Embracing disruption on day 1 of SMC³’s Jump Start 2026
Authored by SMC³ on February 3, 2026
At first, it seemed like a massive winter storm might derail SMC3‘s Jump Start 2026. But, undeterred, hundreds of attendees, navigating flight delays and cancellations, arrived January 26 at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly hotel, ready to talk LTL.
With a day of full programming, Peter Sheahan’s keynote teed up three common themes: the psychology needed to thrive through disruption, operational precision and how leaders can act with certainty in uncertain times.
The weather was an apt metaphor for the major theme of the day: To survive disruption, LTL companies need to embrace change.
Psychology over strategy
Peter Sheahan, founder and thought leader who accelerated growth for well-known companies such as Apple, Chick-fil-A, DeBeers and AT&T, opened the day with a provocative thesis: In times of disruption, companies don’t transform, people do – and transformation is primarily a psychological challenge, not a strategic one.
Sheahan started with a cautionary tale. In 2017, five CEOs representing the largest grocery retailers in the United States gathered for an emergency meeting. They had collectively lost $21 billion in market value in just 45 days following Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Their defense? ‘We never saw it coming.’
Sheahan wasn’t buying it. But what went wrong?
“If it’s not intention, and if it’s not data, and if it’s not capital that differentiates whether a company does well in the face of change and disruption, the question becomes, what is it?” Sheahan asked.
The answer: how quickly leadership teams can process and adapt to change. Sheahan framed this as a psychological shift. How quickly can leaders accept a disruption and own its implications? To Sheahan, this is a critical question.
“The birthplace of agility in an organization is the speed with which the leadership team goes from their awareness of change and disruption to responding and getting out of it,” Sheahan said. “Compressing that time is more important than the systems and the processes.”
Sheahan shared his own transformation story. His COO once presented him with a box of anonymous employee feedback. “Love the company, hate the founder,” read the first comment. Though brutal, the feedback provoked change. When Sheahan adjusted his behavior, i.e., not the company’s strategy or structure, just his own conduct, the organization’s profitability tripled.
“As goes your behavior, so goes that of the rest of the business,” Sheahan told the audience. “Leaders have to go first.”
How leadership shapes technology and regulation
The conference featured a series of conversations with industry leaders addressing how they approach technology and regulation.
Erin Goheen, vice president of technology at XPO, joined moderator Debra Phillips from the American Journal of Transportation to discuss how technology investments are reshaping her organization.
Goheen described XPO’s comprehensive approach to AI, using it for pricing recommendation engines, lead generation that stack-ranks nearly 10 million companies in North America, and linehaul network optimization that provides explicit instructions to dock workers about freight movement.
She emphasized that XPO views AI as a tool to free workers from administrative burdens so they can focus on more strategic work. Goheen stressed the importance of leadership buy-in and deep domain expertise when building AI solutions.
“If you are building technology for somebody to use, you need to know their job better than they know their job,” she said.
Derek Barrs, administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, spoke about his agency’s regulatory priorities, particularly as they pertain to safety and compliance. Barrs outlined the agency’s crackdown on fraudulent entry-level driver training schools, noting how FMCSA investigators visited 1,500 locations and removed 6,800 providers from the training registry.
“This is not a paper-pushing exercise,” Barrs emphasized. “If you’re not doing things that you’re supposed to be doing, and if you’re not training properly, you need to be put out of business.”
Infrastructure and invisible operations
The afternoon breakouts focused on the critical operational infrastructure and back-office processes that quietly make or break LTL companies.
SMC3‘s session, led by CCO Brian Thompson and CTO David Knight, walked through the new tools SMC3 has built to help LTL carriers navigate complexity. The new RateWare® Plus platform delivers the accuracy of direct carrier API quotes with millisecond speed. The team described how they’re processing more than 2 billion transactions annually through their enhanced API services, while also developing dynamic pricing capabilities that allow carriers to respond to market conditions in real time.
The session on back-office mistakes, presented by Mike Campese and Leah Drake from DDC Group, considered the false assumption that back-office operations don’t directly affect customer experience. The duo outlined 25 common pitfalls that plague LTL operations—poorly structured accounts receivable teams, unexpected charges on invoices, inadequate onboarding questions—each one eroding customer trust.
“Think of it like a restaurant,” Campese said. “The best atmosphere and servers don’t matter if the kitchen is producing things that don’t come out right.”
The duo stressed that companies often fail to ask the right questions during customer onboarding, rely too heavily on email for critical workflows, and don’t capture the lessons learned from customer interactions. These failures compound, creating friction that erodes relationships over time.
Campese used the bill of lading to demonstrate how data quality issues often multiply downstream.
“The fallacy is that a digital bill of lading is a perfect bill of lading,” Campese said.
He noted that even electronically transmitted documents often lack the data quality needed for seamless operations. Carriers must actively work with shippers to improve accuracy at the source, or every system downstream will compound the original mistake.
Urgency and action
Day 1 made clear that the LTL industry faces mounting pressure, from economic uncertainty and tariff volatility to capacity constraints and evolving customer expectations. Success requires leaders who adapt quickly, embracing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
“The last three, four years is the slowest rate of change we are ever going to experience for the rest of our lives,” Sheahan remarked in his opening address. “It’s never going to be slower than it is right now.”
For their companies to adapt, leaders must act first.