Hi, everybody. This is Patrick Escolas with another episode of Banyan Tire Tracks. We're actually going to do things a little differently as we're here at the second annual Banyan Connect Conference in beautiful tropical downtown Cleveland, Ohio. I have with me the ever-lovely Connie Morgan of Ascent. I believe her title is super-duper executive pricing and compliance. 

I mean, I'll take it. 

All right. 

I will definitely take that. 

Well, Connie, thank you for – I was all alone at the table here, but Connie sat down with me. 

I did, yes. 

So let's start a little bit with Connie. You're with Ascent, who is a big player. I know that they've been with Banyan as far as LTL for a long time. But Ascent does a lot more than that. Give me a little bit of an elevator pitch on who Ascent is to anyone that might not have heard of them. 

Oh, no, absolutely. Ascent actually has a wide diversification of different sister companies. We capitalize on shipping internationally. We ship by air. We have domestic shipping. We also will ship expedite. So we kind of have a little bit of a touch in everything, which is wonderful. It's very rounding for the company. So we really get exposure to a lot of different components of transportation that in other roles and things that I've played in, you might not have had the opportunity to collaborate with other teams and really discuss what's going on in the market outside of just your world, like your little domestic world. It’s actually quite nice, very diverse, and allows us to see a lot of the transportation world. 

That’s awesome. That’s a little bit about Ascent and yourself. Before we even get into your professional level, one of the things that I thought was unique when we first started talking as I am your account manager. 

So true. 

I know, very fancy. No, but is that – your dad was a trucker and you kind of grew up within the industry. 

I did. Dad was another road truck driver. So I have probably clocked more miles than most of the people that I work with, just in the passenger seat, mind you. 

Definitely more than I have. That's right. 

But, yes, family –

Yes. For legal reasons, no, she was not driving that. Yes.

No, no. Well, maybe but –

Yes, maybe. Yes. 

No. It’s one of those things. I grew up in it. My family had always been in a part of it. My grandfather had ran some trucks over the years, and so my dad got into it and –

Just kind of some of the – in the DNA, basically. 

Yes. It was basically in the DNA. Then he had had just we'll call health issues. So we kind of looked at it as a family and said, “You know what? We can go a different route.” So we decided to start a trucking company. It was a family trucking company, and we ran that for years and then for –

Was that – did you focus more on the dispatching at that point because he wasn't doing the actual trucking himself because of the health reasons? 

Yes. Basically, for him, it was just me and him. You kind of learn from the ground up. So you learn everything about certifications and Hazmat regulations and what you needed to do for DOT. I've went through a few audits of DOT. Trust me, I passed with flying colors, but they definitely teach you a lot. 

Is that when you learn to love the audit process? Because if there's one thing I know about you, you are so detail-oriented, and there has to be a part of you that loves it deep down and has a passion for it. I think it's kind of a catch-22. I found that my personality was like that anyway, so I just sort of – I was like, “Oh, yes. I can do all of the office components and the payroll components.” It was something new. I sort of grasped onto it, and it was this new sort of eye-opening experience that –

Like the first time I opened Excel and I'm like, “I like this.” 

Oh, yes, yes. 

You don't go or you're not like, “Man, video games are cool, and so is football. I think I'll get into Excel.” It happens one day. 

It does, yes. You don't really – you wake up one day, and you kind of figure, “Oh, wait. How did I get here?” But even with that, leading into that same mentality, I wanted to see what else was out there. So that's where I had decided, okay, I want to broaden my opportunities. At that point, I had moved over, and I had worked for larger companies like U.S. Steel, also called National Steel, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo. I ran the transportation for them, being actually the customer side of the business. So that was a little unique going from –

Yes, completely different view. 

Exactly, exactly. Then funny enough, I had had an opportunity. I had a 3PL that was working for me for Pepsi. I had had an opportunity offered to me to swap into to the brokerage side of the world. 

They're like, “You did such a good job. Come work for us.” 

Well, it was one of those things that, yes, I – my job was moving to a place I couldn't follow, and they called me up and said, “Come on over, and we've got a job for you.”

And had nothing to do with you like Coke over Pepsi or anything like that. 

No. 

You failed too many Pepsi challenges. 

No. Well, hey. But then, yes, I got into that. So then it was sort of the tripod. I had been the carrier, I had been the customer, and then I became the broker. 

You had a real holistic view of the entire process now. 

It definitely was an experience because then you got to see why the questions were being asked in the way that they were from each part of RFP processes and conversations and where you maybe weren't able to follow all the logic behind it. Seeing it from all three sides, you could understand exactly what they were aiming to do and what their end goal was for the questions. So it helped you answer and kind of speak the correct way in order to connect all three parties together, which is ultimately the goal. 

With that, did [inaudible 00:06:05], did you ever empathize with like now that you've done the carrier as like if you were a shipper? Or were you like, “Yes. Well, I needed this, but I know that you need this price out of it, and you're going to tell me this but also –” How does that work because you’ve –

Wait, that’s the secret sauce. 

Yes, exactly. Yes. They're like, “You're not supposed to know that.” You're like, “But I do.” But I know you also have to make money on this or else, yes. So what is that like for you now, know it all? How do you play within those three?

Sure. Well, I will never say I know it all. I'm always learning. I love that about it. 

Very smart. 

You can always learn in transportation. 

A hundred percent. 

I think that it allowed me to be more transparent, and the transparency itself helped with the relationships. It’s a lot better with connections to be open about understanding all sides of it and then just be, “Hey, this is what's going to make it work. This is what won't make it work. So let's just find a solution.” Being able to look at it from that perspective, people had a connection to you that you would not necessarily have been able to obtain otherwise. 

That's something that has really surprised me about everybody I've talked to with this podcast and with my clients as well is how relationship-driven the entire industry is because you'd think from an outside that I was even two years ago that it's very commodity-based. It’s either you got the right price or you don't. But that's not the case. 

No. I always joke that it's a huge industry, but it's so small otherwise. I mean, everybody knows everybody. Even with the truckload world or the LTL world, if you don't stumble across somebody in your career that you have worked with prior, you're not doing it right because –

Right, exactly. Yes. 

It's just the nature of it. Then the relationships that you maintain from previous customer relationships, previous carrier relationships, they follow you because the relationship is with you and not necessarily with your company. I think so many people missed that step that it's – you're building. Whatever relationship you build today is going to follow you throughout any experience that you have within transportation. 

That's something we've seen here at Banyan, too, not only from the different sides of it. Someone who really likes using the system goes somewhere else and says, “Hey, whatever you're doing here is okay, but I have this thing that I really know well, and it does a good job.” Those are our favorite. As a salesperson, I don't have to do much. They're just like, “Hey, get me back up and running with what I was already doing before. Yes, no.” 

So we're here at the conference at Connect 23. Why did you come? I mean, not other than just to see tropical downtown Cleveland. I know it's right in the middle of our beautiful island time. No. But what is it you're trying to gain out of this experience? What are you coming in here to learn?

Well, it's one of those – whenever you're bringing in a program to your business, you want to understand everything that kind of surrounds it, everything that you can gain from that. Again, that relationship. So being able to see what kind of product offerings you guys have, how I could integrate that into my systems, how I can actually get my company to be propelled forward by the relationship that was already had. 

Basically, my whole goal is to try my best to really see what you guys have to offer, how I can capitalize on that in a way that I can keep the vision in the road map for Ascent, but yet support the growth that I need for my customers and for my carriers. 

It's, again, kind of lining up these almost three different aspects into kind of one. If we had three transparencies, putting them over and trying to find that clear path forward all the way through with that. 

Absolutely. Then with some of the programs and some of the things that you guys are offering with the analytics, that visibility, that's things that are asked of us all the time. Can I please see my data in a different way? Can I try my best to – how am I doing with these routes? Am I fulfilling the entire United States with the movement of my goods? Really, where am I more heavily saturated? What would you offer as an opinion to help me better my company? We hear those things. 

So being able to lean into some of the things that you guys are offering will allow us to kind of give the customers exactly what they're looking for but in a way that is tweaked and adjusted for how we want to present it as Ascent. 

That was awesome, and I don't know. David, did you tell her to say all of that? Because that was like spot on, very bullet point. No, that's awesome. So I might have gone one way, and I'll go back with this, and we talked about you kind of living in the different worlds with Ascent as a 3PL. I mean, if not bigger than that. Where is the value-add? What makes Ascent different from any other 3PL out there? I'm sure the size of it has better reach, but where do you think the real grab of why someone should use Ascent? 

Ascent, and you had alluded to this earlier, just about being able to be open to adjusting your ways and your processes. Ascent is extremely open to really embracing people's opinions of products and looking at new materials, looking at new offerings. 

So you're not forcing like an Ascent box on someone. It's more –

Exactly. 

How do you need this to work and you'll work with them to fall in line with their plan or their goals. 

Well, and you're looking at what is offered in the industry. 

Okay. Well, yes. That makes –

Yes. I mean, everybody can see what –

You can say whatever you want it to be. But then all of a sudden, you're limited. 

Yes. So as things – as the turn times for returning of documentation become faster, you have to react to that. As the reporting –

Thanks, Amazon. 

Becomes faster and people want that real-time, on-demand type of structure. 

A hundred percent. 

You can't stay, ‘Well, this is how I've always been.” You have to really research and be open yourself to adjusting to meet up with those requests. For Ascent as a whole, they're very, very open to putting on new technology, putting on new heads, really listening to their customers. By listening to what people are wanting, then we can target how to give them exactly what they're asking for. Then we go out to the market and say, “Okay. Well, what products are going to allow us to do just that?” 

That’s where we've really leaned into Banyan to allow us the capabilities of meeting up with several of those checkpoints because there are things that are being asked of us, and we are not where we would like to be with our components today. So we want to expand out the base. We want to have better technology. We want to have faster response times. We want to do better as a company for our customer. 

You want to get your own internal metrics up. 

Exactly. 

So you can say, “Hey, look. We're doing a great job for you.” 

Absolutely. 

Oh. So you probably have a good finger on the pulse for everything and, obviously, COVID and kind of the rearview mirror. Obviously, there's still waves of effects and everything. Then there's yellow that just happened on that. What do you think the future holds as a effect of that, and what do you see moving forward in like the next six months to a year within the industry? Is it all more of the same? Because as we said, you grew up in this game. So is this nothing different, or what does it look like to you?

Well, I can't say that there's nothing different when there's COVID involved. I mean, that’s –

Yes. She keeps – she's like, “You're throwing clichés, and I’m going to bat them down.” 

Yes. I can't say that. But what I can say is that the transportation industry is a cycle. So you're going to have cycles where it's going to be on the high side for cost, and it's going to go on the low side. High side for capacity, low side for capacity. Historically, this is not something that is uncommon to see. It's just that that pendulum because of COVID swung so heavily in one direction because there were components that were not normal that we had to take into account. 

However, the ship does appear to be riding itself. It's just taking a slower time frame to get there. So when you're at analyst responses and, just in general, reports on what's happening with the market, et cetera because we have to look for those people that really verse themselves, dig themselves into the data, and know more, obviously, than we do. 

I can see with the pictures that the data is telling them, yes. 

Correct. But, I mean, we're seeing it where rates are starting to go back up. We're starting to see some level of recovery. We're starting to see just buying increasing. So the purchases are starting to increase for consumers, which is all great indicators to suggest that we're at that bottom level and that we're going to start seeing that incline. 

We're going to start swinging back the other way now. 

Yes. I mean, there's several people that'll tell you that it's going to be May. But I think that's dependent on sort of your mix. 

I would say there's no way you put a date on this. You've already batted me down of the things can't say and won't say. Yes. 

No, no, no, no, no. I mean, but there are a lot of people who are saying May is going to be the time frame. But, again, it's going to be dependent on you. So certain commodities are going to shift earlier. 

You have to believe that and start working that way. Okay. So it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like if you tell enough people that it's going to be May, and you start assuming that it's going to be May and start working towards that, then it probably will be. 

Well, I'm kind of hoping that it turns before May. 

Well, yes, exactly. 

I really am. 

Put that out into the universe. 

I think everybody in this room probably thinks the same thing. 

Yes, exactly. 

But at the same time, I mean, it definitely gives all indicators to suggest that by May, everything should be at least turning the right way. 

Okay. What does that look like as far as turning the right way? Is that you from – how is your viewpoint now, obviously, with Ascent? Is that from a brokerage or a 3PL perspective of turning the right way?

No. I think it's actually – I mean, it's going to be a balance for carriers, for customers, and for, obviously, brokerage teams. There's a balance that is met across the board. I think the COVID, that pendulum swing that I spoke about earlier really sort of shifted a lot of things. 

You kind of want it right in the – if the pendulum's either here on one side and here. You want it right in the middle there. 

Obviously, if I got my choice. I want a good balance of there's equipment available. Everybody gets a fair price across the board. There is always that point in time that the perfection happens. It doesn't last. 

It's how long it's there, right?

Yes. It doesn't last very long. But that's what we always aim for. 

That's awesome. No. Connie, whenever I talk to you, I learn something, and that is one of my favorite reasons to talk to you. So one of the things I always do, even though we're just doing this at a table instead of [inaudible 00:16:55] background is I want to give you the opportunity with this platform. If you have a message to either your customers or anyone in the industry or whether it's from a sense point of view, what do you have to say as a message out into the world or out into anyone listening? Here's your platform. 

Well, you always have to shout out to your mom. I'm just saying. 

Yes. There you go. 

I mean, that's like the go-to, right? 

Hey, Mom. Yes. 

Hi, Mom. 

I like that. I like that. No one's done that yet. Thank you. 

Oh, all right. 

That was awesome. Well, you know. 

Yes. 

I would say that, honestly, for all the places that I've worked, I absolutely adore Ascent. 

Hey, that’s awesome. 

Ascent is a great partner. You can see it in how we interact with people. You can see it in how our customers respond. 

That's the best way to see it. 

I give a shout-out completely to this company. Now, mind you, I haven't even been there a year yet. So that, to me, is, you know. 

Still got the new car smell but still. 

Well, no, it isn’t but –

You've seen enough places. 

I have seen enough to know that Ascent is a great partner. If anybody's looking for a great partner to work with, we're the ones that you would want to look for. We've got a lot of diversification, and we treat our customers fairly and our carriers. We really partner and work with our carriers. By the way, Happy Driver Appreciation Week. 

Hey, there you go. 

I want to make sure to say that. 

I was going to say. Yes, work with Connie. She knows where you've been. She feels your pain. 

I do. I’ve been there. I’ve been there. 

And knows where you're trying to go. Yes. No. Connie, thank you very much for talking with me today. 

Absolutely. 

I look forward to talking to you next time, too. Thank you for everybody listening and/or watching, and stay tuned for our next episode of Banyan’s Tire Tracks Podcast.