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On this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road, Nick Darman, founder and CEO of Alvys, sat down with host Jeremy Reymer, founder of DriverReach and Project 61, to discuss his entrepreneurial journey into trucking, from starting a trucking company to creating a world-class TMS to help fleets maximize efficiency and utilization.
Darman began working in trucking when his father was driving a truck. While attending Georgia State University, Darman started a trucking company and ran dispatch. Other drivers soon recognized his dispatch talents and joined his company as owner-operators.
After graduating from Georgia State, Darman pursued a career on Wall Street. “I learned a lot while at JP Morgan, especially understanding and operating complex international systems,” he said.
“Ultimately, I realized that I’m an entrepreneur at heart,” Darman said. “I wanted to go back into trucking, so I started another trucking company, but this time around I had big goals beyond working with my father and local drivers.”
Seeing an opportunity for growth in an industry that had been slow to adopt a variety of technologies, Darman wanted to create more efficiencies and avenues for scaling. His accounting and systems operation experience helped him dial in on what he needed in a platform.
“Little did I know, what I was looking for didn’t exist yet,” Darman said. “I onboarded four different platforms and wasted a lot of time. I decided to form a tech team in 2017 and built my own proprietary technology to help my logistics company.”
After building this technology for three years, Darman realized that no one had built a robust, cloud-native TMS specifically for carriers. Most of the platforms on the market were targeted to shippers or brokerages, meaning carriers had been overlooked while other platforms matured.
“I initially discovered this opportunity because a lot of my friends were running large trucking companies and asking if they could use my platform,” Darman said. “In order to scale the technology, I had to figure out who would run the IT department. As it happened, we wound up spinning off another technology company, Alvys, from my previous trucking company.”
Darman partnered with specialists who built industrial grade platforms in the cloud. “Together, we embarked on a journey to build something that’s never been built for trucking companies,” Darman said.
“What Elvis did to rock and roll is what we want to do to the trucking world, so that’s how people remember how to say our name,” Darman said.
Alvys is an Old Norse word that means “all-wise,” a core tenet of the company’s philosophy.
“We like to say that our system acts wisely in the background while you run your business,” Darman said. “From a marketing standpoint, I wanted the name to start with an ‘A’ and be very short and work well with a ‘.com’ extension, so it worked out well.”
What differentiates Alvys from competitors? Darman says it’s primarily the platform’s hybrid architecture.
“You can manage your freight as a carrier, but if you need to broker out your overflow freight, the same freight that’s on your dashboard can be brokered out all while having different profit and loss statements,” Darman said. “In other words, you are able to see how your brokerage is doing versus your carrier operation, without logging in or out.”
Having brokerage and carrier capabilities in one dashboard was vital to how Alvys wanted to structure its model and interface.
“Every time you have overflow freight from shippers, you’re able to broker out seamlessly,” Darman said. “Needless to say, one employee could transact both sides of the business – carrier and brokerage. That drives a lot of efficiencies at larger scales.”
This flexibility is helpful for private fleets as well, not just for-hire carriers. “Helping private fleets manage their assets is one of our biggest advantages,” Darman said. “They often don’t have backhauls back to their yards or hubs, and we’re helping them maximize their resources and utilize their assets.
“Carriers of any size can use Alvys to overlap,” Darman said. “Even if you are a shipper, Alvys allows you to segment that aspect of the business and take advantage of the fact that everything is in one dashboard.”
Alvys serves mostly small to medium-size fleets, particularly fleets with 10 or more trucks.
“Although we do serve carriers with hundreds of trucks or more, our platform is particularly useful to those midsize carriers,” Darman said.
Small, family-owned fleets and owner-operators, Darman says, can still benefit from using Alvys, especially if they want to scale up quickly.
“I think small fleets sometimes see that we offer hundreds of integrations and think we offer more capability than they can afford, and so they look elsewhere to something that’s targeted for a small carrier,” Darman said.
“Many companies don’t realize that our focus is on scaling, which means we’re the solution for any small fleet that’s looking to scale fast, even if they only have a handful of trucks,” Darman said.
