Practical Education and AI Empowerment in Freight with Carly Monzo

Listen Now!

The freight industry has a knowledge problem—and Carly Monzo is working to fix it.

In this episode, Carly (founder of ExFreighters) joins Brian Glick to talk about the barriers newcomers face in logistics, why acronyms and “insider language” make freight seem harder than it is, and how better education can prevent costly mistakes before they happen.

They also explore Carly’s work at the intersection of freight and AI—how “AI knowledge bases” can help individuals capture and protect their expertise, and why technology should solve real problems, not just chase hype.

What you’ll hear about:

• The true cost of poor freight education (and how to fix it)
• Why invoice auditing is a critical but overlooked skill
• How burnout shapes logistics careers—and ways to prevent it
• How AI can serve the people moving freight, not just the companies

A candid, practical conversation about freight education, AI, and the people who keep the industry running.

Listen Now!

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Brian Glick: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we are going to be talking to Carly Monzo. Carly is the founder of ExFreighters, which is a company that works on education at consulting, in supporting logistics teams, and we're gonna learn a lot about what it takes to bring people up to speed in this industry and maybe what some of us do too.

[00:00:30] Make it harder on newcomers, along with some of the really cool things that she's spending time doing in applying new technology to the areas around knowledge and institutional knowledge and personal knowledge, and all of this built up stuff that all of us have in our heads who work in the global supply chain.

[00:00:49] So I hope you enjoy the episode.

[00:00:54] Carly, welcome to the show.

[00:00:56] Carly Monzo: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:58] Brian Glick: So let's dive right in. Tell us how you got into this industry and why you decided to stick around.

[00:01:05] Carly Monzo: Oh gosh. Parts of me don't know where to start with that, but I actually got into international logistics first because I wanted to leave the country. That was actually the reason that I pursued freight forwarding. I wanted to find something that could be done in any country with the hopes that I could do it.

[00:01:22] What I'm doing now is living abroad. So the first chance that I got, I started applying to freight forwarders because I was like, okay, that's a job where you can transfer to another branch and you could, you know, explore the world a little bit. I kind of had a little bit of wanderlust going on. Uh, so yeah, that's why I got into it as a freight forwarder in the US, relatively close to where I grew up.

[00:01:42] I'm from Philly originally, but I started as a freight forwarder in Newark, New Jersey. Some people say it's the armpit of New Jersey. Some people get massively offended when they hear that. Um, but it is the central place for freight. And I got started, a freight forwarder, walked in, knew absolutely nothing.

[00:02:00] Not an acronym, not a word. I didn't know what I was doing at all. But pretty quickly I got hooked on the operations game. The way that the operations move, it's spontaneous. You never know what's gonna happen next, and then you start to kind of get into a rhythm and it's, it's cool. Not every day's the same, but you start to learn through experiences, which I'm more of, a hands-on learner.

[00:02:21] So for me that. It's really important and I'm really good at learning from my mistakes. I'm very good at that. So yeah, I started there, got kind of hooked on the industry, and then a couple years later jumped to the other side of the business, the customer side of the business instead of the freight forwarding side of the business where I was consulting for startups.

[00:02:40] So it was a small consulting firm. Uh, great people and they knew the rest of the supply chain. And then I became their freight person. Like, great, you're here. Tell us everything about freight and explain to our customers, you know, how they can move their freight. Because in a lot of cases, that's kind of this black hole area that nobody knows about.

[00:02:58] So I quickly realized that there are tons of things that I knew that I thought was standard knowledge. I thought that everybody knew that really nobody outside the industry knows. And so. I consulted with, you know, tons of companies trying to get their freight operations in line, get them set up with a strategy or even just an operating procedure to begin with, and explain to them kind of the ins and outs of the business.

[00:03:25] I had a lot of fun doing that. Oh my gosh. I worked with so many companies and so many great people, and I think that the other part that helped me stay is the people in supply chain, whether you're on the forwarding side or the vendor side, three pl, you name it. Or if you're on the customer side, the people in the supply chain are just the best.

[00:03:43] They're so much better than the other departments. No offense to the other department, but, you know, they're, they're witty, they're quick, uh, they're a little intense sometimes, but they always have your best interest, which I think is, is something that I've noticed, not just from my vendors, but from the people that I worked with at clients as well.

[00:04:01] They just want to keep. You and your best interest. They keep that in mind all the time and it's kind of like this tough love kind of thing, but the people are great. So I really stayed for the people. And then a couple of years ago, I took a step back and I decided to go out on my own and I started my company, which is called ExFreighters, which is centered around exactly those ideas, explaining to everyday people how the freight industry works.

[00:04:28] The basic things that they need to know to operate a shipment. We do, you know, fractional leadership. I do some contract stuff like reviewing contracts. We have an operations exam, which is super cool 'cause I get to put on my investigative hat. But what's really interesting is it really has become an education source, if not anything else, because we only have two workshops.

[00:04:47] There's only two, but they've become so popular. One is an Intro to freight workshop, so that's for the companies that. Our startups. Maybe they've moved a couple of shipments and it was a disaster, or they haven't moved a shipment yet, but they wanna have all their ducks in a row. That's kind of for them.

[00:05:05] And then the other one that's gotten really popular, especially with the late stage startups and even mid-size companies, not even startups, is the invoice auditing workshop. On one hand, I totally understand why people don't know. How to look at their invoices. But on the other hand, I'm like, of course, if you wanna control your invoice, your freight costs, you have to look at your invoices and make sure you understand them.

[00:05:27] But not everybody has been on the inside of the industry and not everybody understands what's on their invoice. And also, not everybody wants to admit they don't understand what's going on in their invoice. So that workshop is fun. 'cause we get to tell them everything that I know and show them all the ways that they can get control of their operations, but also preserve their relationship with the forwarders.

[00:05:47] Um, I think that's something that I touch on in every client interaction is preserving your relationships with your vendors. You want the operations to work, but they should work with them, not against them. Um, so yeah, that's at least the freight side.

[00:06:01] Brian Glick: So. There's about a hundred directions I want to go here, but let's start with one.

[00:06:07] I'm curious from your perspective as someone who spends this time doing education. You know, I don't think anybody would argue with you that logistics and freight is hard, but what I'm curious about is there's a few different reasons that I've seen that it's hard, and some of them are, it's hard because it's actually complicated.

[00:06:30] Some of it is, it's hard because of regulations. Some of it is, it's hard because there are. People who have incentives in the industry to make it hard and something, I would put a lot of that invoice thing there. How do you think about the why behind the hard? Like are there other ways to think about it or, or you know, is it solvable?

[00:06:51] Is it inherent in what we do? Where's your head at?

[00:06:55] Carly Monzo: Well, I think it's of course a mixture of a bunch of those things, but for me, I think usually what it comes down to is people like to make things more complicated than they need to be when they're explaining them. So they like to use a lot of acronyms.

[00:07:09] Acronyms, freak people out. Acronyms make people feel like, oh my goodness, I don't know what I'm talking about. They really know what they're talking about. They're using this acronym. I don't understand it. And so there's that dynamic, that power dynamic going on a little bit. And so to your point of people trying to make it more complicated than it is, especially when it comes to invoicing, is they want it to sound more complicated so that you know, you don't realize what's going on.

[00:07:33] Not that that's always the intention. I think in most cases, especially a lot of the forwarders that I tend to work with, they're very transparent in the way that they do things. But after years and years of working in the industry, they forget what they know is not common knowledge. So I think there's a little bit of that, and that's why I'm tempted to say the overall.

[00:07:53] The theme is just a lack of education. There's that connector that isn't there a person or system or resource to connect the dots for the people that don't understand the ins and outs of the business of freight forwarding. But it's also not rocket science, like it's just a bunch of words kind of overlapped on something that's actually quite simple when you lay it out.

[00:08:14] But one of the things that I like to highlight is, even though it's not. It's not rocket science, it's not brain surgery, but there are tons of moving pieces involved. And so even though conceptually it's not difficult, you do have to have this kind of head on a swivel mindset where you realize that every decision you make is somewhat time bound and somewhat connected to three or four other things.

[00:08:38] That's why they call it a supply chain. It's a chain reaction. Um, so overall, I think it's the education piece. Once people kind of break down that barrier of acronyms and difficult wording and all of that, then they start to understand, you know, the direct consequences for each of their decisions or the emails they send or the processes that they build.

[00:08:57] It's pretty simple after that, I think.

[00:09:00] Brian Glick: So when you see someone who's new to this. New to our industry from the shipper's side, right. Come into this. I mean, I've been in some horrifying conversations in my career. I can remember one, it was a guy got a, you know, he had been doing a little bit of e-comm and he got a big order from TJX and he brought in a container and then.

[00:09:24] He didn't realize that he had bought the product FOB, and the customs broker called him and said, okay, I need a $145,000 check today. And he says, well, I don't have $145,000. Like I just do not have $145,000 stuck around to send you a check. And then I got a phone call just because he knew somebody who knew me, like, what do I do?

[00:09:47] And I had to explain to him what customs and duties were. And the product was sitting at the port, and I then had to explain to him, you know, detention and the marriage fees and say, you know, and then you say, okay, now you're in a, you're in a moment and you're gonna have to make some hard choices here.

[00:10:05] Right? Is there a way to get to these people earlier? It.

[00:10:12] Carly Monzo: This. I think I, I don't know if it's a, if it's a person to person thing, like the second you don't know something. 'cause most especially first time shippers, or maybe they've shipped a couple of times, but they didn't, they don't know what ANCO term is.

[00:10:24] They don't realize what it's flipped. They don't, they don't understand any of that. If you're relatively new or have low knowledge in the international logistics industry as a whole. You should be open to the idea of saying, okay, I don't know what I don't know, and actually seek that information. I think that the fastest way that I've been trying to get to folks is actually, I've been working with a couple of procurement people and I say, Hey, you know your factory, when you interact with clients, if they have a question about terms or whatever, point them my direction and I'll hop on the phone for free.

[00:10:58] Um, in a lot of cases I'm like, Hey, let's hop on the phone for 15 minutes and I just wanna point out five things that you should be aware of. Um, and so I have, there's a couple of manufacturers that have reached out to me and connected me with some startups that are clearly first time buyers, but it really is hard to get in front of them before it happens.

[00:11:15] And I'm not sure if there's maybe some value to letting it happen in learning the lesson the hard way. I think my tough Philly background wants to say, you gotta learn your lesson that way, but. It is really, really challenging. I mean, that's one of the, the number one things, what you set up, exactly what you said is exactly what happens all the time is they ship all the time and then all of a sudden they say, oh, I can get this product cheaper if I move to FOB.

[00:11:38] They don't know what FOB is. And so really they're taking on all these duties and taxes. It gets to the port and they're like, wait a minute. Whoa, I, I've never done this before. I don't, I don't understand any of this. And then, you know, you have the consequences of detention to emerge. Yeah.

[00:11:54] Brian Glick: So let's, let's be more positive for a moment.

[00:11:58] I know you've been working on some things around ai and I have a little personal rule that I don't like to talk about technology without talking about the problem that you're trying to solve, because otherwise it's just. Technology for technology's sake. So tell me what got you interested and what problem you've been working on.

[00:12:20] Carly Monzo: Yeah, so a couple of years ago, just as I was starting ExFreighters, my own venture, I actually was just coming off of some burnout. Which is really not uncommon in the supply chain industry, in the international logistics industry. That whole sector of business, it's really not uncommon to be burned out.

[00:12:39] It's a 24/7 job that you can do all the time, and especially for people who really wanna keep things going and really care, it can become, you know. It's really difficult to pull yourself out of it. So I actually was suffering from burnout myself. And so once I was ready to jump back into operations, it was about the same time that ChatGPT started to become, you know, an everyday household name.

[00:13:02] And I remember thinking, I'm like, goodness, there's gotta be something, something AI related that helps the everyday person to some degree. Not, you know, companies like, I love working with companies and I love, you know, being able to say that, you know, I help them find a million dollars or, you know, save $20,000 on one invoice.

[00:13:21] That's great. But the people in the supply chain are really what keeps me in it, because we talked about this already. I mean, they're, they're part of the reason that shipments get moved or parcels get delivered is that scrappiness nature of, of the people that are operating. So I really wanted to focus part of my time.

[00:13:40] A portion of my time as much as I could on getting educated in the AI space with the intention of finding, building, promoting, something like that. A product, an AI product that can help the individual in the future and not just the company that they work for, if that makes sense.

[00:13:57] Brian Glick: And so what, what did you learn?

[00:13:58] What, what, what has come from that?

[00:14:01] Carly Monzo: Lots of things. First, I was in the education space, so I was educating myself on ai and I was about the only supply chain person in the room. They were all technologists, data scientists, et cetera. I was the only supply chain person in my MIT professional education class.

[00:14:16] Trying to understand this stuff, I stumbled upon a couple of different products, some of which don't exist today, and some of which are superpowers today. It's crazy how fast things have moved in the AI space, but I stumbled upon this idea of an AI knowledge base. This AI knowledge base, what I've learned goes by like 20 different names, but it's all the same concept.

[00:14:39] Some people call it an AI twin. Some people call it a digital mind, uh, AI doppelganger. But the concept remains the same, which is it's a place where you put your knowledge and expertise and opinions. For mine, I tell stories that happen in the industry because that's the way I express myself, and it's a place where you can actually put all that information and then use the power of AI to amplify your voice, and before you know it, you have this AI asset that's yours.

[00:15:08] That belongs to you, and it's not something that belongs to your company. Usually when you go into a company, they give you a couple of tools, you use them, maybe you execute some great projects, or maybe you, you know, run the operations really well in that system. But as soon as you leave that company, it's really hard to retain all that experience that you gained from that company.

[00:15:28] So this AI knowledge base allows you to retain all of your experiences and put it into something that's actually useful for you in the future.

[00:15:37] Brian Glick: So I'm gonna use a really. Stretched analogy here, but I think it might help kind of draw the picture. I play a video game and in the video game I'm in, you, you know, you're with the sports team and you scout other players, right?

[00:15:51] Mm-hmm. And you have this list, you have all these details, and then if you change teams. In that game, all the lists go away, right? And so it's like, okay, I'm on a new team. And you go look up the player that you were looking up 30 seconds ago and all the knowledge is gone. And you're like, wait, but I didn't get dumber, right?

[00:16:09] But it was all here and now I'm here and it's like a reset. And so what I think I heard from you is essentially solving. Not just that problem, but partially that problem of if you're gonna build up a career's worth of knowledge, you should have a spot that's separate to retain that information. Did I get that right?

[00:16:29] Carly Monzo: Exactly. And please for those who are listening who have started fooling around with custom GPTs, please don't give all of your data directly to ChatGPT, uh, by creating a custom GPT. It really should be, um, a tool that is separate that you place your information in. And something that you build as your career goes on, you build it and you build it, and you build it so that this, this tool, it's not just a tool anymore, it becomes an asset for you.

[00:16:55] But I love the video game analogy. That's exactly how you feel too, when you know, you change jobs and you're interviewing and you're trying to express, you know, the best parts of your knowledge and it feels like, you know, one line on a resume just doesn't do it. So this is kind of my solve for that.

[00:17:12] Brian Glick: What have you learned through the journey of trying to take that from a concept to a product?

[00:17:19] Carly Monzo: It's not nearly as easy as it looks, um, which I think is what everybody says, but also, um, it's. One thing that I learned personally is I tried really early to get this in front of a lot of people because for me, I saw the value immediately.

[00:17:36] Like, oh my goodness, you're gonna have your own tool that you can optimize and, you know, maybe some, somewhere in the future it becomes, you know, the operating brain for your own operations and you can have, you know, your own business around this or maybe you rent it back to your company. I saw the value in all of this, but.

[00:17:54] I kind of forgot again that people don't know what I know. They haven't experienced the training and they haven't been exposed to the things that I was exposed to. Similarly to the forwarders who are talking to their customers and they're like, I don't understand what you don't understand about demerge.

[00:18:11] You have to pay it, et cetera. It was the same experience that I had with the AI thing, talking to a bunch of people that I know saying, Hey, there's a huge amount of value in this. You could do X, you could do Y, and it just kind of fell flat with them. In a lot of cases. They kind of just said, oh yeah, that's cool.

[00:18:28] But they kind of missed the point in a lot of cases, because I wasn't conveying the point, I wasn't explaining to them the power of what an AI knowledge base can do now versus in the future in, you know, one year, two year, three years, and how it build. So just explaining the value of it, I think is a huge lesson that I, I've had to learn and have to keep learning because every day in AI, there's something new, something different, new terms that are coming across, um, new names for products that people are relating to.

[00:18:58] And so I have to change my messaging. So I think that's been a really big lesson for me, um, is just getting the point across of what this product is. Really is and what it can be for the individual and how it benefits them. It's a huge, huge learning curve there.

[00:19:13] Brian Glick: So I actually made the exact same, I'll call it, I don't know if mistake's the right word there, but the same mistake with chain.

[00:19:20] But go back to 2016, 2017, when I was starting, I saw that, and I can say this very bluntly now 'cause everyone will understand what I'm talking about, but that there's too much data. In too many systems, it was gonna become crippling to try to put it in an organized manner into the places it needed to be when it needed to be there within the context of an actual supply chain business process. That's hard.

[00:19:46] But in 2017, when I went to people who were used to having one system and oh, I have to do an EDI with a customer, that's like a one-off project. I was explaining that back then and people were just staring at us for years. I mean, from 2017 till about 2022, 2023, somewhere in there. What we had to learn to do was back down the vision and not explain all the things that we knew as a company were possible and explain the thing that we had, that the customer.

[00:20:25] Could, the next leap they could make from where they were, which was often much, much smaller than what we wanted to sell to them from a vision standpoint, right? But like they said, okay, well I'm used to sending an electronic invoice to a customer. Say, well, what if we could make it where? You could send three electronic invoices to three different customers without having to do a big project.

[00:20:46] And they're like, okay, that I understand, right? Yeah. And we said, okay. What we actually wanna sell you is a comprehensive corporate data strategy that involves categorizing and standardizing your business processes from your go to market motion all the way through to cash receipt. But I'm gonna sell you, you can send three invoices.

[00:21:07] Right. Like that was a, I think for all of us who, or many of us who have the. Passion to start companies or the passion to be passionate about supply chain. And you're going and working with a startup and you're like, we could do FTZs and we could do, we're gonna have a drawback program and we're gonna do tariff engineering and we're gonna show you how.

[00:21:32] If you put fabric on the bottom of the shoe, you could save this much on the duty and the this and the that. And the person just goes, can you just. I have an order from a customer and I'd like it to be there on time. Can we do that first? Right. And I think it's a thing that all of us who get passionate about have to remember, is that you have to kind of take people, one, they can only go so far from where they are.

[00:21:56] Right.

[00:21:56] Carly Monzo: Yeah, exactly. And we talked about this before is, you know, uh, like I said, this AI knowledge base, it goes by so many different names, and when I first started talking to people, I would say, Hey, do you want an AI twin? And they totally freaked out. No, totally, totally freaked out. They're like, I don't want this.

[00:22:12] Like, they viewed it as like a chip that was implanted in their brain. Right. Um, it's nothing like that. So I've had to, you know, uh, just express it in a way that they can understand because it's not any of that. Um, it's really meant to be a tool that grows into an asset. But to your point, I think that's exactly what happens if you get so passionate and so excited that like, Hey, I can solve this problem for you.

[00:22:35] I wanna help you. This thing is gonna help you. And you kind of lose, lose sight of where they are today. Um, and I think it's one of the biggest things, uh, that I've noticed, um, really resonating with people is this AI knowledge base is, it's a tool, it's an asset that you can use, but it's actually a way that you're securing your job.

[00:22:58] It's a job security thing. Um, this is a place where you can put all of your expertise that's separate from your employer and really helps you safeguard your value in the future. I mean, some of the best operators that I know. I'm not saying I condone this, but the SOP does not, it's not even close to the way that they do the operations. In reality, the best operators that I know are, I mean, seamless in the way that they do things.

[00:23:23] They know their vendors, they know who's going where, at what time. They know. They also know three or four different backup people. Um, and all of that information is trapped in their head. And they don't wanna put it on an SOP in a lot of cases, not every case, because they're afraid that they're, they've then exposed their value and now their value is owned by their company or whoever it is that they're working with, and then they become irrelevant.

[00:23:47] Um, and so. When we talk about the AI knowledge base, this is a place where you can feel comfortable putting your information. It's yours, the data is yours. You own the data, you control the data, and it's all yours. And you don't have to feel like you have to keep everything in your head, which is also something that contributes to burnout.

[00:24:06] I actually, when I was, I mean years ago when I was, I think it was maybe my first six months at a freight forwarder. And I had been working there and I was ready for my vacation time, but also really, really nervous about my vacation time because on one hand I desperately needed it, but on the other hand I was like, oh my goodness.

[00:24:25] I don't want everything to collapse when I'm not there, because if I'm not there, then nobody will know all of the ins and outs of what I do. And I remember talking to a colleague of mine and he said, listen, first of all, you need the vacation. You're going, whether your SOP or whatever is finished or not, you're going.

[00:24:43] And he said, well, worst case. Everything collapses and you look great. And I remember being like, so, uh, especially someone who played sports growing up. Like I played basketball my whole life, team sports. I'm like, oh my goodness, I don't wanna do that to someone, especially someone that I work with every single day.

[00:25:01] Although I understood the idea of like, Hey, you people are reminded of your value when you're not there because everything is on fire. And then they say, Carly, I, uh, we didn't know what to do when you weren't here. And you kind of get a little bit. Ego boost and also you, you get an opportunity to prove your value.

[00:25:16] But at the same time, like I was like, I don't wanna do that to my work bait. That's terrible. You know, they have their own workloads to manage and then on top of that, they're handling my customers while I'm gone, and then I leave them with a dumpster fire. It's not cool. So that little tiny quote just sat in my brain because I knew that so many operators are doing that because Exactly.

[00:25:37] Because of. They're afraid that if they put their information, their knowhow, their process, their secret sauce into a document, they are gonna be thrown out the next day. That's how they feel. Um, so, so, so

[00:25:51] Brian Glick: I'm gonna bring this senior management perspective to this for a second, from having been in senior management.

[00:25:57] The people who we have, who I have always specifically liked in the rooms. This may sound cold, right, but I've sat in rooms. I remember in 2008 we said, okay, we've gotta cut 30% of the staff next week. Right, because the economy collapsed. We didn't know whether money was gonna come outta the ATM machines.

[00:26:15] 30% cut in this group. And in this case it was an IT group. But this, I would've said the same thing if I was in freight ops. You know, they said like we would sit down and we literally had a list of people and an org chart on the wall, and it was a very unpleasant day of like a full day of sitting there with the management team going, okay, we all have to contribute cash back by letting people go miserable experience.

[00:26:39] Right. Yeah, but when push came to shove and I looked at my team, we would say, okay, well we can't get rid of that person because they have this specialized thing that we don't know and it is gonna cause a problem. We can't get rid of this person 'cause they have this specialized thing. We went down the list and it was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:26:58] And then at the end of it, we kind of flipped our thinking. And I see this all the time now. Where we said, who are the most collaborative people? Like if we're gonna have less people, we need the people who are the best teammates, and the ones who are the most collaborative and not the ones that are holding us hostage, essentially.

[00:27:19] And we ended up letting go of the people who were the least open with information in the sense of, we said, well, we can recreate information, right? Because frankly, most of the things people think that they're in their head. But what we can't recreate is the people who adapt the most quickly to making us all successful as a team and are the most, you know, we're gonna be in a new unknown world, and the people who are going to be the best teammates are going to be the ones we want to keep.

[00:27:48] And so we actually specifically consciously said that out loud, and it very much stuck with me that the people who thought they were protecting their jobs were the people who were doing the one behavior that we chose to let them go because of push came to shove.

[00:28:06] Carly Monzo: It's so funny because the exact person who said this to me was a fantastic teammate, like I was surprised that it came out of his mouth, if that makes sense.

[00:28:14] Right, right. Like he would be on your list of people to, people

[00:28:17] Brian Glick: was just trying to get you on the plane. Right. Maybe because, 'cause I've said similar things and I've said like at that moment it's, and it gets to the burnout thing, right? Like, you, you need to get that person on the plane. 'cause you know that's what's best for them.

[00:28:31] You say, look, first of all, we're gonna be fine. Second, if we're not, you know. It'll be fine. Right. It's like the thing, my mother said this to me when I was 12 years old and it stuck with me. I was very upset about something. She goes, do you think the sun's gonna come up tomorrow? And I go, yes. She goes, well then everything else is sort of like, do you think your problem is going to prevent the sun from rising?

[00:28:54] So

[00:28:54] Carly Monzo: I know, but my problem was always, but the sun's already up in Asia right now, so I gotta, I got Yes, yes. Fair.

[00:28:59] Brian Glick: Right. Um, it does get kind of interesting, before we wrap, I do wanna, I want to just get into this burnout thing just one more time, more specifically that. You said something else earlier about the culture in freight and logistics in particular.

[00:29:18] Even more so I would say than the general supply chain is one where we are all excited to not have the same day twice and we're all very high energy, but you don't get a lot of thank yous and a lot of pats on the back. Right. And you know, there's a prevalent culture that doesn't, that wants to say, Hey, I am.

[00:29:39] Essentially not human right? Like I can just keep doing this forever and, and nobody ever has to say thank you for me. Nobody. I don't want, I just, and, and what it is, the way I explain it to my team when I'm training people to work with our customers is. Everyone is focused on the problem and the moment the problem is solved, they're focused on the next problem.

[00:30:00] And that's how their brain has become wired over time. And so do not wait for the thank you because it's not coming, because they are. Everyone is in problem solving mode all day. And so when the problem is gone, it's forgotten and the next problem is there. Does that resonate with you? Is that a thing that you think needs to change?

[00:30:19] Is that what gets us excited? Like kind of where's, where's your head at?

[00:30:23] Carly Monzo: A hundred percent resonates with me and actually is, uh, I have a whole slide in both of the workshops that I run and I mention it on almost every call, and part of that is taking care of your relationship with your vendors. It doesn't have to be a freight forwarder.

[00:30:37] It could be any vendor that you have, yes, it's their job to service you, but don't forget. Just never forget to say thank you. Like, Hey, I know this was a lot of work, um, and I know I called you at five o'clock on a Friday because I personally have done that a million times and you helped me solve this problem, or we tried to solve this problem.

[00:30:56] I really harp on that because you know, as much as from an inside the industry perspective, we become hard into it. We're not really expecting the thank you. I mean, I know a lot of people that never expect a thank you. They just do their job and they do their best. But when someone pauses to say, Hey.

[00:31:11] Thanks for this, or, Hey, I know you were working really late on this. It just adds a little something. And when it comes to a business that is so centered around relationships, you gotta make sure that you take care of your vendors the same way you take care of your team and recognize the work that they're doing because they wanna be on your team.

[00:31:28] So, yeah, you gotta be hardened to it and not expect it. But as someone who is consuming a service or product, I always like to coach and remind people, Hey. Always say thank you. Even if you've just had a tough conversation. Make sure you go out of your way to recognize. Exactly. The work that's gone into it because it's, it's more than you see in a lot of cases.

[00:31:49] Brian Glick: Well, I think that is a fantastic note to wrap on. So why don't you tell everybody kind of where they can find you, what's the best way to, to learn more and we'll take it out on that. Yeah.

[00:32:01] Carly Monzo: My company ExFreighters can be found exfreighters.co. We have resources there. I have the AI freight coach, which is my digital mind, or my AI knowledge base, which is available as a resource there.

[00:32:15] Um, and then you can also find our workshops, the intro to freight workshop, the invoice auditing workshop, along with a couple of other services we offer. And to get started and figure out, you know, how you can navigate the AI space. And secure your job and feel comfortable about, you know, retaining your knowledge.

[00:32:33] You can follow me on Substack. Uh, my substack name is called The Average User: Supply Chain Edition. Every person who subscribes free or paid, doesn't matter, gets a free AI knowledge base to, to just test out. And it's a place where you can feel comfortable putting your information in and knowing that you own the data and you own the control around who sees what.

[00:32:53] Um, and it's just a place where you can just kind of. Go plug and play and get involved. Get your hands dirty.

[00:32:59] Brian Glick: Awesome. Well, we will make sure we get links to all of that in the notes. And, uh, thank you so much for chatting today.

[00:33:06] Carly Monzo: No, thank you.

[00:33:12] Brian Glick: Well, thanks so much to Carly for that. It's always been a passion of mine to really look at the people in this industry, and this is part of why I keep this podcast going is because it's so much fun to talk to people, but to really be able to have a conversation about what really affects people at the desk level and how they think about the jobs and all of this stuff around human relationships matter so much in our industry and I'm, I'm so glad we had a chance to talk about it from several different perspectives.

[00:33:42] Uh, hope you enjoyed the episode. As we mentioned, we'll have links to Carly's resources in the notes. And then one of the things we're learning about with new technology at Chain that, that certainly you'll be seeing a lot more of over the next couple of months is a theme that we're calling Practical AI.

[00:33:58] And I think what Carly's doing certainly fits into that, which is how we bring some of this new technology into your existing business processes. In a way where it's not, we're not leading with the word AI. We're leading with the word practical and it's how do we take the data that you have and the information that's moving around your company and use it to move things forward?

[00:34:20] Make sure to check out our blog. I know we have a couple of updates on some of the things we've done specifically around what we're calling AI Checks or AI Audit, depending on which side you're coming from, around being able to look in real time for very weird things that are going on inside your supply chain that maybe you couldn't write a business rule for, but that you, knowing your head.

[00:34:43] Hey, I wanna make sure that this shipment isn't being routed in a weird way, or that we're not paying an unreasonable price for something. These are hard things to do with IT rules, but we're really excited about using AI to help keep an eye on your data for you. So check out the blog, and check out our LinkedIn.

[00:35:03] We'll be sharing everything there. And as always, uh, thanks for listening.