315 - The Road Ahead: How Technology and Autonomy Are Shaping Delivery’s Future with Deliveright Logistics' Doug Ladden

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Doug Ladden, welcome to Listening with Leaders. I've interviewed you on Authority Magazine, so I feel like I really know you pretty well. You are the co-founder and CEO of a company called Deliverite, which you can see up on the screen there. And I went to your website and looked at what you guys do. And I guess the way I would describe it is you're the Amazon Prime of big stuff. And you figured out how to build a technology to move big stuff around the country for customers. And that's what you do. You don't do little things like UPS and Amazon. You do big things. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Doug. Thanks very much. And I think I'm just going to let you describe Deliverite to people from now on because you do a very compelling job of it.

Thanks. You got a fascinating background. You came out of Wharton and then went into investment banking and hedge funds and all that stuff back in the '80s when it was all brand new. And I'm really curious about the story of how you went from finance to becoming a co-founder and CEO of a startup later in your career. I've interviewed a lot of people who've been on that journey, and I'm just really curious about your journey. So why don't you tell us about it?

Uh, sure. Yeah, I, I, I was very fortunate when I graduated from college and went to, to Wall Street and worked at a great firm, Donaldson, Lufkin Jenrette. And after a number of years of investment banking, started up a mezzanine investing business within DLJ. And a partner and I, we started this business, grew it to about $3.5 billion under management. And I have to say, I loved being an investor. I loved learning about different businesses, different industries. It was a lot of fun to not only invest, but also just to learn. And Over time, what evolved was I went from enjoying the investing to more enjoying talking to the people who actually ran these businesses that I was investing in. And sometime later, after almost 25 years, I left private equity investing and I really wanted to figure out, you know, what I was going to do next. And I just kept coming back to the idea of starting something, of being the management team as opposed to the person interrogating getting the management team, of being the person who says, it always seems like it would be really efficient to do it this way. Why do they do it that way? And try to put that into practice. And so I ended up meeting my partner, Ori Anavim, and we had many long-ranging conversations starting around 2012, talking about what we saw going on in the world. And my background is banking and investing. His background is technology development. And he had been at big banks like Morgan Stanley Citizen and had built huge systems that were involved in bond trading, involved in currency trading. And so he, he was always of the mind that when we would talk about a problem, he would talk about it systematically and how could you bring technology to bear. And so after, you know, months of conversations, we hit on how e-commerce sites were really be having a lot of success selling big and bulky products like furniture, exercise equipment, appliances. But it's very challenging to get those items delivered to people's homes because, you know, the old model was the, the local retailer sells it and the local retailer then delivers it to the customer, right? In the e-commerce world, the website doesn't have a store near everybody's home. And so they also can't rely on FedEx or UPS to deliver big items because FedEx and UPS want to deliver items that one person can deliver off of a, a step truck. Weight limits, the fact that they don't want to have their personnel go into people's homes, assemble bunk beds. It just doesn't fit in with the model that FedEx and UPS have. And so we said, somebody's got to build this, this service for big and bulky products. Who's making those deliveries today? Who handles these items today? And there, as it turns out, there are a couple of big players, but it's mostly small delivery companies all over the country. There are literally thousands of delivery companies.

I can't tell how many I've had end up on my ranch.

Okay. Okay.

I get it.

And so, and so the number of companies out there who do this is actually enormous, but the amount of technology that these companies have is de minimis. And we realized these delivery companies all want to work with the websites that are selling these big and bulky products, but they don't have the ability to connect to them. They don't have the ability. If you're a, a great delivery service in Montana, how are you gonna call on the tens of thousands of websites that sell big and bulky products? You just can't do that on your own. And we did two things. We, we started a delivery business to actually start making deliveries. We started in the New York market, and then we also built technology that we could use to run a delivery business. And after years of running delivery terminals ourselves, and after years of having Grasshopper, which is our technology, manage everything that we did from receiving items to managing a warehouse to routing trucks, scheduling deliveries, sending out invoices, everything. We started to say, alright, we actually don't have to manage delivery terminals all over the country ourselves. We can actually work with the existing delivery companies that are out there and license Grasshopper to them so that they can be, have the benefit of the technology we've developed in a warehouse. It was not built in some ivory tower. It was built in a warehouse.

Right.

And they own New Jersey, which is a lovely, gritty industrial town out of New York City. And so it was really figuring out that there was a problem with getting these big and bulky products delivered and realizing that it wasn't just good service that people needed, it was also a technology overlay. And so it was putting those two pieces together that I think really is what gave us the successful start to the business. And, and then it's just been Execution ever since, right?

So let's walk me through it. I'm a consumer. I go out and I buy a new exercise, buy a Peloton. Okay. They've had their ups and downs, but let's say I buy a Peloton. How does that Peloton get delivered to me out in the middle of nowhere in Central California?

I'll tell you the, it's a very similar story, whether it's a Peloton or whether it's furniture or other exercise equipment, you got to figure out what the origin point is. You as the consumer, You've made your purchase online. Okay? And typically what happens is the retailer says, congratulations, you're gonna love your purchase. You'll get contacted in X number of weeks by some firm you've never heard of to schedule a delivery.

And they almost always get lost up here. Google doesn't know where we are.

That, that, that's a problem.

That's challenging.

And so what happens now in the Deliverite world is we know the product that's been sold, we know who has sold it, and we know where it's going. We know it's going to Doug in Central California, right? And so what we're able to do is we get the merchandise picked up, and let's just say the origin point was North Carolina, just to make it more interesting. It's got to get across the country to get to you. We get it picked up in North Carolina, And we know how long it's going to take to get it from North Carolina out to Central California. We also know the deliver— the local delivery company in Central California, and we know when they actually have routes going to your zip code. And so now what's going to happen is you're going to place your order, and instead of having to wait several weeks before somebody calls you up Now in the Deliverite world, you place your order and within minutes you're gonna get an email from Deliverite that says, we understand you just purchased this product. We're gonna let you know when we're able to schedule delivery. Here's your tracking link. So you've got it same day that you've actually made your purchase within minutes. Then once we actually pick up the product, we're gonna scan it into our location. And then we're going to send you another message that says, Doug, we're going to be in your neighborhood on this date, that day, the other date. Which one of these dates would you like? And you're going to schedule that delivery as soon as we've picked up the merchandise. And so you don't have to wait several weeks to know your delivery date. You're going to know your delivery date within— could be 1 or 3 days after you've ordered the product. And, and so now you've even if our delivery date is a month later, it, it, it doesn't matter what the actual delivery date is. You just know you've locked it in. And the significance of that is we've heard from retailers over, over time how once a customer actually schedules a delivery date, the odds of them canceling their purchase drop by 70%.

Right.

So if we can get to that 70% drop-off within a matter of days as opposed to waiting several weeks to get there, that's a huge advantage to the retailer. And so our customers love the fact that we can get their customers scheduled very quickly.

So are you guys providing the actual physical logistical movement or do you subcontract out or have other people do the, all the forwarding and the dispatch and all that stuff?

We work with, we work with dedicated transportation companies who handle first-mile pickups and middle-mile transportation and final-mile delivery.

Got it.

Every final-mile delivery that's made is made by a company that's licensing Grasshopper.

And because of that, I was gonna say, I can just imagine they've got the, they've got the software. So they get the data, they know the order is coming in, they know something's gonna come to their terminal and that they can now schedule that whatever's coming in on a load that's coming up into the mountains, for example. And that's how they figure it out.

And in fact, because we know when you're planning, when that delivery company is planning to be up in the mountains, we've already scheduled it. So it's arriving to that guy's final mile hub as a scheduled delivery.

Wow.

And they, they unload it from the truck, they scan it because Grasshopper also has a mobile app that the warehouse team uses. The guys scan and they say, oh, this is going out for delivery tomorrow. We have to bring it over to lane 3 and get it into the stock 4 on truck 2.

Wow.

So Grasshopper tells you all of those items and you're, instead of bringing everything off the truck and then figuring it out, okay, now let's start scheduling deliveries. Literally, you know, as soon as you take it off the truck where it's supposed to go and why.

That, that has gotta be a huge efficiency booster for the local guys, local—

It's tremendous. We've heard people tell us that they've been able to increase the throughput of their building by as much as 100%.

Wow.

Because there's no more merchandise sitting around waiting to get scheduled.

Okay. So I wanna talk about you, but this is so fascinating. Okay. Now we've got autonomous trucks coming in pretty soon, probably the next 5 years. And we got all that stuff going on, right? And you've got AI going on. How is all this working in your business?

I love the idea of autonomous trucks, but I think you have to be realistic about how autonomous trucks are going to actually be used because I think they'll be great for long-haul transportation.

That's right. You put them on an interstate and let them go.

I think that will get adopted quickly. And I think with very little pushback from people. And When you get into the trucking industry, all you hear about is the shortage of truckers. There's so few drivers. Everybody needs drivers. We're tens of thousands of drivers short. Autonomous trucking over, you know, for long hauls is a perfect recipe for relieving that pressure.

Right.

And, and most truckers would love to work in their own kind of their own state or their own neighborhoods. They'd love to get home to their own bed to sleep at night.

Right.

It's hard to find people who wanna be on the road and away from home constantly. So I think autonomous trucking is gonna be great. Can an autonomous truck back up to a dock and then magically unload everything? No, it can't.

Not yet. Not for a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I think some autonomous trucking should be here soon. I'm excited about when it actually, when it actually gets used on a large scale. But it's not going to put lots of truckers out of work. It's going to make a lot of truckers, I'll say, able to sleep in their own beds at night.

Right.

Because we're gonna need local truck, truckers for my lifetime.

That's right. I don't see it. I don't— I can't see an autonomous truck making its way up here out of the Central Valley, up here into the mountains, and doing it safely, especially up a mile and a half up a dirt road. Not going to work. So you're obviously passionate about this. What gets you up in the morning, gets you excited to go to work?

I'll tell you, I think the fun of actually building a business, it's the best high that I've had since getting into business, since starting a career. As much as I loved investing and learning about businesses, actually building something and actually figuring out how to offer something that makes your customers' lives better. It's really gratifying and it's exciting. I, I think in terms of all the customers that we work with where we know once they start to work with us that we are making them either more effective in terms of their relationships with their customers because the customers aren't calling to complain about deliveries anymore. The customers aren't calling to ask, where's my shipment anymore? They know it every step of the way. They've got the tracking link. They're entirely plugged into the process. And for some customers that we have, the inbound phone calls that they get dropped by 70%.

Wow.

It's another 70% statistic because they've switched over to Deliverite and now customers don't have to ask them, when is my shipment coming? So, so it's great when you get feedback from your customers and say, wow, you guys are making a huge difference for us. I think the, I know your focus is all about listening and all I've been doing is talking. And so I have to apologize.

No, that's what this is all about. We're trying to learn about you and what makes you tick.

But I think the art of listening is, it's so tricky. It's so tricky because when you really are, when you are passionate about something the way my whole team is about what we're doing at Deliveright. All we want to do is tell people about how great it works, right? And how much better it's going to make your life. But that may not be what the person you're talking to is actually wanting to hear about. And it may be that they've got this one problem that they need solved, and all the other nice stuff that you're saying is just not interesting to them. That's right. And so figuring out, okay, what is it that this person really cares about? What, what do we need to talk about that's relevant to them? That's it takes some time to learn how to do that.

And it takes some, it takes a lot of, it takes discipline that a lot of people don't ever develop.

Yeah.

Because you gotta, it's not about you. It's not about how great your product is. It's about who are they and what are they feeling and what's their emotional state and what do they need and what do they think they need versus what do they really need and what are they not talking about?

Right.

So, right.

Whereas I think you've made a study out of this and a discipline out of this.

Right.

I think for many of us, it's just like what we've been able to figure out along the way. And it's just, Unless, say, it's like catch as catch can, but you have developed your habits that seem to work for you and your tricks that seem to work. But most of us don't really have a scientific understanding of how to improve communication, how to improve listening and actually be more effective.

That's right. And I got, I was driven into that study and discipline and understanding because as a peacemaker, I had to learn how to listen to people who are really angry, and it drove me to, to learning the skills that nobody else had ever figured out before. I'm curious, what is it, do you think, Doug, that's unique about you that you, with all this vast experience you've got from investment banking and to now running a startup, starting a startup and running it successfully, what is it that you think is unique about you that's allowed all of that to happen?

Look, I think I've had the benefit of working with some very smart and very motivated people. And I think at each step in my career, I've always learned that, you know, I'm doing the best that I can, but there are people out there who have better insights, better understanding, better abilities than I do in all kinds of areas. And I think one of the important moments for me when I went from being an investor to actually being a manager was realizing that the people that I'm hiring, they are experts in the areas that they work in. And I can ask questions and I can express some opinions, but if I've hired the right people, they're really the people I should be listening to. And it, there was no art in that listening. There was really just, I've hired experts. I really have to listen to what they're saying and think before I make a recommendation and ask them for their recommendation before I offer up my own, because they've got the real experience here. And so I think learning how to do that and being willing to do it and not thinking that, oh, my idea has to be right or my idea has to be the best because I'm supposed to be in charge. I think that was something where I'll pat myself on the back and realize how limited I really am. And I determined that I really needed to work, trust the people that I brought on board.

I, I've interviewed over 320 leaders on this show over the last couple of years, and I will tell you that the most successful ones just said what you just said, that the most important thing you can do as a leader is hire smart people and get out of their way and ask good questions. But if you're going to scale, you got to hire the right people the first time around, and they've gotta know how to hire people that are just as smart as they are. And then when you've got that formula in place, you can really scale and grow your business. And that's true for every single successful CEO I've talked to. Isn't that interesting? You're not alone. You figured it out.

And I have a great partner who's helped, who's helped explain to me how limited I really am.

And there you go. That's it.

Learnings along the way.

Yeah, just because you, you got a C title, you're a CEO and co-founder, doesn't mean that you know everything. And you've gotta check your ego. You've gotta be disciplined. You've gotta listen. You've gotta learn and basically limit your decision-making to the really big stuff. And then make sure that your decision-making process is smart. And then delegate as much as you can and don't be a micromanager and don't think you gotta control everything. That's a really hard lesson for people to learn as it turns out.

And it is, and it's not a lesson that you likely learn just one time. It's, it's gotta, it's gotta grow into it. It's incrementally learned.

That's right. You gotta grow into it. And it, it's tough. It's a really, it's a really tough lesson. But when you get it like you have, then the success follows. So Deliveright, what's in the, what's in the future? Where are you going over the next 5 or 10 years?

You know, I, I expect that we'll continue gaining market share. We'll continue attracting customers who are focused on providing the best customer experience. And so I, I just, I think Deliverite will continue to do more of what it's been doing because I, I think our recipe actually works. And now it's a question of scaling up, do, doing more of it and making sure the quality, it stays in place as we do more and more deliveries. Because going from, you know, hundreds of deliveries to thousands of deliveries to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of deliveries, it's easy to lose the quality. As you're scaling up. And, you know, we're very proud of the quality service we provide. And I think growth while maintaining quality is the watchword for, or are the watchwords for us. Absolutely.

How do you think AI is going to affect your business?

I think we, since we've also built technology on the Grasshopper side, we have AI. We, we use AI. I'll say not as much as we could at this point, but we are working with it every day. And we are using it for things like improving routing for trucks and—

Right. I was just going to say optimizing decisions like that.

Exactly. So I'd say we're very much excited about working with it. We expect to use it more. We all feel like we've scratched the surface. And I think AI is going to become very important. It will— as important as it, as everyone thinks it's going to be. I think it's going to be more important than that. But it's also gonna take some time to get there.

Yeah.

Like, it's just not gonna be this magic transformation that tomorrow everything's really efficient and everything, no mistakes get made.

No.

It's, it's hard to work with something that new and make it right, make it effective with all the things we have to do in our average day. So I, I'm optimistic about it. We're always trying to figure out how we can use it, but it's, we have conversations around what are near-term wins and what are medium-term wins and what are long-term wins. And at this point, I, I think I'd rather focus on some of the near-term wins because there are things we can get, we can actually do with AI today because the AI that's available 6 months from now is probably gonna be a lot more powerful than the AI we all, we think is so neat today.

Right.

And in a way, it's like building the transportation industry on the Stanley Steamer car that was invented 100 years ago and thinking, oh, the Stanley Steamer is gonna be the model for how we get things moved around the country. Yeah. Yeah. That would be a waste of time.

I do think we're on the cusp of a massive revolution, the likes of we've never seen before, between AI and robotics. I think we're gonna see some incredible stuff in the next 10 years. And your point, we don't even know what it is yet. We just know it's gonna be incredible and we'll just have to wait and see. Well, one more question and I'll let you go, Doug. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Okay. So, 2 thoughts on that.

Pardon me?

One is—

Oh, okay.

I have 2 thoughts on that. One is I have a fear of heights, and I once tried to manage this or confront this by going bungee cord jumping. And I will tell you that it did not work.

I can believe it. I don't have a fear of heights, and I would never do that.

I successfully completed a bungee cord jump. I am still afraid of heights. But something else that the people wouldn't know about me is that in the 1990s, I got to meet Gloria Steinem, the women's activist. She spoke at a conference that was geared towards women in marketing, and my mother had been involved in this organization and arranged the speakers for this organization. So I got to meet Gloria Steinem, and I wasn't sure you know, what it was going to be like to talk to a woman who is, you know, fiercely women's rights, right? Feminist-focused. And turned out she was lovely to speak to. I had a very nice conversation with her. She was very smart. She had a great sense of humor, a total charmer. And I really— it was a great conversation. And at the end of it, she said, Doug, I'm going to make you an honorary woman. Well, thank you so much. And she said, when She said, when the revolution occurs and the women take over, you just tell them I'm an honorary woman. Gloria Mae.

Good for you. Good for you. Very good. I really enjoyed our conversation today, Doug. Thank you so much for taking time out to speak with me and our audience. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Doug. It was a great time.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.