Ken Adamo (EASE Logistics) on Why You Can't Price Like a Coward

The Friday before the Fourth of July this year, nobody could find a truck. By Monday there were trucks everywhere and no loads, and spot conversion at EASE Logistics fell by more than half overnight. What Ken Adamo's pricing team did over the following week says a lot about how a modern brokerage finds the market when it moves out from under them. Ken spent seven years at DAT talking about the freight market from the stage before joining EASE, and now he lives with his own predictions every day. In this conversation he explains why API and bot pricing now show you a competitor's move the same morning instead of a month later, why a "no" teaches a pricing model far less than a "yes," and why he'd rather start a lane low and work up than start high and work down. He also gets into how EASE treats conversion, margin, and model accuracy as one triangle, and why, at a lot of brokerages, bots convert three to four times better than human reps. On the market side, Ken breaks down why this cycle is supply-driven rather than demand-driven, what Delilah's Law and the Montgomery decision could mean for small carriers and offshore dispatch, and why he thinks big asset carriers with brokerage arms come out ahead. **What you'll learn:** - How to price your way out of a cliff: what happened to conversion, margin, and model accuracy at EASE the Monday after the Fourth, and how chasing the market down led to seven straight days of spot records - Why you start low and work up: loads bunch between $0 and about $2 a mile with a long tail out to $7 or $8, so pricing high first can leave you losing for days before you find the market - Why a "no" is a weak signal: brokers don't know their cost when they sell, and only a win tells you what the load actually cost to buy - The pricing triangle: how conversion, margin, and model accuracy fit together, and why rate tools get you in the zone but can't land you inside a 3-5% margin business - Why bots out-convert humans: people are good at avoiding losers and bad at capturing upside, and what that means for algorithmic pricing at scale - How to keep humans in the loop: an operator's call to take 5% off the model took a Midwest commodity shipper from 1 in 15 wins to 6 in 15, while a pricing test on light loads got burned on reefers - What Ken didn't see from the DAT side: drop vs. live load, why the ninth load on a lane prices differently than the first, and the one-month sabbatical he wishes he'd taken - Why capacity is measured in hours and miles, not trucks: how an 8-10% shift reshapes rates, and where English proficiency, non-domiciled CDLs, and Delilah's Law fit in - What Montgomery means for brokers and carriers: the drift toward a 12-month authority standard, conditional ratings, and why scale wins **Time-stamped highlights:** - (00:00) Intro: Ken on talking about the market for seven years, then having to go live it - (01:10) Why demand is the more powerful lever in freight: COVID, fracking, and the busy Omicron February - (02:06) The Fourth of July cliff: hair on fire the Friday before, trucks everywhere and no loads on Monday - (02:51) How freight reaches a broker through the routing guide, explained as a dinner with no reservation - (04:15) A fragmented market: data centers, heavy industrial, and flatbed fracking are strong while retail is soft - (05:25) Why retail demand is weak: beverage alcohol, lifestyle shifts, $4.50 gas, and locked-in mortgage rates - (07:09) The freight calendar, and why Costco's shelves tell you when freight is about to pick up - (08:38) Blitz weeks, hurricanes, and weather as bumps on the curve - (09:47) Capacity is measured in hours and miles, and what the ELD mandate taught us about an 8-10% shift - (10:44) English proficiency, non-domiciled CDLs, and the crackdown on truck driving schools - (13:07) Delilah's Law: proficiency testing at issuance and a ban on offshore dispatch - (15:34) What the Montgomery decision means for small and new carriers - (16:56) EASE's driver standards, and why more brokers are now fishing in their pond - (17:51) Conditional ratings and a heyday for carrier vetting companies - (19:57) Why big carriers with brokerage arms win: insurance, compliance, and Schneider's orange boxes - (22:37) How recent policy pushes the industry toward bigger brokerages - (23:50) What Ken got right after leaving DAT: data is king at any broker size - (24:54) Waking up with seven to ten of a shipper's 10 daily Fontana to Sparks loads because a competitor saw the market move first - (26:00) The one-month sabbatical he wishes he'd taken, drop vs. live load, and the ninth load on a lane - (28:17) "Capital B brokerage" and the triangle of conversion, margin, and pricing accuracy - (29:16) After the Fourth: conversion down more than 50%, chasing the market, and seven straight days of spot records - (30:56) "You can't price like a coward," and why you start low and work up - (32:22) Why a "no" signal is so much less rich than a "yes" in a 3-5% margin business - (34:17) Model accuracy, DAT's weekly benchmark report, and why an 11 AM same-day pickup isn't a 3 PM one - (36:11) The problem of operating too well, and brokers who hand back loads that go against them - (37:46) Sales, ops, and pricing as three functions, and managing to gross margin dollars - (40:08) Ken's contrarian view: algorithmic pricing and strong relationships can coexist at scale - (43:02) Bots vs. humans: why bots convert three to four times better - (45:06) Keeping humans in the loop, and the 5% test that took a shipper from 1 in 15 wins to 6 in 15 - (47:03) Experimentation, and the light-load pricing test that failed on reefers - (48:55) What Uber teaches about price, and what $100 more on every load would mean for a brokerage - (50:38) Shipments per employee per day, and running EASE with under 200 people - (55:20) Can boutique brokers compete? Incumbency in RFPs and brokers built around one shipper - (57:00) What Ken is excited about over the next 12 months **Guest:** Ken Adamo, Chief Strategy Officer, EASE Logistics Ken spent seven years at DAT Freight & Analytics, where he talked to brokers about freight market data and pricing from the stage. Before DAT, he worked inside a brokerage doing several hundred million dollars a year. As Chief Strategy Officer at EASE Logistics, he's back on the operating side, working with the company's pricing and operations teams on spot and algorithmic pricing.