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By John Magnor, Co-Founder, FleetCore Logistics

FleetCore is a traditional freight brokerage. We’re a team of six, we mostly run full truckload, and on a normal week we move around a hundred loads for shippers across the country.

For a long time, moving each of those loads meant opening six or seven different tools.

We had a TMS for building loads. We had a tracking app open in another tab. Carrier vetting happened on a separate site. Then there were the texts and spreadsheets holding everything together in between. None of it talked to anything else, and all of it had to be kept up to date by hand.

If you run a small brokerage, there’s a good chance that sounds familiar. Here’s what it actually cost us, and what we changed.

The real cost wasn’t the software — it was the retyping

The obvious cost of a stack like that is the subscriptions. The bigger one is the time.

Most of our reps were typing the same tender into three different systems. Across the team, that added up to something like ten hours a week of pure data entry — time spent copying information that already existed, instead of selling.

For a business our size that’s significant. Most people get into brokerage because they want to sell. Nobody joins a freight brokerage hoping to spend their afternoons re-entering pickup addresses.

It also shows up in the hours. When every load needs touching in several places, the day doesn’t end when the calls stop. It ends when the admin is done, which was often late.

Per-seat pricing punishes you for growing

The second problem was how our old TMS charged. Every new rep or broker we added cost another $200 a month, and sometimes closer to $300.

That sounds manageable until you think about how long a new rep takes to become profitable. In freight, that ramp is long. So every time we hired, our software bill went up immediately, while the revenue from that hire was still months away. Bring on several new reps at once and you’ve added real cost before anyone has closed a load.

For a growing brokerage, per-seat pricing works exactly backwards: it makes hiring more expensive at the moment you can least afford it.

Our data was everywhere, so we couldn’t use any of it

The third problem took us longest to notice. With information spread across six or seven systems, we had plenty of data and no way to use it.

Which lanes were we winning? Where were our margins actually coming from? How were our rates holding up against the market? The answers existed, but they were split between a TMS, a tracking tool and a spreadsheet, and pulling them together was a project in itself. So mostly we didn’t.

How we went about replacing it

We spent about three months looking, and spoke to roughly five TMS providers. Most of the demos were generic — a polished walkthrough of sample data that could have been anyone’s brokerage.

The one that stood out asked us to bring a few of our own real loads to the call, then built them live in front of us. Seeing our actual freight go through the system told us more in twenty minutes than every scripted demo combined. We also got login access straight away, rather than waiting weeks to try it for ourselves.

We ended up moving to Polt, an AI-native TMS built specifically for brokers, and we were one of its early pilot users.

What changed

We went from six or seven tools down to three.

Load building from tenders is now automated, so reps aren’t retyping the same shipment into several systems. By my own rough estimate, that’s given me back around 30% of my time — time that now goes into prospecting and calling customers instead of data entry.

The pricing is based on shipment volume rather than seats, so we can add reps without the bill moving every time we hire.

And onboarding is simpler. When a new hire had to learn six or seven tools, they were as confused as the rest of us. One system is far easier to teach.

What we’d tell another small brokerage

You don’t have to switch anything to get value from this. Four questions worth asking about your own setup:

1. How many tools does it take to move one load? Count the tabs. If the answer is more than three or four, you’re almost certainly paying for it in data entry.

2. How many times is the same information typed? Every repeated entry is time lost and a new chance for a mistake. Ask where your tender details get re-keyed.

3. What happens to your software bill when you hire? If it rises with every seat, work out what a new rep costs you during their ramp — before they’ve made you anything.

4. Will a vendor demo your freight, or theirs? Ask to bring your own loads. A system that can’t handle your real shipments on the call won’t handle them any better after you sign.

None of this is complicated. Brokerage is a fairly simple business — it’s the tools wrapped around it that tend to make it harder than it needs to be.