New Year, Same Arrive

Arrive has accomplished so much in our first ten and a half years. We grew organically faster than any other company in the industry with minimal financing initially. We raised capital from great investors along the way, trained thousands of amazing employees, serviced 5,000+ customers, and worked with over 100,000 carriers.? Our team built one of the best technology stacks in the industry and earned more service awards than any of our peers in the last three years. These accomplishments are incredible, but we know we are just starting to hit our stride.

Arrive’s talent, financial stability, technology, and clear strategic vision enabled our early success.? But, like every other organization, we start from zero every January.? This year we do so with the confidence that we are in the best position since inception to drive value for our customers, carriers, and team.? We will continue to build on the momentum we gained in 2024.

Almost any brokerage can grow when the market has a supply and demand imbalance that favors the capacity providers. What truly sets the elite apart is the ability to be profitable and take significant market share when conditions are not in our favor. That is exactly what we did in 2024. The team ended the year shipping 1,700 more truckloads per day in December than we did in January.? Achieving that growth in a challenging market while maintaining profitability is a testament to our team's determination to win in all markets.?

Outlined below are some of the focus areas we are doubling down on in 2025 to continue to deliver for our shippers, carriers and team.?

Arrive Talent

Talent Acquisition

Our approach to talent acquisition has changed significantly over the years. We have obsessed over our hiring profiles, identified and built stronger university relationships with key partners, increased accountability for hiring managers, and revamped our training program while making our compensation packages more competitive to attract the best possible talent. We have also opened seven new offices over the last 24 months allowing our team to attract talent in new markets while retaining top management by bringing them closer to home and giving them career growth opportunities. As a result, we’ve already filled over 30% of our hires for 2025, a company record.? We are dialed in and ready for a strong year ahead of bringing in the future generation of transportation professionals.

Mentor Program

I often say that landing customers and carriers is the easy part of building a successful brokerage; knowing how to deliver best-in-class service and add value only comes with experience. That's why mentorship has always been a key to developing successful reps.? Some organizations do a few weeks of training and then throw the reps on the team knowing only 10-20% of them will figure it out.? Our goal is to increase our throughput and put all of our employees in a position to be successful even if that means training takes significantly longer than what is standard in the industry.

When COVID forced us to onboard new reps remotely, our training and mentorship experience suffered and it showed in the attrition numbers. Bottom line: Remote work and virtual training just don’t cut it for the new reps at Arrive.? That lesson led us to revamp our mentorship program in 2024. Once again, reps are paired with a mentor right out of the gate and the mentors are incentivized through equity or shared commissions based on their mentee's success.

Today, we have over 200 mentors who spend 6-9 months with mentees before they graduate and start the process of building their book of business. This is a long-term investment in their success that drives retention and the operational excellence that sets Arrive apart and is clearly reflected in our industry wide service recognition.

Retention

Retaining our team is arguably the largest driver of long-term organizational success. As mentioned above, hiring the right people and providing them with a best-in-class onboarding and training experience is where it all begins — but we know we need to go further. The leadership team at Arrive spends more time discussing retention-based initiatives than any other topic. In 2024, we saw the lowest attrition rate in Arrive’s history.?

These initiatives are paying off. Tenure is increasing across the organization, for both individual contributors and our management team. Morale is high and the LFG culture remains strong despite two years of tough market headwinds — the team is ready to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. We have the right people in the right seats and with increasing tenure, we expect our operational excellence to continue improving, which only further supports long-term growth. As always, retention will remain a top priority in 2025 and beyond.?

Financial Stability

Over the past few years our industry has seen thousands of companies go out of business. Some of them raised a lot of investor capital to build market share, hoping the scale would lead to long term industry consolidation and ultimately profitability. But in a people-centric business where challenges constantly arise, no level of scale enables total automation, just ask the largest brokerages in the industry that have over 10,000 team members.

We took a different approach. We invested in technology that empowers our people—helping them work faster, smarter, and more efficiently—while prioritizing the personal relationships we know matter most to our partners.

Our investors believed in that model, enabling us to build a strong foundation during our first nine years. We stayed roughly EBITDA neutral during that time, navigating natural market fluctuations while remaining committed to long term investments that would benefit the organization in the out years.?

Those investments have paid off. We've been EBITDA positive for over a year and never plan to look back. At the same time we are still investing $25 million annually in technology development, hiring over 600 employees each year and increasing spend on modal diversification.? Achieving profitability without sacrificing our long term goals of being a market leader is something the team is incredibly proud of and will pay dividends for years to come.

The CoPilot Strategy

At the end of the day freight brokerage is not a very complicated business. To win you need four main things: superior service, competitive and plentiful capacity, internal talent, and an optimized cost structure.? If you can get all four right, you are going to be a market leader.? Technology is foundational to all of these.

Our proprietary tech platform, ArriveNOW, continues to deliver unmatched efficiency at scale. The team rolled out over 100 product enhancements and new features in the past twelve months. These innovations drove a 17% productivity increase in 2024 and we are projecting another 17% lift in 2025 — a significant accomplishment that is already adding value for our employees and partners.?

What we are building is designed to consistently reduce our costs so we can pass those savings on to customers to earn more and more business. Most competitors simply cannot match the scale of our technology investments and those that can, do not rival our level of innovation and speed. Our proprietary data models are seamlessly integrated into daily operations—from prospecting and load matching to price targeting and cost management.

We are just getting started. Our focus on boosting internal productivity, enhancing customer experience, and fostering stronger partnerships will only improve moving forward. I could not be more excited about the technology roadmap for 2025. The new tools, expanded features, and incredible AI initiatives ahead will strengthen Arrive’s ability to capture market share and deliver unparalleled service to our partners for years to come.

Clear Strategic Vision

Emphasis on Service

Service is everything. While we win on relationships and sometimes price, Arrive is a service-first organization because that is what has set us apart.? Every decision we make — from technology to compensation to culture to pricing — drives exceptional service for our customers and carriers. We are not perfect but we relentlessly pursue perfection by striving to deliver for our partners and finding ways to get better each and every day.? That is how we build trust and long term partnerships.? The way we know this is working is that in the last 3 years, we have won 4X more service awards than the next closest broker in the industry.? That is a massive testament to our team and how focused we are daily to deliver the best possible experience in logistics.

Remain Disciplined?

When we started Arrive, we focused exclusively on dry truckload and were very successful. Over the past five years, we have added new services, including Drop Trailer, Temperature Control, Flatbed, Drayage, Partial, and cross-border services to Mexico and Canada. These modes are growing quickly, with over 85% of our core customers already using more than one mode with Arrive. The continued expansion of these specialized services will remain key stability and growth drivers that enable us to better manage freight cycle volatility.

For 2025, our goal is for specialized modes to represent 25% of our truckload volume. We have invested in top-tier leadership, enhanced technology to support these services, and equipped our team to educate and sell customers on these offerings.?

We are on the right track. We stick to our core strengths rather than trying to be everything to everyone. I could not count the 1000s of times people ask why don't we do this, why don't we do that?? This relentless focus and discipline has allowed us to have outsized growth versus our peers. By staying true to what we do best we will sustain or accelerate our momentum.

This is a Team Sport

Internal tension often exists when executing the “Chicago” or split-brokerage model.? What makes the model work so well is the strong relationships built with Carriers and Shippers by specific individuals on each side of the house to fight each and every day for what is best for their partner.? What makes the model tense is that everyone is very focused on building their relationships on each respective side and may not fully understand the entire transaction in the same way a cradle-to-grave employee does.? That tension can create divides and internal fighting and there is simply no place for that at Arrive.? We treat our full operation as a team sport.? It takes every department to put together a service worthy of a customer or carrier deciding to grow with your organization.? For this reason, we are focused on maintaining a strong and connected culture and celebrating operational excellence across all teams that enable individuals to meet their goals.? We have moved on from many internal detractors over the last 12 months and we will continue to hold our employees accountable for creating a positive working environment for everyone even when things do not go as planned.

Be in the game, at all levels.

The leadership team at Arrive gets tired of hearing me talk about shadowing and coaching but it's the only way to ensure all of our employees can be successful.? In this industry, we all need to pick up the shovel and contribute to each other's success and that is not just managers; that is every level of leadership at Arrive up to my own role.? Everyone is involved and should feel ownership in the relationships and experience of our customers and carriers. Everyone at Arrive is here to contribute and not “play office”.? We do not overcomplicate it.? We expect everyone to be in the game.

Keep investing in the team.

When the market shifts our commitment we will be ready to support our partners. This is where many brokerages fall short.? A large part of an organization's load growth during a freight cycle should come in the short window of inflation and deflation if you know how to pivot from spot to contract.? A lot of companies cut operational resources and internal capacity when the market is in equilibrium which does not allow them to flex up with incremental volume when the market flips in their favor.? Sure, their margin per load goes up, but our goal is to see a similar increase in margin while also driving significant load growth.? Once we earn business, it rarely takes a step back. So by investing during the entirety of the cycle, our customers know they can rely on us no matter how many loads they need us to move during even the tightest capacity periods.

Scaled but still Determined

We have come a long way from that first office above a bar on 6th Street ten years ago. Our only “strategy” back then was running through walls to get the job done. After experimenting with every hiring, training, management, and compensation approach out there, we now know who we are and what works for us, which may not work for others!?

We are going to keep our heads down, stay humble, and focus on what we can control and avoid overextending ourselves as an organization.? Our priorities are simple: build a strong team, increase tenure, expand our technology, improve our cost structure, and continue to obsess about being the best service-driven organization in our industry.

It took us just over a decade to reach ~5,900 loads per day and I’m confident we will reach 10,000 loads per day in the next three years. If the market remains the same as 2024 we are forecasting a 20% year-over-year growth in volume.? However, if the market were to transition to inflationary conditions we expect ~40% growth.? The market is out of our control but our team is ready to win no matter what the outcome.? The momentum we have today is at an all-time high and I could not be more excited for what the future holds for everyone at Arrive.