How well are you getting to know your customers? Making an active effort to learn more about your customers and improve your customer relationships comes with fantastic opportunities to learn and grow. Ryan Schreiber, CarrierDirect’s Director of Engagement, chats with Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh to discuss why customer relationships should be at the center of your universe. While continuing to work on these customer relationships might be more difficult in the “New Abnormal,” you have to invest in keeping these connections and providing transformation and value to your customers.

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For My Customers To Improve, I Have To Improve With Ryan Schreiber

Why Having A Learning Mindset Is Key

We’re talking with Ryan Schreiber about cool concepts he’s given to us in prep. One of them is this idea of disqualifying your customer. It’s important because if you put your customer at the center of the universe, you got to know who that customer is.

I’m looking forward to this conversation. In our prep with Ryan, we had many good topics to go deep into. I’m looking forward to exploring the whole concept about how important customer relationships are for the actual business case that it’s not just a warm, fuzzy, soft skills kind of thing that’s nice to have. It’s important for the future of the business. Without further ado, Ryan, welcome. We are glad to have you here.

It is good to be here. Thanks for having me.

You are the Director of Engagement at CarrierDirect. It’s such a great thing that they have a title that includes engagement. We are looking forward to hearing more about that. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your career path, how you got to where you are and the focus of the work that you’re doing?

Do you want to be Amazon or Sears? The choice is yours.CLICK TO TWEET

That’s a broad question. I worked in trucking logistics. I started that career years ago. I got out of college and I went straight into law school. I graduated from law school in the middle of the last recession. This is the first time I’ve been through a recession employed, which I’m excited about so far. I haven’t been through the recession yet, but hopefully, I get through the whole thing employed. I would be lucky if that were the case. I got out of law school and I had no desire to get into sales. I had no interest in sales. I didn’t think that I’d be any good at sales, but I’m a hustler.

I couldn’t get job interviews. I ended up pounding the pavement. Walking around to law firms with my resume in my hand and a suit here in the city of Chicago, asking anybody to talk to me and nobody would. Eventually, it got to the point where I had to figure it out and I got into logistics sales. I’ve built a couple of different businesses in the space and exited those in different ways. I joined CarrierDirect and I focus on engagement. That’s everything from business development to customer engagement and making sure our customers have a great experience in working with us and marketing pieces as well. CarrierDirect is a management consulting and technology delivery firm that works in trucking and logistics.

Tell us a little bit more about that with the types of engagements you have at CarrierDirect?

We essentially have four lines of business. We have the traditional management consulting, which is process improvement or better vendor selections, technology strategy. What’s your 3 to 5-year technology strategy? What are some frameworks for making buy versus build decisions? The organization changes that go along with that. When you select a new piece of software, your business needs to change to make sure that it’s adopted. It’s training, but it’s also maybe compensation. It’s also processed in and out.

Technology delivery is the third one. We build proprietary software for our clients. We’ve been rolling our fourth line of business. We’ve been rolling out some offerings, like training as a service. Training is something I’m passionate about. We have an offering of CarrierDirect Learning, which is a type of training as a service to take people on a learning journey. I’m passionate about learning. We work exclusively in transportation and logistics. Shippers are one segment of our customer transportation providers, brokerages, carriers, 3PLs and technology companies that serve the same space as us such as Project 44 or Truckstop.com. Those would be some examples.

It sounds like CarrierDirect had this path where they have started with one thing and evolved into other product lines or other services. Tell us a little bit more about what that looks like inside the company and how that evolved.

I talked about the development of our service offerings. That’s the newest iteration of that. Before I got here, CarrierDirect started as an outsourced sales organization for small and regional LTL trucking companies. Over the course of a couple of years, these companies said, “You’ve helped us with this, but can you help us make our business better?” We said, “Sure,” and became management consultants and hired some management consultants. After a couple of years of doing that, the company said, “We have a technology problem. Can you help us with that?” We said, “Sure. We know the space. We are subject matter experts. We’ll bring on some technologists.” With some of these off the shelf offerings, like training as a service, our clients are struggling with training.

They don’t know how to train their people effectively. They don’t have the resources to do it because it’s either too expensive or too time-consuming. Where this mix of industry experts like me who come from a long background in industry technologists, engineers, product managers and traditional management consultants, you can deliver for our clients? It started with listening to our clients and hearing what they had to say, hearing what they needed, and feeling their pain. Not pushing a solution on them that they maybe didn’t quite fit anymore after their problems were solved.

Customer Relationships: Improving your customer relationships starts with listening to your clients, hearing everything they have to say, feeling their pain, and giving them solutions.

I like that because it shows the evolution of solving a problem and then moving into a new space like how do we evolve with our client? That’s one of the things that I’ve often talked about, your clients may outgrow your need in what you provide because you fulfill those needs. They need something else from you. How do you keep evolving that? To me, it sounds like this idea of, “The customer is the center of the universe,” talk about that in your perspective there.

What you highlighted is a perfect example of the old adage that the most dangerous phrase in business is, “We’ve always done it that way.” I’ve talked for years and I talk all the time to our customers about like, “You basically have two choices. There’s the Amazon paradigm, which always treats every day as the first day or you can be Sears and Roebuck. You can decide to keep doing whatever you’re doing and it’s going to be a long, painful death.”

Putting your customer at the center of the journey is about listening to your prospective customer openly and hearing what they have to say and not necessarily powering through to get to whatever end you had in mind. Every conversation, every interaction with a customer needs to have a close and you need to know where you’re going. It’s important to close on what you had previously planned as it is to close and say, “This doesn’t fit. I’m going to go back. I’m going to think about if I hear this enough from a number of customers, maybe my business needs to change and evolve to be able to serve my customers better.”

I love the concept of understanding how the customer’s input impacts your own business. You’re not listening to the customers for them, which is important, but it’s also important for your own business to listen to the customers. When we were talking earlier, you mentioned something about the focus you put on disqualifying customers. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Are you listening to learn or are you listening to reply? That’s the biggest difference. If you’re listening to reply, you’re going to be looking for the wrong things. You talked earlier about building a relationship. You’re not building a relationship. Everybody sometimes listens to reply and listens to learn. It’s not necessarily a criticism of the person, but it speaks to how you are interacting with that other individual.

If you’re listening to learn, you’re going to be able to deliver better solutions. You’re going to be able to close better and save yourself more time. One of the biggest reasons to disqualify a customer is respect for yourself and your own time to continue on with qualified buyers. It’s also to respect their time. There is an element of this that people trust other people who raised their hands and said, “I can’t do that. I don’t know that, but I’m willing to help you find someone who does.”

It’s not even a matter of time, but if it’s not a fit and you try to force that square peg into a round hole, then it can create a lot of problems where there previously hadn’t been any. Nobody wins at that point because the engagement doesn’t go well, nobody’s happy. The reputation of the people on the line is important. That’s a key component when you’re thinking about customer engagement. If a customer or prospect comes up to you and wants to spend money with you, it takes a lot of discipline. What are some of the criteria that you personally look at when you determine whether or not some things are fit?

You brought up a good point there that I’ll hit quickly. It then goes back to listening to learn things. It ties into what we were talking about, how do you figure out how to best serve your customers? There’s a fine line here too. I want to be clear about, “You don’t want to look to disqualify as much as you don’t want to look just to qualify.” You want to go in and ask questions and learn and then make the decision to qualify or disqualify. What that allows you to do is figure out exactly what your customers need.

Disqualifying customers builds trust.CLICK TO TWEET

When you’re evaluating whether or not there’s a fit, what are some of the things that you look at specifically to say, “They’re great people, love them but it’s not our industry or we don’t have the bandwidth?”

I don’t look to say yes to everything. We work with shippers. We work with transportation and drivers. We work with technology companies that serve our space. There are lots of companies out there building technology that doesn’t serve transportation. That’s not an area that we service or that we work with. Even in our offerings of CarrierDirect Learning, all of our learning around CarrierDirect focuses on trucking and transportation, domestically. If somebody says, “I do a lot of international air freight from Africa to India and my processes are bad,” I can look at your processes, but I don’t understand your area as intuitively as we do others.

Certainly, there are the normal ones, like the budget. If you’re not going to be a qualified buyer, I’m happy to help you any way that I can because I do very much believe in giving value before you ask for value. I also believe that, “You never know where anyone’s journey might take them, the prospects were mine.” Some of those other things like, “Are you going to be a good partner?” I’m asking questions like, “How do you interact with vendors? What do you value in outside help? Do you believe that you can solve these problems yourself?” If the answer to that question is yes, then I’m trying to convince you to do something that you don’t otherwise want to do.

I use the analogy sometimes of hypnotism. If you’re hypnotized, they say you don’t do anything you wouldn’t do. Sales are essentially hypnotizing somebody and not convincing them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, but leading them to do it with you. If somebody says, “I know everything about the business. Go do this thing that I’m telling you to do.” You’re going to be a bad partner. That’s going to lead to a bad relationship.

What is interesting about that is this idea that you’re there for the relationship first. You’re there to learn about them. You’re there to hear what they have to say. All in the context of what you do for a business and how you can serve them. It sounds like you want them to move ahead, whether that’s with you, by themselves or with someone else you had better qualified.

I was talking to Peter, our CEO, he asked me what motivates me, what do I love, what do I enjoy? I said, “If you look back at my career, the number one thing I like more than anything else is helping businesses get better.” I’ve started businesses and I’ve grown them. I’m an advisor for startups because I like helping businesses get better. I was also a service provider myself. I would tell my clients often, “I can do this, but there’s somebody who can do it better.” That also goes to not being a low-cost provider. “If you want a low-cost provider that’s somebody else and they can do it cheap, I can do it right. If you want it done right, let’s do it together. If you want it done cheap, somebody else is probably the best person for that.”

Talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing as people know. We’ve not shied away from it here on the show about this challenge with the Coronavirus and the way it’s changing business. The things that matter now are different in a lot of ways than what mattered months ago. Talk to us about what you see in your industry and how CarrierDirect is helping their clients adjust to this new abnormal.

I like the new abnormal. I haven’t heard that before, but I’ve struggled with the idea that this is the new normal. I’ve talked a couple of times about our CarrierDirect Learning, which is our training as a service. That comes from the intersection of listening to customers and disqualifying them. First of all, our training as a service comes from this idea that all of our clients, regardless of size, struggle with how to effectively train their employees and take them on a learning journey that’s spans their first day to their last day. If any of them are doing training at all, they’re doing it in the first maybe 1 to 6 weeks and then sporadically here and there as opposed to being insightful about the learning journey that they want somebody to have.

Customer Relationships: Lots of companies out there are building technology, but they don’t serve the transportation sector.

That’s especially true, the smaller downline, down segment you get. CarrierDirect affordably could not help smaller mid-market companies with training, but they need it badly. We’ve developed this CarrierDirect Learning, which looks at both new hire training and also developmental training. This isn’t a pitch for CarrierDirect Learning. The reason we rolled it out and what we’re prioritizing in terms of building is dealing with this new abnormal, which is everybody’s remote or lots of people are remote. Thirty percent to ninety percent of your workforce is remote. It’s a struggle to keep people connected. A way to keep them connected is to show that you’re investing in them. That’s especially true as layoffs are hitting.

I understand that your friends are not here anymore and this is hard that our job as leaders is to keep the ship afloat. Sometimes that means you have to lose some sailors. That’s hard to deal with. How are we showing you that we care and we’re investing in you?” Keeping morale up is one of those things that’s been difficult. Legacy technology, people are looking at their technology stacks and realizing that’s one of the things that’s been a struggle for them to go alone and keep their team safe. They’re struggling with those things and we’re helping with them either through technology strategy or product delivery that they can help us solve some of those problems so that when they come out on the other side of this, they’re able to hit all slingshot.

It’s interesting learning from you as you talk about the training and where you’re moving to because of Coronavirus, but in part, you were on this path already as a company. Betsy and I talk about this in our book, and we’ve talked about this in other episodes. Essentially, we’re moving from what is called the experience economy, where we’re all focused on making memories and making people feel good to a transformation economy where it’s about guiding people through a series of experiences that help them achieve their aspirations and goals. It’s such a fundamental shift. I think you guys are right there at the crossroads of it.

Thank you. It’s interesting because there’s been a lot of scuttlebutt around like all Millennials, how Millennials want this and want that. The reality is Millennials want something different. Millennials want and have wanted a transformation. They don’t want a job. Let’s level set on this, no one’s ever wanted a job. Other generations may have been more willing to settle for a job. Everyone wanted a passion. Everyone has always wanted to be a part of something and be on a mission. Millennials are maybe more willing to take risks than other generations to say like, “If I’m not a part of something, I’m not willing to do it.”

I love the way you put a box around that. I think it may be accelerated or made it more obvious that those people want to be a part of a mission. They want to be on a journey. If you’re going to give that to them, they’re going to feel good about that. There have been a lot of opportunities. One of the other things we’ve done is launched our own podcast. I talked about exactly that, “There’s a way for you to do what they offer or do pay cuts,” because a lot of companies have done pay cuts, “There’s a way to do it right and there’s a way do it wrong.” The way to do it wrong is to go and tell everybody, “We’re doing a pay cut. Sorry.” That sounds like a threat.

There’s a way to do it right that makes people feel like they’re on a mission and a journey. All as an organization are doing it. If you’re going to do a pay cut, you go to everybody and you say, “We have two choices. We might have to lay some people off.” I’m not going to say who we’re laying off. I’m not going to be, “We are going to lay off, Tim, if you guys don’t take a pay cut,” but we might say, “We have two choices here. We are in this financial situation. This is what’s going on. I’m going to pull back the curtain. There’s no Wizard of Oz. It’s me, this traveling doctor from Kansas. I’m going to tell you guys what’s going on.”

Here’s the reality of the situation we’re in. We’re either going to have to lay some people off. We’re going to have to lay off 25% of our staff or we need to do some pay cuts. We will give 10% pay cuts across the board. We’re coming to you and asking for help to figure out what that looks like.” Most people are going to say, “I’m willing to take a 10% pay cut to save everybody else’s job.” Everybody always thinks they’re on the in-group. They are like, “Go on. My job is okay, but I’ll take a 10% pay cut to save Steve.” There’s a way to do that makes people feel like they’re on a mission and there are all of these opportunities. In CarrierDirect Learning, it’s one of the things that we put out there to say, “Here’s a way to look at that.” I know that was a little long-winded, so thanks for sticking with me.

I think that’s important because there are a lot of unfortunate messages that are having to be delivered. Having the intention of delivering the message in the best way possible to get the best outcome possible. I love that example because you’re right, everybody thinks, “I’m going to be fine.” I was going to ask you about that and then you brought it up, thinking that people assume they’re saving someone else’s job when in reality they may be saving their own.

To know your customer, you must first know yourself.CLICK TO TWEET

I love that you’re focused on teaching others that method. It’s not, “This is what we do at CarrierDirect. We’re focused on it.” I love that you’re out to spread that message of, “This is how the world can get through this better. Here are some things that you should know.” That leads me to another question. I know you’re doing a lot to teach your clients how to engage with their customers and how to run their business but at CarrierDirect, how are you engaging with your clients? Particularly, at the executive-level, because I assume that a lot of the people that you’ve talked to day in and day out are at the executive level. What is your method for how you engage yourself with your executive-level clients?

It goes back to something we talked about which is, “Offer value before you ask for value.” A lot of times, when I first engaged somebody, which was true before and is also true now. I talked about coming in with a learning mindset, “I want to learn about your business. There’s value for me to learn about your business because I like to learn about businesses. I want to know how you’re doing things differently than other people, even if there’s no opportunity for us to work together. I want to find out what it is you might be thinking about or struggling with. How can I share resources around that thing?” I often will get off calls or I will often leave an office where I met somebody for the first time. I’ll send them an email with fifteen links.

“Here’s a link to a video about this technology strategy that we talked about,” “Here’s a link to this article thinking about compensation restructures,” “Here’s a podcast about digital transformations in trucking and logistics,” “Separately, I’m going to send you an email and connect you to this other person in the industry who based on your interests and their interests, I think you guys could be good friends.” Certainly, when you’re open and honest with yourself and also with the people that you engage with about what you want and what you want out of this conversation.

You follow that up with your actions, I go into every conversation and say, “Here are my goals. My goal is to do this here. What are your goals?” “Let’s get that out on the table, so we can make sure we both get what we need.” I follow it with, “I’m not going to sell you on something. I’m here to learn, and I’m here to see how I can make things happen.” If there is a fit, if there are things that we can work on together, I want to talk about those things too. I’m going to be honest about that, but I’m going to give that value before I ask for value in return.

I love that approach. We talk about that too about giving value first. That’s the way it should be. There’s nothing to argue with there. I’ve had people say to me, “What do I have to value?” People are thinking about their product or service. What you said about, “I can make this connection,” “I can send some resources,” “I can be an ear and listen.” There are many things that are valuable beyond your product and service that you can provide to customers and prospective customers.

Your point is about an ear or some perspective, that will be a little bit off on the nose example, but in my industry, I got into intermodal before many intermediaries did. I liked intermodal as an offering. I became a little bit of an expert for my clients. When their other vendors starting getting into intermodal, they would call me and say, “So and so is telling me such and such. Can I verify this with you? Does that sound right?” I made no money from that. Somebody else was making money. I still wanted to do that for my customers. Even prospects, when people I had talked to about doing intermodal or that I had put out content related in general. They would come to me and they would say, “I want to validate this. This is what I’m understanding.”

They also trusted me not to make something up, to raise my hand and say, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” Your value is always your network. You don’t have to be giving them value, your product and service. It can also be connecting them to other people. It can be connecting them to things that you read. It goes back to having a learner mindset. If you’re trying to learn and you go into conversation’s looking to learn, you’re going to learn about that person. If you go into every conversation looking to learn, you’re going to learn how those things fit together.

What I love about the way you go into conversations and you’re talking with these executives is this perspective of, “I’m going to put my goals on the table. You put your goals on the table. Let’s be clear.” I like that so much because if you understand what’s called Prospect Theory, it says everyone has expectations in every moment or every transaction. If I want to give someone a five-star experience, I need to know what their expectations are.

Customer Relationships: There’s always value in learning about other people’s businesses, and taking note of how they’re doing things differently.

I’ve got to provide them something that’s perceived as a gain, which could be time, money, resources, and I have to give them high utility. Once I give them both high utility or usefulness and gains of some way, all of a sudden, it’s like, “That was amazing. I love Ryan. I love what he does for us. I trust him.” That’s value creation at its core. Few people talk about the features and the benefits. Let’s cut to the chase, it’s high utility and its gains versus the expectation they had.

The other part of not being explicit about it in my experience is Peter, our CEO will say, “In the absence of information, people will tell themselves a story.” When I’m upfront about why I’m here and what I want from you, I’m removing that ambiguity and it’s on the table. You’re listening to me and we’re having a much more direct conversation. If you’re playing a game in your mind of trying to figure out where I’m trying to take this conversation.

That removes friction from somebody having to process more than you want them to have to process. You take that out of it. It came to me when you were talking about your network and how that’s your value, that’s how we got here. I had a conversation with our mutual friend Joe Lynch, and he said, “You need to meet Ryan Schreiber.” You and I have had multiple conversations since then and that’s been valuable to me. Joe is not making any money on that, but lots of goodwill. I know, like and trust Joe because he’s done that multiple times. He’s an amazing connector.

He’s unbelievable at that.

One of the things that strike me about Joe and people like Joe is when he says, “I should introduce you to somebody,” and then he does. There are lots of people that will say that and then it either slips their mind, probably not intentionally, but they never get around to making that introduction. That’s valuable and creates that know, like, and trust factor. What do you have to add to that?

The last point I alluded to in my last monologue about following through on your commitments. Do what you’re going to say, say you’re going to do. One of the other things that’s a huge miss in the sales process is every time a prospect or a customer interacts with your personal brand and your company’s brand, they are building a story. If you say, “I’m going to connect you to so and so,” and you don’t, what’s going to happen then when I need you to do X, you say you’ll do X in an actual business relationship. One of my good friends in my industry, his name is Nick Dangles.

I brought him up in the industry. We started a couple of companies together. He’s been a great friend and when he’s doing sales calls, he’ll hit a brick wall. He keeps calling and he says to younger salespeople, “What I want to show them is if I’m willing to work this hard to get your business, imagine how hard I will work when I have your business.” Even if he’s calling to say, “Tina, are you still working with CH Robinson? I told you, I was getting follow up in three weeks.” “I am. I would still love to have this conversation. Let’s try and schedule something for three weeks from now,” and every three weeks on the nose, it’s the same call. It’s following up on your commitments and showing how hard you’re going to work.

That also speaks to the value and importance of having systems and processes in place because nobody could possibly remember every time you say, “I should introduce you to somebody.”

Your customers are always building a story in their minds.CLICK TO TWEET

Especially, him. I have a great memory. He has a terrible memory. The whole point is, I remember everything. One of the things that made us great friends is he remembers nothing. We have this great synergy together where we’re like yin and yang. We’ve been great business partners for that reason. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being a learner, knowing yourself and understanding how to get where you need to go. Nick sets reminders for himself. Nick does those things to make sure that he meets his commitments. It’s 100% exactly right.

We’re taking a turn off of where I never expected us to go in the show because you’re talking about knowing your customer, being a good listener. Now, you’re talking about knowing yourself and to know your customer. If I’m getting it right, you need first to know yourself.

Someone who’s reading this has never heard, “Before you can love somebody else, you have to learn to love yourself.” It’s all one skill. It’s all a skill of learning and being open and about improvement. I want my customers to improve. For my customers to improve, I have to improve. My customers are experiencing things that I don’t know anything about. Despite having been in this industry for over ten years, despite having started in operated businesses that look exactly like theirs. Despite building software companies that built software, my customers are coming up with things that are at the edge of what I know. I’m able to make inferences, think critically about the problems that they’re facing and piece some things together.

At the end of the day, I also have to be a bull and willing to know myself enough to know when I don’t know to raise my hand. I talked earlier about being willing and able to say, “I don’t know.” Younger salespeople and younger professionals in general, tend to think that their value is in having the answers and it’s not, their value is in being a point guard and saying, “I’ll pull somebody in. Who knows?” and iterating.

That’s also how you can develop your business to meet your customer’s needs by knowing what you’re good at and knowing what you’re not. Then saying, “I’ve either got to learn that thing or I got to go find somebody who knows that thing.” CarrierDirect didn’t makeup when I was talking about our journey. We didn’t makeup being management consultants. We wouldn’t hire management consultants. We wouldn’t hire people who knew that skill. We’re a company that has these three types of humans that can interact together and transform the businesses of our customers.

I think that speaks to the quickest way to develop trust is by not pretending you know all the answers. Trust takes you so far.

The only place to go is trust.

This has been fantastic. I loved so much of this. I had this little vision in my head that I’m going to have right in front of my desk some of these bullet points that you talked about that I want to keep front and center in my own mind. Particularly, about going into every conversation as a learner. I liked that. One of the final questions we have for you, we would like to give our guests an opportunity to give a shout out to a nonprofit or a charity that you may want to give props to. Is there anybody that you’d like for our audience to become aware of?

The first one that comes to mind for me is a nonprofit here in Chicago called PAWS which is a no-kill shelter. I’m a lover of cats. My wife and I have adopted a couple of cats. The no-kill shelters movement is something that I’m passionate about. I was trying to think of something in trucking and logistics because there are many. I’m going to go with PAWS. No-kill shelters any kind of no-kill movement.

Customer Relationships: It’s not about being perfect. It’s about knowing yourself, and understanding how you can get where you need to go.

We still got the word out there. That’s an important topic. Thanks for sharing that. Ryan, thank you so much for your time. This has been phenomenal. There’s so much good content in here. We appreciate your willingness to be on the show.

I’m happy to do it. Thanks for having me. I had a blast. This conversation went in directions I hadn’t exactly thought it would, but it was enjoyable.

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This episode with Ryan was phenomenal. There are many things I pulled out of it that I didn’t even expect. Areas we went that I didn’t think we would go on the show. The things that stand out most to me, we opened with the whole idea of disqualifying and understanding who your customers but then we take it through this whole idea of learning. That was unexpected.

It’s a great reminder. It’s not a new concept. I’ve heard it before, but the way Ryan was able to articulate that and why it’s important, he’s obviously got so much passion around it. It got me pumped up about, “I need to have that top of mind with every conversation I go into,” which is also why I love doing this show with you, Tony because every single conversation we have on this show, we learn something. I hope that’s what our readers are getting out of it too.

I hope everybody’s learning, but then again, as we always say, it’s important to put that learning into action. I know some actions I’m going to take after this particular conversation with Ryan. As I mentioned at the end of the episode, I need to keep that learning mentality front and center. I’m going to put a sign up on my wall right above my computer to remember that every day, every conversation is an opportunity to learn.

Here’s what I would love to hear from this episode is if our readers have ideas that have come to them, jump out to either Betsy’s LinkedIn page or my LinkedIn page. Let us know what you took away from this episode because there was so much in here. I want to see what other people were able to pull out and the ideas that came to them. This was quite an amazing show. The biggest piece that I’m going to walk away from this is this idea of checking in with myself and understanding, “What is it I have to transform in myself so that my customers are better served.” I love that idea.

Tony, I think there’s never been a better time in our entire history. I know many people that are doing a lot of self-reflection and evaluation on, “Is this where I even want to be? Is this who I want to be?” I think it’s a golden opportunity during this time of transition for us to all do that. Thank you everyone for being here. We hope you got as much value as we did because that was a great interview. We thank Ryan for all of his great insights. We will see you next time on the show.

 Important Links:

• Ryan Schreiber – LinkedIn
• CarrierDirect
• CarrierDirect – LinkedIn
• CarrierDirect – Twitter
• CarrierDirect Learning
• PAWS
• ProphetAbility: The Revealing Story of Why Companies Succeed, Fail and Bounce Back
• The Congruity Group
• Tony Bodoh International
• Pinstripe.TV
• ProphetAbility Membership
• ProphetAbility for Teams

About Ryan Schreiber

Ryan has lived his career at the intersection of transportation and technology. As CarrierDirect’s Director of Engagement, Ryan works with clients on transforming their businesses and dealing with the pain of change management.

Before joining CarrierDirect, Ryan has started multiple businesses in the industry and brings that experience to bear in attacking the problems transportation providers, shippers, and technology companies overcome in the barriers faced in building the future of their businesses.