HTL in the media

I studied hospitality and then spent six years living it — I worked essentially every role there is, starting as a pool boy and ending as a director. That means I spent years being measured on one thing: whether a guest felt taken care of. Not whether the process was followed. Whether the person felt taken care of.

When I moved into logistics, I expected that standard to be the baseline. It wasn't. A lot of this industry is built around covering loads and moving on — the relationship ends when the truck is booked. That gap is the reason HTL exists. I don't think freight has a technology problem nearly as much as it has a service problem.

So I built the company the way I'd staff a hotel: someone owns your account, someone answers the phone, someone tells you about a problem before you find it on a tracking page.

I explain it with a water glass. A bad server waits until your glass is empty, then refills it — technically they did their job, but you noticed you were thirsty. A good server refills it at three-quarters, and you never think about it at all.

In freight, the empty glass is the customer calling you to ask where their truck is. If they're calling, we already failed. Our version of the three-quarter refill is proactive updates on the loads that matter, flagging a lane that's about to tighten before it costs you money, and calling you about a delay before your customer calls you about it.

The other half is service recovery. Things go wrong in this business — weather, breakdowns, a shipper that loads three hours late. What separates vendors from partners is what happens in the next twenty minutes. We plan for that instead of pretending it won't happen.

Brutal, and I'd tell anyone starting out to expect that. I call the first six months the testing phase — it's the market testing whether you're going to quit.

I made about 70 calls a day for 60 straight days and did not win a single piece of business. No freight, no pipeline, nothing I could point at. The only thing that kept me going was treating the calls as the job itself, not as a means to a load. Then roughly a month after that stretch, the callbacks started showing up in my inbox — people I'd talked to weeks earlier who finally had something to move.

One of those relationships turned into the biggest project of my early career: moving the structural steel used to build SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. That freight didn't come from a clever pitch. It came from being the person who was still around when they needed someone.

My favorite one is earplugs. An e-commerce customer was shipping them in a box that was about two inches larger than it needed to be in one dimension. Nobody was being careless — two inches is invisible when you're looking at a single package.

But parcel pricing doesn't price a package, it prices space. Those two inches pushed the shipments into a higher dimensional weight band across an enormous volume of orders. We ran the math, resized the packaging, and the change came out to about $800,000 a month in savings.

That's what a parcel audit really is. We're not hunting for one big renegotiation — we're looking at dimensions, zone mix, service levels, surcharges, and accessorials, and finding the small structural things that repeat thousands of times a day. Those go straight to the bottom line, and they don't require the customer to change carriers.

Mostly to buy back time, not to replace people. On the sales side, I use Claude to analyze my LinkedIn network and surface warm paths into accounts — who I already know that can make an introduction. That approach got me 15 meetings in two weeks, which cold calling would never have produced in that window.

On the back-office side, I use it for accounting cleanup, reporting, and the administrative work that used to eat my evenings. Conservatively it wins back about two hours of my day, every single day.

Here's the part that matters: I put those two hours back into customers. Checking in on accounts, reviewing lanes, catching problems early. AI didn't make us less hands-on — it's the reason we can be more hands-on while we grow.

That your freight program should be something you brag about, not something you apologize for. If logistics is a recurring headache, it's not because supply chains are hard — it's because someone stopped paying attention.

We start almost every relationship the same way: a free audit of what you're already doing. We integrate with how you ship today, we don't rip out your carriers, and we show you the math before you commit to anything.