ULTL Playbook LIVE: Optimal Experience Manifesto

What to expect if you are coming and what to miss if you aren't.

Hello!  Curtis Garrett here.

This is a manifesto written directly to the 30 people that I’ll be in the room with on November 9th and 10th.

Today’s date is November 4th, 2023.

Since the event is approaching quickly and we have folks coming in from all parts of North America, I wanted to get a piece of writing out to everyone to help guide you towards the best possible experience possible during the one and a half days we are all together.

I am posting this publicly as well because I feel everyone should know the depth of how our time together will be spent. There has been zero paid marketing or posting about this mastermind; rather completely grassroots and everything stemming from me, A Team members, Speakers, Attendees, Sponsors, and partners like Manifest, FreightCaviar, etc.

Further - the content, discussions and list of people attending will all be kept private and will not be streamed, shared, or recorded in any way.  We want to ensure that without fail, this gathering sets itself apart from every other conference, trade show, and industry meeting out there.  You need to be here to get anything out of it. This mastermind will foster networking and build trust within the participants to a level we don’t normally see.  It’s about adding arrows into your LTL sheath.  Actually - several arrows.  An arrow for knowledge, one for strategy, one for new and stronger relationships, and several more, based on your own reception and interpretation of things.

I am very happy with the group size and makeup of the gathering.  The goal was twenty-five attendees, the minimum was ten, but I estimated it would land around twelve to fifteen.  We ended up with twenty people attending and eleven speakers including myself. Thirty-one in total!  That’s pretty cool!  A positive signal for the future of this event.  The background and experience level of these thirty-one individuals is broad AND deep.  We have folks in their early to mid-twenties all the way to a retired LTL carrier executive and everything in between.  We have people from three of the largest five LTL carriers, and executives from seven active LTL carriers.  We also have two folks who recently worked in key roles at Yellow Freight.  We have business owners, someone from Wall Street, one person from small parcel, and another from the forwarding world. Truckload-ers – where you at?!  We also have a gentleman from a technology company, a TMS builder, that will join us.  Lastly - we have several 3PL folks, including one from a top five brokerage, and three from top twenty-five, by revenue.

I want to thank Adam Robison from The Robinson Agency, Madison Conway from DDC FPO, and Eric Krueger from Navix for their amazing contributions of time, money, and creative bandwidth in helping build this event in a rather short period of time.  You 3 are special people - and I’ve enjoyed working with you!

Ok, now to the experience itself.

PLEASE come with your game face on :) I’d like to see questions that stump the experts.  I’d like to see minds changed and opened.  I’d like someone young and fresh in the industry to enlighten some of the seasoned veterans. You can always tell when community respect grows, and lightbulbs come on in people’s heads.

The format will be as follows. Nine topics will be presented and discussed.  Each speaker is going to have fifteen to twenty minutes of material prepared, and then we will have at least thirty mins of discussion and Q&A before moving on to the next topic.  I’ve been at so many conferences in the past where I am desperate to ask a question or get three minutes with the speaker afterwards, but that usually isn’t an option.  It will very much be here!  It’s the core of how this event was built.

The dinner on Thursday is to get everyone acquainted and comfortable with each other before we dive in all day Friday.  We have the entire upstairs, bar, and outside balcony of a tasty Southern cooking restaurant in High Point.

Breakfast, all day coffee and beverages, and lunch will be provided and be less than 5 steps out the door of the boardroom.

Sitting here now and think, everything is done, and all loose ends are tied - with the one exception of the task of awarding the scholarship winner with their free attendance, flight, and hotel.  I’ll be announcing this on Monday.

I am so very excited to see everyone next week - and words cannot express how truly grateful I am to have the LTL community endeavoring on this experiment with me…both in person and in spirit.

Thanks - and remember - everything needs to be wrapped, but it all can’t be double stacked.

In Space, Time, Risk, and Health…

Curtis Garrett