Mario Harik on XPO, Freight Operations, and Building a Trucking Giant

Mario Harik

Engineering gives you a very good road map and framework for solving problems. I have young kids, and whenever something breaks or we want to build something, I tell them what engineers do: they build things and they fix things. In business you deal every day with either problems to solve or goals you want to accomplish, and the engineering mindset gives you a framework for both.

Think about the engineering design process. It starts with identifying a problem or a goal. Then you collect a lot of data around it, define your requirements, design and build a solution, and eventually test it to see what the outcome looks like. That discipline, that rational, data-driven thinking, actually helps you run a company.

The other side of it is people skills. When you run a company, you have teams of people, and your goal is to make sure they become the best versions of themselves. Applying engineering principles helps there too: your team becomes data-driven, they become problem-solvers who know how to go from point A to point B. As I grew in my career, engineering gave me the framework to solve problems and achieve goals, and coupling that with people skills is what enabled me to run a trucking company.

Mario Harik

As a CEO, your first job is to figure out your overall strategy. How are you going to create a lot of shareholder value? Are you going to build a company that grows earnings and ultimately delivers a lot of shareholder value? To deliver that, you need a framework for defining strategy. Once you have the strategy, you have certain elements attached to it, KPIs you monitor on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to check whether you're achieving each level of that strategy. And for every KPI, to move from one value to a better value, you need an action plan, a solution. That engineering mindset is a problem-solving mindset, and whether you're defining strategy or executing on the levels of your strategy, it helps you deliver those outcomes over a period of time. That discipline, grounding your decisions in data, makes you a more effective CEO.

Now, on its own that goes at odds with managing people, because as an engineer you're thinking perfection: the process has to work just right. But the reality is people don't operate that way. So engineering on its own gives you a framework. How you translate that framework into managing people, loving them, believing in them and investing in them, is the other ingredient that lets you deliver good outcomes.

Mario Harik

Let me start by introspecting, looking at myself. Growing up, I always used to think perfection was a good thing. Every time I set out to work on a project or a task, the outcome had to be perfect, and you tell yourself in your own mind these things: this is not good enough, it can be better than that. If I was building a piece of software, it had to be exactly right, the code had to be simple, no bugs. But the human mind typically doesn't operate in perfection. We all have our own idiosyncrasies, our own biases, our own way of doing things.

So in managing people, a lot of it goes back to how they view solving a problem, how they look at the world, how they look at delivering value, how they treat others with respect. What surprised me most is that every person is different, and every person in their own way is beautiful. Their mind works in a beautiful way. Taking their own methods, their own way of thinking, and believing in what's best in them, is what creates the most output. It's also a pleasure, because you're working with a group of smart people who are each finding their own way to be the best version of themselves. Not applying one framework or one method to solving a problem is important.

Mario Harik

Brad is one of a kind. He started eight multi-billion-dollar companies from scratch, in different industries, and a lot of it goes back to having a framework, a method. He wrote two books that outline that framework: how to build great companies that endure, companies that create a tremendous amount of shareholder value.

If I go back to what I learned from him in more than a decade, number one is always think big. Don't set small goals. Life is short. Set big goals, whether it's how much value you're creating, how much profit you're growing, or a project you think needs three years that you figure out how to get done in three months. Do it at work and in your personal life, because when you set big goals you achieve great things, and when you set small goals you achieve small things. That's probably the number one thing I learned from him.

Mario Harik

Number two is how you manage people, who you surround yourself with. Have a disciplined approach to the people around you, because in business you don't go at it alone. You want a team that works collegially, that supports each other, that follows a strategy, that wants to win. How you create a constructive team environment, and how you build feedback loops so you're always adjusting the plan, in small areas or big ones, to get to better outcomes: the team dynamic and the feedback loop is number two.

Mario Harik

We break it down into three broad categories. This is the work side, but some of it carries over to your personal relationships too. Number one: are they good at what they do? Do they have a high intellect, a passion for their area of expertise? Are they genuinely excellent at their craft?

Number two: are they serious about work? Are they hard workers? It doesn't mean you have to work ninety-hour weeks. It means that when you wake up in the morning, you take the mission of the company and the mission of your role to heart, and you want to maximise the output of what you do every single day.

Number three: are they collegial? Do they get along with the team, look for what's best in the team? Along with that come kindness, humility, and always striving to learn and better yourself and the people around you. When you combine those attributes and create alignment on the mission, what you can deliver is truly remarkable. Look at sports: a team with one star player but no strong, cohesive team doesn't deliver a lot. Business is exactly the same. It's a team of people aligned on the goals, who respect each other but push each other. It's okay to have some friction. It's okay for someone to tell you, in your area you could do this in a better way.

In your personal life, the kindness and humility and being collegial all translate too. If you surround yourself with loving, affectionate people who bring the vibe of the party up, that enriches your own life.

Mario Harik

It's not consensus from the onset. I actually worry if I'm in a team meeting and everybody is already aligned on a solution. Because the first question I ask is: did we look at that problem in ten different ways to get different perspectives? If you want to create alpha, it's not about settling for a local maximum. It's about looking at a problem from different angles, getting different voices, putting data behind each perspective, and then landing the plane on the right outcome.

So getting along means we can disagree. You might think your solution is better than mine, or vice versa, but it's a respectful disagreement. And when we leave the room, after debating, after looking at the numbers, after looking at the data, we all agree that this is the go-forward path.

Mario Harik

It's tough to compare yourself to someone who started eight multi-billion-dollar companies. He's one of a kind. It's more that every person is different in how they were brought up and how they think about problem-solving. A lot of the methods I learned from him, I apply in slightly different ways based on who I am as a person.

Mario Harik

We've always had a service-focused culture, because in business your customers are everything. Ultimately a customer has a choice: they can use you, or use one of your competitors for the service you provide. What was different is that we split the company into three pieces, and now the entire management team is focused on our less-than-truckload business. Part of our strategy is to deliver the best service possible for the customer.

You have to make a conscious choice about what product you're selling. In our business, a higher service level lets you sell supplemental services, which typically come at a higher margin. It also lets you gain more profitable market share, because customers want to do business with you. We've meaningfully improved our service product through the years, and that has let us either gain share or expand margin.

These things are easier said than done, because in trucking we have 40,000 people, about 23,000 here in North America. You're influencing the behaviour of tens of thousands of people, so that every time they touch a customer's freight, they handle it as if it's going to their own house. That has a cultural component, a compensation component, a systems component, how you track it, how you hold people accountable, and the investments in tools along the way.

Mario Harik

As a less-than-truckload carrier, a customer might ship one or two pallets. We get it to one of our terminals, where we consolidate that freight with other people's pallets, and then move it across a network of about 300 locations across North America. So one of our KPIs we call service quality: not damaging the freight, because consolidating and deconsolidating freight over a long distance can lead to quality issues. The second measure is on-time service: if the customer expects a pickup today, you pick it up today, and if they expect delivery in three days, it arrives in three days. Those are the two primary measures of service.

The average weight per shipment is around 1,400 pounds, and it varies, from a couple hundred pounds up to 10,000-plus. Once you start getting past about 15,000 pounds, it makes sense to send it as a full truckload, where you book an entire truck to go from point A to point B.

Mario Harik

At a high level, if you break it down, we have a plan, a strategy, and your plan can't be very rigid; you have to be open to changing it over time as new information comes up and as you execute on it. But that plan has big levers for how you're going to improve the profitability of the company and, as a result, create shareholder value. For each lever you have a number of KPIs that drive that particular lever.

So number one is defining what it is you want to achieve, and for each lever, the KPIs that lead to that outcome. Every single day there are approximately ten KPIs we obsess over. For each one, we look not only at the first derivative, the change: it's up 5%, up 2%, down 2%. We also look at the second derivative, the slope, the rate of change. Is that KPI accelerating in the direction you want it to, or is it decelerating in the opposite direction? Then for each one you have an action plan, a list of projects, initiatives and actions to take that KPI from point A, where you are today, to point B, where you want it to be. Part of running the business daily is being able to identify the goals, watch the key performance indicators every single day, obsess over them, and then look at the action plans, the inputs, what you're doing differently to move that KPI.

To do this you need great systems, Shane, because without real-time information you can't make changes quickly enough, whether to fix a shortfall or to control something accelerating beyond what you expected. So it's a platform that gives you the data in real time, a clear set of things you monitor every day that align with your strategic goals, and managing the inputs, who owns each action.

The second portion goes back to people. I spend a lot of time in the field. I go to our docks and terminals, and I like to sit in the break room early in the morning with our drivers and dock workers and ask them: tell me what's going on in the business, what's working, what's not. That feedback loop is the other half of getting to the best outcomes.

Mario Harik

It's truly remarkable. Of our roughly 23,000 people in North America, 18,000 are either truck drivers or dock workers. They're the folks closest to the customer. Each of our city drivers, our pickup-and-delivery drivers, interacts with half a dozen to a dozen customers a day, so you get real-time feedback on the decisions we're making and how to make them better.

It can be small things: the type of tyres we're using, the type of parts we put in our trucks, what kind of trucks we buy and what actually makes a difference, issues at a local service centre, all the way to our compensation programmes, our benefit programmes, how we compare to the peer group, how we're doing on service, and the tweaks we can make to our processes and procedures. We get feedback on the handheld technology they use and how to make it more efficient. It's truly remarkable. I carry a notebook with me, and every time I hear one of these ideas I write it down. When I get back to the office we put them into an email that I send to the top 100 people in the organisation, and I say, these are the things I learned from the people who matter most in our company, the ones who are actually moving the freight for the customer. That leads to better action plans; in some cases we change the action plan to affect the output metrics, and in some cases we actually change the strategy or add a lever to it.

Mario Harik

I'll give you a couple. When we were on a very strong journey to improve our service product, one of the first things we did was change compensation plans, so that instead of pay being driven only by growing revenue and profit, a portion was driven by improving service to the customer. You can think of that as the carrot: by improving service, a supervisor on the dock can bring home more pay.

But when we talked to our drivers, a lot of it went back to accountability. What they'd tell us is, well, I take care of the customer's freight, but so-and-so on the dock isn't taking care of it. So we built systems where we could track service performance back down to the person level, and then we created coaching, so that if you cause a damage as a person on our docks, you go into a specific training programme and get coached to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Mario Harik

Every time we move a pallet across the network, people interact with it, and you need a modern platform that pulls data straight from a handheld into a system you can aggregate and act on. If I'm a dock worker and I see a pallet is damaged, I take a photo and flag it, say a small scratch on the shrink wrap. We know who last handled that pallet. When the customer receives it, if they say the scratch is fine, no harm done. If they say the freight is damaged, we can track it back to the last person who handled it.

Now we're also using AI. Every time we close a trailer door, a supervisor takes a photo, and we use AI to judge the quality of loading, to say that a pallet wasn't strapped to the wall, which means it could tip over and cause damage. So technology helps identify which shift something happened and tie it back to the person who could have caused it.

Mario Harik

Historically it's after the fact. As a supervisor closes a trailer door, they take a photo and rank the quality of loading. The next day the next person in the network opens that trailer, takes a photo, and ranks your quality of loading. If you think about software development, it's almost like a code review, except you're doing a trailer review for the next person opening it.

Now, with the new AI versions we're launching over the next few months, when the supervisor takes the photo, AI automatically tells you what it found wrong in your trailer, so we can fix it before the trailer goes on the road.

Mario Harik

Tens of thousands. And it matters because reducing damage is one of our biggest costs, and damage-free freight is one of the core measures of service quality for any trucking company.

Mario Harik

100%. Everybody goes to work wanting to do a good job, and when you get feedback and positive reinforcement you do it better. Every time one of our drivers or dock workers scans a pallet, they see two dials on their handheld. The first shows their productivity versus their peers, so if ten people are working the dock, they can see whether they're number one or number five, and there are bragging rights in being number one. The second dial shows how many damages they might have caused, by not strapping pallets, for instance. Supervisors have their own modern, proprietary platform, built by our own engineers, that shows performance across the whole workforce or a given shift.

Mario Harik

Overall very good, and there's a reason. It all depends on what you do with the information. If someone causes a damage and you coach them, tell them where they went wrong and how to do better, that's an uplifting experience. Maybe I've been on the job three or six months, I've been trained, but it takes muscle memory to get better. If you use the information just to hold people accountable with strict rules, you won't get much satisfaction. If you use it to elevate your team, to coach and teach them, it can be very uplifting.

Mario Harik

It depends on the meeting, but generally we start grounded in data, with all the materials sent ahead of time. For monthly operating reviews or weekly staff meetings, the material goes out in advance, covering how each KPI is trending and the action plans behind it.

For some meetings we also source questions ahead of time from every attendee, and they rank those questions by importance. We do the same with takeaways: based on the material we sent, what were your key takeaways? Every attendee ranks them. So the first part of the meeting we walk through the fully ranked takeaways, then we go through the ranked questions. It becomes an effective use of time because everybody contributes to the agenda.

A few rules I keep. One, no devices; be focused on the person speaking. Two, only one person speaks at a time, because giving someone your full attention leads to a far more constructive conversation. Three, it's okay to disagree, and disagreement is encouraged, but you do it respectfully, focused on the problem and the data, not the person.

Mario Harik

We schedule our operating reviews on a monthly basis, and a week ahead of the meeting we send all the material out, plus a survey where each person submits their top takeaways and the top questions they want to ask during the meeting. Then we send another survey once we get all that back, where every attendee ranks, on a scale of one to ten, what they believe is the most important takeaway and the most important question.

Here's what's fascinating, Shane. Think about it this way: say I run pricing. The people attending that operating review aren't necessarily only pricing people. You have salespeople, operators, technology folks, finance folks, HR folks. They're all looking at your data and all your content, and they're all giving you feedback, whether it's a takeaway they saw or a question they want to ask. When those takeaways and questions get ranked, that's where the magic happens, because now automatically every person in the senior leadership team understands the good things and the bad things in that particular subject matter. And based on the questions, someone might think, that's interesting, a person asked about this and I didn't see it in the information, I didn't see it in the data. Now the group in that meeting can contribute in a much more effective way, because they're getting the wisdom of the team, the wisdom of the crowd.

Mario Harik

You can, but to identify talent you need many more touch points than a single takeaway or question. A lot of companies do performance reviews once or twice a year. I don't believe in that; feedback should be daily and weekly. You tell a person what they're doing well and where they need to improve, and over time you can see who's trending in the right direction. We also have leadership team discussions about talent that go several layers deep into the company, about up-and-coming people, so you get a wider perspective from a group.

One other thing I do in those meetings I call round robins. I always subscribe to the idea that the senior folks, including me, speak last. I give my takeaways or questions at the end, so there's no biased thinking. Jeff Bezos had a similar view: as a leader, you speak last, because if you give your perspective first, someone junior with fantastic insights gets biased toward the group. So the more junior people speak first.

Mario Harik

Not all of them, but for any structured meeting where we're discussing something like an operating review, we use AI to both take notes and summarise, and in many cases we send the takeaways back to the team so they see what was discussed and the key things we focused on. For a small get-together or a quick status update, we might not. And once a year we get the team together to walk through our strategic levers, give ourselves an assessment, how did we do in this area, that area, and think about how the strategy should evolve. For those big sessions, where you spend two or three days changing the direction of the company, we use AI extensively, and then send back out the action items to inform how we change the levers of the strategy. For a weekly staff meeting where we're going through KPIs, AI becomes a bit less important, because the actions that come out are usually a handful and easily understood.

Mario Harik

For the larger meetings, I like everybody to give their takeaways. It's fascinating to see how each person interpreted what they heard. I usually do it two ways: what are your broader takeaways, and what are you going to do differently coming out of this. For smaller meetings, it's just walking through the action items.

Mario Harik

That's a great question, because in business one of the most important levers you have is who's part of the team, the individuals working together to deliver a great amount of value, and as a public company your number one goal is creating shareholder value. When I interview, there are certain levers based on the person's skill set and role. One is technical ability, which in my mind has components: their actual core skill set or core job, their intellect, how smart they are, and their passion for the area they're responsible for. Two, are they hard workers? Are they someone who takes work very seriously, puts in the hours, and wakes up every day thinking about how to do the job more effectively? Three, are they a kind person, someone who raises the vibe of the team, a loving person who would love their teammates, the company, the customers and the shareholders? Someone humble, collegial, with a thirst for knowledge, or someone who takes away from the team?

I go very deep in my interviews. If I'm interviewing someone who oversees sales, I don't just ask, how did you grow revenue at your last company. I ask, how did you structure your sales force? How did you manage leads? How did you manage your pipeline? How did you convert it? How did you manage revenue realisation? How did you manage account plans? What were your targets for face-to-face meetings per seller per day? When you start double-clicking and triple-clicking and quadruple-clicking, you get a much different perspective on how all-in a person was in that subject matter. You find out whether they were fully in command, whether they had that area locked tight.

Testing for seriousness or dedication is harder, but I ask a lot about how they look at their work versus their personal life. The best professionals don't have a sharp distinction between the two. Work is part of life the same way life is part of work; it's a circle, and you do these things interchangeably. And after spending an hour or a few hours with the person, I apply the airport test: if I got stuck with them in an airport, would I enjoy that time? Did they bring the vibe up? Did I feel uplifted after that interview, or emotionally down? I also ask intellectual questions to test how smart they are.

Before I do my interviews, I also get about a 50-page document on the person, built from the notes of every single person who interviewed them. I take subjectivity out of it and look very objectively at every area someone identified as a potential issue, because a lot of the time what people flag ends up being the reason someone fails at work. So in my interview I double-click on those areas to make sure the person doesn't have a shortcoming that could detract from creating value or from raising the vibe of the team.

Mario Harik

It could be that they don't go deep enough into their area of expertise. It could be how they manage their team members. It could be that they were very critical of the people they worked with over a long period. It could be how and why they switched jobs. Part of it could be that they have an ego, that they're not a kind person, that they won't treat their teammates or the people who work for them with respect. All of that comes up in the feedback if it's on the negative side. It's very important to be in tune and not brush these things under the rug; on the contrary, take them out, test for them, and figure out, is this going to be a deal breaker, is this the reason someone fails after you hire them?

Mario Harik

When you assess talent, you want to know your top performers, the ones you want to retain and invest in because they have untapped potential, and also who isn't adding value. I learned this test from Brad. An A player is a top performer you're proud of, someone you think the world of. If an A player walks into your office and says, "Mario, don't try to talk me out of it, my family is moving to another state and I've taken a job elsewhere, it's done," and the feeling in your stomach is a pit, you go home and tell your wife you just heard the most horrible news and you don't know how you'll replace them, that's an A player.

If someone walks in and says the same thing, and your feeling is, "Whoa, that's actually good news, we can upgrade the talent," that's a C player. We take this very seriously. I personally think the biggest lever for creating alpha in business is who's on the team and how they work with each other. If everyone who works for you is an A player, they push each other in a beautiful way, they deliver better results, and they create a better environment, because part of being an A player is how you manage your own team. The higher up you go, the more important it is to have A players.

Mario Harik

At a high level, you look at every person in a very customised way, based on what makes them great. For everyone who works for me, I start by looking for the things that make them a beautiful professional. What makes their brain beautiful? What makes them a great team member? And I believe in them, in their ability to do amazing things. If you look at the human psyche, people want to be appreciated, and when you show someone you truly believe in their ability to be great, they have a much higher chance of being great than if you only focus on where they're falling short.

That doesn't mean the shortfalls shouldn't be discussed. But when I give constructive feedback, I never make it subjective; I always ground it in data. I'll say, okay, look at this situation, based on what the data is telling us we could have gotten to this outcome, but we got over here, and we need to figure out how to do it better. Suddenly that person thinks, yes, I fell short in this area, but they don't become defensive, because I'm not telling them, I think you dropped the ball, I think you're not working hard enough. That kind of subjective feedback causes people to retract from it. When it's objective, it's just, let me tell you where things didn't work well. Then, beyond believing in them, it's about creating an environment where it's safe for them to try things and safe for them to sometimes fail, because that's part of life. For every five great things you do, you'll fail at one or two of them. You want to create a safe environment where people can spread their wings and figure out the best way from point A to point B.

Mario Harik

That's a great question, Shane, because early in my career this was a big shortcoming of mine. The way I led teams was that I'd look at a goal or a solution we wanted to build, analyse it, and come up with a road map using the engineering design process. I'd go to my team member and say, this is where we are, this is where we want to get to, and I personally believe this is the best way to get from here to here. When you do that, you automatically atrophy that person's brain from finding the best outcome themselves. And over time I realised that if I didn't have the time, or wasn't a subject matter expert in a certain area, we just wouldn't get to the optimal solution; we'd shortcut it quite a bit.

So over time I learned that instead of handing someone what I think the solution is, I should teach them a process where they analyse the data and come back to me with insights about what the data is telling them, and then they design a solution. In many, many cases I look at what they built and think, wow, that's something I didn't even come close to thinking about. Whenever you give someone only constructive feedback, only telling them where they're falling short, you're missing out on them potentially being great, and you're molding them into your own perspective, your own solution, rather than letting them be much better than you. That's why my feedback always starts with the things that make them great, the things they should keep doing, amplify, find new ways to use, and only then, on the constructive pieces, I remove the subjective and let the data and the situation speak.

Mario Harik

It was iterative, learning from different leaders and mentors over the years, some who gave very critical feedback up front, some who were more constructive. Brad was my mentor for more than a decade, and his approach is very similar: always looking at what someone does well and how they can amplify it.

Mario Harik

Let me give you a personal experience. I started coding in the early '90s. I began with BASIC on a Commodore 64, and I had an older brother who studied computer engineering, so in my early-to-mid teens I read all his books. I became so passionate that I spent the lion's share of my time outside school coding. By the time I got to university, for my undergraduate degree in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut, I thought I was the best programmer who had ever existed. I loved writing beautiful, efficient code and thought I was really good at it.

To my mind, that's what ego is: you think you're so good at something that you stop learning. And that happens in business as in life; it creates a ceiling that doesn't let you create more value or get to better outcomes. A few years later I came to MIT in Boston for my graduate studies in engineering, and I met programmers who were fifty times better, who just had beautiful minds, the way they thought about things, the way they problem-solved. That taught me I was a good programmer but nowhere near a great one. And it taught me humility, which suddenly opens many, many doors, because you say, well, I might be good at this, but wow, look at how these other people approach the problem in a completely different way. That humility lets you learn more, break through ceilings, always get better, and avoid getting stuck in a local maximum in whatever your area of expertise is. So ego, to me, is a shortcoming in someone's framework of thinking, where they believe their knowledge and skills are the best they can be, and that prevents them from wanting to learn and ask more questions rather than tell more about a certain area.

Mario Harik

I grew up in Lebanon in the '80s, when the country was at war. Many nights we didn't sleep at home; we slept in a bomb shelter. It was a very dark period for the country. My brothers and I were lucky, because our parents were unbelievable. They gave us a beautiful childhood surrounded with love, so even though the world around us was crazy, we were shielded to a certain extent, though you still deal with the trauma of war. It teaches you a lot: being in a bomb shelter while your neighbourhood is bombed is a different kind of pressure from anything you see in business or life.

We had to flee the country. We lived in Egypt for a while, and in Canada for a while. It's good to be back in Ottawa; I hadn't been back in almost 35 years, but I spent part of my childhood here. All of these experiences gave me a different perspective. When you interact with different cultures and different people, you learn to look at things from different angles, and I find a lot of enrichment in seeking other points of view.

Mario Harik

I was very young at the time, and it's really in your teens that you start thinking about risk. Overall I'd put myself in the more risk-averse category, but I think that's my engineering education more than my upbringing. As an engineer, you quantify everything and assign a probability to a risk materialising. If you only look at the downside, it's easy to say that's too risky. But if you also probability-adjust the upside, it changes your perspective. So I have a very analytical view of risk, but I lean more risk-averse than risk-taking, and my engineering education governs a lot of that.

Mario Harik

One of our large competitors went bankrupt in 2023, which was sad for the company and the people involved. But for a less-than-truckload network, one of the most important forms of capacity is the terminal network: how large your buildings are. Some of these buildings have docks a mile long. Having enough capacity in key markets is incredibly important, and it's very hard to permit and build a large trucking terminal. When Yellow went bankrupt, all of that real estate came up for sale, and I was a new CEO. The questions were: how much do you buy, in which markets, and how do you justify the return on the capital you deploy?

Mario Harik

One of the things I learned from Brad early on as a CEO is that one of your most important jobs is allocating capital to create the most shareholder value over time. So we looked at what the data was telling us. In which markets were we falling short on capacity? Which growing markets would see us run out of doors and physical space? We knew the larger the terminal, the better, because you get higher efficiency.

We analysed that in all the markets we operate in, and we knew that the larger the terminals we buy, the better, because you get higher efficiency in a market when you have much more space. We used data to identify those markets, mapped Yellow's network onto ours, and found 28 properties that would have the largest impact. For each one we built a business plan: how much efficiency would we gain, and if we were capacity-constrained today with, say, a 5% share in a market where our company's overall industry share is about 10%, how could we grow beyond 5%, and what would the financial flow-through, the income, be? We ended up spending nearly a billion dollars on that real estate, and it was a remarkable acquisition. It made us much more efficient on day one in those markets and improved operating margins dramatically, that wasn't the only reason, but it was part of it. And more importantly, that capacity now gives us the runway to capitalise on what could be an industrial recovery in the years to come here in North America. Those terminals will play a big role in enabling us to deliver on that.

Mario Harik

You start by looking at the units, how the financials add up. What's the overall return you're going to get on that deployed capital? What I learned from Brad is that it doesn't matter what the size of the check is; the only thing that matters is the return you get on the size of the check. Our board was very involved, giving feedback and perspective based on the numbers we were showing. Initially we started with a much smaller purchase price and a much smaller set of terminals, and we grew it over time. Brad's feedback in the process, as our chairman then, was fantastic, the team working together, brainstorming, figuring out what would give us the highest return. A lot of it is looking at the data and the returns, but also having a lot of feedback loops asking, are we doing the right thing here, is this deployment of capital going to create a lot of alpha for shareholders? The answer was yes, and then you feel much more comfortable making the decision, because you can see the road map for delivering those returns.

Mario Harik

In business that's always the case. With a multinational company of 40,000 people, every decision has big ripple effects. This is where proper financial planning and analysis comes in. For every project, including a billion dollars of real estate, you have a project plan: over what period will we launch and renovate each terminal to look like an XPO terminal, and once launched, how much do we expect to improve productivity and efficiency, and how much share will we gain? Our FP&A team tracks all of that, so you can see the trajectory of whether you're delivering what you expected. When something deviates, the team gets together to ask, did we have the wrong action plan, or what should we do differently to get the project back on track?

Mario Harik

FP&A is financial planning and analysis. They look at all the financial KPIs: how your top line is trending, your cost structure, and ultimately your profits. When you double-click, for any period they list risks and opportunities: which initiatives can deliver a better financial outcome, and which risks in the environment can take away from it. We assign a probability to each, so you can probability-adjust the projected performance for the week, month, quarter, and year.

Going further down, every operator who owns a P&L has an FP&A resource showing them where their metrics are trending and which levers they can pull, and whether those levers are performing at the level a business leader would expect. And, as I mentioned, we look at both the first and second derivative of every KPI. Many companies stop at, revenue is up 5% year on year. Our FP&A team says, that 5% is a decelerating trend, so next month it could be 3%, then 1%, and that's the problem we need to course-correct as a team. Ultimately the scorecard of an operating company is how much you're growing your top line, your profits, and your operating margin, and the FP&A team is what instruments all of that and gives you the forecast.

Mario Harik

As a CEO, you have only a few levers to create a lot of value over time. Number one, I believe, is who you surround yourself with, who's on the team, how the team works together. Number two is capital allocation: you have a finite amount of resources, no matter how big you are, so where do you deploy that capital to get the highest return? In many cases, as a public company, that capital is shareholders' money, given to you to invest so they can make more money. Number three is where you allocate time, your own and the team's.

On capital allocation itself, there are a few forms. One is how much capital you deploy into the company, and it's a simple equation: for every project, what's the return on the capital deployed? For a million dollars you put into a project, are you going to get a million a year back, two million, three million, or a hundred thousand? The second form is M&A. There you look at how a company fits your strategic vision, whether it gives you new customers, a new product, a new capability, or scale, and then, once you apply your systems and know-how so that one plus one equals more than two, whether the acquisition is accretive and creates shareholder value. The third is the other uses of cash: how much leverage to keep, whether to pay down debt, or whether to buy back your shares. If you believe your profitability today is going to be much higher in a few years, then buying back your shares today, when they're cheap, creates more return for shareholders. So capital allocation should be very objective about what creates the highest return, and wherever that answer is, that's where you deploy.

Mario Harik

Complacency overall comes from feeling comfortable and content. The best way to fight it is by setting ultra, ultra-big goals, in business, in life, in relationships. Say you set a goal for your company to grow a certain amount, and you achieve it. You give yourself a good pat on the back, and then you become complacent; it starts to feel okay. But I believe life is short. If you set big goals, that alone is a cure, because you're always striving to achieve something much bigger. And as a team, winning breeds winning: as you start achieving those goals, the team gets more excited, more confident, more motivated, and then they set even bigger goals.

Big things don't necessarily have to be in business. If you're a musician, you want to be the best musician possible and play a piece you never thought you were even capable of. If you're a business person, you want to create shareholder value. If you're a family person, you want a loving family where you see your kids and your friends do amazing things. Life goes in the snap of a finger. You don't want to live an easy, complacent life with small goals. What fights complacency is always striving to do something bigger, always pushing for the next step, the next level.

Mario Harik

I break it into personal and business. On the personal side, I want an enriching life with family and friends, spending a lot of time with my kids, and seeing them grow into beautiful adults and good people. On the work side, it's doing meaningful work: building companies, seeing people succeed, seeing folks do things they didn't think were possible, provide for their families, and have happy, constructive lives. Something that meaningfully impacts people's lives for the better.

Mario Harik

One of the most important things a CEO controls is where you spend your time and where your organisation spends its time. I once got a good piece of advice: when you're trying to do a lot of things, you have less time, so you have to simplify to what's most important. When I'm with my kids, I put the phone away and do meaningful activities. Last summer, being an engineer, we built a robotic arm and programmed it to try to solve a Rubik's Cube. It didn't work as expected, but we gave it a fighting shot. Or I take them fishing, doing outdoor activities. When you're limited on time, you make the quality of that time the highest possible. I don't watch TV, I don't play golf. For me it's either working with the team I love, or spending time with my family and doing amazing things with them. They keep you young.

Mario Harik

That's true. My hobbies are my work and my kids.

Mario Harik

To execute over a long period, you need a strategy with clear levers. For us those are things like service, investing in capacity, gaining profitable market share, growing pricing, and improving cost efficiency across how we operate the network. When you have clarity on what drives the right business outcomes, it's easier to organise where you spend your time.

I gravitate toward where the action plan isn't leading to the intended results. If a certain area is working swimmingly well, my contribution won't add a lot of value, because I already have a team who are all in, with a strong action plan they're executing on; my job there is to make sure I'm giving them what they need, spending enough time to keep the guardrails and hold them accountable to the outcomes. But if an area is not performing well, falling short of what we as a team believe the best outcome can be, I gravitate towards spending my time there. First I help the team analyse the data behind that area, give them my perspective, and make available bright people who can give different perspectives, so we can change the action plan from what it was to what it ought to be.

In terms of where I spend my time across stakeholders, I like to spend a lot of it in the field. My team even tells me, Mario, if I haven't been out to a terminal for a few weeks, you've got to get out there, because you're getting in our hair and starting to micromanage. But being with the people who move the freight gives you perspective; you can zoom out and say, what we're working on over here makes sense, because I can see how it'll impact the lives of the people actually moving the goods. I do find a lot of leaders spend their time on the output, but ultimately you've got to spend time on the inputs, the action plans that change the output, because those are what you can control. So I find myself spending a lot of time in the data and the action plans that influence an outcome. And I love spending time with customers; every quarter I meet with dozens and dozens of them, whether a sales meeting or a quarterly business review, and having that voice of the customer permeates the entire organisation. Earnings and time with shareholders matter too, but they're a lower magnitude than the rest.

Mario Harik

Getting information is a conscious choice. Every morning you can choose to do your job the way you always do, or choose to learn new things. Within the company, I learn a lot by asking questions; in a meeting I might ask 50, but before I ask them I've already reviewed the data, the Excel spreadsheets, so my questions are informed.

We also do a lot of research as a company. Every weekend a small team of analysts pulls together research reports, on ourselves, on all our competitors, on the industry, on what we're hearing about ourselves in the media, and on our customers and their companies. I get hundreds of pages of content, all highlighted with the key points and a summary for each. On Saturday or Sunday I read those couple of hundred pages, highlight the pieces I think are important, and in some cases share them with the team and ask, what do you think of this outcome, or this new technology we read about? From people I meet, whether a CEO at a conference or an investor, I ask a lot of questions to pick their brain on what they're seeing and how they're doing things differently, which helps inform what we're doing. Step one is having a very conscious view of going to get information, to build a more holistic picture of whatever topic you're looking at.

On filtering signal from noise, I don't know that there's a specific method, but you have to be very honest about the information you're consuming. One technique I use is repetition: how many times do I see the same theme appear across different sources? Take AI: you're seeing that the new reasoning models are getting better, but you're also hearing it from customers using them in certain ways, and from research on tech companies. Or take industrial demand in the country: you read through research reports from 20 different analysts who've each spoken to hundreds of people, and you keep seeing the same theme or trend. Then that becomes a signal, versus something you heard once, which might not be as impactful.

The other thing I do every morning is spend 15 to 30 minutes in a calm place, usually in the car, thinking through every decision and aspect of the day, informed by what I've read. I let my mind race through the plausible outcomes, almost like a decision tree. In chess, you think, if I move this piece, what are the next three moves, and how deep you can go depends on how you train your brain. I synthesise all of it and figure out what each path leads to and how to apply it to a problem.

Mario Harik

I start by thinking through what we're dealing with as a company, what I'm worried about, what could somehow impact the business. Then I think about all the material I read the prior day or week, and the key takeaways and trends I'm seeing in the data. Here's something fascinating, Shane: a lot of the time people use speech to think, which limits you to the speed at which you speak to find or solve a problem. But you can train your mind to go much faster. You start with an idea and just let it roll forward. Say we want to grow the top line, grow sales, gain market share, close a certain account, and we have a cost-efficiency issue in part of the business. Then you start thinking through the different levers you can move. If volume grows based on what I'm seeing in the research, where industrial demand is picking up in the country, and I know we have three accounts we're onboarding, then if we push cost efficiency too hard we might have a problem, because volume is going to grow faster. I just let my brain think through all of them, and at the end of the process I usually find I have three or four things where there's clarity, these are the three or four things I have to focus on to get to a better outcome. I do the same in my personal life, with my kids, their schooling, their activities. But the key is getting into a very calm state, so you remove the environmental noise around you as you do it.

Mario Harik

At the personal level, predominantly for research, fact-checking, or whenever I have an idea or a thought process; my bias is always to go to one of the AI platforms. I have all of them on my phone, and I use them to go deeper on a topic or get more information. I also use it whenever I've read a large document, as a good way to get a summary and AI's perspective on the key takeaways it found in the data.

Mario Harik

Correct. And I usually do it with more than one platform, because each will surface slightly different key takeaways from the ones I had. The variability between them helps me spot things I skimmed over or thought weren't important, and suddenly two platforms tell me, this is actually a very important point. In the end you get more information and more actionable material out of it.

Mario Harik

It's tough to tell, because the speed at which AI is developing is very fast. Today's effective robots have a very specific application. We used to be one of the largest warehousing operators in the world, and in that space you have an autonomous robot, effectively a square that moves across a warehouse floor, holds shelves of goods, and brings the right shelf to a stationary human picker, instead of the human walking the picking area. Purpose-built robots that solve a specific problem have been effective so far.

Humanoid robots are a much tougher task, because they're trained to do what humans do: how we move our hands, how we perceive the world through vision, how we perceive it through hearing. You're trying to fit an AI model that typically works great in a digital setting, dealing with content, into perceiving the physical world the way a human does. And there's another component: as humans we have emotions, things we perceive the world with, empathy, compassion, anxiety, emotions that shape our behaviour. Where AI and robots are today, they're still not there in terms of perceiving what human consciousness is. So it's tough to tell whether effective humanoid robots are two years away, ten, or twenty, because the rate of change is very fast but the problem is very, very hard.

More broadly, what's happened over the last two or three decades is remarkable. I built my first AI neural network in the late '90s on a Pentium CPU capable of maybe one gigaflop at peak. Today's Google TPUs and Nvidia chips are at around five petaflops, roughly five million times more powerful. Back then, an AI model with 10 million parameters was pushing the envelope; today large language models run two, three, four, five trillion parameters. If that trajectory continues, we'll see how it materialises in robotics. But in the near term, I think it's purpose-built robots using AI to automate a specific task.

Mario Harik

It started with my parents. My dad was an entrepreneur and an engineer, an amazing, very wise business person; spend 15 minutes with him and you know it. Since we were kids I saw his work ethic, building great things and providing for our family. It was rooted in me young that working hard has to be part of the equation if you want to build big things. You can't do it without being 100% in, thinking about it when you wake up and when you go to bed. Couple that with leading an organisation of 40,000 people, a responsibility I take very seriously: if I work an extra hour and can improve the lives of 40,000 people, I'll work that hour. Being all in, obsessing over every KPI and every team interaction, is part of delivering better outcomes and seeing the people who work for you deliver amazing things and be proud of themselves.

Mario Harik

It's definitely clean fuel for me. I believe humans can create amazing things, and when I work with people I always believe they're capable of more than they think. We live short lives, and you want them to be meaningful and impactful, to see someone grow and do amazing things. So winning, for me, is about being smart: taking a group of people, building a good plan, and fighting every day to win, because you're seeing people realise their full potential. I don't think about winning as crushing the competition. The bar is whether we're achieving the best we can achieve. Of course you study your competition to understand their levers, and sometimes you see a great idea and use it rather than reinvent the wheel. But it's never about winning at someone else's expense. It's about winning because we're doing things right for the long term.

Mario Harik

100%, that's how I think about it.

Mario Harik

Success is someone, including myself, realising their full potential, achieving what they can achieve with the tools, education, and background they've been given, and being the best version of themselves, while also being happy and emotionally fulfilled. You can achieve great business success at the expense of your family life, but then you're not fulfilled, so what is that success? And it's not only about achieving it personally, but playing a part in the people around me achieving it too, my kids becoming great professionals and great human beings with fulfilled lives, and my team and colleagues reaching their best potential while being emotionally fulfilled.

Mario Harik

Thanks, Shane. Thanks for having me.