75 | Collaborative Partnerships with David Commiskey

our new CEO, David Kaminski. We're going to have to cut that. Nope. [LAUGHTER] Having critical conversations with your customers to truly understand what their current state is and where they're trying to go. Another guest that has only daughters. Yes. So you're welcome on this podcast anytime. Yeah. You fit in perfectly. We're not going to talk about football season, David, but it's basketball season for the Michigan State Spartans. So get excited, everybody. Tom is us back. Calling all CPG shippers, truckers, and logistics pros. Welcome to the Truck Yeah podcast, your ultimate cheat code for smarter shipping, smoother logistics, and dominating the shelf where it matters most. Buckle up. It's time to learn, laugh, and get your freight on. Cut cam. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another edition of the Zip Line Logistics podcast. My name is Jesse Jewett. Joined with me, as always, Teddy Lee. Knox, hello, Teddy. Hello, how are you? Wonderful, wonderful. We've got a special guest, another special guest collaborator here of the Truck Yeah podcast. Our new CEO, David Kamisky. Good morning, David. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. So we're going to dive into your experiences, where you're from, everything that we need to know about you and your history as a transportation specialist. And then we're going to talk about collaborative partnerships. You brought that with you, starting with us here at the end of April, right, of 2025? Correct. And now we're, you know, I wouldn't say necessarily changing the way we do business, but emphasizing some positive things. So let's just start with you. Where are you from? Where did you go to school? How'd you get into transportation? Yeah, so originally from Michigan, Detroit area. So just outside of there, went to Michigan State University for supply chain management. So that's how I ended up getting into the logistics side of the business. Actually interned my way through college at a company called Menlo Worldwide Logistics. So everybody has a fascinating story about how they got in, what their first job was. You know, a lot of people from outside the industry. And coincidentally enough, my first job as an intern was faxing out paper routing guides back in the day to two-in-one automotive suppliers. We like that. Love that. Paper routing guides via fax. This is in the early 2000s? Yeah, this is like 2003, 2004. Love that. And something, you were so riveted by that, you decided to major in supply change management? Or did you go in there with that idea? You know what? It was once I actually got out of faxing routing guides and getting on the phone with customers and shippers and receivers and coordinating logistics, you know, on the behalf of the tier one auto suppliers. I just found it really exciting. I've always been a problem-solving guy. So the ability to do that in real time every day was just something that, you know, captured my attention. And I, you know, got a lot of energy out of it. That's awesome. That is. I actually have a retailer that still allows faxing for appointments. So it's still around. It's still the mix, yeah. You've got to be able to, you know, we're going to talk about tech savviness. But, you know, sometimes old tech goes a long way. Teddy, how about that? It does. That's correct. Outside of logistics, David, what do you like to do? Golf when I can, not always very good at it, but it's always a victory to get out on the course, try to keep in shape as much as possible and spend time with the family. So I've got a four-year-old daughter. And so that's usually my break from the action. Once again, another guest that has only daughters. Yes. So you're welcome on this podcast anytime. Yeah. You fit in perfectly. Right in the mix. So let's talk about your experiences. We don't necessarily need to go with, like, exact employees or employers of where we're at. But, like, talk about, you know, the messaging is collaborative partnerships. So over your, I guess, now almost 15, 18 years of transportation experience, what did you take away from some of those experiences at your previous roles? And how are they going to be deployed here, I guess? Yeah, so the biggest thing is really leaning into customer relationships and starting to, you know, kind of open up the conversation, really understand where the customer is coming from, what their current situation is, and where they're trying to go ultimately. Right? So if you think about, you know, a logistics partner in general, you know, there's many different kinds. Right? There's brokers, there's 3PLs, there's integrated 3PLs that they call them, 4PLs even, right? And so the common theme throughout that is to have mutual success, you have to have open collaborative conversations. And what I mean by that is, you know, I spent time in the LTL arena too, and we had these same conversations, you know, working for an asset-based LTL company, as working for a 3PL company and a 4PL company, is really having critical conversations with your customers to truly understand what their current state is, where they are, what their problems are, and where they're trying to go. So you're saying a critical conversation is not just, what's your cheapest price? Exactly. OK. Exactly. Can you give me some examples of a question that you might ask to draw something on? I don't want to give way too many secrets here. That's right. But just general broad questions, right? Yeah. So, you know, a lot of it starts with, you know, before we get into the questions is, you know, really what's important to you, right? And, you know, starting to understand, hey, what's important, where your problem area is in biggest pain points. And then, you know, from the provider side is, you know, hey, what's important to us? And finding the intersection of those two things is where you can start to uncover, hey, I think we've got some opportunity within the network, specifically within the shippers network to drive results for their business. And then how do we go about executing that? I think that's something that's overlooked so often in logistics is how important it is for us to worry about what we need our days. Like, using the right carrier makes life a little bit easier because there's more visibility, there's more tracking. And that lines up really nicely with our values. And a lot of our customers' values as well. I think that's something that people don't always understand or think about when they're thinking about logistics. They just think about the initial price. And that doesn't create a collaborative network usually. Yeah, the interesting part is when you step back and think about it, what you're really doing is moving further away from the transaction. And then talking about what are the things that can drive actionable value in the network that are outcome-based discussions with customers. So, hey, I'm opening up a new distribution center on the West Coast. Help me understand what the total ended cost impact is going to be to me from a transportation perspective. Or help me start to engineer that network and do a center gravity study to figure out, hey, where should I put that facility? Because I want to reach 98% of my customers within a two-day transit. Yeah, there's a lot of layers to peel back, right? I mean, we've talked about it before. Something as granular as a ship day for a specific lane. That we've done that through our technology canopy. If you ship this two-day point on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, you're actually going to save money. You have more capacity versus Tuesdays and Thursdays. Because it's a two-day point, and it hits the MAVD. So those things are-- I mean, that's a specific lane. You were talking about a distribution center and a network on where it's going to go. But those are the types of solutions that are collaborative, right, and acting as an extension, in my opinion, of the customer or the shipper that you're dealing with. I think-- this is one of my favorite things about ZipLine is that it's always kind of the give and take. It's never just like you're holding on to information to be the most valuable. You're giving that. You're educating, but you're constantly learning as well. And that's something that I've noticed the second that you stepped in these doors is it's not you withholding anything. It's just constant information going forward and getting involved with customers. And that moves around. And I think that really helps individual customers, but the company as well, which is also extremely important. Yeah, the biggest thing with customers at the end of the day is transparency, right? That's the basis of any sort of collaborative partnership. Once you have transparency, you can start to build trust through execution. And then also that conversation of understanding what's important to them and where they want to be, then you start to step into that trusted advisor role. And I think that's important because it's the basis of moving away from a transaction to a collaborative, outcome-based partnership. That's awesome. So you're six months in, roughly, to your tenure here at Zipline. We've, like I said, emphasized a lot of the things that we took in our first 14 years or 17 years of existence. And now we're focused here in Q4 and beyond developing those solutions for our customers. How are we going to do that? Or what are we focused on? Yeah, so one of the big things that you have to understand foundationally is we've got a lot of great history here. And we have great service. We've got a proprietary technology. We've built this team of retail experts. And then we have a capacity network that's very large that we can curate on behalf of our customers to serve their business the way it needs to be serviced. So our focus, at least, kind of step one, was just grounding in on, what does the customer journey look like? Because at the end of the day, we have to meet customers where they are and then start to understand, what's the situation and the problems in their business? How can we help identify and help them understand the magnitude of what those are? And then how we can put a solution in front of them that's going to drive value within their business from an outcome perspective. And so it's different across the brands. As you guys know, you've been here for quite a while. The emerging brand versus the scaling brand versus somebody who's established or mature, they all have different pain points. Their networks change over time as they start to build volume into retailers and grocers and leverage different intermediaries within the supply chain. So really starting there and then coming in and just having transparent open conversations about-- not necessarily about capacity, we can do the execution all day. But where are you trying to go, right? Like, hey, we see you as a brand that's scaling, right? You might have a heavy East Coast presence that's 80% of your volume. But what are your growth goals? What other retailers are you trying to get into? Are you looking at retailers on the West Coast and you don't have a solution for that? And that's really where we can help shine and really be an advisor and drive true value with customers. Because that's how we're differentiated. We've got the execution piece, but strategically we can step back and take a look at your network. We can look at all of that data and start to say, hey, if you're going to get into these West Coast retailers, this is what we would recommend as a strategy. And then we wouldn't just take that and say, hey, you must implement it. It becomes a conversation starter to say, how you view it, right? And then starting to take that knowledge of a 3PL expertise that does this across multiple different customers, but then also the knowledge that sits inside that company that you're working with or a shipper to start to blend those two approaches because you may have to make adjustments. What works for one and could be best practice for a certain shipper may not work for another shipper based on a number of different factors, whether it's volume, skew count, some of the things that we've talked about. And that's where we really can dig in and take a really hard look at that network and start to say, hey, here's where we're starting. Now let's have an open conversation with the customer and start to understand why this would or would not work. And then continually iterating on that and then delivering through execution. That's what keeps it so fun. It's never the same. There's always something. There's always a problem to solve. And I think it makes it a little bit more enjoyable. But I think that's also our retail experts out on the floor make that much of a difference because they've seen variations of everything. So it makes it very simple to put things together based off of one individual supply chain. Nailed it. We talked about our history, looking at our history that we've established over the first 17 years of existence. And now the baton has been passed to David. And it's funny, or at least it's funny to me, of taking our values that we were founded on-- communication, education, experience, partnership, integrity-- I missed one. Accountability. Accountability. There you go, Teddy. And that's all part of what-- it's literally in the note there-- collaborative partnerships, right? That's one of the values that we were founded on. So we're expanding on it and emphasizing our people, our technology, and our capacity. That's all integrated within those values. And it results in the place that we're sitting in today, which is an excellent 3PL that has a lot of growth potential. And the customers that we've established that we've been working with for multiple, multiple years, right? In some cases, 10-plus appreciate the collaborative partnership that we've established. So having David here to kind of emphasize that and grow on it is exciting as we head into 2026 and finish out 2025 strong. I like that you said, like, grow on it, because I feel like it's-- I think it's pretty cool that our values have not changed. Yeah. And ever. And I think the customers that have worked with us for a long period of time would be able to see that as well. But there is a lot of growth. We're constantly growing with them. But to your point, David, every growth is a little bit different. So it's not going to look the same customer over customer. And I think that that's pretty cool. Keeps you on your toes. Yeah. I think it's interesting too, right, when you think about the very strong foundation. And the focus starts to shift towards really around meeting the customer where they are. I think it's really important to understand that growth journey, because our job is to understand what those challenges are in the business and pair that with our expertise to come up with solutions that make sense for customers within their stage of growth. And those are bespoke solutions. It's not, hey, this is off the shelf. This is what you get. Square peg round hole. We're truly running through a consultative process to figure out how to engineer the best outcomes for your networks based on the capabilities we can deliver. Even canopy, just the flip of a switch. And it has changed to what you need and what you want with your network. It's not a TMS or a portal or something that is the same for everyone. It's customizable for each individual user. Customization. Yep. I was thinking about that, the bespoke solutions for the customer, right? You think about like a consolidation. We're going to consolidate all your freight. No problem. Well, it's cool when you actually look at it. Our freight is maxed out at two pallets. So it's one of the two pallets. You can't really consolidate 15 stops on a truck, right? So now that's got to pivot to an LTL solution, in my opinion. So those are the examples that we're talking about, as we get more granular. What else do we miss? Yeah, no, just building on that point, too, right? When I think the important thing to note is we're doing that every day, right? It's not like our goal is to be an extension of the customer and drive outcome-based solutions, right? That deliver XYZ, that have a meaningful impact on our customers. And as serving as that extension of their business, our expectation of ourselves, most importantly, first. And then our customers is we are doing that dynamically on a daily basis to help drive those consolidation opportunities within the business. And so I think when you talk about canopy and outcome-based relationships, you move from this-- I would call it management and oversight from the customer perspective to driving insights into the business that can help propel their business forward. Well said. I don't even have anything to add to it. That's rare. I think we're ready to wrap. Well, I mean, I think back to the foundation of transparent conversations, leaning into customers. I think the core DNA of our company and our people is we want to win for our customers, right? And so that doesn't change. I think we hit the turbo button on that, and we continue to go harder and lean into those relationships. And regardless of where any company sits within their journey, the approach to partnerships really transcends all of those, because there could be different shipping profiles, different modes, different pain points, network complexities. As you move across that scale of-- we're moving from an emerging brand to scaling to establish to mature is that transparency and driving that conversation is appreciated across all of those things. And customers constantly change, right? So that's why we have our engagement strategy with customers to make sure we're out in front of them having conversations, because we want to make sure that we're getting the headline news first, so that we can figure out, OK, this is how we're going to help you pivot to drive results. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, if anyone wants to talk about this further, 888-GOZIP-LARN, give us a call. We'd love to connect you with David. It's going to take a few extra steps to get to him. He is the CEO of the company. As always, leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. We're not going to talk about football season, David, but it's basketball season for the Michigan State Spartans, so get excited, everybody. Tom is those back. And he's ready to defend the Big 10 title. Thank you for coming on. Another edition of the Zip Line Logistics podcast. And we'll see you next time. Thank you.