How Top Brokerages Will Operate in 2027: The New Playbook for Brokers

Ten years ago, a carrier rep's advantage was how fast they could dial. Today it is how well they can brief an agent. 

That shift was the subject of our recent LinkedIn Live with FreightCaviar, hosted by Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski and Reed Loustalot, with Vooma Co-Founder Jesse Buckingham and Christian Salazar, President and Co-Founder at Brotherly Freight.

Christian's team operates out of a 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Old North Dayton, with an office that still packs 15 people into 1,100 square feet. Here is what came out of the conversation.

The Broker of the Past Ran on Knowledge Nobody Wrote Down

Christian remembers the years before MacroPoint and Project44, when tracking meant ripping check calls, anywhere from 50 to 300 in a day, and taking the driver at his word on where he was. "There was so much blind faith and gray area that was happening," he said. 

He also remembers a load builder on his squad who would put his headphones in, disappear into the TMS, and come out six hours later having built the next week's freight.

Paul's carrier network lived in what he calls the most unorganized Google Doc ever: company name, lanes they ran, whether they spoke Polish. Thirty or forty dials to cover one load.

Reed's description of the job was blunter. A rep takes in communication, makes a decision based on a bunch of different variables, and updates a database. 

"Ultimately, at the end of the day, you're kind of just a conduit for communication and decision-making."

The real cost was that none of it transferred. If you left the office and a colleague picked up your book, Reed said, "it might as well have been a guy off the street." The context lived in one person's head, and when they walked, it walked with them.

Brotherly Freight Built Lean On Purpose

Brotherly Freight launched in 2025 with a thesis: the traditional ratio of a few sales reps supported by a wall of operations people was about to stop making sense.

They structured the company around that thesis. The whole business runs on a profit-sharing program, which puts information sharing in everyone's financial interest and keeps headcount low in everyone's financial interest too. 

They sell into five verticals and only five: consumer goods, hazmat, building products, aerospace, and what they call their prime supply line, working directly with aerospace primes in the Dayton area

Those primes are usually working on the same aircraft with the same must-arrive-by date, so Brotherly Freight brings the freight into its own warehouse, consolidates it onto one truck, and delivers it together.

Why One Operating Layer Beat Five-Point Solutions

Before committing, Christian's team talked to essentially every AI vendor in freight.

His conclusion: plenty of companies do one thing well. One has a good cover product. Another has a good quoting, building, or tracking product. But as he put it, "we need all of those different things to be able to talk to each other. And so our data is housed in one area, and that's how we're going to create efficiency." 

That is the distinction he draws between Vooma's individual products and Vee, the operating layer that sits on top of them. "Those work products, quote, build, cover, track, schedule, collect, those save my team minutes and clicks. Vee is saving us hours."

The clearest example came from a new customer award of 5,000 loads. The old math says hire three more carrier reps. Instead, they asked Vee to analyze the award, identify which lanes they already had carriers running into, and return those carriers with contact info, volumes, and reload opportunities based on where their trucks were pinging. One prompt. No new headcount.

What Vee Does Across the Load Lifecycle

• Quoting. Vee reads across their rating platforms and TMS history, applies their documented SOP, including the partial-pricing logic that is usually locked in one veteran's head, and drafts customer responses with dedicated, partial, and team options. On some accounts, it responds on its own, and reps circle back later to coach it toward a better win rate.

• Building. Email tenders get read and built into the TMS so carrier sales can start covering right away. Vee also learns the edge cases, like freight forwarder customers where the pickup address is not even on the tender.

• Covering. Christian can tell Vee a lane out of Laredo is tough and ask it to dial until it has five offers. It calls, it emails, and when a human picks up, it can transfer straight to a rep. On a drop trailer lane, the team asked for daily outreach across their carrier platforms and 13 scheduled meetings with carriers that had the trailer pools to support it.

• Tracking. At 8 a.m. Vee works the check calls, writes updates into the load, and surfaces only the exceptions. Christian's track and trace person works the 10 or 15 that need a human instead of the full board.

• Collecting. A standing noon instruction: find anything 24 hours past scheduled delivery, text the driver, email the dispatcher, get the POD, upload it to the TMS. That is a back-office hire that never had to happen.

One of those discovery calls turned into a carrier now running multiple lanes with Brotherly Freight, and a steak dinner in Dallas after the Highway user summit.

What Implementation Actually Takes

The technology was the easy part. What the rollout demanded from Brotherly Freight was two things most brokerages underestimate. 

The first was documentation. Vooma’s team kept insisting the SOPs be written down. Christian resisted. “Us freight brokers are not made to write processes. We’re made to go out and cover, just going to book it and rip it.” He now calls it the single biggest unlock. 

Jesse’s framing is that the difficulty was never designing the SOP. “The hard part is not necessarily designing it. It’s training people to follow that SOP every time. What if that person leaves? Do they really understand it?” An operating layer that executes the SOP and improves it with feedback removes that loss.

The second was getting carrier reps bought in on outbound calling. Vooma sent engineers to Dayton to sit and listen to reps sell so the agents could mirror how that team actually talks. Once reps could direct Vee the way they would direct a teammate, it started to feel less like a tool and more like one. “

"It's weird," Christian said. "You're able to talk to it like you do a rep."

When Vee double-tapped a carrier a rep had already called, the fix was a sentence. “It was like, okay, I’ve made a memory of this; I won’t reach out when there’s an update in there. And that’s how easy it was to fix that.”

Jesse sees that compounding across a business. “Instead of anyone being a bottleneck, the system can help anyone unstick themselves.”

Revenue Per Head is the New Scoreboard

For years, the benchmark was a million dollars in revenue per head. The number people throw around now is closer to two million, and Paul referenced a recent post claiming 2.5. 

Brotherly Freight's own comparison is the sharpest version of the point: the same freight that used to take a team of 18 now moves with roughly 10 people.

The number that actually lands, though, is a round of golf. Christian played at the end of last month, which is end-of-quarter and end-of-month for his business, and did not get a single call.

Not from a carrier, not from a customer, not from his own team.

"They were just getting what they needed without me having to be strapped to the desk."

For context, this is a man who told us he had not left his desk in ten years. "We went out to lunch one day, and I'm sitting there getting antsy. I feel like I'm being lazy or something. It was just weird. It's like foreign."

The broker of tomorrow doesn't eliminate human connection—they finally have the freedom to prioritize it.

See what Vee would do with your freight. Book a demo →

Watch the full conversation with Jesse Buckingham, Christian Salazar, Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski, and Reed Loustalot: How Top Brokerages Will Operate in 2027