Carrier Details™ Launches Carrier Aggregate Federal Data Business - FreightWaves Now
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Kaylee [Host]: Coming up with our next guest this morning, we are part one of twofer with this, we are going to welcome Kathy Sardelli who is one of the co-founders of Carrier Details, also with her is her other co-founder, Mark Draeb.
Mark and Kathy, thank you guys so much for joining us on this show this morning. Let’s get into what Carrier Details is. You guys are launching this website, a brand-new service for the freight industry. Welcome, starting off with you Mark, tell us a little bit about what’s going on.
Mark [Carrier Details]: Well, opportunities knock, so you have to open the door and take advantage of them. So, both Kathy and I worked with and for Grizella, I was a co-founder and Kathy was a principle of SaferWatch.com™, and Saferwatch™ is a carrier compliance tool grabbing all the FMCS information and making an app out of that; and that’s still going on strong. Both of us exited the company, Truckstop, which now owns that product, and when I left a number of colleagues reached out to me and asked, for my consulting services and things like that, and then they asked for if they could get the data. So, there is a lot making that data happen, actually making it reliable and consumable, so, I started doing that and then Kathy became available in March of this year I think it was, so I reached out to her, and we started Carrier Details. So, it’s really exciting to get back in the game, I guess.
Anthony [Host]: From your perspective, what is one of the biggest things that really kind of pushed you into really heading up this co-founding this company?
Mark [Carrier Details]: I’ve been doing this since 2008, and what happens is that, just like with anything, you get to know a lot of people in the industry, actually, I have been in this since 2000 also working with PostEverywhere at that time; so, you get a lot of friends in the industry. So, this was an opportunity not only to leverage the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years, but also leverage all the contacts. I got a chance to work with good friends like Kathy and other partners I’ve used over the years that have been very helpful, like Dan Kochkovski with Vision37.com to do all our marketing, and customers that have become friends of mine quite frankly; and meeting new people like you guys. So, getting a chance to continue networking.
Kaylee [Host]: Absolutely, Networking is the name of the game when it comes to this. So, Kathy, let’s get a little bit of your thoughts on this. Becoming a co-founder is kind of tough, but when you’ve got that good idea, it is definitely something you want to stick and make it work together. Tell us a little bit about your experience in getting Carrier Details founded.
Kathy [Carrier Details]: My experience in the transportation industry began in 2010 when Mark talked me into joining his company and launching SaferWatch™. So, it’s an industry that I embraced but not one that I initially had any background in. What struck me about the transportation industry was the fact that it is very embracing, it is critical, and very often flies under the radar until you don’t get something delivered to your door. It is also 100% made up of people that are really the salt of the earth. So, I was attracted to the industry, I was attracted to the participants in the industry, kind of have made my home here. The opportunity to work with Mark again was a really big draw in that we are very aligned in our values on how we are dedicated to serving customers, and all those other phrases about integrity, accountability, etc., but at the end of the day one could do many different things, and we are located in a very small town, Hebron ND. In fact, I live on a ranch, so you can work from anywhere remotely, but who you work with became very important, particularly after leaving my previous employer. So, the opportunity to get back together in a field that we are very comfortable with, in an industry that is very ripe or really sitting at the edge of really great technology advances, it’s good timing, it’s a great industry that I love very much, and even though what we work with, data, is maybe not “super sexy,” it is critical it is a foundation on which all of this great technology can be built, and we are very good at it. So, it was an easy fit.
Kaylee [Host]: Kathy, sticking with you, I want to kind of get your thoughts on the competition space in this carrier compliance, carrier safety database, and understanding platforms. There is a bunch of folks in the industry working to make sure that people know that the carriers they are working with are safe and are up to standards to move their goods safely and keep their people safe as well. Can you talk about how it is competing with some of these other companies that are in this space, and why it is so important still to have so many people who are doing this work, no matter if there is one company doing it or there are fifty companies doing it.
Kathy [Carrier Details]: I’m going to first very quickly talk about the fact that at our company Carrier Details, we aggregate data, and we distribute it. So, we are not a competitor to carrier compliance applications. We are the foundation that they would or could run on. So, from that perspective, no competition. Any one of the third-party carrier compliance applications could come to us and say, hey would you guys manage this really very difficult data for us? FMCSA information, just as a sidebar, is great; it’s publicly available, it’s all we have to do our due diligence before putting a load on the road, but it is very difficult to work with, as it was never meant necessarily to be distributed in mass, and it’s hard. There are a ton of anomalies and exceptions, always. So, to say, finding someone who is really good at managing a foundational repository database upon everything else is built is like finding a needle in a haystack or finding that gold nugget. So that’s where we sit. We are the foundation; we are the data that supports all technology.
From a compliance perspective, truthfully, due diligence and the standard for due diligence will not go away. We are a litigious society, and our history shows that the courts will side with not only the deepest pockets, but the courts are going to expect that someone putting a truck on the road is going to have done a certain standard of due diligence. So, from a third-party perspective and compliance, it’s not going away, and we support that. We are very tuned-in to what the market is asking, what the minimum standards are, and again, I think having applications that can help a brokerage manage that process so that there is less human error, that’s the homerun. Having some of that automated is the home-run and we are part of the foundation for that.
Anthony [Host]: Excellently put Kathy and Mark. To both of you, thanks for much for joining us this morning, and if seems like if people want to reach out and learn more, they can go to CarrierDetails.com
