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Writer's pictureRob Haney

A Monument to Trade


Old map with compass

Nestled in the foothills of South-Western Turkey lies the ancient Roman city of Hierapolis. Once a hotspot for the wealthy Patrician class, this bustling city is now a sleepy ruin marked by a large necropolis holding the graves of the city’s inhabitants. One finely carved mausoleum stands out from the rest, with the inscription., “Flavius Zeuxius, the merchant, who sailed seventy-two trips around Cape Melea to Italy, built this.”


Flavius is of an anonymous merchant fraternity that made their fortunes transporting freight in the Ancient World.


Today, the trucker is the modern-day Flavius, hired by a broker intermediary to anonymously move goods from a port to a warehouse. This process of intermediating trucking does not lead to long-term systemic supply chain improvement. With no way to stand out, a good trucker cannot demonstrate better service and grow his business. With anonymity, it doesn’t matter if one trucker can complete seventy-two long journeys from port to destination on time and with perfect quality, while another has completed only a handful of moves and always showed up both late and with damaged goods. Without a relationship with the truckers, the shipper has very little control over their brokered delivery performance other than price.


Clockwork knows the better call is to return modern-day trucking into the spotlight. By connecting a trucker directly with the global shipper, anonymization is removed. Instead, Clockwork’s toolkit gives the shipper the ability to see the quality of each delivery and see the trucker who performed the move, while giving the trucker the ability to differentiate their service. By knowing which truckers have performed the best, the shipper can expand on their direct relationship by sending more of their business to truckers who have completed moves successfully in the past. The trucker is incentivized to perform moves on time, without damaging the goods, gaining recognition for their performance and positioning them for more volume.


With Clockwork, everyone wins. The modern-day Flavius is able to stand out, to earn more business through the quality of their work. By cutting out the middlemen, the shipper ensures that only the best truckers are moving their goods; making sure that the next Flavius Zeuxius or Marco Polo works with you, and not with the other guys.

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