Company Name: Zeal Logistics

Location: Vancouver, Washington

Size: Founded 2021; 27 employees

Services: Freight mix includes CPG, produce, steel, and general commodity freight for SMB to Fortune 500 shippers

Problem: Zeal’s team was stuck in a cycle of repetitive work—POD collection, manual check calls, and constant follow-ups that drained hours from every day. As freight volume grew, operators hit their limit: service quality became harder to protect, offshore staff burned out from monotony, and reps struggled to keep up without sacrificing accuracy. Scaling by hiring more people was no longer sustainable.

Results: Zeal cut POD collection time by 50%, gave operators more than three hours back each day, and enabled reps to manage roughly 25% more loads without added stress or headcount. Augie worked directly inside Turvo and existing systems, so the team didn’t change how they worked — only how much work they had to carry.

Growing Fast, Feeling the Strain

Zeal Logistics grew quickly from day one. More freight, more customers, more lanes — on paper, everything looked strong. In reality, the pace came with a cost. POD collection alone pulled hours out of every day, and reps found themselves constantly switching between emails, portals, and documents just to keep shipments moving. SOPs kept multiplying. Operators brought in to relieve pressure were soon buried in the most repetitive work in the operation.

As volume grew, the strain became impossible to ignore. Service quality was harder to protect. Burnout was rising. And adding more people wasn’t a sustainable answer — it would erode margins and only delay the problem.

Eman Mytryk, Co-founder and CEO, understood the inflection point:

“You can’t ask someone to manage more freight and expect service not to slip. People burn out. It’s that simple.”

The business couldn’t keep scaling through people alone. Something needed to change.

Starting With One High-Impact Workflow

Zeal began where it would make the biggest immediate impact: a single workflow that touched every customer, every rep, and every day — POD collection. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was a real bottleneck. If they could eliminate it, the entire operation would feel the impact.

Ella Santos, an operations manager, had been watching the team struggle for months. “People were bored and burned out. They didn’t want to read paperwork all day. They wanted to grow — not just grind.” That became the objective: remove the grind without disrupting the workflow.

An AI Teammate That Fits How Teams Already Work

Nothing about Zeal’s process had to change. Augie, the AI teammate for logistics, plugged directly into their existing systems and began taking on the repetitive work across multiple workflows — starting with POD collection, then expanding into track & trace and their new billing workflow. With Load Building next on the roadmap, Zeal is steadily removing one bottleneck at a time without altering how their team operates.

The team kept working the same way; they just had fewer manual steps to deal with. For the first time, people had breathing room. “The difference was immediate. People had room to think again,” Ella said.

Along the way, Zeal evaluated several tools — but nearly all of them were point solutions focused on a single task: extracting PODs, tracking loads, or triaging email. Each one added noise: another portal to check, another integration to maintain, another place where context could get lost.

Augie took a different approach. It managed the work end-to-end and carried context from one step to the next, so Zeal didn’t have to stitch together or oversee a patchwork of tools. They didn’t bolt on more software — they added a teammate who fit the whole operation.

Results That Changed the Daily Reality

The impact was fast and measurable:

• POD collection time cut in half

• Operators reclaimed more than three hours every day

• Reps handled 25% more loads without added headcount or stress

• 85–95% of weekly loads now have PODs collected within 24 hours

• Zeal now maintains a 98–100% POD completion rate, with Augie owning the follow-up and workflow end-to-end

• 17% of all PODs are collected solely through Augie’s automated work

These early gains didn’t fade — they became the new operating baseline. And the shift wasn’t just operational. It was cultural.

People were more energized. Employees asked for bigger responsibilities. They finally had time to be proactive instead of fighting fires. With less repetitive work, service quality improved naturally. “People show up more excited. They’re doing real work now, not the same tasks on repeat,” Ella said.

When people get time back, service improves. When service improves, growth becomes sustainable. Zeal started seeing all three at once.

A Scalable Path for Every Role

Success with POD collection and track & trace gave Eman clarity on the long-term strategy. “I want an AI teammate for every single person — not to replace them, but to take the parts of the job that slow them down.”

This is not about automating the entire brokerage at once. It’s a controlled, sequential expansion across intake, quoting support, exception management, billing workflows, and the dozens of tasks that make up the freight lifecycle. One workflow at a time. One bottleneck removed at a time.

The strategy is simple:

• Grow revenue faster than headcount.

• Deliver better service than competitors.

• Protect your people from burnout.

What Leaders Can Learn From Zeal

Zeal didn’t launch a massive initiative. They didn’t redesign their org chart. They didn’t build a 200-slide AI roadmap. They identified one workflow that consumed their day — and removed it. From there, compounding benefits took over. Higher productivity. Better service. Less burnout. A stronger foundation for growth.

This is why Zeal’s story resonates with the C-suite: It’s a playbook for scaling a brokerage without scaling burnout — and it starts smaller than you think.

As Eman put it:

“This won’t happen overnight. But we’re committed. We’re building a brokerage that runs faster, serves better, and protects our people. That’s the point.”