[Music] welcome to taking the higher Road a special show dedicated to the trucking industry specifically at the Confluence of recruiting retention and compliance in the fourth year is the host of the show I bring over two decades of Industry experience both on the carrier side as well as the vendor side and each week I interview industry experts and thought leaders who bring their insight to the driver life cycle as we discuss the industry's greatest challenges I always appreciate your feedback good or bad don't forget to leave a rating and review I'd also like to thank
and highlight the show's valuable sponsors their dedication and commitment to the industry and to the show is greatly appreciated if you're interested in being the sponsor of the show or joining me for an interview please email Jeremy at taking the high road.com this week I'm honored to be joined by a fellow industry entrepreneur a leader who recognized the opportunity to bring more modern technology to trucking Nick Darman founder and CEO of Alvis Nick thank you so much for joining me hey thank you for having me here well I'd love to get into your background you
know what what led you to trucking and transportation as well as what was the Catalyst for building the most modern TMs in the industry perhaps you can share a bit about Alvis and what set to you apart especially in an industry with so much Legacy software um I'd also like to get your take on uh where you think the industry is heading and then you know are we finally going to be heading out of the Sprite recession and and then how might technology play a role in the recovery and Beyond do you think we can
get through all that today perhaps that's a lot to unpack well and just when you think we're uh just getting started before we begin as is the custom I I'd like to ask my guests if there's a particular book they might recommend to the audience is there a a book that's been especially impactful to you that you could recommend yeah one of the books I read a long time ago uh is snowball uh that's uh written uh by Warren Buffett and uh while um a lot of it talks about his history and how he created
his wealth what I took that was very important to me and for just my career is that inflection point that everyone experiences once you uh reach that flywheel uh concept uh then you just um are have to support all the pieces that you took forever to build and when I say forever it takes so much time to bring so many different things so many moving Parts into a one holistic uh you know experience and then watch that flywheel um take effect uh that's what I learned from that book and I uh I still use that
concept of whether you build a particular department or look at even some of the folks that build you know professional sports teams you know it's all about that uh fly will and a lot of people give up before that inflection point so one thing that I uh I understood uh very clearly we should never give up before that inflection point we need to actually push so hard to make sure that we get to that inflection point and once we get to that inflection point that all the hard work that we put in for many years
will actually pay down dividends yeah that's a really good point and I think I I'm not familiar with that book so I added it I know the the book good to great references the flywheel and that's a book that's referenced uh fairly consistantly on the show so and Warren Buffett is uh well he's the sage of Omaha so I definitely need to to read that one thank you for that recommendation for those in the audience who uh who aren't familiar definitely add that to your Goodreads list as well um Nick you and I first met
at an ATA midyear management meeting in Phoenix I believe uh might have been around 2021 and uh I noticed that Alvis was uh sponsoring the opening reception and you had a team with you and so I introduced myself and I just wanted to know more about Alvis and and what you were all about so for those in the audience who may be unfamiliar who is Nick Darman and uh and how did you wind up in trucking so my my history about Trucking and how I started in trucking was when I was at Georgia State I
used to live in Atlanta Georgia and uh uh at that time my my my father was driver driving a truck and I wanted to help him financially so I started a trucking company while he bought a truck and I started to dispatch him while being at Georgia State and you know shortly after some of the folks who recognized my dispatch capabilities they joined my company and I was you know dispatching them as owner operators as soon as I graduated from Georgia State I decided to pursue my career uh you know on Wall Street I moved
to New York uh took a job at JP Morgan learn a lot of things while being at JP Morgan including gillwood different systems uh International systems uh and after being there for a few years I realized I'm an entrepreneur at hard and I want to go back into Trucking so I started another trucking company uh but this time around I had big goals and I wanted to uh create create more efficiencies you know throughout the organization I already had accounting experience as well as dealing with different systems so one of the things that I really
needed to make sure I dial in is uh on board a platform that's going to help uh my Trucking Company scale little did I know that what I was looking for didn't really exist because I uh onboarded four different uh platforms and after you know wasting my time uh you know deboarding then onboarding uh pissing all my employees off all the time chasing a vision that doesn't really exist I decided to form a tech team in 2017 and uh build my own proprietary technology to be able to help my trucking company and logistics company as
I envisioned after building uh uh you know this this technology proprietor technology for three years uh you know I realized uh no one has actually uh built anything for the carrier in the in in the market a lot of the platforms are out there you know for for shippers visibility uh Freight brokerage um but carrier uh has been overlooked and the reason I discovered that is because a lot of my friends who at that time you know were running uh large trucking companies they uh were asking me if they could use my platform because they
really like what I built by that time and uh that's when I I knew it there's an opportunity but in order for me to be able to scale this technology multi-tenant technology I had to uh figure out who is going to actually run uh you know this it department and uh before looking for another partner uh to to run the IT department I uh spun out the technology company from my previous uh Logistics and trucking company and uh named it Alvis and after that I partner up with someone who knows how to build industrial grade
platforms someone who knows how to build in the cloud and together we impart on this journey to build something that's never been built before for trucking companies well that's exciting and I think uh I think what helps is you have roots and Trucking you know I think uh a lot of people in this industry you have roots in trucking right a family business or some other sort of intimate connection or you stumble into it out of pure happen stance and in my case it was just I stumbled into it uh but I embraced it and
it's it's a great industry as you know but in both cases you and I I think where there's a um familiarity or or or parallel is that similarly a as a as an operator of my own company recognizing the need for technology on the applicant tracking system side uh I did the same thing and it was first for my own business to scale and I think that's the recipe for Success certainly more so a greater chance of success than an outsider complete Outsider you know coming into the industry thinking that they know things that that
they just really don't you as an Insider as a carrier as a as a asset-based uh uh carrier and broker knew some of the things that you wanted and that's what you that's what you built um just first of all you mentioned you decided to to to name it Alvis and I want to get more into you know exactly what Alvis is all about but uh what how did you come up with the name where did that come from well there's there's different um aspects to how I came up with the name I'm going to
start with uh Alvis is pronounced Alvis a lot of people want to pronounce it as Elvis because of the why I always tell them think of Elvis and we always like to say what Elvis did to rock and roll is what Alvis is doing to trucking space that's uh one reference point the second Point Alvis as it's spelled means uh being wise you act wise so we like to say uh our system acts wisely in the background while you run your business that's the that's the second meaning and the third one I always wanted to
make sure uh from a marketing standpoint uh Alvis uh where the the name starts with an A and it has to be very short with uh a.com so from a marketing point point of view I wanted to uh to make sure that it's uh with an a that way we're always first uh when we when when it comes to lists at at the same time it has to be short and I should be able to have access to the com extension so there's three um aspects to it one is it sounds like Elvis what what
Elvis did to or what Elvis did to rock and roll is what Alvis is doing to trucking space second Alvis acts wisely that's the meaning of of the word Alvis and third uh it has to start with a and it has to be very short yeah and well well said and and that's interesting and I think for those in the audience who listen like you have to think through these types of things right you have to consider the marketing aspect of it and so uh that's uh that's that's genius I appreciate you sharing that and
and just again for the audience say do you mind sharing just a little about Alvis you know perhaps what uh what differentiates you from some of the older especially some of those Legacy Solutions out there yeah so uh Ju Just to kind of uh give you a side note Alvis uh has this uh hybrid solution or hybrid architecture I call it and what I mean by harbit architecture you're able to manage your Freight as a carrier but at the same time if you need to broker out your overflow Freight uh we have this uh hybrid
architecture where that same Freight that's uh on your dashboard you're able to broker out all while having different pnls in other words you're able to see how your brokerage is doing versus your uh carrier side of the business and you do not have to log in or out into a different platform or sometimes you have platforms where you still uh need to log into to a different module in order to run your brokage business with us you don't need to log in and out uh multiple times you log in once you have everything in One
dashboard and every time you have overflow Freight from your shippers you're able to brok R seamlessly and efficiently uh and uh at the same time uh you have different pnls and needless to say one employee could actually transact both businesses the freight brokerage business as well as the carrier business which drives a lot of efficiencies at scale and there's a lot of functionality I mean in in private fleets as well too right it's not just uh uh for higher carriers I know priv absolutely so private fleet is uh one of our you know uh ad
Advantage when it comes to uh helping private fleets manage their assets a lot of times they don't have a back hole back to their uh you know yards or or hubs and uh we're helping them uh maximize uh their resources maximize and utilize their assets properly so anyone that has a trucking company right anyone that has a truck is able to use Alvis to a point where they could overlap whether they are a carrier for hire or a private fleet at the same time you can have the freight brokerage component and even if you a
shipper you're still able to uh segment that aspect of the business and uh take advantage of the fact that everything is in one uh unified dashboard is there a particular Fleet size that uh that you find has the most SU ESS or is that how broad is that so most most of our Fleet size uh companies uh are 10 trucks and higher we have uh you know we have a lot of uh carriers that have hundreds of trucks in their Fleet uh we even have a carrier that has a thousand trucks uh we don't have
that many that have under 10 trucks even though we have a platform that's going to be able to help them grow but uh as of right now we noticed that most of the trucking companies that are on boarding Alvis are those that have 10 trucks or higher probably a little bit more stability in that group plus they're a little bit more sophisticated in in recognizing the need to embrace and adopt technology sove can scale absolutely absolutely and you know there's the a lot of a lot has to do with how they perceive uh you know
the market uh at times they might think wow Alvis has over 300 Integrations it's a very sophisticated platform I don't think I'm going to be able to to afford and therefore I'm just going to look elsewhere something that's targeted for for a smaller carrier and and and I understand their point of view uh but at the same time we we focus on scale so anyone that's thinking to scale fast then Alvis is the solution even if they only have 10 trucks right right um You were also uh you know we recently had Freight waves I
should say recently had their um F3 conference in Chattanooga and I noticed that Alvis was was a 2025 Freight Tech 100 company listed there uh does that you know what does that mean to you does that is that something that uh that you take some pride in absolutely uh so so one of the things that I had uh uh for for our company for our organization is to have our heads down uh don't come out until the product is uh somewhat complete uh uh I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with uh uh our product
I always want to push our team to to do deliver a better product I I care about our customers so much and um there are still other customers that uh want to see more things in Alvis and uh you know we passionately uh pursue uh you know do those goals to make sure that every single customer of us Delights in our product and as a result uh you know we weren't really doing much uh Marketing in the past uh even though we've sponsored certain events but nothing really so aggressive um I didn't even uh want
to come out and speak about Alvis until I have some sort of a satisfaction and again uh satisfaction is a spectrum a lot of uh us at alers know that I I demand Perfection it is it is hard but I was uh I was a carrier and I know how much business I lost because of the wrong platform and I take this to heart it's it's very important to me to make sure that what we need to deliver is delivered but in my Discovery uh while building uh back in the days when uh I was
building the this proprietary technology for my trucking company I uh I realized uh I was a fool to think it's easy to build technology uh I thought I'm just going to form a tech team and at that time I formed a tech team we hired almost 15 uh engineers and uh I was confident enough I'll be able to tell me exactly what they need to do and we're just going to deliver the technology we need come to find out I was wrong apparently I needed to find someone who knows how to build industrial grade platforms
so just because a lot of the Silicon Valley guys who don't know anything about our space they come into the space and they fall short someone like myself who has the passion for for this industry has the experience will always will also fall short like I did I have fallen short to actually deliver what I needed to deliver for our customers so it's very important for the two School of thoughts to come by and build something that's never been built before this is one of the reasons why uh no one was able to figure out
how to solve the pain points for car use it's because you either have people from the industry who think they know how to build technology and they're going to hire engineers and tell them what to do which by the way that's not going to happen they will fall short or you have people from you know uh very sophisticated uh Tech environment and experience they just uh gather some feedback from the industry and they think oh that's easy to to to to solve and when they start building they also fall short so the two have to
marry in order to create what I call you know a special experience a special product that the market desperately needs what do you say today what's the biggest obstacle in the way of of carers embracing TMS technology or or making a change from uh from their current solution what's the biggest obstacle for it well uh there there's definitely many many uh uh different ways of looking at it and there's always different obstacles uh but as I said before we build our technology as a hybrid solution because any carrier that's scaling will have overflow Freight and
we need to help them be able to broker out the freight and because we built it as a hybrid solution consequently we buil a freight brokerage module and in my experience building a freight brokerage module is actually uh 10 times easier than it is to build a carrier operating system uh and um the reverse is is also true running a freight brokerage is 10 times more complicated than running a trucking company so it's it's very interesting how flips when it comes to technology so one of the biggest obstacles uh building a carry operating system is
how many different moving Parts you have to put together to create that seamless holistic uh experience for our customers uh so it's easy to build things in silos right you could actually form uh you know a tech team and U have them build uh you know a standalone product but the reality is uh trucking companies they have to have multiple Standalone products and you have to integrate them together to create that unified solution and that's where uh uh that's where the problems begin is how do you make that as one solution uh and one thing
is to make that as one solution another thing is to uh make sure it's reliable and it's bug free so that's the biggest challenge the biggest challenge to uh break all those silos unify everything together and deliver one solution that's reliable and it actually works and it's not uh driving people crazy that it bugs all the time that's uh that's that's at the Forefront of of our company well you know I ask a lot of Industry leaders on this show about like just the ongoing Freight recession and and I ask if they feel like this
downturn is worse than the Great Recession you know 15 or so years ago um I also ask if or when they feel like uh we're going to eventually you know climb out of this what are your thoughts on this current environment and and what are you hearing from from your customers I've said this I I've said this multiple times uh predicting uh you know timing is very is a very dangerous game uh but at the same time we could all be optimistic anything that goes down and stays down for too long will eventually uh come
back up uh but in order to actually compete even in a down Market I believe efficiencies and uh optimizing your assets is very important and one of the things that we buildt at Al is to make sure we help our dispatchers optimize their workflows is the marketplace component and I'll give you an example we have multiple tenants uh that are freight brokers and they're able to connect with the uh trucks that are in real time in Alvis but at the same time we also have different freight brokers that are in in injecting Freight into Alvis
so uh not only that uh they are able to see where the truck is located today right they're also able to understand whether the truck is going to be available two days from now where they deliver and if they deliver in Jacksonville Florida um the broker that's ingesting Freight over into Al let's say for example Uber Freight since we've already completed uh the partnership with Uber Freight and they're actually ingesting Freight into Alvis and they have a load two days from now from Jacksonville in the in the case of our example then they're going to
be able to notify that carrier hey uh there's a truck that we see is going to be delivering in Jacksonville Florida and we also see that uh it do doesn't have a load uh out of Jacksonville floor do you wish to bid on this lane or do you wish to take it for this rate and that's how they're going to be able to transact the business you know seamlessly and they're going to be able to bid and once they come to a consensus and agree to take uh you know partnership or do the do the
load at this time all alas does is populate that same information from Uber Freight into out us you don't have to build anything everything is covered your dispatcher comes to work and they see oh wow that truck is already covered two days from now out of Jacksonville that's called efficiency so in order for us to be able to compete in a down Market something this complicated has to be built in the background in order to help the carriers thrive in this environment yeah that's a really good point and and you nailed it on efficiency and
and and the point that you made earlier is look you you you're not a prognosticator you don't know when things are going to get better you don't have control over that but what you do have control over is how you're going to respond and you respond by building more efficient technology making it easier for the end user so they can prve so that's exciting that's uh and that's that's I mean I think that's a stoic mindset too is what I've been reading a lot about is just the importance of controlling what you can control and
and and understanding what you cannot um do you do you mind uh giving us maybe a sneak peek into what we can expect from Alvis in in 2025 and Beyond any anything you able to share yeah so so so absolutely uh I've already mentioned before uh Marketplace is an interesting component and it's not to replace uh anyone it's really helping our current tenants uh transact business with uh uh the uh the teners that are already in Alvis and at the same time uh getting uh companies like uber Freight or other freight brokers in injecting Freight
into our system so they're able to you know get additional uh capacity that's that's validated in Alvis that's actually going to help you know the industry broadly but at the same time it's going to help the carrier uh that's using Alvis where their dispatchers instead of dealing with thousands of different data uh you know per hour they're going to be able to get help from Alvis because we're going to be able to match it seamlessly and we're going to surface only the freight that's important to their available trucks that are going to deliver let's say
a day or two days from now and and that's that's a very exciting module that um we have just recently launched and to be honest we have to build many many other things in order for this to be possible so it took us years and years of building building different workflows integrating with different Platforms in order for us to be able to unlock the possibility of creating this seamless transaction between available Freight and available empty truck I think that's super cool and hopefully that even helps drive more uh new customers you know new users uh
to the TMS just because of that availability and and and the recognition that this is an option so uh first thank you so much for joining me Nick I I appreciate your passion your Ingenuity for leveling up the trucking industry with more modern technology and uh and I wish you a wonderful holiday season thank you and thank you for taking the higher road with me once again special thanks to the sponsors of the show we really appreciate you if you're interested in being a sponsor or joining me for an interview please email Jeremy takingthe High
road.com until next time thank you for taking the higher Road [Music]
