Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best

Shashi: Welcome to this new edition of the Dreamers and Doers Podcast from Aryaka Networks, where we invite thought leaders from all over the world for some candid and insightful conversations. In today's episode, we're talking to the Chief Technology Officer of an innovative transportation and logistics services provider that specializes in moving freight to almost any part of the globe or any industry. They've been in existence for over 50 years. I'm referring to the Pennsylvania-based Pilot Freight Services. I'm thrilled to welcome Mark Baker, the CTO. Mark, thanks for joining us.

Mark Baker: Thank you, Shashi. It's my pleasure and looking forward to today's conversation.

Shashi: Let's get started with perhaps you describing what Pilot Freight Services does and your role in the company.

Mark Baker: Yes, I'm the Chief Technology Officer. Pilot Freight is a leading Asset-Lite 3PL provider, we specialize in the end to end transportation solutions all over the world. We have a heavy focus in domestic in the US. We also concentrate in two areas of B2B and B2C. In our B2C market, we're actually considered the second largest provider of business to consumer in the heavy, bulky goods in the US, we do a lot of work with Amazon Walmart, companies like Purple Mattress, Bed Bath & Beyond. Whatever you have, say, for example, if you bought a mattress from Purple, we'd most likely be the carrier that would bring that and also take away your old mattress.

Those are some of the unique pieces. We also deal with the full mile and last mile. Full mile being we handle from distribution manufacturer all the way to the consumer. The last mile being from a distribution center to the consumer's home. With that, we've got approximately 75 facilities around the US. We're able to service literally every zip code in the country, we're able to offer a variety of services with that. In my role as the Chief Technology Officer, I manage the information and the flow and the technology necessary in order to carry that freight and move it from point A to point B and all information and data points that that generates that we need to provide on a real-time basis to both the consumer but also back to the customers, which we deal with.

Shashi: All this seems simple but we know it is not. I know freight and logistics as we know somewhat of a traditional industry but when we scour your website, we see the mention of it having a technology-forward culture. What does this mean in the context of Pilot Freight and, broadly speaking, could you talk about the state of technology in this freight and logistics industry and how it's evolving?

Mark Baker: Yes, a lot of people interact with companies that they perceive to be technology forward, obviously the UPS and FedEx of the world, which have a lot of sophisticated tracking, dealing with companies like Amazon, they provide a lot of real-time tracking. In reality that throughout the industry, really where this happens all over the globe, there are some very, very heavy legacy presence in the industry, a lot of old equipment, old programs, things that have been used over the decades in order to move freight.

We obviously move, point A to point B, it could be anything from Shanghai, China to Chicago, Illinois, or from New York City to Los Angeles. In that particular movement, a lot of people really don't pause to think that there could be literally at times hundreds of decisions that have to be made around the movement of freight from point A to point B. That package that you order from the online retailer has got to be moved and it has to be decided the route it's going to take, the cost it's going to be, all of those things are being calculated today on an almost real-time fashion and for the transportation logistics provider today in order to participate in that heavily growing e-commerce market, but also in the business to business because we deal with things like just on time, is that you've got to be able to provide the technology solutions that go along with that.

You need to be thinking forward about your technology, not just with what you're doing today but how am I going to service that? How am I going to improve the services and how do I bring value to the consumer, both at a business level and also the consumer level? That's why we referenced ourselves as a technology forward-thinking company, that it's really about how we move information along with moving that physical piece of freight to someone's home or to another business.

Shashi: Mark as a consumer, I'm incredibly grateful for the transportation freight and logistics industry and truly enjoy the benefits, particularly during the pandemic, sitting at home when we had goods delivered at the click of a button. If I were to think about it from your perspective, while a lot of us got to sit and work from home, you were deemed an essential service by the government in the United States, and I'm pretty sure from governments the world over.

As an essential service, I imagine you had to adapt faster than most industries while dealing with this pandemic at a human level yourselves. You mentioned some large customers, AWS and Walmart, and others, they were deemed essential services industries, and they were dependent on you. I think the big trigger is, how did you cope with this sudden need to transform yourself? Could you talk about that experience, from a pilot perspective and how you navigated the situation for your customers as well?

Mark Baker: Yes. Really, when you step back from it all, you have to, people talk about vision, they talk about whether you're a visionary, they talk about, what are you think about and one of the things that I consider in my particular role, particularly as the CTO, along with our CEO, is that Pilot has always having to be thinking about what are we going to be doing in the future? How are we going to prepare ourselves? The old axiom of plan for the worst hope for the best is something that's been around in the technology world for a long, long time, disaster recovery, common terms like that, that you hear and a lot of times aren't really tested until a crisis happens.

There were a lot of companies during events like 911, where today those companies no longer exist because they weren't prepared for such a catastrophic event. You have that same thing today with companies as a result of the pandemic is that they don't exist anymore, because they really didn't know how to cope with something like that. Pilot, I think, does a really good job in terms of constantly thinking about the future or thinking about things of how we can position ourselves.

When I joined the company, one of the elements that I needed to think about was is what would Pilot do in the case of a disaster, and not just a disaster in the traditional sense of people think about hurricanes or floods or these types of things that might affect the data center but also when we use the term business continuity, what does that really mean? How do we make sure that we can do our business in any type of crisis? Well, the pandemic was one that really changed the dynamics.

Pilot had to move in a matter of hours or days, to transform itself into, first of, remote workers, people that could do their jobs. Well, that was done because we laid in foundations over the last few years of going completely into the cloud. The second was being able to provide the type of networking, partnering with companies like Aryaka, that we could be very, very nimble and responsive to our customers. Then once that started to occur, then we found all of a sudden, we were dealing with exponential growth, as you said, during the pandemic, a lot of people all of a sudden realized that they weren't going anywhere.

Instead of going to the brick-and-mortar store, they were ordering online. A benefit in one sense [unintelligible 00:08:16] was we experienced tremendous growth in our B2C e-commerce area, as a result of that, was something we needed to adapt very quickly to and that really came as a result of the systems that we had, keeping them scalable, keeping them in a fashion to where we could meet the unique needs and then we could also respond to the volume levels that started to increase.

Now, like a lot of companies, everybody experienced a real challenge in that area. We like to say that, everybody was perfect but the reality was, it was just capacity. All of a sudden people who were used to getting things the next day in the morning, or overnight, sometimes they had to delay a little bit, but overall, I think Pilot did an excellent job in responding to it. I would have to compliment the IT team, but the company as a whole from its leadership at the executive level, through those people who work the docks, who basically load the trucks that they were responsive.

They also understood the fact that they were actually putting themselves at risk during that entire period in the fact that they were being exposed, potentially. We did an excellent job adapting early on protocols, and actually had very, very few incidences where we had exposure. We took precautions with our customers, we changed our service offering where we did in-home delivery, we had to change and adapt to that quickly. All of that is really when you come right back to the term that you brought up earlier, not only technology forward but it's really about logistics forward is that we needed to be nimble, we needed to optimize and we needed to really be responsive to the shifting marketplace.

Shashi: That's really fascinating, Mark. I'm truly grateful to companies such as yourselves for being in the frontline, so to speak, and making sure that the whole machinery didn't grind to halt and people like you at the helm along with your teams that were able to keep things moving and have a sense of normalcy, which is very important to get back to. Speaking of transformation you mentioned this was a cataclysmic event of sorts that not many people could foresee. Some other things that come about from the left-field are mergers and acquisitions. You could either be an acquirer or an acquire and I know recently for example Pilot acquired DSI logistics. I keep reading about other acquisitions that the company makes from time to time. Especially now so that the transportation and logistics industry has become a hot market I think these will continue. From a CTO advantage point, how do you handle this transformation when you have to bring technology stacks from disparate companies together in a manner that's less disruptive for both the acquirer and the acquiree?

Mark Baker: Well, it's always a challenge too. It's easy to buy, it's another thing to merge. Consequently, you have to really position yourself to be nimble if you will, in this given area. Some of that is just really, how do you consolidate how do you bring not only the IT systems that are in some cases very disparate in these acquisitions but also the people along with that and it's making sure that they're able to one, first become and identify that they are now a Pilot employee. Whereas in the case of DSI, they were DSI employees for a number of years. One of the things that I think Pilot has really learned to do well in its acquisition strategies is that it really has approached it with a one from the beginning is that we do a lot of testing and scoring of our potential targets that we want to acquire.

Now pilot historically was originally somewhat of a franchisee-franchisor model but has really grown to where it's acquired most right on the verge of all of our franchise operations. That we really are now one corporate entity, but when it comes to the third-party acquisitions like DSI and Manna Freight is that we concentrated in areas where we felt that the growth was going to be there. DSI in the case of last-mile is again a response to the growth that we have seen shifting the patterns that we've seen shifting because it's not only in the case of where people were used to ordering online. Another dynamic that we deal is we work with customers like Lowe's and other building supplies, is that people will go to a store and they'll buy something. It may be an appliance, it could be materials. It could be something of that nature.

Pilot has positioned itself where it not only can operate from a distribution center to bring something to your home. Pilot actually operates embedded into, in some cases into the actual retail store. When you order something or whenever you want to go and buy something and you don't have the means to get a home, Pilot is there to be able to be responsive and actually move that material or move that delivery and deliver it to a home. All of that goes to make up is that, so how do you actually acquire and how do you start to merge that into it? First off it is you have unification of the technology from my perspective, and making sure that you can move it. At the end of the day, it's really information. That information just is maybe locked away in a different system.

It has a different way. One thing that Pilot has concentrated on is positioning itself so that it could really bring data together quickly, our ability to analyze, our ability to look at data and then make those decisions as we're acquiring, and that company to make sure that we're not disruptive to its customers, disruptive to its employees, disruptive to its shareholders, and then make sure that we bring them in such way. We've done that with a variety of different products and different services, but being in the cloud, this has allowed us to leverage Pilot. Didn't take the traditional approach of what I would call the typical freight forward in acquiring technology like an ERP. We took more of a best-of-breed is that we find the best possible solutions. Then we integrate those together. By doing that, it's really allowed us to respond and be very elastic in the marketplace. As we do acquire a target to acquisition. We're actually able to take their technology and move it in. In many cases, we actually take the best of the best, bring it together and then really integrate it and do some really fantastic result.

Shashi: It's like a technology chef in the making, you need the right ingredients to get the right taste at the end of the day.

Mark Baker: Exactly.

Shashi: Knowing you, Mark, you've actually held roles in pretty fast-paced companies, both as a CIO, as well as a CTO, you've taken some of these fast-growing companies and then stepped on the accelerator to speed it further. I guess the trick is to go fast with reduced risk. If I may ask, how do you frame the vision for these roles, because both of them require you to play the role of a visionary? Then how do you ensure that vision doesn't get compromised or the risk doesn't get elevated? How do you preserve that customer experience in all of these different roles?

Mark Baker: Well, I think it starts with the fact that when I began my career is that I was been approaching and I actually, some time ago I grew up in a family. My father owned a transportation logistics company, I swore one day I would get out it. I think today he laughs and I'm back in it operating as a CTO level, but I look at things from a very simple point of view and the fact that it's what does the business do? Then I ask the simple question is there's got to be an easier way to do this. I think part of being a visionary is that you have to first understand the company you're working for and particularly people in a CIO or a CTO role is that it's not about the technology. The technology is just simply an enabler in order for the business to meet its mission and vision.

Part of the job of the CIO and the CTO today is they've got to come into a company and they really need to look at it and understand what does this company do? What does this industry do? What are the unique opportunities and what are the challenges that it faces? Given that, as you start to really understand that and say, "How can I take this thing called technology and enable this business to be faster, more lean?

How can I help it to grow revenues? How can I help it to gain its EBITA and to produce more profit orientation to not only what it's doing with its customers, but all also with its employees?" We talk about words like efficiency and productivity. A lot of times people, I think lose sight of that. It's not just about reducing headcount, but maybe it's enhancing employees. Think about the massive amounts of data that we handle as companies today.

One of the areas that we talk about a lot is data quality. The question is how can we improve that quality of data? How do we take our employees and give them something to help enhance their job and make them capable of doing more sometimes with less time. I think that there's a grand opportunity in areas like artificial intelligence. People sometimes get a little scared about that term because they think that's a replacement for me as a human being. No, actually, if you really embrace it, and this is where the job of CIO and CTO comes into play, it's helping people to understand is that I'm going to actually bring a technology that's not only going to enable you to do your job more efficient, but I'm actually going to do something that's going to enhance your ability to do a job than what you're doing.

Consequently, you're going to benefit the company in terms of revenue growth, perhaps it's sales to someone who's actually doing operations or administration so that they can deliver better information to make the company more profitable. Those the type of things that when I look to be a visionary is that you have to be constantly aware of what's changing what's happening in the end industry. You need to look at things and say, "What would that look like in the next five to 10 years? How could I take that product or service that's emerging on the market and apply that in the business that I worked within and I could make it an improvement, not for the sake of the technology or the latest shiny object, but really, really enable the business to meet what is its mission? What is its vision? You know, what is it trying to do?"

If you do that, if a CIO or CTO really focuses from the business view first, then I think that they can have an incredibly successful career, a lot of fun at what they do, and certainly accomplish some great deal of things. It doesn't mean that it's all easy, but it doesn't mean that it can't be done, because I truly believe that there's nothing impossible, there's nothing that can't be done if you just simply take those two words out of your vocabulary.

Shashi: That's something we're going to convert into a sticker then. [laughs] Mark, this is really good. Maybe you want to switch gears a little bit. You mentioned career. I want to talk about your career a bit. How did you get to become a CTO or a CIO? I learned that it's part of the family business now, but you've probably gone down this parallel path without aiming to go there. Could you trace the arc of your careers journey and also sure you're mentoring a lot of people who are coming to you for advice and paying it forward. What's your advice to people that want to follow in your footsteps?

Mark Baker: For me? I simply started down the path. I actually did not go with the intention and didn't have a structured career of wanting to get into IT and technology, I just simply looked for a better way to do something. I used to have to do billing and invoicing for a company. I simply asked the question of there's got to be a better and easier way to do that. Well, that led me down the path of buying a computer and learning how to program to write an accounts receivable program. Sometimes you fall into a career, not because you do it with intention, but sometimes you do it out of necessity or desire to want to improve something but as a result of what I found was it wasn't that it was the technology that grabbed my attention, it was a fact that I found a particular way to improve something that a business was struggling with and that I could actually make it better and more easy not only for myself but other colleagues with it. That's really what started me down my track.

What I learned in the lesson early on was three simple rules that I've applied in my career that I say it on my opening day when I've gone to different companies and I have the first rule is, never lie to me because I firmly believe that trust is the most easy thing in the world for people to lose between one another. It's the most difficult thing for people to gain back. Now, can it be earned back? Absolutely it can be but most people won't do the work necessary to do that. Relationship is really built upon trust. I think it's important that people in their career, particularly those that want to be a CIO or CTO, they really have to have trust at the forefront because you are being trusted by the executives, by the shareholders, by a number of people, not only with what you do on a day-to-day basis but IT organizations can literally put a company out of business.

In the fact that think about the amount of global systems that are out there, think about the ransomware, think about some of the high profile cases whereby IT allowed say a ransomware into the company. Consequently, it literally froze them out of their ability to do business. It's a critical role and trust for me is an essential piece. I start that out with just something within the department of the employees that work for me or I work with on a daily basis. The second one is pretty simple. Make a backup before you start. We're all human beings, we're going to make mistakes. If you can start with where you are or where you started from, and you get there with a backup, whatever form it takes, it's always a good thing just to be able to have that ability to fall back to the point of where you launched as you go into something.

The third rule is the most important to me is mutual respect. I absolutely believe that no one is any more important than anyone in a company and organization. From my point of view, is that I think it's important, particularly being a leader is that if you want to be in a leadership role, you need to remember servant leadership. You're there to serve the people that you are leading. You're not there to be their boss. If you're there to give them guidance, you're to get them a vision of what they need to work for. You're there to encourage them so from the point of view is that you've got to start with, do I respect all of my employees, and do my employees respect each other? It doesn't mean that we don't disagree. It doesn't mean that people have their own opinions and that's good, and that's a healthy thing because sometimes out of those discussions come the best ideas.

By applying those three principles and three rules into an organization, that's really what has helped me in my career and achieving what I want to achieve. Then as a result of that is I found just, I have a little bit of a selfish side, if you will, in the fact that I don't follow well, I like to be the guy in charge or the person in charge, consequently, because I feel like that sometimes it's a little bit of what a leader has to have. They have to have the desire to want to be out front, with that, it comes with a great deal of responsibility. I think people can remember that if they can remember the fact that you're there, you are the person upfront, you're the person who has got to be the one who is taking responsibility for everything, no matter whose fault it is at the end of the day, it's your responsibility to be a leader.

Leadership to me is the utmost quality that you have to happen. Those three principles are really the ones that serve you well. As a result of that, you can help people along the way. I love pushing people up. Just to share a quick story with you, I worked for a nonprofit in my career, and I had a young lady who was faxing administrative assistance, who worked in a different department who had a knack for programming and I encouraged her to develop her skill sets and she really enjoyed it. She had an opportunity to go to work for another company. She was afraid because she was comfortable in her particular role. I encouraged her to leave and I tried to help her understand what skills she had and where things were going. This was actually back in the early '90s.

Consequently, the opportunities were vast at that particular time. She called me a couple of years after that. She said that I really wanted to just call him, thank you for encouraging me to leave because as a result of leaving, she has become the top developer in another company. She had actually attained the title of VP of development, and she was making well over the amount of money that she was being paid at the nonprofit but at the same time, it's you build into people. The greatest satisfaction that you can have as a leader is pushing your people up, pushing them out, and having them grow. For me, I get the most excited, but the most joy in what I do when I see other people succeed. If I got a chance to play a part of that role in their career, great, that's really what it's about. People don't remember you for the stuff you have, they remember you for the relationships and the things that you do for them along the way but sometimes it can be a little act and sometimes it could be a major shift, but whatever you do remember, people are people and always remember to help. By helping them you'll help yourself.

Shashi: Mark, that was so beautifully said. It was extremely insightful for me clearly as I say, great power comes great responsibility, and you have taken that responsibility to heart and made it your own. The three things that you stated about really having that mutual respect, having a plan, and building trust, which I thought is very important. Today we fixate so much on technology that we put trust to the background sometimes in this era of instant gratification. Earning that trust and keeping it can go such a long way. I thought that was the highlight of the podcast session. Thank you for that wonderful narration. I wanted to thank you for your time here, as well as for being an Aryaka customer. It's something we're very proud of to have you and retain you and make sure that you have good experiences with the company. We wish to have you back at some point and maybe talk about leadership because that's an area I know you excel in.

Mark Baker: Shashi, I really appreciate it. It's been my pleasure. I will tell you as an Aryaka customer and just as a company, I've always been a great admirer of Aryaka, not only the technology it provides but the people that I've met and grown to appreciate a relationship with them over the years that you guys doing fantastic guy. I would certainly encourage anyone who is out in the marketplace for the services, please take a look at it. It's one that I can tell you from my point of view, I've been a customer well over a decade with Aryaka, but more important is I'll go back to what I said about trust. Aryaka has been a very valued and trusted partner for me. Remember part of that in developing yourselves, as leaders, CIOs, and CTOs, that you've got to find those strategic partners that will allow you to trust them. Certainly, you guys have done that for me. I really appreciate it, the opportunity here. I hope that this message will help anyone who is certainly considering this particular track and give them some insight into how and why you might want to consider this.

Shashi: Mark, thank you so much for those kind words. We treasure them. We hope to keep that trust going in the future as well. Folks that was Mark Baker, CTO of Pilot Freight Services. With that, we're going to do a wrap up this podcast. Thank you for listening.

Note: The transcripts of the podcasts may not be fully accurate. Please excuse any grammar and spelling issues.