Think of puppet strings instead of vessel strings! Now imagine you own a bunch of ships. Big ships – all over the world!
You may project that the commerce of your ships will create revenue streams with monumental global reach and generate pervasive growth within industries that will be subservient, grateful and ever conscious of your inadvertent “gift” to mankind.
Then what happens? You own all these ships. You have to pay for the upkeep. Heck, you even have to pay to run them if you can’t get your customers to cough up the dough quickly enough. Then just THINK about all those pesky governments trying to cash in on your enterprise, not to mention all those little pests calling themselves “legal entities” cashing in on business transactions that wouldn’t exist without YOUR ships! The nerve.
So you bungle a few decisions over time that cause you to lose your highest revenue product (LCL) to those pernicious NON Vessel Owning (very) Common Carriers, who somehow wheedled their way into existence at your expense. They continue to pirate your revenue, commandeer your customers and (OMG) give them better service because they can afford the people and you’re still paying for your ships… NOT the gratitude you had envisioned when you loaned your ships to the world. The strings are getting stickier…
Then the world evolved into more industry than you imagined – a common occurrence in free enterprise when government involvement is limited. Compliance, supply chain software, port operations, contrived complexities like surcharge tables, real estate, government and yes, militaries around the world became standard and you can act like they are important as long as it suits the main objective – wresting from the NVOs the profits that result from managing your assets better than you have… Oops! Isn’t that really YOUR money after all?
So it turns into the 21st century, and you spend your time still trying to undo the industry that eclipsed your earnings without that old “asset” part. You even try to set up your own NVO internally!! What an idea! Then you can dominate the shipping world both ways – owning the ships and not owning the ships!!
Ah, but the real NVOs also offer that messy air freight stuff, and the brokerage and the… Service.
Your management team doesn’t know any more about it than you do, and you’re stuck with an ocean shipping culture that will not allow some leeching, low life shipping company wannabes to operate like they must in order to thrive. The fear is palpable. It turns into not-so-diplomatic animosity. You cannot pull these strings correctly, and you get the poor performance and demise of the carrier-owned NVOs looking down your throat!
So if you’re big enough and have the assets, you go hire some really smart people – maybe even Phd. types – who can design and create ways to put the strings back in your hands. The smart guys invite software developers to meetings and lay out the plan! They will create a giant data base into which every carrier in the world will posit their ocean rates. Customers will be able to access the rates directly from the ship owners, and there will be no more need for NVOs, and the strings will be back where they belong, right?
Believe it or not, the lords of the strings are still trying to develop strategies that will create more puppets, and will work hard to sustain the illusion of control. The real world of commerce will move on to industry formats and business models that will promote independence, transparency and prosperity for people everywhere, while the lords of the strings call software developers now to plot the recapturing of the shipping world!!
R Fain
www.snapshippingservices.com
