The Freight Brokerage Stack

A 25% gross margin is hiding in the logistics brokerage business. It sits in specialized freight, in roughly 3,000 fragmented firms, and nobody has consolidated it.

This is our read on the niche freight brokerage market in Canada and the United States: what it is worth, why the margin is where it is, who owns it today, and why the window to consolidate it is open now rather than in five years.

A market within a market

US trucking brokerage is about $135B across roughly 28,000 brokers. We are not interested in most of it. The commodity van market is where everyone fights, margins run about 8%, and scale belongs to firms that got there a decade ago.

The part that interests us is specialized freight: flatbed, oversize and heavy-haul, bulk and tanker, hazmat. Call it $24B, under a fifth of the spend. It is harder to move, it needs permits and equipment and expertise, and it is priced accordingly.

Niche inside the marketSpecialized freight as a share of US brokerage spend

Niche versus overallGross margin and annual growth

Better margin and faster growth, in the part of the market that is hardest to serve. That is not a coincidence. The difficulty is the moat.

Inside the $24B niche

The four sub-nichesMarket size and gross margin

Specialty flatbed moves steel, lumber and building materials. Oversized and heavy-haul moves machinery, transformers and turbines. Bulk and tanker moves food-grade liquids, chemicals and dry bulk. Hazmat moves fuels, industrial chemicals and compressed gas.

Why the niche wins

Three structural advantagesFragmentation, margin and stickiness

Roughly 3,000 brokers and no dominant player. The top ten hold under 20%. Gross margin on specialized freight runs 20%+ against about 14% on commodity van, because permits, equipment and expertise earn the premium. And about 80% of niche volume is repeat business, because compliance, lanes and equipment lock shippers in.

Same asset-light model as the rest of brokerage. Better economics. We compete where scale and software actually matter.

Where the money is

About 6.8 million loads a year move in these niches, flatbed and tanker making up roughly 70% of them.

Loads by nicheAnnual volume across the four specialties

What sits next door

The same shippers need more than trucking. About 40% also move freight internationally, 30% import or export by ocean, and 35% are importers who need customs clearance.

Adjacent servicesMarket size and margin on what we can cross-sell

Core niche plus adjacent services is roughly $100B of addressable market, reachable through shippers already on the books.

Who owns it today

About 3,000 niche firms across the four specialties in the US. The distribution is the whole story.

The universe by sizeFirm counts by revenue band

The sub-$2M band alone is about 75% of the universe, too small to stand alone. Around 150 firms sit in the $5-15M band, which is the right size to automate and roughly $1M+ of EBITDA. Thirty firms are $15M and up: fewer, pricier, and a route to scale fast.

The core band by specialtyWhere the $5-15M firms are

Six screens every target passes

Owned demand. 60% or more of loads from direct shippers, not off a load board.
Defensible margin. 20%+ EBITDA in a niche with a real equipment barrier.
Sticky freight. Repeat lanes and standing contracts, low churn.
Right size. $5-15M revenue, roughly $1M+ EBITDA.
Clean cash conversion. Not trapped in factoring, or refinanceable at close.
Transferable and compliant. FMCSA and BMC-84 in order, principals retained on earn-outs.

SelectivityTargets that clear all six screens

Roughly one in twelve. That ratio is the point of having screens.

Where the margin comes from

A broker's day is the same ten-task loop on every single load. Take the quote request, price the load, post it and find capacity, source and negotiate carriers, vet the carrier, book and confirm, track and trace, handle exceptions, produce documents and invoice, settle with the carrier.

Most of those tasks have an off-the-shelf tool. Two do not, and those two are where a platform is actually built: exception handling, and the integration spine that ties documents, billing and carrier data together.

The five tasks we automate firstShare automatable and margin points added

Roughly 77% of the desk is automatable. The top five tasks are about 16 margin points between them, and the tail takes it to 10 to 20. A book running at 20% runs at 30 to 40.

Same book, no trucks added. The first business takes under six months to install the stack and build the spine once. Every add-on after that is about three months, because the playbook repeats.

Where the EBITDA comes from

Three engines, not one. Technology is the biggest but it is not the whole story.

The three enginesEBITDA added by source

Sales. Organic growth around 15% a year, consolidating a fragmented niche and cross-selling adjacent services. Shippers pay a flat subscription for lower fees and guaranteed service levels, which turns brokerage revenue recurring and smooths the cycle.

Expenses. Playbooks across every function and roughly 77% of the desk automated. Cost to serve collapses and margin runs from 20% to 40%.

Consolidation. Fifteen sub-scale books bought over seven years and run as one platform, on one system, with one carrier network.

EBITDA over the holdPlatform versus a standalone book

A standalone niche book roughly tracks the freight cycle. Under a platform, with about two books a year added, automated and cross-sold, the same book compounds instead.

The risks, and why now

Timing is the thesis. Four independent forces are converging: a recovering freight cycle, a wave of retiring owners, tightening regulation, and rising cargo fraud. They are thinning the field at exactly the moment the technology to consolidate it finally works.

Every named risk has a priced discipline

Freight cyclicality. Buy off the bottom. Asset-light, multimode, with subscription revenue underneath.
Cash conversion. Underwrite cash, not EBITDA. Refinance factoring into insured-receivables lines.
Niche tail-risk. Cargo insurance with per-load and per-lane caps.
Key person. Earn-outs, and one system plus the subscription capture the relationship.
Compliance and fraud. Licensed and bonded under BMC-84, with platform-scale carrier vetting.
Integration. A proven playbook. Under six months for the first book, about three months per add-on.

Six of six, mapped to a repeatable discipline before signing rather than after.

Six reasons it is nowEvery gauge moving the same way

Spot rates are up 23% off the Q4 2025 lows. Over 3,100 brokerages disappeared in 2024. The new FMCSA bond requirement landed in January 2026. Flatbed rates are at records on reshoring and nearshoring. Cargo theft is up 1,500% since 2022. And the desk is still run on phone, email and spreadsheets.

The recovery is starting, the technology has arrived, and the owners are retiring. All at once.

Who is building it

Nick runs the platform day to day. Fifteen-plus years in freight and logistics, 10,000+ loads moved, hubs in Miami and Toronto covering the US, Mexico and Canada. Founder of Linkr Log, the first book. His niches are oversized and specialized, machinery, building materials and hazmat, with an AI-enhanced desk already running.

Tyler Wright chairs the board and builds the platform. Fourteen years building and scaling, 69,000 loads directed over five years, $35M+ of new EBITDA created across four companies at 40%+ CAGR. Five acquisitions sourced and integrated across ten countries, 125 staff. Holds a commercial licence and can drive the flatbeds he is brokering.

Bowen Lin advises on logistics and finance, with over ten years at TD Bank.

Consolidate the niche. Automate the desk. Expand across every mode. Operators who have run the desk, the deals and the financing, not just modelled them.

Market figures are drawn from Brush Pass Research, Transport Topics, Armstrong & Associates, FMCSA, TIA, DAT, SONAR, Cass and ACT Research (2024-26). Operating figures are directional and in part illustrative, not audited. Nothing here is an offer to sell securities.

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