29 Aug 2024
Author: Matt Pyatt, CEO at Arrive Logistics
This week is officially ten years since we opened our doors and started bringing in business. Before sharing a reflection on the last ten years at Arrive Logistics and the path ahead, I want to acknowledge that none of this would be possible without the people I have been fortunate to work alongside these last ten years, our customers and their trust and the relationships and service of our carriers that are the backbone of this industry.
Arrive ranks among North America’s largest truckload brokerages, with over 1,700 team members working across eight North American offices to support over 4,000 shippers and 10,000 core carriers. I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished in our first decade and this is just the start of our amazing journey. The Arrive story has been one of growth and we are more focused than ever on continuing to increase our position in the market by providing the best possible experience in logistics.
Arrive’s story starts well before we opened our doors in 2014. Eric Dunigan and I had often discussed starting our own brokerage while working together at Command. We got to the point in 2013 that we were ready to go but needed capital to get started; so we reached out to two guys I had worked with in college, Manish Patel and Doss Cunningham, to discuss being the original investors in our freight brokerage business. One big benefit, their main business, Nutrabolt, had a $5M freight spend at the time!
It was not a typical business plan we presented; rather Eric and I thought of hundreds of questions an investor would have about freight brokerage and answered them ahead of the meetings. We spent hours going into detail on every one of those questions with Doss and Manish. It prepared us for starting Arrive because we had almost built the entire playbook through answering all these questions. Why do carriers need brokers? What are a brokerage’s capital needs? How would we differentiate ourselves in such a saturated market? How would we achieve the scale necessary to unlock the cost structure savings and service capabilities in an industry with notoriously low margins?
Ultimately, they decided to take a chance on us.
While writing this, I looked back at all the emails, documents, and presentations we put together. It was an awesome trip down memory lane. From the opportunities to the risks, so much of what we discussed in those exchanges has come to pass, but there was one surprise none of us predicted.
Our original pitch was that Arrive could hit $242M (~900 loads per day- LPD) in sales by year ten (adjusting for the revenue per load assumption, it would have been closer to $400M). Instead, we hit that number in our 4th full year in business and have continued growing exponentially ever since.
It would be impossible to include every important event that led to our success from the last decade in a single blog post. Instead, I want to share ten highlights and how they influenced the Arrive story.
We were fortunate to enter the market during the exact point in which the market shifted from inflationary to deflationary (Inflationary peak). In early 2014, rates rose due to the polar vortex that knocked supply and demand out of balance and by early August, rates were moving back down. Shippers were looking to cut costs while carriers were more in need of volume, making adding shippers and carriers much easier for a new brokerage.
But fortunate freight market conditions alone do not guarantee success — our team also had industry experience to hit the ground running. As a result, we hit huge growth milestones right out of the gate: 100 LPD in our 10th month, 1,000 LPD in our 50th, 2,500 LPD in our 81st, and over 5,000 LPD in our 119th month (last month!!).
Arrive’s first office was above a bar on Austin’s Dirty 6th Street. On day one, our headcount consisted of Eric, Duke Begy, Nick Smith, Daniel Poklacki, Brett Smith, Christopher Hinck, Clayton Ferguson, Chris Price, Sean Richards, Shannon Ibarra and myself (Justin Rish was a fast follow!). Starting a business can be stressful, but this team balanced the relentless work required to grow with plenty of fun. I look back on those days as some of the best with the company.
That “LFG” mindset became the foundation of Arrive’s culture at the very beginning. Even though the days of sleeping next to our computers and phones to do night dispatch are behind us, eight of those founding team members are still at Arrive today and leading the charge forward. The contributions of each and every original team member are something I am forever grateful for. They believed in Manish, Doss, Eric, and myself enough to relocate from all across the country and join a startup with zero active business. Thank you all for being so instrumental in our success. Your contributions to getting Arrive up and running will always be remembered and we would not be where we are today without this group.
Competition is fierce in this business, with over 25,000 brokerages and hundreds of thousands of asset-based carriers fighting for the same freight. We have learned what ultimately sets Arrive apart is our people, their obsession with customer service, and pairing our team with technology that enables them to deliver that obsession efficiently and consistently. Whether we have 10 team members or 1,000’s, practicing the fundamentals of what makes a brokerage grow has been core to our success and that starts with hiring, training and retaining talent.
Hire, Train, Retain — it’s constantly repeated in our leadership conversations and I believe our commitment to keeping this at the core of our company strategy will continue to differentiate Arrive for years to come.
This job can be challenging so we aim to create an environment and culture where our employees enjoy their work and who they work with and are given the best chance at being successful in logistics. In recent years, that has meant getting back to basics that may have been skipped over during Covid: Strong Hiring Profiles, Best in Class training that includes 6-9 months of on the job shadowing before going into sales, team engagement budget rather than corporate, more in office work, less meetings, more senior level engagement and many other little things that makes the company great and successful.
Leadership’s role is to understand our team and eliminate barriers that make it harder to get the job done. As CEO, I have had to accept that despite our best efforts we will make mistakes and everyone will not agree with every decision. Despite occasional setbacks, I am proud to say Arrive has won over 30 workplace awards, such as Top Workplaces USA, Great Places to Work and Best Workplaces for Innovators to name a select few. While this job is not for everyone, these continual awards show our commitment to making Arrive a place that attracts and retains great people that want to be in logistics!
I discussed load growth earlier, but I cannot forget how special it was for our team to become the fastest brokerage in the industry to reach $1 billion and $2 billion in sales ($1.6 billion in our seventh year and $2.4 billion in our eighth year). Coyote hit $2 billion in a similar time frame but nearly half of that revenue came through a series of three acquisitions. Arrive has done it organically by hiring, training, retaining our people and staying focused on relationships, service, and execution. Organic growth is not easy…
Most brokerages today can sell capacity and even provide decent service — but only a select few can consistently nail service, execute at any volume a customer throws at them and ultimately turn these relationships into lasting partnerships. That is what our customers want and what we deliver and it is displayed in our historic growth.
Around the same time we started Arrive, a handful of companies entered the market with technology that promised to transform the brokerage landscape. What those companies may have overlooked is that brokerages are in business services. In turn, it quickly became clear that while shippers, carriers, and brokers can benefit from the efficiencies technology offers, what is valued most are relationships built on transparency, trust, and outstanding service execution.
That is why Arrive’s Copilot Model delivers best-in-class technology without sacrificing human relationships. It played a key role in Arrive earning 18 carrier service awards from enterprise shippers in 2023-2024. This recognition is a testament to our culture of customer obsession and the team’s ability to develop technology that fosters that culture and mindset.
Our tech platform, ARRIVEnow, has come a long way in the last five years thanks to our amazing in-house technology team of almost 200 employees. The TMS alone is a massive competitive advantage. Our ability to optimize our teams workflows and how we leverage data in our operations at Arrive is a differentiator in our industry. Employee productivity has nearly doubled since 2019 and that number will only improve as we gather more data and integrate additional AI and machine learning tools into reps’ workflows. Ultimately, these efficiencies will further improve our cost structure, translating to better pricing and service for customers, better (and more) load matches for our carriers and more opportunities to grow for all of our employees.
Arrive is a top-six truckload brokerage in North America. Note that “truckload” excludes LTL, partials, rail, and other modes that most brokerages offer. Why? In this business, it is tempting to try and do everything for everyone, but it’s hard to be good at everything. Our goal has always been to make Arrive the industry’s best truckload brokerage before going deep into other service areas. We are well on our way and I am confident Arrive will continue to move up the truckload leaderboard and move over 10k LPD in the not-too-distant future.
Over the last five years, we have increased our investments in other forms of truckload, particularly cross-border and Open Deck. Following a similar playbook that led to our dry and refrigerated truckload success, we aim to strengthen and expand these services in the coming years and listen to our customers to learn how Arrive can continue adding value in their network.
Building a business is a lot of fun when you surround yourself with unbelievable people inside the organization and in the boardroom. Choosing investors is not something any CEO or entrepreneur should take lightly. We have been fortunate to have partners who believe in our long-term strategy, empower us to make decisions and incentivize us to drive better outcomes.
Doss and Manish have been invaluable board members since day one and continue to bring so much more value than just financial support all these years later. Lead Edge Capital was our first outside investor in 2017. The relationship I have formed with Nimay Mehta from Lead Edge has been a career highlight. Paul Bell, Lead Edge Operating Partner, has also been an incredible advocate for the business and helped us navigate significant growth as a board member.
Our most recent group of investors led by ATL Partners has been just as special as the others. Paul Teske and Kirby Fine navigated a very complex transaction but have since moved on to new opportunities. The current ATL representatives (Frank Nash , Sanjay Arora , and Andrew Clarke) are fantastic board members that have pushed the Arrive team to improve our business in so many ways. Their co-investors, The Baupost Group, Temasek , and BCI are board observers and have been excellent partners even in the most challenging freight environments.
Arrive has always been attractive to investors because of our unprecedented growth, our capital efficiency, and ultimately the predictability and accuracy of our financial model. I am extremely fortunate to have found the right group to support our growth now and into the future.
One thing I am especially proud of is giving team members a chance to own a piece of Arrive. Many founders in this industry retain 100% ownership but over 25% of Arrive is employee-owned because we believe the people doing the work deserve to directly benefit from the organization’s success. This practice aligns everyone with the company’s long-term goals and offers team members a significant financial opportunity as Arrive continues to drive shareholder value. I look forward to continuing and even doubling down on this practice as we continue to scale and recommend every founder and CEO deploy the same strategy.
One of the best parts of being the Founder and CEO is the ability to build the team you want to surround yourself with from the very beginning. I would be remiss to not give a shoutout to the entire Executive Leadership Team at Arrive. Our relationships and the trust that we have in one another is what makes Arrive a truly special place and gets me excited each and every day to get out of bed and work to make Arrive even better. Jason Zwirkoski, Justin Frees, J-Ann Tio, Richard Shields, Scott Sandager, Jonathan Schoonmaker, Michael Johnson, and Eric. We have so many amazing leaders throughout the organization that I am fortunate to work with daily; unfortunately way too many to call out individually but know I appreciate all that you have done to get Arrive to where we are today.
Reflecting on all of our stories and accomplishments from the last decade was a great reminder of what makes Arrive special: We have the best team and sales culture in the industry, best-in-class technology that keeps improving and benefiting our team and partners, and fantastic relationships with customers and carriers.
Moving forward, we will continue to invest heavily in growth and technology while achieving best-in-class capital efficiency, resulting in the continuous improvement and expansion of our capabilities. Few brokers in North America are in a position to reinvest the amount of capital back into their business as we do annually which will position Arrive to continue to thrive.
I have nothing but confidence that we are ready for whatever challenges and opportunities the next decade will bring. Our team will continue to step up and take ownership of delivering for our customers and making Arrive an even better place to work and that commitment will drive our continued success and growth.
The journey so far has been incredible and I could not be prouder of how far we have come. Our best work is still ahead and I am excited about the future we are building together.
To our customers, carriers, and team: Thank you for everything, and here’s to delivering for the next decade and beyond!
