Blythe Brumleve:
0:00
LinkedIn presents. Welcome into another episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI Logistics and I am your host, blythe Brumlee. So in this show today we're going to be talking about a few different talking points for this solo show no Guests Today and just to set sort of the roadmap for the show, I want to talk about two AI tools that I have been using. I've tried a lot of different AI tools over the last year and these two have really stood out over the last year as tools that I have are I'm pretty much using every single day and they have added tremendous value to my workflow. So I'm going to talk about those. Then I'm going to lead that into a discussion about bootstrapped marketing ideas. This was the topic that I covered a little at a high level on Freight Waves Now a couple weeks ago, and so I'm going to go a little bit more in depth with that topic. Then we're going to talk about the yellow situation. I mean, you're going to hear it from you've probably heard it from a lot of different viewpoints. I'm going to come at it from a little bit of a personal experience, so I'll get into that one a little bit later. Then we're going to talk about some of the episodes, a little housekeeping notes about some new sponsors that we just brought on to the show. Hopefully we're going to be bringing on a couple more sponsors in the next month, working on those behind the scenes, of course, and some new content initiatives, which I don't know if that is of interest to anyone, but I think most people like seeing a little bit of the behind the scenes, a little bit about how the sausage is made, so I'm going to share those a little bit later in the show.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:44
But first let's talk about those two tools that have really made such an impact on my business, and I think it will help a lot of you out there who maybe you are a small team, maybe you're doing all of the marketing as a solo operator, or maybe you're just doing the marketing yourself because you don't have anybody else in the office and you are working with a small team. You're probably wearing a ton of hats. If any of that kind of fits for you, then these two tools are going to really save your life. So first one I want to mention is otterai. Otterai is a meeting note taking app. It automatically plugs in. It's about 200 bucks a year best 200 bucks that I have ever spent, essentially because of all of the things that you get from it.
Blythe Brumleve:
2:34
Now it's a note taking tool, and this note taking tool will automatically join the meetings that you have in your calendar or you can set it up on a manual basis. They also have an app that you can download on your phone and record meetings in person, and it will actually take notes of every person that's speaking in the meeting itself. But it is a really cool tool because not only does it take the notes, it's sort of a live transcription of any meeting that you're a part of. It will then take that summary and create takeaways for you, and then anybody else who is on that meeting will also get sent a copy of the transcription of the takeaways and they can then download it and they can do whatever they want with it after the fact. Now, obviously, if these are sensitive meetings, you don't necessarily want to share that with parties that made that shouldn't have access to that kind of information. So just keep that in mind that anybody that's on the invite typically gets a copy of that transcription. But you can set it up in a way where only one person has access to that transcription and then they share it out manually after the fact and if they deem appropriate.
Blythe Brumleve:
3:52
Now some cool stuff of what I've been doing when I have these transcriptions now, because I've been using the tool for the better part of the last part of the last six or seven months now, but I now have. So it's not just I guess I should back up a little bit it's not just the meeting note taking functionality of it being able to take notes whether you're on a desktop or a mobile device fantastic but primarily the way that I use it is. I use it for podcast transcription. You upload an audio file, you upload a video file and then about 15 minutes later you will get an email from autoai. They've transcribed the entire thing. They create the takeaways, which is great, and that will allow you to start having a centralized database of your content, and I've really been able to do some really cool things.
Blythe Brumleve:
4:44
One thing in particular I'm super excited about kind of ties into our title sponsor, which is SBI Logistics. They have a freight agent program. They're largely regarded as one of the best freight agent programs in North America. I would say that they are. I've met all of the people. I've met a lot of their agents, lovely people. I wouldn't do business with them if they were not. But what I've done is because of the sponsorship deal that we have set up with SBI. We have a freight one of their freight agents on the show once a month to talk about their experience of when they decided to become a freight agent, when they decided to start looking around and start seeing if there were other, better opportunities, how they discovered SBI, what were the selling points that made them join SBI to leave a current either current program that they were in or maybe they were in freight sales with an existing book of business, either of those two sort of buyer profiles. Those have made the jump to becoming an agent for SBI. So I say all that because we have done about a half a dozen interviews where I'm in my seventh month of independent podcasting. So shout, you know, shout to the creators out there who understand how you know I guess challenging it could be to move to that full-time creator role.
Blythe Brumleve:
6:04
But one of the really cool moments is being able to now take those conversations with those half a dozen freight agents, put them in a transcription tool like otterai and I can now craft up a freight agent guide that is now available on the digitaldispatchio website. So if you are interested in checking it out, you can go to the resources tab. It should be one of the dropdowns under the resources options. But making that guide, I was able to craft it using direct quotes from those conversations from otterai. If I were to have gone back and let me just tell you, I guess, what the process was, maybe just a year ago, if I wanted to do this same exact thing, I would have had to go into each interview, pause the interview type out, pause the interview type out, pause the interview over and over and over again until I hand transcribed that interview myself, then found the key moments within that interview myself and then do that rinse and repeat for all of those interviews. Obviously, that would take a ton of time, which is why I've never been able to do something like that before until today.
Blythe Brumleve:
7:17
Until now literally just launched this guide last week and it took about a half a day's work in order to compile all that information, figure out the angle that I kind of wanted to go, check out what kind of information is already out there about becoming a freight agent and then try to make it 10 times better than everything that is currently out there. So that was my mindset with going into creating this guide but being able, when I tell you to, being able to use real quotes for real conversations to make this guide better than anything else that's out there on the market. It was just such a eureka moment for me and I wouldn't have been able to do it without this tool. So otterai is hands down, I would say, out of the top five tools that I have used over the last year. Otter is in the top three, and I'm going to get to one of those other that's in the top three in just a moment, because it's not only change how the post production of after you've done the hard work of creating content and then you don't want that content to just wither away and die, you want to continue to find ways to use it. So often you will see social media clips, you will see email campaigns all very valid in things that I have done for each of these shows but being able to compile all of that information together and being able to package it in a new way is such a game changer for content creators out there that are looking for new ways to take the content that they already have and try to repackage it in a way that's going to make sense for their audience. So that is just use case.
Blythe Brumleve:
8:57
You know one A. For me, use case, one B is being able to fully focus on the meetings that I'm having and not worried about taking notes every single second. And that's what I was doing before, with a lot of prospect meetings, with a lot of client meetings. Now I'm able to fully focus on the person that I'm talking with, knowing that the meeting is being transcribed, so I don't have to do that and try to pay attention to the meeting. At the same time, I know that I have those notes that I can go back on and if something is really really important, maybe like one or two takeaways, then I'll write that down on a post-it note while I'm talking to the person. But one post-it note and being able to focus 98% of the rest of my time on that conversation, that has been such a game changer for me as well. So I cannot recommend otterai enough.
Blythe Brumleve:
9:52
I know that there are other meeting note-taking tools that are out there, but the reason I really love otter is because the speech recognition, they also recognize my voice. So when you're doing post-production for a podcast or a YouTube video or even some of these meeting tools, you have to go in and you have to clean up, typically the company name and the spelling of the names that are mentioned either people or companies or brands, and that's kind of you know. It kind of can be all of those same things at the same time, but you have to clean those names up. In a majority of transcription tools that I have used With otter, they recognize the voice. So now I don't have to blithe Brumley. Can you imagine how many times you know, some kind of transcription tool has screwed up the spelling of my name? With otter, though I said it once, it now recognizes my voice and I don't have to worry about going in and finding my name in you know all of these different transcriptions and fixing that spelling. So that's one little thing that I don't have to do anymore because the technology recognizes it. It's now getting to the point where it's recognizing the regular guests that I have on the show. So, like Grace Sharkey, she comes on once a month. Some of my favorite episodes to record are with her. Otter now recognizes her voice as well and will automatically add her as the show name into the post-production workflow.
Blythe Brumleve:
11:21
It's a very minor thing. It takes something, you know. It only takes, you know, five seconds to fix that in a typical transcription. But when you're saving yourself from having to do that for every single transcription that you have, those little seconds kind of add up. It's not, you know, it's not significant, but it's not insignificant either. So those are the one A and one B of why I just love that software. They don't pay me to say this. It's 200 bucks a month. It is, hands down, the best $200, not $200 a month, $200 a year. So if it was $200 a month I might consider paying for that, to be honest, but it's $200 a year. So if you haven't started using you know some of these, you know note taking apps and things like that. I would highly encourage you to try Otter.
Blythe Brumleve:
12:07
But then also be weary of who is getting access to that information. So there are certain meetings when I don't allow the transcription to play a role, especially if they're really personal meetings or something like that. I just don't want that. I guess record out there. Just you know, with anything, I think you just have to be overly cautious if the conversation is really personal.
Blythe Brumleve:
12:32
But in the couple of use cases that I've given, such as joining meetings, I think there's also a tremendous amount of opportunity for people who know marketing and sales is really important. They want to upskill, they want to learn. You know what are some of these commonalities that prospects are coming to them with. Maybe even some of the executives are wanting to know what are some of these commonalities that our prospects are coming to us with. Maybe it's a marketer in your office that isn't able to join. You know sales meetings.
Blythe Brumleve:
13:01
This is an opportunity to take a tool like that, have it auto join the meeting and then it sends a summary of what that prospect call was like. So the marketer can then take that information, take the questions that are being asked by the prospects and then be able to make content around that. I just there are so many different possibilities to be able to use this tool and make it be a force multiplier within your organization. So maybe you have a VP that is charged with increasing revenue, which I mean. If you're trying to increase revenue right now, god help you. We all are, and using a tool like this can help you find out what are some of those deeper moments with your prospects and customers that you can then package together in new content and new marketing. Address that with some of your current content marketing, maybe have your executive team be able to speak on those issues at a higher level.
Blythe Brumleve:
13:58
There's so many different possibilities that can happen, but you have to start with, you know, communicating with the internal team, and this is a great way to make that happen and make it happen in a way that's not super intrusive. Where are super time consuming? Where you have to have, you know, a marketer. Sit in on all of these sales and prospects meetings and they just might not be worth it. There's better uses of their time. But if they could get an email that has you know, these are the six sales calls that we had today, then they'll be able to briefly glance and say, oh, here's some content, gold mine, some nuggets of information that we can use. That's going to fuel the rest of our marketing ship. So I've talked a lot. What did I just spend 15 minutes talking about one software program. Okay, so, otterai, very, very good.
Blythe Brumleve:
14:53
Are you in freight sales with a book of business, looking for a new home, or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership. These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called the freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI Logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, it and sales. But I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI's freight agents themselves. I want better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI. Hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations or, if you're ready to make the jump, visit spi3plcom.
Blythe Brumleve:
15:45
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Blythe Brumleve:
16:26
The next one that I will recommend because the cost and the time that it has saved me, is so I cannot understate it enough Opus Clips. Opus Clips is it was founded and is being currently being built by a bunch of ex-TikTok employees. So these ex-TikTok employees saw a need to help people with social media clips. You know those little clips with the text that's overlay on the video. You kind of see two talking heads that are stacked together on a vertical video. Those social media clips take so much time or they used to take so much time to create.
Blythe Brumleve:
17:04
I mentioned earlier about the transcription process and how I would have to look at the transcript or listen to the transcript, type it out, listen, pause transcript. You know it was just a convoluted flow. In order to make that happen, you have to do the same thing with social media clips as well. You have to listen to all of the content, find those moments. Then you have to find the moments that fit within a certain time period that is appropriate for that social media channel LinkedIn, for example, up to 10 minutes and video length of what you can find. You typically don't want to do 10 minutes just because everybody's attention spans are so much shorter. Unless the content is really good and it justifies the 10 minutes, then by all means have it last 10 minutes.
Blythe Brumleve:
17:49
But something like YouTube Shorts, which is really important for folks to discover. You discover your channel. It's a max of 59 seconds. If you go to one minute long videos, it will treat your video as a video and you won't show up in the Shorts feed, so you have to keep that content at 59 seconds. Twitter is like two minutes if you don't have the verified account. I think Instagram is somewhere similar to LinkedIn, where a reel is a minute and under, but the or maybe three minutes. I don't know. I can't stuff to keep up with Instagram and all of the things that they're trying to copy and trying to steal, but I know that you can upload a little bit longer videos to Instagram reels as well.
Blythe Brumleve:
18:32
So my point being is that there's a lot if you wanted to look at one hour long show, transcribe it by hand and then find a few social media clips for one or two different social media platforms. You're talking about hours, sometimes days, of what this used to take me With Otter using the transcription. That's 15 minutes With Opus. Now what I can do is I can take my videos. I can either upload it directly to their platform or I can take a YouTube link of a video that I've already published. I can paste the link in about 15, 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, depending on the capacity at the time. I will get back 10 to 15 social media clips within the timeframe.
Blythe Brumleve:
19:18
It looks for specific keywords. It can look for just generic keywords that AI has identified as key moments that are within a conversation, so they'll automatically gear towards those keywords. But you can also give it specific keywords of content that you want it to find. You can also give it a specific timeframe of where, in the show that you want it to search for, maybe a really powerful moment happened in the first 15 minutes or the last 10 minutes of a show, and so you can. They have a lot of different variables that you can use from Opus, so that company is called Opus. There are $150 a year.
Blythe Brumleve:
20:06
To put it in perspective, I used to have a contracting team that I would hire periodically to do the same thing, and they would have to do a lot of this. Manual work. Manual work typically means expensive because you're paying for people's skill and you're paying for people's time. So if you can cut down on the amount of time that it takes for them to have to do this, then you are expediting the rest of your content flow, and I was so. Periodically, I've used this team for different content projects with not only just my team or my stuff. If I have a big project coming out and I want some social media clips for it, I've hired them.
Blythe Brumleve:
20:48
In the past I asked them for a quote to do this on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind, this was right before a lot of these AI tools, especially video focused AI tools, started hitting the market. They quoted me at $3,000 a month. Now, I love this team, I love working with them, but for me, $3,000 a month is a lot and I would only get and I say only, I would only get four videos a month and 10 to 15 clips from that one video. And because of that cost, I was like I have to find. I know this is a need for me, but I also have to find another solution. Is there another solution that exists that is not going to cost me $3,000 a month and that's when I found Opus $150 a year and it gets me with most AI tools. It'll get you about 80 to 90% there.
Blythe Brumleve:
21:42
And what I love about Opus is that they have this almost like a grading scale or a sliding scale, where they list out. So they list all of your clips once they've created them and then you can go in and you can set up different brand templates. You can put your logo in them, you can make it. If it's a solo show, it could be just you. If it's you and another guest, they can cut it to where you're kind of the stacked talking heads. They automatically add the captions in and then they give each video a score of any from zero to 100. From my experience they haven't showed me anything that's under 70. Typically for a lot of these videos that are 90 and above are I don't even have to touch, like. They're post ready immediately after, not immediately, like 15 minutes, which is pretty damn near immediate. They are ready for me to start posting immediately.
Blythe Brumleve:
22:40
The amount of time that this tool has saved me. I have been using it for the last four months and it's just it's compounding. It's almost like compound interest for the financial nerds that are out there for the content creator nerds. It has saved me days, days that it would be devoted to hand scribing or hand transcribing a full hour long podcast interview and then to go in and spend probably a full day's work of finding social media friendly clips, cutting them myself, editing myself. Not just that whole workflow. But then you have to consider that you got to add it to another transcription tool because it's a mobile video, so you got to use another app that's probably going to cost you a hundred bucks a year or $20 a month or whatever the going price is nowadays for that, and you have to spend your time updating that transcript as well. Opus and Otter they cut out all of that. Where now the post production time is out, as I would say, probably two hours is what I spend on a show now, versus 20 hours a show before. That is a significant savings, not only in time but money as well, and I cannot I cannot sing the praises of these two tools enough.
Blythe Brumleve:
24:01
I've been trying a lot of different copy editing tools. You know whether it's, yeah, copyai I used for a while, liked them, jasper liked them. I've used other copy writing tools large language models, things like that, but to me nothing is better than taking a transcription and then feeding it into like a chat GPT and saying summarize this for me. And it does it in minutes. So that's what my new sort of workflow looks like when it comes to content creation, and the reason that it has been so powerful has been because of these two tools that have allowed me the flexibility because with this now I'm able to dedicate more time to creating more content. But the content, the level, I guess, of the content that I'm creating doesn't have to suffer because I can give myself permission to do a little bit of extra research on that interview that's coming up, to do a little bit more legwork on you know what makes for great topics and conversation in the world of logistics that I can be talking about, that I can offer a unique view that's different from everybody else. What allows me that bandwidth to be able to create better content faster.
Blythe Brumleve:
25:20
So if you're not using these two tools yet, there are. Even if you're not a podcaster, if you're not a video creator, these tools will still save you hours of time because think about, think about from the lens of a webinar. I'm sure most companies out there have either been a part of a webinar. They've hosted one themselves. And then where does that webinar go? It goes off to the content desert to die a slow death.
Blythe Brumleve:
25:46
With these tools, you can then come up with new creative ways to repackage that same content that was on its deathbed and you can revive it. And you can use these different tools to revive it in a way that's better for your audience, it's better for your prospects, and you can continue to drink from that. Well, to keep using, I guess you know, sort of water, water and desert as analogies here. But you can continue to, you know, add new life into that content you've already created. So think about it from the lens of what content do I already have? And then how can I use and maybe experiment, do a trial run with some of these two? I think both of these tools either have a free trial or you can upload up to, like, I think, two hours max, to to opus right now for free, and so you can try out these tools for free to see if it's a good fit for you.
Blythe Brumleve:
26:39
And think about all of the content that you've recorded in the past. Maybe you've been on interviews, maybe you've participated in webinars or live streams, any kind of content like that. You can now take and repackage it in a way that makes sense for you and your business and, ultimately, the ROI that you have in mind Because, like I said, I've tried a ton of different copy. You know AI tools, large language models. I've talked about it a ton on this show. These two things have been game changers for me.
Blythe Brumleve:
27:12
Another tool that I have talked about in the past is Swell AI. I still think that they're incredibly valuable. As far as you know that the package and the services that they're offering is pretty much a transcription tool podcast show notes. They help you with social media promotion, things like that. I still think that they're a great tool to use as well, but I would not put them in my top three and it pains me to say, because I really love the founders of that company and the things that they're building. But with my podcast tool, with my podcast host, buzzsprout, they now have a lot of those same capabilities that Swell was offering independently. They're now built into my podcast host and I think you know just kind of looking at you know what the AI market is right now.
Blythe Brumleve:
27:53
With a lot of these different software tools, I think we're seeing where consolidation is taking place, especially among some of the bigger players. People, microsoft, they're all still making big, big plays and in and around AI, and I think that they're doing that to bring in together kind of an ecosystem for their current customer base. So then there's less incentive to want to try a new tool. So if you're looking to try new tools, there are so many that exist but if you're looking for something that's actually going to fit into your workflow, I would consider Opus and I would consider Otter, and they have had just such a dramatic effect on my entire content production, my entire. You know just the way I think about content. Now it has changed dramatically where I can do so much more with more time, and that's, I think, that's what every business owner is looking for in these circumstances. So that does it for that topic.
Blythe Brumleve:
28:55
That topic I want to bring up is very kind of relevant to the first two tools that I mentioned and that's bootstrapped marketing ideas that I talked about on FreightWaves now a couple weeks, maybe last week. I think it was last week. That's neither here nor there, but I talked about it because obviously there are a lot of companies Freight is struggling right now. There are a lot of companies that are going to close or either close to closure we're going to get into yellow in just a second but this topic of bootstrapped marketing ideas when you don't have a lot of time or mula that is what we discussed a couple weeks ago on FreightWaves. Now, with the preface of, we've been doing a lot of stories. This is coming from FreightWaves. We've been doing a lot of stories about companies close to pulling the plug and a lot of companies that are playing it very close to the vest. What should you do with your marketing dollars if things aren't looking good? Obviously, it's a terrible idea to not market, but can you get by on the free stuff? And, if not, what do you need to spend your money on in order to keep the doors open until 2024? So, basically, what can you do to market your company in order to ride out the economic storm that everybody is currently experiencing? Right now and this gets back to the tools that I just mentioned you have to be able to do more with less.
Blythe Brumleve:
30:11
Bootstrapped marketing is essentially the only reason why I learned marketing to begin with. I have always wanted to be a business owner and I, but I didn't make a lot of money, especially 15 years ago when I first, when I started my first business I started up a sports entertainment blog didn't have a lot of money. New marketing agencies were very, very expensive and I knew I couldn't afford it. So I started learning how to do marketing myself. This was also the time that and I'm dating myself here but this was also the time and the like 2008, 2009, 2007, when some of these, a lot of these social media platforms Twitter, facebook, I think, instagram was 2011, but a lot of these companies started hitting the market, and so I was basically forced to use social media, this new fancy way of communicating with people, in order to market my business, because I couldn't afford a marketing agency. So Bootstrapped is essentially in my blood To this day.
Blythe Brumleve:
31:10
There are a lot of things that I see I could do it myself or I could learn it myself, and that's the approach that I take to marketing is I have to be able to justify the time and the money that is spent on marketing, and I have to be able to justify it at a business level. Once I learned how to justify it at a business level, everything changed for me. Everything changed for me and I have to, and now I wanna share, you know, some of those tips with you. So, first things first is having conversations with your customers. If you are a Bootstrapped marketer, if you are a Bootstrapped company and you're looking to still market yourself, having conversations with your it sounds so easy. I know it does. Conversations regularly with your customers, not just hey, how you doing. You know, this is the freight I can move for you today. This is the equipment I have available. None of that.
Blythe Brumleve:
32:02
I'm talking about setting aside the pleasantries of normal everyday conversations and instead schedule in-depth conversations with your customers. That's where a tool like AutoAI can auto join you know some of those meetings and be able to take notes for you, but being able to get that firsthand insight of what's going on with the customer, what are they struggling with, where do they need help with? Can my business help solve those problems for them and what does that look like? What does that ideal relationship look like, either to do new business or expand on existing business that you already have in play? So that's where those in-depth conversations really come into play, whereas, if you look at it from the lens of maybe, what folks have done historically from a marketing perspective is they've looked at what their competitors are posting to social media. They're looking at what their competitors are. You know webinars, content they have on their site, advertisements, things like that.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:01
The problem with that approach is that you're playing. You're constantly playing from behind. A lot of those things take a lot of time to build Webinars, social media presence, you know content, advertising campaigns. If you're doing it right, you know a lot of those things take a lot of time to build. They take a lot of strategic thinking and to put all of those pieces together You're pulling together. You know somebody who's familiar is they advertising, for example. You're pulling together someone who's familiar with graphic design, copywriting, ad tech, and also somebody, ideally in sales, who knows how all of those people, too, should create those things to add to the thing in order to make people buy the thing.
Blythe Brumleve:
33:42
That it's a lot of moving parts, but if you're having conversations with your customers, then you're already ahead of the game because you don't have to spend that time doing the market research or playing catch up to a competitor. So what you can do instead is have those conversations with your customers, prioritize those conversations with your customers, set aside time. It doesn't even have to be that much time. Maybe once a week, maybe a couple of times a month, you spend half a day just scheduling meetings with your current customers. You wanna check in, you wanna find out what's going on with them, what they're struggling with and how you can get ahead of some of the problems that they may be experiencing. You're not gonna discover some of those in-depth insights by having the pleasantry of the normal conversations hey, where are my trucks? My trucks are here. Hey, where's my stuff? My stuff is here. You're not gonna get those kind of insights when somebody is in that type of mind frame.
Blythe Brumleve:
34:32
You need to set aside the timeframe in order to have those in-depth conversations and be able to get to the point quickly, and so that's why I would suggest having conversations with your customers. Then, if you add on some of these other tools, like Otter in this case, then you'll be able to take a lot of those insights, not only share it with your internal team, but you can share it with any marketers Maybe you have contractors that you're working with as well. You can share that direct insight. The direct verbiage that the customers are using is so important because, especially in our industry, we have a habit of using acronyms for everything, using insider knowledge to kind of prove how much we know. Customers don't know all that stuff, and so you need to be able your marketing and your sales needs to be able to speak to the language that they're using, not the language that you're used to using.
Blythe Brumleve:
35:23
So that's one really important takeaway, and the reason I mentioned this is because that segues into the next point that I wanna bring up is that 95% of your audience is not in a buying cycle. It might be even lower or maybe even higher than that where 5% is estimated. Around 5% of your buying audience is actively in a buying cycle, meaning they're looking to switch providers, they're looking to switch products, and you hope to be able to capture that 5% of attention when they're ready to buy and you, hopefully, will be the ones that they remember. Or if you just praying to the SEO gods that if they Google the type of solution that you have, that you're gonna show up at the exact moment that that customer is gonna find you and then they're gonna book a meeting with you and become a customer, that margin of error is so slim for that to actually happen in today's age where you need to be proactive.
Blythe Brumleve:
36:24
You need to be having the conversations with your customers because the reason you're having those conversations with your customers is you're gonna be able to take those conversations and you're gonna be able to parlay that into content that you're going to create, that you're going to get on camera and you're gonna speak about that. You're gonna write a LinkedIn text post about, or a LinkedIn newsletter about that. You are going to be focusing on those areas because you want to be talking to the same customer profile that is already experiencing those same issues. So you're gonna be creating that content, not just once, but on a regular basis. It's going to be the gasoline to your content fire. And so that's where you're really going to gain a competitive edge and avoid the SEO trap of trying to rank on the first page of TMS for Freight Brokers or something like that. It's going to be very challenging to organically rank for that keyword, whereas you need to be focused on brand.
Blythe Brumleve:
37:23
You need to be focused on people, knowing who the hell you are and the problems that you're solving, and the only way you're going to be doing that is either through a lot of money that you spent on advertising or you take the organic approach and you publish to social media, you build up an audience and you build up that content snowball slowly but surely. So when that 5% of your audience gets into a buying cycle, you win before they ever get to Google, because they're Googling your brand name and they're coming to your site and then they're going to convert and hopefully convert and then they're going to hopefully become a customer. That is the pathway to conversion and if you're not focusing on those key metrics, that takes time, it takes investment, but it doesn't take a lot of money upfront and it's gonna pay off in dividends because you're not playing from behind by just focusing on what maybe a competitor is doing because they're not focused on you. That competitor is not focused on you because they're already ahead of the game. So how do you get ahead of the game? You get ahead of the game by talking to your customers and by having those conversations with your prospects, finding those commonalities, finding those questions and those concerns that they have, and then creating content on top of that to address all of those things, and doing it repeatedly. So that is my marketing plan, like 101 for any business out there, that is Bootstrap.
Blythe Brumleve:
38:45
That doesn't have a lot of money and you're looking to make it to 2024, start with the customers you have, because without them, it's gonna be really challenging to try to find new business, because, if you think about it from the shippers lens, they got plenty of you brokers, carriers, beating down their door trying to do business with them. They're not typically going to Google and searching for these things because they already have people that are blowing up their phones, contacting them nonstop, stopping off in their office, which is happening a little bit less than the other ones that I mentioned, but the point is is that they have a lot of people beating down their door to do business with them and if you are sending a templated email, that is easily identifiable because of the fonts that are. I guess this is kind of circling back to a show that I did a few weeks ago where we had a shippers panel at the TMSA Elevate Conference and he said that he could tell if you're sending him a templated email, because Gmail and Outlook have identifiers for templated emails that come from companies like HubSpot or companies that create email templates with the under the guise of it's gonna be easier for you to send out cold emails. Well, guess what? The shippers can tell that you're trying to do things the easy way. They can tell because the font color is different. They can tell because the font size is different from the email that you're sending and that you will immediately get deleted.
Blythe Brumleve:
40:10
And none of that software is going to make a whole lot of sense because it made it easier for you. It didn't make it easier for the end business users. So we're in a new era of marketing. Covid should have taught all of us that. If COVID didn't teach you that, then maybe these economic circumstances will teach you that the only the strongest are gonna survive. And if you place that investment into your customers and into your prospects and learning more about them, that is how you get stronger as a business. That is how I have marketed myself as a bootstrapped business for the past 10 years and it is something that I still continue to do to this day. And I only devote more money to marketing when I earn more revenue and I can justify it. But I still come back to these tried and true methods of talking with my prospects, talking with customers and creating content that they care about. So I will, I guess, a few other tips that coming from this conversation on freight waves. There's a couple more tips.
Blythe Brumleve:
41:09
A lot of you may be saying I don't have time to do this. If you don't have time, batch it. And what I mean by batching it is by setting aside a half a day, once a month at minimum, in order to have these conversations with your customers record. Well, I guess let me back up. If you're gonna batch it, you should be having these conversations regularly with your customers and with your prospects. If you're not sitting in regularly on these conversations and you need to have some kind of a meeting tool, meeting note taking tool that's going to join those conversations and then you get a copy of it.
Blythe Brumleve:
41:41
When I say batch it, this is what I refer to is that the content that you're going to be creating. You need to set aside time for that, and if you set aside half a day maybe a Sunday, maybe a Friday, when things are a little bit not as crazy as like a Monday set aside, block off your calendar and devote it to just creating five to 10 pieces of content. Maybe it's a LinkedIn text post, because that's typically the easiest way to reach your audience. You know shippers are already on there. You know carriers and brokers are already on LinkedIn, so you don't have to get on camera to do a LinkedIn text post. You don't have to get on camera to do a LinkedIn newsletter.
Blythe Brumleve:
42:22
Think about these things that you can batch it and you can just figure out how to solve this problem by investing in your customers and by investing in your business and yourself, by just dedicating time to it. All you have to do is dedicate time to it. We have a world of freelancers and gig economy workers that will be able to help you edit a video or to record a podcast or, to you know, post all of your content out to you know, 12 different social media platforms. We have freelancers and gig economy that can handle all of that, but the I guess the focus of the message still needs to come from your customers and from you.
Blythe Brumleve:
43:02
So don't make excuses. Make time, and you can make time for it by setting aside one day a month or two half days a month to focus on this incredibly important task that can help keep your business afloat, and not only help keep your business afloat, but help your business grow. So if you don't have time, if you're trying to make up excuses of who's gonna handle all of this. It's just like is it Matt Damon from the Martian? Like, solve one problem and then you move on to the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one, but you're not gonna get anywhere if you don't start and if you don't dedicate time to doing it. It is very important dedicate time to do very important things. Okay, so that does it for the bootstrapped marketing ideas, and then I guess this is all kind of you know, I hate even you know, kind of getting into this topic, but it's a necessary evil, because I mentioned kind of briefly earlier about the situation that's going on with yellow. They are one of the largest, if not the largest, ltl carrier in the country. They control about 10% of the LTL market. They have failed to reach a deal with their union team of drivers. I'm not a union, non-union expert, so I will let people who are familiar in that area of the discussion I will let them, you know, kind of handle that part of the discussion.
Blythe Brumleve:
44:26
The reason I wanted to bring this up is because when your company is facing closure, if your company is facing cutbacks, that is an unfortunate reality that a lot of trucking companies are facing right now. It is an unfortunate reality that works in a cycle, and I mentioned this because 10 years ago I was working at an asset-based 3PL and, looking back, there were warning signs for months, weeks. I noticed the warning signs weeks, but if I'm being honest, looking back on it now, there were warning signs for months that our company was going to be closing soon. It was abrupt. I found out at a dentist appointment. I literally was at work that morning, left on my lunch break to go to a dentist appointment and I got a text in the dental office that we were closed. And it was one of the most. Even leading up to it, it was one of the most anxiety inducing experiences that I've ever been a part of.
Blythe Brumleve:
45:33
I think a large part of me wanted to see the hope. I think in the various situations that were going on, there were lots and I think for a lot of folks who maybe have experienced the same thing you look back on. There's an uptick in closed door meetings. There's an uptick in contracts. There's an uptick in visitors coming to the office, visitors that you don't know of. As an executive assistant at that company, that's what I got the first-hand sight of seeing.
Blythe Brumleve:
46:06
And then you start hearing the murmurs, you start hearing the rumors, especially from outsiders. I had other people reaching out to me telling me that, hey, what we're hearing is not looking good. We're hearing that you're running at a runway and to me in the office I was oblivious to a lot of this insight because we were being told a certain amount of hope existed, and you have to understand it from the executive's lens of they have to do this, they have to preach hope, otherwise employees are just gonna start leaving in mass, customers are gonna start leaving and that will be the downfall of the company. But if you can hold people together under a common goal and to keep hope alive, then that will keep employees there longer, which helps in financing and helps in financing options. We just faced a situation of the finance partner being incredibly wrong and that's what ultimately. That was one part of kind of a perfect storm of situations that existed that ultimately led to the downfall of the company that I had worked at for five years.
Blythe Brumleve:
47:20
I still remain incredibly sentimental to that company because I was a waitress before I ever started working for them and I considered myself just a waitress and I was gonna work in a job that I would be on my feet all day, much like my parents, much like my grandparents, very much a blue collar household. My dad still has a lawn care business. He's the only employee, he's the sole owner of the company and he goes out in Florida heat hundred plus degrees over the summers and he cuts grass for a living and he's done that for 40 years. My mom works on her feet all day. My grandfather was a tow truck driver.
Blythe Brumleve:
48:02
All that to say, if people choose to invest in me, if they choose to believe in me, I will reward that wholeheartedly and that's what I saw this company as. They gave me a position when I was just a waitress. They then invested in me to go to different social media conferences, marketing conferences, application training, microsoft training, web design, adobe suite training. Like all of these things. These tools that I used and that I was trained on then have helped me so much with the role that I am now, and I will be eternally grateful to that employee or that employer and to all of the my boss at the time, who's still a mentor to this day for me. I still wanted to stay with them because of the hope aspect and because of the loyalty aspect, and I have a suspicion that for a lot of folks that may still be at yellow working, that they might be feeling the same things, that the same, I guess, sense of hope and loyalty towards that company that maybe they have worked at for a very long time.
Blythe Brumleve:
49:13
It is so stressful, it is so anxiety-ridden. My heart goes out to those employees that are being affected by it, the drivers in particular, because maybe you're not in the office in order to experience some of the closed door meetings, the increase in closed door meetings, I guess I should say maybe some of the new finance partners quote unquote partners that are coming in to quote unquote save your company bullshit. They weren't coming in to save our company, they were coming in to pillage our company. I have an extreme amount of disdain for some of the larger banks in this country because of what they put our company through, because of the hope and the lies that they sold us 10 years ago, claiming that they were gonna keep the doors open, that they were gonna keep everybody employed and they were gonna keep business running, and it was all a farce and unbeknownst to a lot of the leadership team that was in the organization and anyways. All that to say if you are still in this situation and you are still working for a company like Yellow or maybe you're working for a company that you know it's tough it's tough right now If your executive team is not supporting you and if they're not being transparent with you and letting you know of what's going on, I would be very cautious of staying with that company, and I say that because employees want to help, drivers want to help.
Blythe Brumleve:
50:46
They want some kind of a way to they change is very difficult. Changing a job is very difficult and stressful, and I would imagine that most of these people want to stay there in their roles Maybe it's an expanded on role, not just at Yellow, but other companies that are experiencing the same thing. So if the executive team is being open and upfront with you and telling you you know that a dire situation is going on, that is an opportunity for the employees to either choose to go in another direction or to stay and step up, and a lot of the time, majority of the time your employees are going to want to step up, and so that would be one thing that I would be looking for is the executive team, is the leadership team being open and honest and communicating with you of what the situation of the company is like. Can you help? Are there ways that you can help or think about things a little bit differently? Are there tools that we can implement into our processes and our systems that are going to save us a little bit of time and money, that are going to help us compete when we have folks that are walking out the door? You know, it's that situation that you have the opportunity to use hope to your advantage in order to help save a company that you clearly probably really care about. So that's the situation.
Blythe Brumleve:
52:08
But then, on the flip side, if it just comes to the point where, like it's a yellow, where it does look like they are going to go out of business, then that is a situation where you have to think survival mentality first, because you have to think about where your paycheck is going to come from, even though you're very hopeful and you don't want none of this to happen. Of course you don't want none of this to happen, but you still have to think about it in the sense of self-survival, and where your check is going to come from, how you're going to take care of yourself and your family so you don't end up in a situation where you're losing your home and that situation becomes even worse. So, thinking about it from that, liz, here are the things that I did towards the end of my tenure at that company. I stayed until the doors were shut. Even after the doors were shut, I stayed for weeks afterwards in even helping out my former boss for months after the company closed. It stays with you. It stays with you for every bit of those the last 10 years. I think about that company several times a week, several times a week. The and I know a lot of the leaders that were working on that company still think a lot about that experience as well, because it has shaped them and it has driven them into new paths, into new careers. And most of them have done very well since the closure of that company and some would argue I would argue that that was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Blythe Brumleve:
53:30
At the time it felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me, but knowing that, knowing where I am now, a couple of things that really helped me out during that time downloading a copy of all of my contacts, downloading you can do this in Outlook, you can do it in Gmail. You can export it as a CSV file, which is another name for an Excel file. You can download a copy of all of your contacts' names, addresses, email addresses. I would do that not only for my email, but I would do that for any kind of text solutions that I use, software things like that. I would export a copy of those contacts and I would make sure I have one central database of contacts that I can then email to an email address outside of the company email address. So then that way you at least have a copy of contact information for everybody you've ever done business with or everybody you've ever worked with, and so then you have a copy of those contacts.
Blythe Brumleve:
54:24
Then and this, actually this got me into a little bit of trouble with the bank, but I wasn't really concerned with the bank at the time. I was concerned with the company and how we were gonna survive and also how I was going to survive. But on after I had already received my last paycheck, I was still in the office doing some cleaning up things. It's when the vultures are really prevalent in that kind of a situation, especially from the bank, and what I did is I sent out an email. All of the contacts that I downloaded, all of the contacts that I had regularly communicated with, I BCC'd, create a BCC email. Paste them all in there. Let them know I am no longer working for this company. If you want to reach me, please reach out on this non-company email address.
Blythe Brumleve:
55:11
That pissed off. The banker didn't care, because he still is like scum of the earth, in my opinion, to this day. I do not like that banker. He came up and yelled at me as soon as I sent that email, told me I didn't have the authority in order to do that, and because he was trying to collect payments when those payments should have gone to carriers that were very much in need of that money, much more so than this bank representative, and so I thought he was a piece of work. You know, I know this is gonna be alive, so I'm not going to, you know, curse too much in that regard, but I still have zero respect for that man and To this day, that was one of the best decisions that I did, because once I did that, I had job offers coming in to my personal email address.
Blythe Brumleve:
55:58
Even though I didn't take them, I still had job offers coming in from all of those different contacts that I had made and you know it ended up being a situation where I was blessed enough to be able to say I, you know, I don't know that I'm gonna stay in logistics, I think I'm gonna go and try out. You know a different career I actually did. I I Went and tried out not tried out. I wouldn't work for a magazine, ended up becoming their editor in chief. That parlayed into a radio gig here in Jacksonville, florida, where I was able to become a radio host, also occasionally a TV host. We had a View type program that was on here locally in in Jacksonville called the chat and much better than the view, I have to say, especially the you know the view in its current form, its trash show. But today, you know, I was able to parlay that into different career opportunities before going back into logistics, before starting my own business digital dispatch and then before starting this podcast and just you know, logistics, podcasting in general. So it was a Great, it ended up turning into a great decision, but it was downloading a copy of my email contacts. That, I think, was the biggest saving grace, so if my biggest piece of advice to anybody who is currently Going through some kind of an experience like that.
Blythe Brumleve:
57:16
Have an insurance policy and a list of your contacts is the the quickest insurance policy that you can have, because if you're gonna, if a bank comes in and they do a hostile takeover, if you know, maybe you get, you know, let go or something. You probably are not going to have access to that kind of information because they're gonna shut you down Immediately. They're gonna shut off your computer. You're not gonna have access to your email or two different systems. So that's why I would advise to just have that as an insurance policy a list of all of your contacts, email it to another email address that's non-company related and then at least that way you have a little bit of an insurance policy. In case you know she hits the fan and it sounds like, for you know, especially with yellow, as some of these other companies, you know it's gonna be hitting the fan. You know very soon and there are ways to protect yourself, while also still trying To do whatever you can to save the company.
Blythe Brumleve:
58:10
I have no regrets with staying with the company. I did for as long as I did, even after you know not getting paid. You know it's still cleaning up the work, because I cared about the work in the role that they did in that role, in that job, and I know there were I wasn't alone, there was probably, I think, a third of the staff that did the same exact thing as me. I don't begrudge anyone else who saw the writing on the wall and immediately closed up shop and went and found other jobs that that was a gangster move that I Just did. I didn't want to do because I wanted. I wanted to try to save it and help it and it didn't work out.
Blythe Brumleve:
58:48
Oh, but I don't really know how to close out that topic. I just feel for everybody that's involved, especially the drivers that are involved that have been there for so long, and the people who are potentially going to be losing their pensions and retirement. I'm gonna get emotional if I keep talking about it. Um, I'm. I guess all that to say is I'm, I'm here to help in any way possible. Get the word out. If you have talented folks that are looking for jobs, that are looking for Resources, I'm happy to share with with my network, because I know there's a lot of there's gonna be a lot of talented folks and a lot of folks that that really care about the work that they do and they're gonna be losing their jobs and nobody likes to see that. So here to help in that regard.
Blythe Brumleve:
59:31
I don't know how to segue to this next segment Because I kind of it's a shameless promo time, which just feels so weird to segue. But I don't really know how to segue from such a I guess, a heavy topic like that into Some topics that are not so heavy. So let me take a drink of water or sweet tea actually that that is a sweet tea, all right. So shameless promo time. I, you know, this is a new part of the show that I wanted to introduce because With all of the content that I've been talking about, with the content that I'm able to create, I I feel like I don't do enough promotion on the shows that I'm currently, you know, releasing during the week, or I've been released recently a couple of those episodes that I really want to highlight.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:00:13
One is I mentioned her earlier, but Grace Sharkey. We host a monthly show now it's a recurring show together where we talk about, you know, freight tech. We talk about major stories going on in the freight world and the freight space and we also talk about. You know some of our favorite like logistics of stories. If you saw my logistics of sand story. You know Barbie movie paint, the pink paint that. You know that was one of Grace's topics. All of these we cover in Recent shows. But one of the recent show that we did do was talking about the she in Situation.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:00:47
Which situation is, putting it lightly, basically she in a fast fashion company. They have been rumored for a while to not rumored. I guess it's been documented it. I really only found out about this recently. But they have Some questionable manufacturing practices and questionable is, putting it lightly, basically modern day slavery is creating, you know, a lot of the, the clothing and Some of the manufacturing practices are very, very like I said, questionable at best. But influencers for she in are Very high demand. They love she in, they love the partnership deals that they get from the clothing manufacturer. So some of them were.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:01:31
Some of these influencers were flown out to China to address some of these concerns about their manufacturing Practices. They're flown out to China. They were invited to do factory tours. Obviously, if you're doing these things, it's not going to be the real conditions. It's probably going to be a very a marketing friendly set of, I guess, positions that they're going to or how do I phrase this? They're? They're trying to put up a front. Yeah, that's really the the gist of it. They're trying to put up a front that their manufacturing practices are sound and that they are of high quality and they brought in these influencers to show them that part of the quote-unquote high quality process and the influencers ate it up. To be fair to these influencers, they're probably not fully. They take outfit photos for a living. They take makeup photos for a living. They're not entrenched in the geopolitical issues of what's going on with fast fashion practices. They probably maybe you know, I've heard a little something and just you know, decided to look the other way, kind of like, you know, maybe with like factory farming and things like that. You know I love steak but I don't want to know how it's made, so that type of situation.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:02:44
So we covered that topic pretty in-depth, talking about the manufacturing practices with Grace Sharkey in that recent episode. We also talk about freight rates. We also get into a couple of our you know different, you know logistics of stories. It's also available in that episode. It just published it on the 11th of July. So if you haven't listened to that one. Go over to the digital dispatch website or just check podcasts.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:03:07
Youtube feeds, which is another great way to, I guess, are a great place to mention that, because of the support from our sponsors, we're now able to have the video portion of the same podcast interview be uploaded at the same time. So that is one thing that has been a big goal of mine. So, six months into this full-time Podcaster thing, we're now able to offer the video component of the same podcast that we've been recording. So if you check my YouTube channel, just search for everything is logistics Then you will see some of the content that we have uploaded already. So this process is in place for any new shows starting in July. But we also have the task of going back to the last six months and Taking the podcast version of those interviews, making the video version and then adding it To the YouTube channel as well. So if you follow me on YouTube, I'm sorry for you know the deluge of Content notifications that you're going to be getting, but it's because of the sponsor support that we have now that we're able to justify a YouTube editor. You know taking the time and the investment to. You know create YouTube Versions of the same conversations that we're already having. So that is one that I wanted to highlight is the she in fast fashion supply chain with Grace Sharkey. We get into a lot of topics and it's like a two and a half hour show, so there's time stamps all throughout. If you don't want to listen to two and a half hours I do not blame you, but that's one show that I think that you should. We keep it an eye on.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:04:35
Another one, speaking of sponsors, as breaking down the logistics industry trends report with carton cloud. Carton cloud, as a new sponsor of everything, is logistics and what they do is something really cool where they Every year and I think twice a year, so they they survey not just you know their customers and their prospects as far as what's going on in the logistics industry. They opened up this survey to anybody that's working in freight, anybody that's working in logistics. They collected, I think, close to 2,000 responses for this logistics industry report or industry trends report. So we had on the COO, sean Hagan of a carton cloud on the show to talk about Not just the report and the findings, which are super interesting, but also how they approach team building and their software products.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:05:22
So they are a TMS and a WMS provider, and one thing that I thought would really stood out to me during this conversation Is that they take an annual retreat with all of their employees. And you might be hearing that thing and, oh god, like we just talked about all these companies that are closing their doors, and here we have a company that is is taking a retreat. Well, you know, no, retreat is kind of a sign that you're doing something right in the freight world. So I want to, as much as I we can highlight the bad, let's highlight the good as well with carton cloud. And so what they did at their retreat is that they visited a customer and they operated as they were employees inside of that customers organization, and so they were able to. You had developers and marketers and just you know, normal employees that don't really work in a warehouse or work in transportation or anything like that, never really seen how you know warehouse operation works. They had all of these employees. See how that sausage is made and what they had is. So it's such a tremendous amount of feedback, internal feedback, that's being created Because they're forced to use their own system, their own software, in order to complete and make you know the See the job and then put it to completion using their software.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:06:42
So they were able to gather so much more insight than just you know having like a typical customer interview, which we've talked, you know earlier in the show about how important that is for a customer interview. But then, from the lens of that, you Will also, from a user standpoint, imagine the the amount of insight that, like people that the developer team or the user experience or the marketing team was able to see Using their own software to try to complete a customer goal. So that's one thing that I really loved about that approach from carton cloud is that they were able to Not only talk to their customers because they do have, like regular customer interviews and things like that, so they do those things but then also using being the users of they're the same software that they're selling helps in so many different ways from a content perspective, from a sales perspective, from a development perspective, from a leadership perspective. So that was another interview, even though it's a sponsored interview and they are a sponsor of the show. Like I still approach these topics from an organic, conversational level. So it's not just a giant sales pitch for you know, and however long podcast last, which is typically, you know, 30 minutes to an hour, but it's valuable insight that you can get from these conversations. So that's another one.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:07:58
And then, lastly, I will leave you with another freight agent interview that we did with SPI Logistics and that is Dino del Grosso. So we just released that episode this week and he really has a very Sales mind approach when it comes to being a freight agent. So for folks who are, you know, in freight sales, or your existing freight agent, or you're just interested in freight sales Just in general as a topic, that is the episode you definitely want to listen to, because he has a ton of insights. Kind of get into a little bit of a back-and-forth about cold email versus cold calling, what's the right approach, adding sub agents underneath you and helping to teach them the the role of a freight agent within the freight world. I thought was super interesting as well. So all those conversations have been released on the podcast over the last yeah, over the last week.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:08:51
And then, lastly, what I want to leave you with is some events that I will be attending in the near future. There's so many events going on, so expensive and it's so time-consuming, but there is a strategy to attending some of these events, and a little bit of insight into how I'm approaching this is I'm trying to pick no more than two events a quarter to go to and I'm trying to diversify the types of events that I go to. So part of that diversification plan is a conference that I've never been to before and that is CSC MP. That is CSC MP Edge Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. It's happening in Orlando, florida, in early October. I'm actually going to be on a panel with the other ladies of a leadership coalition, which I don't know if you maybe have seen some of our episodes, but that is a separate podcast that I do with Charlie Safro, nicole Glenn, christy Kinnichel Gosh, liz Wayne and Sharon Star. So I host that show with them, and so we are going to be on a panel together at CSC MP in Orlando in early October.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:09:56
So if you're going to be in the area or you have any kind of interest in going, make sure you get registered for that event. Super excited to go to that one because I've never been to a General supply chain. Well, no, I take that back. Future supply chain from freight waves is a general supply chain conference. But you know, kind of to my diversification point, I'm trying to go to other industry related events that I haven't been to before that are kind of in my area of interest. So that is one of them. Just mentioned freightways, but freightways future freight festival is happening in Chattanooga in November. Registration info is all over the freightways site, so you know you can go and find more information for that.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:10:34
And last but not least, manifest, a future of Logistics happening in early February, the reason I'm going to be hammering about this one for a while. Number one it's my favorite conference. It's the one place, conference wise, that I have been to where it brings together the entire supply chain under one roof, where you can see it in action. And what I mean by that is they have an expo floor. That's, you know, traditionally at a lot of conferences you have boots and you know, maybe you have a little bit of, you know, razzle, dazzle at the booth, you know, to get people to walk up, but it's, you know, it's networking. That that's essentially what it is with manifest. Oh, they have that, of course, but they also have the extra layer of, like warehouse, robotics, autonomous trucks, all of that on the expo floor then they have these little moments of Of conversational moments is, I think, is what Pam Simon she's the the conference chair for manifest has said where she wants.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:11:30
You know, of course, like business talk, networking talk is going to be happening at at these conferences, but she wanted to make these little conversational moments Happen where it's like it's the a beer garden, it's some rose all day. You know, at another booth it's my favorite, which I've mentioned a million times, is the puppy lounge. Part of the reason why carton cloud is sponsoring the podcast is because we quote-unquote met in the puppy lounge at Manifest. So that is a really big selling point for me is that those different conversations, different conversations can happen at different moments, and that's what I love so much about Manifest is that it's creating all of these different conversational moments, that you can now see other events starting to do the same thing as Manifest, which is a good thing for everybody involved.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:12:25
Our industry is so exciting and it's so interesting, but I think historically it has been marketed so poorly where we don't show all of the really cool things that go on within this industry. They had at Manifest. They had Spot, which is the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, which is, if you've seen any kind of like robot, you've likely seen Spot, you know, kind of walking around on all fours, you know, going through different difficulty athletic I guess you can call it a thing I guess Tess, to see how you know how cool it works. They had Spot on the Expo floor walking around, someone controlling it. They even had Spot go up to the puppy lounge where real dogs were at and kind of interact or try to interact, you know, with the puppies that were there. Now, the Spot stayed on the outside, the puppy stayed on the inside, so there was no potential harm to be done to the puppies on the inside.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:13:23
But just cool moments like that that exist at Manifest, and I say all that because it is my must attend event of the year. If I go to no other events, I'm going to Manifest and I don't say that lightly, because I do genuinely love, you know, the TMSA events, the Freight Waves events. You know some of the TIA event that I went to for the first time this year. I've loved all of those events too, but Manifest has sort of set the bar, I think, for experiences at logistics conferences and other conferences are now starting to realize that they need to step their game up, and that's good for everybody. That's good for the attendees, it's good for the sponsors, it's good for all the companies involved that we need to continue to step our game up to show how cool this industry is.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:14:08
All that to say, manifest is happening the same week as a Super Bowl. So if you have not registered, you need to get registered. And if you have not registered and you need to get registered, and then you also want to be able to have, you know, some kind of a dinner experience, a VIP experience for maybe some high level customers, things like that. Keep in mind it's happening during Super Bowl week. I think it's the Monday through the Wednesday of Super Bowl week. Super Bowl is happening that following Sunday. So you need to book your rooms, you need to book the Maystab, you need to make sure you got those dinner reservations on lock, and then you also need to make sure that you have your tickets secured If you want to save a couple hundred bucks off of your ticket.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:14:48
I have a registration link to the conference. It's probably in the show notes. I think I'm going to have it in the show notes. I should have it in the show notes, but it's also over on my website you can check out. I mentioned earlier about the freight agent guide being under the resources section of digital dispatchio. We also have a conferences and events page. That's up there as well. You can click on that page and it'll take you to all the manifest information that you could ever want to know. I think I also have a link in my everything is logisticscom link as well, so just look for the manifest tab. You'll be able to save a couple hundred bucks off of your registration ticket. But I want to emphasize that you need to start thinking about this conference now.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:15:26
Don't wait to book your ticket. Don't wait to book your hotel or any kind of extra like VIP experiences that you are looking to create because of the fact that it is Super Bowl week. A lot of those things are going to be scooped up. If they haven't already, they're going to be scooped up very soon. So just wanted to make sure that I leave you with that point. But that that about does it for this show. We went an hour and 15 solo talking. I am starving right now, so I am going to go make something to eat and yeah, so that about does it for this week's show. I'm just going to find myself rambling if I keep on going any longer, but that is a quick update. You know everything that's going on in my world. More live shows to come, of course, and also you know great interviews coming up. We've got one with Romile Wattley of Truckin' Hustle God, it's such a great conversation. I can't wait for you guys to hear that. So that's coming up in the next couple of weeks as well, but in the meantime, thanks for everyone for tuning in.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:16:22
This has been another episode of Everything Is Logistics. You can check out more of my work at everythingislogisticscom. All my socials newsletter, all that good stuff is there. And if you don't follow me on LinkedIn, you absolutely should, because we are a LinkedIn partner with the podcast. That doesn't necessarily change any of the content that we produce here on the show, but it does. You know. It gives us a chance to network with some other folks who are other you know podcast creators, so I'm looking to have some of those folks on the show in the near future.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:16:51
One of 19 podcasts selected for this LinkedIn program and three of us total out of that 19 are supply chain adjacent. So Dial P for procurement is one of those shows, and then also we have Corey with Sustainable Packaging Solutions. So those are two other kind of supply chain adjacent shows, which three out of 19,. That ain't bad for the supply chain industry. So we're going to keep up in our game when it comes to conferences. We're going to keep up in our game when it comes to content, and I think that all of you should be doing the same within your own company.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:17:23
It's going to be challenging, tough times ahead, but in times of despair, in times of challenging, look for the hope, look for the helpers, and that will help you persevere, whether it's in your current role or maybe it's in a new role. Change is not easy, but sometimes it can be really, really worth it and you'll find, you know, new skills in yourself that maybe you never knew that you would have otherwise. So thank you guys again for tuning in and I'll catch you next time. Have a magical day and go Jets.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:18:25
Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co-worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website.
Blythe Brumleve:
1:18:41
Well, that doesn't happen. At Digital Dispatch, we've been building online since 2009, but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as $1500, along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on DigitalDispatchio. Just check out the pricing page once you arrive and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags.
