Scaling With Private Equity: Mike Horvath’s Viking Global Partnership at Revenova

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Michael Horvat, COO and co-founder of Revenova, the industry’s only CRM powered transportation management system for freight brokers, three PLs, carriers and shippers.

Founded in 2014 and deployed on Salesforce, Revenova TMS unifies multimodal quoting, planning, booking, dispatch, tracking, and settlement with market-leading CRM, digital engagement, AI, and analytics. All of this to help mid-market and enterprise customers, including some of North America’s largest 3PLs, grow revenue, improve service, and lower costs.

Michael leads Revenova’s go-to-market and product strategy. Before this, he co-founded Forseva, the first native Salesforce credit and collection suite serving as CMO and executive vice president until its acquisition by Equifax in 2014. Earlier stops include NCR, Quintus, Avaya, and Corterra. A graduate of Northern Illinois University, Michael brings a builder’s perspective to logistics tech.

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One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Now results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, COO of Revenova and co-founder, Michael Horvath. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Mike Horvath (02:17)
Well, thanks for having me today. Very excited about the conversation.

Anthony Codispoti (02:20)
So Mike, you’ve got a pretty long and storied career in sales. Is that something that came naturally to you or did you have to kind of build that skill and that comfort level over time?

Mike Horvath (02:33)
Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, ⁓ I got into sales primarily because of a college professor at Northern Illinois University. I took a sales class. In the first day of class, the teacher said, I have to teach the textbook. And so I’m going to have the midterm exam next week and the final exam two weeks from now because it’s required for me to teach this book. So I needed to read half the book, get ready for the test. And you still have time to drop this class if you want. If that’s not something you’re interested in.

And he’s like, in sales, you have to do unreal things on unreal timelines. And I’m like, wow, this is very intriguing. So I didn’t drop it. I stuck it out. We did the midterm exam a week later, final exam a week after that. And then we were basically paired up with salespeople, professional salespeople. And it’s almost like an internship for the rest of the semester while we were learning all different things about sales, how to prospect, how to objection handle, all these different really interesting things. And from that point on, I’m like, OK, this is

I like this, you know, and I had a really good time with the internship. And after that, you know, I picked up my first job with NCR in sales because really of that influence of a professor at NIU.

Anthony Codispoti (03:43)
And then that’s an incredible way to structure a course. You know, I graduated with a business degree and one of my big complaints coming out of there was no entrepreneurship courses. And ⁓ at least that I was aware of, there were no sales courses available. And so not only did you have a sort of sales course available, but they were doing the practical things, right? You weren’t just learning the terms and the theory, like you were learning the practice of how to do it. I mean, that’s, that’s incredibly impactful at a young age.

Mike Horvath (04:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, I went into it as a marketing major thinking, you know, marketing, advertising more on the marketing side of business. And ⁓ after that class and after doing the experience at the internship level.

I think I I think I could do this. I think I like it. It was really engaging with people. I really liked that ⁓ aspect of it. You’re always problem solving. You’re always engaging people in conversations, trying to convince folks and understand the requirements. All the things you do as a good salesperson and all the activity management and time management that you have to do as well. So yeah, that’s how I started down that path.

Anthony Codispoti (04:49)
And what specifically were you selling at NCR back then?

Mike Horvath (04:53)
Retail systems, so it was all about the tech. So that’s kind of how I got into the tech space as well. It was a point of sale, you know, and working on different point of sale opportunities with grocery stores, restaurants, retail outlets, you know, in central Illinois and basically in the car, driving around, talking to different people, setting up appointments and, you know, trying to understand what the requirements are and how ⁓ our solutions could help them.

Anthony Codispoti (05:18)
Before we get to talking about your current venture, Revenova, I want to hear just a little bit about your past. Maybe pick one of your most formidable stops along the way and talk to us about that.

Mike Horvath (05:31)
Yeah, that’s an easy answer for me. That would be Quintus Corporation. We were a CRM vendor in the mid 90s, before Salesforce.com was even probably a thought on people’s minds. And we had a great product and we had a great company. was early there as one of the salespeople and was able to close very large accounts like State Farm Insurance and John Deere and United Airlines in the central region. We were crushing it as a company.

And in 1999, we went public and had great mentors there. General, name is John Ciccola, works for Google now. I’ve learned so much from John. He was a great mentor. Peter Kenyon, another great mentor there. And we were just doing great, going like gangbusters. And then the whole bottom dropped out of the company. Our CEO, under the public pressure of making numbers, did some illegal things. And we…

ultimately got delisted off the exchange. And ⁓ everybody’s equity value, a lot of people lost a lot of money, including myself, ⁓ potential money in terms of the equity value we had. We had a market cap of over 1.7 billion when we went public. Our stock went from $18 to $55 on day one. We were a darling of Silicon Valley at the time. And now we are in survival mode. ⁓

You know, I was the RVP of sales at the time. had to let go half my team. Like I got a call saying, we got to let go ⁓ performers. We have to do all these things. And so you learn a lot from that experience. The unbelievable highs of taking something that was a small software company and going, and getting going public and watching it just be a complete win to being a complete loss. ultimately we.

we filed bankruptcy that the investors actually did a prepack bankruptcy sale to Avaya. So basically sold our tech to Avaya, which then lived on as their customer reaction center and so on. And when that’s when I decided to leave the company, ⁓ I’d spent a ton of time on the good side and on the bad sides, recovering customers, keeping customers.

on board, keeping the revenue. We had a great product and we had great people working at the company and our customers were seeing value from it. But that whole ethics problem with our CEO, Alan Anderson, can look it up, Google him, you can see all the things that happened. Ultimately, got ⁓ banned by the FCC to be a CEO or executive on a public company. A lot of different things that happened as a result of that. But ⁓ yeah, so that was a great

learning experience and you can, you know, I look at it both from the positive aspects I took away from it and what did I learn from the downside of that.

Anthony Codispoti (08:19)
what was the biggest thing you learned from the downside?

Mike Horvath (08:23)
The biggest takeaway was you have to work with ethical people you can trust. Because that was a classic example of everything was going well. And one person for sure and how it got through the rest of the audit checks and stuff, I don’t know the answers to that. But ethical people, line yourself up with people you can trust and that have good ethics.

because these things can happen if you don’t, right?

Anthony Codispoti (08:54)
this was somebody that you had worked with for some period of time before the company went public. Were there any signs that there were some unscrupulous things or maybe that the character of this person was questionable?

Mike Horvath (09:07)
No, I mean, nothing obvious to me. And I was in the central region, you know, and the executive team was in Fremont, California. So I didn’t have day to day interactions, you know, with Alan Anderson specifically. I mean, I talked to him quite often. I was one of the top reps and our region was always a top performing region, but never, never anything that would indicate that this would happen. And so I do think like,

If you’re going into a company and researching the people that you’re going to work with is a good idea. Like see what backgrounds exist. You know, obviously the internet’s a great thing to look at backgrounds on folks and see, you know, what they may or may not have done or been involved with in the past. You know, make sure you cross those T’s and dot those I’s when you’re going to, you know, especially partner up with somebody or invest a lot of time in a career. But no, that was the shocking part of it is, Alan was very, you know, dynamic man.

Lots of positive aspects could go out there and really promote the company very, very well. Why these things happened, why he did it, I could only guess, financial motives potentially, stock price stuff as a public company. But yes, that’s my big takeaway. And it’s obviously you can’t always prepare for those things. And I think that’s life, right? Life is hurdles you have to overcome that come at you that you never saw, right?

Anthony Codispoti (10:30)
Yeah, so it’s not like you look back and you’re like, there were some red flags that I missed. This just blew you away. This was not something you were expecting.

Mike Horvath (10:37)
That’s the

biggest frustrating part of it for, you know, and I still stay in touch with a lot of the team that we work together with. You get out to California quite a bit being a Salesforce partner. usually connect up with the, the team that we had there because we built great relationships, great friendships. We had, like I said, a great product. It just was a really bad ending.

Anthony Codispoti (11:01)
So where did the idea to start Revenova come from?

Mike Horvath (11:04)
That came from my colleague Charles Craig Miles. Charles and I and Dave and Jeff Parisi, the four of us, ⁓ we actually had two companies, the Forceiva, one you mentioned in the intro. That was a result of me coming out of another bad experience, we’re talking about overcoming hurdles. ⁓ Forceiva, I had a company called eCredit, you saw it on my bio. ⁓

It was a turnaround situation working with one of my mentors, Jeff Dickerson, another great person I learned a lot from. And we turned the company around and ultimately sold it to an investment group and a new CEO came in. And at the time I was really much, very much, I loved where we were heading as a company, e-credit. We had turned around, we had a good vision for what we were going to do. And the new CEO came in and we kind of talked about stuff. And I’m like, I just want to know, you new management, new investors.

Am I your guy? Here’s what I think. Here’s what we’ve done. Here’s my track record. I’d like to stay.” And he’s like, yeah, we kind of came to that agreement. Literally a week later, we met in Chicago and you fired me. Yeah, so like, okay, that’s certainly a 180 degree turnaround from the conversation we had a week prior on, know, I in or out kind of thing and where are we going and what our visions are? Do we share those things?

Anthony Codispoti (12:11)
my gosh.

Mike Horvath (12:26)
There’s another great example of woe, which has happened. of course, Jeff Degerson, former CEO of eCredited, already offered me another position at another company he had went to post acquisition. And I call him, like, Jeff, that’s the way it was. I know, Mike, I made a commitment to another good friend of mine that was going to take on the role that he was thinking about for me. So was like, oh, boy, what do I do now? And Jeff kind of said, hey, Mike, you’re smart enough. Why don’t you start a company? He and I had worked together many times on multiple occasions.

And he’s like, you’re smart enough. You know, you’ve got good ideas. You know, take one of those, go get some money. I can help you do that. And let’s, start a company.

I connected with a colleague of mine, Dave Craig-Mile, who’s one of the co-founders, and he’s the best tech guy, architect I’ve ever worked with. And I said, I’ve got this idea for an application for one-click credit checks on Salesforce. Every sales guy needs to get through the credit hurdles. If you’re selling, I learned that firsthand when I was selling, you know, I want to get the deal closed. wait a minute. know, credit has to approve the customer and it’s slowing the deal down and you’ll flop the application.

Anthony Codispoti (13:30)
And so this is a credit check for an

individual or for a company.

Mike Horvath (13:33)
credit check on a company. like

say company wants to buy on terms, can you sell it on terms or you got to get cash up front, all those types of credit decisions that companies make when they do a B2B transaction. So I had this idea. So I talked to Dave, we prototyped something and like the dog will hunt technically. I think there’s a good idea here. And I’d seen this kind of process, you know, in the field when I was at credit. And ⁓

So he was like, my brother knows a rich guy. His name was Rich, actually. And he goes, he’s an angel investor. Let’s talk to my brother about getting connected with this, get some funding. said, okay, let’s do that. And then Charles listened to the business pitch. I put it back together and he’s like, hey, I’d like to be part of this.

I’m at Schneider Logistics right now, but I’m thinking about making a career change. I wouldn’t mind doing something entrepreneurial. And so we met up with Rich. He funded the company and Dave Charles and I, and Jeff Parisi, who was a top sales guy at e-credit that I’d met through that environment. We started for SEVA and then we grew it over a four year period and sold to Aquafax ultimately. And that was a great ride, incredible fun. ⁓ was, was, and what was great about

this was Dave, Charles and I had highly complimentary skill sets. We were philosophically aligned. I knew Dave from a prior work experience at Shop Talk. And we just had a very similar philosophy of what we wanted to do as a business. And so that was great. And yet we were, we always were not afraid of conflict either as a management team.

then we always knew enough about each other’s domain to kind of challenge your thinking if you thought it needed to be challenged.

And one of the philosophies is hard on the problem, easy on the people, is if you’ve got to, if you’re going to, be afraid of conflict. We’ll talk more about that maybe later, but we had, we were able to really build a company, do it the right way. In our opinion, we bootstrapped it with some angel investment and we didn’t out kick our coverage. just did all the, think the right things to grow a company. And I learned a lot through my growth period at Quintus, working for large companies like NCR. ⁓

you what were the good things to take away and what you’re trying to emulate to grow a company. And through that experience, when we exited, Charles is like, and our investor, Rich, is like, wow, what do we do next? Like, this was awesome. No founder drama. Your business plan was exactly what you said it was going to be four years ago. This is how we’re going to grow the business. These are our possible outcomes.

Anthony Codispoti (16:04)
That rarely happens.

Mike Horvath (16:05)
You know what? He says the same thing and he invests in a lot of different companies. He’s like, man, you guys are, he goes, what are we going to do next? Because this was a lot of fun. You know, I never took the phone call. I’m quitting the company. You know, we’re going to change our business plan 180 degrees. You know, this kind of thing. It was, we had a vision for what we wanted to do. We executed on it and we exited because we got a great offer. We just couldn’t refuse, you know? And, you know, we had no intention of building the company to sell it. You we just said, we’re going to build a good, we’re going to build a great company.

where people like to work, we’re going to serve our customers and we’ll see where it goes from there. And we’ll evaluate that. So we never had any plan to build it to sell it, to build it to go public, to build it to stay private. Let’s go acquire customers, make them happy, work with great people and we’ll see where the chips fall. Yeah, so Charles is like, well, what do we do next? Well, when I was at Schneider, ⁓ I had three TMSs. It wasn’t connected to my CRM. And maybe we can do the same thing with transportation management that we just did with credit.

Anthony Codispoti (16:50)
what happens.

Mike Horvath (17:04)
management on Salesforce. And so we went out talked to a few brokerages, because that’s Charles had come out of the brokerage arm Schneider. People were like, love this idea.

Anthony Codispoti (17:14)
explain this a little bit.

What’s a TMS? What’s the explain the brokerage role here?

Mike Horvath (17:19)
Yeah, sure. So when you think about transportation, when I talk about transportation, I’m talking about trucks, you know, delivering commercial goods or, you know, moving things on trains or moving things by plane or moving things by containers on oceans or trains. So the whole logistics, transportation of fizzle-will goods around the globe. So a transportation management system is what orchestrates that.

manages that. So how do you price it? How do you track it? How do you, you know, settle, charge your customer, pay your carriers that move the freight for you? All the things that go in between that those transactions. That’s what a transportation management system is going to do for you is the operational side of that traditionally, which is I’ve got a load of products, a truckload of things that need to go from point A to point B or point A to B to C to D to E. And how do you operationally plan for that?

book the carriers, get the appointments with the location to make sure it all happens on time and then bill for it and pay for it. And so wrapped around that, of course, are salespeople trying to find new shippers. In the brokerage world, a broker, what they do is they sit between carriers out there, truck drivers and trucking companies, et cetera, and the customers that have to move freight. And the broker says, I’ve got a carrier network that I can help you move your freight. Mr. Shipper.

And I can do that at a great rate for you and I can service that for you and I can deal with all the crazy stuff that happens in the logistics, you do the traffic and weather and other events. And I’ll deal with all of that on your behalf. And I’m going to basically mark up debt carriers costs to you for that, for doing that for you on your behalf, and then take all that off your, off your plate. So that’s what brokers do. You know, they just basically sit in between it. And then sometimes

You know, there’s a lot of terminology in our space, brokerages, third party logistics companies, which are three PLs often referred to as there are a third party that does logistics on your behalf. So they might actually manage your warehouse facilities. They might also have trucks that they use of their own. So they manage their own fleet. So our TMS, our vision for that was we’re going to build a TMS today is tightly coupled with sales processing and marketing because

In order for a broker or a 3PL or even a shipper to get the right carrier network, you have to have a sales and marketing campaign to go find the right partners, right?

So you have to go find the carriers that are going to be a best fit for your business if you’re a broker and or a shipper. And if you’re a broker, you need to go find the customers that have freight that you can move on those carriers. So you’re selling and marketing one direction for customers as a broker in 3PL. And you’re also selling and marketing to the providers, the partners that you’re going to need to move that freight. So it’s a natural.

It’s a natural way to natural process extension. TMS kind of sits in the middle of that transaction, you know, then feeds everything into an accounting system. So our whole vision was, well, why the heck don’t we just put it all together, right? Why don’t we put it on Salesforce? So it’s sharing the same data by design. So all the accounts that you’re prospecting to and you’re quoting freight for are already in the system. You don’t have to do this synchronization of data, which is a big challenge in our industry.

Anthony Codispoti (20:29)
So prior to this point, the CRM and all these sort of logistics functions were housed in two different software products.

Mike Horvath (20:38)
Yeah, it may be more than two ⁓ because there’s a lot of tools that people use to facilitate this process. So you might have a sales, you might use Salesforce for your CRM and marketing for sales and marketing. Then you have some TMS that’s over here. So now you’ve got the same data that needs to be here over here. You got to replicate that.

Then there might be an accounting system that’s on another platform. You got to get the data over there. Then there’s a whole host of third party tools and data that logistics professionals use to help them price freight correctly, to track freight correctly. So now you’ve got this mishmash of things and three monitors, seven different applications up trying to all coordinate that process. And our vision was, why don’t we…

try to eliminate all of that swivel chair kind of application flow and all that data synchronization stuff and allow you to, what we say, focus on innovation versus integration. So the challenge on our industry is you’ve got to integrate so many things. And even in our world, you’re still integrating things. But if you can make the user’s experience very seamless and you can work off the same set of master data, you’ve got a big head start on your competitors who have to spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money getting things just to work together.

Right? And so that’s our value prop. Nobody had done it before. Yeah, we are the first TMS to come up on the Salesforce app exchange. So if you’re not familiar with Salesforce, I mean, everybody pretty much knows in the industry who they are, but a lot of people don’t realize that Salesforce also has a huge ecosystem of third parties that develop on their platform.

Anthony Codispoti (21:50)
So nobody had done this before. Nobody had done this before. Combine.

Mike Horvath (22:12)
and or support their platform. And most of that development is stuff that’s complimentary to the Salesforce suite of products. But vendors like us can build a completely new departmental module and live on the platform too. And that’s what we did at Forseva and that’s what we did again at Revanova. So we kind of took, hey, we did it once successfully and it’s worked. And now we did it again with a different application to serve a different industry need with Revanova.

Anthony Codispoti (22:37)
And so right out of the gate, were you guys getting customers? How did that first one come about?

Mike Horvath (22:43)
Yeah, so the first one really came about from our initial kind of research that we were doing on the concept. So as a young company and you’re in a startup, you have to find willing partners to kind of go along for the ride, right? To get to an MVP product that they can actually use in their business. So we had a couple of customers that really said, I’ll help you develop this and I’ll test it I’ll do these things while I’m still using someone else’s product. But I love your vision. And when you get there, I’m in. Right.

And so, one of the takeaways that I’ve learned over the years was I worked for a startup that spent long before the product was ready, spent tens and tens of millions of dollars on marketing, only not to have a product that could actually be truly implemented. And one of the takeaways I took from that experience was don’t spend a dime on marketing until you’ve got at least three customers and ideally five to 10 customers running your platform, running your app, working it.

like it, will reference it, and then you can pour money into marketing.

Anthony Codispoti (23:43)
So what

you’re describing is a big time commitment from the customer, right? They don’t know that you’re going to end up developing whatever it is that you’re, you know, sort of putting on paper and a presentation. And it takes a lot of time from them to be testing this, telling you the bugs, asking for new features while they’re still trying to run their business. How did you get these three to five first people kind of agree to do that?

Mike Horvath (24:12)
I guess that’s the art of the deal. So one of the things we always talk about is why do you want to do business with us? Here’s our vision for the market and here’s how it can benefit you. When you’re in startup mode, we’re not there today, but that’s what we’re trying to achieve. Will you be a part of that? Will you be part of the initial design? if you’re willing to do that, we’re going to be highly collaborative of you. You’re going to get the things that you want.

As most startups, really, I think the big success for us has been like the customers tell you everything you need to know about how to make your product highly attractive and highly valuable. Right. So we were willing to put in all the time.

as well to sit side by side with customers to build it the way it would improve their business in a way that it was worth the time investment. So they’re saying, hey, I’ve looked around the market. I haven’t seen anything like this. I love this idea. And if I’m one of the first in, once we go live, first we get nice financial incentives on the actual use of the product, virtually giving it away.

to cover our costs to get those first customers up, live and running as a reward for the investment and time that they put into helping us get there.

And that was that proved out to be great. Now, I would say a handful of those customers are still with us and a few have left, you know, from actually went out of business, you know, brokers that come and go. We started off with smaller companies initially to prove the concept. You know, it was a much easier thing for a smaller company to bite off the five man brokerage, the five truck fleet.

was much easier. We’ve hence moved up market, you know, after years and years and years of development because the deals were there. But early on, was just lock arms. And you just have to go and keep knocking on doors until you find three or four that were willing to do it with you that represent an ICP you want to go address, you know, after you’ve got to an MVP status.

Anthony Codispoti (26:10)
And so how does where the product is right now compared to what the original vision was?

Mike Horvath (26:17)
Well, the vision is the same, but the feature sets, you know, 50X and what we started with. The vision was always we were not going to pin ourselves to a specific mode of transportation, meaning like truckload versus less than truckload versus dry edge versus ocean freight versus intermodal, which is moving freight on the rail lines.

we are going to make our TMS agnostic to any mode specificity. So we had seen competitors, I have a truckload TMS or an LTL TMS. But if you did both modes as a provider, you needed two different products. had the data synchronization problem. had all that stuff. And many moves today are a combination of moving something by container and then moving it by.

taking stuff out of the container, moving it with a bunch of trucks all over the other place. So the logistics can get complicated and it’s a mix of these different modes of operation. So our initial vision was we were going to limit ourselves to a mode. We weren’t going to limit ourselves to a geography, meaning we were going to be multi-currency and multilingual, know, out of the box, meaning, know, so now today a lot of our customers are in Canada that move cross-border freight because they sell it in Canadian dollars. They move it in U.S. dollars and we reconcile all that stuff. And they have people that have French language requirements. So they work in French or they have French documents.

And so we said, if we’re going to be a logistics provider and logistics is global, stuff comes from China, stuff comes from other areas, we move stuff over there as US manufacturers, we would not limit ourselves to anything. Even the name Revenova had nothing to do with logistics. It was just a name, right? That we came up with after, ⁓ you

a session probably with a few cocktails and looking for open URLs to what was available and what sounded kind of cool and what didn’t impige and all us into what we were thinking we were going to be. a company name that could go any direction in case our vision needed to change. You know, like, this is dog ain’t hunting. Maybe we go a different direction. No. And just like for Civa, our vision hasn’t changed at all. We’ve just been executing on it. So we’ve just been adding more features.

adding more modes, we’re going to continue to do that as we grow. so yeah, nothing has changed. No founder drama, no vision changes so far.

Anthony Codispoti (28:27)
So

when you go to a new client, a new prospect, who is it that you’re actually selling to? What’s their role?

Mike Horvath (28:34)
Yeah, it’ll depend on the company. So Broker 3PL Space, we’re usually dealing with the executive team, CEOs, VPs of operations, VP of transportation, people that are in charge of customer sales or carrier sales, kind of depending on the size of the company. If we’re going, if we’re talking with manufacturers who actually make the products that need to be shipped, it tends to be the people in their logistics or shipping areas that we start with, not the CEO of…

We wouldn’t go to the CEO of Procter & Gamble. It would be their logistics people at Procter & Gamble, for example. Those would be the people we go there. So it depends on the customer segment, where we would end up going. we tend to like to sell high.

but we also do grassroots things as well. Talk to the people who actually doing the job, so dispatchers and freight brokers and things that we see at trade events and others to maybe build it up from the bottom and bring it down from the top because there’s value props across the continuum there.

Anthony Codispoti (29:37)
So I know a couple of things that your platform focuses on are predictive pricing and route optimization. Do you have any case studies or any numbers off the top of your head that you can share about, you know, a client where, you know, here was sort of the economics before and then the economics after Revenova came in.

Mike Horvath (30:00)
Sure. And there’s a lot of demonstrable ROI across a lot of different components. This lack of the need to do integration versus innovate in and of itself is a 30%, 40 % kind of ROI that relates to maybe what they were doing prior to deploying Ravenova. But the coolest thing I would say that we’ve on the pricing, dynamic pricing side is

After about two years ago, after being in business for almost 10 years, our customers use a lot of different third party, what we call pricing. ⁓

resources to understand the spot market. Think of it a lot like how you would look at the stock market ticker on Yahoo Finance. You kind of want to see what the trade, what are things trading at? What’s the price? Is it going up? Is it going down? And in that world, you get a very real time view of what’s going on in the market, right? You can see what’s going on on the Wall Street and on the NASDAQ and you can look at all of those exchanges in real time and kind of see, make decisions on that. Well, freight markets work very similarly. ⁓

The full truckload market in the US is very much…

dynamic market. Trucks are moving around the country constantly. They’re always in different areas. There’s a limited number of trucks out there. And you need to get your freight moved and you got to find someone who’s going to do it for you. And the pricing on it, call a spot market. If there’s somebody who’s just looking for freight today as a carrier and someone who’s got a load to move today, they don’t have a contract. They’re going to say how much, and they’re going to tell you how much based on what they need to move the load at, what the market’s telling them, how hard is it to find a carrier, how it’s going to be

dictate how much you’re going to be willing to pay. So our customers are asking us for help on that. And so we introduced something we call our Lane IQ Network, which is a real time pricing engine, which is, and it’s anonymized. So for a competitive standpoint, you don’t have to give up any of your business secrets. Like what are my great carriers that I like to use on certain lanes that they call them logistic lanes or basically Chicago to Dallas or Dallas to LA. That’s a lane, if you will, of a shipping lane. And so

different carriers specialize in these different lanes. And the whole trick in 3PLs and brokerages is building out that carrier network and then I kind of keeping them captive, if you will. It’s not the right word, but basically keeping them engaged. So you keep feeding them freight, keep their trucks busy. It’s easy on them. They don’t have to go out and try to find freight. You’re just pitching them freight left and right, right? And

Ultimately, if you have those kinds of relationships, you start to build contracted rates. Okay, I’ll agree to move this for X. Could you just keep giving me freight? This is great. This works for me. But there’s a lot of freight that moves in the spot market. I don’t have a truck. I don’t have a contracted rate. I need to move this. So how much, Mr. Carrier, to move this today? And so knowing what the market is doing, pricing these lanes is highly important to any logistics.

company, anybody doing logistics, what’s the spot market look like today for like full truckload or flatbed moves, etc. So in our world,

We roll up all of that anonymized and provide it back in real time. So like a real time view of the market versus a historical view, which is what most competitive solutions do. They roll up data from history and try to say, based on three days ago, seven days ago, here’s what I think the price should look like today. We’re saying, here’s what the price looks like today. Here’s 10 carriers that bid that lane. This is what it looks like. Not the carrier names, but just the rates. And that’s the difference. And that’s really exciting because that’s something very new.

Anthony Codispoti (33:28)
And so is that

most helpful to ⁓ the person who needs the freight shipped or the carrier that’s doing the shipping ⁓ so that they don’t have to guess? It’s sort of like, hey, here’s sort of where the market standard is today in this moment in this region.

Mike Horvath (33:45)
Yeah, that’s right. It’s really about where is this at? You everybody’s, if you think about it, like any negotiation, you’re trying to buy the freight at the lowest possible cost. And the carrier, of course, is trying to cover their cost at a nice margin. And so there’s this back and forth and moving something for something when you need to get your truck back to Chicago because you’re in Dallas and you got to get it back there for a load maybe two days later. You know, that’s called a backhaul.

you’re willing to maybe take a better, a lower rate just to get something to cover the cost of the truck moving back to where it’s going to pick up its next load, right? And ideally you want to get as much as you can. And so that’s the trick on both sides is understanding what people are bidding for that lane and what people are paying for that lane. And what we’re showing is what are the carriers charging for that lane? Cause they have to cover their costs. So there is a floor. I mean, you can get below that occasionally people like, Oh, I’ll take anything because I just want to cover something.

But typically, carriers are trying to cover their costs at margin. So you kind of know where the game is being played at that point, and you can negotiate.

Anthony Codispoti (34:49)
And it gets both parties to a decision point faster, right? Because all of this is time sensitive. I need my goods to get there in a certain amount of time. And as the carrier, I need to get the truck back to a different city in a certain amount of time as well.

Mike Horvath (35:02)
Yeah, ideally, you whether you put out what’s called an offer rate, you say, I have a shipment and I’m willing to pay X for it. And knowing that that’s a that’s a fair price.

that’s you’re not gouging the carrier because you don’t want that’s a bad business relationship too, right? You know, I’m just jamming you down for, you’re not making any money. Eventually that relationship dies, right? Because you’re not that person’s not going to want to do business with you. So the idea is try to get a fair rate based on what the market conditions are because capacity moves around. As I mentioned, if there’s only a few trucks available, well, you know, you probably can get a better rate for your truck because you got 30 people trying to move freight and you got three trucks. ⁓

an example of kind of the dynamics of supply and demand, but it truly is a constantly moving supply and demand market.

Anthony Codispoti (35:46)
Can you share a story about an unexpected hurdle that you guys faced at Revenova and how you and your team overcame it?

Mike Horvath (35:54)
Yeah, the probably the unexpected hurdles that I’ve I would say that we haven’t had many unexpected hurdles The Yeah, I think we yeah, can honestly say that it at revenue but we I can’t think of something we’re going my god, like We weren’t expecting that. I think most of the hurdles we’ve had to overcome have been expected ⁓ and so

Anthony Codispoti (36:04)
most of them you expected.

Mike Horvath (36:22)
really more around those lines. And most of those hurdles have just been ⁓ features or product features that we didn’t think would be hurdles to maybe getting to a different segment of the market and ultimately were. And so you learn that on the fly, you’re out there and you’re losing business, right? Because we lose our fair share too, going into competitors, good competitors out there ⁓ and you learn, right? And sometimes those hurdles, sometimes those features were like, whoa, that’s a big gap.

we better plug that. So I’d say those are the types of hurdles we’ve had to overcome, have been more product feature related against an addressable market we thought we were ready to go after and it quite weren’t ready to go after, after really getting into it. ⁓ But those things, just adjust our plan and keep going and plug those gaps and then go back and…

you know, give it, if the market’s worth it, you just keep going back. And you find people like I did, I talked about earlier in startup mode, which is you find customers and you’re trying to enter new markets as we expand our.

TMS into different modes, it’s essentially a whole new market for us. Even though there’s a lot of commonality in TMSs, there’s a lot of nuances by mode that you have to put into your product in order to effectively service that industry or that particular mode within an industry. And so you look for people that are willing to partner with you to get you over those ⁓ feature sets to an MVP product for that market, then expand from there.

Anthony Codispoti (37:53)
What growth strategy’s been most effective for you guys?

Mike Horvath (37:58)
Yeah, I think from a growth perspective, philosophically, we believe in, I call it, don’t out-kick your coverage. So one of the things we, as a company, said we didn’t want to do is thrash. And what I mean by that is we see a lot of companies get lots of investment, hire a ton of people, go do a bunch of things, spend the 40 million in marketing, and the business doesn’t come and they got out cut.

30 % of their workforce a year later, stuff like that. And we said, we’re not going to do that. One of the things that I think we’ve been able to do very, well is people matter, right? They’re not just field replaceable units. You hire somebody, we hire people with an expectation that they’re going to come in, they’re going to be a high performer, they’re going to be able to grow with the company, and you’re going to be here forever. ⁓ And that’s not, let’s just hire a bunch of people, see who sticks, and then we’ll keep the ones that do and the ones that fail. just move

move

out. It’s just not Charles Dave or I’s or Jeff’s philosophy at all. And so we tried to and we never had an expectation that we would ever get any money from anybody else after we started founded the company either. So we said we’re going to grow this business responsibly. We’re going to be good stewards of our money that we have. We’re going to be good stewards of the people and build a good culture. We want people to be engaged. We want them to see the vision. We want them to feel part of this.

And that’s how we’ve grown the business. Now, in the case of Revenova, a few years ago, we sold our company to Viking Global Investors, bought Revenova.

And they said, we love what you guys are doing. We just want you to do it faster and bigger, right? And so, they ingested a lot of capital. They put a lot of capital on our balance sheet to do that. And we’ve done that. At the time, I think we were about 18 people or about 80 now. And we’ve grown that over that time period, I think, again, in a very responsible way with hiring people that we think will be long-term employees and not just kind of loading up the bus and see who sticks. And I like that.

employees would tell you that and we give them lot of intra-departmental mobility. You come in and you’re kind of doing something and now you want to, hey I really like what’s going on over there and I think I have a better fit over there. We’re very good at moving people around to the best fit for their skills and where they want to go with their careers as well. I think having that culture allows you to do great things with the team that you have.

Anthony Codispoti (40:33)
With over 15 years in tech leadership, as you kind of look forward now, what excites you most about the future of your space?

Mike Horvath (40:44)
Well, the big thing for us, it’s everywhere, is AI. there are tremendous use cases that can be, that where AI can contribute to productivity in logistics. And we’re implementing a bunch of that at Revenova. And we’re just scratching the surface at this point.

It’s I think it’s definitely a disruptive technology that many industries are adopting and is changing the business landscape. I think in ways that are going to stick and it will will will going to change a lot of things in the business world. So we’re in on it 100 percent. And I think that’s where the biggest opportunities lie.

When you combine the power of AI with a very powerful workflow and data integration platform like we have with AI on platform, it presents itself with an opportunity for just amazing productivity gains.

Anthony Codispoti (41:42)
What can you say about how you’re currently using AI and what some of the future plans look like?

Mike Horvath (41:49)
Yeah, the current state, you know, the big benefit is getting quotes back to customers quickly. So in the logistics world, you’ll get a lot of inquiries on how much to move this from here to there and shopping around. a lot of that inbound traffic comes on email.

And so using AI to read the email, using AI to formulate a response, then combining it with the workflow and all the business intelligence we keep on platform around the rating, as I talked about, you what’s the price, what’s the market look like, being able to generate a good rate with the right margin profile and be able to respond to a customer within under a minute. You know, they send the email in and less than a minute later, you know, here’s what I got for you.

And that’s all done through automation. And that’s AI plus all the other workflow things that we deliver on a platform. That’s way different than a person getting it, having to translate it, key it into a system, and then go back and engage the customer. So the productivity gains there are huge. And that’s just one use case. The other use case that we’re using is on the capacity aspect of it. So carriers will often send emails all over to brokers and they’re balancing, I’ve got empty trucks in the city. I need free. What do you got?

We’re doing the same thing there. They send an email in and we’re responding back with, here’s the freight I have for you, all automated, all through AI and workflow and integration with the rest of the system’s platform. And then that’s the one channel. Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (43:15)
responds on its own without a human being

like interceding there.

Mike Horvath (43:20)
It responds like your human being would respond. So it’s combining the AI capabilities of understanding unstructured data and turning it into structured data, and also then responding with something, a response. then in between that is all the business process and workflow that you have that a user would use to price that same freight. It’s just the AI is talking to that and now presenting it back.

Now we’re going down to multi-channel, conversational AI as we like to call it, ⁓ where it could be an email, it could be a voice phone call. I could make a phone call using a combination of workflow and AI. You could call in and say, what’s the status of my load? It’s supposed to be here at three, is it on time? And we adjust that voice call. We hand it off to ⁓ both AI and workflow. We respond back to you with a voice, like my voice, it could be my voice.

I’d say, yeah, Anthony, your shipments on time, showing on time should be there at three. Anything else I can help you with? No. Okay, good. Okay, thank you. Hang up the phone. You’re talking to, exactly. Yeah, you’re talking to a combination of AI workflow, telephony. There’s a whole technology mashup there, but AI is part of it for the more conversational aspects of.

Anthony Codispoti (44:26)
I’m not actually talking to you, I’m talking to the AI. ⁓

Mike Horvath (44:41)
You know, chat GPT, right? You ask it a question, it comes back with an answer. It’s not a pre-canned answer. It’s what the AI delivers as the answer. And now you’re speaking that back. So it’s more conversational in nature. That’s where the AI I think comes in real handy on the voice side. You know, the rest of it is all the other things that person would do in the TMS. It’s just orchestrated, you know, in that workflow data integration and AI combination.

Anthony Codispoti (45:06)
It’s incredible. ⁓ Yeah. I mean, we’re talking about a couple of things here that are incredible. And the first part of it, sort of the front end, you know, having the human like voice that responds and very conversational, like that’s being applied in other spaces, still amazing. And then, so you guys are taking some form of that tech and you’re combining it with all the back end data that you’ve got so that you didn’t have to take a customer service reps time to go and look and research.

It knows right where to pull the data from. puts it in this human-like voice package and delivers the answer to the customer. And what’s that sort of timeframe? I asked the question, I get the answer back in a few seconds, several seconds. How’s that work?

Mike Horvath (45:53)
It’s

highly conversational. So it’s almost as if like we’re talking about today. You you asked the question, there’s probably a slight, in most cases, a little pause off of a normal conversation, but not, not bad. mean, we’re skeptics. I will tell you when this was all hitting, we’re like, I don’t know if that dog, you know, hunts, right? And, sure enough, you know, as you go through some of the, some of these use cases,

And especially in logistics, it’s a 24 by 7 world. You’ve got people moving on the roads all day, all night, and things happen and they need to get a hold of somebody or they need a quick question answered. It’s a very effective way to get that on that channel done. Of course, you always have the option to say, I need to talk to somebody and it hops out and you can route that call to somebody else.

I see a lot of upside to this in this multi-channel concept, combination of AI making it more of a human-like experience versus a very structured flow experience. If we’ve all of the experience, press one, press two, press three. Exactly. Yeah, and it’s just scratching the surface. So it’s only going to get better and better and better, which presents a challenge.

Anthony Codispoti (46:51)
Push one for this, push two for, yeah, Yeah, those are annoying.

Mike Horvath (47:02)
It’s an opportunity and a challenge too, right? You got a lot of people doing these jobs today. And so how do you now redeploy those folks for more productive work or are you laying people off? So you can see how disruptive it could be. And our philosophy has always been, ⁓ you’re gonna have to balance that now with your hiring ⁓ functions because some of these things will.

For all the kind of we call happy paths, mundane, repeatable things will probably be very well handled by AI enabled flows like this in the coming years across all industries. And it will probably reduce the need to have as many people as you have today if that’s all they’re doing. So training people to do other things that add value to the business, I think is also a cultural thing.

all industries are going to have to deal with, with their employee bases because of, you know, what AI will, the opportunity AI offers.

Anthony Codispoti (48:03)
And so how do you handle when somebody calls in and they get this AI responder? Is it identifying itself as AI? Is it going to be obvious to folks that it’s not a human being?

Mike Horvath (48:19)
Yeah, I think that’s how we approach it. ⁓ But that’s up to really the company deploying it. ⁓ We’re doing it under the brand we call it Artemis. And Artemis is our persona for AI. it was built off of RTMS, which is Revenova TMS, RTMS, AI, and you. When you combine all those letters, it becomes, it’s Artemis spelled that way, A-R-T-I-M-U-S. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (48:24)
How are you doing it?

Mike Horvath (48:46)
Our default flows that are pre-integrated and ready to go, because the long pole in the tent for any AI deployment is the integration and workflow layer is not the AI side of it necessarily. All of our pre-integrated packaged cases that I described, they all say, hey, I’m Artemis, I’m your AI assistant. I’m here to help you and here’s what I can do for you. And then it does its thing. And so in our world,

We say you’re talking to some AI capability. But that’s just a prompt. You don’t have to do that. You can say, hi, this is Anthony. I’m here to help you. How can I help you today? I have a funny anecdotal story. One of our customers, we’ve been talking about this. And everybody has different philosophies. And that’s why these are always optional things.

But he’s like, we have one of our employees who sort of has a monotone voice. And when he talks to customers, he gets, are you AI or are you a person? And I said, you know, it’s funny, but when you have people that are on the other end of the phone where they almost can’t distinguish it, you know, it’s very interesting, right? Cause usually on voice apps, you can tell right away if you’re talking to a recorded prompt and not some sort of personality, right?

Anthony Codispoti (49:40)
Hahaha

Mike Horvath (50:02)
And that’s the upside of AI, think, is you can kind of develop a personality with it that could be very smart, can be very quick, can be very informative, and is available 24 by 7 to do very task-specific things and over time, many, many, many things. And that’s where everybody’s business philosophy is going to come into play. We have customers who say, if someone wants to talk, we’re going to put a human in front of them. And that’s a very valid way to do business. And there’ll be a lot of people who appreciate that.

There’s others who want to have a of a hybrid. Others are looking to automate everything as much as possible. They call it a digital brokerage, like almost no people. Everything happens through the automation. We’ll see where it goes. We’re positioning ourselves to have features that can kind of address the needs of those three different philosophies. So if you want to try to go fully automated across all interaction channels, we’re going to.

try to put you in a position to be there. And if you want to have a mix of that or hybrid, that’s fine too. That’s your call as a business. We’re just enabling these types of capabilities.

Anthony Codispoti (51:04)
Exciting times Mike. What’s a serious challenge that you’ve had to overcome in your life? What you learn going through that and how did you get through?

Mike Horvath (51:14)
⁓ Yeah, and professional or personal side.

Anthony Codispoti (51:17)
Let’s get let’s do both one at a time.

Mike Horvath (51:19)
Okay. Well, personally, I’ve had two near-death experiences in my life. So when I was young, there’s a scar here that I have. I was run down by a motorist on my bicycle and almost died from it. I got my whole neck ripped open and it was not a pretty experience. you learn a lot from that. So I was young when that happened and it kind of changed my whole perspective on life in general.

You know, you’re moments away from something catastrophic happening. So be optimistic. know, I always folks laugh. They always say, you how you doing? Every time I wake up on this side of the grass is a good day. Let’s go make it the best one ever. That was the start of that philosophy. In 2020, I got covid and before vaccines and anything were available and I got actually I recovered from it. I got a second time, but.

The second time I was hospitalized and it was, know, the doctors were like, hey, sign off on a ventilator, you know, and I’m like, whoa, and I’m like, I don’t feel like doing that. And I said, how about we wait, you know, and this was a really interesting question. You know, he, asked me.

Hey, are you in good with God? And I said, you know, I think I am. I’m a Catholic and believer. And I go, God has intervened once before for me. And he’s like, when is that? And I told him about the car accident story. And he’s like, OK, because we’re going to hold off on this then. And ⁓ sure enough, I turned around in a couple days. I was out of the hospital. And they didn’t throw me on a ventilator. So. ⁓

And of course, that was good. But again, kind of reinforce my whole life philosophy, which is, you know, things can happen quickly, you know, going south, enjoy your life, you know, make the best of every day that you can and keep going. So that, you know, that’s those are the personal stories.

Anthony Codispoti (53:17)
So

on that, I’m curious, can you describe in more detail how that changes the way that you feel at your core? Is it that things roll off you more easily? Is it that you’re seeking more of the joy than the work? Or I don’t know, kind of help us who haven’t been through something like that understand it.

Mike Horvath (53:40)
Yeah, I would say that you described it well, which is the first part of it was at a young age was how do you overcome that? Like here I was, I had over 800 stitches, had lots, you know, this kind of thing and you’re young and

Like you learn to toughen up for sure, you know, because of the physical stuff that, people, know, kids are cruel, come at you, you know, Frankenstein, blah, blah, blah. And you learn that that’s not important and it’s not a reflection on you. That’s a reflection on them. And so you, you you end up being, it ended up improving my optimistic view on things and also the ability to just deal with all kinds of stuff that gets thrown at you.

And also realizing that, again, life is an incredible thing. It’s very fragile, and yet you can be very resilient to it. I mean, surviving that was, the doctors all said, don’t even know how you made it to the hospital. But I did, and I survived. were magnificent doctors. And same thing with the COVID experience.

It changes your philosophy to basically go, there are things that are important in life. And the most important thing is you can’t do anything unless you’re healthy. And so I focus a lot on that through nutrition and exercise and stress management, because nothing more stressful than someone telling you in both cases. I remember when I was in the hospital and I get up in a car and the doctor’s like, I want to bring a priest in to give him last rites. We’re not sure he’s going to make it through the night.

And I remember the look on my father’s face and I was like, my dad was a strong World War II veteran and he just was like, he’s like, I got nothing, you know? And I could see it on his face that he was worried. And that was the first time I think I saw my dad worried. Every time in my life, he was a much more, you know, strong man, like say World War II vet, police officer.

So he’d seen a lot, through a lot. He was never fazed by anything. This fazed him big and I was like, oh, am I in trouble here? But again, survived it through a lot of great folks on the doctor side that pulled me through. And then same thing with COVID. Somehow I got through that and it just definitely toughens you up and makes you focus on what’s important. And the first thing again is your health.

your health and then you focus on the things that make sense for you and make sure you focus on all the things around you that matter and the things that don’t matter put off to the side. It’s kind of going back to like a business philosophy of working prioritized lists. Now I’m a big list manager, but you got to prioritize it. what’s, cause you know, is your worst enemy.

You know, you guess what? What are you going to spend time on? You do that. I do that in my personal life and I did it in my professional life. These are the things I got to tackle today professionally. These are the things I want to focus on personally and everything else was going to just have to wait until I accomplish those things. And that’s OK because you can’t do everything for everybody all the time. Right.

Anthony Codispoti (56:37)
How about on the professional side?

Mike Horvath (56:41)
Yeah, so hurdles. We talked about quinnis, of course. We talked about probably the ones that ⁓ were the biggest challenges, know, just suddenly getting let go. mean, Shop Talk was probably another one where the investors pulled funding. So I just showed up one day and the chairman of the board was there. And I’m like, hey, Joanna, what are you doing in town? And she’s like, well, ⁓ I’m here to shut the company down.

Anthony Codispoti (56:45)
It’s a big one.

Mike Horvath (57:04)
Like really, it was a mismatch. So it was a marketing company that was trying to get into the software space. And I was hired because I had a lot of software experience and we were going to try to move into the software space. So the sales cycles were different. The business was different. The investors were misaligned. Probably another good business experience is are your investors aligned if you’re funded by investors? Are they aligned with what you’re trying to do and the timing in which it’s going to take to get it done?

So yeah, that between that one just bang, know, companies closed today decided to go as a first and only time I filed for unemployment. I said, hey, you know what I’m gonna today? I’m go down to the unemployment office and set in the room. I filled out my form and you’ll laugh at this. I fill out the form and I’m sitting there with a bunch of folks.

in the room and also know like Mr. Horvath, would you please come to the front? I’m like, oh my God, what did I do wrong? I was like, I really miss? She goes, you can go, your form looks fine. And she goes, I don’t always get forms filled out correctly. So I went home, my wife’s like, what are you doing here? My wife’s like, what are you doing at home? I go, well, they closed the company today and I have no job. And she’s like, oh my God, of course she’s panicking. I’ve never panicked on that stuff. I always felt like,

Anthony Codispoti (58:03)
Ha

the overachiever in the unemployment line.

Mike Horvath (58:19)
Again, going back to that, not me philosophy that I’ve had? Like, why not me? I I grew up in a, my mom was a secretary, my dad was a police officer, know, I argue a middle class, mean, can you argue lower middle class, you know, neighborhood, I went to a public high school and went to Northern Illinois University, which I loved, funded it myself, ⁓ mostly with a small student loan, which I paid off, by the way. ⁓ And, you know, people say, you can’t, you know, you can’t compete with the…

Ivy Leaguers, you can’t do that. People constantly would come out of the woodwork and I’d say, got this interesting idea or something like that. ⁓ I always had to philosophy is why not me? And yes, I can. Don’t get in my way. I’ve got things I want to accomplish and I’m going to go for them. it’s about.

I think it’s a lot about your intangibles, right? It’s about your perseverance, it’s about your attitude, it’s about your optimism, it’s about your work ethic. You can learn a lot of things in college, you know, that you will use and you won’t use, but I think that the intangibles, the personality traits, things like that, that you learn along the way from mentors, from family, from friends, I think are a bigger indicator of whether or not you’re gonna be a success in life or not, because if you just stick to it and keep learning, you know, I try to learn.

all the time. I never stop learning. Read, watch podcasts, do things. Always try to learn something new every day as you go through life because there’s just so much to know and you never know what’s going to help you in a situation that’s at some point in time. So just keep expanding your knowledge base.

Anthony Codispoti (59:54)
Like that why not me philosophy. Was that there before your first near death experience? Was that already part of you?

Mike Horvath (1:00:04)
No, don’t think so. You know, I was young at the time and I think that just was sort of an eye opener on just how to live life and be aware of your surroundings and be more cautious. know, it was kind of a the why not me thing happened, I think, as I started in my career. you know, probably the first challenge was, hey, you’re the Midwest sales guy, you you’ll never outperform the West Coast salespeople, the East Coast. They got better territories. They get this, they get that. They’re always the top.

I remember taking that as a personal challenge going, okay, I’m going to outsell. I want to be the number one guy in the company. That’s my goal. And said, how do I do it? So just started to go after it. And I said, working less, doing the things that I learned initially from Dr. Holland, have a process.

learn how to prospect, how to overcome objections. I just started applying what I had learned and just gained a ton of experience and just kept going at it. And then when I saw success there, I think is when I got to the why not me. I did it. Why not me? Why can’t I do the next big thing? Why can’t I manage reasons?

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:05)
Once you had some taste

of success after somebody told you you couldn’t do it and you proved that you could, that’s kind of where the switch went.

Mike Horvath (1:01:15)
Yeah, I think that was a big part of it. It weird anecdotal stories I could tell you too. I’m a musician, I play bass guitar and guitar and can hack my way around a keyboard and a few other instruments. And I remember a guy that was probably my age at the time was in a band and we were a bunch of teenagers playing in the garage. And he’s like, you guys sound good, but how come no one’s singing? And we’re like, well, none of us know how to sing. He’s like, why not? Give it a try. Do these things. So we all started doing it. We got pretty good at it.

And that’s Mr. V and other fan. I’m like, yeah, you know, he’s right. Why didn’t we try this? you know, so I think there were nuggets of that through life that you get. Right. And and it’s it’s you just you take those things and they might even be you might not even be conscious of them. You know, they might be subconscious things that you’ve learned in the past that contribute to that. But certainly.

As I got into the professional world and people were very skeptical about, you will never be able to do that or you can’t do that or how are you going to start a company? There were people that said, yeah, you can, that were mentors that said, you can do that, man, you’re smart enough. So you had good people. And I think that’s a great thing for anybody that’s young in the industry or just building their careers is gravitate to those mentors and just.

absorb as much as you can from the good people that you work with that are willing to be mentors. And if you are someone who’s got a lot of experience, mentor the younger people coming up behind you, give them, instill these types of things in them. Because I say this to our team a lot, you guys can do this. That’s one of the challenges as a founder is stepping back, right?

is getting out of the day-to-day details. As we grew the company from 15 people where I was involved in so much and now almost 100 now.

where I’m not involved in a day to day and I committed to the people that, know, that I used to do those jobs and look like I’m not going to helicopter you. You’re smart enough. You’re good enough. You can do this. If you need my help or you have a question, always here for you. But I’m not going to helicopter you. I’m not going to tell you what to do. You’re going to do this. You can do this. So I you need people in your life that tell you that too. You know, not just the naysayers and you you don’t have to overcome that personally, but you do need people that can reinforce that you can do things.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:34)
You need a cheerleader, absolutely. I’ve just got one more question before.

Mike Horvath (1:03:37)
They used to call me the chief

morale, they used to call me the chief morale, the CMO, like chief morale officer, because you always come in here and you’re always pumping everybody up. But I think that’s important. I think it’s easy to get distracted by what’s not going right and not, and not, you know, also reinforcing all the great things that going right.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:51)
I mean, mindset is everything. Yeah.

Mindset’s everything. And so if you can help put your team into the right mindset, you can do this. We are capable. We’ve got a great product. We can overcome whatever obstacle is there. You’re sort of greasing the slide, right?

Mike Horvath (1:04:11)
Absolutely. I tell everybody, look, when we started Revenova, nobody even knew what it meant, what it was. There was no, who are you guys? mean, we have formidable customers now, very, very successful customers, household names. We have a lot going for us. Of course, there’s always challenges. Any product company that’s evolving, there’s always things you don’t have that you wish you had now. It’s going to take you months to get there. And you just…

You have to always, you have to also focus on all the great things you already have, right? You can’t just focus on the things you don’t have. So it’s this optimism I’ve always had, know, an optimistic kind of after those near-death experiences is you just have to be an optimist, you know. Otherwise, why live life? Why be a pessimist? Why be a cranky and crabby all day? Like, no way. That’s not going to be me. I’m going to, I’m going out on a happy note, going out with a smile.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:02)
love it. Before I ask my last question, Mike, I just want to take care of a few housekeeping items here. Anyone who wants to get in touch with Mike, you can look him up on LinkedIn Michael Horvath, and look for Revenova in that search. We’ll also include a link to that. His company is Revenova.com R E V E N O V ⁓ A.com. And then his email address is mhorvath at Revenova.com again, links to all that will be in the show notes for this.

And as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that aren’t going to hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to addbackbenefits.com. And finally, if you take just a moment to leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, we will be forever grateful. So last question for you, Mike, you and I reconnect one year from today and you are celebrating something big. What’s that big thing you hope to be celebrating one year from?

Mike Horvath (1:05:56)
Well, I guess that I’m still here. That’d be a good one. And that, you know, we’re launching, we were launching into the fleet space as a company. a company goal for a year from now is that we are a player on the fleet side of the industry. So carriers that are looking to for a TMS.

A year from now I’m hoping, hey, those Revanova guys, you should look at them. They got something pretty cool. We’ve been soft launching that for some period of time. We’re going to go in a big way starting Q1 of 26. So we have a few launch partners. It’ll be some well-known names that people will be like, wow, they bought Revanova for their fleet? And we’re like, yes, they did. But that’s not been publicly announced yet. So hopefully a year from now we’ll be talking a lot about that as a business.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:50)
Terrific. Well, Mike Horvath from Revanova, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Mike Horvath (1:06:58)
thank you. This was quite enjoyable and I’d love to come back if you’ve got another topic you want to talk about.

Anthony Codispoti (1:07:04)
I’ll take you up on that. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.

Mike Horvath (1:07:06)
Yes.