January 2024 was misleading.
We experienced a lot of crazy winter weather, including a good, old-fashioned Polar Vortex, which led to an increase in tender rejections and caused a whole lot trouble for electric cars. A decrease in tender rejections fed the spot market and raised hopes for a quicker-than-expected recovery.
While February brought the market back to reality, our friends at Arrive Logistics released their February supply and demand report, indicating that things aren’t improving as fast as hoped. Their findings suggest more of the same: an unimpressive, anemic winter.
We appreciate the folks at Arrive because they give us hope by suggesting things might improve, even though they’re careful not to make firm predictions. However, they did hint at a new update in their report: they now believe the recovery will start in the third quarter of the year, not the second, and they mentioned this change quite subtly, without making a big deal out of it.
The link to this article is HERE.
CloudTrucks is making moves into the brokerage space
In December, CloudTrucks exited the fintech space, no longer factoring for their subscribed carriers, proving that collections are hard work.
According to the Journal of Commerce, CloudTrucks acquired Shipwell’s brokerage operation. They will integrate this operation into their TMS offering, calling it CT Exchange. The full story is locked behind an expensive subscription, but here’s the gist of it.
Owner-operators are notoriously unloyal and often switch between different services and have unique preferences that can make them hard to please. Adding more “lottery freight” means more use of this platform, and for a company continuing to receive venture capital funding, more users could lead to increased revenue and further investment. The positive aspect of this move is that CloudTrucks isn’t trying to disrupt the shipping industry in a way that could make things difficult for others in the field.
LTL and freight brokerages
Every one of your customers has LTL needs. If they don’t ship a lot of LTL, they probably face high rates and poor service from LTL carriers.
Here’s a chance for you to become more important to your clients by helping them with their LTL needs. You might think, “But we specialize in full truckloads, what do we know about LTL?”
It’s not that different. You’d be taking a task off their hands, making their lives easier. You don’t want to go directly to LTL carriers and negotiate rates because they will want volume commitments and will only give you general rates since it’s coming from a third party.
There are programs offered by large LTL shippers that extend to brokers, providing a TMS to get quotes, book loads, manage execution, and handle payment. It’s an opportunity to add revenue without adding additional costs and build deeper relationships with your customers.
Check out AFS Logistics – they have a program designed specifically for freight brokers. We’ll talk more about this later.
Link to AFS Logistics is HERE