Freight Therapy: Because Every Shipment Has a Story

Welcome to Beyond Point to Point, the podcast where we go beyond pickup and delivery and dive deeper into the world of logistics, freight, and supply chain management. From industry trends to expert insights, we're here to help you navigate the complexities where we explore the real world strategies where we explore the real world strategies, challenges, and insights shaping today's supply chains. I'm your host, Joe Greek. Today, we're diving into a concept we call freight therapy, a mindset rooted into one powerful idea, listening. Too often, conversations in logistics jump straight to rates or service options. Freight therapy takes a different path, starting with curiosity, asking better questions, and uncovering problems that aren't always obvious. In this episode, I sit down with Tim Schuster to talk through what freight therapy looks like in practice and how that mindset helped a well known audio manufacturer, KICKR, rethink its East Coast distribution strategy. If you've ever felt like your freight strategy has grown more complicated than it needs to be or that something's off, but you're just not sure what it is, this episode is for you. Let's get into the conversation. Tim, thank you very much for being on the show today. Should I call you doctor, or is Tim fine? Oh, good heavens. I I thank you. It's my pleasure to to jump on here with you today. Well, you've used the wording freight therapist in the past. So what exactly does that mean to you? Well, and it's, through years of local sales and national accounts and being a specialist, that that became a familiar refrain for me in sharing with customers because there there are times where our customers see so many people that they are the, transactional souls that come to see them. That's the thirty, three PLs that want to talk to them that day or whatever, just selling price. And when customers focus on their supply chain, there is so much more substance in need that they have way, way beyond just how much is something gonna cost me to get from point a to point b. And I would say, well, as your freight therapist, I'm here to help you or we're here to help you. And, that kind of evolved into something and sharing that with our group in sales training, that's something I shared with them, how to be a freight therapist. And I look at it this way, with so much change that we have seen in the supply chain world since, let's just say, twenty nineteen. You know, we went through COVID. We went through the boom and the unique times right after that. We saw a drought in Panama. We saw the Houthis firing on steamships going through the Red Sea. Good heavens. And tariff situation that we're seeing. It's it's causing a lot of people just to simply rethink of what I was doing in twenty nineteen and what my supply chain needs to look like today. Good heavens. It's it probably needs some freshening up. And sometimes it needs a complete overhaul. So freight therapy today is more important now than it has been in quite some time. This was so much change we have seen in the past five or six years in the supply chain world. Well, when it comes to traditional therapy and also by extent freight therapy, listening is critical. So why do you think listening is underestimated when it comes to supply chain and logistics? If you're familiar with the Mississippi Delta or the Eastern Arkansas, they have crop dusters. And I look at a lot of the competition that we sell against today. They're crop dusters. They're just loaded up with whatever herbicide or pesticide or fertilizer that they have for the day. Their their flavor of the day is what they're going to sell. That's what's gonna be, put on that crop. If you truly do listen to what people's supply chain needs are and you engage with them of what they're happy with and what they're not happy with about their supply chain, that's where our customers need us the most. And that's where if we're talking to customers and where if we're focused on what their needs are, it's a custom solution. And there may be things that could be brought up that they haven't quite thought of. And we have some examples of that where customers are looking at coming through different, ports of origin into the United States. They're looking at manufacturing domestically or near shoring. And these are things that just really weren't that big of a deal five or six years ago. So as a freight therapist, it's really important to give comps saying, listen. This is what somebody that's not in your exact industry is doing, but somebody that has similar issues that you're dealing with in supply chain. Here's how they got ahead of that a little bit. That space and that listening, you cannot get to that point without listening to your customers and hearing what transitions and unique circumstances they're faced with these days. Well, I think a recent example of a beneficiary of freight therapy would be Kickr. So what were some of the challenges that they were encountering when you got connected with them? Well, the KICKR makes, car audio primarily and subwoofers. They're in Stillwater, Oklahoma. And if you've ever been to Stillwater, Oklahoma, it is right in the middle of the Great Plains of the United States. And besides Oklahoma City and Tulsa, it's it's not really close to anything. Well and if you look at Kicker, where their customer base is, their biggest customer is in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their second biggest customer is in the New York, New Jersey area. The fourth biggest customer is in Miami, Florida. So you look at an organization like Kicker, we were talking to them about what we did for them. You know, we were handling LTL for them. And we're taking care of their fulfillment needs out of Stillwater. All of that material that was being manufactured in the Pacific Rim, coming into LA Long Beach and going over the Dallas rail ramps being dried up to Stillwater, that was the jumping off place for the entire universe for them. And, what we talked to Kicker about was if you're truly gonna save money and have better speed to market in this world that's influenced by not only big box retailers, but online retailers, and we can mention a few here, you really need to focus on maybe a different jumping off point for your freight. We took a look at Charleston, South Carolina for them. That's a great port. And every steamship that calls on the, Port of LA Long Beach, most all of them come from the Pacific Rim and go to Charleston, South Carolina too. So we sold them a little bit of warehouse space in Charleston, and, we store their goods there. We drain their containers from the South Carolina Port Authority over to our facility in Charleston. And, we do a small package, you know, and LTL fulfillment out of that building for them. It's saving them a considerable amount of money. And not only that, they have quicker speed to market their next day to their biggest customer now instead of two or three days away. And, the one thing that, our valued contact Dave over there said is there's a lot of things that can go wrong between Stillwater and a point that far east. He said, you take the miles out, you take the exposure of things going wrong out of that as well. And I thought that was a good way of putting it. Well, what were some of the measurable results, once you had this new strategy put in place for Kicker? Well, you know, they said if this was a break even for them, it'd be a win because they're closer to their customers and that speed to market, that that would be a huge win for them. And and what I think we and perhaps they underestimated a little bit was if you do take miles out of that supply chain, how much savings that would be? And they're a privately held company and I I have an idea how much that saved them. But, out of respect to their proprietary, situation, I don't wanna go into details. But it's it's a significant number. It it was very significant for their bottom line and their margins to do what they did. And and you also take a look at what they're not exposed to right now. Instead of having to build another building in still water, having to expand, they flip the keys to us and put their faith in us to handle that. And we have a warehouse management system, that was basically giving them the feel that that Charleston freight was just right behind them in their own warehouse. We'll cause that connection through that warehouse management system. They could see the inventory at any time. They could pick through that warehouse management system. It's a very good one. And that was such an intuitive and symbiotic tool. It put them in a position where Charleston just felt like just an extension of who they were. And I feel like we could do that for so many other customers these days. We have folks in the east, excuse me excuse me, that are in the welding business, that they wanna play a larger role in the oil and gas world. And they don't have a presence in Midland Odessa or San Antonio or Houston. We're talking to a couple of those folks where they wanna have a presence, a beachhead, if you will, in Texas where they can sell their goods just like they have their own brick and mortar there in that market. We could do that in Midland, Odessa, San Antonio, and, at the port itself if they're bringing those goods in from overseas and add value and take miles out of their supply chain. Well, what advice would you give to a shipper that maybe hasn't taken the time to stand back and look at their overall distribution model in a while? Well, I think the tariff situation has done a couple of things. One, a lot of people are rethinking of what countries of origin they are sourcing from. But the other and I think the broader thing is a lot of people are taking a step back and saying, is what I did four or five years ago still making sense? Am I bringing goods into the right part of the United States? You know, the Southeast, the Mid South, and Texas, that's where everybody's moving to. You know, just here in Middle Tennessee, I think all of us here can recognize that we have a half a dozen new neighbors that are either from California or from the northeast or from the Midwest that that's where everybody's gravitating towards. So we have a lot of customers in those markets are trying they're trying to figure out how can I bring my goods closer to where the population center of the United States is? And we look at the anticipated growth for the southeast in Texas. That is still where the growth is projected to be for the next ten years. And you look at Averitt's footprint, you know, we are rock solid in Milwaukee and Illinois. But you look south of the Ohio River and El Paso east to the Atlantic Ocean, That's our wheelhouse. What we're really good at is LTL. But we're so much more than that. And the thing that I suggest that if customers are really taking a fresh look at what their supply chain model looks like, They need to be closer to what markets they're selling in. They need their raw materials closer to their production facilities. Automotive, for example, Japanese manufacturers building in Georgetown, Kentucky and Blue Springs, Mississippi or San Antonio, Texas, Smyrna, Tennessee, North Alabama. We have distribution and fulfillment solutions, drayage solutions just right there close to them to where we can add not only bandwidth to what they already have with maybe existing, providers that they're loyal to. But we talk to a lot of customers these days who are doing three people's jobs. There were three people in that shipping office and now it's just them. And they're looking for simplicity. They're juggling chainsaws every day. So if somebody can handle the warehousing side of things, can take care of their freight forwarder situation with being a fully licensed in house customs brokerage solution when it comes to imports, and somebody can also be a viable solution from an LTL and truckload perspective. I think a lot of folks are looking for simplicity these days as well. Hey. You cannot argue with simplicity. I really appreciate your insights today, Tim. Thank you very much. The show. Tim shared how freight therapy led to a smarter distribution strategy for Kicker. Now let's take a closer look at that story in action. In this short video, you'll hear directly from the Kicker team and see how rethinking their East Coast fulfillment helped them reduce mileage, speed up deliveries, and improve service to key markets. Kicker started out as Stillwater Designs, and I was playing in a rock and roll band and made speakers as a hobby. I was approached by a friend to build a speaker for a pickup truck. I did that, and that became very popular, and we developed that through the eighties, and it grew really rapidly. Today, we have six hundred and some different products that we sell all over the US internationally. Early on when I took the director of distribution role, I had some challenges in front of me. At a certain point, management came to me and asked me to investigate alternative warehousing. You know, Averitt has solutions for that. Kicker used us for LTL. And when we opened the door to a broader conversation with Kicker speakers, we took a look at where their big customers were. They were bringing most of their goods to the eastern two thirds of the United States. We have a lot of our big customers out there. It only makes sense to shorten the distance to decrease our our transit time. So what we took a look at for them was how can we cut miles out of their supply chain? We took a hard look at Charleston, South Carolina. All of the ports that they were sourcing from in the Pacific Rim, they were could very easily bring those goods into Charleston just as easily as they could LA Long Beach and ultimately the Snow Water. So we sold them a little bit of warehouse space in Charleston. We're doing the drainage of the container from the ocean port to our facility. We're storing those materials for them in Charleston and doing LTL and small package fulfillment out of our Charleston facility. The end result with saving the money on the transportation, it also allowed them to be a day faster on their service to get it to their customers. And that that was a big win for Kicker. I think we're winning. I I really do. That's the feedback we're getting in the field. It's changing their order patterns, because it's getting to them sooner. It it's it's showing up without damage. It's on time. They've got great relationships with their drivers. In a nutshell, I think I think it's really working out well for everybody, and we're just happy it's it's going this direction. Most customers know us as an LTL services provider, but we're very good at these other things that are not LTL. We have an outstanding truckload product, an outstanding expedited product. As a freight forwarder, we have outstanding specialists that can help get goods from overseas. You're going from Oklahoma or New Jersey or Miami, there's there's delays. And, you know, everyone's been able to turn that into a couple day run. Our customers in turn are happier with it. It's it's a solution all the way around. We are the power of Warren. The cultural similarities between Averitt and Kicker, like, you know, you could sit there and switch shirts from one person to the other. It didn't take too long to realize how special Kicker was and what their culture is and how similar that is to our organization. We wanna partner with people that have that same service mindset. People that that are interested in continuous improvement and working together and partnering, I think are super important to us. You know, Averitt's just a phone call away. I deal with a lot of problems, so it helps to have partners in place to assist with those problems. It certainly makes my job and life a lot better. Thanks for joining us on Beyond Point to Point. If the Kickr story resonated with you or if you're thinking about ways to improve your own logistics model, we've got more to share. You can download the full Kickr case study at averett dot com slash kicker. It's packed with data, strategy insights, and results you can learn from. Whether you're looking to streamline operations, reduce transit times, or gain more visibility. I'm Joe Greek, and until next time, thanks for listening.