Last summer, Robin Gregg came on board a growing payment startup, geared towards the freight industry, as their new CEO. With a background of 15+ years in the payments industry, including most recently SVP of Product and Growth Strategy at commercial payments solution company Fleetcor, Gregg brought scaling experience to the leadership position.
“I was excited about growing a business again for a much, much earlier organization,” says Gregg of the opportunity. “I have not been in a startup since late 2009, when I was at alternative payment provider Revolution Money that we sold to Amex in January of 2010. It felt like a really great opportunity for me to bring my expertise on and help the team grow.”
The first order of business was a rebrand to expand the transportation startup’s customer base. Renamed RoadSync as of January, the digital payment platform has expanded beyond those who unload the trucks into freight handlers and warehouses to expedite payment time, an often-tedious process, during delivery by 87 percent.
The ATDC Signature company recently closed a $2.5 million funding round to accelerate growth and expand its product footprint across warehouses. Here, Gregg shares more about joining the transportation startup, why a rebranding was essential to the startup’s growth, and what’s next on the product development horizon.
What drew you to the RoadSync product and this leadership position?
I had been in a corporate payments industry job for 7 years. It was a great experience at a fast, high-growth company where I learned a lot about how to grow a business quickly, how to be very resourceful when doing a lot of mindful growth and how to put more sales muscle against a growing business.
One of the reasons I came on board is I was really excited about what we were doing in the transportation industry. I’ve been in payments for over 15 years and the transportation industry in general is not always well served with modern technology and payments. It definitely felt like there was an opportunity to create a better experience for some of the merchants that have to figure out ways to accept payments from truck drivers and from carriers. I was really interested and intrigued by what the company had gotten started and thought that my background could help them scale and build out the platform.
How did you approach the rebranding of RoadSync and what was the reason behind it?
We officially changed names January 1, 2018. The reason we did that was because the industry and the customers that we’re serving are much broader than lumpers. Lumper is an industry term for an individual who unloads a truck, typically at a food distribution warehouse but it could be at different types of warehouses. It’s such a specific thing. It was a great conversation starter, but we went with something that’s a little bit more broad. The rebranding felt necessary to be able to broadly serve the industry and give us the space to explore new applications to serve merchants.
The original co-founding team had done a great job tapping into this specific pain point around how warehouses and freight handling service providers accept payments from truck drivers. In an industry that really cares about getting the drivers back on the road, that cares about door turnaround time, the team created a solution that helped ease that pain for the people who work out of those warehouses.
Where does RoadSync stand now as far as features and clientele since you’ve expanded? What does that new ecosystem look like?
We have two sets of clients today — the warehouses, and the third-party freight handling solution providers that serve the warehouses. The reason that they are our clients is because they’re the ones who have to figure out how to accept payments from truck drivers — today, a lot of them are doing it in a labor-intensive way. They may be hand writing receipts, they may be manually tracking their transactions.
This can lead to errors and it’s more time consuming than it needs to be. It’s not a great experience for either the truck driver who’s bringing the delivery or the employee who’s trying to process the transaction. We try to fit into their business processes — how they assign doors, how they assign labor to the various doors — and to integrate into those processes to make sure that the transaction is handled as seamlessly as possible in that environment.
How does RoadSync help warehouses integrate the platform into their day-to-day operations?
We have to provide 24/7 customer support for our clients and the warehouses. We do implement warehouses with a team to provide training resources onsite and train folks on how to use the solution. We get them up and running pretty quickly — usually in half a day. If they don’t need us onsite, we can do training over WebEx.
We really tailor the implementation and the training experience based on what the client needs and what their resources are, which vary. Our clients span from people who manage dozens of warehouses to people who might only have one or two. In the end, we made it very user-friendly and intuitive so you can jump into a simple transaction.
What does the road ahead look like for RoadSync?
We’re specifically focused on continuing to scale, reach more warehouses and grow the product that we have. We are adding more features and services to our products, most recently credit card acceptance, which has been well received by our current clients. New features like these will help make our product even more helpful in the warehouse environment for the clients and the business processes that they’re trying to manage internally.
But for the most part, this year is really just about taking what we have and continuing to grow it; and putting more sales muscle behind it.
