exist. Second is, how do I get myself out there to talk to them? Cold calling, knocking on doors, sending emails, figuring out different ways to do that. So by doing all those stuff manually, and Truck PDO is boring. Man, you're hitting on, like, all of my favorite talking points. So so to me and and I think it's it's interesting. Right? Like, when you're in that that very small trucking phase, you know, a couple of trucks, maybe it's maybe you're an independent owner operator, maybe you've got three or four trucks, It can be really hard to build direct relationships with the shippers. Right? Like, Amazon doesn't wanna have five thousand trucking relationships. Right? They're gonna work with maybe a broker or they're gonna do a load board type approach. So as a small company, you really have to find ways to differentiate yourself. And one of the ways to do that is to build great relationships. So I love that you touched on that component of it. And then as you scale, the goal is to get away from the spot market, which is, you know, kind of for for folks who don't know spot market, spot market is basically, I need this move tomorrow. Here's what I'll pay for. It's not contract. It's not long term. It's let me find the trucker who will do this for the cheapest or who might, you know, theoretically do this for the best. Versus contract freight is, look, I I'm gonna Justin, I'm gonna reach out to you and say, I wanna move I want you to move fifty containers or fifty loads per month, and here here's how it's gonna go. So when you start out, you're kinda stuck playing that spot market and looking to grow those relationships via brokers or direct relationships. So you're part of of banging on doors at warehouses, man. There's nothing more exhausting, but potentially more rewarding, you know, when you're in that first one, you find that opportunity. You've automated all you've been through the wars, man. You and you've figured out ways to to to solve some of these. What are what are the coolest things that people don't know about Truckpedia? If if I'm a trucker, what's the one thing that that would make me go, wow. I didn't know you did that too. Love that. Love that. And then, so a couple way couple of things. Regardless of broker or a shipper, nobody likes to chase their, truckers. Hey. Where's my where's my loan? Where's my loan? TruckPedia, one feature I built in, I was really proud of is getting that automate update. Whether it's a broker or whether it's a shipper. Now every truck, you know, since twenty nineteen has ELD in it. As a truck arrived, send that update to your customer or whether broker should let them know truck has arrived, truck has departed. Here's a POD. Right? You don't need to ask him for it. Here you go. Right? Here's a POD. Immediately, relationship a lot of time. Relationship is built not just crow grab the beer, grab you know, you can have dinner together or having a call about how your weekend went. But also, it's how do you make the other person's life easier? How do you make their job easier? And a lot of time as a broker, as a shipper, that comes down to where's my load, and I don't need you to call me every time, but if I need it, I can see it. Same thing as bill lading or POD. Everybody wants that. Right? You cannot complete a load without that. Don't ask your people to chase for it. Let them know. And and same thing, don't surprise your broker or shipper after a load has been delivered. Oh, by the way, I got a two hour detainer request. No. No. No. Thirty minutes before it happens, send them an automated email. By the way, my truck is still here, and we're about to enter detention. So that way, what either the shipper or the broker can call the person and know, hey. We gotta speed up. If you don't want detention, then you you gotta load them within the next thirty minutes. So don't surprise them with extrovert charges afterwards, and those can all be automated. It doesn't have to be each one by one to do it. So by having that feature available in Truckpedia, we actually gain a lot of trust from brokers and from shippers. Right? Just just by doing that, people love doing business with me because I made their life easy. And in addition to that, I don't mind paying this guy, you know, just in two hundred dollar extra for this load because, you know, he he makes my life easy. Right. I get that, man. I love it. Dude, how did I understand that you come from the family background in in trucking. How did you get here, though? Like, what what's your career path? What was the point? What were you do what were you doing before you said, dad, I wanna help? I actually for the longest time growing up, I go I I was like, dad, I don't wanna help. I I never knew what I wanted to do as a kid, but I knew it was not trucking. Seeing how stressed my dad was really home, always on the road, phone call, paperwork, everything. I didn't wanna do anything related to that. First job out of college was Amazon, launching robotic warehouse for Amazon. I thought it was cool. Right? We're we're converting legacy warehouse to robotic ones. But little did I know I was gonna invest into logistics. The only industry I knew I didn't want to get into. Working at and working there made me realize that, wait a minute, this was, like, twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen. Twenty seventeen. Twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen. Started with internship working there. We realized that wouldn't Everybody's old school. At the time, Amazon didn't have the Amazon, Relay where where where, I forgot Flex, for what it's called now. But it didn't have any of the Amazon logistic thing figured out yet. They're still using trucks from brokers wherever. No visibility. No nothing. Everything old school. Made me realize, wait. My assumption about my adapting old school, completely wrong. Everybody's a dinosaur. Everybody's archaic in the industry. And they have realized it's huge, huge market cap in trucking. One trillion almost alone in logistic in the US. And that's when I had my moment. Let me leave Amazon. My dad's been working his ass off for years to feed the family. Let me retire this guy earlier than he actually would by himself and and see what I can do. I still didn't wanna do trucking. I gave myself three years. In three years, I'm gonna retire my dad, and I'm gonna go back to business school. Right? Get MBA and transition, go back to corporate world again. But life never goes as planned. Once I get in, I go, this is fun. I'm scaling business. I'm growing. Right? We're growing really fast, and I'm I'm loving the game of it. And and there's a lack of technology, and I can solve that, not just for him, but for everybody. So when he retired, sold the company, which I did achieve my goal of retiring him with three years. Twenty twenty twenty thank you. Twenty twenty one, he's he he he retired, exited. Immigrants' parents never really retired, but I was able to get him where I want him to be financially. So and then that's when I started doing Truckpedia full time. It's like, I I don't need to go to business school. I can just do this. This is actually this is no better this is probably the best business school that anyone can ask for is by scaling the business from nothing to something. So so that's kinda really, led me to starting a Truckpedia path. What a cool story, man. So, Justin, what's next for Truckpedia? If if I've got a got somebody who, you know, is is is viewing or listening, thinking, wow. This is really cool. I can't wait to see what the next what what's the next launch? What what's the secret sauce coming up? Absolutely. It's the same thing. We wanna service truckers. Our goal we don't want to be the next Uber, next convoy. We don't want to even want to be in marketplace. We just wanna focus on truckers. How can we help trucking companies achieve the same success I did for my dad, which we have seen a couple companies going from three to eighteen, going from five to twenty trucks? We were already seeing some successes with trucking company who follow the the the the advice and tips and our software to scale. Same thing, double down on trucking companies, helping them figure that part out. Next step is we actually figure out that a lot of brokers are actually struggling to find shippers as well, where they're not utilizing the marketing strategies people are using outside of trucking to approach customers. A lot of people would tell you cold calling is dead. Email marketing is dead. No. It's not. Email marketing by far is my number one favorite tool to scale. Right? We realized that the tool we build for trucking companies, it's applicable for brokers too to scale to find their own cost. So so yeah. So our we just want to be the software for trucking. We don't wanna take out anybody. We just wanna empower as many people as we can within this ecosystem inside trucking site. So our goal is literally how can we not just be a TMS, but also become a marketing tool for brokers, for shippers to scale their business as well. That's amazing, man. So one of my favorite questions to ask guests, is if you were talking to a younger version of yourself or talking to a new or recent college grad thinking about supply chain, and I love that you came in kicking and screaming, What's, what's the piece of advice you'd give back, Ed? Great question. What advice would I give, to those people? This is kinda advice I got from my, one of my mentor from Amazon as well. Leo, two advice. First one was, be firm on your vision. Be flexible on how you get there. Right? There's no, don't just think there's one path to where you need to be. Like, just be once you set on your vision, like, I'm gonna like, for example, you're trucking. You wanna say I want to grow to one hundred trucks like be flexible how you get to that one hundred trucks right? So and don't be afraid of failure. Don't be afraid to be like I I can't do this. No, yes you can, right? If you don't know, just break it down to the most fundamental element. If I know nothing about trucking, white piece of paper, look in industry. How would you solve it logically as an outsider? And and then look into the current way how the industry is solving it. Don't let don't do the first thing. I'm gonna learn a lot of new people in the industries. I'm gonna learn from people who know how to do this for years, and then I'm gonna do exactly what they did. Well, if you do exactly what they did, you'll end up where they are. The word where it's lack of innovation. Right? Do both. Learn from them, but at the same time, bring your own, bring your own perspective to it. Why they're doing this way? Maybe I'm I'm thinking from doing it this way. Why not do it this way? I challenge that. Challenge the status quo and keep, reiterations over what you're doing. Talk to your customers. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, and be fast and be flexible on how you get to your end result. That's awesome, man. Hey. Listen. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, learn more about Truckpedia, potentially become a customer, or just reach out to one of the famous, fabulous Forbes thirty under thirty folks. What's the best way to get in touch? I'm very active on LinkedIn. Used to be more active on LinkedIn. You can send me a LinkedIn request. Justin Lou, Truck Media. You can find me there, send me a request, or just go on our website. If you're, if you're interested to connect with me, LinkedIn is the best. If you say, hey. I want to learn about Truck Media. Probably go on Truck Media website and schedule for a demo where we can showcase more of our features and product to you. Hey. It's Justin Loo from Truckpedia. I'm Mike Bush. Thanks for listening, everybody. Talk to you soon.
