On a recent episode of Taking the Hire Road, Jeremy Reymer was joined by Spencer Ware, co-founder and CEO of Repowr, and Patrick Visintainer, co-founder and COO of Repowr, to talk about asset underutilization and it’s impact on the freight industry. The co-founders also shared some of the experiences that led to the creation of their on-demand trailer reservation platform.
It’s not easy starting a company from scratch, and for Visintainer, an important part of handling the challenges is maintaining a positive mindset. One way to do that is through embracing the struggle. “If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress. So sometimes you have to embrace the struggle and learn from it, and know that progress is being made,” he said.
Learning about fleet struggles was one of the things that sparked the company’s creation. Ware’s trucking industry experience began on the insurance side. After graduating college, he became an insurance agent in Birmingham, Alabama, building up a book of business with small-to-medium-size over-the-road fleets.
Working with those fleets as they grew introduced Ware to the challenges with equipment and asset utilization.
“Every year I noticed that my customers would [when] the market would be very good, go out and buy as much equipment as they possibly could,” he said. “And then by the time they got that equipment, trucks and trailers, the market had flipped and a lot of that equipment just sat idle [and] underutilized. They didn’t really have any type of flexibility: They were stuck with it.”
Sunken costs were another factor that Ware noted, adding, “They didn’t really want to sell the trucks and trailers; they may need it if a big project comes up.”
While Ware began in insurance, Visintainer started his career in the logistics trucking space for a large trucking company in Birmingham. “During the day to day, I was coordinating customer freight working with our shippers and planning drivers,” he said.
Visintainer saw firsthand the challenges and inefficiencies, especially regarding trailers. He notes that in the early days after the ELD mandate took effect, trailers started playing a significant role due to the stricter hours-of-service reporting requirements. “People were wanting to drop trailers … and if they’re not at the right place at the right time, that can be very detrimental to you and your businesses. … So a lot of huge problems come from just the trailer aspect and the utilization of the trailer.”
Creating a company, especially one centered on sharing equipment, was not without its early challenges. “We had a lot of people saying, ‘No, I’m not gonna give somebody this trailer. It has my name, my logo on the side,’ things like that,” said Visintainer. To overcome these hurdles, the Repowr team decided a personal touch was a great way to sell the concept. Going out and meeting the customers while listening to their ideas and suggestions were some of the early wins as the company was developing its vision.
Another benefit for the founders, who have been best friends since the sixth grade, is their early rapport – something that isn’t always the case for startups. “You don’t have what are inherently some of the challenges that other co-founders might have if they don’t know each other that well,” said Reymer.
How Repowr works
“The fundamental reason that Repowr exists is to improve trailer utilization,” which Ware calls a big problem in the industry. “Seventy-five percent of the trailer’s life span is spent detached from a truck.”
That lack of utilization is what prompted the founders to focus on connecting logistics companies, carriers, shippers, brokers and owner-operators to collaborate and share trailers with one another seamlessly.
“We built a marketplace of idle, underutilized and available trailers throughout the country,” said Ware. This marketplace can allow users to search by location and equipment type, then book it “within three clicks of a button.”
Another challenge impacting trailer utilization is fragmentation, in which large, well-capitalized fleets are the ones that can afford extra trailers. Visintainer notes, “97% of the available trailers that are owned in the marketplace are owned by just 3% of the market. And on the flip side, 92% of the trucking companies that operate are these smaller fleets; that creates fragmentation as well as underutilized assets in the marketplace.”
Additionally, for carriers wishing to utilize their trailers better, knowing the trailer’s location, its load status and how to access it remain barriers to entry. Visintainer talked about how shared visibility is the first step toward a solution, leveraging telematics and integrations to know where the trailer is and its status. The second involves whether the trailer is in use and loaded, and how long it’s been sitting. With ELD integrations, Repowr now can know where the drivers are, helping match trailer demand with trailer supply.
“As we get deeper, we look at integrations like TMS integrations and loadboards because we want to meet our customers where they operate day to day,” said Visintainer.
Small fleets and owner-operators are not the only ones benefiting from the additional trailer utilization. Large enterprise fleets are using it to reposition or adjust for deficiencies if they need more trailers in a given market. “We have enterprise fleets that supply trailers every single day, but then we also see them cross over and reserve trailers in an area where maybe their trailer capacity is light and they have a startup project that they need trailers today for,” added Ware.
From early adopters to first movers
As Repower continues to grow and evolve from its early days in a basement during the middle of the COVID pandemic, one abiding key to their success is learning from customers and turning those early adopters into a first-mover advantage.
“I think why we’ve been successful so far is we really lean on those early adopters and early customers and we learn from them.” Visintainer said. “We wanted to know what they thought of our product, and we still do this stuff today. So really just spending time with the customers, going to see them face to face … has been a huge aspect.”
“Whether you own an asset or you don’t own an asset, there’s an opportunity with Repowr, and it’s just fitting all the pieces together and getting a full understanding and getting used to [the platform] and trying it out.”
To learn more about Repowr, click here.
