The Extra Mile Podcast by CarrierDirect: Meet the Hosts Part 2: Adam Perlmutter
In this clip, Adam introduces himself, shares about his background, his family, and why he's starting this podcast with Bain.
Meet the Hosts Part 2: Adam Perlmutter Episode Transcript
[Bain]
Alright everybody, welcome back to The Extra Mile Podcast. I am your host Robert Bain, and I have with me, not a special guest, but my co-host. The one, the only, the man himself, P-Mutt. Adam Perlmutter. Adam, welcome to our show and I would love for you to get a chance to introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are.
[Adam]
Hey thanks Bain. It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been talking about this thing for a little bit so it’s.. I’m excited to get it going.
So just for all the listeners at home, I’ll give a little bit of professional background of myself. As Bain mentioned, I’m Adam Perlmutter. A lot of colleagues throughout the years have called me “P-Mutt.”
I’ve got about 14+ years industry experience in transportation & logistics. I started my career in carrier sales at a smaller brokerage up north of the city called AFN: summer of 2006. I learned the ropes there for about two years. Then left the business to pursue a start-up opportunity with my dad. That's probably a story for another time. Anyway, lesson learned there: working with family, just as hard as advertised.
So I came back to what I was used to. Came back to logistics and joined up with Echo Global Logistics, where I had a couple former colleagues of mine from AFN who welcomed me with open arms. That was in 2009. Pretty exciting time for Echo Global Logistics. This was right before they went public, and at the time they were just starting to build their full truckload service offering. So I was one of the first twelve or so people brought on to build the carrier sales desk. Shortly after joining, [I] became the regional carrier sales manager for the Southeast region. When I started there, it was an inbound structure, but then as we progressed, we switched from inbound to outbound. We can get into more of that on a future show as well.
After owning the Southeast for a little while, we launched the Canadian team. So I was responsible for that team and all inbound and outbound opportunities there. After managing those two teams in parallel for about five years, I spun up the carrier development team which was focused on strategic carrier onboarding and partnership for underdeveloped lanes, underdeveloped markets, and new business that we were being awarded in the coming months, just so that we’d have carriers all revved up and ready to go by the time the business went live. From that, became the senior manager of truckload spot pricing. So designed and implemented a truckload quoting tool for the entire business to utilize for all truckload spot opportunities. That was a lot of fun. I was at Echo for the better part of 8 years.
And then I left there for an opportunity to help build the freight division at Uber, and that's where I was first introduced to you Bain.
[Bain]
That’s right.
[Adam]
I remember that quite fondly. So I came on to Uber as a business development manager, but you know the titles there were really just, you know. I was tasked with coming in to help grow the team. During my time there I conducted over a hundred interviews with candidates, created process, SOPs, trained new hires before there was a formal training team, responsible for booking and onboarding carriers.
You know at the time, people, when we got on the phone and we told him we work for Uber, a lot of times they thought it was like a prank call. They didn't really understand what we were going for. Those were fun times. Eventually managed a team there of carrier reps, which we led the engagement for all larger fleets. At the time we defined that for all carriers sized 50 trucks and up. As you may or may not know when Uber launched, it was an app directed mainly towards owner-operators and small fleets, but we had to keep engagement going with larger fleets because we knew at some point there would be functionality there to work with those folks. So we had to keep them engaged, so that was my responsibility for a time. And then I was promoted to become the head of reefer carrier sales, and I was really building out the entire temp control service offering while at Uber.
After two-and-a-half years at Uber total, I left with a colleague of mine who I had met while working at Uber for a venture to start our own brokerage. So we had a couple investors who were also a shipper, specializing in fresh produce. They brought us in to build up a business around handling their transportation and then eventually soliciting business from outside shippers. Built a team of 13 full-time employees as well as 9 contractors overseas.
Did that for the better part of a year, all before joining with CarrierDirect. So I've been with CarrierDirect for just over a year now. It was my year anniversary in July. It's been a wild ride. It's been a lot of fun.
Just a little bit about me in a personal sense: I've been married to my wife for almost four years. We have two boys. One is two months old, and one is almost three years old. As Bain mentioned, I’m fresh back from paternity leave, so, ready to go.
Before that, raised in the streets of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. Went to Indiana University where I majored in Communications and Culture. And then, just things that I'm interested in... big NBA hoops fans. Stemming back from the Michael Jordan days, so you might catch some comparisons or analogies between hoops and freight.
Then, I wanted to talk, Bain, a little bit about, why the Extra Mile Podcast, or why I was interested in doing this with you. I know this is like an idea we’ve been bouncing off each other for some time. But essentially, you know, I’ve been a long time consumer of podcasts, first time creator. So, you’ll have to bear with me over the first couple of episodes while I find my voice here.
We thought this would be a good platform to discuss the cool things going on in our industry. Relative to other industries, transportation and logistics is pretty new. Trucks aren’t anything new, but since deregulation happened in the 80s, there’s been just an influx of companies. There’s low overhead coming in to start a business, it can be extremely profitable, and recently there’s just been a lot of private equity money coming into the space. So it’s been really cool to see all the up and comers coming in, the disrupters bringing new innovation to our industry.
One of the great perks about being a consultant is being exposed to so many different businesses and strategies, and getting to weigh in on challenges that these companies are facing on a daily basis. We figured the pod would be a great chance to get out there and bring you all, the listeners, along for the ride. We're not going to share any proprietary or confidential information, to protect our clients, but we will definitely weigh in and discuss the topics that get pushed across our desk. I love learning about the industry that I worked in for many years, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to share the knowledge and perspectives that we picked up along the way.
We will be having guests on on the show to talk about current challenges in the industry and solutions being built and implemented. Lastly I’d say, we want this to be a collaborative show so if there are topics that you guys, the listeners, want us to talk about please reach out to either one of us on LinkedIn or you can email me directly at aperlmutter@carrierdirect.com.
I’m looking forward to getting this thing going, and thanks for going the extra mile with us.
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