Direct Connect Logistix grew Mexico volume 88% and reduced quote time from days to minutes

Results tl;dr

• Grew Mexico volume from 1,600 shipments in 2023 to 2,700 in 2025, with 2026 tracking to 3,000
• Grew Mexico carrier base 5x, from 10 active carriers to 50 sourced through Cargado
• Median 48 minutes to the first carrier bid; 3 hours to a booked load, down from days of phone calls and emails pre-Cargado
• Expanded carrier access beyond Laredo to crossings including El Paso, McAllen, Nogales, Calexico, and Otay Mesa
• Pricing team became Market Rates power users, pulling rates hundreds of times per month via the Excel add-in

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A limited network built on mass emails and lots of time

Direct Connect Logistix (DCL) started moving Mexico freight in 2018 with a handful of customers and carrier relationships, initially sourcing carriers through a known legacy carrier database system. The team would filter by region or city, pull email addresses for carriers running through Laredo, and send mass emails to lists of hundreds of carriers at a time.

“That was the only way we could do it because through [another legacy load board] there was no program to post out of Mexico,” said Kim Jameson, an account manager at DCL. “It was a lot of manual work.”

The other challenge they had—the data was so incomplete or old.

"We'd send a blast to 400 carriers, and we'd get maybe 100 bounce-back emails that no longer existed," said Joe Green, VP of international logistics within DCL’s multimodal division. "We'd be lucky to get five responses. It was an enormous but outdated list. It was just luck of the draw, trying to find a needle in the haystack."

The fallback was relationship building over WhatsApp, talking to carriers they'd worked with before, hoping availability lined up with the lane they needed to cover. Those years of manual outreach produced a network of about 25 Mexico carriers, only 10 of whom were active enough to be running freight monthly. Nearly all of them moved through Laredo. The other U.S.-Mexico crossings out of reach.

“We were limited at the time by border crossings and equipment types that we’d be asked to quote,” Joe said, adding that it was hard enough to find a dry van out of Laredo. “If someone asked us to do something through El Paso or McAllen or Nogales, it would be rare for us to find someone quality enough to use or even quote to earn a piece of business. We couldn't go after some of the opportunities that we were seeing.”

Every quote they did go after required hours of phone calls and WhatsApp messages to find a willing carrier, confirm capacity for a specific day, and negotiate a rate.

“We had such a limited carrier base that we had to go with their price,” said Kim. “We couldn't be risky because we had to get a carrier rate in hand. That was a big struggle.”

Then, Joe said, "By the time you get all that information and relay it back to your customer, you'd be an hour late. They've already gone to somebody else."

So the team stopped pursuing the more time-consuming spot opportunities and instead focused on dedicated freight. For five years, the team built its Mexico business by hand, one email at a time.

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A LinkedIn post, the right timing, and a platform the industry was missing

Then, in 2023, a LinkedIn post from Cargado's Matt Silver caught Joe’s attention.

"He teased something that was going to revolutionize the carrier market for Mexico," Joe said. "And of course, we were every day fighting the good fight, trying to just survive. So when someone posts something like that, I had to at least ask."

The timing was right in a way that went beyond DCL. Post-COVID nearshoring was accelerating. U.S. brokerages with a Mexico capability stood to meaningfully win if they could scale fast enough. DCL had the customer base and Mexico expertise but not a carrier network deep enough to meet the moment.

"It was the right need at the right time,” Joe said. “As soon as Matt got it going, we knew we'd want to get set up and try it out."

DCL joined Cargado on April 5, 2024, and was among the earliest brokers on Cargado.

"This is something the industry needed," Joe said. "I always said whoever came up with this first was going to do well, because it was such a sorely needed platform."

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Results

5x more carriers and more crossings beyond Laredo

“The most appealing part about Cargado,” Kim said, “was knowing that one posting was going to hundreds of carriers that had already been vetted and that I was going to get responses.”

Kim says what was also appealing was the ability to post to different crossing points. The team that had spent years working with one carrier through Nogales now had more capacity options at every major U.S.-Mexico crossing. “Finally, we got to some of those locations that we'd always been hoping for.” Today, DCL moves freight through El Paso, McAllen, Nogales, Calexico, and Otay Mesa ports of entry, in addition to its initial Laredo crossing. They’ve also accessed more equipment options and expanded beyond dry van to also cover reefer and specialized moves.

Since joining Cargado, DCL has moved freight with ~50 carriers, a 5x expansion of the ~10 carriers it used before. That pool is even wider still, because nearly 400 carriers have placed bids on DCL freight through Cargado.

“Just being able to get a couple more quotes than we normally would has opened up the doors,” said Joe. “Our network has exponentially grown.”

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With 48 minutes to a bid, spot freight is on the table for the first time

Before Cargado, DCL focused on committed business. About 85% of its Mexico volume came from customers shipping out of the same origins to the same destinations on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The team built the carrier relationships those lanes required and ran them well.

What the team couldn't do well was respond to the last-minute spot requests. Every opportunity required hours of phone calls and WhatsApp messages just to find out whether a carrier could take the shipment on the specified day, before the team could even talk price.

"We never had the ability to quote emergency, spot, or last-minute freight from customers," Joe said. "You've got to take so much time trying to reach one of your carriers to find out, number one, could they do it? Number two, could they do it on a specific day? And number three, could they give us a rate that will help us earn it?”

By the time the team had a quote, the customer had booked the freight elsewhere. Every one of those quotes was a missed chance to deepen a customer relationship or open a new one.

Through Cargado, the median time from a DCL posting to its first carrier bid is 48 minutes. The median time to a booked shipment is 3 hours.

“I think it’d be hard to quantify [the time saved],” Joe said. “We're talking days to hours. And in some cases, even minutes.”

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Mexico volume nearly doubled in three years

That speed has opened the door to more volume. A new DCL customer running a spot board for southbound freight gave the team a stream of last-minute quotes that would have been impossible to pursue through the old workflow. The team is winning a higher share of what it posts, even as it posts more.

"It’s been huge for us that our customers can come to us knowing we can give them a reliable price and a reliable carrier,” Kim said. “Before, I wouldn't have been able to secure that as quickly or efficiently.”

In 2023, the year before joining Cargado, DCL moved 1,600 Mexico shipments. In 2024, that grew to 2,300. In 2025, it grew again to 2,700. And in 2026, the team is on pace to hit 3,000, nearly doubling its Mexico volume in three years.

“With Cargado, our customer and carrier bases have grown,” said Joe, “and with that, our confidence in going after the business, because we can trust the information and the output we're getting from the platform.”

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A pricing tool the team uses every day

DCL's pricing team has become one of Cargado's most active Market Rates users. In April 2026 alone, the team pulled rates 288 times through Cargado's Excel add-in, which lets the pricing desk validate Mexico rates against live market data without leaving their spreadsheet. The result is faster, more confident quoting on lanes the team has never run before.

"We can verify our pricing with the pricing tool on Cargado as well, which has been helpful. We've been able to find good new carriers to run some of these new customers we've earned. And that's been huge for us.”

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Faster coverage with Cargado Chat

“With trucking and logistics, there’s only so much information you can provide [in the posting],” Joe said. “There’s a lot of nuance. Chat was huge for being able to say, here’s more to the story if this helps you commit or give a rate. You're able to elaborate more on top of just the selections that were given before we post a lane or a load.”

Before Cargado, those conversations happened over WhatsApp, the main communication platform used by Mexico carriers. For DCL, it slowed the bid process down and left carriers to make commitment decisions on incomplete information. But Cargado was built for the nuance of Mexico freight. With Cargado Chat, carriers can ask the questions that matter before they bid, and DCL can share the context that makes carriers comfortable committing.

“Chat was a game-changer,” Joe said.

Because conversations stay in the platform after a shipment closes, the team can return to carriers they've already built rapport with, even months later, on entirely different freight.

In May, DCL started a new dedicated lane. The CTPAT-certified carrier the team had planned to use fell through when its Mexican interchange partner backed out of the agreement. Before, the team would have had to scramble through WhatsApp, hoping a good carrier had capacity on the right day. Instead, Joe turned to Chat for proactive capacity.

"I restored some old chats that were no longer active and reached back out to four or five carriers I'd been talking to to see if they might still be interested. One of them wrote back and said yes.”

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A Mexico partner that listens and evolves alongside DCL

DCL has been with Cargado since its earliest days, watching it grow from a few hundred carriers and a single market rate to a marketplace with rates at every major crossing, a bulk-pricing Excel add-in, and Chat. Several of those features started as DCL feedback.

"A couple of the things that have been implemented over the last several months were ideas we brought up to Matt and Rylan and the team that we'd love to see,” Joe said. “There's nothing out there that we haven't used since it's been implemented. It's been one of those good wins.”

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