#220: Andrew Hurst (Delivered) — The Business of Moving Things

Andrew Hurst [00:00:00]:
One of the things that most people forget is like their package is a few hours late or whatever and it's like the orchestration of all the human events. To actually get that there, they would be like, I can't even believe it arrived, right? I mean, when you think of like.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:14]:
What it's like a miracle.

Andrew Hurst [00:00:15]:
It's a miracle, right? It's like a miracle that this thing actually arrived just because of how much paperwork is still in the industry, how much fraud and theft we fight against every single day across the entire channel. And I think that at the end of the day, when you look at what logistics is, it's, you know, it's a bunch of humans trying to accomplish something and support somebody that they've made a promise to.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:40]:
Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today I had the true pleasure of speaking with Andrew Hearst. Andrew. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Delivered, a fast scaling logistics platform revolutionizing partial shipping with quicker, more reliable deliveries at lower cost. Andrew also serves as CEO of ARC Transportation where he led a 5x revenue growth in just five years and is also the founder of Verrut, the compliance platform now trusted by thousands of logistics teams nationwide. Under his leadership and across all three companies, Andrew is bringing an entrepreneurial lens to the freight industry he grew up in and is challenging the status quo and legacy giants of logistics and redefining how parcel shippers move goods throughout the country. This conversation was a ton of fun. First off, we set up shop right on the warehouse floor where Andrew has built all three of these companies.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:41]:
The backdrop of industrial scale freight equipment and thousands of parcels and packages set an amazing backdrop and context for this conversation with which I think speaks to Andrew's life work calling an ambition to meliorate a whole industry. For those who'd prefer to see it, I encourage you to watch our conversation on YouTube. We talk about the advantages and pride of building in Cleveland, how he is raising a family of 11 children while scaling all three companies, what it's like competing against Goliath organizations like FedEx and UPS, and what he believes the future of logistics will look like at all. Andrew's clarity of thought, humility and commitment to creating enduring impact is inspiring. It's not surprising at all that he's been recognized with the Vistage Excellence in Leadership Award and named a Smart Business Dealmaker of the year in 2023. Please enjoy this energizing, insightful discussion with Andrew Hurst Lave the land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance, headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio. Round Roundstone shares Lay of the Land's same passion for bold ideas and lasting impact from our community's entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders. Since 2005, Roundstone has pioneered a self funded captive health insurance model that delivers robust savings for small and medium sized businesses.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:02]:
They are part of the solution to rising healthcare costs, helping employers offer affordable, high quality care while driving job creation and economic growth throughout Northeast Ohio. Like many of the voices featured on Lay of the Land, including Roundstone's founder and CEO Mike Schroeder, Roundstone believes entrepreneurship, innovation and community to be the cornerstones of progress. To learn more about how Roundstone is transforming employee health benefits by empowering employers to save thousands in per employee per year healthcare costs, please visit roundstoneinsurance.com Built for entrepreneurs, backed by innovation, committed to Cleveland.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:42]:
It's not, it's not every day that I feel like you have the opportunity.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:44]:
To be in the place where the.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:46]:
Conversation is, is happening. So maybe we just start there with.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:50]:
Where, where are we right now?

Andrew Hurst [00:03:52]:
Yeah, so we are in our, kind of like our world headquarters. Like we have a couple different companies that converge in this warehouse. We have a freight forwarding company, we have a, what would you consider a typical three plus. So think of pick pack operations and then we actually have a parcel delivery network that operates out of this facility. So it's a, it's a couple different companies that converge into one. All logistics focused, all, you know, focused on servicing a customer anywhere in the life cycle of products, basically.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:23]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:24]:
So you grew up in the world of logistics?

Andrew Hurst [00:04:26]:
I did. Third.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:27]:
Third generation.

Andrew Hurst [00:04:28]:
Third generation, yeah. So my grandfather started a pickup and delivery company in Cleveland back in the 40s. So as you could imagine, this was, you know, you know, very small company. But he somehow worked it where he was one of the only guys who could actually pick up air freight on and like on the airport in Cleveland.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:44]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:04:45]:
And ended up, you know, he ended up dying at a, at a rather young age. But he had five boys. All of them got into transportation. My dad was a truck driver for about 30 years before he started a small freight forwarding company. And so then I just, you know, there's a way I got into the business. But ultimately, yeah, third generation logistics is one of those things where you don't choose it as much as it chooses you. I think that's, that's, you know, you have to really want it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:11]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:05:11]:
Stay in it for that long well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:13]:
How did you find that growing up within it kind of influenced. I mean, it shows you. Evidently.

Andrew Hurst [00:05:19]:
It shows me. My dad always says it's in your blood. So. Yeah, I mean, when. Well, to go back, I didn't like I grew up in it, but I never really wanted to be in logistics. Yeah, I was a, so I'm a, I'm a 90s kid, right. I grew up in the 90s and at a young age, so the mid to late 90s, I was into computer science. My brother, my older brother, he's 10 years older than me, he's one of my business partners, but he became an electrical engineer.

Andrew Hurst [00:05:47]:
So like during that late 90s, early 2000s, everything was exploding, Right. And so I learned how to code and I was like, hey, I'm going to be a computer, you know, computer engineer. That's what I want to do. I had a great job. I was, you know, a systems anal or systems engineer or senior systems engineer for an international company at a like 16 years old. It was a great gig. But I would go and work for my dad on night, weekends and whatever, load trucks or, you know, work things off the dock. And I think the tie is that when I was, when I was always trying to solve something with, you know, using technology, it was like I was solving a puzzle, right.

Andrew Hurst [00:06:21]:
Trying to do whatever the scenario was, trying to solve it with, with some piece of tech. Well, anyway, we had a, we had some operations guys who didn't show up one day. Because I always tell the story of like back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was no, like, there was very few, like supply change, college courses. People didn't really think about it. You kind of just ended up in the industry usually because of a decision you made or maybe a family member. It shows you, it shows you, right? Like, you know, not a clean record. You can't really work whatever it might be. But I always tell it because the, the way I sort of like sat in the, in the first seat for like a true, like operations was one of the guys was hungover, didn't come in, and my dad was kind of just like, hey, I need some help routing some freight.

Andrew Hurst [00:07:02]:
And when you route freight, that's like the decision engine of how freight moves around the world.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:07]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:07:07]:
And quickly, like literally within a few hours, I was just like, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. It made so much sense to me. The same way you move like bits and bytes around in code or databases. And it was like, this is like the real world implication of that sort of virtual what I've been doing for so many years. And so it just made a ton of sense to me. And that was a little, I think, around 25 years ago. And since then, I've dedicated my life to becoming the best at understanding as much about the industry as I can along the way building other companies and software companies that help the organizations that participate in this field.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:43]:
Yeah, it's kind of interesting to ground the rest of what we'll talk about in that, you know, this is what you want to do for the rest of your life. I feel like it's not so usual to figure out what your life's work might be at such a young age, and particularly in a scenario where you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:01]:
Became a leader very young.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:03]:
Did you have this entrepreneurial inclination, obviously, like problem solving with software applied to logistics, but did you have a sense at that point that you wanted to build companies?

Andrew Hurst [00:08:16]:
So my dad was always super entrepreneurial. So my dad was a truck driver. And, you know, I give a ton of credit to him because he, he, you know, he grew up without a dad. So my dad was about 15 years old when his father passed away. So, you know, he didn't really have this sort of dad figure in his life. But so he, he was driving a truck and he knew his company was closing up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:35]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:08:36]:
And so that was like, you know, he talked to my mom about it and they prayed about it and they, they, they, they said, oh, I think we should strike out on our own and try to start our own freight forwarding. And my dad had been really friendly with all the guys on the docks where he would do these pickups. And so, you know, his last day of driving was on a Friday. They bought a truck on Saturday and he started, you know, picking up on Monday to start his company. And that was 30 some years ago for Ark. And Ark has always been in the black. Every single year they've made money. And there's a testament to that where my dad knew nothing about accounting.

Andrew Hurst [00:09:07]:
He knew nothing about anything related to, like, actual business. He didn't even know how to put freight on an airline at that point. He was just a driver. And, you know, I grew up in that seeing like, no problem is too hard that you can't solve without a little bit of curiosity. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that how I look at it or how I would reflect on it is my dad would, you know, on the weekends go find a bike in the garbage and fix it up and sell it on trading Times and trading times with the thing. So I just saw it all around me of this sort of like entrepreneurial spirit. Never being afraid to think that you can do something and you can do something bigger than yourself, not just, you know, what you've been allowed to do by somebody above you saying you're allowed to do it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:49]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:50]:
So maybe at the highest level, take us through the overview of the three companies that, that you run.

Andrew Hurst [00:09:58]:
Yeah. So I started with arc transportation, which is a typical freight forwarder. So these are whether it's ocean containers coming across the ocean, air freight, you know, we do live events. So like if you're going to, to a trade show, we'll typically move product from someone's warehouse to a trade show. And all the high touch, high value stuff associated with that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:18]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:10:19]:
And so that's our freight forwarding division. So that, that started in 1991. That was the business my father started. I joined that business in 2003 and for the next basically eight years of my life, that's all I did. I learned everything I could about the business from domestic to international to warehousing, to the trade compliance side of it, the customs, you name it. I just kind of just, you know, engulfed or enveloped myself in the industry.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:43]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:10:44]:
And along the way I noticed that, you know, after 9, 11, I should say, TSA started putting on requirements around how cargo gets put on airlines. And they never really like had super strict enforcement right out of the gate because they didn't know how to grapple with, like, well, how do we enforce a law that we put into place? And so over time, the law or the requirements, although they didn't really change, the enforcement got much, much more strict.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:08]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:11:08]:
And we'd had this, I had this idea of like, I wonder if the industry could get together in some sort of consortium that would allow us to all trade the same information we're trying to get from the, you know, from these sources because, like we were getting literally a billion data points a month and we were a 15 person company trying to sort, sift and collate and then properly format something like, you know, maybe not a billion, but a few hundred million data points.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:34]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:11:35]:
And we were doing it. And there was 4,000 other companies in the United States doing it. And so I thought if we could build a clearinghouse. And so that's really where the impetus of, of Vero came from, is that, you know, Verrut is a piece of software that allows freight forwarders to stay compliant with TSA regulations or importers, exporters to Stay compliant with, with CTPAT regulations and dot and we've kind of broadened into the compliance spaces. But it with something that we were struggling with as a freight forwarder saying if I'm struggling with this, there's gonna be a huge group of other people struggling with this. And every single month we're killing ourselves doing the exact same protocol. And there's no real auditability inside our process. And so I'd work eight to eight at my air freight forwarding job.

Andrew Hurst [00:12:19]:
I'd go home and kiss my wife and my newborn and then I'd work from about whatever 9:30, 10:00 clock. So about two in the morning coding. Built the first MVP of it and then sold one version, one actual subscription. And then called my brother, my older brother had mentioned, I called Joe and I said hey Joe, I think I've got this idea that might work. And he was a consultant and he was working in the big time consulting world. And so he started helping night and weekend type stuff. And that was about 12, what was that? 2011. So figure about 14 years ago.

Andrew Hurst [00:12:53]:
And we've been able to make our partnership work. I love my brother. He's one of my favorite people in the world and he was the sales engine behind that. And we've built an incredible team and that, that, that has continued to grow. So that then dovetails into the next issue that we faced was delivered. And what delivered ultimately ends up being is a last mile parcel delivery network.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:16]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:13:17]:
And not to get too granular, but during COVID there was all sorts of reasons of like parcel was constricted and you only could do so much. And we had a customer reach out to us at Ark, basically saying hey, we typically ship five pallets of parcels a day and now we're shipping 15 a day and FedEx won't take the other 10. And every single day that goes by there's 10 new pallets on our dock. What do we do? Yeah, and so we, we knew there was, you know, we had zone skipping programs for other people which is a method where you take parcels from one area of the country and you move them in bulk to another area and you put them in the system in the other area. And it's a way to cut costs but it's also a way to help alleviate know pressure on the network. Well the, the, the nationwide parcel carriers came back and basically said you're not doing that else we're going to charge you full boat and we're going to dock your account. And all sorts of me mean things at the time. And so they said, what else can you guys do for us? And our network is not set up for, you know, 10,000 parcels a night.

Andrew Hurst [00:14:11]:
It's just not. And so, you know, I kind of sat back and was like, what would, how would I build a, a large parcel network today? I FedEx or UPS today, knowing what I know about technology today versus when they built them in the 80s. And you know, UPS was built in the early 1900s. Like what. How would I build that differently? And that was really the start of, of delivered was, you know, I kind of sketched out a model of like, would I want to own all the assets? Probably not. Would I want to have to leverage my balance sheet to, to actually move parcels? Probably not. With the, you know, with the ability of the Uber and Doordash and all these, you know, these 1099 guys that can participate in the delivery world in a way that allows you to have like, direct understanding of where that person is using that same technology in a way that, that, that's around parcel. Those were the things that kind of cultivated into what delivered is.

Andrew Hurst [00:15:06]:
And you know, I, I owe a big debt of gratitude to Bill Primer. I don't know if you know Bill. I think you might. Yeah, but Premier's a, he's a fantastic human being. And I have a small group that I was part of called Vistage. And so I, you know, I, I pitched him this idea. Just, I'm like, hey, what's the viability of this idea? And, and afterwards Bill came up to me. He's like, hey, I want to, I want you to introduce some, someone to you.

Andrew Hurst [00:15:30]:
And up to this point, all my companies had been bootstrapped, self funded, even though it took a long time with vroot and was, you know, you know, one of those like everything of the 401k levered, everything was levered to get to profitability. Delivered was one of these companies where I knew we were gonna have to go raise money for. And Bill was a huge part of that story of just giving me a great intro. And then from there we've been able to get our software built, get some scale going, get some customers on board. And really the last half of this year will be where our full like true live push kind of comes into play. So, you know, that's maybe a little bit more than you were anticipating out of the gate, but that's kind of the make of the organizations that we've built. Yeah, we've bought other organizations, but those are the three organizations that we've kind of, that I've spent the majority of my time in and currently hold, you know, the best way to describe it, like CEO title of all three companies. And that's kind of what I, what I do in my day to day.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:23]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:24]:
I think you've set about as good of a stage as you can set for the rest of the conversation with that context. A lot of different threads to pull on. I guess I would start with how do you manage the leadership role across three different organizations? Like how do you just. Where do you focus your time?

Andrew Hurst [00:16:41]:
That's a great question. I really look at myself and a core group of leaders as though we sit atop a conglomerate, if you can think of it that way. And so delivered is where I spend all of my time right now, or I would say 90% of my time right now for various reasons. But it's also the newest. It has the largest impact in terms of growth potential in a short amount of time. And it's also something that I think needs to happen in the marketplace. So I spend most of my day to day time there. But along the way, we've hired some really talented people, we've put them in place, and we run either eos or scaling up at all these different organizations to allow us to quickly understand the problems, identify issues, understand where we're going, what we're trying to accomplish.

Andrew Hurst [00:17:31]:
And so I would say that a lot of my time was spent really either a cultivating leaders or recruiting leaders that we believe could, could support the needs of those organizations. Because one thing that we always, that I've always focused on is like, I don't want to, you know, you know, be a cat chasing a, you know, a flashlight or something like that or a laser. We always want to make sure that we're, you know, that we leave something better than we maybe founded as, as a direct leader. And so with that, you know, we've, we've put really good leadership teams in place at all those organizations where I can spend, you know, an hour and a half to two hours a week from a leadership perspective, understanding what the business is doing, what the needs are, and then how it influences. Because when you zoom out, because of how we move back and forth, we might have one business where the solution they're looking for is actually in what we would consider like another business unit and we can point those, those back and forth and it leads to a lot of credibility. So if we were just one of these entities, the credibility would be a lot harder in some ways. But the, the Ability to kind of leverage all these different relationships we have, make it a bit easier for us to either get in the rooms we need to get into or solve the problems we need to solve for the customer.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:40]:
Yeah, I think everything you've laid out and where we are today, this is typically obfuscated from most regular people's day to day life. When they receive something, it's certainly taken for granted. All of this infrastructure and all the different, you know, people. I am sure that the idea that, you know, of the compliance and certification process for packages getting loaded onto a plane is just not something that has ever crossed people's minds.

Andrew Hurst [00:19:09]:
Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:10]:
When you, you know, embedded yourself in, you know that, that first 10 years or so at Ark, where you're just like in the industry learning as much as you can, what do you find that are the things most taken for.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:24]:
Granted about this whole system?

Andrew Hurst [00:19:26]:
Humans. So the, I think the biggest thing people forget is that typically it requires a human to care enough to execute on the wishes or the demands or the requirements of some organization. And this is, I think this is what's, what is what I've, I've always looked at as being super challenging where you have a, a driver who is, you know, sacrificing his body, he's sacrificing his time, his weekends, all that sort of stuff to deliver a good, whatever it might be either across the country or across town. And it's a pretty thankless job. And you're pretty much looked down upon by society in a lot of ways. And it's sometimes really challenging for these people to demonstrate maybe for people to understand how much these people care about what they're doing. Most drivers have a lot of pride in what they do most what you consider like dock workers or warehouse workers. A lot of them take a lot of pride in what they do.

Andrew Hurst [00:20:34]:
And it's the industry or the mechanisms around it try to almost dehumanize them down to robots. And there's a ton of talk about automation and can we get to automation? I think we will. I think there's a great opportunity to get to automation. But there is still no, no, there's still nothing that can replace, you know, between the ears and a human being able to understand certain things and overcome certain scenarios. And so I would say like one of the things that, that most people forget is like their package is, you know, a few hours late or whatever and it's like the orchestration of all the human events to actually get that there. They would be like, I can't even believe it arrived. Right. I mean, when you think of, like, what.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:16]:
It's like a miracle.

Andrew Hurst [00:21:17]:
It's a miracle, right? It's like a miracle that this thing actually arrived just because of how much paperwork is still in the industry, how much fraud and theft we fight against every single day across the entire channel. And I think that at the end of the day, when you look at what logistics is, it's a bunch of humans trying to accomplish something and support somebody that they've made a promise to. And so when you make a promise and that promise is held by a computer, the failure of that promise, really, it's binary, right? It's. Yes, no. Whereas humans will typically work extremely hard and carry it as a personal badge of honor to either deliver on something even when it seems insurmountable. So even if you're going to like Chicken Alaska, right? And you're like, hey, I need this thing there, and there's legitimately a place called Chicken Alaska. I need this thing there for whatever reason. And we're chartering flights and we're taking Seafari, and we're doing all these crazy things for this one thing where.

Andrew Hurst [00:22:12]:
Because we care about what the customer's needs are. And I think that's. That's what, you know, the industry. It's really hard for people outside the industry to understand that. But when you go to, like, these conferences that a lot of these people are at, it's funny, because they all kind of have the same view of it, and they all kind of like, you know, you saddle up next to someone at a bar or whatever, and they have the same stories. Right. They've got the same experiences, and it translates across the. Across countries, it translates across languages of the care we put into moving goods, whatever they are.

Andrew Hurst [00:22:44]:
And so I think that'd be. That that's what I would identify as something that is maybe overlooked in the industry or maybe not expected in terms of how much we focus on the human element.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:53]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:54]:
I love also that the inspiration for both the businesses that you've built within, call it the umbrella of the conglomerate, unnamed organization, came from within. There are problems that you're solving for yourself. It's like not every day that someone would come across or even be aware again, of TSA regulatory compliance requirements for parcels and even know that that's an opportunity. I think there's a lot of advantages in uncovering business opportunity when you're solving your own problems. And so when you apply the technologist mindset that you have, how do you balance that the human element that you just mentioned with this tension of ultimately, you know, not that humans are inherently inefficient, but they are.

Andrew Hurst [00:23:47]:
I mean, you're right, like they are. That's the complexity around, I guess that's the challenge around when does technology win and when does it get in the way?

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:56]:
Yeah, that's a good way of framing it.

Andrew Hurst [00:23:58]:
And for us, so everybody's focused on AI right now. Like it's literally a billion or trillion dollar buzzword is AI. And, and you know, one of our organizations, so delivered, focuses a lot on, you can call it AI. We really look at it as machine learning. But the stance we've taken is nothing can beat a human that has more information. Humans can consume and compute more information faster and make decisions without having to have already experienced it because they can draw on it. They've got that sort of like contextual nature of drawing back on previous experiences where AI has still yet to maybe reach that level. I don't know if it ever will.

Andrew Hurst [00:24:39]:
And if it does, the compute might cost more than it's worth. But regardless, our goal is can we use technology? Can we use AI? Can we use these things to help augment the human decision making process? And so a lot of our energy goes into not can we replace humans, but can we make humans more impactful, can we help them make decisions faster? Can we help them understand the impact of the decision they make? Can we. All those things, how can we do that in a more efficient way? And sometimes that means making part of the decision for them. And sometimes that makes, does mean, you know, we're measuring something. But in many ways, you know, we want to remove as much of the boilerplate of life as we can through technology to where the real creative of a human being that can be leveraged is leveraged at its maximum capacity. And so that's where we look. And when I look at technology, it's like, how do we get all the, the just the boilerplate of our life out of it? You know, I think ChatGPT. Chat ChatGPT is like the interface that a lot of people have interacted with AI in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:42]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:25:42]:
And you can type in like, hey, please, you know, rewrite my sentence for me or my paragraph for my email for me. And it does it amazing. Right. And you know, it takes a little bit of soul out of it for sure. But the idea is it gets you 90% there in some ways. And if you think of that being like a time saver or an efficiency creator or you know, a multiplier A force multiplier for the human. That's how we, at least in my logistics world, how I think of AI or technology really being able to support human interaction in a lot of ways.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:15]:
So as you were framing Delivered in the context of Goliath, of, you know, FedEx and UPS, the UPS, I mean, what is it like to go up against those as like the named, you know, that's, that's the, that's the ambition. That's the level that you're playing to with Delivered.

Andrew Hurst [00:26:36]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:36]:
What, you know, you mentioned kind of the history of those organizations when you set out to learn about, you know, those companies, the history, the way they've approached the industry. Where did you find that starting from scratch, you could create an alternative that, that is competitive?

Andrew Hurst [00:26:56]:
It's a great question. And it's, you know, every day you wake up when you're fighting a, you know, a Goliath and you're like, man, I don't know if this is. I don't, I don't know how I'm going to live the next day. But I would say that I was talking about previously. You know, one of our customers came to us and basically asked us, hey, can you help us? And we were able to on no investment, we were able to actually execute on getting packages delivered. And what we found is we were doing it at a 50% discount of what FedEx and UPS were doing it for this customer. And we thought to ourselves, like, okay, we have no infrastructure, we've got no hard costs yet we're able to execute at this with no real technology outside of what we currently have. If we put forth effort on building technology that shaped decision making, that shaped how stuff should move, that shaped all this sort of stuff, we absolutely can compete.

Andrew Hurst [00:27:47]:
And so what was interesting was when we kind of started creating the marketplace for this and we started going out to both vendor partners to actually execute for us as well as our customers. What we realized is the marketplace has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Where you gotta remember we have computers that are in our pockets right now. And if we were to try to accomplish this 15 years ago, we would never been able to. It is, you know, I think Microsoft talks about this and most people that, that execute at, you know, that execute really large businesses, there's a little bit of like luck or providence involved where like, right time, right place, right idea. I'm not the only one who's ever had this idea. We've seen other companies have this idea. They've executed it differently.

Andrew Hurst [00:28:33]:
But at the end of the day, everybody says, like, it is possible like this, what we're setting out to do is possible from a dollars and cents standpoint, which is important, right? Like when we look at our business, costs are at the, at the absolute top into the right of our graph in terms of what our customers care about shortly thereafter is reliability and all the other stuff. But rarely is someone saying, I want to pay more to get this box of sneakers delivered. Most of the time it's saying, I want to get this thing delivered as cheap as possible and it has to be the best experience as possible. And so we have to like kind of marry those two. We liken ourselves to a commodity in a lot of ways. But when we look at FedEx, we look at UPS, and I hate naming them because it's like, it's almost unfair, but when we look at an order.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:18]:
It is a sort of duopolis thing.

Andrew Hurst [00:29:19]:
It is 100%, it's 100% a duopoly. But when you look at them and you're like, how would I build this differently? Well, Amazon did, right? Amazon owns no planes, they own no trucks, they own no last mile delivery vehicles. These are all contractors operating in Amazon's ecosystem. And so for us, we have built a very similar ecosystem. And we basically said, Amazon can do it because they control the, you know, the demand basically, or the supply, whatever it is. And then they obviously fulfill their own demand and they can't even fill all their own demand. But they've been the fastest growing. And so they were like a, an area for, and I continue to look at them as inspiration to say, like they've been able to do it.

Andrew Hurst [00:29:58]:
They did it in a way where they grew way faster than they needed to in terms of, you know, expenditures. But for us, the model stays the same, right? The model stays. We don't need to use our balance sheet like a FedEx or UPS would typically use. They leverage their balance sheet to, to grow. And what they've basically done is they've limited capacity to create this false sense of, you know, of, you know, shortage, supply, shortage, shortage. So then demand obviously lifts it up. And because they're a duopoly, they get to name the price. And if you've watched anything in the, in the last, I don't know, let's call it 12 months or 24 months.

Andrew Hurst [00:30:37]:
This, and this has been going on forever is ups makes a change, FedEx makes the exact same change.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:41]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:30:41]:
And it's like, you know, they're a couple weeks behind. So when you Get a fuel surcharge rate table change, which is very, you know, nerdy. And I get it. You're going to get the exact same thing from UPS two days later or a week later versus what FedEx did. And so they're constantly, you know, raising the tide of the marketplace. And they've really created a problem for themselves because they've got, you know, they've got these, you know, with your ups, you've got these unions, right? And you gotta, you know, feed the union. You've gotta, you know, made all these deals to, you know, from back in the day where we're starting with a fresh, you know, a fresh slate. So we get to go at this in a way that we don't have the large sort facilities that you have to feed, right? Like they have to build for peak.

Andrew Hurst [00:31:23]:
So when you're a UPS or FedEx and you're a organization that is built around this idea of hard assets, hard sort facilities, all this equipment, all this investment, you build for peak, right? So you're building for the months of, let's call it September to December, the rest of the year. Your whole entire network is either contracting or being repositioned. And for us, for Delivered, we are utilizing assets that are already available that are already in the marketplace. And it allows us to be extremely flexible. And we continue to bring assets on that typically would not be available in the parcel space. So think of certain airlines or think of certain truck lines that have no business being impartial. The way we package this up and the way we actually generate the, our movement, we're basically like taking what would be considered low end commodity freight capacity and we're turning it into like this high value, high dollar parcel space. And so that's, that's how I would look at it from the standpoint of we are going at the marketplace in a very, from a very different angle than FedEx UPS, because we don't have the assets.

Andrew Hurst [00:32:25]:
And I would venture to guess that if you put those, you know, you put the leaders of FedEx or UPS, you know, the founders, not so much the people today, but the founders, they would have gone at the marketplace in the exact same way as Delivered is going because it makes sense today and it reduces the risk for all parties involved. So that's, I don't look at it as so much as a like, oh man, we got to fight Goliath every day. I think I look at it more along the lines of we have a leg up because they have to turn some massive 90 billion a year ship around and we get to start from scratch. And I would venture to guess they're probably more envious of us than we are of them in terms of where we're at.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:02]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:03]:
On the flip side of that coin you mentioned, you could frame it almost as a commodity, which often comes with the connotation of a race to the bottom of sorts, which from viz's standpoint is challenging without scale. So how does delivered get to scale? You talked a bit about this contrast between the businesses you've built bootstrapped and going out and having to raise capital for the first time. What in your experience has been the difference between those two worlds? And what does scale look like for you guys?

Andrew Hurst [00:33:35]:
I would say speed is the number one thing. And the thing that because we never raised money prior to delivered, you don't realize, well, let's take one step back. One of the missions of when we raise money for delivered is we wanted it all to be from investors in the Ohio area. So everybody that is invested in delivered besides one is Ohio based money. And it was important to me to do that. I'm a huge supporter of Cleveland. I am, I'm all things I love, I love it. You know, sometimes the weather, right, where we always complain about the weather, but outside of that it takes.

Andrew Hurst [00:34:14]:
Is a lot of pride in saying, can we build something here? When I was building Verrus, people like, you can't build a software company in Ohio. That's insane. You can't build it. And I would always be like, highland did it. And I always look at, you know, Highland and Westlake and sleepy Westlake built a, whatever it is, a, you know, a multibillion dollar company. And I'm like, if they can do it, I can do it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:35]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:34:35]:
And so, you know, that was. And so the same, same goes for delivered was the idea of like, what is a better place to build a company that has within about, I think it's about 400, 500 miles of Cleveland, or let's call it Columbus. The 71 corridor between Cleveland and Columbus, you reach about 70% of the population. And so when you think of, I move parcels, parcels are bought by people in population. Where would I want my stuff to be? It's going to be Cleveland and Columbus. And that's why you see Columbus exploding with distribution centers and Cincinnati exploding with distribution centers because everybody knows, hey, I can reach 60 to 70% of the population overnight. And. And so for us, when we were looking at the idea of delivered, we wanted to raise Cleveland money because we want to be or not just Cleveland, but Ohio money.

Andrew Hurst [00:35:22]:
And we wanted to make sure that when we are successful, not if, but when we are successful, we actually allow that money to flow back in the pockets of people in Cleveland. And so it's, it's super important for me from a standpoint of like raising that money and then also the networks that come with that capital that we, that we raised. I've developed incredible friendships with some of the people that we raise money from and some of my really good friends invested. And I think the idea behind that wasn't so much the if we are successful, it's how do we bring along as many people on this journey so that they get to experience success. And that's what's been so exciting for me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:02]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:36:02]:
To answer your question about scale, because we have such low asset requirements, it's basically a technology build. Right. And the consumption of our technology, you know, we're building in a time of, of, you know, AI enablement or AI help. Right. We're able to accomplish a lot with a much smaller team. Y and so what might have taken a team of 15 to 20 guys is now taking a team of three to five really good engineers. And we've capitalized on that. So we like just because of where we're at, because of how we executed at the time we executed, we've kind of been on the bleeding edge of this whole idea of less is more.

Andrew Hurst [00:36:42]:
In a lot of ways, when you're talking about development teams, the way you deploy the things you do. Agile was all the rage and it's still a big part of a lot of people's method. And we've moved away from it in a little bit of a continuous release cycle with a little bit less rigidity around how we do those things because we don't need all the, we don't need the massive teams to coordinate. And this has given us the ability to get our product out faster. The thing about buying is when we buy space on a vehicle or we buy space on a last mile vehicle, the cost difference between us and let's say a FedEx UPS is marginal at best. And so the benefit of a commodity is, you know, if you think of like electricity or think of, you know, you know, your gas bill, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:30]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:37:30]:
Like you might be able to save money if you switch from one buying group to the, you know, Columbia Gas, whatever your Columbia, whatever your provider is, but it's relatively the same. Right. So when we're buying, we're buying at a relatively the same price as these large Conglomerates because you got to remember, every single day that goes by, a FedEx or UPS truck is decaying. It's depreciating. It requires rubber, it requires oil changes. Planes require, you know, engine overhaul. And these are massive expenses for them, labor increases, all that sort of stuff. What we've basically said is deliver needs to be extremely good at making sure our customer success team provides excellent support for our customers.

Andrew Hurst [00:38:08]:
Number one, we need to have technology that allows us to never lose visibility of a parcel across all of our partner movement. And we need to be able to support our customers during their peak seasons in a way that allows them to experience, have an experience like they would even if it wasn't peak. And what that with those three kind of motives in mind, it alleviates the need for delivered to be the best airline, the best mechanic shop, the best, you know, fleet manager, the best, you know, driver manager. Whereas you look at these other companies, they have to be the best at everything.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:40]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:38:40]:
Otherwise they're losing margin in those fields. Right. So we actually look at our positioning as an advantage to where our ability to get to profitability, which is, you know, some people go, who cares? As long as you're scaling profitability doesn't matter. Obviously it's changed in the last 12 months, let's say where profitability is something people are focused on. You know, we're focusing on profitability in the next 12 to 14 months. Now profitability and scale kind of go hand in hand, but we need a relatively low amount of daily shipments to kind of get to that profitability point and then as a land and expand with customers in terms of different marketplaces. But we don't need, you know, we're never going to be in a position where we need to, you know, take a ton of money and like an Uber, where you're constantly raising just to try to get to some magical, magical number where we just, we just closed up our seed round or I'm sorry, our Series A and you know, we're like, we don't think we're going to raise money again. We think we can, we can do it on the capital we raised.

Andrew Hurst [00:39:37]:
Obviously cash flow is different, but, you know, why give up equity when you can use debt for that? And so that's kind of how we look at the marketplace in terms of, you know, scale for us is actually much easier because it's a technology scale play as opposed to someone who's got to buy hard assets and scale hard assets.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:54]:
Well, first off, I greatly appreciate your philosophy and you know, the ethos of the fundraising exercise of keeping it local, because, I mean, that's how the flywheel gets going. And that's kind of sorely. What if there's. Of the patterns that have emerged through conversations, you know, throughout. Through this. It's that, you know, in the, in the rare event, in the very difficult process of building a company where there is success, when the wealth generative component goes elsewhere, it's. It's unfortunate. So I appreciate that that's important to you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:27]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:40:28]:
It's kind of funny because there is. There's an incredible amount of risk takers in Cleveland from businesses, but then on the investment side, it's a totally different game.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:36]:
Yep.

Andrew Hurst [00:40:37]:
And this is not calling anybody out, but this is just the reality of it. You can go to the coast and you can go wherever, and the valuations are whatever you say they are. But what seems to be Midwest mentality is like, we want to anchor that in something. Right. We're used to the machine shop down the road being able to show us 27 years of, you know, income statements and balance sheets and say, oh, this is how we're going to value the company. As opposed to, like a technology startup, it's kind of like, okay, what is the inherent IP worth? Is this, you know, is the person who's running it have subject matter expertise where they have a vision of the marketplace that's a little bit different, but.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:10]:
It'S based on, like, what can go, right?

Andrew Hurst [00:41:11]:
Yes, exactly. And there I'm excited because I think the appetite is changing. I think people are understanding that especially the, you know, the wealthy individual are understanding that, you know, a portion of their management of their wealth should be dedicated to maybe not just always being a. An LP in some Silicon fund or something like that, but maybe take a little bit, a little bit more of an angel approach or in some of these local, you know, local funds. So I'm excited because I do see it happening more and more. But it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years because, you know, we've had a couple good exits for companies. And when you meet the founders and you meet the teams that invested in it, they are. It is a different feel than when you meet people who haven't maybe invested and they're much more obviously likely to invest again.

Andrew Hurst [00:42:01]:
And so, like you said, it's a flywheel. And it's just, it's going to. It's going to require a lot of good entrepreneurs to decide. It's much harder to grow here. I have to deal with, you know, maybe stunted valuations. But there's advantages to that as well as you see. You know, like one of the reasons one of our competitors went out was they got too far over their skis with valuation. And, you know, you can't raise money at a half a billion dollar valuation when you're not generating profit.

Andrew Hurst [00:42:25]:
It's. It's very hard to do that in this space, especially with interest rates are the way they are today. So. Yeah, sorry, you got in my soapbox there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:33]:
No, all good, all good. That's why we're here. So you mentioned, you know, you kind of enumerated the list of things that, that you're not going to be the best at by design.

Andrew Hurst [00:42:42]:
Yep.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:43]:
What are you going to be the best at?

Andrew Hurst [00:42:45]:
Yeah, so we want to be the best at providing our customers with a consistent, reliable service. And what I mean by that is time in transit is incredibly valuable. When you're buying a pair of shoes online and you're saying, oh, I'm going to get these in two days. And some days you care about your shoes getting there in two days. Other days you, you don't. Right. If you're buying, you know, your prom dress online or you're buying something online, it is important that you get that usually on the day that you expect it. And so for us, one of the things we focus on, and this is, you know, by design, the architecture of what we do from a.

Andrew Hurst [00:43:20]:
From the ground up is we really focus on service and time in transit. And so we put all of our effort into making sure that the product that the customer gets is a product that we would want as consumers. So we really looked at it from the door, from kind of like, you know, our doorstep or like in the front door, backwards into. How should this be built? So this comes in with ideas like visibility. Like, how can we enhance the visibility for both the shipper and the receiver? How can we create an environment where our partners that are doing deliveries can reduce their costs? How can we. And this is all done through technology typically, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:55]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:43:55]:
How can we help them? You know, it might be putting together buyer consortiums. Right. We have, we have some things that we're kicking off. We're like, you know, we help people buy fuel better, we help people buy their own rubber better. We help, but we are not necessarily involved in it. And the beauty of these things is it's. It's about building a relationship both with the vendors and with our shipping partners. Because ultimately, what we know is that when, when a parcel goes on the delivered network.

Andrew Hurst [00:44:20]:
We are, and this is going to sound hokey, but it's really what we believe is we're carrying the promise that that retailer or that E commerce company has made to that consumer. And so it's super important to us. So all of our energy focuses on time and transit, which obviously is like I had mentioned before, is coupled very, very closely with cost. Right. So we want to continually drive down the cost of that. I liken it if you're a tech, right? So you're familiar with AWS and Azure and all these organizations. AWS is probably one of the only services that I've used in recent memory that I can remember where they've actually reduced your costs without you having to go back and negotiate rates with them. They'll be like, oh, you're using old S3, we'll give you cheaper rates on it.

Andrew Hurst [00:45:00]:
The long term strategy for delivered is that we continually adopt technology that allows us to reduce the rate and out compete FedEx in UPS on rates, specifically on rates, while never losing that serviceability. So when you think of things like drones or you think of things like autonomous sort facilities and the technology required for that, it's super important for us to be able to own that technology and deploy it. The way we induct parcels is vastly different than the current market. Currently everybody's using lasers. They're using all sorts of stuff that require, you know, the cost is insane. We actually built our own induction technology that allows us to use cameras that both scan and dimensionalize parcels in a way and at a speed that allows us to do it on par with any other short center. But we own that technology. So instead of going, okay, every new facility that we put in place, we have to put in, you know, $2 million worth of lasers.

Andrew Hurst [00:45:55]:
We do that at like literally a fraction of the price to get that same level of service. And then we deliver stuff like awesome. We can give people visibility into what their parcel look like when it was scanned, what it looked like when it actually land on the doorstep. And we'll run AI to say, does it look like it was damaged? So we can notify our shipping partners and say, hey guys, there's an 80% chance of probability that this thing is damaged or there's no, you know, this, this shouldn't be damaged. So that's future state. But the idea is that we lead with customer service, we lead with it, with, with the idea that reliability of time and transit is of the utmost important for our shipping partners. And it might not be for everybody, we might. That might not be what everybody cares about, but the shippers that we're focused on are the shippers that really care about delivering a high value or high quality level of service to their, to their customers and their buyers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:43]:
I mean, this dovetails on what you just outlined there. But how do you think about then what success means?

Andrew Hurst [00:46:49]:
Yeah, so there's two ways success. I look at success, right? There's a monetary. There's a monetary number. And I've told everybody that could listen, Delivered is a company that I want a B behind a billion, not a million. And so I look at Delivered as really being one of those companies that actually can participate in the scale of a market that can actually do that. And so that's kind of the monetary side of it. I think I've expressed enough of how much I care about this industry so far. Podcast, right.

Andrew Hurst [00:47:24]:
And so I look at this as being something where we can create an organization that truly values the people that are in it. And I don't mean from a engineering standpoint, I mean from the participants that are, you know, if you live in Cleveland, you're getting a package delivered, even if, you know, the mail's not running, even if schools are closed, there's still people that are going to deliver packages and those, you know, during COVID everybody said, oh, you're a hero for doing that. We've been doing that for the last hundred years, guys, and we're going to do it for the next hundred, right? Until robots are delivering and drones are delivering, which is still, you know, far off. Where, you know, it was nice during COVID to get the appreciation, but these people work their tails off. And so to create an organization that doesn't lock them into a situation, but creates an environment where they can make money and do so in a way that, you know, keeps their dignity and allows them to experience success personally is of the utmost importance to us. So we really look at Delivered as a platform to allow other organizations to kind of extend their businesses onto. Whether you're a trucking company or an airline or a last mile delivery company or you're three pl and you want to create something unique on the platform. That's really where we're looking to go to.

Andrew Hurst [00:48:34]:
So I think Delivered, from a monetary standpoint, we've got, you know, sky's the limit, right? We're going for. We think there is. The marketplace is big enough to support, you know, you know, billion dollars in terms of money. But from a personal standpoint, I think from the standpoint of how we measure success outside of just dollar valuation is in that realm of can we add value to the individuals that participate in the supply chain in a way that is both monetary for them, but also part of their dignity and part of being able to do that. And then personally, I just think it's fun to do this stuff. At the end of the day, I'm an entrepreneur. I love this stuff. And if we have the subject matter expertise and we feel there's an opportunity to take it, we're gonna take it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:16]:
So, yeah, pretty much it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:17]:
But pulling the personal thread, I mean, you, as we mentioned kind of earlier on, got into this very young. You've been through multiple organizations doing this. How do you feel you've evolved as a leader? Like, when you look back on your journey from where you are today.

Andrew Hurst [00:49:35]:
Yeah, it's funny, I was talking to someone who. I tried to buy somebody's company maybe about five years ago, and I look back on it, it was six years ago. I look back and I'm like, man, that was. That was rough. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:47]:
Just.

Andrew Hurst [00:49:47]:
Just the way it was approached. And.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:49]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:49:49]:
So, like, I look at it, I look at, you know, the, the idea of, like, always evolving is super important. And you know, from a standpoint of like, if I was to roll back the tape 20 some years ago or even 10 years ago, I would be kind of amazed that people, like, took me seriously in a lot of ways.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:08]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:50:09]:
You know, I had, I held a CEO title when I was, you know, 29. Right. And I know there's a lot of young CEOs, but you're CEO of a family business and you have those. You know, anybody who's listening to this that's part of a family business knows there's always those, like, internal struggles of like, you know, okay, you know, the, your dad or your grandfather, your uncle who started the business. And, you know, we always would get together whenever we'd have a disagreement, which was rare. We never really had disagreements.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:33]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:50:34]:
But we always tried to lead with humility and just be like, hey, we gotta be servant leaders here. You know, I'm a Christian, so a lot of my worldviews through this lens of like, how can I serve others, how can I help others accomplish their goals and how can I do and commit to the things that I say that I'm going to do? And so with that, when I was put in a position of leadership, I didn't know a lot of things, but I was always willing to learn. And I joined like a CEO peer group. And I would say that the kindness that was shown to me there, the exposure I had to some of the stuff these guys were doing, really helped accelerate me understanding of like, oh, no, there's other things out there that I can accomplish. So I would say as just as a self, you know, like self long or self prescribed, lifelong learner. It was one of those things where I felt I had, like, got a master's class by watching people like Bill Primer navigate Highland Software and Tony Mazzella navigate Mazzella. And, you know, the list goes on and on with the guys in my group and watching them be successful in what they do and do it with, almost all of them had incredible humility and never were, like, too big to learn. They were constantly reading.

Andrew Hurst [00:51:47]:
And so over the last 15 years, I've turned into like a voracious reader of all things I can. Both business, but also just like, you know, historical and all different things that allow me to draw on, you know, whether you like Thomas Jefferson or not, if you read his biography, some of the stuff he just decided to do because he was the only person to do it is incredibly inspiring. And being able to draw on those things and be like, okay, if a 20 something or 30 something Thomas Jefferson can do this, what has changed today? And why can't we do those things today? And so that's, I would say, is like, the transformation of leadership has really been centered around this idea that I try not to think I know everything, number one. And I try to just learn as much as I can from as many people as I can. Like you right now. Learn it from you, man.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:31]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:32]:
Learn from each other. I mean, the crux of this podcast for me is trying to figure out the best of what other people have already figured out as applied to your own entrepreneurial journey, because the entrepreneurial journey is very similar. It's very rare that you have a unique problem. What you're working on with compliance for parcels for tsa, that's unique. But the process of how you go about building a company to. To solve the problem, people have been through this for a long time.

Andrew Hurst [00:53:01]:
It's funny you mentioned that, because you'll look at a company that has whatever, you know, $100 million or a billion dollar market cap, and you look at a company who's like a small $2 million machine tool and die maker, something like that, they're literally struggling with the exact same problem. It's just at different scales. And it always blew me away because, like, before I joined, like some of these, you know, this peer group, it was always like, oh, no, they don't have these problems. It's like, only I have these problems.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:23]:
And.

Andrew Hurst [00:53:24]:
And you quickly realize, like, no, everybody has the exact same problem. Scale's different. Right. You know, there's internal politics and sometimes external politics, and there's all the requests, but everybody's struggling with the. With, you know, usually the same set.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:35]:
Of problems, and the reward for solving them is more new problems.

Andrew Hurst [00:53:40]:
That's exactly right. Like. Like, you just like. And I think that's what I love, honestly, about the entrepreneurial journey is like, the moment you solve a problem, another problem comes up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:48]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:53:49]:
And like, my wife is. Is always telling me, she's like, are you ever gonna retire? Is that ever something in your. In your, like, in your mindset? I'm like, I want to be one of those guys who's, you know, 80, whatever, years old, still attending all these events and trying to give people wisdom.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:04]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:54:04]:
You know, whatever it is. Because I. I love it. I love the. The approach and the. And the difference that the different points of view entrepreneurs have. So, yeah, I'm a student of the game as much as I can be.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:15]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:15]:
Well, that certainly resonates. What are you most excited about? Looking forward.

Andrew Hurst [00:54:22]:
I think from, like, the perspective of logistics. Let's call it from the perspective of logistics. I'm really excited that people are, especially shippers. They're not just. They're not comfortable with the status quo. They're finally starting to ask questions of like, you know, why is this the way it is? And they're willing to think differently about it. And I think that comes with generations. Right.

Andrew Hurst [00:54:47]:
Like, we're slowly starting to see, you know, a generational change. Right. To where, just for context, when I started in this industry, we received POS by fax machine. Bills of lading were done in eight in sets of eight with carbon copy between it on typewriters. We used dot matrix printers when we could print out stuff, and now everything is done automated. We have AI reading our emails and entering stuff in the systems with workers. All the sort, like. Right.

Andrew Hurst [00:55:14]:
And so that's the perspective of the. Of the industry. I came in, and I think what I'm most hopeful about and most looking forward to is that the continual push of how can we, as an industry operate more efficiently? How can we adopt technologies like, you know, I'm super bullish on, maybe not drones in the way we see them, but in terms of, like, that sort of technology, whether it's in warehouse or outside of warehouse, and then more Importantly, I look at the visual technology, right? Like, we're getting cameras that are getting so good, and we're getting AI layers on top of those cameras to help us understand and identify things. Where, like, we have these smart warehouses we're putting together where we'll know where every parcel is the moment it enters the warehouse to the moment it leaves. We know where that is because we're tracking that label throughout the warehouse, and we're tracking 100 million of them at a time or whatever the number might be. So the. I would say that the compute that we have available to us is super exciting to me, and I'm really looking forward to it. That's number one.

Andrew Hurst [00:56:10]:
That's from, like, the logistics standpoint, I think people are solving things in weird and unique ways, and I love it. But from a personal standpoint, I've got 11 kids, so I am just super excited to see these kids just continue to flourish, man. Like, yeah, I have the benefit of, you know, some of my kids, you know, they'll. I have one. I have two of them working on AI workers right now of, like, they're. They're young and they're in high school, but I said, hey, I want you guys to learn how to build AI workers. And so, like, I'm super bullish on the next generation. I think a lot of people always look at the generation below them and they're like, oh, they didn't have, you know, I didn't have that.

Andrew Hurst [00:56:43]:
Or I. And, well, it's 100% true. My growing up was very, very different than my children and their friends. But the thing I like about it is they are, if you can. If you. As a, you know, a leader, let's call it. Like, you have some great people on your podcast, like a new birthday Fideli, and some of these people that are just unbelievable, which never met him, but, you know, we actually talked prior to it, like a Bob Campana. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:06]:
Absolutely.

Andrew Hurst [00:57:07]:
Someone who can spark the imagination of some of these young kids. They know how to use technology, so, like, naturally, they're not married to a way of doing things. They're so willing to just be like, oh, we can do it a different way. Great. They don't fall in love with it. They don't really build monuments to old ideology. And so I look at it as, like, I'm super excited because I think the next wave of. What do you call it, entrepreneurs, or really what I would refer to as, like, just problem solvers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:32]:
Problem solvers.

Andrew Hurst [00:57:33]:
I mean, these problem solvers are going to Be able, like AI or machine learning or whatever you want to call it. It is going to be so inherent to them, it's going to be so baked into their psyche that they're going to be so much further ahead in terms of being able to solve problems. We already talked about how engineering staffs are shrinking. We already talked about how compute is continue to expand. Like you know, when I started you had to set up your own iron in your server room. Like that's like it was back at like we had tape drives, we, I mean it was insane. Right. And now you can spool up a server, you know, in the cloud in, you know, seconds.

Andrew Hurst [00:58:05]:
Right. And you can be, you can be online. But what it does, what it does force people to do is really be creative thinkers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:11]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:58:12]:
And so I'm super excited because I think all of the boilerplate stuff is going to go away and you're going to have intelligent people be able to deploy a product or a solution in a way that maybe the friction was too high previously. And so we're removing a lot of that friction. So I think we're going to see some really cool ideas come out of, you know, wherever the, you know, idea generate factories are.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:31]:
No, I think that's very well said. I mean really, the like arc of the technological leverage is always like how do you do more with less? And it's at a point now where it feels like you can ask why are things the way they are for a lot more kinds of things. And I mean this was the origin of a company I co founded. But where the answer to that question is, well that's just the way we've always done it. It's like that's not normally a good enough answer.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:55]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:55]:
And so you can think creatively about like, all right, well like if you were to start today from scratch, unencumbered by all these things that come with having a hundred year legacy in history, you could probably like figure out a better way to do it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:10]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [00:59:11]:
In any industry.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:12]:
In any industry.

Andrew Hurst [00:59:12]:
In any industry. It's like if I got to get, if I get to white paper, like literally from a white paper, how would I do this? Especially when you ask a kid what's kind of crazy about them is they'll typically find the simplest way to solve something, you know, once they get to that age of reasoning, because they're just like, oh well this just is what makes sense. And so it's super exciting to see these people where they'll be able to have these sort of green fields to build into and remove a lot of that, you know, old ideology or encumbrance.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:38]:
Of old ideas, let alone, you know, three businesses.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:41]:
Yep.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:42]:
How do you, how do you balance that with 11 children?

Andrew Hurst [00:59:45]:
Oh, man. So that's the secret, right? That's. I wish I could. We need another hour just to talk about that. Well, first off, my wife is incredible. She, I mean, she handles most everything at home. I'm very, very blessed in terms of who she is and what she represents. But, you know, we didn't set out to have a bunch of kids.

Andrew Hurst [01:00:03]:
It wasn't like we're like, oh, we need this huge family. It was like we were, we were very much of the mindset of like, hey, we, we, you know, the number of our kids, we kind of keep our hands open and we're like, whatever God provides us, you know, we'll accept. And you know, we, we, we have, we have 11 kids. Each one of them is incredible and talented and amazing and. But what we've decided as a family is like, we spend like, the time I spend is super, super, like focused and engaging and you know, for, for good or worse. Like, I don't do a bunch of, like, I don't have a bunch of social network outside of my, my business or my work because most of that's spent with my family, you know, and I come from a large family as well. And so all those things kind of, kind of, kind of, you know, tie together in the sense of like, I have a set of things that are very, very important to me with my family. Whether it's dropping kids off at school or whether it's attending their sporting event or whatever.

Andrew Hurst [01:00:57]:
And those are things that are kind of like, they get blocked off on the calendar. Nothing changes from them. But there's also a lot of things where maybe I'm not as sentimental as some in terms of like, oh, I need to be at my kids preschool graduation. There's some of those things where I'm kind of like, you know, that's a thing I don't necessarily need to be at. So we really try to be intentional with every decision we make as a family. And for my kids, them understanding being part of like, I talk very openly about all my business with them and try to coach them up in the idea of like, you know, people always want, or a lot of people talk about work, life, balance. And I'm much more of the mindset of like, it's all just life. And if you can't go to work and love every minute of the work you're doing and you can't go home and love every moment of the work.

Andrew Hurst [01:01:37]:
And obviously, yes, we have bad days, but for the most part, how do you let those things converge in a way that makes you more successful as a human being? Because one or the other is going to suffer. And so, yeah, I think that we've taken a very, very focused and intentional approach on making sure that we build into our children in a way that we know each one of them needs. Because everyone's like, how do you even spend time with all of them? And it's weird. I don't know how to describe it other than I know every one of my children, I know what their likes, their dislikes are. On the weekend I'll take one to go grab a cup of coffee, Starbucks run with my 15 year old daughter and you know, I'll go, you know, throw the ball with my 8 year old son and you know, on and on and on and on, all the way down. And you know, it's, it's because it's super important to me and I think anything important to you, you'll figure out a way to squeeze it in. Like if I told you there's another way for you to make $100 million, but you have to keep doing everything you're doing, you'd be like, all right, I can figure out how to squeeze it in. I go with the same level of my wife and I go with the same level of like zeal at, you know, being intentional with our kids.

Andrew Hurst [01:02:34]:
So it's not a factor of like, more like if we could do it, it's more of just like we have to do it. So we'll figure it out.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:41]:
That's amazing.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:42]:
Yeah, I love that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:44]:
Well, one other thing that I know is important to you is Cleveland.

Andrew Hurst [01:02:46]:
Yes.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:47]:
And perhaps we can bookend the conversation there. Maybe just some reflections and thoughts of what it's meant to do this here. You know, I imagine there are a lot of places you mentioned some of this, I mean, quite literal business structural advantages of building it here, but what does it mean for you to build it here? And then we'll bookend it with.

Andrew Hurst [01:03:04]:
So, you know, we started this conversation with like, why did I get into logistics? Right. And it was my, my grandfather started a pickup and delivery company in Cleveland, Ohio. I can show you pictures of the old trucks and stuff like that. And yeah, you know, it, it is just there's something about being able to, to like build on top of a legacy that I hold near and dear and some People could care about it. Some people don't care about it. But I feel that it gives you motivation in a way that maybe forces you. And Cleveland's a place specifically where it's a very small community, and if you don't do what you say you're going to do, or if you're a maybe less scrupulous, you know, individual, it would. It force.

Andrew Hurst [01:03:46]:
It forces you to be honest. At the end of the day, being clean forces you to be honest. And I love that about it. You know who you should deal with, you know who you shouldn't deal with. And obviously I grew up here, so first and foremost, that's kind of how I would start in the sense of, like, I feel that there is that legacy that the Midwest is more geared towards legacy building than maybe the coast cities where, you know, people are, you know, jumping in and out of businesses like, you know, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't. I mean, I get it, right? When in the ecosystems that they're in, that's. That's what it's meant for.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:13]:
Yeah.

Andrew Hurst [01:04:13]:
But for me, this is something where I want to be able to leave every organization better than I found it. I want to leave a legacy along the way. And I feel Cleveland is a great place to leave a legacy. You look at the Rockefellers, you look at, you know, some of the stuff that was founded in this area and built in this area, and it pains me to see, like, the, you know, what has happened over the last, whatever, 30 years or 40 years in Cleveland. And I really look at Cleveland and even Columbus because I think it's. They're starting to come closer together in terms of, you know, the. Even though we're geographically still 100 miles apart, 120 miles apart, the idea of the support systems, totally. And we have incredible hospitals, we have incredible banks, we have incredible.

Andrew Hurst [01:04:52]:
Anything you could want in this region, we have. We just need people willing to stay here and, you know, wear a thicker coat in the winter and just grind through it. Because I think the rewards that we can reap in this area far outweigh, you know, maybe just some monetary compensation. And, yeah, go to Florida in the winter if you need to, but for the most part, try to keep your, you know, try to stay in Cleveland when we can for those type of things. So it means a ton to me. I love. Like, I would never want to own a restaurant just because of what it is. But, like, Cleveland's got a pretty great food scene for being a small city, like, relatively small in terms of the, you know, on the level of, like, New York, whatever, it's got a great food scene.

Andrew Hurst [01:05:29]:
And everybody is like, when you're from Cleveland and you meet someone from Cleveland anywhere in the world, there is just this inherent, like, oh, we know what's up. I can't tell you how many times I've been in an airport or I've been traveling. And you immediately are friend with somebody if they're from Cleveland. And like every flight you take on from another city to come back to Cleveland, you talk and become friends with the person on the flight. So there's this Midwest hospitality that I absolutely love that, you know, Cleveland has that might not, you know, might not make it on a balance sheet somewhere. Might not make it on a. On a strategy document somewhere. But from a personal standpoint, I appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:06]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:06]:
Well, again, all that certainly resonates.

Andrew Hurst [01:06:08]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:09]:
So I'll ask you our traditional closing question which tethered to Cleveland is for a hidden gem.

Andrew Hurst [01:06:16]:
So I knew you were going to ask me this question. I don't know if I have any hidden gems, but I do have one place my wife and I love to eat at. It's called. And it's. It's. I think it's a relatively. I think it's been on the Food Network, but Lucky's Cafe in Tremont.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:30]:
So good, dude.

Andrew Hurst [01:06:31]:
So good. Like, every time I go and we go, like, my wife goes more, more than I do. But every time I go, I'm still shocked with how good it is.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:40]:
The Steel Oatmeal.

Andrew Hurst [01:06:41]:
Oh, dude, the Steel Oatmeal. They're like, I'm a huge fan of their biscuits and gravy. Whatever. That's like, oh, my gosh. Like, everything I get there, they have this Cafe Bravais, like coffee drink. Everything I get there, I'm always just like, oh, man, I gotta go to the gym after this one. It's fantastic. So, like, that's one place that I would suggest.

Andrew Hurst [01:06:58]:
Anybody coming to Cleveland, if you haven't been, make a trip there, get there early. It's gonna be booked up, but it's a fantastic place to eat. I love it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:06]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:07]:
Well, Andrew, I just wanna thank you. This is really special, very special. To do it, you know, where you're making the magic happen. Appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and reflections on the whole journey.

Andrew Hurst [01:07:18]:
I talked over there for a minute. But I do appreciate you as well, Jeffrey, for asking me to be on this. It's a great honor. So I do appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:26]:
Absolutely. If people had anything they wanted to follow up with you about, where would you point them?

Andrew Hurst [01:07:31]:
You know, you could. Actually. I have my own podcast that I'm gonna plug right now. Yes, please. We have a podcast called Chief Dad Officers or CDO or Chief dad Officers with an S. We talk about being a father in the workplace. It's a couple. It's myself and a couple of my buddies who, you know, we love being dads.

Andrew Hurst [01:07:48]:
And so it's cool. You can go there. You can check that out. Or you could, you know, you can. You feel free to, you know, email me at any of my companies. Yeah, that'd be. That'd be the best way to get ahold of me and, you know, happy to. Happy to talk to anybody about anything they need to talk about.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:02]:
Cool.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:02]:
Well, thank you.

Andrew Hurst [01:08:03]:
Absolutely. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:08]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey of the Land or find us on Twitter Oddle of the Land or at Stern Hefe J E F E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:45]:
The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UpCompany LLC at the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week. It.