Loadsmith — a fast-growing midmarket brokerage in Denver — has selected San Francisco-based Parade as a core technology partner to accelerate its capacity management and digital brokerage platform.
To maintain its authentic customer and driver experience in the transition, Loadsmith has also selected Los Angeles-based branding agency La Visual to collaborate with the Parade architecture and create a cohesive Loadsmith-branded experience not just for carriers but for the internal carrier sales team. The strategic collaboration with Parade and La Visual will help Loadsmith build a deeper and more efficient carrier network while maintaining relational integrity with carriers, automating workflows and empowering the sales team with real-time carrier profiling.
“Loadsmith has partnered with Parade and La Visual because of its belief in their world-class ability to create the best branded experience with a tremendous amount of technology know-how,” said Loadsmith CEO Brett Suma. “Parade and La Visual working together created a great resulting product.”
While the desktop and mobile versions of the Loadsmith-branded carrier portal will launch in mid-July, the app — containing additional functionalities that facilitate driver interaction with Loadsmith — will be released later in Q3.
Currently, North American truckload brokerages and shippers are up against an ongoing tight-capacity market. Visibility tech allows brokerages across the industry to act and feel like trucking companies from a shipper’s perspective. Without technology on both the shipper and carrier side, brokerages can hit revenue plateaus.
In its first year, Loadsmith brought in $21.5 million in revenue. In 2021, Suma expects more than $50 million, but he believes that in order to scale further, Loadsmith must embrace more technology.
La Visual Chief Creative Officer Dain Kennison said the agency was a firm believer in people-first organizations, a characteristic that Loadsmith embodies.
“When you have a very disjointed and dissonant experience where you’re having to hop from one tool to another, it doesn’t feel like one cohesive company and voice,” said Kennison. “That can really affect people’s opinions on the brand. At the heart of this is building tools not just to connect people with robots but really to connect people with people and make people’s lives and jobs easier moving freight, both on the carrier rep side and on the carrier side.”
“We want to get into the office with the driver, and the driver’s office is often their truck when they’re on break, not Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” said Suma. “It’s often in the evening when they have settled in for the day or early morning before they start. We want to give drivers full transparency and the ability to see every load that we have and be able to act on it as well. Parade’s capacity platform rivals anything out there in terms of digital freight matching.”
Not only does the mobile-enabled platform meet drivers during downtime, Parade’s capacity management platform allows the carrier sales team to utilize AI and machine learning to profile carriers in real time and predictively match, find and book across private and public carrier networks.
“Because we’re harnessing all that capacity data, you can actually find carriers at a time when brokers are having a really tough time finding carriers,” said Anthony Sutardja, CEO and co-founder of Parade. “Once we find them, we can actually drive incredible reuse with that carrier. We know and understand what that carrier likes to do and how they like to do it, which teaches the brokers like Loadsmith how to buy better. The most amazing outcome is the increase in margins; we see 200-basis-point increases for our end customers. We do think that this technology changes the unit economics of freight.”
While this partnership promises increased margins, carrier reutilization and instant bookings, Loadsmith has no plans to alter its operational structure in terms of the number of carriers each carrier representative manages, even if a particular carrier manager sees heavy adoption of the app for load bookings.
“We’re not going to change the ability for that carrier to have a single point of contact within the organization and that single point of contact is the point of resolution for that carrier, whether it’s load procurement, after-sale approval, billing and payment questions,” said Suma. “It’s so important that we don’t change who we are at the core level in terms of being very driver-centric from an availability and response perspective. We’re not building a carrier portal and app to replace the human connection. We’re simply making all of Loadsmith’s loads available to all of our carriers that we invite to join the app.”