Scout Freight is the newest logistics company to expand Freight Alley. The brokerage, with headquarters in Dalton, Georgia, and an office in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, was founded by logistics veterans Elliot Scott, George Yates and Matt Moore.
The founding team launched Scout Freight after years of working together at U.S. Xpress and among other companies. One advantage the founders bring is decades of experience from large organizations. Creating a new freight brokerage from scratch allowed them the opportunity to move fast and try things that would be difficult for larger companies to pull off.
“We’ve been in big corporate organizations. They’ve been at Covenant and Shaw, and wanted to do something a little bit different,” said Elliot Scott, head of people at Scout Freight, in an interview with FreightWaves. “We want to be nimble. We want to have control of how we run our business. We want to get away from some of the bureaucracy and just create a fun culture.”
Scout Freight employs a distinctive hybrid operating model that blends Chicago split and cradle-to-grave approaches to freight management. This flexible system allows the brokerage to adapt to diverse customer requirements while maintaining a strong focus on customer ownership over freight.
“If a customer requires a split model, we can be nimble and that’s what being a startup with the experience we all have—we can kind of be a little different than everybody,” said Tyler Montgomery, chief customer officer at Scout Freight. “If we get a large account that needs the operations support or the carrier sales support, we will put a small carrier sales team around that and grow it out that way.”
This approach creates accountability within the organization while avoiding internal competition. “We’re trying to create ownership over the freight so that there’s no ‘hey, that’s your load’ or ‘that’s your customer,’” Montgomery explained. “It’s ownership over the business, the customer as one.”
Unlike many freight brokerages that recruit inexperienced college graduates, Scout Freight has deliberately built its team with seasoned professionals. “It’s not been a startup or a situation where we’re just going to colleges and trying to bring in people fresh out,” Scott said. “Ours is that we’ve been targeting more people with experience who are really coming in just so we can come and do good work together.”
Looking ahead, Scout Freight plans to expand into ocean freight services, creating a more comprehensive solution for customers. “Eventually we’re going to open up an ocean side of things,” Montgomery said. “We’ll have the rep from domestic drayage housed together, and then we’ll have international to create a more unique solution for the customer.”
At the end of the day, in a freight brokerage, culture is king. “We’re just trying to make it a people-first business, because if the people are taken care of, our success will come from the team,” Montgomery said. “Their success is our success and vice versa.”
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