If you're leading a team, starting a company, or just figuring out things as you grow, you're going to want to tune into this one.

Laura Erie breaks down how she stepped into industries that she had no experience in and found ways to lead her team to win.

No theory, no fluff, just leadership that works.

Laura is the director of Transportation Replenishment at Kind Snacks.

Before that, she worked for organizations like Monolith International, JF and other big companies with big operations.

And trust me, she's lived through the tough calls, the rebuilds, the pressure, and she shares a lot of that with us.

My mom and my dad was an insurance salesman and I didn't even know what supply chain was.

So I started out in college.

I knew I wanted to do business, was a marketing major and worked, got an internship at the Department of Transportation.

A subdivision of that was Federal Highway Administration.

And I was there with this other intern.

And he said, I don't think you should be in marketing.

I think you would like Supply Chain.

He's like, why are you in marketing?

And I said, well, I like to solve problems.

He goes, yeah, but you're very like, factual and driven.

Marketing is very dreamer based.

And I don't know if this is true or not.

That's what he told me at the time.

And he said, I think you should check out Supply Chain.

And that conversation, that two second conversation changed the path of my life and my entire career.

I mean, first, I think what's important for people, especially if you're thinking about leadership and where, where you come from, to remember that very small decisions, small conversations can change the course of your entire career.

I always attribute my career to my husband.

First, we were dating at the time at Michigan State, and I wanted to go to this interview with Kraft Foods, but I didn't have anything to wear and I was just gonna like, I was gonna ghost them, which is bad, right?

And he said, no, you're going, I will go buy you, like, something to wear.

So he bought me this suit outfit.

I went killed it, got an internship, ended up getting a career with craft.

And then they changed into Mondelez.

That craft job turned into a full time career for Mondelez.

From there, she kept stepping up.

Bigger roles, bigger problems.

But she didn't stay in food forever.

At one point, she walked away from it entirely.

What was really interesting is that I landed in food.

Now I love food.

I like snacking all the time.

My team knows I'm always snacking on something mostly so that I'm not talking the whole time.

But what is very interesting is how I got out of food and went to GAF in the roofing industry.

I had gotten to the point where I was feeling very.

It's.

It's hard to explain, but sometimes in your career you're like, gosh, I'm not sure if this is right for me anymore.

And it could be the organization where they're going to.

It could be you and your life and what you need out of it.

And so I decided to go interview at GAF for senior manager of warehousing, which I'd never done before.

Somehow I convinced them that I would be a good fit, which was amazing.

And I ended up at gaf.

What's really interesting, I was there for about five years, an amazing organization.

I had a colleague that I worked for at Mondelez actually call me up, Michael Scott, and he said, hey, we're thinking of this director position and you'd be perfect.

I want you to talk to like, some people.

And it should be posted.

So the role hadn't even been posted.

It was like being ideated.

And he was, you know, someone I worked with, someone I trusted.

And he called me kind of out of the blue and said, hey, I think you should really look at this now.

The timing sometimes is really perfect.

I was looking to progress in my career from a senior manager, which I had been at for a while, to that next director level at gaf.

It was.

It had been talked about for the last year.

And I kind of thought, you know, this one is, is a sure bet.

It's back in food, you know, kind snacks has.

I did some research.

They really had a strong foundation as an organization of not just putting values on a page, which I have seen at other companies, but really, truly living them and having a connection with someone I worked at.

He could tell me how was it different than Mondelez or Craft.

How.

How did he feel?

And really felt like that then pulled me into the kind organization.

I have to say, the second, the second reason their interviews are.

Are amazing.

They make sure to have a very diverse panel.

And I had two really amazing women leaders, senior leaders in supply chain interview me.

And I thought, wow, like, this is a place where I could feel valued, where there are people I could look up to and get mentoring from.

So at that point in my career, I'm trying to shift to more of a director level role.

But I want to make sure I have the right support, the right mentorship.

And so all of those things combined, it's a really long answer to.

This is how I landed at kind snacks.

But I could not be more happy.

Gosh.

Well, if, if you're not graduating yet, get an internship, try it out, right?

That, that's the best way.

Unfortunately the way that it depends on where you live.

But some states and cities are, and school districts are starting to see the value in high school of getting hands on exposure and experience in college.

The really the best way to do that is you have to drive it yourself.

I was vice president of our entreprene counsel at Michigan State.

I thought maybe I wanted to go start my own business.

I had changed degrees to supply chain.

For me though, I've hired people that are history majors.

I hired someone who had a degree in French.

I've.

I can train anybody on supply chain is always what I've said.

What I look for is especially those entry level roles.

You have to have high analytics skills.

You really have to be a go getter and be able to keep up with a lot of problems all the time.

And it does.

After a while you get experience, but you have to be able to want to solve those problems and not just solve them on the surface.

What really makes you successful is solving them a little bit deeper to say, how can I prevent this from happening again?

I've always had this mindset of like, here's the problem.

And working my way back to the beginning to say like, where did it start?

Where did it come from?

And I had someone who mentored me at Federal Highway Administration where he said, I want you to build a process diagram.

I was like, process diagram?

Like what's that?

So a process diagram is how my brain thinks naturally.

So if you're looking and you're constantly kind of analyzing things, if you're a great problem solver, I'd say supply chain has a lot of opportunities for you to do that.

Supply chain is so broad though.

You can be in warehousing, manufacturing, engineering, R and D and quality sometimes are also considered.

Supply chain just depends.

They're more scientific.

You have transportation, which I've been in and out of product, supply.

You can do demand.

There's so many roles and that's actually what's kept me in supply chain so long.

I've been able to bounce around and take that set of skills that I have, learn new jobs, do different things and make a career out of it that you know, I've really been energized and engaged every role that I have.

And when I was starting to feel like it had, I had done all that I wanted to accomplish at that level or that role, there was always another opportunity in supply chain to go do something else, to learn and grow.

It's kind of Laura's thing.

You throw a new challenge at her and she'll figure it out.

And right when she found her rhythm outside of food, something new popped up.

A chance to come back.

But this time a very different mindset.

You know, it comes back to those tiny little things.

End up setting your career in a different path.

So, you know, my internship with Federal Highway Administration was probably the highest paid internship I could get.

And I was paying for my own college.

So that set me on a path of understanding.

They trained me in databases, which helped me really get smart and understand how data connects, which helped my analytical abilities.

So I already was naturally a problem solver, like very go getter.

I'm going to figure it out.

You know, take goals, go and achieve them, figure out how to do that.

So I think naturally this way, problem solving, which is something you need.

Transportation, though, wasn't something I was like necessarily looking for.

I thought I would go into customer service or something else.

And now I'm sitting here and with really deep transportation knowledge.

But what kept me in transportation is how much it's changed.

So it's changed from when I started 20 years ago.

And literally was they.

The Kraft Foods recruited me into transportation because I had worked at Federal Highway Administration.

Again, it wasn't a cognizant decision on my part.

It was just the most money I could possibly get to help me pay for college.

And Harry Haney called me and asked me to come.

I was like, sure, why not?

Ended up in Madison, Wisconsin, which I didn't even know where the hell was really.

I thought Wisconsin was going to be like cornfield something.

But I landed really haphazardly in transportation.

And that first rule, I was making phone calls to carriers.

We used to call it dialing for diesel.

Right.

It was capacity constrained.

It was, it was 2006.

It was really challenging to try and get capacity.

I would, I had some sites on the West Coast.

I would do whatever it had to take to get loads covered.

That was my job.

But I felt kind of underutilized.

So on the weekends I would go and do projects like air freight.

What could we do differently?

And analyze data, build like little mini databases to help me answer questions.

So all of these little decisions kind of landed me in this role, this first career role in transportation where I could look at things differently.

And I thought and saw the world a little bit differently, I think, than some of my peers.

What kept Me in transportation, though, is it kept changing, right?

From dialing to diesel to suddenly routing guides and things that you could have that would select the best carrier based on a certain set of criteria that it would go through in the system.

We had had moved to OTM and understanding how that system connected, how other systems connect, started to build my knowledge.

And then I would occasionally say, okay, all right, we're getting capacity constrained again.

I've seen this story before.

And I would go into another function.

So functions I went into after those first two roles in transportation, I went into manufacturing for about a year.

Not long came back, understood.

Inbound raw materials.

We had an inbound raw material project going on in transportation.

Wow.

I'm your girl, right?

Well, so I really a small little decisions of like, it seems haphazard.

And looking back at it, I'm like, wow, if that had been on purpose, that would have been really brilliant.

But haphazard things that you just, you make the best out of.

And then you say, how can I use that now in my role as a manager and then a senior manager.

When Craft and Mondelez split, it was really funny.

My boss, he was there interviewing us for the first time.

I had never met him.

He was going to be going to the Mondelez side.

I wanted to go to the Mondelez side.

I always want to be with a high growth organization.

That's been something that maybe has helped my career be so successful.

But I'm able to manage any type organizations that are more, you know, cash cow, steady, stable, or even declining.

And organizations that are growing high growth.

So when I.

He is interviewing me, he said, give me a piece of feedback.

I had met this guy like 20 minutes before in a big group of people, mind you, right?

And here I am in an interview asking to be met.

My first role as a senior manager.

And I'm thinking, well, shoot, this is a tough question to ask.

And I was also like, I call it 10 months pregnant, because I think it was a couple days later I went out and had my second child.

And I said, you know what, Mike, I really, I really value your insight and I think you have some great ideas, but you were talking in a group of people that had lower level people who don't know what organization they're going with.

And I think that you should be more mindful of the audience and talking about new systems and changes because that we're already going through so much change, that's a little scary.

And I gave him some real honest, constructive, as constructive as I can be.

But I'M I'm pretty between the eyes.

And he said, okay, I, you know, eventually he said that actually won me the role versus my peers.

And my peers had been in transportation at the manager senior manager role longer than I had been.

So it was, it's again just very interesting things, little things that kept me in transportation, kept me moving along in my career path, but transportation just continues to change.

The thing I'm most excited about now is AI.

So we use Uber Freight to manage our operations.

They do a fabulous job.

Their AI tool that's coming.

I could not be more excited as, especially as a director.

I hate it when I have to ask my team like, hey, you know, I was asking before this call, what number is Veritas on the list?

Like what percent of business do they have?

And, and it's, it's like you want to know because you want to be educated.

You want to go in very prepared interviews, papers, meetings with, with your peers or leadership.

And some of it is just having a set of facts behind you.

AI could really help me get those facts faster.

So it's nice to learn a new tool where you're in a power of strength and depth, at least for me.

So transportation is something I always end up coming back to.

I love it.

I don't know where I'll go, you know, someday, but it definitely just keeps me super, super engaged.

And it's always different and changing.

I absolutely love it.

You know, it really depends on what you're reading and your experience level.

I think too some people have said like, hey, this is kind of unprecedented times like Covid, it's not that bad.

But what is interesting is, you know, without being political, just listing facts, tariffs have had a huge impact on volumes for us at kind we have, we have a good book of freight out on the west coast.

So the ports being quiet are a huge benefit to us.

And we're seeing exactly what you're seeing where our routing guides, the carriers on our guides are honoring their rates and they're taking the volume because the capacity exists with inventory not coming in off the coast.

So our freight is a great way to get off of the coast and elsewhere in the organ in the country.

When you think about what could happen.

Next.

Think that's the million dollar, billion, maybe even trillion dollar question right now for the US is that capacity right now is being hugely impacted by policy that seems to go up and down and can change very quickly, right, wrong or indifferent.

And what's very hard is for organizations to react to that.

So, you know, Kind where mostly our items come domestically.

And what I mean domestically, not necessarily us, but from like the North American continent.

We aren't even necessarily impacted.

Like the Walmart that is saying, hey, we're going to have to raise prices and giving warnings and telling their consumer that, you know, this is coming.

But we do new business in Canada, so we are having the tariffs cross border.

Those things are all impacting everyone, all the shippers across the U.S.

right.

A lot of companies do business both in the US and in Canada.

And you're having to now manage, not just complexity, cost that was not forecasted or budgeted.

So, you know, a lot of companies are having to, to think about what do I do, how does this impact freight?

While companies are saying, what should I do?

They're, they're looking at this huge bogey on their budget that now they have to offset and in some cases they can't.

That's why Walmart or other companies are saying price raises are coming, price increases.

But for some companies, they're like, all right, where else can we dig deep?

You know, inventory is one, slowing down, manufacturing furloughing people.

If the demand isn't there, the consumer is getting very nervous.

There's so much going on, it's really hard to take a big step back and say, okay, how do I plan?

Well, recently, I think even I was reading the news, like yesterday, the courts ruled against the President having powers to set tariffs in the way that it's being used today.

Now, whether or not that's challenged, whether or not, you know, the Trump's, Trump's campaign or administration listens to that, those are a lot of questions I don't think we know.

But what is different right now versus Covid or other times is that we have, we have these crazy ups and downs.

There was a point where I think ordering for the Christmas season, a lot of people don't realize that's happening right now.

Toys are coming in that have already been manufactured and produced.

They're coming in and they're getting positioned in warehouses across the country to be ready to deploy to customer warehouses and then on to stores.

Why they want to turn over the store very quickly after, you know, the school season ends right away, it's Christmas, right.

People sometimes complain we skip Thanksgiving if those things don't happen or if they happen now, that if, if tariffs are taken down quickly, it's now going to flood the market.

So now you're dealing with this.

We went low, capacity was high, rates went low.

Now all of a sudden, capacity could Tighten up and rates will get very high because people are flooding the market, trying to very quickly move inventory in a shorter time period.

You know, not having an additional month or two that the tariffs have, have done for them.

How can they position.

Because some customers, some companies in the U.S.

you, this is their season to make money for the entire year, that money that allows them to purchase for the following year.

So it is so hard as a shipper like kind right now to figure out what's going to happen.

And right now you're entering budget season.

I don't know if everyone knows this, but budget season starts in June, July, August.

Different companies do budgets differently.

But we're trying to figure out what do I tell my organization.

And so FTR in April published something.

It was like, here's three scenarios.

Here's the economics of what's happening right now.

And it's crazy because as a career transportation professional, I understood the puts and takes of supply and demand.

I even had product supply, really understood supply and demand.

But now you're having to really understand policy, how it impacts the economy and what could happen.

And it does.

It feels like there's such a wide range right now of scenarios.

How do you, as a leader, you know, educate your organization on what to expect?

Because right now, yes, rates are low, carriers are honoring capacity, but it feels like it could flip on a dime.

Especially, you know, if, if we haven't passed the point of no return for the holiday season for some shippers, it could almost set us to have a completely upswing year, which we saw in Covid.

Right.

That's the best recent experience.

Experience I don't think is drastic.

But where, you know, you had all the imports turn off.

China wasn't producing or, or you know, Asian countries weren't producing.

We weren't getting materials on the west coast.

And then all of a sudden they started up again and flooded the market.

We have the ports that were congested.

We had transportation that was congested, the rails.

And all of a sudden rates went up, right?

And I think they went as high as crazy numbers.

I've never seen my career usually where between plus or minus 5% is kind of where you think it will go, right?

You, that's your margin of error.

That's a normal market goes up to maybe there and then it market cracks down and it goes up and down.

I think we had like 40%.

Some, some shippers, I was at GAF at the time.

Some shippers even saw like 50%.

It really depended on your area of rate increases.

So that's the extreme and then there's the mid hole and then there's, well, maybe we missed the window and rates aren't going to go up.

It is so challenging right now, sitting in my role, trying to tell the organization what could happen.

So that's the, the trillion dollar question.

How do I educate my organization to prepare for the worst that could happen, give them a moderate, more realistic picture and then if something better happens, great, we can course correct that.

But you're really faced as a career professional trying to educate up to your C suite.

What's the worst that could happen, what's most likely and what's the best?

I think in this time right now, because it's so volatile, so many different pieces of supply chain procurement, raw materials, manufacturing, they're all doing the same thing.

It's really challenging.

But if you're a professional listening right now, if you're not talking about the effects of a quick flip with the economy and what could happen, you really should be, you should be preparing your leadership for those types of impacts, talking to your carriers and saying, hey, if capacity tightens, you know, what's your strategy?

Where are you going to go?

Maybe not all your carriers, it depends on how big your carrier mix is, but certainly those that are strategic.

This isn't about logistics anymore.

It's about building out a team or department whose core values align with the company's and how do you do that without burning them out?

As I've mentioned, Uber Freight is a key partner of ours, managing our operations.

We, we did fall when we were more operating in the heavy spot market last year, things were starting to tighten up a and we weren't really happy with where we saw the levels of fraud.

So there's, there's like the bad actors stole your freight, you're never gonna see it again.

Fraud all the way to, I think they opened our truck and maybe put other stuff on top of our freight.

And like the seal looks funky, something looks funky.

We found footprints, we found weird substances that shouldn't have been there.

Knowing our manufacturing and our delivery.

So there's a wide range of scenarios.

You have to.

I hope that some larger carriers are listening to this and saying maybe I should lobby the government.

Right now that's very in favor of deregulation to say, hey, there's some laws that could really be changed to help us manage this situation, protect our customer.

All the way down to really what we've had to do in partnership with Uber is a lot more detail.

So we had to really Evaluate our co manufacturers and manufacturers to say, all right, what are, what is your practice when a carrier comes in to pick up a load?

What information are you verifying and what do you do if it doesn't match some of the information?

You have to be careful.

There's privacy laws.

If you store certain information, you know how are held to a different state standard of protection for that, that person who isn't even your employee.

So it gets very delicate.

But we really had to go toward getting more detail.

Things that you want to do as a shipper is really understand your, your check in process.

What questions are you asking?

What information is coming into that co manufacturer for me or warehouse, wherever your freight is, starting from that first pickup is really crucial to help with any kind of fraudulent activity.

There's always going to be exceptions.

But that point, really focusing on that pickup and making sure everything matches and empowering that employee or third party or contractor to say, you know what, something just doesn't feel right.

I'm going to say no or I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to do some verification.

You know, to me, I would rather have a late shipment than a stolen shipment.

Especially you know, in, in times when manufacturing is very constrained.

Now right now I think that some manufacturing has opened up and there's capacity on lines.

But when you have a constrained line, you can't afford anything to be stolen because every single stolen shipment is going to directly result in cuts.

You've already sold that inventory, that's why you're producing it.

You show you have the demand for it.

Especially in today's economic climate, you can't just afford to keep high inventory to buffer against all of this.

So it's a really bad situation where you want to invest as much time and energy as you can into not having that freight stolen.

You might get reimbursed for it, but that takes a while.

I mean, depending on the situation, how bad the fraud was, how pervasive.

I mean there have been FBI cases, I could tell you that happened a year and a half ago that I may or may not still be working on trying to figure out how to, how to get this reimbursed all the way to, okay, my load was broken into like I said.

But if you invest in that pickup, you ask for the driver's name, you ask for the company they got brokered to.

If they got brokered to a company that does not match who you thought you tendered it to, sorry, you can't take my freight.

Don't let them take it.

And if it's late, it's late.

It's better than stolen.

The coordination between all your people, especially in today's, today's market, if you're a smaller, mid sized shipper, like I know some of your customers are, you really want to build those relationships out transportation.

If you stay isolated to just you and those carriers, you are going to fail because you're not going to be able to influence.

And it goes back to that problem solving.

What's the problem?

Where upstream do I need to fix it?

And a lot of times it's not even with you or the carrier explaining that inside your organization.

It's super hard because at the end of the day, the carrier touched it last, right?

Like not it is as everybody's hands go up, but if you have relationships with those people, and that is what I'm so proud of my team for.

And kind in general really encourages this.

We have people at our warehouses that man, if they ever needed a job, I would hire them in a second.

Why?

Because they built a relationship with us and we have mutual respect and trust.

They do something, they go above and beyond.

We send kind product, we send a card and say thank you.

Those little moments of recognition help build those strong relationships.

And I think that's something that kind does really, really well.

You know, my, my team, I don't, I don't know what prompted it, but I, I saw an email from, from Julie on my team that was thanking our general manager on our account at Uber.

It's unsolicited thanks to their boss to say, you're doing a good job.

And I think in transportation you hear that so little that no news becomes good news, right?

That means you're doing your job and you're doing well.

But if at kind we can say thank you, we can show recognition, we can tell them what it meant to us.

Just like you would tell one of your friends if they did something nice for you, brought you dinner, whatever.

Um, when you show those people how much you appreciate it, they're more likely to do it the next time.

And by the way, it's just the right thing to do.

What hit home the most for me was the intentionality behind Laura's drive.

She wasn't just solving basic logistics problems.

She's investing in her teammates who are solving problems with her.

An industry like this that moves extremely fast and the pressure never lets up.

That's what leadership's all about.

I am very proud to say that kind has changed me to be a better Leader.

But Mars doesn't acquire organizations unless that value system does work out.

That's something that I've seen.

I don't know if they go and say that in their strategy, but I see where Kind and Mars values align.

So it's been a very good fit.

Mars has been very good, I think, at letting Kind do what we do well and then giving us suggestions or letting us reach out to say, hey, you know, we need some help in some other areas that we're not good at.

That you are.

And although we're owned by Mars, I do feel like we're independent enough to make our own decisions.

There's obviously oversight and things like that.

And Mondelez probably has it with Clif Bar.

You know, it's those acquisitions that are a little bit softer that I think allows the brand to really thrive.

Not in marketing or sales strategy, but those are my observations from where I sit in supply chain.

And when you think about that culture, it's so hard to look at a company that you're going to do business with or go through an acquisition and say, okay, you have this on your website, you're recruiting, your HR website, or where you are looking for job postings.

They might talk about the culture, the values, the vision of the organization.

But I have found where sometimes those values aren't lived or held accountable, the leaders aren't held accountable.

At Kind, the leaders are held accountable to live those values or it's very apparent you're not a good fit.

I would say the most, the memory that I have of Kind that sticks in my head is their recruiting process and the interview process.

I interviewed with almost every single cross functional partner that I would be working with in my new role.

A lot of interviews and each person had the ability to ask me or, or the, you know, they were empowered to ask me about my fit.

If my answer, you know, to a question they thought was a concern, they could ask and probe further.

They were making sure not only I could do the job and would be the best fit for the organization of all the candidates, but they were making sure I'd be a good fit, fit to the culture.

And they're very, very protective of that.

We have things on our goals, my team, we are to do two volunteer events.

That is in your goals.

I am going to talk to you about that at your year end rating.

If you have not prioritized that that is part of our culture.

And the organization makes it easy.

There's remote in person.

They give you days of, you know, it's not Vacation time, but it's additional time where you can leave your desk, put your out of office on, and go do that.

So they've literally taken away every excuse that you could have.

And so if you live that culture and you really are coming to kind, because that culture speaks to you.

They've done.

They've taken away all the roadblocks to allow you to.

To do that.

And I just.

I absolutely love it.

I want my legacy to be where my team and my partners, like, they felt like they were treated fairly, they were, you know, cared for as people, because at the end of the day, we're all people, right?

We're all human beings.

I want to be looked at and remembered that way.

But when I think of my legacy, I.

I want my team specifically to feel like, hey, she was tough to work for, but she gave me feedback.

She was my biggest advocate.

You know, maybe behind closed doors, I was giving some tough, direct feedback, but I care, and.

And I would love my team to walk away from a role or having worked with me, to say, hey, I worked for her, and she really helped me be my best self.

And.

And I also want my team to think, like, wow, when I went through some tough times, she was really there for me as well.

That to me, like, as a legacy, as a leader, I think that's the best thing you can be.

And I have some.

I've been really fortunate.

Someone that I've.

I mentored with and then work for.

She's been such a role model to me in that of what it.

What really matters.

Like, we spend a lot of time at these jobs, a ton of time.

And if you don't enjoy what you're doing and really value and build relationships with the people with you're with, like, what are you doing?

And so to me, I genuinely love my job.

Like, I love getting up in the morning, coming on, talking to my team.

Someone on my team came up with Photo Fridays.

We share random photos of, like, our lives and talk about us as people.

I think in a remote environment, that legacy is even harder.

And trying to really think about how do I build connection to my team in an authentic way, because I really do care and making sure people know, like, hey, you know, sometimes I might not say the right thing or do the right thing, but it is coming from the best place.

That's.

That's what I think my legacy is with, how I would be remembered by the people I work with.

And really most critically to me is my team.

So here's what stuck with me.

Laura was never given the perfect roadmap or blueprint.

She listened, she adjusted, she evolved.

She kept saying yes to everything that was uncomfortable, from almost skipping that first interview, to walking in the industry she was unfamiliar with, to mentoring the next wave of leaders.

She kept showing up, and that's the part that matters most.

We appreciate you all tuning in.

We'll catch you next time.