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Coyote Today & Tomorrow: An Inside Look With CEO, Jonathan Sisler

Jonathan Sisler Chief Executive OfficerThe global freight market is evolving at an incredibly fast pace, but Coyote thrives in its complexity and volatility. I wrote this article to provide an inside look at Coyote’s business today, along with our plans for continued innovation and success in the future. Regardless of how we evolve as a company, our mission will remain the same: deliver smarter supply chain solutions and strategic insights that drive the success of shippers and carriers in our global marketplace.

In sharing these details about our business, I hope you feel connected to where we are today and where we are going.   

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Coyote's Core Focus Areas

At Coyote, we have three core focuses that are driving our business: broadening and deepening our solutions, providing omnichannel, scalable technology and creating seamless experiences for shippers and carriers. To understand our approach in these areas, you need to first understand the unique challenges facing our customers today. 

 

Today’s Challenges for Shippers

One of the biggest challenges facing our industry today is compliance, especially because of the ELD mandate. There were a lot of unrealized fears about the mandate and how it would impact carrier capacity. Ultimately, the widespread concern about the ELD mandate was one of three driving factors impacting the current deflationary market. Regardless, ensuring carriers are compliant has been a challenge for shippers over the past two years.

Another challenge facing our customers is the complex shipping demands affecting the global supply chain. As we have transitioned from a North American freight brokerage to a global provider, we’ve been able to diversify our multi-modal solutions portfolio and offer customized supply chain solutions to help our shippers and carriers scale their businesses. Being a centralized, one-stop solution for our customers and building our modes beyond the scale of traditional broker competitors is something I’m really proud of and a core aspect of our business that will continue to be a key differentiator.

With this background on our customers’ challenges in mind, let’s discuss how our three core focus areas are working to address them.

  1. Broadening and Deepening our Solutions

At Coyote, we take an integrated approach to solving complex supply chain challenges with solutions custom-built for our customers’ businesses. This approach, when paired with our expansive marketplace, means more options and success for all members of the supply chain. Every time a new shipper or carrier joins our network, it increases in value for all participants. Since Coyote operates on a centralized model, we maintain efficiency and visibility as we scale. That means we can offer broader and deeper solutions that were created by leveraging our customers and carriers in a bigger, more comprehensive way – across more modes, solutions and geographies.

Coyote’s integrated approach focuses on expanding the ways we can support our customers and can be segmented into three categories – Move, Flex and Manage.

Move, Flex and Manage graphic

  1. Providing Omnichannel, Scalable Technology

Technology has changed the industry, and Coyote has always been committed to making these innovations available and easily accessible to our customers and carriers. We know that simply creating new technology isn’t enough – you also need the skilled people who can use and advance the technology to make it valuable for our customers. That’s why we’ve focused on investing in our people across the business, because we believe human expertise is the key to unlocking the real value of technology and synthesizing it into actionable, strategic initiatives.

When we break our technology down, the core functionality is offering access to the right capacity to shippers and right freight to carriers, when and where they need it, in the most efficient way possible. The better we can deliver this experience, the more value we can provide both sides of the market.

Our technology development doesn’t focus on a specific product or channel. Instead, it’s focused on a core philosophy. Everything we develop, regardless of channel or end-user (shipper, carrier or internal) comes back to a few simple questions: Does this make it easier for shippers to access capacity? Does it make it easier for carriers to access freight? Does it make our marketplace more efficient? In asking and answering these questions when creating our new technology solutions, we know they will be most impactful for our customers.

  1. Creating Seamless Experiences for Shippers and Carriers

Technology, scale and connectivity cannot stand alone. Effectively managing each of them requires a skilled and dedicated team that’s united in their mission. At Coyote, our team is committed to delivering unmatched service to our customers every day.

Delivering this service and experience requires more than industry expertise and knowledge. It requires direct input from our customers and carriers. That’s why we take the time to get to know our customers and understand their unique needs and challenges. Much of this insight can come from our day-to-day interactions, but we also provide our customers the opportunity to tell us directly whenever possible.

A great example of this is our recent Executive Shippers’ Forum, which took place in Chicago in June. For the customers in attendance, the Forum, which was led by Coyote leadership and supply chain executives from across the nation, gave them an opportunity to hear from industry experts about the state of the market, discuss modern-day supply chain challenges and hear about the best-in-class work Coyote is doing on a global scale. We know that our attendees were there to learn, but so were we. The level of direct feedback we’re able to receive at events like this and while attending industry conferences helps guide our strategy and solutions for the future.

We apply this same model on the carrier side, hosting multiple Carrier Councils each year to learn from the carriers in our network. Providing insights into the topics affecting their businesses is valuable to shippers and vice versa.

 

Bringing It All Together

At Coyote, we invest an incredible amount of time and energy working to better understand our customers’ unique needs and challenges, analyzing the market to provide actionable insights to our customers and creating a phenomenal work environment for our team. In doing so, we’re setting ourselves and, most importantly, our customers and employees up for success and growth in the short and long term. As we look ahead, I want to highlight how the above core focus areas are shaping the future of our business.

  • Expanding Globally

We want businesses around the world to benefit from our unique, service-centric model that has been so successful for our customers in the United States. To make this a reality, we’ll continue to execute our multi-faceted, multi-model global expansion strategy. We’ve already experienced great success in our new offices in Europe, including our international headquarters in Amsterdam and our cross-border office in Mexico. Our global expansion will continue to be a priority for the company moving forward.

  • A Continued Focus on Technology, Connectivity and Visibility

Over the next five years, I see Coyote evolving even further into an industry leader through our technology offerings. Shippers are looking for higher levels of service and need visibility into their freight, specifically how and when it’s moving. As demand for solutions that cater to these service expectations rises, we’re constantly looking to innovate with new solutions. A great example of this is our recently launched Carrier of Choice program and enhanced digital freight platform, which were developed to support both the shippers and carriers in our network. Our goal with these solutions was to set shippers and carriers up for success in any market – whether it be deflationary, like today, or inflationary, as the Coyote Curve® predicts it will be next year. By leveraging insights drawn from customer feedback when building new solutions and grounding them in a commitment to exceptional service, we’re able to accomplish this goal.

  • A Personalized Approach to Customer Service

The “Netflix Approach" to personalize every consumer experience is shaping the way we do business. To achieve a truly customized supply chain, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. That’s why we’re creating innovative ways to provide the resources, expertise, capacity and data that help our customers seamlessly shift from short-term capacity to long-term agility. By constantly evaluating new ways to best cater to our customers’ new needs and challenges, we’re able to be the trusted provider that can help them navigate the global freight market.                                    

Everything in our history has led up to 2019. This year – and in the years to come – we will remain committed to further scaling and improving the model that has been so successful to date. We understand it’s going to take our global network of employees working together collectively to get this done, but our people and culture are built for success. We’ve proven it time and time again. I look forward to seeing how far we can go. 

If you’re interested in working with Coyote, please visit Coyote.com and be sure to sign up for our newsletter for the latest updates.