Building a Revenue Engine in Logistics with Kara Smith Brown

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In this episode, Kara Smith Brown, Founder and CEO at LeadCoverage, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to break down how logistics companies can build go-to-market engines that are precise, scalable, and grounded in what actually moves the needle. They cover:

• How to build a revenue engine that focuses only on customers you can actually help
• The difference between having a controversial POV and having a useful one
• What intent data actually is (and why supply chain companies are finally catching up)
• Why logistics marketing has to stay grounded in the physical movement of goods
• How strong partnerships can accelerate growth without burning out

Kara Brown is the Chief Executive Officer at LeadCoverage. In 2017, after senior roles at SEKO Logistics, OHL (now Geodis), and Rubicon Global, she co-founded LeadCoverage with Will Haraway to bring modern go-to-market strategy to the logistics industry.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Brian Glick: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we are talking with Kara Smith Brown. Kara is the Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Lead Coverage and has been a longtime personal friend. For a little bit of context, Lead Coverage is a very unique company that focuses exclusively on supply chain and go to market activities. That's everything from outbound lead generation to public relations and really everything around logistics and how logistics companies go and reach out to their customers and convert those customers into revenue. So wide ranging conversation coming up, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

[00:00:49] Kara, welcome to the show.

[00:00:52] Kara Brown: Thank you very much for having me.

[00:00:53] Brian Glick: Why don't we just dive right in with why did you get into this industry, and more importantly, why did you stay?

[00:01:01] Kara Brown: The why is like maybe most people in supply chain, accidental.

[00:01:09] Brian Glick: Yeah, there's only two answers. Accidental or born into it.

[00:01:13] Kara Brown:  I guess that's true.

[00:01:13] So it's actually a funny story. I don't tell this story very often. Usually I go right to like, did the Echo Global Logistics IPO, but I skip, why did I end up there? So I loaded trucks in college. Like that was my part-time job for the Expo, Home Depot delivery stores. So there used to be in the late nineties, early two thousands, there was a home delivery store that was just like monogram refrigerators.

[00:01:42] And it was Home Depot's version of just like giant electronics and appliances, and I routed trucks for the western suburbs of Chicago, final mile home delivery of this group. And so when I was looking for a job after college, Echo found me and they were like, what do you know about trucks? And I said, actually, I loaded trucks in college.

[00:02:07] And they were like, you're hired. And that was it. That was, I kind of ever since then have been in it and I've loved it. And the second part of your question is why have you stayed? And I think what I've learned is number one, it's a $2 trillion market, right? And so there's, there's little pockets of these industries that I continue to learn about.

[00:02:28] I ended up going to the truck driver recruiter show this year and they asked me to speak on the book. And it was so cool to meet this billion dollar industry that's like a sub-industry of the industries that we already serve. And I thought that was super cool. And also I think the fact that we are creating jobs

[00:02:47] in the industry that runs the entire economy, right? The global economies are run on supply chain, and there's something really kind of grounding in that. To me, I like the idea that we are grounded in drivers and grounded in physical movement of goods. So I think that's why I've stayed.

[00:03:07] Brian Glick: So grounded and marketing are not always words that people put together when they're doing their little mood board of what they think about from a marketing per se.

[00:03:19] Right? You know, and I come from more of the tech marketing side, but even in the, let's say, less hyped up world of transportation marketing, like we're the greatest and this is the loudest and this is the brightest. You don't hear the word grounded there much. So how do you think about what you do in an industry that is very pragmatic versus if you were doing it in some sort of biotech thing where everything's new and exciting all the time.

[00:03:46] Kara Brown: Well, I think that's the difference, right? So one of my very best friends in the world, her name is Katie Ivy, and she is a brilliant CRO, very specifically in the tech space. So she is probably running a company that, they sell software that helps demos perform better, right? Like it, it's vapor on top of vapor.

[00:04:05] No offense to Katie and her team, but, we in supply chain, like we physically move things, right? Like at some point something has to get moved. And so we think about what we do for a living as the physical movement of goods, the tech that moves the goods that enables the movement of the goods, and then the money that moves the goods.

[00:04:24] And so at the core of each of those kinds of pieces of supply chain is the physical movement of goods. And so I think even when you are marketing or building value props and messaging for companies like yours that are very specifically tech, at the end of the day, your customers are moving goods. Right, and so there's the, I like it, the grounding nature of that, right?

[00:04:50] We work for a lot of robot companies, and so robots physically move the goods. Is there a multi-tenant orchestration inside of the warehouse that you're talking about, the supply chain or the software layer that controls the robots? Yes, absolutely. And that's super sexy, but what I think is the grounding piece of it is that it all comes back to the physical movement of goods.

[00:05:13] Brian Glick: I know that part of what your company does is helps companies that maybe didn't, when they meet you, forget the software companies. Let's talk about the trucking companies and the freight brokers, like the people who actually do work when they meet you. I'm assuming that many of them have never really thought about what you do as a muscle they need to get good at in their business like that.

[00:05:40] It's the first time and maybe a little less with the truck brokers nowadays, but when we met 10, 15 years ago, this was not a thing that people thought about. How do you get people out of the starting gate with like, this matters?

[00:05:58] Kara Brown: It's such an interesting question. If I look at the last nine years that we've been doing this, I used to have that conversation often, like I used to have to get over the hump of why you should care about your market position and why you should try marketing.

[00:06:16] And then I think two things happened. One, Covid, and we went from. Doing the same thing for probably 50 years, right? Picking up the phone and browsing through the phone book and using relationships to just taking orders for two years and everyone becoming a billion dollar company, hitting a wall on the other side of Covid and the sales and marketing tactics that worked in 2019

[00:06:45] do not work in 2023 before Covid. I had to do a lot of explaining what marketing is and what our position is on it. Post covid. I have to do a lot less of that because people are finding there's pain, right? There's pain around sales today. That's one. And then two, I think is, we wrote this book, right? We wrote this Amazon bestseller, and I'm just overwhelmed with the kindness that the entire industry has been about the revenue engine.

[00:07:12] And so now what's happened is people are actually, they're reading it and then calling us, and so I'm having to do a lot less like, Hey, this is why you should care. They're coming to us saying, Hey, we already care. Can you show us the path forward?

[00:07:29] Brian Glick: I'm very curious about the book journey, right? So you are the third CEO friend of mine who wrote a book in the last 12 months.

[00:07:36] Kara Brown: Wow.

[00:07:37] Brian Glick: So Bob Moore over at Crossbeam, and Chris Logan over at Logisteed. So what was the inspiration and what was it like going through that process?

[00:07:47] Kara Brown: The actual answer is it was mostly terrible. I give book writing like zero stars. Um, it's a hard process. It's a second job. It was so much time and energy. I'm really glad we did it.

[00:07:57] The book has done exactly what we wanted it to do and so I'm super proud of it and I'm glad that we've finished it and now we just finished the workbook, so the workbook is also coming. There's an 80 page workbook that takes you through the exercises, which will be really fun. We're getting on the road with that.

[00:08:13] The reason I wrote it, so I follow a podcast called Two Bobs, which is two guys that talk about the art of selling expertise. They help consultants sell, and they said if you put all of the content out there, you give it all away. You write the book, you share all the things. When people come into you, when your leads are showing up at your front door, they are pre-qualified leads.

[00:08:38] I thought, let's try it. I've been posting to LinkedIn for, you know, forever and have this following, et cetera, and so we wrote the book. It was absolutely arduous. I'm happy to walk you through the process of just how bad it was. Really glad that we did it, got to the other side and it's  happened.

[00:08:55] So we had a phone call with a prospect and he has the book on his desk and he pulls it up and he opens it to an earmarked page and he reads me a paragraph and he goes, can you do this? And I was like, yeah, I wrote the book on it. And he goes, how much does this cost? And I was like, this much money. And he was like, great, send me a contract.

[00:09:17] So I think it did what we wanted it to do, and I'm grateful for the warm welcome that the community has given me all around the book.

[00:09:26] Brian Glick: You're a driven person, right? So we say to anyone who doesn't follow you on social media, you are squarely type A. I had to debate with somebody about who's Type A, who's not.

[00:09:35] You're definitely type A. We're just gonna put that out there for the world.  There's no doubt. Right? So how do you make that work in running a business? 'cause not everyone is the same.

[00:09:48] Kara Brown: That's probably a better question to ask the people that work for me.

[00:09:53] Brian Glick: Oh, I've heard their answers.

[00:09:54] Kara Brown: Yeah. You know, I'm a hard person to work for mostly because as hard as I drive myself, I drive the team just as hard. Right. Like I'm very fair. I would never expect anyone to work harder than I do. But it's unlikely that you're gonna outwork me, right? Actually, this morning I had a call, I have a new finance guy, and he's awesome.

[00:10:23] I like him a lot, and he said something to the effect of, Hey, if you run out of energy and you don't wanna get on the road. And then he said something else and I was like, oh wait, we don't know each other that well. There is no end to the energy, right? Like you'll never see the end of the energy of Kara Brown.

[00:10:44] And I have pretty high expectations, like I expect the team to meet me where I am, but I don't expect anyone to outrun me. And so, you're right. I'm super goal oriented. What really drives me is, it's kind of fun, is a female thing, right? Being a female business leader is something I'm not sure that I would recommend either, but less than 2%.

[00:11:05] Actually 1.7% of female founders will break $1 million in revenue. And the number of women that break $10 million top line alone, right, without VC capital, is statistically irrelevant. It's so small that they can't track it. So that's always been the goal to like, break through these glass ceilings and we're doing it, which is super fun.

[00:11:28] Brian Glick: So you are in a business where you have a partner who has a different personality type thing, right? And yeah. Is a little more chill, let's call it. Tell me, tell everyone the history of that relationship and how you guys make that relationship work. I'm very curious.

[00:11:47] Kara Brown: Yeah, I wish Will were here with us.

[00:11:49] Brian Glick: He'd be chuckling in the background and letting you talk.

[00:11:51] Kara Brown: He'd definitely be chuckling. Uh, so my business partner is Will Haraway, who is the yin to my yang. Uh, we met actually on a client. We had the same client and got off a call. I called him and I said, Hey, I don't wanna do what you do and you don't do what I do.

[00:12:09] So can we just agree to like work concentrically? This was the first time he and I met and he would tell you the story if you were here. He said, holy cow. This woman is insane. She's so aggressive. But I really appreciate her push, right? And uh, he calms me down. We actually call him the calming goat sometimes. So I run really hot.

[00:12:31] I run really fast. And Will is oftentimes the peacemaker behind the scenes. The person that can kind of calm me down. And I think he would tell you that I also have probably pushed him, right? That I push, he pulls, the company moves forward, I push more, he pulls back, the company moves forward. It's been a wonderful partnership.

[00:12:53] He's an absolutely terrific human being, and I think more importantly, maybe it's not more important than being a terrific human, but he is the best at supply chain, PR and analyst relations. He is absolutely the best at the job, and I'm so grateful to have found him when I found him and to partner with him.

[00:13:14] And he is also someone that I trust implicitly. We always have the best interest of the company, the whole company, between the two of us, it's really special. Most business partnerships fail, right? And so for us to be together for almost 10 years and continue to grow, and the business has been growing 40% year over year.

[00:13:34] Um, and so to have that kind of partnership, I'm just super, super fortunate. He's great.

[00:13:39] Brian Glick: Yeah. And it brings up an interesting point that I think some people might miss, which I just wanna put a finer point on, which is you don't have to have a co-founder on the first day, right?

[00:13:54] Brian Glick: You guys built businesses and then brought them together.

[00:13:57] Kara Brown: Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah. So Will had Backbeat Marketing and I had Smith Brown Marketing. And we did a bunch of stuff together, and so he was doing PR for my clients. I was doing demand gen for his clients. We were cutting each other checks for probably four years until we were like, this is administratively a nightmare, right?

[00:14:19] Like, we should stop cutting each other checks and we should just do this together 'cause we are more powerful together than we are, you know, alone. And also I think, you know, there's a lot of trust built in those years. A ton of trust, a lot of hard conversations, challenges we had to overcome together.

[00:14:36] Finding each other's strengths and weaknesses and learning each other so that now in 2025, the team can run because he and I are kind of the glue at the top.

[00:14:48] Brian Glick: Sort of an analogous situation in our business, and it happened yesterday where we have a lot of software companies that approach us and they want to do very complicated partnerships.

[00:14:59] They wanna have their software in their network, they wanna do co-marketing, they wanna do this, that and the other. And when we have those conversations in theory they're very complicated and they take a lot of time. And I met one yesterday who had that, oh, we could do this and that and this and that and the other thing.

[00:15:17] And it's very hard. When we get a common customer, I. And then a second customer, and then we say, okay, now let's apply those patterns that we've already established to the third and the fourth and the fifth one. It's very easy and it's natural, and I think that's interesting in what you guys did. It's that same kind of thing that if you do things with people and you don't get in your own way with all this, like, let's get the lawyers in the middle and let's make a whole business

[00:15:46] plan, let's just go do one. The net inefficiency of the first one being inefficient is so much less than the inefficiency of trying to start in front of a blank whiteboard and figure out how the hell this is all gonna work and you're gonna be wrong anyway. Right?

[00:16:03] Kara Brown: Always. And I think you, you and I are a really good example of that, right?

[00:16:07] You and I have tried to partner, we're a HubSpot implementer, right? So we have tried a couple of times to find a customer to work on together. I think we may have one pretty soon here, but like, the thing is we have tried a couple times and it hasn't happened yet. And so we don't have paper that manages the partnership because it hasn't happened yet.

[00:16:27] And so I feel really good about when it happens, you and I will partner, figure out the paper and it'll be great. So I think yes. Partnerships also, I think when they're like forced when it's, Hey, this makes sense on paper, but may not make sense in personality. It's almost like getting married. You don't meet someone at a bar and then like, decide to get married.

[00:16:49] Brian Glick: You definitely don't write the prenup at the bar.

[00:16:51] Kara Brown: Exactly right. You need to spend time together and meet the family and decide if you like the way they brush their teeth. Right? Like there's, there's pieces of partnership I think that are really personality driven too. And frankly, Will Haraway had to decide if he wanted to deal with this every day, all day.

[00:17:09] This is a lot coming at you. Right? So, um, I'm blessed that he did that. He decided, yes. So I think it's been a phenomenal partnership for us. It's been, and I think more importantly, actually more than anything else, is it's been so good for our clients, like the combination of Will's absolute mastery of PR and AR, my ability to kind of pull the business together.

[00:17:32] I'm really moved into kind of like the business role and then we hired Crawford McCarty, who is an absolute dynamo at getting the demand gen work done and Courtney Herda came in to run paid, and so we just built this great team and that in serving our customers and driving hundreds of millions of dollars in leads for them is only because, you know, Will and I worked together so well.

[00:17:56] Brian Glick: So I wanna shift topics for a second. 2016, the notable thing that happened is the Cubs won the World Series and after the Cubs won the World Series, hell froze over. And since that time, it's been an interesting time to be doing content in supply chain marketing. This is the only thing I can think of that connects those things together.

[00:18:17] Since the Cubs won the World Series, which is right around when you were getting going with all of this, and right around when I was getting going with Chain, it's been an interesting time and you've had to guide your customers through lots of things, and maybe this is more of a Will conversation, but still, when you think about how to get your customers talking about what's going on in the world, regardless of what particular crisis or issue, how do you think about logistics companies’ role in advisory, in content marketing, and how do you think about messaging for companies that move things for a living?

[00:18:57] Kara Brown: So I think about advising your shipper customers. So we are in 2025. We have three and a half years of I'll be apolitical and say things are gonna change coming outta Washington, right? Like we are gonna have three and a half years of changes. There's three and a half years of news coming out of Washington.

[00:19:20] Your shipper customers or your broker customers, whoever it is, are going to need to react to what's happening out of Washington, whether it's to their customers, to the end consumer reshuffling supply chains, thinking about, you know, inventory control, et cetera. As a vendor in this space, as an expert at the thing that we do, moving goods, you have to have a position.

[00:19:51] And the position doesn't have to be political. It's just your expert view on the marketplace because your customers really do want it. I'll give you the examples of clients that are doing it really well, and then I will not mention clients that aren't doing it well, but we do have some that have extra challenges, and what I see is kind of the difference between the two.

[00:20:11] So we'll use Redwood as an example of a broker/3PL 4PL, who's doing a really, really good job. They were early to the conversation about cross border. They have been in the news for a really long time because they were never shy about sharing their point of view with the press, and they kind of punched above their weight, if you will, when it came to PR because they were willing to have a point of view, right?

[00:20:36] So early, we're talking 2020, 2021, they started sharing a cross-border index. Like just sharing it, publishing it, which allowed them to be really on the front edge of what was happening in the news on cross border, which turned into a CNBC mini documentary on cross border freight, which does exist, which happened at the Redwood location right in Mexico.

[00:21:02] Contrast with another client we have that will remain nameless, that has a very specific set of clients in, let's just say forestry, 'cause I don't wanna make anybody feel uncomfortable, so let's just say forestry. And this particular client with a real deep understanding of this marketplace has been hesitant to share that point of view with the marketplace.

[00:21:31] So, it's not working for them, right? Like they are not seeing the sort of growth and pickup that we would hope for them because they're not willing to plant the flag and say, we are the best at this. We have math on this, we have data on this. And it doesn't really, what what we tell clients is, it doesn't really matter if you're right or wrong, but if you have a position, when something comes out of D.C.,

[00:21:59] you can impact the narrative in the larger economy, right? And if, but if you're not, if you don't have a point of view, then you are left out of the conversation. And so we guide clients a lot towards, have a point of view, and it may not be like the thing that you're known for. Redwood doesn't only do cross border freight, like they do everything right?

[00:22:21] They're the definition of the modern 4PL. They have incredible technology, like they have all kinds of things, but this is a thing that they went out first and they won. So plant the flag, choose the thing and get out there and own it because when the press does come knocking, you have to have a point of view.

[00:22:39] Brian Glick: So I wanna double click on point of view there because I think what you are talking about and what I'm thinking about are actually different things. I think when most people say you have a point of view, it's an opinion that may be charged, right? And I think what you are, but I think what I'm hearing from you is a point of view may just be a way of looking at the facts that leads to a conclusion, right?

[00:23:15] Like this will happen. Right. As opposed to this is right or wrong, which is a little bit more charged.

[00:23:21] Kara Brown: I really appreciate this and I'm probably gonna turn this into a LinkedIn post, so these are the reflections that end up on LinkedIn. The difference between a charged point of view, which is like, combative and maybe like, you know, you wanna create a controversy and your point of view on what this means for the future.

[00:23:45] Right? Like, yes. What I am saying, you're hearing me correctly, what I'm saying is your customers want you to tell them what this means in 3, 6, 9, 12 months. I'll give you my kind of way that we do this. So we build HubSpots, we build HubSpots every day, all day. It's about 15% of our book of business. We do a lot of broker HubSpots, right?

[00:24:06] Here is a very specific example of how this works. When you hire me to build your broker HubSpot or fix your broker HubSpot, I will ask you one question that no other HubSpot shop will ask you, right? This is broker, this is brokers or forwarders. Right? Here is the question we ask, what are you gonna do with your carriers in the HubSpot?

[00:24:24] And inevitably I get blank stares and I'm like, okay, well if you're humans, if the people that work for you are tracking every single email, inevitably you will end up with carriers inside of your database where you really just want shippers. What are you gonna do with all those records? And they look at me like, I don't know.

[00:24:41] And so I tell them, this is my point of view. Here are three solutions for this, but in 3, 6, 9 months, if you don't think about this problem, here are the problems that are gonna come from that, right? Too many records in your CRM, big messy database, et cetera. So this is a very granular example of what your shipper customers

[00:25:01] are asking. They're saying, okay, if this is happening in the marketplace today, it's tariffs. If there's another IWLA strike, if there's another Key Bridge collapse, tell me what this does to my supply chain in 3, 6, 9 months, and what's your point of view on how to circumvent those issues that you see in front of me?

[00:25:22] And that's your point of view. It doesn't have to be contentious.

[00:25:25] Brian Glick:  And I, and I can share, and I don't know if we're just workshopping at this point, but I can share one that we're working on, that we're working on in our business. Right? So, look, there's a lot going on in tech around AI, right?

[00:25:38] I don't think Chain.io has a particular point of view that's interesting or valid about which large language model is better than the other one. Or, you know, we don't have a lot of data scientists, but what we do know is how data moves around organizations. And so the very strong point of view that we are

[00:25:59] figuring out how to express to the marketplace is if you don't figure out how you're gonna govern all these bots you're building in three years, you're gonna have 14,000 things with unsecured access to your TMS. And so you need to put governance on your roadmap this year.

[00:26:13] Kara Brown: Yes.

[00:26:14] Brian Glick: Right? Like that's a point of view.

[00:26:16] Kara Brown: And it's not contentious.

[00:26:17] Like no one is gonna say, oh Brian, you're so dumb. We should not have governance over these AI. Like, it's not contentious, but like, yes, we probably should be. You're really saying to people, Hey, the downstream effects could be that you have bots doing weird things inside your system that you don't know about, and this is a piece of the puzzle that you want people to think about.

[00:26:41] Brian Glick: Cool. All right, well, I guess we solved that then. So everyone can send your checks to Kara and, uh, there's your free consulting for the year. So let's wrap up on something optimistic. What are you excited about? What's got you excited for the future?

[00:27:00] Kara Brown: I am really excited about the book tour we're doing. We're not calling it a book tour.

[00:27:04] A book tour feels like it's all about me, and it's not, it's about prospects and it's about getting intent data in front of as many humans as I can. So I'm really excited about doing these workshops. So we're doing two hour workshops all over the country through the end of 2025. And I am bringing the intent data message to as many humans in supply chain as I can because I believe that what is happening in the SaaS space, and this is ed tech, FinTech MarTech that are way ahead of us and full transparent, like we all kind of know that supply chain are a little laggard when it comes to marketing technology.

[00:27:42] I am trying to bring it to supply chain as much as I can, and I'm a little bummed because intent data, AI, and agentic AI like Clay are all kind of showing up at the same time, and I'm seeing some confusion in the marketplace about what these things are, and I think people are kinda lumping them together. And so  I'm really excited about carving out this intent data opportunity that all of our prospects, all of our clients have, or all of our, all of the, anyone in our supply chain kind of ecosystem has

[00:28:19] to use intent data to get in front of the very specific ideal customer profile that's perfect for them, and most importantly, to cut down on the opportunity cost in every single funnel. Like that is the real goal for me, is for everyone who listens to your podcast, everyone at supply chain, to stop trying to sell to people who can't buy from you or don't want to buy from you, and just get in front of the people that you can help.

[00:28:46] Brian Glick: You are such a nerd. Some people are excited for football season. I appreciate how much of a nerd you are.

[00:28:57] Kara Brown: That's actually another reason why I love Will Haraway so much, is he is my sports guy. So we get on calls and he talks about sports and then I just sit there and then eventually on leadership calls, I'll go,

[00:29:10] “Sports!” which is everyone's cue to stop talking about sports.

[00:29:14] Brian Glick: Literally happened yesterday on an internal Chain call. People getting on, they were talking about pets or something. I will sit there politely and sometimes I can make it about 40, 45 seconds. I'd be like, okay, so we're gonna do the meeting now, right?

[00:29:26] Kara Brown: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:29:28] Brian Glick: So, yes. But it is very important to have people in your business who don't do that. Otherwise all of your employees will quit. So, yes.

[00:29:35] Kara Brown: Yes. So Will Haraway softens the blow and he comes out and he is, you know, talking about sports and the Final Four and Sweet 16, and I have no idea what's going on.

[00:29:43] And then I go, “Sports!” and that is the cue to turn it off.

[00:29:47] Brian Glick: All right, well, we're gonna do the thing that since neither of us knows how to do a social interaction that isn't talking about work, and we've established that we're gonna do the Craig Ferguson closing thing that he used to do, where we're just gonna make a very awkward, very formal closing here.

[00:30:02] And then we'll know that we're done talking. So we're gonna do a moment of awkward silence, and then we will cut to the outro. So, are we ready to do an awkward silence? And it's even better when there's no video 'cause everyone can just listen to dead air. So 3, 2, 1.

[00:30:34] Huge thanks to Kara for just spending the time. So much fun to chat with someone else who's as passionate about their business as I am about mine. We'll have links in the show notes to Kara's book as well as to Lead Coverage and all the other things we talked about and make sure we'll also get a link in there to the revenue engine workshop, which is the series of onsite events that Kara mentioned.

[00:31:00] Hope you enjoyed the episode, and we will look forward to talking to you soon.