Farm to freight: blurry logistics made clear with Michael Steeke, Rocket Shipping

Shay: Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today you have Shay Foulk with Michael Stake. Michael, how are you today?

Michael

Steeke: I'm good, Shea.

Shay: I'm good.

Michael

Steeke: Glad to be here.

Shay: What, what part of the world are you in for the listeners' benefit? And what's the weather like here today on March 21st?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, I am in beautiful, I would say central Minnesota, north central, just about an hour east of Fargo, North Dakota. It's— we're just jumping into another blizzard, actually. They're projecting anywhere from 5 to 8 inches. You know, we got, I don't know, probably 70 to 80 sitting on the ground over all winter anyway. So I'm just praying for a slow thaw. So we can take advantage of that moisture. We've been in a drought or droughty conditions for the last 2 years. But I'm also predicting we're gonna have a late spring. So we'll see.

Shay: Yeah, I don't, I don't like to use the 2-letter PP out there. I know a lot of people have been floating that around. I think we're Too early to tell. We'll see what the weather does. But you face some unique— not unique, but you face some challenges in your area there. And yeah, interesting. Good luck buckling down on that storm coming through.

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, right, right. I'll just pull the tractor out for the 35th time this winter and move snow.

Shay: So Michael, you and I actually got connected over Twitter. I put up a picture and mentioned something along the lines of, you know, if you're a good truck driver and you have a bill of lading in hand and it has a phone number on it and you call ahead, kudos to you. If you don't, you know, not kudos to you. Or I didn't say anything mean, but I didn't say anything nice either. It's just one of those scenarios. You know, we run a seed business, we're a farm operation, a lot of logistics going on. And it's frustrating from the receiving end,. But what I realized after, you know, one of your comments, you said, yeah, I mean, it's always frustrating when that happens. What I realized is there is so much more out there that goes into this. And, and I know from your standpoint, you're on the farming side, et cetera. So I wanted to, wanted to reach out to you.

I'm glad we were able to connect here. I guess maybe I would have you start on, on your agriculture side, a little bit of your background, and then we'll hop into the logistics from there.

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, sure. No, I'll make it real quick. I'm, I'm early 30s. I graduated from North Dakota State University up in Fargo there and started my career instantly in retail ag. Came off of a dairy farm. Actually, my, my parents sold off the cows the senior year of high school for me. So that was the first time they were actually able to get to a high school basketball game, crazy enough. So that was, it was nice. But They told me not to come back to the farm. That was when they still had cows. So I went for engineering and quickly transitioned slowly over to ag systems management in general. And so I came out of college jumping into retail ag at a cooperative down in, in south central Minnesota. Did that for, I believe, a couple of years, made it back a little, little farther north, got into ag sales for equipment at a Case IH dealership.

From there, I started a precision ag business back home. That was the funniest part was, it was in high school, it was, I can't wait to get away from here and go to college. I can't leave home fast enough. And after college, when I finally figured out that I really just— farming was in my blood, I couldn't figure out how to get back. Because we were— the family farm wasn't big enough at that time. To support another, you know, another salary or another mouth to feed. And so I had to figure out how to get back. And it took a Precision Ag business, starting that up in my hometown, getting a little traction, joining up with a seed dealership, and just kind of, you know, repping a fair amount of different types of products. And then from there, I was helping on the farm. I jumped in back into, sales in ag, but more of a regional agronomy role. I was with a company called QLF Agronomy.

We sold molasses or carbon-based fertilizers. That was pretty awesome, really opened my mind to some of the unique types of biostimulants and fertility products in the market. And then, yeah, I mean, I just, in between that transition, I've been traveling a lot and ended up having the opportunity to buy the farm outright from my parents, did that, took on a, you know, a ton of debt and I was looking— I just was a— it was a, it was a burnout time frame for me. It's just too much agriculture all at once, trying to, you know, work with growers and trying to do it yourself. And there was some down markets during that time frame and whatnot. So I was looking to try something different to, to stimulate my mind. And then I can always use farming as more of a passion instead of it turning into a job again. So I, yeah, got into logistics in the end of 2019, start of 2020.

COVID era, I believe that was it. Yeah, COVID era. And, uh, yeah, got to see what the supply chain and logistics looked like through the COVID area, and that was extremely different than what we're about to get back into right now.

Shay: Yeah, so, so I want to go back to the farming side a little bit. Are you primarily row crops there where you're located? Any small grains?

Michael

Steeke: We got some small grains, uh, so, uh, when we sold the cows, we went corn and corn and beans because that was the easiest thing to do. My dad had a 9-to-5 job, so did I, so it was the easiest thing to manage. When I took it over, I tried to find a few more niche, uh, crops and whatnot, we jumped into spring barley. We have a feed mill just in Perm that does— that sells dog food all over the states. So we get a little bit of premium for feed barley, don't have to worry about the malting requirements. And then it was just corn and beans. We tried some peas, I really liked those, but just didn't, didn't fit quite with the rotation we want to go to. So we ended up in '23, it's just gonna be corn, edible beans, replace the soybeans. We do have a little bit of soybeans, but edible beans, and then spring barley.

Shay: Okay, great. You know, when you— you made an interesting comment there, you said we had to figure out how to get back to the farm, but also there's another mouth to feed. And, and there just wasn't room. And we hear that a lot. And so I think it's interesting from your standpoint on, you know, here's how we diversified, here's areas that we added to the business. Was that difficult for you to kind of decide what path to take? Or did that come naturally? What did that look like?

Michael

Steeke: Um, in terms of, uh, how to make room for myself, to a degree, yeah, it came that— it kind of came naturally. Uh, I've always been pretty inquisitive on the latest tech and the latest things we could be doing. It, it gave my dad a heart attack many, many times, you know, trying new, uh, practices and things like that, just on a— not on a whim, but I did a lot of research. But we went through some— so we tried, you know, we tried no-till. It didn't work out all that well. Um, you know, that was one specific change that both gave him a heart attack because things looked so much different from a weed spectrum and things of that nature than, you know, conservation or full tillage that we did. We were pretty early to adopt in our area, Autosteer RTK, put a tower up on the farm, we jumped into variable rate as soon as I could.

And then my next bottleneck was trying to understand actually how a map should be made, not, you know, make it because you have the ability to just start throwing rates out because it's cool to see them on the monitor. We moved heavily into carbon-based fertility. So that was adding last space products to our 28%, jumping into a little bit of the humics, that those types of things, liquid fertilizer, dry fertilizer blend, I really liked using, using a multitude of different fertilizer types. On the dry side, we had to go to a few different co-ops to find them. Potassium sulfate was a big one. I love putting pel lime and pel gypsum down in some mixes. AMS is not used heavily over here, so we had to go to find that. It was all urea, and, um, not many people were split applying. Yeah, so it was a lot of urea and ESN.

So we, you know, we were the ones that were, you know, doing in-season 28% with carbon on, um, you know, stream barring and, and, uh, liquid, uh, side dressing on corn and whatnot. So I pushed as hard as I could, um, without, uh, without making my dad's life too, too crazy to try and manage it. Because at that time, I was still just trying to earn my spot. I wasn't the one, uh, uh, you know, having to, to spot all the bills.

Shay: So yeah, and that quickly changed for you there. Um, you know, we don't have to get into details on it, certainly, but you, you know, you mentioned had the opportunity to kind of buy the farm all at once. How did that, you know, from, from an opportunity standpoint, I guess, and, and the financial and the business mind is where I would ask this question from, What, what kind of ran through your head? Uh, what was the financial decision to do that? And what kind of support did you have in order to make that happen from maybe some key partners or, uh, strategic resource team, I guess?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah. I mean, uh, there wasn't, there was a little bit of strategy behind it, to be honest with you. It was a little bit more of the health-based, uh, reasoning. My mom, um, had some, some health issues and it was a little bit worried about longevity of potentially, you know, where she might be in, in the upcoming years. And, and, you know, if there was ever potential for her to wind up in like a nursing home scenario earlier than she'd expected. And so we really wanted to move that, that transition faster than ever planned. And so I was still a bachelor at that point, um, and my sister— I have two sisters, one is, uh, just a little bit younger than me, and another one we, uh, my parents adopted, uh, and she's substantially younger than me. So none of them were really a candidate to want a piece of the farm. And so Yeah, I just took it on myself.

Like, I figured out I could make the payments. I had to make crops fly. My dad let me use our equipment, the equipment he had for free, which wasn't, you know, wasn't this crazy updated line of equipment. It was just enough to get us by. And my entire goal was to legitimately make the farm pay for itself with no extra profit at the end of the year. For at least the first 2 years, that was my goal. I had an outside job. I was doing fine there that way. I just wanted— that was my goal, and it kept me sane. Like, I don't need to be shooting for high profits. I just want to make sure it pays for itself. And it, it relieved a little bit of the anxiety of like, holy crap, I just took on, you know, more debt than I've ever seen in my life. So, uh, that's how it started. And then, you know, since then, lots changed.

I got married, had a kid, um, I've hired my dad back to the farm as an employee under me, and, and I'm in a totally different industry as well. And so it Things have changed a lot, but it's been a really fun ride, a lot really humbling ride. And really understanding like wearing a lot of hats on the farm beyond just trying to do the cool things, actually making the, you know, the ARAP work and all that stuff. It's, it was a great learning lesson. And I highly recommend and don't recommend it just depends on, it depends on your appetite for or that kind of thing.

Shay: I think it depends on what hour you call a farmer, uh, throughout the day, right? They recommend it or not. I was doing some stuff this morning that I absolutely loved, and then this afternoon, and then there was some stuff that I don't love. And I think that's kind of the beauty of it though too, is it's, you know, no two things are ever the same. And, and I think that's a good segue into kind of the other side, and one of the primary reasons I had reached out to you You know, you made a reference here offline before we started recording and you said when it comes to logistics, a lot of times they can be blurry and blurry from either the person receiving the delivery or who's shipping it out. And there's all these intricacies that happen in between. So what did you, you know, how did you get involved in the logistics side of things?

You know, tell me about, you know, what's your business, what's your business name, where are you at today? Maybe give us a little background there.

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, no, I'll give you a real quick one. Um, I got into logistics, uh, after, you know, being a regional guy, agronomy guy. I was just getting kind of burnt out, like I mentioned, and I was looking for something new. Um, I had no plans of like looking into logistics. It just happened to be what my brother-in-law was doing. And, um, you know, at the time he'd been married to my sister for probably, I don't know, about 4 years. And honestly, my family had no idea what the heck he did. You know, we knew he did all right, but like nobody knew what the heck he did. He's like, I, you know, I set up, I set up freight for, for companies and and kind of a middleman making sure everything goes well. We're like, yeah, yeah, cool, what, you know, whatever, how's the bar doing, right?

Um, and, and so I was intrigued enough, and, and I was like, hey, you know, is this something that maybe I'd be good at? I got the sales experience, you know, it's not like, you know, he didn't have a business at that time, he was, he was in a 1099 for another business. So I was just really probing him for, you know, what does the market outlook look like? Is it something that maybe I would enjoy, that I could do, and whatnot? And Um, we had a lot of talks and he was actually just looking to, uh, make a pivot himself and, and start his own, what we call an agency or brokerage for, uh, LTL. And at that point he's like, hey, I'm looking to do something, uh, on my own, you could work for me as a 1099.

And I was like, that's actually perfect because I do want to, I want to focus on the farm just a little bit more because I, it needs to start making some good profit, not just like skimming by. 1099 is perfect, I'll work in the off-season, like I can, I can totally, I can put a ton of hours in the winter and, uh, middle of summer and all this, like, it'll be perfect. And so that's how we started, and he kind of trained me up as fast as he could, uh, on what the heck LTL was— less than truckload— um, where it fits into the supply chain, who's using it, and, uh, why there's a need for a middleman or a broker, uh, versus going direct with a typical carrier. For those that you don't know, like, carriers would be like a FedEx Freight or an R+L Carriers or an Estes YRC. You're going to see a bunch of these trucks on the road and be able to put, you know, one in another.

Now that you know that, every time you see a truck that has a logo on it, you're like, oh, that's a, that's an LTL carrier right there. They're probably doing a long haul. But anyway, so to get started, it was just like, it was sales. And my instant, uh, I guess my instinct was to go after what I knew. I knew all, all, uh, companies moving, um, you know, egg-based products to farmers or dealers, it's on pallets. Freight, you know, it's not coming to the mailbox. And so I started going that route, and, uh, it worked well because as I was learning LTL as fast as I could, because I could shoot the, you know, the wind with farmers, I didn't have to be the expert. They knew what I was talking about, and they're like, oh yeah, I'm always looking for better rates, or, you know, I have this problem, can you help me with it?

And so, um, I built my entire book of business that first quarter off of, uh, like, honestly, agricultural customers, you know. I, I listened to a lot of their issues, and I had the same issues on my own farm. And, and it's funny, that's when you posted that picture, was like, oh, truck's in the yard already, didn't realize he was even going to be here within the next 2 hours, looks like I better run out there. Sorry, family, if I was eating lunch with them or whatnot, I better get things moving. So there's just a lot of those types of issues, and, and, um, that's how I got started. That's how I got— or I've, uh, kind of gotten this far. I don't focus on ag like I did then. It's a more, um, a wider lens, uh, a focus for, for the customers we serve. But, but, uh, anyone in agriculture still is near and dear to my heart. Plus it, uh, it allows me to, to get my ag kick.

I— any talking to any logistics manager at a company moving, um, you know, fertilizer products or whatnot, they, they love talking, you know, shop anyway. And so I get my kick that way too as well.

Shay: That's awesome. Now, what's the name of your company?

Michael

Steeke: Sorry, yes, the name of the company is called Rocket Shipping, and, and, uh, our headquarters are in Fargo, North Dakota. And when we tell people, like, we tell people that, they're like, what, what is wrong with you? You know, actually, it's funny, if you— most of the, the, um, transportation industry will, uh, they'll be heavily, you know, situated in the South. But, you know, Chattanooga, Tennessee is a hot spot Phoenix, Arizona is a hotspot. Nowhere where it's snowing, you know, 4 or 5 months out of the year is a hotspot to put a headquarters for a transportation company.

Shay: Yeah, well, that's all right, doing something a little bit different there. And so, you know, you mentioned that you got started basically as COVID kicked off. COVID era, uh, everybody had challenges in some way, shape, or form associated with that. What were— what was your company's initial challenges How did that look with you guys getting going independently? And you mentioned that's going to change moving forward. So what's the future there?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, a broker, or better known probably as a 3PL, third-party logistics provider, is just somebody who resells a rate from a parent company or a parent source that they're using that has an extreme amount of buying power with the carriers. The company that we utilize for agency model spends over $1 billion a year with freight carriers. So we have a lot of leveraging power to get good rates. So knowing that there's a ton of 3PLs out there, in fact, I think the last number I read was like 14,000, you know, 14,000 to 15,000 3PLs or 3PL providers out there. And so if you're anybody shipping freight, you know this because you've probably been called maybe once, maybe 10 times a day from somebody trying to solicit you for freight.

But So knowing that, you know, realistically pricing in terms of like just freight pricing was a little bit more of a commodity. You know, you got 14,000, 15,000 people buying for— people are buying for freight, their pricing is gonna be all over the place. And so we focused in on service and support. And to do that, I always said you gotta have boots on the ground. That was a farm term. Um, you gotta have actual people in the office, uh, handling service support for shipping, uh, shipments, freight, truckload. LTL, all of that. That was our, that was our business model going forward. It fit really well. It segued really well into the fact that because when the COVID era hit, everyone got locked down. You couldn't go to retail stores. So not even specifically, but you couldn't go to retail stores and buy a couch anymore, buy a grill or buy whatever.

You had to have it shipped to your house. And so what this did for the rest of the industry is all of a sudden the freight carrier network took on so much capacity from this new, basically this new industry that popped up called e-com freight that, uh, carrier performance just, just went down the toilet. And when carrier performance, that simply means like being able to talk to somebody at the carrier, uh, damages, um, ETA times were just junk, you know. An ETA, um, like the, the predicted times could be 3, 4, 5 days off. They might not be able to locate your shipment very easy. And so performance, we call that performance on our side, went to crap. And so all of a sudden it felt really good when you actually had somebody to talk to that said, hey, I'm just looking for my pallet, I don't know where it's at, can you help me out?

And having a live person on the other end saying, yes, I will reach out to the carrier and I'll get to the bottom of this, it was, it was a breath of fresh air for anyone doing that. And so the reason I say that is it affected everyone else. And so same thing with the agricultural industry. You know, if you were used to having really good service support for, you know, any of the carriers you're using, that went to pop. The second thing was one of the other biggest pain points that I came into was for the most part, you know, farms are everywhere, we farm everywhere, and a lot of times they're very rural locations and a lot of carriers don't actually deliver to those locations themselves. They use what we call— and I'm specifically talking about LTL here— a partner carrier, somebody smaller in the area. Could be a mom-and-pop or it could be just a smaller, um, LTL carrier.

And they, they partner with them to have, you know, they'll bring it to their local terminal. Like the FedEx will bring it to the nearest terminal to the dealer that it's going to, and that might be 300 miles away still. And they'll partner with somebody smaller to bring that the last 300 miles. Well, the problem is they don't go that route every day. In fact, they might not even go it every week. There's times where it's like, oh man, you know, the ETA said 4 days, but, uh, what they forgot to tell us was there's a partner carrier that was going to pick it up on that 4th day, but they actually don't deliver out to, you know, BFE Kansas for 6 days after. And it was like, I need— I picked that carrier because I needed this product because I was planning on planting in 4 days kind of thing.

So there was just a lot of issues that you actually needed live people, somebody on the other side of the phone that said, you know, I can, I'll get to the bottom of this and then I'll bring you some solutions and we can pick which one makes the most sense. Yeah. And so that's how we, that's how we built it.

Shay: Now, how much did you do of that? Do you still do of that yourself? What's your team look like today? How has that kind of changed over time here? Because I imagine it has.

Michael

Steeke: It definitely has. So I started out basically cradle to grave. That simply means, you know, the, the shipments that I set up, I was tracking, I was, uh, calling the carriers, I was making sure everything was going good. And if it wasn't, I'd be the one to reach out to the customer and said, hey, here's the issue, here's our options. Um, since we've grown, the cradle to grave model is awesome, it's just not scalable. And so we've grown to build a, a big in-house— we call them an operations team— they're a bunch of, uh, guys and gals that have been in the industry for 10+ years each. So collectively a lot of experienced years, um, and they, they simply are focused on making sure shipments, uh, get picked up and get delivered with realistic expectations.

And so we have Rocket Shipping went from myself and my brother-in-law's name's Gabe, 2 people, uh, and one operations person to we're at about 29 people today and growing pretty, pretty heavily within this, you know, recession we're going going into. So we've definitely scaled up to be able to handle more customers, more volume, but also retain that same service and support that we started with that our customers come to expect and need.

Shay: Yeah, that's awesome. Now one thing that we talked a little bit offline on too that I want to make sure that we get to, scalability is always a huge question. And you know, you said it differently, you said it way, way better than I ever can.. And so I'm just gonna kind of tee up the question for you here. He talked a little bit about, you know, setting up a technology company that kind of handles some of the, you know, the freight tech and doing some integrated integration on, on management and, and tracking and things like that. Re-explain what you said to me because I think it's crucial for the people that are listening to kind of understand what all goes into this and, and how you guys are looking to improve it moving forward.

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, so, um, through the, the changes in the cut in the company, and like I said, we started off in LTL and we did, we did build a full truckload brokerage as well because that was a mode we were missing that a lot of our customers were needing. They're like, can you do it for us? So we started one of those too. But what, what the really the, the piece that brings it all together, um, we started a, uh, tech side of the company that, uh, that builds technology to be able to integrate We're working with a TMS that allows our customers to pull in their LTL and their full truckload, which is good and dandy and all that. You know, we talk about data on the Precision Ag side all day long. Like, you need good data, you need clean data, you need to be collecting a database because someday you'll go back to it. It's gold, right?

Well, for so many people, their supply chain is so fraction— or fractured. You know, you got, you got your truckload, you're using brokers, using asset carriers, and you're working with them maybe on an email basis or a calls. You're using a portal or 5 portals because you're working with a bunch of different LTL, you know, players. We need something singular. You can bring all that stuff in, but all of a sudden all the data could be aggregated and now you have one report that actually shows apples to apples, this carrier, this carrier, this truckload, blah, blah, blah. But when you bring technology like that, you've created another bottleneck because it's, it's another, it's another spot where you have to manually enter data. There's, there's manual processes involved when you bring more technology in.

And so We have an in-house tech team that we've hired now to create integrations and just integrations for easy terms is we want to, we want to build code that allow our TMS, our quoting portal to talk with the software that our clients are using to create orders, to handle inventory, to create POs, packing, whatever they're using. That inherently is grabbing the information from the customer they're about to move a shipment to, to automatically pull that information in. And the beauty of that is, A, there is that, there, that process is now automated. B, there's no chance or there's very little chance of there being any manual data entry error. The error had to come from the person entering the information in to begin with, like the customer.

And if, if we can get them to the point of advanced enough, we can actually put logic within our TMS where the carrier that best fits that lane, truckload or LTL, even if they have dedicated rates on the truckload, it'll, it'll automatically pick them, quote it, dispatch it and create that BOL and then email it to the warehouse that it's going to be picked and packed as well to the customer that's going to receive it. And so the goal is to take a lot of the manual steps out of there. For the entire reason of scalability. And the reason I'm— we're big on scalability is because some of our biggest clients during the COVID era were e-com companies moving freight to residences, and a lot of them were dropshipping like furniture, and margins are razor thin. So what do these guys do?

And, and when you're a dropshipping company, you know, half of your, your, your expenses is the cost of the product, the other half is just freight. So there isn't a whole lot of things to play around with. So all they want, all they cared about was automate, automate, automate. I have a team of 3. I would like to go from, you know, $100,000 in annual revenue to $5 million with my same team of 3. Figure it out. So we felt very, you know, right at that time it was like, geez, you're giving us a crazy, you know, task. And once we were able to work through it and figure it out, it put us so far ahead going to the rest of the industry because no one's thinking about scalability in that same sense as they were.

Shay: Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't, I don't know whether you put an M or a B in front of it, but it sounds like a $100 million idea to me. And, and having that, that seamlessness and the ability to make it really easy from a continuity standpoint at the customer level, at whoever that you're working with on the freight side of things, To me, to me, it's really exciting. And that's what I would turn around and ask you, you know, maybe one of the final questions here is, you know, what are you most excited about when you think about this from a logistics standpoint and where the future of your company, your guys' company goes?

Michael

Steeke: Oh man. Yeah, I'm super excited. Technology has always been just a, you know, absolute passion of mine, utilizing it to figure an equation out or figure something out better. And when we're able to position data in a single source of truth, a TMS, a database, however you look at it, and be able to align the data to what makes sense, clean data, it's useful data. All of a sudden we can now go to the carrier or carriers. Let's say we're building out a portfolio of carriers or truckload asset carriers for a customer, our client. All of a sudden we have such good data to go to the carrier with that, they're always going to know exactly what they can expect from that customer and be able to give them the pricing that is about as accurate as they can get.

They're building in very little risk because right now, I'll give you the app, like, just so for any of the, any, anyone in the, in the audience listening that, that's selling product and moving freight, here's what it looks like for the most part. You probably have 3 or 4 different LTL or 3PL brokers you're working with. They all have a sync, they have a portal for you to quote on, and maybe you're working directly with a carrier as well. You're quoting, you yourself are quoting across 5 portals just to find the best price. And I get it, that, that makes sense. You, you want freight spend, but now you have no way of actually comparing carrier performance, and service and support across the whole thing because you're working with technically 5 different vendors.

And so it gets very, very hard to ever create, to ever go to the next step or the next scale with that because you don't ever have clean data. And so it does take— it's kind of like on the farm side, if you got, you know, you got— you're running 3 combines in a field and they all happen to be different colors and you're trying to blend yield maps from a green, a red, and a yellow, like that data is going to be junk no matter how you—

Shay: and so that's a really good analogy, by the way.

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, you're getting the job done, but it's absolute junk. And until you're able to find a way to, to make it apples to apples across that entire data acquisition standpoint, you'll never have the ability to get the absolute best outcome. And what we're talking about here is pricing and the relationships with the carriers we're looking for. And on the full truckload side, we want to go get dedicated rates because I know that there's common lanes in your supply chain. If I have good data, I can go to a, you know, a Knight-Swift or an asset-based carrier, somebody that owns the trucks, and say, these are the lanes we're doing, this is how often we're doing them, give me your bottom dollar price, because if you, if you can be in this, this range point of pricing, I can tell you that you're going to get 10 loads a month guaranteed.

And they're like, wow, I'm not going to build in any risk because I know you're saying I'm going to get them. Whereas most of the industry right now is like, here's all of our lanes, bid them. You have no idea if I'm going to give you one or all of them. And so as a carrier, like, or a broker, you're like, I better bake in some, some, some margin here because if, if, uh, if I give them too low a price and they give us one load, I'm gonna be pissed off. But if I put too much in and we were, you know, we were just a hair above everyone else and got nothing, I'm also going to be kind of pissed. So good data equals good business equals great partnerships in the future, way I look at it.

Shay: It's awesome. I like that. Uh, you know, it seems to me that as technology continues and as we think about, uh, the advancements, you know, you talked about the service and support was one of the biggest areas that helped grow to where you guys are today. When you think about that moving forward as you add in integrations and AI and things like that, at the end of the day, there's probably still going to need to be people, you know, from a service and support, but also just deciphering when things go wrong, you know. So how do you think about that for your business and how do you stress the importance of that internally?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, AI is hitting the airwaves like crazy these days with ChatGPT and GPT-4 model and all that stuff. And we're trying to embrace as it's coming. We want to find ways to make our lives easier and more scalable, but we don't want to— we're never gonna put ourselves out of a job, I'll tell you that much. But also, we don't want to take the human mentality out of it or the creativeness out of it. And so we're looking at how can we use AI and logic to take menial mundane tasks and automate them. You know, there's a lot of things that it's just funny on LinkedIn, um, about every new innovative thing that comes into the market inherently is going to create a new bottleneck because it's going to require new processes and whatnot.

And so when the transportation industry started to get advanced enough where there was API connections between the carriers and, and software, so all of a sudden tracking was up to date, That was good and all, but now all of a sudden it took a little bit of that personal communication with your rep out. And so you might be quoting shipments a little bit blind and getting what we call variances. Oh, hey, we had to reclass this. You didn't even class it right. Or, you know, our scale says $500 and you put on there $400. We're going to have to re— what it's doing is it is the quote that you picked when you booked that shipment and you expect that shipment to cost you $300 and you got an invoice back for $450. That happens all the time now because the automation within that, those API calls to book a shipment, they leave a lot of discrepancies to be had for a, you know, like a novice user.

And so all of a sudden an entire industry of what we call freight bill auditing was born. It was like people that just simply said, you hire me, I'll take all of your invoices, match them up to your, your quoted amount, what you were expecting to pay. Tell you what the difference is and I'll go dispute them for you. And it's like, this wasn't there before. And so every time we do something like that, there's bottlenecks. You know, the computer age, when we added computers, all this information and database was there, but now we have to have a way to pull it out of that and make it useful. And that's kind of where we're going. And so we're going to embrace AI heavily. It just won't be— it won't be removing any of our jobs. We'll always keep what I call boots on the ground. We need people behind those phones. We need people to empathize but also provide logical and creative solutions.

And AI can't do that.

Shay: So you're playing a violin for the people that are listening. And that's where I want to wrap up here, Michael, from your perspective, you know, the farm operations, the businesses, people that are, that are listening, that are running progressive operations, tens of millions of dollar businesses, whether or not they're in farming or have multiple entities here. Um, you know, what solutions do you have to offer? Why should they call you? What, you know, what's the way— and this isn't, this isn't a sales pitch, and this isn't why I reached out, but I think the important thing here is that there's someone that you that are listening to the Ag View Pitch or listening and you're realizing like, hey, this guy gets it, he understands our needs, he understands our demand, and sounds like there's an exciting future there. So there might be people that are interested.

What, what's your thoughts? What's your comments? What do you kind of want to leave the listener with here?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, um, you know, I would say honestly, we're not the right fit for everyone. And I probably would have said that when I started. I'm like, I can always be the right fit for you. We'll just— we'll mold the way you need. But we're not the right fit for everyone. But honestly, in the egg industry, what we understand and what's most important is the fact that it's a seasonal industry. And if you don't get shipments to your customers in time, that could mean the loss of an entire sale. Not because they're just pissed off, but because they actually planted that field or that you know, that crop without the product you wanted to put in. And maybe they'll save it for next year, but you lost an entire year of sales for that customer. And that just doesn't work. And so you need that, that extra service support, somebody behind the phone, constantly in contact with the truckload driver.

Maybe, and maybe it wouldn't happen, Shay, on your farm, we would have been up to date with the truckload guy saying, hey, Shay said call, did you call? And making sure that happens. Because when you're, you know, most of the time, the ag industry moving truckload is on the spot board, meaning there's no, you're not working with the same truck trucking company or owner-operator on every lane. And so it's someone new every time. If they don't give a crap, what all it's got to be is pick up and deliver and I get paid. That's how it is, and there's no consistency. And so having that service support, if you're wanting to ensure that, uh, your products, your, your, um, commodities are getting moved to the, uh, the end dealer, the end farmer in time, that are— that's something that we, we heavily are, you know, are in right now.

And we focus on creative solutions for warehouse, vendor-to-warehouse moves, vendor-to-dealer moves. We have the tech play to, to help automate. If you got a ton of locations, that gets a little bit hairy. So having a tech solution or a tech stack to create some consistency between all your locations is important. And just in general, you know, our team can, can find ways to make things easier and more automated. And, and, you know, we don't, we don't, we don't turn away anybody if they're looking. We do have the agency side where if you're moving, you know, 3 shipments a month all the way up to, uh, 20 shipments a day, it will, will be a fit for you. If you're moving more so that, you know, the 20 to 100, 200 shipments a day in peak season, we can handle you there on our enterprise and our technology side. And so if you're interested in having a talk, I'd love to have a talk.

I'll never say that we're a perfect fit right off the bat.. But if it makes sense, I'm more than happy to have a conversation, talk a little shop on the side.

Shay: Very cool. Michael Stake with Rocket Shipping, headquartered out of Fargo, North Dakota. Michael, Michael, thank you so much for your time. And, and is the best way for people to reach you through Rocket Shipping, or, or how should people contact you if they're interested?

Michael

Steeke: Yeah, honestly, um, uh, my, my email is just michael@gorocketshipping.com if you want to do a little research before you even reach out. I know that happens a lot in the ag industry. No one wants to be sold to right away. Go check out our LinkedIn page. We put a ton of information out there, rocket shipping, and you'll find all the affiliates or the people that work there. Um, we have a website, it's under construction, but it'll be up soon. But, uh, or reach out to me on Twitter. Love Twitter. That's a good way to do it as well. That's how me and Shay kind of connected.

Shay: So absolutely, thanks a lot, Michael. Really appreciate your time. And, and more importantly, I guess I would say, uh, good luck and, and Godspeed to you guys as you kind of grow on this journey. I'm excited to see where it takes you.

Michael

Steeke: Thank you. Sounds good. It was great chatting, Che.

Shay: And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We will catch you next time.