One Year of Cooler Logistics: Defying the Odds and Building Stronger Foundations
Cooler Logistics recently celebrated its first year of success. While starting a business is challenging, launching during a market recession might seem nearly impossible—but Cooler Logistics has proven it can be done.
At Cooler Logistics, the focus is on maintaining a personal touch in every aspect of the business. Their approach emphasizes building strong, meaningful relationships, and encouraging the team to establish lasting foundations. By prioritizing human connection across all operations, they ensure the success of their customers, carriers, and employees alike.
The actions that led to Cooler Logistics' successful first year in business.
Cooler Logistics made three foundational decisions that have been instrumental to their success today. First, they prioritized their core values, called the CLIMB values—Collaboration, Leadership, Integrity, Metrics, and Balance. These principles are deeply integrated into their operations, influencing internal processes, employee reviews, and goal-setting. CLIMB values also set the standard for all interactions with customers and carriers, shaping a consistent and value-driven approach across the board.
Second, their leadership team, bringing over 150 years of logistics experience, chose not to rely on load boards. Instead, they drew on their industry expertise from a time when strong carrier relationships were key to keeping freight moving efficiently and safely. This decision was a return to the brokerage roots, focusing on building organic, meaningful relationships that promote mutual growth. Although this path posed challenges, it laid a strong foundation for sustainable growth. As they explain, "Load boards are coverage tools but have turned into a crutch. Our detailed prospecting strategy empowers carrier reps to be proactive in coverage, supported by tech tools like Greenscreens, Carrier Source, and Carrier 411, enabling us to build networks around our customers' lanes.”
Third, Cooler Logistics has placed equal emphasis on cultivating strong, trustworthy relationships with both customers and carriers. In a market fraught with volatility and rising fraud, these deep connections are essential. CEO Michael Cherney believes that the industry’s increasing reliance on load boards has weakened the once-crucial practice of building solid customer and carrier networks, making these relationships more important than ever.
Understanding Strengths and Adapting Strategy
When setting a pricing strategy, recognizing your strengths is essential. By leveraging Greenscreens, Cooler Logistics was able to track quote wins and losses, helping the team gain a clearer understanding of their market strengths and customer network. This data allowed them to quickly identify weaknesses and adjust their pricing strategy when necessary.
As the business grew and Cooler Logistics continued to utilize Greenscreens, they saw consistent growth in load volume. Beyond increasing business, the tool also enabled leadership to incorporate win rate data into strategic planning and team goal-setting.
Growth with Greenscreens
In their next phase of growth, Cooler Logistics is enhancing their partnership with Greenscreens by adopting a prescriptive AI-driven pricing algorithm. This includes access to the Target Buy Rate—a predictive model based on both Cooler’s data and Greenscreens' broader network. The Cooler Logistics team will set clear goals, tracking metrics such as the volume of quotes entered, the number of new customer quotes, and the overall win rate.
“We’re really excited to go live with our Cooler-specific pricing algorithm. We feel having this data available will allow us to target future customers based on our internal market strengths.” — CEO of Cooler Logistics Michael Cherney.
Cooler Logistics’ Favorite Greenscreens Features
- Win rate data: Users can track their win rate on the Quote Tab. When you send a quote through Greenscreens.ai, the system logs your quotes on the Pricing tab under Quotes. Tracking your quotes on the Quotes tab can show you which quoting strategies are working, and which team members are winning the most quotes.
- Connected Partner Ecosystem: Their Integration with our TMS: Revenova
- Real-time market movement tracking: The Network Lane Prediction widget shows you the expected rate in the market. The rate here comes from the Greenscreens.ai network and is not specific to your brokerage. It can be lower or higher than the target rate, depending on how your brokerage books freight on the underlying lane or similar lanes. The Network Rate also considers the day of the week, as prices tend to run a little higher for weekend pickups.
Advice for Brokerages Facing Current Market Challenges
“Change is constant in logistics. Staying true to your values and building strong foundations within your teams is the key to long-term success.” — Michael Cherney, CEO of Cooler Logistics.
If you could describe Greenscreens in one word, what would it be?
Indispensable.
.jpg)