The Easy Button for Expedited Freight

Matt: Hello and welcome to On Air with Airfreight.com. This is a new podcast that is all about business logistics and the high-stakes world of expedited shipping. It's brought to you by Airfreight.com, which is a premium freight broker specializing in those critical shipments when your money or your business is on the line. We have solved thousands of critical shipments for Fortune 100 companies to small businesses across America. And we believe that this is an interesting conversation that is crucial to everyone's everyday lives. So we're excited to bring this new podcast to you. And my name is Matt, and I am today's guest host, because the actual guest today is our actual host, Kevin Carpenter. Kevin, what's up?

Kevin Carpenter: Hey Matt. Hey, what's up, man? Thank you for having me here on my show.

Matt: You're welcome. Welcome to your podcast.

Kevin Carpenter: I'm excited.

Matt: Yeah, dude. Excited to jump in and learn a little bit about you, learn a little bit about the world of expedited freight and even Airfreight.com, and maybe what people can expect from this new podcast in the freight and logistics world. So let's just dive in right away. You are an expedited shipping agent. What does that mean? How would you explain that to somebody?

Kevin Carpenter: Sure. I'm the guy that you call when you have something right here and you need to get it over there, usually pretty far away, as fast as possible. And I'm the guy you call that determines the best way to go about doing that — the mode, the carrier selection — and we execute the shipment for you. And then we take care of any problems that may arise along the way, and we keep you updated throughout the process. So we're kind of like that easy button for critical freight.

Matt: The easy button for critical freight. I love that. So how did you end up in expedited freight?

Kevin Carpenter: Sure. So I'm going on my twentieth year in expedited freight, which is pretty crazy. That just kind of hit me the other day. I started in 2006, just entry level as a dispatcher in the expedited freight world. The company that I worked for was called Panther Expedited Freight. And if you're involved in the industry at all, you've probably heard of Panther, because they were and still are one of the premier expedited companies out there. Like I said, I started off as a dispatcher, and pretty quickly worked my way up to where they would send me to work on site with a customer. I had a customer that I was on site with for three years. I moved my family to Detroit and was an on-site rep for three years with a company in Detroit, just handling all of their expedited shipments on behalf of Panther. I decided that my family was going to move to Hawaii in 2012. I just kind of one day bought plane tickets one way and told my wife — I already knew she wanted to do it. So I gave us about three months to figure it all out. And we did. In that process, I connected with Dan Boaz here at Airfreight.com. We hit it off pretty quickly. He loves Hawaii. He thought it'd be cool to have a guy in Hawaii. And also there were some time zone advantages that you have being six hours behind East Coast time. So, not to jump ahead, but I'd be answering calls at two or three PM in the afternoon and it'd be nine or ten PM on the East Coast. So we were able to start with Dan. And one of the cool things about airfreight.com is all of us here work remotely. We all work from our home office, maintain a professional setting from our home. We were doing it way before it was cool to do it. Like I said, I started with AirFreight in 2012. So it was actually a way more unique thing to be working from home during that time. Obviously during COVID that normalized it quite a bit, but we were well ahead of the curve at that point. And yeah, so what would that be — fourteen years? I've been with airfreight.com. And I have a large base of repeat customers that call me, that I've just kind of accumulated over the years, because I'm that one call solution. Now I'm not the right call for every single shipment that my customers have, but I am the call for their most critical ones. So that's a good place to end that.

Matt: Nice. So you guys live in the world of expedited freight, and then within expedited freight you really specialize in this high touch, high level of service, for those most critical freight needs that people have.

Kevin Carpenter: Sure. Because even in the expedited freight world, there are still volume customers and volume providers. There are customers that have 10 to 20 expedited shipments every day. And we'll back up just a little for people in the audience that don't know — expedited freight, the hallmark of it is that it's a dedicated truck that's handling the shipment from point A to B. It's not moving through a network, it's not sharing space on a truck with other freight, getting transferred at a bunch of different terminals along the way. Expedited freight is a dedicated truck picking up at a specified time, time definite, and then going straight to delivery in most cases. But again, even within that expedited freight world, not all expediters are the same, not all expedited service providers are the same — especially when it comes to, there are asset based companies, there's asset light companies, and then there's totally non asset based companies like airfreight.com.

Matt: So in this world of freight and logistics, what is something that you feel like people just don't know or misunderstand about it?

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, I think that people don't take too much time to appreciate the fact that — look around in the room you're in right now. Everything in that room rode on a truck at some point in the process. Unless you handmade it right there. But that's not a very large percentage of items. Everything in the room you're in rode on a truck at some point. So I think people often either forget or underestimate the importance of transportation and logistics as a whole in our world.

Matt: It has a massive impact on our day to day lives.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, absolutely. It does. And airfreight.com is not handling that everyday stuff. We're handling the stuff that — like you said in the intro — somebody's business is on the line, or a very important customer is on the line. Or in the case of certain manufacturers, they have an assembly line that's going, and if a machine breaks on that assembly line, there's now a fixed cost that they're losing every minute that that line is not running. So that puts a high cost of a premium freight shipment — like an expedited truck shipment or an air freight shipment or an air charter for that matter — in perspective.

Matt: So a couple follow-up questions for you. First of all, you said that you moved your family a couple times, and that you've been doing this for twenty years. When you first started in logistics, you had zero kids, is that right? And now you have—

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, well, I have eight kids now. And what I tell people is, no job held my interest for more than a couple months. But then my wife was pregnant with our first kid. That probably helped me lock in a little bit. But it definitely helped that I started with Panther during that time that my wife was pregnant with our first kid. So I've never looked back since joining the expedited freight industry. And thankfully I've been blessed with lots of kids, lots of mouths to feed.

Matt: You've got lots of mouths to feed and you've got a homestead to attend to, right? You're raising them on the farm.

Kevin Carpenter: Yep. We have forty acres here in central Alabama, mostly wooded, but we try to raise our own meat. We do chickens — we have laying chickens as well as meat chickens. We've got some goats running around out there. We like to run pigs through the woods every year. So we provide our own chicken and eggs and pork.

Matt: That's awesome. So I know that you said airfreight.com specializes in the world of high touch, critical cargo, expedited shipping. But even in this podcast, for the sake of this conversation, we're going to be exploring more in the world of freight and logistics and transportation. So my question to you is, A, does the world need another podcast? And B, why would someone want to listen to this one? What are we hoping that people get out of it?

Kevin Carpenter: Well, I've always thought it was interesting — and not just because that's what I'm doing, but objectively, I listen to plenty of other people about what their jobs are and I can almost find interest in anything. I can figure out a follow up question to ask or probe it a bit. And I think what we do, in the situations that we deal with on a day to day basis and the ways in which we're saving the day for our customers — in many cases, we're handling the most important shipment that they've had all year, or maybe in their whole career. Maybe in a person's entire career, they are stepping in to handle a situation that they've never dealt with before. So yeah, it's really fun, and I love talking about it. I've had the idea, I've been pitching it to the other members of the team for years, because we'll have just these really interesting conversations. Every now and again I'll step back and say, man, if somebody else could listen in on this, I think it would be pretty interesting. So hopefully we can let people into our world a little bit. But I don't think it's just going to end up being about expedited freight. I think transportation and logistics as a whole right now is really in the forefront, more than it has been in a long time, in the consciousness of the nation right now. So I think it's a good time to let people into our side of transportation and logistics, which I happen to think is the most exciting side of it.

Matt: Yeah, I agree that it's an important part of the conversation, and the country, and the economy. And getting the chance to interview and hear from thought leaders in this industry and breaking down some of what's happening in transportation and logistics at large will be really fascinating. But also hearing these cool stories from the world of expedited freight is, like you said, objectively interesting. So I'm looking forward to hearing more of those. Because I feel like you guys always share these stories that to you just sound like an everyday thing that happened, like we saved the day for some company or something. And I'm always like, well, that's amazing though, that's so cool. But every single guy who is a shipping agent for airfreight.com is like, well, that's just what we do every day, it's not that interesting. And I'm like, but it is, it is that interesting.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, it's true. After a while it's — yeah. And right now, if you were to say, what's an interesting one you've had, I'd be like, let me try to figure out what's the most interesting, because they all kind of, like I said, they're usually all high stakes. But here, just right off the bat, and since I know that we're going to air this episode soon, I can say — in the news right now there was a screw worm, a possible screw worm they may have located in South Texas. And this is a flesh eating worm that hasn't been in America for some decades. They eradicated it some decades back, but now they think it's creeping back in, coming from Mexico.

Matt: The screw worm is back.

Kevin Carpenter: The screw worm is back. Breaking. And again, I actually don't know for sure because I didn't follow up on the news article, but this was in the headlines this week. What's interesting is we actually handled an air charter just yesterday for a sample of what is possibly a screw worm. We moved a small canister from South Texas to the USDA testing facility via dedicated private airplane. I don't know the reasons that they wanted that particular thing on an airplane — probably because it's something that they didn't want to let out of containment. And that's just one of the many reasons why you would use a dedicated service versus putting your shipment through a network. Even if it's an air network, you're not going to have possession of it the whole time, or visibility of it. So yeah, Steve Janssen on the team is actually the one that coordinated a Learjet from South Texas to Kansas, I believe. And it's just kind of neat, because we're dealing with that on this side and then on Google News it's like a top three headline that they're going to do the test. They're going to be testing this, and it's like, yeah, they're going to test it once we get it up there.

Matt: That's just such a great example, because yeah, again, it's part of the national conversation. Anything that's happening in the world, the backbone of it is logistics and transportation. And sometimes high touch critical cargo is even part of the conversation.

Kevin Carpenter: Sure. I mean, take disasters, take hurricanes and the floods and the fires. People need to move supplies, amenities, equipment to an area quickly. They're not going to call normal trucking for that. So yeah, it's not unusual to see our work in the headlines.

Matt: That's awesome. Well, I know that one thing that we're doing every episode is taking people through the On Air Gauntlet. So, Kevin, are you ready for the On Air Gauntlet?

Kevin Carpenter: I think I'm ready.

Matt: I might ask you maybe one more question. I think you're asking everybody three questions, but it might be one more. Who knows? Just throw a little curveball at you. You know, we can't use copyrighted music, right? But if the podcast had a theme song that was a real copyrighted song, what would the theme song be?

Kevin Carpenter: I think it would have to be Danger Zone. Kenny Loggins, the Top Gun theme.

Matt: Hell yeah.

Kevin Carpenter: I mean, that's what I'm thinking to myself as I'm scrambling a Learjet for a customer.

Matt: I don't know if I can whistle it — is that copyrighted? I don't know.

Kevin Carpenter: That was pretty good. That was pretty good.

Matt: Awesome. Danger Zone, a little Kenny Loggins. Tell me, for this podcast, who would be your dream guest?

Kevin Carpenter: Elon Musk. Why not? I mean, we're talking dream guest here, right? Let's bring Elon in. Let's get his take.

Matt: Nice. Let's get him, man. Let's get the richest man in the world on the podcast. Okay, all right, done. I'll reach out. I'll see if my people can get in touch with his people.

Kevin Carpenter: That's your job, by the way, to do that. You're the producer.

Matt: Why Elon?

Kevin Carpenter: Well, he's at the forefront of the self driving revolution. And it doesn't take too much extrapolation to see that the trucking industry is going to get shaken up. Because you're talking about a truck that can drive cross country, it doesn't need hours of service, it doesn't need rest, it doesn't need to use the restroom. If it's programmed correctly, it's not going to even make any mistakes. And it's going to give you maximum fuel efficiency. It's going to lower costs. And that's one thing we know — that's the way the market works. If something's going to lower costs that drastically, companies are going to go with it. So I think it's inevitable that that's going to happen. And I think it would be interesting to get his perspective on that. Because what are we going to do with all these truck drivers? What are we going to do with the most popular profession in the country, by volume?

Matt: Is it the most popular profession in the country?

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, by number of employees there's more people in trucking, yes. Should we fact check that?

Matt: Yeah, we'll fact check that later. Asterisk. We're not going to fact check. Maybe we should. Let's just say roughly, let's say it's one of the top jobs. It's really close to the top.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, it's really close to the top. I researched it some time back, and there might be some technicality depending on how broad you go with your criteria. A lot of people are in the trucking industry that are specifically drivers.

Matt: Yeah, makes sense. That checks out. Fact checked. We just fact checked it. You're right. So dream guest is Elon. What is maybe the most unhinged logistics problem that you've ever had to solve? And if the most unhinged might be too much, you know.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of unhinged things going on. I'll give one that at the time I just couldn't do anything other than shake my head at. And that was, we handled an air charter shipment for — I believe it was a meat company in Wisconsin, and they had a packaging machine go down. They needed a very specific transmission, and they found it at an obscure parts warehouse in New Mexico. And again, as I discussed earlier, when a company's manufacturing goes down, when production is halted, when they're not putting product out, they are losing money. The only question is how much money they're losing. And the bigger the company, the more money they're losing per hour. So that means every hour that they don't have that transmission, they're losing, let's just say, twenty thousand dollars. So you don't have time to do normal trucking, you don't have time to do expedited trucking in that case from New Mexico to Wisconsin. So they called us, we found the appropriate aircraft to charter for that. It was a Learjet, actually, which we've already talked about. That's one of the more popular sizes, especially for small parts that need to be chartered.

Matt: Sponsored by Learjet? Not really. No.

Kevin Carpenter: Well, you made a nice video about the Learjet, I believe. Shout out our YouTube channel.

Matt: We did, we did.

Kevin Carpenter: So we picked it up — we sent a driver and we did it door to door. That means we picked it up at the origin location, took it to the airport with an expedited van. Then we have the aircraft waiting there to receive the part. They take off. And then there's another van waiting at the destination airport, pass it to that van, and then it moves on to delivery. So that's a door-to-door air charter. So we picked it up at the origin facility. We take it to the airport. The pilots called, as part of the procedure for these types of shipments. We make visual contact with the freight and the paperwork. And we did that, and the pilots sent me pictures of the item. They sent me pictures of the paperwork. I immediately wanted to get the okay from the customer that this was the right stuff — which again, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, when you're doing this type of shipment, everybody knows what we're there to get. In this case, this was not the right item. So we almost chartered a Learjet across the country with the wrong transmission that would have done the customer no good. So we caught that error and saved a lot of time. Took it back, got the right one. At the time I remember thinking that was pretty unhinged.

Matt: That's wild. Can you imagine if someone would have come to receive a package from a dedicated private jet charter and it's the wrong thing in the box? Someone would have gotten fired. Good thing you caught that.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, and that comes from having good procedures in place, because we've done this enough times to know what to check for, know what to ask. But again, you don't want to just go through the motions, because one time out of a thousand, somebody messed up and gave you the wrong part.

Matt: Nice. All right, last question in the On Air Gauntlet. What do you want to be remembered for when you're gone?

Kevin Carpenter: I march to the beat of my own drum, and I think everybody that knows me would agree. And I kind of figure that's what I'll be known for.

Matt: Nice. I love it. Well, Kevin, thank you. And we're excited to hear what's coming from the On Air podcast very soon. Actually, just give us a quick preview of maybe the next month, four or six weeks, next couple months of guests, or what we're going to be hearing and talking about.

Kevin Carpenter: Cool. It's a nice smattering of industry experts. We've got a venture capitalist for a venture capital company that owns one of the larger trucking companies in America. We've got a customer of mine personally that was so happy about the job that I do for them that they wanted to tell people — a packaging company out of Cincinnati. And then we've got a few expediters as well. Expedited shipping agents like me here with airfreight.com. It's a fun group of guys that we have here. So we would be remiss not to showcase the cast of characters over here.

Matt: So all people in the logistics, business, transportation world. It'll be cool to get a wide variety of people, a smattering, like you said, and see where the conversation goes.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, and even maybe there'll be people that aren't in logistics, but they'll have something to say about it. That's just a hint of things to come.

Matt: Awesome. Well, Kevin, thank you. And again, I'm Matt, your guest host, and this was Kevin, your actual host. And thanks for listening, and hope you will join us again for On Air.