Arrive Sees Brokerage Consolidation Ahead

Lee Klaskow (0:07)

Hi, everyone, this is Lee Klaskow, and we're Talking Transports. Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence, Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host, Lee Klaskow, Senior Freight Transportation and Logistics Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Bloomberg's house research arm. Before we dive in, a quick favor, if you enjoy the podcast, please take a moment to follow rate review and share it with a friend or colleague. Your support helps us continue bringing new conversations with the leaders shaping transportation and logistics. And if you'd like to connect, you can find me on the Bloomberg terminal on LinkedIn or on X at Logistics Lee. Today we're coming to you from Bloomberg's global headquarters in New York City, and welcoming back a familiar face to Talking Transports. Joining me in the studio for his third appearance on the podcast is Matt Pyatt, co-founder and CEO of Arrive Logistics. There is certainly plenty to catch up on. Freight markets are tightening, technology and AI continue to reshape brokerage. Arrive has a new majority investor, and landmark Supreme Court decision has potentially changed the liability landscape for freight brokers. Today we'll discuss the Montgomery decision and what it means for the brokerage industry and how the company vets motor carriers, whether it could reshape competition across the brokerage industry, and what Matt is seeing in truckload supply, demand, and pricing. We'll also talk about Arrive's next phase of growth, the role of AI, and where Matt believes freight brokerage is headed.

Matt, welcome back to Talking Transports. It's great to have you here again on the podcast.

Matt Pyatt (1:38)

Thank you, Lee, for having me. I'm excited. This is the first time we've done this in person, so hopefully it comes off well.

Lee Klaskow (1:44)

Yeah, I'm sure it will. It's always good to do it in person. But for those that don't know Arrive Logistics, why don't you tell us a little bit about the company?

Matt Pyatt (1:53)

Yeah, absolutely. Arrive is a freight brokerage base out of Austin, Texas. We started the business back in 2014, and primarily we focus on North American transportation full truckload. And so over the last 12 years, we've kind of grown from a start of zero up to this year we'll do over 4.5 billion in revenue, over 2,000 employees, 10 offices across North America, and we serve thousands of customers, and we work with tens of thousands of carriers.

And so today we're one of the third or fourth largest truckload brokers in North America, moving north of 8,400 truckloads per day across the United States. And so that's who we are, that's where we focus. We don't do anything on the ocean. We don't do anything in the air. We really don't do anything on the rail. We are really focused on that truckload segment.

Lee Klaskow (2:39)

So that's a pretty impressive 12 years, if my math's correct. How did you guys grow so fast? Was it organically? Did you do it through M&A?

Matt Pyatt (2:47)

Yeah, so all of our growth has been organic. And so we really pride ourselves on just hiring great people. We do all the basic things really, really well.

There's a lot of people that always ask, how are you guys growing so quickly? And we sit down and list all the little things that we do. And it's just really a culmination of this daily execution. So it starts with hiring great people. We hire almost exclusively out of college, and we have a huge town acquisition department. We have a huge campus relationships department. And so getting the right people, we then train them for nine months. And so that's a long time to train a salesperson coming out of college. A lot of our peers put them through three or four weeks and then throw them on the phones. And so we train really, really extensively. And then we have a great culture, right? We promote from within. We create a great sales compensation program. And we have a team of people that just want to go above and beyond. And then on top of that, we have great technology. And so, you know, I always think of it as a co-pilot model. We want to have unbelievable people because our people are our product, right? So if you're a consumer products company, you're really focusing on what is the consumer buying at the retail location.

Our product and what we focus on every single day is our people. And so we just feel like we've done a really good job of identifying talent, developing talent, retaining talent, and then incentivizing those people to go above and beyond and service our customers on a daily basis. And so when you do all those little things well, you know, customers like to work with us. You know, we go, we give them a great product. We service them well. We communicate well. We've got great technology that makes us efficient. And so, you know, we do all those things and that's allowed us to be very successful in what we do.