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Taking the Heavy Out of Heavy-Haul
Taking the Heavy Out of Heavy-Haul
Taking the Heavy Out of Heavy-Haul
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Hello, everyone. My name is Jeff Cox. I am the founder and president of Veritred, and I'm here today to talk to you about how we are using transportation, specifically transportation software, to disrupt the heavy equipment industry. So let me give you a real quick background on who we are and where we come from. So prior to founding Veritred, I spent 10 years with Lockheed Martin, and I designed software for the federal government. And in 2005, I took my life savings, and I quit my cushy government job, and I purchased a fleet of Peterbilt trucks, and I went into the heavy haul trucking business. So for over a decade, I transported equipment literally all over the globe, and my family had a long legacy in the heavy equipment business. So my grandfather had founded a company called Linder Machinery, and my father was president of that company for 30 years, and they're one of the world's largest Komatsu distributors. But it was never really my ambition to be a large asset-based trucking company. What I was doing was I was learning the rules of the road. I was documenting, you know, how this equipment moved. I was building databases, forming alliances, and really formulating the intellectual capital that would eventually become Veritred. So I was taking the profits out of the trucking business, running that business during the day, and then automating it at night. In 2014, I decided it was taking too long, so I wrote a business plan and decided to take on some partners. Here's a look at our current ownership mix, and I just kind of add this to, you know, supply credibility here. But Sumitomo is the world's largest trading company. They own brands like Linder Machinery. They own Sunstate, SMS Equipment, and about 80 other industrial companies. So they're a $35 billion-a-year company, and they're an equity partner of ours. Another one of our equity partners is Iron Planet, who obviously just got purchased by Ritchie Brothers. So they're the world's largest auction house. And then United Rental, who is the world's largest rental company. So you can see that we've really vested in the industry, and I think that's proven by the depth of our partnerships. And one of the benefits of doing this the way that we did, by buying trucks and chains and binders and really getting out there and learning our craft, is we came away with a lot of credibility. And not only from the large shipping customers and the distributors and the OEMs, but also the trucking companies. You know, those guys, they just don't want to do business with some Silicon Valley startup. It's, you know, I always compare it to being in the mafia. You're either in this industry or you're not, and you almost have to be born into it. And if you don't pay your dues and you don't go about it the right way, you're really not going to make your mark. And I believe very strongly in that, and I think that that's one of our competitive advantages. And as we look to disrupt this industry, you know, it's not only the depth of our partnerships, but it's also the strength of our background and kind of how we went about building out our solutions. So real quick, looking at the market that we're looking to disrupt, we're talking about heavy haul or transporting construction equipment. And inside North America, it's a $40 billion industry. It's very complicated. It's dangerous. It's expensive. And because of this, all of the large asset-based trucking companies have just opted out of it. So companies like UPS and FedEx, they have no footprint in this market, and it's left it to become a very niche operation. And because of that, it's void of almost all technology. There's no network effect. And, you know, to overcome these limitations, the industry relies very heavily on middlemen, freight brokers to be specific, to overcome the inefficiencies. And that makes things very expensive. It makes them very inefficient. And the industry really pays for that. So to overcome these inefficiencies, we launched two key products in 2015. And I'm not going to talk to you about both of them, but the reason I mention both of them is just to kind of clear up any misunderstandings that are out there in the industry. So we have a marketplace solution and then an enterprise solution. And our marketplace solution is used by companies like Ritchie Brothers, Iron Planet, Rock and Dirt, and this is not the ideal solution for distributors and OEMs like you guys. So I only bring this up because a lot of people have run into us through our integration with Iron Planet, and they think that this is all we're about. But essentially, this solution is where we help, you know, kind of transient equipment buyers, identify trucking resources, get them competitive bids, help them align with the right capacity, and we take a fee for making that match. Large distributors don't do business that way, and we recognize that. So for the enterprise customers, and these are, you know, our customers on this side are, like we have the world's largest Komatsu distributors. We have the world's largest Caterpillar distributors, John Deere distributors, work in, you know, a lot of different OEMs, rental companies, contractors use this solution. And what we do for them is a little bit different. We allow them to build and manage and optimize their own internal logistics programs. So, you know, although it's built off the same technology stack as our marketplace platform, the benefits are very different. You know, they're looking for control and visibility. They want to reduce the risk. They want to increase compliance. They do want to save money, but they don't want to sacrifice service to do it. And so as I articulate this solution, I'll be talking to you about the differences here, but just know that if you've used our marketplace solution, checking out on Iron Planet or one of those other marketplaces I mentioned, we recognize that most AED customers don't do business that way, and please take the time to learn about our enterprise solution. I think you'll find it's a lot more relevant to what you're looking for. So when we started studying this model way back in 2005, what we learned was there was really a lack of transparency inside the large distributors. So, you know, different people inside just one company would arrange transport different ways and really had no visibility into what other arms of the same company were doing. And what I mean by that is you would have one guy bring in your equipment from factory, and then you'd have someone else who was in charge of transportation for rental or intertransfer, you know, interbranch transfer, or if it's a repossession or finance deal. And so you had all of these different arms of your company arranging transport, and that created a very sporadic freight pattern. And so you had a lot of freight traffic within a relatively small geographic area, but because there's no transparency across your enterprise, you weren't able to take advantage of things like back hauls or double loading the trailer. And so all of these efficiency gains were lost, and you ended up paying, you know, 60, 70% of the time, you're paying two ways for a one-way move. And that's kind of the industry average. And this is, you know, the most sophisticated construction companies on earth are doing it this inefficiently, and, you know, at the very best, they have a whiteboard to sort of manage their logistics operation. So that's a little bit on the problem we set out to solve. And, you know, with our background and everything, obviously we turn to technology, and that's our bread and butter. We are a technology company, although we have a hands-on experience in the heavy haul trucking business. That was really just a means to fine-tune our technology. And so here's a look at our tool set and how we use it to drive innovation. So for us, it all started with the dimension. And this may sound like a trivial detail, but if you talk to your equipment managers, they'll tell you that they have had to look up the specs on certain machinery a thousand different times. How does a CAT 777 break down? How is it going to be transported? You know, how is a CAT D8 disassembled? Do the tracks go on a step deck? The main body goes on a beam trailer. You know, the push arms and all that's going to go on a flatbed. And what do these items weigh and all that? So our system has electronically profiled all of this freight in a way that you don't have to continually look that up. It's going to be there for you at the push of a button. We've got over 55,000 unique items in our database. To give you an idea, the only competing product out there is really Ritchie Specs, and Ritchie Specs is at about 10,000 items. So, you know, we spent a long time compiling this data, and it just saves your people the time and aggravation from having to look it up. But on the back end, it adds significant value, and I'll talk to you about that in a second, what that looks like. So one of the key issues is just understanding the pricing. And anybody who has shopped for freight rates knows that your pricing is going to be all over the board, and it's going to have a huge variance. So, you know, the first thing we did is we set out to create a pricing tool, and we were very fortunate that we had a lot of strategic relationships with Komatsu and Iron Planet and some of the larger cat dealers, and we were able to amass a very large amount of data around pricing that's hard to move freight. And the industry uses this tool different ways. If you go on to Iron Planet's website and you look at any item on their website, you know, you'll see our estimator tool. You click one button, and it can calculate the price of teardowns, permits, escorts. All of that intrinsic data required to move equipment goes into this estimating tool. And what Iron Planet wants to provide their customers is they want to get them purchase ready. So if you're an Iron Planet buyer, your second largest cost is transport. First largest cost is the price of the machine. Second is transport. So traditionally, to get buyer, you know, to get that buyer ready to purchase, you would have to go to a freight broker. You'd have to get competing bids. You'd have to wait a day or two, and that lag was costing Iron Planet business. So we built this tool in a way where they can click one button, and they can get a freight estimate, and they're instantly ready to purchase. So since our launch with Iron Planet back in 2010, and we actually launched this product with them before we launched Bear Tread, so the math's not adding up on the time frame there. That's why. We've launched it with probably two dozen other online websites. And so, you know, it's on Rock and Dirt and ProxyBid and Vermeer used and Cat used. You know, a lot of these intrinsic players are using this tool, or I should say industry players. So the way a distributor uses this tool is they use it to close deals faster and with greater certainty. So when you have a salesman who's out shopping an equipment deal, he wants to build that package, and one of the key data points to build that equipment package is transport. It may be transport from factory. It may be from, you know, the distributor to the end customer, whatever the case is. Now they have a means to go in. They type in the zip code. They press one button, and they instantly know how to gauge that freight cost. So it's really the only reputable tool in the industry, and we give out thousands of electronic estimates every single day, and the industry's really become, you know, really started to rely on this tool as sort of the source for this data. The next tool that we built in our suite is what we call the VT Load Advisor. And so when Iron Planet came to me, you know, back in 2010, this is when they were competing very heavily against Ritchie Brothers, and the difference in the two models were, you know, Iron Planet's an online model and Ritchie's a brick-and-mortar model. Well, where Iron Planet's model was getting beat up on a little bit was at pickup. When you bought from a Ritchie auction, there's always a loading dock. There's a team of people there to help you get the machine on the trailer. There's guys there to jumpstart the battery and forklifts and cranes and all of this. But when you bought from an Iron Planet auction, none of that existed. So their customers were continually showing up with the wrong truck, the wrong permits. They were unable to get the machine loaded efficiently. So we created a tool that electronically profiled the freight for them, so we can identify what type of permits are required, how's the item going to be disassembled, how's it going to move, how's it going to load, what port certificates are required. And then we also identified the exact trailer capacity needed to move a specific item. And that's nice because it eliminates uncertainty. But where that ended up having industry-wide ramifications was once we saw Uber launch. And once we saw Uber launch, we learned a new way to match supply with demand, and I'm going to talk about that more in a slide or two, but just keep that in the back of your mind. But really the benefit of this tool is it provides expert guidance in a way that's automated, and it creates a more predictable transportation experience. So for companies like Ritchie Brothers and Rock and Dirt, it allows them to expand their geographic purchase range. People are willing to buy equipment that is not local when they have more confidence in the transportation process. So a lot of what we have done is create a suite of tools that gives them more confidence in that transportation process. So the control center, and typically I'd switch to an online demo and show you how all this works, but you'll just have to take my word for it. It all works and is being used by really the largest companies in the industry at this point. The control center is just a way for you to organize and view all of your freight through a single pane of glass. So we originally launched this product with the 10 largest Komatsu distributors, and what we would continually see them doing is one branch manager would send a machine south to a branch down south, and five minutes before it got there, the branch manager down south would send a machine up north. And the trucks would literally pass each other empty, and they'd miss each other by five, ten minutes. And it was strictly because they didn't have visibility into the other branch's operations. So we built a control center so that they could very easily sort and see their freight through a single screen. And by doing that, they started to make more efficient freight decisions. They'd say, oh, well, this truck's going to be here in five minutes. I'm not going to call another carrier. I'm going to get a backhaul, and I'm going to utilize this carrier because he's already delivering for my company down at this branch. And so we started to generate cost savings just through visibility. People with double-load trailers, they'd spot those backhaul opportunities. So the next barrier in order to disrupt this industry was overcoming the trust issues. And so we had all of this fragmented hauler capacity. There's really no dominant players. I mean, you do have some large trucking companies out there, but if you compare them to the size of J.B. Hunt or Swift or transportation companies and other industries, they're really just specs. They're very small in comparison. Primarily it's fragmented, independent owner-operators. And because of this, people weren't comfortable doing business outside their local range. If you don't know who your hauler is, you don't know who you can trust, that creates a lot of issues. So we developed a proprietary rating and feedback system. And so all of the carriers in our tool are going to be rated one out of four ways. If they have less than the 85% rating, they're going to be right away designated as unrecommended. And then we have bronze, silver, and gold. And then when you click on this information, you're going to see really never-before-seen detail on each of these carriers. So we'll tell you how big their fleet size is. We will in real-time monitor their DOT compliance information to tell you that their license and insurance is valid. We'll tell you who in the industry they haul for. So this particular carrier, he does business with Anderson, Titan, PowerMotive, Komatsu, Lender Machinery. It's almost like a personal referral. You can look at this and say, okay, he's a gold-rated carrier. He's got a 96% rating. He does business with these five, six massive companies. And then we also monitor their insurance in real-time. So that's a unique capability that supplements your compliance operation. So right away, you know, with a glance at one of these screens, you can see this is a trustworthy and reliable carrier. It makes you more comfortable in doing business with them. Now, if you're an enterprise customer, this is fully transparent. So right now, it just says gold-rated trucking company. But if you're one of our enterprise customers, you're going to see this is Bob's Heavy Haul or this is Keen Transport or whoever it is. We're not masking any of those details. We're not taking any transaction fee. It's just a flat monthly fee to use our tool in an unlimited fashion. But you do have the benefit of not having to learn the lesson at every branch. You know, if this carrier has done a poor job for you before, if he hasn't honored his word, you're going to learn about that through the other equipment managers in your company. You know, they're going to document that experience, and it's going to be visible enterprise-wide for all of your employees to see. So the next key issue, and then I'll try to tie all this together, is reducing the business risk for your company. So I saw two weeks ago, I think it was a John Deere excavator hit a bridge in Nashville and took out half the bridge. And, you know, I have, you know, been around this industry a very long time and, unfortunately, been at least brought in as a consultant, on situations like that. And I understand, you know, not only the cost of the trucking company, but, you know, we all kind of know how it works. If the trucking company has a million dollars in insurance, they get sued. Then if there's a broker involved, they get sued, and then they immediately hit the deepest pocket, which is typically the dealership or the OEM. So there's a lot of liability in transporting this equipment. I touched on it earlier, but we monitor carriers' insurance and compliance in real time. That takes several integrations on our end, and it's a unique capability. We allow you to set company-wide thresholds. So you can go into your profile, and you can say, I don't want to do business with freight brokers. I don't want to do business with freight brokers. I don't want to do business with people who haven't been in business longer than three years, people who have this level of insurance, things like that, and then we enforce those thresholds at the point of dispatch. So if you try to dispatch to a carrier who doesn't match your company's compliance thresholds, you're going to get a big red X that's not going to allow you to do it. You can't override it, but it's going to make you document it and it's going to identify who overwrote that setting. And then we also set safety expectations and guidelines in each of your shipping documents. So we're not just helping you identify capacity, not just helping you get competing bids. We're helping you identify the right capacity, and then we're helping you build the shipping contract with that company. And even the largest distributors out there, we found, overlook this detail. You know, they're doing hundreds of shipments a day, but there's no contract in place, and a lot of that's because it's considered sort of a spot market. But with Veritred, we're able to eliminate, you know, that liability and build a contract on each and every deal and document the expectation in each one of those. And then lastly, we indemnify your company on every one of our contracts. So, you know, this is language like, you know, as soon as the machine touches the carrier's trailer, they assume liability, and as long as it's in their possession, the liability is theirs. And, you know, we've had a team of lawyers kind of pour over our bill of lading documentation and things like that to identify, you know, all of the areas to put this language and enforce it so that we can help protect your company. Now, when you bring all of this together, and I talked about kind of the uberization of this model, and if you think about what it takes to uberize something as complex as heavy haul, well, that's where the efficiency really comes from. And so when I talk about driving efficiency, I'm not just talking about the dealership. I'm not just talking about the auction company. I'm not just talking about the rental company or the carrier. I'm talking about industry-wide efficiency. And so what we realized was the way we profile freight is something like this. We take this CAD, I think that's a D8, and we profile it in such a way where we identify how it's going to move, the dimensions, the trailer required. And then we profile the capacity something like this. So we understand their deck length, their trailer capabilities, how much weight they can haul, what permits they have, things like that. And then we can use our intellectual capital to identify who has extra capacity. And then we can use a mobile app to identify who's in the right proximity, who's able to load this particular type of equipment, who needs a backhaul, et cetera, et cetera. And it skipped ahead there, but the idea is we identify the best match for a given job. So a lot has been made about our bidding system, and we do identify carriers who are in the right place at the right time. We make it very easy for you to get multiple competing bids, and by doing that, we lower your cost. However, we recognize that a lot of distributors own their own trucks. A lot of distributors work with a very small preferred carrier network, and they do that intentionally. These efficiency gains go outside of just getting you 20 competing bids. It's about identifying who's in the right area with the right equipment, who provides the right level of service, and then targeting them for the backhaul or targeting them for the front haul so that they can arrange the backhaul and things like that. So it's about making smarter, more informed business decisions with how you transport your equipment. And this is being utilized all over the industry already, and it's a powerful disruptor, but it's only getting better. We're actually launching a new product in June this year, and when we do that, it's going to be a quantum leap forward for the whole industry. I had planned on kind of showing you a sneak peek of that, but I'm not able to switch over to the Internet on this presentation. But if you're interested, just reach out through AED, contact me, and we'll make sure that you can get a look at that new tool set. So now let's talk about driving change. So the two core topics of this presentation are innovation and change. And I just showed you the innovation piece. And for us, that took 10 years, and that was the easy part. So technology, relationships, all of that. But now let's talk about how do we drive change. Now we've got this fancy tool set. We've got companies like Milton and Holt and United Rental and Sumitomo and Ritchie Brothers and Caterpillar and Komatsu. They're all telling our story. They're all saying it the same way. How do we take that momentum and drive change throughout the industry? So naively, when I entered the industry, I thought it was all about my digital marketing campaign. So I recently hired a gentleman named Wayne Keyes, who is the top guy at Tafco Publishing who owns Rock and Dirt. And he has done a brilliant job with our digital marketing. He's about to launch a major campaign around that effort. However, that just sort of scratches the surface. So I'm not saying ignore digital marketing for an online marketplace or a digital software company like ourselves. That's critical. However, you've got to go a lot deeper in the heavy equipment industry. It takes roots. It takes connections. It takes credibility and all those other things. So before I go into driving change, let's take a look at the stakeholders involved. And so this represents the dealerships, the OEMs. And I talked a little bit about what these guys are looking for. They want to gain control and visibility across their enterprise. They want to save money. They want to reduce their risk. They want to eliminate keystrokes, save time, make things easier and more complete. And to be honest with you, these are the easiest sales we have. I can go into the presence of a large Caterpillar dealer. I can give them our pitch. And within 20 minutes, I can get buy-in. They understand that transportation is one of their four largest costs of goods sold. They understand the inefficiency around it. They understand the risk around it. And our tool set translates very well to them. And that's an easy sell. However, this is the guy that's tough to sell to. And this is the heavy haul truck driver who owns four trucks. And he is by definition skeptical. And he doesn't trust you. And he's not interested in new technology and doing things a different way. So the way we relate to these transportation companies is we bring up our relevant background. We're from the industry. We have done this with you guys. We are also from the trucking industry. We're able to provide you not only with a new tool set, but also multiple sources of high-paying freight. We can help you increase your truck utilization. So stop running empty 40, 50% of the time. Plug into our network and let us help you find a backhaul so that you can not only save our customers money, but you can make more money by better utilizing your assets. And then we also give them a variety of free tools. Our load advisor makes their dealing smoother and less friction with their transactions. We manage their workflow, their documentation management, their invoicing. These guys are notoriously kind of bad at back office processes, and we help eliminate that. We give them free access to our specs and estimates tool to help them with their pricing, permitting tools, things like this. And then we also allow them to be more profitable by eliminating the middlemen. So if you're taking a lot of – if you're identifying backhauls through freight brokers, you're essentially giving away 20% of the deal. And that might not sound like a big deal, but these guys run at a profit margin between 4% and 8%. And then, you know, the guys that are making money in this business are the middlemen, not the guys who own the trucks. And our model helps flatten the industry and puts the pockets of the guys who are actually doing the work who have skin in the game, the guys who have invested in equipment. And then we also operate as an industry advocate. You know, we're a voice. We get in front of the industry, and we sort of make the case for these asset-based carriers. So that's how we appeal to this group, but we don't rely on that. We also rely – yep, so this slide is not working, but what this is going to show you is all of the distributors we're doing business with. And so the way that we capture this industry capacity – and so part of our high-level business strategy is we consolidate the industry's trucking capacity using a technology platform so that we can engage them more efficiently and drive efficiency industry-wide. So the way we do that is we sell our enterprise product to companies like Titan Machinery, Holt Caterpillar, Linder Machinery, you know, all of these – at this point, probably 20, 30 heavy equipment distributors who use our platform. And then the first thing they do when Cleveland Brothers signs up on our platform is they send a letter to all their carriers that says, you know, if you want to continue to do business with us, then you have to join Veritred. And the trucking companies get a free account. There's no cost to them. But we use our industry leverage to capture this capacity. And so that's a lot more powerful than saying, you know, us doing a digital marketing campaign saying, please join our network. We don't do that. We rely on our industry partnerships and friendships and customers to lock that capacity into our platform. And by doing that, we are able to build a nationwide network of really the premium trucking companies, and we're able to do it in a relatively short period of time. And so that's been a very powerful strategy. It takes a lot of industry depth, partnerships, and relationships to pull off. And you just see kind of a glimpse of it there. But the next thing we do – and I apologize. This is another slide that is sort of working. But here's a look at, you know, Ritchie Brothers, CAT, Sumitomo, United Rentals, some of our channel partners and equity partners. And the way we use them to drive change throughout the industry is, well, one, they tell our story. They help us evangelize. They help position us as an industry expert, as a thought leader. So, you know, next week I'll be in Japan speaking at a global leadership conference for Sumitomo, and I'll be talking about innovation in the transportation industry. I have consulted with Iron Planet since 2010. I've consulted with Komatsu since 2006. A lot of these big companies bring us in, and we're sort of the digital freight guys. We rely very heavily on AED for that. They help us promote our brand and tell our story. And that not only gives us credibility, but it allows us to steer people towards our solution. But more importantly, it allows us to understand their needs. So we don't develop product in a bubble. You know, when we sit down to build new product, and, you know, over the next nine months we're spending $3 million on our product. And we just did a capital raise, and all of that is in the works. But in that group are two large Komatsu distributors, United Rental, Ritchey Brothers, Holt Caterpillar, Milton Caterpillar, Sumitomo. So we are not developing what we think the industry needs. We're working with the industry to solve your problems and develop with these industry partnerships. So they're actually sitting in our user group meetings, going through screen designs, talking out ideas, and that activity has taken place, and now we're in development mode to launch the next version of our shipper application. But these industry partnerships, they not only help us drive leverage, but they help us communicate the core benefits and really get us in front of the industry. So it took years to develop and starting to really bear fruit for us. Oh, and Wayne knows the slide work. They help us as a consultant. They help position us. Using their name, we consolidate the trucking capacity. And then we also count on them for key integrations. So when you want to launch a new product inside this industry, you really want to develop that stickiness. And to develop stickiness with Caterpillar, you've got to be integrated with DBS, e-emphasis, Microsoft Dynamics. These inventory control systems, these accounting systems, once you have an integration with those core business systems, it makes switching costs very hard for these large distributors, and it makes your product very sticky. So another way that we use our partnerships. So here's a look at Sumitomo's footprint. And so Sumitomo, you know, right now we have a very large footprint in construction and mining. However, Sumitomo puts us in all of these other industries almost overnight. And so you can look just looking at these pictures. This is all open deck freight that moves on the same types of trailers. So these are very relevant spaces for us. And we had a large network inside the construction and mining industry. But using our partnerships, we're able to expand much, much quicker into these other industries much, much quicker. So I can't tout the importance of our partnerships enough. And then once you get a little momentum, everyone starts shouting the same story, and that's when you're off and rolling. And now, you know, the challenge shifts from people, you know, from credibility and customer base, and now you hit scale, you get all this momentum, and now you can't develop product quick enough. And that's kind of the mode we're in. We're right now hiring as quickly as we can hire. We're looking for a new CIO. We're bringing our development in-house. We're scaling that team. We are trying to develop product for all of these partnerships and relationships that we have and really drive value to the next level via innovation. So look at our board of directors. You know, Richie Brothers, TAP Publishing, who owns Nextruck Rock and Dirt, Dante Fletcher from Yoder and Fry, Kenny Tojo, who is the head of construction and mining for Simitomo, and then, you know, low man Totem Pole is me. And so I rely on these guys not only for business insight and discernment, but they know the industry. They're in it. We're all neck deep in it. And they all kind of represent a different segment. You know, Richie Brothers is auction. TAP is online marketplace. Kenny Tojo, I mean, they own distributors and industrial, you know, tubular steel companies and Linder and SMS and Sunstate Rental. We also are partners with, like I mentioned, United Rental, who is obviously the world's largest rental company. So we've got a lot of insight, and we've been very strategic about forming these alliances and these partnerships. We don't just, you know, pick money from anybody. We're, you know, you won't read a big press release about us raising $50 million from some venture capital company. What we have done is we have been very quietly raising money inside the industry from the industry's largest players, and then we're about to do the big press releases and all that over the next year and a half. So as we develop new products. But we've, you know, we are much more interested in strategic alliances than we were with big paydays or just, you know, stockpiling cash. So, whoops. Well, this was going to talk a little bit about, you know, just consolidating the disruption strategy that I articulated. But the idea is we literally spent three generations, 12 years, earning the industry's trust. We automated all of the critical challenges, looking up dimensions, getting price estimates, identifying the right carrier capacity, vetting the carrier, identifying the right capacity, getting multiple competing bids, automating the workflow. All of the traditional barriers have come down through our tool set. Not only is it automated, not only is it easier, but it's also more complete. It's safer. We've reduced your business risk. Now we're using mobile applications to capture the industry's trucking capacity, consolidate it even further. And that's how we're disrupting the industry. So, you know, we are not a Silicon Valley startup. This did not happen over a three-year period. I am standing on the back of giants. And because of that, you know, not only do we feel blessed and fortunate to be here, we feel like we've got a, you know, a real clear path going forward and got a real opportunity to make change here. So that's our disruption strategy. That's how we're going about it. You know, for distributors, it's a white-labeled solution. You log into Veritred, it's going to show your logo. It's going to have your colors. All of the email communications go out on your company letterhead. All the bills of laden are archived in your letterhead. It's a fully transparent solution where you pay one small monthly fee that's less than .5% of your transport business. You know, it's right at $1,500 a month. Companies like Milk and Cat, you know, they're saying we've saved them upwards of $500,000 so far this year. We've got a lot of people kind of saying that story, and we're about to publish some white papers to that effect. So it's one of these tools that once you try it, the savings is real, the benefits is real. All of the players in the industry are starting to appreciate it. We're just really happy to have earned your trust and made it this far. So that's about all I have. Are there any questions or anything I can answer for you guys? Okay, Katie, I'm not hearing anything.
Video Summary
Veritred is a transportation software company that aims to disrupt the heavy equipment industry. The company was founded by Jeff Cox, who has a background in software design for the federal government and experience in the heavy haul trucking business. Veritred has developed a suite of tools that address the complexities, inefficiencies, and lack of technology in the heavy haul industry. Their products include a marketplace and enterprise solution. The marketplace solution connects equipment buyers with trucking resources and facilitates competitive bidding, while the enterprise solution allows companies to build and manage their own internal logistics programs. Veritred's tools provide features such as electronic freight profiling, pricing estimation, load advice, visibility and control through a control center, carrier rating and feedback, and insurance and compliance monitoring. The company has formed strategic partnerships with industry giants like Sumitomo, Ritchie Brothers, and United Rental, leveraging their credibility, expertise, and customer base to drive change in the industry. Veritred aims to consolidate the industry's trucking capacity using their technology platform and provide value through efficiency gains, cost savings, increased truck utilization, and reduced risk for stakeholders in the heavy equipment industry.
Keywords
Veritred
transportation software
heavy equipment industry
marketplace solution
enterprise solution
truck utilization
strategic partnerships
efficiency gains
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