Work · Case study
A freight brokerage where the chasing, not the typing, was the problem
A small food-freight brokerage thought re-keying was its problem. Its own numbers said appointment and status chasing cost far more, and the fixes ran on software it already paid for.
Client not named. Every number below came from the client.
The business
A small freight brokerage with no trucks of its own, moving mostly less-than-truckload freight, much of it food. Two desks handle quoting, booking carriers, appointments, tracking and a daily status report to the main customers. It runs on Gmail and Google Workspace, a load board, its own rate-confirmation system and one large shared spreadsheet. Customers stay because they always know where their freight is, not because it's the cheapest.
Their numbers
- About 10 hours a week across both desks spent making and chasing appointments.
- About 100 emails a week chasing status on loads already moving.
- About 2 minutes to enter one load into their system.
What we found
- Appointments were the leak, and nothing flagged them. The trigger was a blank cell in the spreadsheet, spotted by eye. The desks deliberately book appointments for smaller carriers to keep control, which is the right call; done entirely by hand, that control cost about ten hours a week.
- Status chasing was a trap in both directions. Ask too little and the customer calls first about a missed pickup. Ask too much and everyone gets annoyed. More or less chasing wasn't the answer. Cheaper chasing was.
- They were already paying for part of the fix. A carrier-vetting service on their bill included truck tracking alerts that had never made it into the daily routine. It was one of four tools that had been bought or built, worked, and quietly stopped being used. The real constraint was adoption, not capability.
What we recommended
Your own team can do it now
- A small script on the spreadsheet they already keep that emails the desks, twice a day, every upcoming pickup with no appointment yet. Cost: nothing beyond the Google Workspace they pay for.
- Put the tracking they already pay for into the daily routine, with one named owner for the alerts, and ask each regular carrier what automatic status updates they can send.
- Five written one-page procedures for how the work actually runs today, so it survives a desk being empty. Delivered with the assessment.
A Claude skill or assistant on a standard setup
- Later: move the owner's own quote-drafting assistant, which drafts replies for approval and never sends, from a personal login onto a shared business account.
- Later: a daily draft of the customer status report for the desk to review and send. Never auto-send.
Needs a developer (we refer this out)
- Down the road, and not ours to build: notification hooks on their own system, so alerts come from the record instead of a spreadsheet.
Leave it alone
- Don't pay anyone to integrate the system for automatic load entry. Their developer offered full access to build it. We recommended against it: the typing it replaces costs an hour or two a week, there is no proper API to build on, and only one person knows the system.
- Don't buy a second tracking product, don't build a driver check-in app, and don't automate the customer relationship itself. The daily personal contact is the product.
What they chose to do
They started very small: a light email integration for the owner and two of the staff. Everything bigger was deferred because of timing on their side. The plan is to revisit it later as a managed setup: one shared knowledge base, with their systems talking to each other so nobody does the same work twice.
What happened
Too early to say.
What I’d do differently
I walked out of the discovery call sure the headline was re-keying: the same load details typed four or five times a day. Then the client's own numbers came back. Two minutes a load is an hour or two a week; appointments alone were ten. Chasing outweighed typing by roughly six to one, and I rebuilt the roadmap around it. Next time I ask for the numbers before I settle on a headline.