What Shippers Really Want: Timur Eligulashvili on the Last2First Podcast

Timur Eligulashvili usually does the interviewing on his own show, Logistics Remix. This time the roles flipped: Jason Burns invited him onto the Last to First podcast, where Burns talks with the people pushing last-mile delivery forward. Most of his guests come from the carrier side. Timur brought the view from in between: he sits between shippers and carriers and sees how the money moves.

They covered a lot: Timur’s path from a Honda logistics analyst to founding SmallParcel.com, what he learned running sales inside a regional parcel carrier, how zone skipping really works, where regional carriers beat the nationals, and the pricing games UPS and FedEx play to grow revenue per package while volume stays flat. Here are the takeaways.

From Excel analyst to parcel consultant

Timur did not plan on logistics. He studied business operations at Ohio State, graduated into the 2001 tech crash, and got hired as a logistics analyst at a Honda subsidiary mostly because he was good at Excel. Logistics, he learned fast, is not about moving stuff. It is about moving data.

From there: freight brokerage at CH Robinson in Chicago, then employee number 20 at Echo Global Logistics, which grew to a thousand people and an IPO in four years. Then uShip in Austin, back when the Shipping Wars TV show was accidentally driving signups from people who wanted to move cars, boats, and a hundred-foot-tall gnome. Then VP of Sales at LSO, a regional parcel carrier in Texas, right through COVID. Four years ago he started SmallParcel.com.

What SmallParcel.com does: TurboTax for shipping

The simplest way to describe it: SmallParcel.com is like TurboTax, but for shipping. A shipper connects their carrier accounts or sends shipment data, and the system hunts for savings in three buckets.

First, better rates with the carriers they already use. Second, switching or adding a carrier, often a regional or alternative carrier that complements the nationals. Third, money left on the table: unfiled claims for lost and damaged packages, rebates owed but never collected. A lot of companies are not filing claims at all, and the ones that do usually are not filing to the maximum because nothing is standardized or automated.

What Timur learned inside a regional carrier

Timur’s time at LSO taught him how regional carriers actually operate. They run lean. There are no Super Bowl ads, no stadium sponsorships. The money goes into operations, and they know their top hundred customers intimately.

It also taught him the two biggest blockers to getting a new shipper onboard. The first is technology. Before a single package can move, the shipper has to print the carrier’s labels, connect for tracking, connect for rating, connect for invoicing. All of that has to be set up first. As Timur put it, you cannot just call and say let us start shipping tomorrow.

The second is legal. Getting to agreement on the contract can take weeks. He has seen five-page contracts and fifty-plus-page contracts, especially with Fortune 500 shippers whose legal teams are paid to tilt everything in their favor. Every blocker is learnable, but the work between hello and the first pickup is real.

Zone skipping, explained with real math

Zone skipping is one of the least understood and most powerful tools in parcel. Here is how Timur explained it on the show. Shipping from Los Angeles to New York with a national carrier is zone 8, the most expensive zone. Instead, a shipper trucks or flies that volume to the destination market, inducts it into a regional carrier’s last-mile hub there, and pays a zone 2 rate for the final delivery. The middle-mile cost plus the zone 2 last mile usually comes in well under the single-carrier zone 8 price.

The catch is volume. Zone skipping needs real volume, pallets or truckloads moving daily, not ten packages a day. It works best for shippers with distributed inventory who can feed regional hubs consistently.

Where regional carriers win

Regional and alternative carriers win in a few clear spots. Anything time-sensitive or specialized: perishables, pharma, anything that needs to move in 24 hours. Point-to-point networks that skip the hub-and-spoke hops the nationals force every package through. And distributed inventory paired with zone skipping.

They are also expanding fast. Seven years ago, a shipper diversifying in Texas had one or two regional carriers to call. Today it is eight to ten. The model is copy and paste: win Texas, then California, then Chicago, then Miami. The best growth comes when existing customers pull a carrier into new markets. Once a shipper has done the technology and legal work to onboard a carrier, adding that carrier’s new Miami coverage is an easy yes, because the shipper already knows the savings are there.

How UPS and FedEx grow revenue while volume stays flat

This is the part shippers feel but cannot always name. The nationals’ volume is not growing, but their revenue per package is. How? Pricing knobs that no contract anticipates.

The fuel surcharge went up nine or more times in two years. Then there is dimensional rounding: an 11.1-inch package is now billed as a 12-inch package before the cubic volume math even starts. As Timur told Burns, these are changes that no contract and no legal team is going to put in place. Nobody’s lawyer thinks to write “you can’t round up dimensions” into a carrier agreement. Whoever came up with that, he said, it is clever. Not good for shippers, but clever.

The invoices themselves are part of the problem. Pull up a rate sheet or an invoice, he said, and it reads like hieroglyphics. And nobody gets the same price: the warehouse next door might be paying something completely different for the same service, because every rate card is negotiated one by one. You cannot just go on a website, say “I am a shipper this size,” and get your rate.

His line from the episode: “FedEx and UPS, they nickel and dime you, and you don’t even know you’re getting nickel and dimed till you’re getting quartered.”

Advice for regional carriers: the 10 percent rule

Burns asked what a regional carrier should do to win attention from bigger shippers. Four points stood out.

First, the math has to justify the onboarding work. A shipper will not go through technology integration and legal review for one percent of their volume. It needs to be meaningful, at least ten percent, or the effort is not worth it. On the carrier side, that means having real footprint: covering 30 to 50 million people, not three million out of 330 million.

Second, show up where shippers shop. Parcel Forum and Home Delivery World are the two conferences Timur always names. Put up a booth and start conversations.

Third, find a niche and own it. A carrier does not have to be the lowest-cost provider to win. Win on reliability, on technology, on how you take care of customers, or on specialization in the product being shipped. As Timur put it on the show: “Not all business is good business. Don’t try to win it if it’s going to cost you in negative margins.”

Fourth, build partnerships. Ask existing shippers for introductions. Partner with middle-mile providers. Partner with non-competing last-mile carriers in other markets and trade referrals.

A new coaching role at the Last2First Huddle

Burns closed with some news: Timur is joining the Last2First Huddle as a coach, helping members work through business challenges across disciplines. The Huddle is Burns’s community for last-mile operators, with playbooks, weekly calls, and an AI tool called Ask Miles that he trained himself. Timur told him he admires the vision: being the voice for a lot of these companies and trying to elevate the game. They agreed to do it again.

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This post is based on Timur Eligulashvili’s appearance on the Last to First podcast, hosted by Jason Burns. Watch the full episode on YouTube.