[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast, the only podcast for job seekers, professionals, and students who are focused on career enhancing conversations and insights across all aspects of the supply chain discipline. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
Visit SCM Talent [email protected]. In this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast, we speak with Aaron Mitchell, chief Operating Officer at YMX Logistics, plus over two decades of experience at Kraft Heinz. Leading areas such as network transformation, warehouse operations, and global logistics optimization.
Listen, as Erin provides her career development story, including a start as an in-house developer of applications, taking that experience along with a company sponsored MBA to get into operations and technology, hear about the value of servant leadership, plus Aaron’s experience with a major merger. She emphasizes finding people who have a drive for results and a problem solving set of skills, plus the ability to have effective conversations.
Listen to Erin’s tips on relationships with vendors and partners. She also emphasizes the value of early experience making decisions as a line leader or team leader, seeing the impact on the people and operations she closes with her thoughts on technology shifts. Innovation, finding the right talent, and our best advice on careers in supply chain.
I’m your podcast co-host Rodney Apple, and
[00:01:40] Rodney Apple: I’m your
[00:01:41] Mike Ogle: podcast
[00:01:41] Rodney Apple: co-host Chris Gaffney.
Aaron, welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast.
[00:01:50] Erin Mitchell: Hi, I am happy to be here.
[00:01:52] Rodney Apple: We’re excited to have you on. We look forward to diving into your career journey. Speaking of, you’ve had quite the impressive career in supply chain and logistics and operations. We’d love to start out by learning what inspired you to get into the field early on, and how did the days at Kraft hen shaped your career trajectory?
[00:02:12] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so early on I never had any intention of being where I’m at. My early on was I was an application developer out of college, and so I joined Kraft. Back then, it was just Kraft food. I joined CRAFT in their IS department as a software developer. So we were heavily, this was a million years ago, and we were heavily on the make side of make versus buy.
And so back at that point in time, all of our internal operations and logistics applications were all custom made in house. I was a developer. I was there probably toward the end stage of that phase where big companies did their own in-house software development. In my first two years, they transitioned to a buy strategy and an outsourcing.
So they wanted to convert everything to a purchase software and they outsourced all of their tech to info. And so I, a lot of my coworkers were reorged into different roles or outta the organization. I was given the opportunity to stay, they sponsor my MBA and I ended up moving into many other roles, some enterprise technology roles, roles, supporting mergers and acquisitions and domestics.
Pure ops roles, all sorts of different things. So I think the only thing they ever had in common was that most of the roles I did were a, an ops a people and tech inter intersection. So whether it was implementing our first ERP or it was like, how do we weave in or weave out certain parts of the business?
But there was always like an operations and technology intersection and that was where I really played well.
[00:03:41] Chris Gaffney: So Aaron, most of us get into this world of logistics in an individual contributor role. I’d love to hear a little bit about your early people leadership roles in terms of your leadership style and approach.
Was there a manager, a boss you had? You said this person does it right. I want to role model some of the things that they do as I start to, to lead teams in a more formal way.
[00:04:09] Erin Mitchell: Oh, definitely. I think I was really fortunate at Kraft Hein or at Kraft in the early days. I had a quite a few managers that were very like students of servant leadership.
I wouldn’t say anyone actually like quoted servant leadership, but when I go back and I look at the different leadership styles and what was really. Like what fit the shape of some of my best leaders. It was a servant leadership style and I had one boss. He was great. He was, I actually, he had some really good stuff for me over the years.
I think he was my boss twice, but he really coached me on, on how to gain consensus and how to get people to do maybe what you want them to do or what they should be doing, but isn’t necessarily like their natural inclination. And so he always coached me. And I’ve used this with other folks that on my teams as well, if you can talk people through a problem and talk them into a solution, like instead of telling them like, oh, we’ve done this before.
The solution has X, Y, Z. If you can ask them questions about what’s worked in the past, what have they tried, what happens if we do this, what happens if we do that? And they come up with a solution? They’re very much more likely to go and execute that solution themselves without you saying, okay, now go do that and report back to me in a week.
So he really was that, especially when you get up in front of a challenging group, which a lot of times when you’re going through, especially like m and a or transformation activity or things like that, you’re up in front of a group of stakeholders that have very differing views of what success looks like in this room for them personally and for their functional organization.
And you have that conversation and you can weave people through all the different objectives and opportunities and outcomes and things like that. And. Group can gain consensus or they could, they can align on something. You then have a go forward plan that people aren’t gonna fight you on every step of the way.
So I think that that manager in particular was fantastic with pearls and nuggets like that throughout the years.
[00:06:01] Chris Gaffney: You know what, you can name him if you want, whether he looked at a circle, but sometimes it’s awesome to, definitely
[00:06:06] Erin Mitchell: Kevin Hendricks. Kevin Hendricks, he was a, a craft guy that he’d started with the company.
Back when I believe he was fresh outta high school, he was a part-time dock worker in the Chicago Kool-Aid factory. Worked his way through school and worked his way up in the organization. And one of the things that he always said he loved about craft, and this was the old craft, was that it was still a company at that time.
That you could start at the bottom and work your way up and you could be a leader of the company having started in a meat factory or on a dock or in sanitation or something else. So I was. It was a pretty cool group of people to have around you early in your career.
[00:06:46] Chris Gaffney: Wonderful. Thank you for that. Yeah.
[00:06:49] Rodney Apple: So Aaron, you touched on Kraft. We mentioned Kraft. He as well. So we all know there was a giant merger and you played a a critical role in leading the North America logistics integration. I can’t even fathom what that was like looking at two giant companies and the footprints that had to merge together.
But could you speak to that strategic effort? And what were some of the key challenges that you had to deal with at that time?
[00:07:16] Erin Mitchell: Yeah. I think when I look back, so I was talking with you guys before the podcast, that was one of my favorite roles. It was transformative for me. It was transformative for the organization.
Met a lot of really great people, did things that I never thought I would have to do in my career, like just crop cheese that I didn’t know existed. But some of the big challenges when I look back, I think. There’s really two. There were two things. One was it was a really high pressure environment, so we, we were two big companies.
This merger was in the news. There was big publicly stated goals, right? Berkshire Hathaway was involved. 3G was involved, like we were getting publicity at the same time. The organization was in turmoil and it was a lot of, it was the headquarter relocation, it was the merger of the two companies and then the headquarter relocation at downtown Chicago.
We lost a ton of people and I don’t think. We really understood how many we were gonna lose ’cause it cut pretty deep. And, and on top of that, like the craft and Heinz aspect, culture aspect of the merger was like ships colliding. It was not like, it was not like craft in de bisco where we held hands for 10 years and then parted ways.
It was crash, bam, we’re gonna do this. And I really enjoyed that aspect of it, but it, it was difficult in the early days. So we had. The big challenge of bringing in people, so building the teams. So I think a big part of this was we had to saff all of logistics, all of operations, all of marketing sales everywhere.
We had to saff everything. So we were doing basically like speed dating, trying to like interview people as quick as we can. I think in one day I was interviewing 30 to 40 people, placing them on teams. Like we were just in, at the end of the day, all the leaders would meet and we’re just, this person goes here and this person goes here and this, and just.
That was the way we were hiring. And then for that, like for my particular role in, in this, my team needed to be very nimble, quick problem solvers, quick decision makers. We had objectives we needed to meet, we needed to be comfortable with driving things forward, assessing situations. And so just looking for those people that had that skillset.
And that was really when I started myself refining the things I look for in a team. There’s a lot of things you can teach people. You can teach people logistics and trucking and warehousing and. All that kind of stuff. But I, the things you can’t teach people are drive for result. Like you can’t teach that into a person.
You have to find that person that has drive for results. Same thing with problem solving skills. Like you have to fi, you can coach, you can mentor, but like a person has to come in with problem solving skills. And then the last one was the ability to identify and deliver win-win situations or solutions.
So. Whether they’re at the table with a peer or someone that reports to them, or a vendor or an entire leadership team of people that they’re completely intimidated by, can they, can they identify what those folks need to get outta the conversation, what they need to get outta the conversation and come to that middle ground where everybody leaves the room and says, I got what I needed from this.
And I think if you can find those three things in a person, you can teach them everything else. And they’re generally very highly motivated people and they generally are, have the ability to work as a team. So I think that is con to this day, what I continue to look for as I built teams in, in every role I’ve had.
So that was one thing. The second challenge. The second concern was that, and this is a little bit more like, this is a little less theoretical, a little bit more like tactical, was that we had a plan for this. Integration of craft and times that was put in place in partnership with a consulting firm. So I walked in and this plan was 80% of the way done, and if this plan was executed, it was supposed to deliver on these huge cost saving.
My team and I started executing on the plan, and there were multiple tenants of it, but there was a big piece of it that we realized very quickly. We went and we executed a couple parts of it across the network and realized very quickly as we were doing the check portion of the result that it was not gonna deliver.
Results. So we went back, we retested some numbers, we reran some assumptions, all sorts of things. This was not gonna work. And so we knew that our runway was really short here and that we had to do something quickly. So there was two things, right? So I’m sitting here at night, I am laying in bed. I’m like, oh my gosh, I have this great new job.
I have all these new people I just hired, and we don’t have a great plan. And so the two things that I needed to figure out is. One, how do I communicate that we need to change course? So how do I tell people that are already bought in and invested in this, that we gotta do something different? And then the second one was, my expectations don’t change.
I already know the answer. They’re gonna say, okay, fine. The end result here is, okay, fine. Now what are you doing? And Aaron, so first part on the communication. We were able to get through that, it went fine. We used data, right? It’s always great to take emotion out of it. We use data. Here’s the assumptions, here’s what happened when we execute it, here’s what happens.
If we execute the rest of the plan, we’re not gonna get there. The second one was we had to get really creative and come up with some projects. So luckily, again, had really great people on the team, had really great relationships in the organization. Were able to come up with some substitute plans, a couple different ones.
They were able to deliver on the results and that we were able to execute in time. But yes, that was that. Those were the things that stand out to me from that Kraft Heinz merger experience.
[00:12:35] Rodney Apple: I would imagine a lot of late nights as well, late nights
[00:12:38] Erin Mitchell: and
[00:12:38] Rodney Apple: weekends.
[00:12:39] Erin Mitchell: Yeah. Lot of swings. You think? I tend to pretty high energy.
I can pack a lot in a work day.
[00:12:48] Mike Ogle: During this short break, we recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected]
[00:13:06] Chris Gaffney: set resonates. Having done some large scale stuff, in my experience, you. Obviously we’re going quick, but you go from leading small teams then into these kind of large scale transformation, and then along the way, oh by the way, leading a very large operational organization, and I know I’ve talked to lots of people, they’re like, when I got into that seat, I was like, gosh, do I have everything I need to get it done?
Somebody thought you either did or had the potential. When you think of leading a big footprint like you talked about. What are the organizational, operational skills that you had to build along the way to really drive that? And I, what I also hear you saying is you guys were in that mode of we gotta run the business, but we gotta change the business at the same time.
So I’m curious if there are key things that you reflect on there.
[00:13:58] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so leading that footprint. I think the thing that I had to rely on the most. Was influence and partnerships, right? This, that is not a job you get done on your own no matter how much you wanna force it or pit bull it or push it through, you really have to have partners.
And at Kraft Heinz, I was, a lot of it was my logistics partners. You have to have vendors that you can trust. You have to have people in the organization. You’ve gotta build those quick relationships, especially when the organization is in turmoil and you’re trying to execute projects that touch commercial.
Agreements and things like that. So I think when you’re, when I was in it, realizing quickly, like I’ve had a lot of roles where me and my team could do a lot of things in this role. We could do a lot of things, but we couldn’t do them. Like the things we were trying to do. We could not do them without really good relationships.
With three pls, really good relationships with the demand planning team. Really good relationships with manufacturing, with the commercial teams, with customers like. We really had to be good communicators, good problem solvers, build, be people that were trusted to deliver solutions, and knowing that if it didn’t work, we weren’t just gonna walk away.
So I think that was really the, the lesson learned from me there, and skills that I took into future roles.
[00:15:14] Chris Gaffney: In your prior answer, you highlighted three differentiating capabilities that I would put in that leading self bucket, and then you just talked about. A key attribute in leading large scale organization.
Those are all what we would in today. Today’s world call soft skills. I think. And in the world of today where we’re reading about the AI is taking over, it seems like AI’s never touching those things. So if I were a younger professional, I could still make big bets on saying, if I can invest and build those intellectual capabilities that you talk to, I probably am gonna have a place in the future.
I know we’re off script there, but what are your thoughts on that?
[00:15:57] Erin Mitchell: So I a hundred percent agree with you. So I think about this a lot because I have three teenagers, so I’m always like, what do I tell my kids to do? I also think back on my career, and I started with a tech background, right? And that is a set of tools in my toolbox that I have had and relied heavily on for 25 years now.
So when other people are coming in and they have degrees that don’t have that tech background, and they’re like, I gotta go build these skills. I’ve had them. I can pull data, I can manipulate data, I can understand interfaces and user interfaces and all sorts of stuff that, that I just take for granted, right?
So I think those are super important skills. But I think the things, when I am looking at what’s coming out of college right now at younger talent, I see a lot of tech skills. I see a lot of folks that can build and do really cool things. But what I really need them to have is, or what I want them to do, I guess what I’m not saying it’s missing.
I’m saying they, these are things that I would recommend they do is get that experience early on as a line leader or team leader. So I think operations experience, even if it’s a summer job in college or high school or wherever, having that, like I did the work, I then coached or mentored the people doing the work.
I was accountable for something I think is really important ’cause. When you’re a leader and you’re trying to motivate teams and you really, it’s really important that I’ve been there, done that. Like it goes a long ways. And so I think that’s important. I think honing your problem solving skills, so it’s one thing to say, I can do this thing and I have a hammer and I’m gonna hit every nail.
It’s another thing to say, this might not be a nail today. This might be something else, and I need a different tool or different solution. So having those problem solving skills, really understand what you’re going after. And then my other one is, and I see this a lot, is people that get bogged down in like analysis paralysis.
So again, we have a ton of data today, like so much data, like it’s, you can get it to tell you anything almost, but you know a lot. How do you, how do you actually glean out of that? What is important? What is gonna move me forward? Where is the bottleneck? Things like that. And I feel like if, if you find yourself getting bogged down in analysis paralysis, try to get a coach or something to help you through or some way to, to get out of that.
Because I think as you move into executive roles, you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to make decisions, you’re gonna have to make decisions faster. You have to make decisions with incomplete data. So I think that’s also just very important if you find that you want to continue to move up past a manager or a senior manager and into those more executive decision making roles.
[00:18:36] Chris Gaffney: Now that’s wonderful. I would put a real big underline on that context statement you made when you and I started. You did start on the shop floor, whether you’re in a manufacturing plan or fulfillment center, dc, whatever your terminology was. And a lot of kids in the last 10 or 15 years got into this analytics, world tech, world consulting world, where you could avoid those stops.
And the jobs were extremely attractive. And I think what we’re seeing now is it’s gonna be. Back to the future is if you’ve been on the floor even for three to five years, it will be a huge differentiator for you. So thank you for agree.
[00:19:13] Erin Mitchell: And I, I find when we find those people in the marketplace and we hire them, they hit the ground running.
Like they’re so much faster at uptake on what needs to happen and when we get productivity out of them. So yeah.
[00:19:25] Rodney Apple: So Aaron, you made a pretty big shift and from the recruiter seat, I don’t see this move too often moving from the, the shipper side, the brand owner side into the logistics service provider side of the house, but would love to hear what motivated that change and, and what kind of, how have you leveraged that background with Kraft Heinz to be successful in the COO role at YMX logistics?
[00:19:48] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so the why I made the move like this is, this seems to be like the number one question that people ask me, especially when I run into them out at like trade shows and things like that. They’re like, what are you doing? But it was really, it was one of those situations where I feel like, especially looking back, the stars aligned.
I, I was, I loved the work I did at Kraft find. I had amazing experiences and opportunities, but I was definitely in that spot where I felt like I’d done all the things I wanted to do. And there just wasn’t anything else out there that really excited me and came upon a time when my direct leader was leaving the company and we’d had some conversations about my personal, like the goals I put in my development plan every year.
And one of ’em was I wanted to influence top line growth. So in operations at Craft and Heinz, you’re always cost cutting. Like you, you’re optimizing, you’re cost cutting, you’re doing it in day in and day out, whether it’s tactical or strategic. I feel like I’d done that. I was really good at it. Like I knew that world extremely well and I’m like, but how do I get to a point where I can influence top line growth?
And that’s really not at a company that size. That’s just not an opportunity that exists from an operation standpoint. And I decided to leave and I really wasn’t sure what that meant. It felt like I was leaving my family, if that makes sense. I’d been there forever. I’d been to a lot with a lot of the folks there.
So it was really hard and I, as I was leaving, I had several conversations with other large food companies about roles very similar to what I’d done at Kraft Heinz or in that same realm. And it really felt to me like they were very plug and play, and I’m sure it would’ve been fine. I’m sure I could’ve gone and done those, and in six months, I probably would’ve been like, wow, this isn’t really the big change I wanted.
But I would’ve been good at it. I would’ve been successful. It would’ve been fine. But what I did instead was I instead decided to go on a path of like self introspection. I set up, I set up one-on-ones or interviews with people. I ended up doing about 45 of them, 45 or 47 of them, something like that. It was a lot.
I documented them. A lot of ’em were former craft or craft Heinz people. Some were people in industry that I’d interacted with over the years, whether I was the customer or their supplier or whatever. And I asked them a ton of questions about their job. How they found it, did they like it? There were some people that had left big companies over the years and they had bounced a couple times, like they’d gone somewhere and they were there for 18 months.
They didn’t love it. They went somewhere else. So I really was trying to find out like what, how did you find what you wanted to do? All I’d ever known was this big mega company, right? That’s it. I’d always and big mega company with tons of resources and everything all figured out and I’m like, how do I even know if that’s what I want?
That’s what I chose when I was. 20 years old. So I just, I talked to everybody. I talked to them about do they take a risk? What did they do? How did they find it? I got awesome feedback from people. I got a lot of, a lot of people offered connections, resources, questions to ask myself, tips on what to listen for and ask in interviews to avoid some of those like pitfalls along the way.
And it made me realize that, you know, what was really important to me was that I work with people I can learn from. So like I wanted a manager. Who I could learn from, who had done, had experiences that I hadn’t had before in the past, that I had peers that had experiences that I hadn’t had in the past and that I could learn from ’em.
I also learned that I really love building things, so I wanna give me a big problem, give me a big challenge, have me, I wanna build a strategy, I wanna build an organization. And then I also learned as I talked to people that the big brand didn’t matter. So when I had left Kraft Heinz, I’m like, I need to go somewhere amazing, like Nike or one of these big companies.
And I’m like, oh, I guess that is awesome, but that’s not what I need. I don’t need that. I’d really rather take a higher, take a risk in exchange for a higher degree of autonomy and control over my destiny. Like to me, as I was going through all these conversations, I realized I was seeking, like I, I wanted to control my destiny.
I wanted to build something amazing. The comfort of the big brand was great, but not for me right now. So, yeah, so that was my journey. And then somehow that ended up being employee number two at a logistics startup. Yeah. But it felt right. So that’s how it went.
[00:24:01] Chris Gaffney: Awesome.
[00:24:02] Erin Mitchell: Yeah.
[00:24:03] Chris Gaffney: Talk to me about the day-to-day at YMX versus the day-to-day at Kraft.
How, what does that look and feel? The same, how does that look and feel different?
[00:24:12] Erin Mitchell: Yeah. No, no, it’s so different. So the difference is huge. YMX. Was tiny when I joined. It was Matt Erling, the CEO, and it was me. So there was two of us, and we’re still tiny today. We’re much larger. We’re closing in on 400 employees 18 months later.
But we, we’ve got a lot of heart and we’re, we’re a cohesive organization and it’s really fun. But right away, so I joined right away. We had an acquisition and we bought a very small trucking company, and the first order of business was professionalization. So I come in. If there’s no HR in this company, there was a patchwork of non-integrated systems and processes, so just very kind of haphazard, and we had to just quickly professionalize the entire thing in order to use it as our platform for growth.
So everything from HR policies, wage standardization, upgrading our TMS, getting things off of the premises into the cloud, like. Integrating all of our safety and routing and everything else, like we just, plus all of our financials and how we re report on things and just, it was just a huge undertaking and there was no, unlike anything I’d ever experienced in the past.
When you have an H IT group, you have an HR group, you have a procurement group, none of that. We built all of that. Yeah. So it was just, it was crazy and super fun. So we built the capabilities, we built the playbooks, we’re using them to scale today. At the same time we were building the brand. We were engaging customers and we were creating our culture.
So it’s, it’s been 18 months, it’s been 10 years crammed in 18 months. But it’s been great. It’s really been exciting. It’s everything that I wanted and I needed, and I really credit both the opportunity to be here, but also that time I spent and that effort and everyone that helped me understand like what I was looking for
[00:25:55] Chris Gaffney: in terms of going from, as we say.
Being served to serving. What’s that dynamic for you, uh, in terms of getting involved, as you said, in the top line in terms of the bd, bringing customers in, onboarding customers, that type of thing. How does that look and feel for you after having been on the other side of that for so long?
[00:26:14] Erin Mitchell: So it’s great.
I think just about everyone at YMX is engaged in our sales and everyone is customer facing at this point. We’re just that small. But yeah, so going on sales calls, going to conferences, meeting with people, like reaching out to peers and industry or former peers, it’s all been part of the process of building the organization.
Additionally, within operations is our sales engineering team and our customer success organization. So everything we do at YMX has a huge customer focus. It’s safety first, customers right after it. So we’re always, every person on our team knows how important the customer is and knows that every interaction we have is critical.
And our number one job is to deliver for the customer
[00:27:02] Mike Ogle: during this short break. We recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].
[00:27:19] Rodney Apple: Aaron shifting gears a little bit, but we know technology can be a big, huge differentiator, you know, when it comes to logistics and operations and especially in a logistics service provider or three PL environment. I would love to hear your experience and philosophy there when it comes to sustainability.
I picked up and your profile that you have done have done some good work in that area.
[00:27:39] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. So I think that was one of the things that really. Really rounded out the whole opportunity to join YMX or to be part of this organization was working with our, the PE firm. They’re really focused on sustainability and that just helped the whole package come together.
I do think the thing that makes yards and makes supply chain such a target for sustainability is just the ability to have so much impact quickly and at scale. So if you think about a yard truck running 140, 150 hours a week. Versus electrifying a personal vehicle that runs 10 to 20 hours a week. You can clearly have impact very quickly with a yard truck and that payback is much faster.
So from a dollars and cents and impact and everything else, we’re in the right space to have that sustainability impact. That’s, to me, it’s a no brainer. And I’m gonna go off topic just slightly, but I really appreciate, like we’ve had some challenges in with regulations and with incentives and things like that, that we’re here and they’re going away, or they’re in question.
And I’ve really appreciated customers and potential customers who’ve said, you know what, it’s the right thing to do regardless. We’re gonna electrify regardless. And to me, that’s just such a refreshing thing. ’cause we know that, but like to hear our customers say, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna move forward anyway.
And it’s just been fantastic. Back to sustainability. I think the other piece that really, that I think Matt and I really aligned on early in the beginning, and he was the CEO of pink and I was his customer. So that’s how we met originally was I was his cut for when I was at Kraft Heinz. But I think the piece that, that we aligned on early is sustainability and technology aren’t just electro by the yard trucks.
There’s an element here of we can do the work more efficiently. So like. We can take yard trucks outta the equation. We can take hours outta the equation. It’s, it’s new to this industry that we’re in because a lot of the service providers, they’re selling trucks and they’re selling hours, and that’s how they make revenue.
And Matt and I had the conversations early on where we said, okay, when that opportunity comes up and we know we can do it better with fewer hours, fewer trucks, and it’s gonna hurt our revenue, are we gonna do it? And we said yes. So I think that’s the thing that makes us different. We’re not afraid to take assets outta the equation, so not every yard is a candidate for electrify electrification, but every candidate, every yard is a candidate for how do I reduce the hours or reduce the assets.
Doesn’t mean you always can, but you can always look at it.
[00:30:12] Chris Gaffney: I’ll also go off topic, but I’ll build on that. I just saw a project for a very large internal campus operation that might have 50 or 60 of what you and I would call a yard. Yard operates, people doing drop in hooks inside of a, and it had not been a huge focus of optimization and it was a massive, totally controllable opportunity in there.
Yeah. So I think it’s a good lesson for folks that there’s, everyone’s looking for where’s the next space where I can do something, but almost everybody has to deal with some aspect of the yard. Yep. So you talked about customer success. You’ve talked about sustainability. You still gotta make the math work in terms of making sure that you’re making money with your clients and that type of thing over the right time horizon.
So customer service, customer success, metrics, the green piece is important in terms of being more sustainable, but you still gotta make the p and l work with the client. And when your teams are faced with those decisions on a day-to-day basis in terms of how do I make all of this work, right? So we’re actually winning over time.
How do you coach your team to think about, again, back to their decision making in both the day-to-day and maybe the midterm?
[00:31:18] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so one, it’s always safety first, right? We employ drivers, we’re on yards that have people and equipment interacting, so it’s always safety first. Second is always customer first, right?
So it’s safety customer and, and have that face to face with the customer. So we’re a big feedback culture like, so I’m always coaching folks, have the face to face, ask for their feedback, things like that. So get the customer first. But then we have, I still manage to a fairly, fairly far down in the organization.
I have weekly check-ins with our supervisors across the country. So they have a direct align to me at least once a week where if there’s something that’s not feeling right or isn’t working, we can talk through it and that call. And usually if there is something, and they’re probably not the only one that’s had that concern, I still manage all the data.
We’ve got all of our enterprise data, we’ve got our financial data, we’ve got our safety data, our fleet data. And then we get into the, how is it going, supervisors, right? We all review the data together and then tell me what’s, tell me what’s happening. Tell me what’s happening with your customer.
Interactions, tell me what’s happening with your driver. Interactions, tell me your concerns, tell me your opportunities. And that’s, that’s how we maintain that connection. And we make sure that we’re all aligned. Obviously, we have to scale that, right? So at some point we’re gonna have to come up with something different.
But right now, this is working.
[00:32:37] Chris Gaffney: Thank you.
[00:32:39] Rodney Apple: And that’s a perfect segue into our next question where. Looking ahead, there are lots of rapid innovation within logistics and supply chain. Where do you see things heading? We’ve talked about electrification, yard visibility, we’ve touched on ai, but what do you see shaping the careers of professionals down the road?
So
[00:33:01] Erin Mitchell: I think I, I think the biggest thing that I see today, or the biggest thing I’m hearing, at least for the last year, is there’s a lot of decision fatigue. There’s a solution out there for everything. Like you can walk the floor at anyone, any trade show, and there’s a tech solution to solve pretty much any tiny little problem you’ve ever seen.
Niche, and that’s great, but you talk to the big shippers and they’re like, they’re like, there’s a million things. They’re all integrated differently. They all do different things. They, they all. Some might have different commercial arrangements. Sometimes like I’m shocked at some of the variation and commercial arrangements, and so they’re just like, I don’t know what to do.
I’m just not going to make a decision. And so one of the things that we’re trying to do as an organization at YMX is working with some of our bigger customers right now and pulling in bits and pieces the best fit for what they’re doing, and. Kind of packaging it up and giving them a turnkey, low touch, low integration solution so that they can get those solutions in their supply chain.
But they’re not out there actively managing three different software vendors. And then there’s this AI camera vendor, and then there’s this, and then there’s that. It’s, we will manage that for you. You’ll work with us, we’ll provide the solution and the services, and then you’ve just got, you don’t have to worry about it, basically.
But I think that’s really, it’s the decision fatigue. It’s there is so much out there today. Uh,
[00:34:27] Chris Gaffney: I have absolutely heard that. And I heard someone who’s probably at a peer level of yours and he said, my other reticence was early on I was very bullish and we made some bets and they didn’t turn out well.
And so he said, ultimately the CFO was saying, I’m not as comfortable when you bring me your big bet anymore. So he said, I got really tired of kissing frogs in the new tech space as well.
[00:34:52] Erin Mitchell: Oh, interesting. Yeah. That’s very interesting.
[00:34:55] Chris Gaffney: So it’s funny, it’s just, as you said, it’s overwhelming at this point. Wow.
[00:34:59] Erin Mitchell: Yeah.
[00:34:59] Chris Gaffney: We talked a little bit about talent, so I don’t wanna, I wanna make sure, if you can put a fine point on it, in terms of getting the best people and the market is different. We’ve got some people who are growing, you’ve got some people who are upgrading whatever. But in the space of talent, what, when you’re looking, listening, what skills are most in demand today?
And if you’re gonna give coaching beyond what you’ve already given to folks who would be listening. What would you offer so that they have the best chance of moving into this world?
[00:35:29] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so I said before, like there’s a lot of really great tech talent out there. A lot of programs, supply chain programs, even operations programs have a focus on data and technology and things like that.
But it is that soft skills. So it’s communication, leadership, organizational agility, negotiation. It’s really getting those, if you can find those people, those are the ones that are gonna, I think, gonna be successful and move up through. Through organizations.
[00:35:54] Chris Gaffney: You mentioned you have kids who will hopefully enter the field.
I have a few who are in the field. What do you wanna see them do more of, do less of so that they’ll be ready when the time comes? I
[00:36:05] Erin Mitchell: don’t know. That’s such a great question. I, I feel like I’m too close to it. I do, I’m gonna, gonna probably overshare right now, so my 17-year-old is working part-time in one of our maintenance shops.
So he’s learning from the mechanics. He is doing all of their bidding, their clean. I think he does a lot of cleaning, but he’s enjoying the view into what does it actually take. It’s not mom on conference calls and mom flying around and mom doing podcasts. There’s a lot of work that gets done and it can be gritty work.
And so he’s really enjoying, he’s enjoying that. He’s getting the hands-on experience so.
[00:36:38] Chris Gaffney: I think you ram reemphasize that point if all else fails, get yourself a hands-on Yeah. Kind of situation. Yep. Wonderful. Yep.
[00:36:48] Rodney Apple: Aaron, as we wind down, we like to leave with this question. Is there, for someone starting out on their career, and you’ve touched on this already, that, is there any one big piece of advice or two or three that you’d like to offer?
[00:37:01] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, so going back to the Kevin Hendricks. Discussion in the beginning, very impactful in my career. He always told me to not be afraid of the stretch assignment. He said, I’m, he’s lived my whole career here saying yes to everything someone asked me to do. So when some leader would call him up and say, Hey, Kevin, can you go down to Atlanta and try to fix this big problem we’ve got?
He would just say, yes. He’s like, I had no idea what I was walking into, but I’d go do it. So I’ve always just tried to live that same, that same motto like, and I coach it to my teams as well. Someone asks you to do something and you’re like, I am not EFT for this. I do not know what this even means. Just recognize that in six months when you’re through it and you’re successful, you’re gonna look back and you’re gonna say, that was a transformative experience.
My perspective has changed. The tools and my toolbox have grown. I am now a different person, a different leader, a different team member. Like I bring more to every team I’m on by taking on these assignments. So I’ve always tried to live by what Kevin says is take that stretch assignment, don’t say no.
[00:38:02] Chris Gaffney: Wonderful. Yeah, that’s flawless advice. Aaron, where can our listeners go to learn more about YMX logistics if they are your next customer?
[00:38:13] Erin Mitchell: Yeah, definitely. So we are very active on LinkedIn, so you can go to YMX logistics on LinkedIn. Follow us. We have a lot of industry publications. A lot of information there.
We’re [email protected]. You can request, you can request us to do a site analysis for you or a quote if you’d like. We can get to know us a little bit better there. I think those are, or you can reach out to me. You can reach out to me directly and I’d be happy to talk to anyone about YMX logistics and what we offer.
[00:38:43] Rodney Apple: Thank you Aaron. Actually, I’m curious, how did you come up, or how did they come up with the name YMX Logistics?
[00:38:48] Erin Mitchell: Um. It’s yard management excellence.
[00:38:52] Rodney Apple: There
[00:38:52] Erin Mitchell: you go. What it is. Yes. And so we, we did not have a, just full transparency here. We did not have a name. We had all these like placeholder name until I believe the day we closed our first acquisition.
So it wasn’t, it was last minute decision. I think YMX logistics was on the list, but I think it was last minute. That’s what went in the document so very. Yeah.
[00:39:13] Rodney Apple: Love it. Aaron, thank you so much for making the time to come on the Supply Chain Careers podcast today. Greatly appreciate your perspectives and advice, and I know our audience will as well.
[00:39:24] Erin Mitchell: I’m Chris Rodney. Thank you so much. I’ve appreciated experience and the opportunity, so thank you. Can’t wait to listen.
[00:39:32] Rodney Apple: Likewise,
[00:39:35] Chris Gaffney: you are welcome, and we always learn from our guests. That’s probably the most enjoyable part of this for me. Good deal. Good deal.
[00:39:46] Mike Ogle: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released as we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
Visit SCM Talent Group at scmtalent.com.
