Cooler Logistics is a growing freight brokerage focused on food and beverage transportation, with a strong specialization in refrigerated freight. From the beginning, CEO and Co-Founder Michael Cherney and his team have built the business around strong relationships with both customers and carriers.
As Cooler grew, the team wanted to pair that relationship-driven approach with better visibility into its transportation data. Understanding profitability, identifying network strengths, preparing for customer conversations, and determining where to pursue new business all required connecting information from across the brokerage.
By implementing GoodShip, Cooler gained a centralized platform for understanding its network, identifying opportunities, and giving teams across the business the context they need to make more informed decisions.
Like many brokerages, Cooler had access to a significant amount of transportation data. Every load generated information about customer rates, carrier costs, margin, service, tender volume, lane history, and carrier performance.
The challenge was turning all of those individual signals into a clear picture of the business.
Cooler wanted to understand where they were performing best, where profitability was changing, and which parts of its network represented the strongest opportunities for growth. Answering those questions could require significant manual analysis across reports, spreadsheets, and other systems.
That same challenge extended to the customer level. Reps needed more than load counts, revenue, and margin to understand an account. They needed context around performance, profitability, awarded versus actual volume, and the lanes where Cooler could provide the most value.
Preparing for QBRs and other customer conversations also meant gathering the right information and determining which insights were worth bringing to the table.
As Cooler continued to grow, Michael wanted the team spending less time assembling information and more time using it.
Cooler chose GoodShip to bring its transportation data together and create what Michael described as a “single source of truth” across the business.
With GoodShip, the team can analyze its network at the lane and customer level to understand where it is buying above or below market, where profitability may be at risk, and where its operational strengths create opportunities to grow.
One important unlock has been identifying Cooler's power lanes.
Instead of relying on instinct to determine where the brokerage is strongest, Cooler can use its own historical data alongside market context to identify lanes where it consistently performs well and buys competitively.
That information gives sales reps a more strategic way to approach customers and prospects. Rather than broadly asking for additional freight, they can focus conversations on specific lanes where Cooler knows it can provide strong service and competitive pricing.
As Michael explained during the webinar, GoodShip helps Cooler make those decisions based on data rather than simply “vibes and feel.”
GoodShip also gives the team faster access to customer-level insights. Ahead of a QBR, Cooler can quickly understand performance, identify meaningful KPIs, and surface the data points that should shape the conversation.
Laney, GoodShip's AI Transportation Analyst, accelerates that process further. The team can ask questions about its network—such as which customers are experiencing profitability risk or which lanes represent its biggest opportunities—and quickly get answers grounded in its own transportation data.
That means Cooler can spend less time digging through reports and more time focusing on the opportunities that can actually move the business forward.
The GoodShip platform has provided Cooler with a clearer understanding of where its network performs best and where the team should focus its attention.
That visibility is helping the brokerage make more strategic growth decisions. Instead of pursuing volume indiscriminately, Cooler can identify opportunities that align with the lanes and markets where it has demonstrated strength. Sales reps can bring those insights into prospecting and customer conversations, helping the company grow around what its network already does well.
GoodShip has also strengthened how Cooler manages existing customer relationships.
The team can compare awarded freight with actual tender volume while evaluating profitability and service on the same lanes. If Cooler was awarded 100 loads but only receives 50, the team has the context to understand the gap and start a more productive conversation with the customer.
Rather than simply asking where the missing volume went, Cooler can look at changes in demand, capacity, performance, and lane economics and work with the customer to find a solution.
According to Michael, those conversations are translating directly into growth: “Every conversation we’ve had as a baseline of this has netted more business.”
The same visibility extends to Cooler’s carrier network. The team can evaluate metrics such as on-time pickup, on-time delivery, and bounce rate at the lane level to understand where individual carriers perform best. That helps Cooler strengthen carrier relationships by leaning further into what works and addressing areas that don't.
GoodShip has also made it easier for teams across Cooler to work from the same view of the business. Leadership can see where margin needs attention. Sales teams can identify the right opportunities to pursue. Account teams can enter customer conversations with relevant data. And carrier teams can better understand where individual partners fit within the network.
For Cooler Logistics, the result is more than better reporting.
It's a more informed way to grow the brokerage—using its own transportation data to understand where it has an advantage, strengthen customer and carrier relationships, and give the people closest to the business the context to act.
