When a Shipment Goes Sideways: Todd Anderson on Trust in Expedited Freight

Kevin Carpenter: Welcome to On Air with Airfreight.com. I am your humble host, Kevin Carpenter. We have another very special treat today. One of our expediters at airfreight.com is joining us. His name is Todd Anderson. He's been an expediter since 2019. Todd, welcome.

Todd Anderson: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Carpenter: Hey man, you're absolutely welcome. I know you've been wanting to do this and I told you we'd get you in, and here we are.

Todd Anderson: Been knocking the door down.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, exactly. So you didn't just start at airfreight.com with no premium freight experience. Why don't you tell us a little about your background coming in?

Todd Anderson: Yeah, sure. After college and some starter jobs, I ended up at one of the largest expeditors in the country. Worked there for about ten years — almost just shy of ten years — where I was leading an operations team for the third party logistics portion of the business. And then I transitioned over into project management, into their corporate side for a few years, and then came over here to airfreight.com with that nine and a half plus years of experience in the expedite industry.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah. And so you definitely have an understanding of what separates expedite from normal freight. You want to speak to that a little bit?

Todd Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, expedite is exactly what it sounds like. It's when normal freight won't do the trick. And whether that's for the reasons of speed or care — those are probably the two biggest reasons that we see need for expedite or dedicated trucks. Typically speed is number one, but also those instances where people don't want their freight to be shuffled in between trucks and at terminals and DCs where it can get damaged. So that's where we can come in with a dedicated truck as well. So really, speed and care are the two reasons, the most common reasons we see for people requiring the expedite service.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, I agree. I'd even add to that, and it probably goes with speed, but just one that can't fail, can't have anything go wrong. It's critical for one reason or another. And most of the time, if it's critical, it's urgent. So I totally agree with you there. Airfreight.com has an absolutely top-tier network of carriers. That's one of the main things that differentiates us from other expedite companies, obviously. So we just established expedite differentiates itself from normal freight because your shipment's going on a dedicated truck, point A to B — no sorting, no shuffling, no relying on a network to show up for work and make the right decision with their freight and not damage it. So major benefits right off the bat, night and day. Airfreight.com is an expedited freight broker, meaning we're not just doing exclusively ground expedite, we are helping customers from the top down. We're assessing their shipment need. Right off the bat, it's not necessarily a ground shipment, right? One of the first things we're thinking as an expediter, when a customer is giving us the details of their shipment and we're asking our follow-up questions — what would you say is the first mode we're trying to eliminate from the equation?

Todd Anderson: Trying to eliminate from the equation? I don't know if you worded that well, but yeah — I think I know what you mean though. Obviously your first step is the fastest. If they're in an emergency situation and a dedicated aircraft is going to be the fastest way to get it there — no, I'm not trying to eliminate that. We're going to sell that if the customer needs it, you know?

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, it's poorly worded, I suppose. Exactly, that's where I was trying to steer us. And fair enough — I look at it like that because it's about one percent, probably even less than one percent of the time. So we would be remiss as expeditors to overlook that. So normally I'm trying to ask questions to the customer to eliminate that, to determine that they don't need a charter before I move on to the next steps down. And there are some narrow instances where cargo air freight comes into play — I had a great conversation with Steve Janssen about the pitfalls and how that works. And then we also do hand carry, where we're using the commercial flights that are already out there. We're not going to give the shipment to the airline and hope they do the right thing with it, because again that goes back to LTL freight and common freight. If your shipment is ultra critical, you never want to just hand it off to a network and hope they do the right thing with it. So we hand carry — we have a courier that will actually hand carry your shipment on the aircraft, they never lose possession of it, so you still get to utilize that commercial air freight network but you don't have as many hoops to jump through with the TSA and also don't lose possession.

Todd Anderson: Yeah. And I think it's worth mentioning that we use NFOs as well. And where I think your point is valid on you don't want to throw it in a network randomly — the way we keep control of that is we handle the front and the back end of that NFO as well, right? It's not just that we're giving it into a network. We're actually taking it to the airport with a carrier of ours, and then from there the airline's taking it. So they're only handling the port to port portion of it, where you're limiting your liability there, or chances for anything going wrong.

Kevin Carpenter: Absolutely, you're absolutely right. And that's definitely one thing that differentiates AirFreight from other air freight brokers or freight forwarders — that we do manage the pickup, the drop to the airport. Now, what I meant was once we give it to the airport, there's still that bit of uncertainty. And my experience is I've even been burned in that portion, where we've given it to the airline. One main thing is if you're going to do a true NFO versus a hand carry — an NFO, for anybody that might be listening to this that doesn't know, is next flight out. So that's where you're utilizing the commercial network that's in place. Delta, these guys, they have products where they do allow you to move cargo only without it being attached to a passenger. There are TSA hoops that you need to jump through. There's certain processes that make that more time consuming for a number of reasons. Okay, back to what I was saying — I've been burnt once you do hand it to that commercial airline. So as long as, as the expediter, we explain that to the customer up front — that, hey, we are, and that's the language I like to use, we are going to give this to Delta or Southwest or whoever it is, and hope they do the right thing with it. Then if something does happen, there you go. And if there's connections involved, that's even more to explain, because now it's got to make that jump from one plane to another. Normally if you're managing an NFO, you want to make sure it's a direct flight for sure. So personally, based on the way I talk to customers about it, they almost never select NFO as the way they want to go. I do see where they can have value though if the customer wants to go with that.

Todd Anderson: I haven't had any real big issues running NFOs, but to your point, generally running direct without any connections seems to be key to keeping that clean.

Kevin Carpenter: Absolutely. Yep. And there you go. Personal experience definitely plays a part, as we're going to talk about in a couple minutes. Our personal experience managing shipments, dealing with real life opportunities, informs how we move forward and how we advise customers moving forward, informs how we select carriers moving forward. So back to the hierarchy of the decision that we're making when we're dealing with a customer and finding out their shipment needs, finding out the details of their shipment. We're going to first look at air charter, the fastest humanly possible way to ship something, which involves a dedicated jet. And again, no losing possession of the shipment. Hand carry, NFO, and then probably our largest by shipment volume, our largest category, which is ground expedited freight. Expedited ground, dedicated vehicle shipment. If you're in the industry, you call it just an expedite. Can you think of any other euphemisms?

Todd Anderson: I mean, hotshot is one that's tossed around for a lot of various different definitions depending on the region or industry you're in. A lot of guys consider any dedicated truck to be a hot shot, whereas if you're in Texas, a hot shot is a twenty five hundred or thirty five hundred dually with a large trailer on it. So it depends who you're speaking with. But yeah, that's another one that gets tossed around a lot.

Kevin Carpenter: With a gooseneck. Yeah, and that's an interesting and fun thing about what we do — we're dealing with people all over the country. So we immediately have to snap into whatever dialect they happen to be using, because there are different terms for different things. Okay, so ground expedite, airfreight.com. I started off by saying we have a top tier network of expedited ground carriers. What does that mean to you right off the bat?

Todd Anderson: It means that first off they're qualified from a government standpoint, an insurance standpoint — our customers are covered. That is number one, I think, when we're really considering which carrier to use. Another obviously is our history with them and the communication that they use. Do they offer automated tracking on the truck that we're using? That's a big portion. That's important to a lot of customers, to know exactly where that truck is at all times. So that's another factor that comes into play. And obviously just our history with them. How well do they communicate when something goes wrong? A lot of times that's how I gauge a carrier. Anybody can run a perfect shipment, right, and not have any problems. You really start to see who you're dealing with when something goes wrong. And by that I mean things that are out of our control, whether it's a traffic jam, an accident, a mechanical thing that happens on the truck. Those things happen. And no matter how well you're maintaining your vehicles, no matter how new your vehicles are — in fact, some of the newer ones have more problems than some of the older ones — you're always going to have mechanical issues. You're always going to have things that come up.

Kevin Carpenter: And that's the one that they're going to be the most embarrassed to talk about, right? And so that really tests their mettle. If they're willing to be open and honest about what's going on immediately, without first trying to hide it or anything like that, right?

Todd Anderson: Sure. Exactly. And I had a situation like that recently where a carrier dropped the freight at a wrong address. It was a pretty understandable mistake, although it could have been avoided. But we spent a lot of time finding that freight. We tracked it down. The customer obviously was not happy about that shipment. We took care of the customer on that one, and guess what? They've been my biggest customer since. So that shows you it goes two ways. When I have good communication from that carrier, it passes through me straight to the customer. And that customer respects that as well, even when situations go wrong. Because their communication was good to me and we could keep eyes on the situation as best we could, that customer now trusts me regardless. That was our first shipment with them, and it went completely sideways. And because of that transparency that our carrier had with us — and we therefore could have with our customer — we've built a great relationship with them now. So like I said, I learn more from carriers when things go wrong. We're dealing with traffic, we're dealing with mechanical things. There are things that are going to go wrong at some point, right? And when those things do go wrong, that's really what separates the men from the boys.

Kevin Carpenter: Yeah, totally agree. To back it up a little — airfreight.com has a vetting process to even let carriers into our network. Now, in network means they can see our shipments and bid on our shipments if they have a driver nearby, if they can make the specified pickup time, can haul the specified freight, and can make the specified delivery time. And then if there are any special requirements that individual shipment requires, they're also confirming that they can meet those. But first they have to be vetted in. And that's where that top level that you were talking about a couple minutes ago comes in. We're checking their legality, we're checking their history. We use some of the most advanced vetting software — shout out to Highway — that allows you to really go in depth on carriers. Even if they are legal and they can check some of the high level boxes — and we understand carriers are going to learn how to do that so that they can get in the door — we always want to go a couple layers deeper than just the high level check boxes. And I would absolutely say with confidence that's something airfreight.com does that most other expedited providers do not do.

Todd Anderson: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think there's a surface level that says, hey, this carrier's good. And then Highway does a really nice job with that as well, where they're starting to peel the onion back and they're using evidence to say, okay, maybe this is a little fishy, even though on the surface everything looks good. And that's one thing that I think probably ninety-five percent of brokers and transportation providers out there don't even look at. They're just looking at the surface. They don't want to know the truth — you're exactly right. And I think that makes us different as well. It makes our job a little tougher too, obviously. We're having to sift through the crap a little bit to try and find the best carriers possible. And to your point, they don't want to find that. We do, because we want to make sure that we are using the absolute top tier.

Kevin Carpenter: Absolutely. And it goes back to even the air freight conversation we're having. We are not going to offer a product that we don't stand behind. We're not going to offer a product that we're not confident in. So we want to be one step ahead of other providers in that regard. So once they are vetted and they're in our network — and obviously we need trucks all over the country, we have customers calling in from coast to coast, Hawaii and Alaska, parts of Canada, and we cover those loads. We have trucks in position to cover all of those loads. So obviously we have a lot of trucks in our network. It's a top-tier network. So once they're in our network, we cover our shipments as they come, because again, we do last minute time critical freight. Sometimes it's called ad hoc. It's just a one-off shipment. It's not something that's going to happen weekly. It's not a route. It needs to pick up right now and it needs to get there ASAP, safely and legally. So we as expeditors, we have our top-tier network that we post our shipments out to. And at that point, we get multiple options back from our carrier base. So within that network, we learn which carriers are the most reliable. And that really goes into what you were saying a minute ago about the ones that aren't afraid to communicate bad news in a timely manner, in an honest manner. That's huge. And as we've discovered doing this job, being in that same position for our customers that are dealing with, in many cases, the highest stakes situations that they've ever dealt with in their professional careers — that's not uncommon. So they need somebody that they can trust, just like we need somebody we can trust. So we understand that for this to work, we have to be able to trust our carriers. So we trust our carriers. We trust some more than others. On any given shipment, we're going to have somewhere between three and ten bids, sometimes more. That's ten different carriers that we get to select from. So obviously I'd be lying if I said they were all at exactly the same level. That's silly. That's not the real world. So those are the criteria we're looking at. You just told me about your situation where the driver delivered to the wrong address. I said a mechanical is embarrassing — that's embarrassing. Your customer saw that you were honest, dealt with it immediately, and now they're your biggest customer. That kind of encapsulates the whole thing right there.

Todd Anderson: There we go. Well, that's true, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build that confidence in us that says, these are the guys that I want to have my freight. And sometimes when things go wrong, that's when you learn that this is the company that you want involved with your freight. And I think it's worth mentioning, to build on what you were saying earlier, that not only are we selective with the carriers, but that's a two-way street. I have always felt that there's two different customers that I have. I have the customer that's paying us and the customer that we're paying, being the carrier. And those carriers have options — especially when they're the only truck in the area, there might be five, six different loads out there. What I have found is they want to deal with us. We have been known now from the carrier perspective, not only the customer perspective, as a reliable company to do business with. I think that right there gives us a lot of advantages over any other broker as well, because we're going to get access to the capacity before another broker is, because that company wants to deal with us.

Kevin Carpenter: Simply because of that mindset. And I absolutely share that same mindset. These are relationships that we have with these other carriers, with our partner carriers.

Todd Anderson: Yep. I had a carrier recently tell me that we are a diamond in the rough. And I thought that was very high praise from a carrier, for sure.

Kevin Carpenter: I agree. And I can echo that. I hear similar reviews and similar things. But maybe they're just trying to butter us up.

Todd Anderson: I've done business with them for a while and I have a pretty good relationship, but he was pretty honest with me on that. He said every time your guys' loads pop up, we're all over it, because we want to deal with you.

Kevin Carpenter: All right, Todd. Well, we did it. And now what we're going to do here, we're going to close this episode with the On Air Gauntlet, is what we're calling it. And we're going to put a sound effect right there. I'm going to hit you with three rapid fire questions. They might be freight related, they might not. And then you're going to answer them as quickly as possible, because we're already at time. And then we're out of here. All right, you ready, Todd?

Todd Anderson: I'm ready. I am.

Kevin Carpenter: You ready for the On Air Gauntlet? Okay. Question one. What do you want people to remember about you when you die?

Todd Anderson: Lord. That I was a good father.

Kevin Carpenter: Great answer. What's the craziest thing you've ever shipped?

Todd Anderson: I shipped a golf trophy for the PGA Championship. The golf trophy for the PGA Championship.

Kevin Carpenter: That's pretty crazy. What is your favorite sandwich?

Todd Anderson: Ooh, BLT.

Kevin Carpenter: I already knew that. Thank you, Todd Anderson, for being on air with airfreight.com.

Todd Anderson: Thank you. Appreciate you having me.