If you think of the transportation industry as a community, then Matchmaker Logistics in an active member of its neighborhood watch program. We maintain paid subscriptions to several “watch dog” services, including one invitation-only program, that shares information about carriers across the country. When brokers experience a serious problem with a carrier (loads double-brokered, loads held hostage, service failures, etc.), they post this information as a friendly, cautionary alert to other brokers in the industry. At Matchmaker, we take our watch dog efforts seriously. We have systems in place to add all problem carriers
Read more →Archive for the Matchmaker Logistics Corporate Culture Category
We often use this space to talk about our efforts to provide great service, but don’t think that we have never had a service failure–I wish that were the case! Nobody bats a thousand, and recently, we experienced a particularly painful steee-rike! It happened with a long-time customer who ships time-sensitive, extremely fragile machinery from coast to coast. Like many businesses, this customer had become more price conscious over the past few years. As a result, we had been steadily losing a good percentage of their business based on price. After a recent shipment
Read more →In recognition of our industry’s best and most hard-working truck drivers, we distributed Truck Driver Survival Kits at the recent 2012 NASTC conference. Here’s what was inside: B/C Powder: To relieve the headaches of the job Band-Aid: To help you repair broken trucks Brown Paper Bag: So you won’t hyperventilate while getting your truck unloaded Eraser: To get rid of problems on the road Gum: To get you out of sticky situations Laffy Taffy: To remind you to keep your sense of humor in traffic Lifesaver: To keep you from drowning in everyday problems
Read more →Cold calling stinks. Marketing is mysterious. And, advertising is just plain awful. I know I’m not the only who feels this way. Experts estimate that the average person sees more than 3,000 marketing messages per day. Go to a major supermarket, and you can increase that number to 37,000 if you count all of the products on the shelves. With hundreds of advertisements everywhere from the bottom of your soda cap to the back of the bathroom stall door, it’s no wonder we’re overwhelmed by all of the marketing chatter. We see approximately 250
Read more →I consider myself to be an extremely lucky guy. I was blessed with great parents, an incredible wife, two amazing children. Opportunities like playing on a nationally ranked Ultimate Frisbee team and being a guitar player in not one, but two, regularly working bands have serendipitously fallen into my lap. Some might call me a lucky dog, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Not so long ago, we decided to add a full-time Administrative Assistant to the Matchmaker Logistics team. I started by placing an ad on craigslist.org, much to the horror of friends with extensive
Read more →What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.” ~ A. A. Milne, Creator of Winnie-the-Pooh With two young daughters in the house, I get my fill of Disney movies, storybooks, and silly kid jokes: “Dad! Why did the potato cross the road? It saw a fork up ahead!” Kids love corny. And, at Matchmaker Logistics we love what one of our customers called “small potatoes”. When other shipping giants couldn’t help out this ‘little guy’, we’re proud to say we were able
Read more →This week at Matchmaker, we’ve been talking about “drills” and “holes” just as much as we’ve been talking about trucks. That’s because we have a new page on our website entitled: Why We’re Not in the Business of Finding Trucks (and why you might be our perfect match…) This process of going public with a profile of our typical customer and our approach to helping said customer reminded me of an old joke that perfectly illustrates why it’s all about “the hole” (and not necessarily about “the drill”): An entrepreneur attended an auction at which he won the bid on an old
Read more →This Tuesday, we celebrated the 6th anniversary of Pam Carrier’s employment with Matchmaker. Considering that the average employee spends just 4.1 years with an employer these days, 6 years means a lot. Some companies out there do some pretty ‘crazy’ things to retain their talent: Chesapeake Energy offers dermatology services, including Botox injections. Employees also have access to tanning beds and spray tanning services. Cisco employees can drop off their cars with mechanics for a free oil change. Microsoft’s Redmond Campus has over 20 shops and restaurants, including a spa and a pub! Kimpton
Read more →If you missed the quarterfinal soccer match in the 2011 Women’s World Cup Sunday night, you missed history in the making! The USA played against Brazil. It was an epic battle, physically and emotionally draining for both teams. There were several controversial calls and emotions ran high. Brazil took a 2-1 lead in the extra 30 minutes of the game. On the verge of their earliest World Cup exit ever, the U.S. women’s national team needed a miracle to fight off elimination. Down to their final minute (minute 122), Abby Wambach tied the score
Read more →At Matchmaker Logistics, we have always viewed the carriers we work with as customers. Our founder, Jim Skane Sr., always emphasized that without the carriers we had no business. We believe that by building relationships with quality carriers and earning their confidence, we become better able to service our shipping customers. We strive to go beyond “The Golden Rule” and continually search for ways to make our service more valuable to the carriers that rely on us to load their trucks. That Was Easy! For example, at Matchmaker, we use the Aljex software system which
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