In this episode, I sit down with Josh Lyles, founder of Sales Dash CRM.

He has an unbelievable story.

Our relationship started with a cold call.

He started at the front desk at a gym.

He moved to Tesla where he climbed the ranks and he just wasn't fulfilled.

So he started a company built around a CRM product.

His story not only covers the entrepreneurial mindset required to build a company, but also grit and resilience along the way.

Josh, how we doing?

Doing pretty well.

Good to be in Cincinnati for the first time.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that one cold call as turned into an awesome relationship we have with you and your team.

So appreciate you making that call that day.

Let's talk about the cold call.

I think that's an awesome place to start.

How do you find us?

What made you make that call?

And I believe you used your CRM.

Yeah, I did.

Tell us about it.

Thanks for answering the call.

It's good to be here.

Now, third.

I think I answered the third.

Yeah, it was the third one I came across your information on Apollo.

It's one of the Legion tools, contact database softwares that I was using just to find other freight brokerages that, that we were targeting for CRMs.

You're just on my list essentially in my CRM.

Right.

Of all my followups and everything that I'm supposed to do.

And so I think when I looked back at my first note when we were before recording this, I saw that your title is Supply Chain Leader, which threw me off a little bit because.

Not Decision Maker.

Yeah.

You know, you have no idea.

Right.

I mean, Supply Chain Leader is such a broad title because Supply Chain's rather broad.

Yeah.

So I was just really trying to figure that out and then just, you know, just a couple notes of research and whatnot about Veritas and then the third one you picked up.

And I'm not going to say I can't even remember what the opening line was or anything of that nature.

But I think the biggest thing was just it was the perfect timing.

And that's one of the biggest things in sales is just the timing that you're reaching out to somebody.

It's not a skill necessarily that you can require.

It's just a fundamental, I would say, of just actually doing the follow up.

You don't know what time of day, you don't know what day of the week is going to be best.

Some of it is luck of you and Brian actually just having the conversation about CRM the day prior and me just strategically putting my follow up on that day.

And actually making the call.

So there's so many factors that can go into that, but at the end of the day, it's about making the call and just talking to you before beforehand or just emailing you back and forth prior to this is that's where it's worth making the calls.

You know, you just never know when the timing is going to be right.

If you have an idea of, hey, this could be the right kind of company to partner with, then great things can happen.

It's funny, Josh, because yes, our relationship started with a cold call, but it has continued to grow.

Josh, you're in Nashville, we're in Cincinnati.

So it's not like we see each other often.

But, you know, we do go back and forth a lot.

We saw you at a conference out in Phoenix.

We see more conferences in the future.

But, you know, our relationship has grown.

And yes, it started with a cold call and you were selling us a CRM, which we did buy.

It's awesome.

But it's grown into more than that.

And that's why I thought when speaking with Brian, trying to figure out who would be awesome to bring on, you were one of the first people that came up.

Not because you created a CRM, because of your story, your mindset.

I think that is more impressive than simply going out and starting a CRM.

So I do want to mention the cold call.

If you're like me.

I don't enjoy getting cold calls.

I work in an industry where we're cold calling people every day.

Right.

I get this cold call nine and a half times out of ten.

I'm getting off the call like I'm in the middle of work.

Our industry is crazy.

It's nonstop.

I'm getting off.

I'm getting off the call.

So why do you take the call?

You're opening?

I knew you were a person.

You weren't just going through a script.

You had already done your research.

I knew you did your research because you hit me with something.

I want to say it was something like, Justin, Josh, with Sales Dash CRM, if you're like most companies that are your size, you're probably prospecting.

Your sales team might be prospecting off Excel.

I'm going to step into the conference room real quick.

Josh, you're exactly right.

You're with who?

Sales CRM.

And we go on.

But you hit me off the bat where I knew you had done your research.

You knew about Veritas.

It made sense because we were talking about buying a CRM.

Smaller companies.

It's a struggle because it's, it's, it's clutter.

Like you are operating off Excel.

Yeah.

You're trying to.

You knew.

Yes.

You knew our pain points.

You had a product that you simply, you didn't want to.

Major commitment.

You just wanted to show it to us.

And I think you asked for, you know, 10 minutes.

Yep.

Yeah, absolutely.

10 minutes.

I already like it.

You've done your legwork.

I'll give you 10 minutes.

You get on for 10 minutes and now that's where you seek your teeth in.

It's funny because Josh shared his notes.

He took notes.

He housed them in the CRM.

He sent me a screenshot of it.

So it's awesome to know that other people are out there doing what we do and following the sales cycle.

But the rest is pretty much history.

I want to change course here.

You started a company.

How old is Sales dash at this point?

We've been building for four years.

We've been freight specific for a year.

Okay, where did this idea start?

Tell us a little bit more about your background.

I'll get into some other, you know, mindset type stuff later.

But how did you get to this point?

Where did you start?

Tell us more about that.

Yeah.

So I never saw sales as a profession that I would go down like growing up, I just played sports, played basketball as a walk on D2 basketball player.

Only lasted.

Where'd you play?

Augusta University, Augusta State.

At the time, I only stayed on a semester just because I just knew that it wasn't going to be my long term thing.

I wasn't going to be able to make money doing it.

5, 9, 5, 10 bad knees, you know?

Yep.

Can't jump out the gym.

So it's, it was just not.

It didn't make sense.

So I moved back home to Atlanta, graduated from Georgia State, and then I was actually working at a gym, just front desk.

And then the general manager said something to me of like, hey man, you should be in sales.

Growing up as a quiet, just reserved, observant kid.

And that was never a thought in my head because I just didn't talk that much.

I typically would just listen.

That's just my demeanor that stuck out to me because it was really interesting.

I never.

And then I had two other people tell me that.

And I think it was just from I.

I started to pick it up as to why and it could be when I get passionate about topics, I think that that's when I can connect deeply with people, I guess.

Long story short, from that gym, I got a sales job at New Balance.

It was my first sales job that I had.

It was retail sweater shoes.

It was a little bit more white glove because we would actually like, tie people's shoes.

We'd watch them walk, we'd scan their feet.

We were solving more issues for them.

And then from there, I got recruited From Tesla on LinkedIn, which is why I always tell people that I think that their LinkedIn profile should be just somewhat buttoned up because it changed my life.

I mean, that got me into Tesla at an early part of their timeline.

I'll just stop right there and then I will continue.

But what do you mean by buttoned up?

Tell a personal story.

Don't just be one of those people that's like proficient in Microsoft Excel and all this kind of stuff.

It's pretty common.

Yeah, it's so common.

Right.

And we're all proficient in that stuff.

But it's like, tell your story.

Who are you?

Like, throw some personality into it.

And then on top of that, I think the simple way to think about it is if you're trying to get a sales job or an operations job or whatever job job title that it may be, there's always skills that are required underneath that job.

And you need to ensure that those are on your profile.

Because when recruiters are searching for you on LinkedIn, they're looking for people with those skills or with those keywords in their descriptions.

And so it's just simply a way to get found.

But it's also not be robotic, like, throw personality into it, because you're a hiring manager.

I've been hiring manager at a multitude of companies.

Like, you're not looking for somebody that's robotic, especially when it comes to sales.

You want somebody that's going to be themselves instead of a resume.

It's just bullet points of general information.

You want to find somebody that's actually interesting.

Love that.

And it's spot on.

And I think that's often overlooked, especially for those, those individuals who are looking for something more, who do want to, you know, pursue a different opportunity to pursue their passion.

If you do want to work for a company as opposed to starting your own company, like those things matter at the end of the day.

Like that's where people are getting recruited and that's where talent is, is being pulled from.

So I love that.

I know I cut you off.

So Tesla recruits you from LinkedIn.

Where'd you go from there?

They actually were recruiting me to be a sales advisor, but I actually ended up going the step below.

I was finishing out school in my last semester and truth be told, not a car person couldn't give a damn about cars really.

And but funny enough there was actually, they were actually one of my first college presentations that I did in my communications class.

So it was a kind of a cool come around story for me.

I was really intrigued by the whole electric vehicle movement and with what they were doing with what Elon was doing.

And so I started off on the ground floor.

They told me that I could get promoted six to 12 months.

And I was like, all right, six months.

I like that's when I want to get promoted because that's just my nature.

I was probably the first, I'll say this like humbly person in that position to actually get promoted within six months.

It was actually on my six month mark day.

Why you would it, what were you doing differently?

Simply put in the way that I always kind of position it to others is I was doing the things that that role required.

So I was doing things that sales advisors do.

So it was technically closing deals so I would close deals for them.

I didn't get paid commission on it, didn't fully, you know, I got a somewhat credit but certain somebody else is actually getting the full credit for it.

I didn't care about that.

I just wanted to prove to them that I'm already built to be in this position.

And so it was, let me display that I can just do those things.

And yeah, it happened naturally where I was starting to close more deals than those that were already in that position not doing what they were doing.

So I wanted to just make it a no brainer for them to put me in that position.

Awesome.

Where'd you go from there?

Got into a sales advisor role for them, did pretty well.

I was surrounded by, I eventually got surrounded by two guys that we were all at one point or another top 10 global salespeople for Tesla out of 400 plus sales advisors.

And I learned a lot from, from those two but they helped sharpen me.

I was the youngest out of all of them.

We did really well.

And then I was only one that was really probably molded for leadership.

The other two, they were just true sales guys.

Yeah, I was kind of the one out of the three of us that was appointed to get into leadership and I wanted to go that path.

I just didn't know the timing but I figured why not?

And So I was 23 at the time and I was like why not?

At this point if I can grow my career and accelerate it, I want to go for it.

And so they gave me an opportunity to move to our lower volume store in Atlanta.

And then once I went well and I onboarded the new manager there, they moved me back onboarded the manager there.

And then after both those went pretty successfully, that's when they moved me up to Nashville.

And I was their store manager for their only location in Tennessee at that time.

What year is this?

2016 through 19.

I made my transition from Atlanta to Nashville in 17 or 18.

So you're.

You're experiencing a ton of success early in your career.

Speaks volumes about you.

Where'd you move from?

Tesla.

When's the sales?

Is that roughly when sales dash started to.

I got into freight brokerage.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Started Broken Freight.

Yeah.

My two first friends that I met in Nashville, they were working for a company in logistics.

Didn't know what in the world.

It was a strange thing because they were just always hanging out with their coworkers.

So if I'd meet out to go out and get drinks with them or go out and grab food or whatever, it may, maybe they were always hanging out with their coworkers.

And it was just odd because I never hung out with my Tesla coworkers outside of work, really.

And so.

But it spoke volumes to me about their culture.

Once I actually, I.

There was a time period where I just got to a point where I said, I'm going to look for opportunities outside of Tesla.

There's just things shaking internally.

Want to get out.

And I was talking with them and letting them know I don't, I don't care what state I land in, I don't care what industry.

I just want to do something new.

Things were sh.

Shaky internally.

There's.

I'm sure the, you know, the future was a little unknown.

Was a job becoming easy for you.

It was becoming really routine.

But I wasn't able to backfill my staff.

And so there's a few things that went into it, but one, I wasn't able to backfill my staff.

So.

Perspective.

I came in there with 13 salespeople left before and I couldn't backfill.

I'm working six, seven days a week, which I honestly typically was, but six, seven days a week at the store.

And it got to a point where, you know, if I only have four sales guys, salespeople, there's days where one to two of them are there and I've got to go buy them lunch.

So like, and they'll take breaks and we just don't leave the store.

It was tough, but that was just Kind of the gritty nature of that, of that environment.

And.

And there was a couple other things where they were going to merge sales and operations again as one function.

We had already done that and it just.

To me it didn't work.

That also semi attributes to like a little bit of stuff in freight.

Right.

With cradle to grave split model, everybody sort of got their own opinions on, on what helps grow and scale and in that environment, at least at Tesla, for me, like if you were to label it a split model, that was the one that made the most sense.

The fact that they were going to be merging those again, it was going to shake some stuff up.

It got to a point where, yes, it got routine and I felt that I needed another challenge.

You love the culture.

You mentioned the culture.

You go to the freight brokerage, you love the culture.

It was different.

Started to hang out with people outside of work.

That was different for you.

Is this your first introduction, like what a culture should look like or tell us more about?

No, not necessarily what it should look like, but when I went on site for the interviews, there was just definitely a really interesting buzz and I felt, I also felt the talent that was in that building when I, when I was interviewing.

So they were actually owned by an ELD company.

And that was the one thing that was kind of an interesting difference maker for them as a freight brokerage was what could that relationship look like for them if they're owned by an ELD company that has 250,000 plus trucks in their network.

So that never came to fruition and eventually was shut down.

And that shutdown is actually what led me to build sales dash because my whole.

And even when I was at Tesla, I would tell people, they would ask me, hey, are you trying to climb the ladder here and just keep going up, up and up.

And my answer was actually no.

Where.

Why?

I just wanted to build my own stuff.

I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

My dad's an entrepreneur.

He was just like a basically solo consultant in the radio business.

I just studied business and entrepreneurs.

And for me it's one of those things that if other people can do it, then I feel that.

I completely agree.

But I want to still focus on why.

I see.

No, that also Josh, but this is like.

Was this 2019?

2020.

2020, yeah.

So this three weeks before COVID probably.

Okay, what are you thinking at this time?

Did you already leave the company?

Did they cut?

You know, there was 270.

They kept 20 of us.

I was one, luckily one of the 20.

And it was Lucky.

I will say I was fortunate at the time because Covid literally happened two, three weeks where everything shut down.

After that, then getting jobs is already harder.

But they retain me to go to the parent company, which is Keep Trucking, who now goes by motive.

But I will say I was.

I was honestly just.

There was a day of hard frustration and I just kind of sat in with myself and I said, I can't just, like, sit here and be frustrated like goat pound beers or drinks at the bar and sulk and all that stuff.

That's not.

It's not.

Throw yourself a pity party.

No.

Maybe for like two hours.

That's fine.

That's acceptable.

Yeah, maybe.

I was just so frustrated because I love my team.

I oversaw a team of 13 executives, account managers, one SDR, and we were having really good success.

And I was really excited about my growth that was going to be at that company.

And what I felt from being brand new into it and what I felt my impact was with my team.

And just the camaraderie that my team had was really special.

I was just so frustrated about that being gone.

But at the end of the day, it's business and this stuff happens.

And so it was just selling back into that, but getting to a period where it's, hey, how can I try to control these situations?

So if Tesla's having situations where investors are pushing them one way.

Right.

This company had a similar situation where it says, hey, go back to focusing on our core product and don't worry about this other freight brokerage arm.

It just got to a point where I said, this could just keep happening to me, you know, and I may keep having that frustration, but I felt that I had the skillset, the leadership capabilities, everything.

I felt like I had the tools in the toolbox.

It's still going to be more that I have to sharpen up.

I knew I want to go try something because I had made good money at a young age, I had saved up, I wasn't financially stupid, so I was able to take a risk.

And I always just knew in the back of my mind that if I failed, I could go back to being a sales manager or a VP of sales, and I'd be okay.

So we were telling me is you were in a situation where you could have easily just folded your cars, pouted, go found the next job.

You've been right back where you originally were.

Yeah.

Instead, you create a plan.

You had a passion to do something, and it was more.

So just invest in yourself.

You want to start a company because that's, that's that burn that you had inside of you.

You want to go pursue that.

Why a CRM?

Basically what I did was I told myself during the week, the following weekend, I just told myself, hey, I'm going to lock myself in a coffee shop until I figure out what I want to do.

Because I never knew what I really wanted to do.

But that was my mentality.

And this is also the scary part is I figured it out within an hour of what I wanted to do and I really just sat there and was just like typing stuff out.

And the biggest thing was what do I feel are my strengths and what do I feel that I know or do better than others?

It's very strange to say CRM, but that was the one thing that when it carried over from going from Tesla to the freight brokerage world and where I felt that I saw success was the management of that and how I got it to work for me.

I felt that it's what made me a really good sales advisor when I was at Tesla, felt that it's what got me Into Management at 23, 24 years old, high performing sales manager at that, and then getting into freight brokerage.

My team is onboarding the most shippers at the highest volume and most of my team actually came from outside the industry.

So in like the VP of sales one day comes hits me up and he's like, what are you doing?

Like what's your, what's your special sauce?

I'm like, it's, there's no special sauce.

It's sales.

It's.

You make the calls, you take the notes, you do the follow ups.

And as a sales manager I'm just proactive and jumping into their pipelines, helping them with next steps, helping them prevent missed things.

I'm more engaged on the floor with my team I think than the others because of how I like I was only manage small things, right?

But I was, I was the only manager that did bi weekly meetings with my team versus weekly.

And for me I just felt that I didn't need to do weekly ones because I was like, I want to be on top of this stuff to where I thought the sales process moved a little bit too slow in freight where you can just have a week where it's just no answers.

So there's at that point to me there was just no reason to continue to meet.

So I was just trying to really optimize how I can be as efficient as I can with my team.

And so it was those things.

But with the CRM in particular, it was their clunky.

People didn't understand them, salespeople didn't understand them, and managers didn't understand them.

So when I saw that across the board, I felt that it was the fact that you got to go hire teams of people, pay them thousands of dollars and go through this whole thing just to get them to understand the system, to help them generate more revenue was bogus.

And it was just to figure out how to simplify it.

And my steps were write it down on paper.

How would I want this to look if I was a salesperson but also as a manager?

So I was really looking at it from both seats and I just, I knew there was opportunity there with how people didn't fully use these systems to their maximum potential.

So if you're listening and wondering when we're talking about the CRM, Brian and I met Josh.

We just, we liked him.

You know, we like being around you, we like talking to you.

Likewise, we're not, you're not here because we want to plug a CRM.

We're massive fans of the CRM.

You're here because we want to surround ourselves with people like you.

I'm hoping that's mutual.

But Brian, I want you to come on because I think your story is very impressive.

Ryan, I talk a lot about these things when it comes to investing in yourselves and taking your risk and surrounding yourself with a strong, tight knit inner circle.

But also you said something early on.

You didn't just get to this point because you took a risk.

You said, when I was younger I would just listen.

And I caught that.

But that is one of the most important things for a sales rep to do is effective listening.

You got, and you've always, it sounds like you've always been really good at listening.

And then you started to compound all these other characteristics.

You started managing people, you started slinging shoes, the sales skills.

You're listening to people like throughout all of this, you're always listening.

That's the most under discussed attribute for successful reps.

You listened when I talked to you originally and I immediately went out to Brian and I was just like, Brian, like I don' know this guy, just talked to him.

But his products sound exactly like what we need.

We needed something simple.

We needed something industry specific.

Easy use, like change is often difficult for companies to begin with.

But you, you checked all these boxes and we didn't want to just go to the big box providers and say like sign us up and then go through implementation, have no idea how to use it like, you still walk us through different things.

Our reps still reach out to you.

And I know that's not going to be the case long term, but we appreciate you appreciate your partnership.

If you're listening, I hope you got a lot out of Josh's story.

Where are you taking this next?

So I think to back up on that, though, I was excited after meeting with both of you guys just because of the way that you guys carried yourselves.

And, like, I knew that you guys were obviously growing, and I, I just.

Without you guys, police, I say this about you guys all the time.

Like, I feel like you guys are very humble and I know that you guys have accomplished a lot, and there was things that I found from others that I would talk to and that they knew you guys of what you guys have done in the industry at the big box brokerages and whatnot.

But the one thing I will say that is a challenge is like a software seller for you guys.

As, you know, buyers of software was, you guys.

One didn't just take, I guess, references from others.

You guys also were just willing to actually bet on somebody that was also growing.

And that's sometimes tough, right?

Like, I'm sure there's times where you guys, in the early days when you guys are growing your brokerage and people are like, we're looking for somebody maybe a little bit more established or that can handle more operations and maybe not willing to bet on, like, a smaller company.

That was one of the things that I picked up on very fast from both of you, you and Brian and always really appreciate.

And that's.

There's one of those things, like, as a salesperson, you talk to certain people, you're like, man, I really want to work with those people.

But you guys were easily one of those people earlier on in my journey.

So I really appreciate that because I was stoked about it.

And, you know, I knew it was going to take some time to kind of work through implementation and get.

Get the team onboarded.

But that was one of the things that I kind of recall early on was just like your willingness to actually sit there and say, hey, you guys are building something in this space.

But I like, you have some commonalities.

Like, I think we had talked about sports, we had talked about mindset, and, you know, we've talked about some of that stuff with some of the trips that you guys have been on for those things.

And so I felt that there was sort of that alignment going through that process of working with you guys.

So, yeah, it's been like we're just getting started too, at the same time.

Yeah, no, no, it's awesome because mistakes are going to happen.

Like you're going to.

You're going to buy or people are going to buy from people that they want to work with.

Yeah.

We could tell early on that you're passionate about your product.

You had a good product to begin with, which obviously helps.

But we knew going into it that there were going to be mistakes and there are going to be glitches and kinks that we'd have to work through.

But the difference is you cared a lot and your service was just amazing.

So you were always responsive.

And if you didn't have that answer, you would let us know, hey, this is working on this next rollout.

Here's a temporary workaround when you relate that to just sales in general, or let's just say logistics.

If you have a fallout out or something happens, those things are overlooked because your level of service and communication, the relationship is so high that when the mistakes do pop up, these are swept under the rug because you know the track record of that individual and you trust that person.

So props to you.

You've built something awesome thus far.

I know it's going to keep growing.

You had this idea to do a CRM.

Tell the listeners what you built.

What does it do?

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a customer relationship management tool.

And essentially, simply put, it is almost like a notebook, a digital notebook of all your.

Your friends that you have in business.

Right.

Or the people that you want to reach out to.

And so it's your contacts, the companies that you're reaching out to, and for people that are in B2B or business to business sales.

It can be a complex sale, right, because you have a company, but there may be multiple people that you have to talk about, talk to at the company that gets find a decision maker.

You may want to find influencers, people that have the information or can get you to the right person.

Timing is a big factor, you know, just like in calling you and also just making sure that there's alignment with the challenges that they may be having internally.

So the tool essentially is just a record log of that.

A lot of people will always start in spreadsheets and say, this is the name of this person, this is their email, this is their phone number, notes.

And that's normally as simple as it.

Always a note column, less always.

So with that, I'll just say that once.

You typically get probably above the 20, 30, 40 contacts part.

If you're in an area or in a business where follow ups are really important and you need to make multiple calls, multiple emails to make a sale.

That's where CRMs are really effective.

It allows you to track back all your steps.

When did you make your calls, when did you make your emails?

When are you following up with them?

And to me, follow up is the biggest fundamental that you have to have and I think it helps with that.

And so, so many of them from my experience were just so complex.

When I was at Tesla and jumping into the CRM that they had used, there was all these fields that we would never fill out.

And I remember when I first got into it, it was just the most confusing thing ever.

The bells and whistles.

Yeah, just like all of them.

And it's just unnecessary.

Right.

And you know, you spending money for those bells and whistles that you're not using.

And so for me it was just simplify it down.

Right.

And from being a salesperson and a sales manager is okay.

If I'm working through this, the screen, top to bottom, left to right, like how a human, you know, analyzes things, how can I just make it to where the majority of the stuff that I want to see is in the screen and it is going to give me the information and I can make my calls and then I can just move to the next thing and I can just move to the next one.

That's what sales is.

And so it was just simplify the notes and the follows piece.

Find a couple of things that I felt that were missing from the other systems.

When it came to notes and follow ups of like not having to jump from tap to tab for your notes or hey, if I forget to set a follow up, which is super common, how do I make sure that that's going to still be on my radar?

It was just those simple things that I felt were missing.

And then I also knew that the cost was high for the systems.

I had heard some of the price points that some of these companies pay for them.

I just never understood why that needed to be a thing.

So that's really where it kind of sparked of wanting to actually see if I can get into that space.

I actually knew it was a crowded space.

From my research that I did, I knew it was a crowded space.

But quickly in my journey, my go to market strategy sucked.

I'm very upfront about that of I targeted a multitude of different industries.

I didn't think about the kinds of people I'm reaching out to and their pain points within their company.

It was last year, actually, when I really got to a point where I really had to figure it out.

And I hate admitting this, but it's just.

My truth is I've read all the books and the entrepreneur stories where they say start with one product and one service and then grow it out from there and.

Or one industry and like one Persona, and I just ignored it.

I felt that I could just tackle the world and it was just stupid.

There's just.

There's just no reason to do that.

And so when I did focus it in freight, and the reason why I did that is because I understood freight.

I understood what went into the sale.

I knew how complex it could be.

I knew about the sales cycle, I knew about the challenges people had in it, but also how they didn't really know how to maybe structure and streamline their sales process, that if it was templated for when they signed up on day one, that stuff's already there that they'd go pay somebody thousands of dollars to do.

And they'd have to also teach them what a freight broker does, that there's great opportunity.

And then when I went to the TIA conference last year and I was going around, everybody was building tmss and nobody had CRM.

So to me, it was just kind of a perfect fit and right time and just to go for it.

And I'm really glad we did.

My team's been grateful about it.

I gave my developers a crash course on freight.

Real they'll never probably use, but it's really helped them in the development process to actually understand why we're doing certain things and why we're developing things a certain way.

And from the user standpoint, not ours as a development team, you didn't create.

Something that didn't exist necessarily.

You found a void in our space, mostly with CRM providers.

You build a product better specific to an industry that you could grow and elaborate on.

So, you know, if you're listening, I know Josh would recommend locking yourself in for 24 hours straight to find out your next step.

But you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Josh didn't reinvent the wheel, Brian.

I didn't start a brokerage as the first brokerage ever.

Like there are thousands and thousands of brokerages.

You had to find, you know, something that you're passionate about, pursue it.

I'm sure you're not necessarily passionate about technology and CRMs in general, but you are passionate about providing value, building relationships, you know, listen to people's needs.

Like, is that.

Would you agree with that where are we at there?

That's a great point.

Yeah.

Because it's not necessarily fully the technology.

I love what the CRM can do for people because of what.

What it did for me, it changed my sales career.

For the salespeople I managed, some of them came when I first hired them.

Not in great financial positions, in debt.

All that stuff got them out of that, put their families in much better situations.

So that's the reason why I love sales, is because one, all businesses need it.

I think sales always gets a bad rep.

But at the end of the day, your company, everybody's company, has salespeople and has people that are selling.

And so that's the reason why I do love it is because you have to have those people on your team.

Typically, you know, if you want to be as efficient as you can, they need a good system in place and a good process in place to be able to execute and get to that point.

And so that's what's fun for me is when I get to hear the stories.

Talking with guys on your team about record new shipper months and others that I'm working with.

That's what's probably the most fulfilling for me is when I do get to hear that stuff because it's not me that's doing it right.

They still have to do the work.

The system helps them work to get to achieve that.

But that's.

That ultimately is what's most fulfilling for me about it.

And it's just.

And it all spurred more.

So not that I'm a true, like CRM nerd technology nerd.

It's just more so.

Hey, this was a tool that really helped me, but may have had too many bells and whistles that were on it that actually less can be more and more effective for you.

But you got to get to that.

That spot where you realize like, hey, I just don't really need all those things to get the job done with the fundamentals.

Well, we love it.

We appreciate you.

I know our employees find a ton of value in it.

So if people were to look you up or want to learn more about sales, sales-CRM where they find you.

Sales-CRM.com would be the best.

Just for general information about us.

And then you guys can always add me on LinkedIn.

Josh Lyles.

L Y L E S.

Feel free to shoot me a message.

Happy to call, text, email, whatever it may be.

Last question.

I have ever thought about getting back in brokerage.

Absolutely.

Sorry.

Sorry, Brian.

You already asked me this twice.

I'm persistent.

But, Josh, we appreciate you.

Thank you for coming on.

Thanks, Justin.

I asked my wife to leave me.

Yeah.

It's because I lost my self worth.

I felt like I had no value.

I got fired.

I had another kid on the way.

We had nowhere to move in Cincinnati.

We were stuck in Austin Tech.

Majority of people have been there.