# Derek Abilene, Director of Carrier Relations at Panhandle Freight Partners — read of CarrierCard, May 11 2026

> 11 years brokering freight, currently managing relationships with 340-ish carriers out of our Amarillo office. Four people on my team, one of whom spends probably a third of her week chasing down carrier performance data in McLeod.

## How I got here

Someone in the Freight360 Facebook group posted a screenshot of the pricing page last week with "is this real or vaporware" in the caption. I bookmarked it, forgot about it, then pulled it up this morning while waiting for a late morning check call to come in. Came in with zero expectations.

## What I clicked first

The headline got me: "Automated video scorecards that show on-time delivery, lane reliability, and earnings every Monday morning. In under 30 seconds."

The "earnings every Monday morning" framing is interesting. Most of my carriers do not care what I think their metrics are. What they care about is whether their check is coming and whether I have more loads. If this actually reframes the scorecard as a value delivery mechanism for the carrier, not a report card I'm handing down, that's a different posture than what I expected.

## Where I paused

The line "Professional Communication: Video feels personal and credible. It says: we track you, we value you, we want your business."

That framing is exactly right. I've been trying to articulate to my boss why carrier retention is a relationship problem, not a rate problem. A carrier who feels seen is one who answers on Sunday. I stopped here because it described something I've been trying to explain for two years in one sentence.

## What I distrusted

Two things, and the second one is a dealbreaker in terms of trust.

First: the testimonial from "Marcus, Dispatch Manager at MTE Logistics" saying they went from 15% no-shows to 5%. Specific, credible-sounding, exactly the stat I'd want. Fine.

Then I scroll down and find this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So Marcus is fictional. The "23% increase in load acceptance within 60 days" under "Results From Freight Brokers Using CarrierCard" is a projection or a fabrication. They put a fake testimonial with a fake company above the fold and then disclosed the fabrication four scrolls down. That's not a quirky startup disclosure, that's burying the lede on something that changes how I read the entire page. If I hadn't scrolled far enough I would have walked away thinking this had live customers.

Also: McLeod is not in the TMS list. Echo, Cerasis, 3PL Warehouse. McLeod runs probably 30% of mid-size brokerages in the US. Samsara is for fleets not brokers. The TMS list reads like someone Googled "freight TMS list" rather than talked to actual brokers.

## What would convince me

I'd want to see one real broker, named and verifiable, who ran this for 90 days and let me see their before and after carrier no-show rate on a specific lane. Not a percentage lift on "load acceptance," which can mean anything. A real dispatch manager whose LinkedIn I can check, with a specific corridor (Dallas to Denver, dry van, 45-foot flatbed, whatever) and a number I can sanity check.

The video format idea is genuinely interesting and I'd be curious to see what a sample scorecard actually looks like. If there's a demo video of the product showing a real rendered scorecard, that would tell me more than any stat on the page.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page lists Echo, Cerasis, and Samsara as TMS integrations. We're on McLeod. Is that on the roadmap, and how long is the integration typically?

2. The Marcus testimonial is listed under "Results From Freight Brokers Using CarrierCard" but further down you say you have no live customers yet. Which is accurate, and if Marcus isn't real, where does the 23% load acceptance figure come from?

3. Can I see a sample rendered scorecard video before I start a trial? I want to know what my carriers are actually going to receive in their inbox.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The core concept is sharper than 90% of tools I've looked at in this space, and the carrier-facing framing is something I'd actually use. But I found a fake testimonial above a "no live customers" disclosure on the same page, and that's a trust hole I have to climb out of before I'm willing to give anyone my TMS credentials.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-11. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*