Changing the game: Core business model, plus ecosystem of value

By Omar Singh, president and founder, Surge Transportation

The companies growing rapidly and staying relevant to their customers are offering much more than their core business model – they are offering “core-plus,” some form of additional value creation or frictionless experience. These companies are focusing on developing a rich ecosystem of partnerships and leveraging those partnerships to provide a robust system of offerings rather than sticking just to their core business models.

Surge Transportation is leading that trend by providing value to shippers in ways that are not limited to providing reliable capacity. Through partnership and instant connectivity with TMS platforms, Surge provides shippers with Real Time Pricing and capacity as an option to optimize the routing guide. While these offerings are changing the game on how shippers manage their supply chains, the question for the innovators leveraging these partnerships is — how do we remove friction for our customers so that the tools are optimized, useful and practical?

One way is to integrate ourselves into this vast ecosystem of supply chain relevance and not only participate in some of the strategic initiatives of our customers but also to actually deliver them in a sort of fix it and forget it fashion. Not only do we provide our core business capabilities, but we also can participate as partners in whatever our customers’ initiatives are because we are integrated with all of their major partners already.

The holy grail of any growing business is new customer business development, followed by existing customer relationship expansion, yet creating and maintaining that relevance requires that at least as much effort and investment placed on partnership alliance development. In order to have customers we need to have integrated partners.

As a growth strategy we need to deploy a multipronged approach to company development that includes not just new customer development, but also determining the best vendors to partner with. If all other things are equal, why would a customer choose to work with provider A who offers only their core business service if the alternative is provider B who offers a core business model plus an entire network of connectivity to the customer’s ecosystem? Outside of some sort of specialization or specific reason, they generally do not.

For more information, view Surge’s recent webinar Changing the Game: TMS + Capacity Together.

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Why limit your provider mix?

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Obstacles to Implementing FreightTech