Rock Solid Logistics, Inc.
John Moran
Operations Logistics Manager | Family-run managed-transportation 3PL and FMCSA freight broker | Brighton, Michigan | HTS Fit-Check Call booked for Thursday 6 August, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern
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John Moran is Operations Logistics Manager at Rock Solid Logistics, Inc., a family-run managed-transportation provider in Brighton, Michigan. The cold email went to Dan Vaughan, the VP and COO; Dan passed it internally to John, and John replied the same evening asking for a phone number and giving his personal cell. We called him on it within hours, and the fit-check call was booked on the back of that conversation. He never asked a single written question: he asked for a phone call. That is a responsive, phone-first operator who was handed this by his boss and moved on it immediately.
The research changes the shape of the call. Rock Solid is not a licensed US customs broker: they are absent from CBP's own permitted-broker list, their site carries zero customs, tariff, or HTS language, they run a transportation management system (3Gtms) rather than any customs-filing platform, and their lifetime US import footprint is 18 bills of lading. The word broker in their profile means FMCSA freight broker, licence MC653998, surface transportation. What they actually sell is freight network optimization: parcel, LTL, truckload, intermodal, air and ocean freight managed for Midwest industrial manufacturers, with a white-labelled TMS, freight bill audit, and a free freight-network analysis as their front-end offer. Under the qualification framework this does not read as a direct-buyer fit: no classification function, no customs licence, a team of about twenty.
The honest one-sentence picture: a warm, fast-moving contact at a small freight-optimization firm that does not itself classify anything, sitting one step away from the people who do: the Midwest importers whose freight they manage, and the customs brokers who clear it. The call is worth having as a channel conversation, and this dossier is built to run it that way.
The Conversation So Far
What they have actually seen and said
- Cold email, campaign "Brokers Registry", sent to Dan Vaughan (VP/COO). From Adrian's sending account: "DANIEL, is ROCK SOLID LOGISTICS, INC. classifying through CargoWise, Descartes or similar, or line by line by hand? Broker teams are moving to our AI because it does the first pass in minutes at higher accuracy, at a fraction of the cost, and your clients never see a difference. Pentagon Freight Services went from three weeks to fifteen minutes. Worth a look? Adrian"
- 5 August. John Moran replied from the same thread, Dan having passed it to him internally: "I believe you reached out to Dan over here at Rock Solid Logistics regarding your program. We're always looking to improve efficiency and I was following up on that to have a discussion on it, and see if there is any possible overlap. I have your email but not your number though. If you can, give me a call at 702-577-5705 when you have some time." Signed Operations Logistics Manager, personal cell given freely.
- 6 August. We called John on his cell and booked the call on the phone.
- Booked: HTS Fit-Check Call, Thursday 6 August 2026, 11:00 to 11:30 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, with Adrian.
Reply to booked call in under a day, no written questions, straight to the phone. High engagement. But note what he said: "improve efficiency" and "possible overlap". He has not named a classification pain, because as the research shows, they are unlikely to have one in-house.
Company Profile Intel
John Moran
- Role: Operations Logistics Manager, from his own email signature
- Public footprint: none found. No LinkedIn profile, directory entry, or web mention ties any John Moran to Rock Solid Logistics. Normal for a firm this size where only leadership keeps profiles. Trust the call, not the web.
- Where he sits: the listed Director of Operations is Yuri Becerra, so John's role likely sits within that operations team. Dan Vaughan (VP/COO) handed him the conversation, so he is the designated evaluator, not the economic buyer.
- Contact: cell 702-577-5705, given unprompted in his first reply
- Style: phone-first. Asked for a number rather than sending questions, and booked same day.
Rock Solid Logistics, Inc.
- What they are: managed-transportation provider and freight-optimization 3PL, DBA Rock Solid Business Solutions. Not an asset-based trucker, and not a customs broker.
- HQ: 5918 Meridian Blvd, Suite 3, Brighton, MI 48116. Single office.
- Leadership: Carla Vaughan, CEO since 2008 (ex-CFO of Kaiser Logistics); Dan Vaughan, VP/COO. Family owned, near-certainly the same family, no outside investors found.
- Headcount: sources read 18 to 25. Do not quote a number.
- Licences: FMCSA broker authority MC653998 / USDOT 2242791, active, $75,000 surety bond on file. Not on CBP's permitted customs broker list.
- Founded: contested. Their site says 2008, LinkedIn says 1995, their archived 2015 site says a parent "Rock Solid Corporation" from 1993. Do not state one as fact.
Key intel
- The website on our lead record was wrong. rocksolid.net redirects to a Texas broadband ISP, an unrelated business. Their real domain is rocksolidlogistics.com, matching the email domain and the Brighton address. Everything in this dossier is verified against the real company.
- Not a customs broker, verified at the source. CBP's own permitted-broker list (2,483 entries, 25 of them in Michigan) contains no Rock Solid and no Brighton, MI entry at all. Their site has zero mentions of customs, duty, tariff, HTS, or entry filing on any page.
- The decision maker is Carla Vaughan. CEO since 2008, a former logistics CFO. Dan Vaughan passed the email down to John, so the path on this call runs one or two levels below the decision.
- They are AI-receptive. Their own marketing claims "AI-assisted analytics" and "AI-assisted shipment monitoring". The vocabulary of the pitch will land.
- They already run a free-analysis motion. Their front-end offer is a complimentary freight-network analysis: send three months of freight data, get a summary back in about three business days. A free tariff-exposure scan for their clients is the same play in a different lane.
Business Model
What they sell
- Freight network optimization: network design, freight cost engineering, transportation control tower
- Managed transportation across six modes: parcel, LTL, truckload, intermodal, air freight, ocean freight
- Logistics technology platform: a white-labelled 3Gtms TMS environment with client portals and dashboards
- Freight bill audit and pay plus claims management
- Free freight network analysis as the front-end offer
How they make money
- Brokerage margin on managed freight (carrier spread) plus managed-transportation and optimization fees
- FMCSA freight broker authority, no asset fleet found: they arrange and manage, carriers move
- Clients are Midwest industrial and component manufacturers: archived testimonials name Radix Wire, Applied Precision Systems, Acoust-A-Fiber, and Pace Incorporated
- Family owned, no outside capital, no press footprint, actively hiring in operations
The structural point worth holding onto
Classification never touches Rock Solid's own P&L. Their margin lives in carrier rates, network design, and audit recoveries. The HTS and tariff line lives with their importer clients and with whichever customs broker clears those clients' ocean and air freight. That is why this call should hunt the client base and the broker partner, not their own desk: the classification volume Ripple wants exists, it is just one step away from the man on the phone.
The Numbers
Read this first
There is no reliable revenue figure for Rock Solid Logistics. Estimates span roughly $2M to $5M in net revenue, one widely-indexed figure of $380 million with a Series B attached was checked and rejected as placeholder data, and the founding year has three different sourced answers. Headcount reads 18 to 25. Nothing in this section should be quoted at John as a fact about his business; the trade figures below are ocean bills of lading only.
Verified from primary sources
- FMCSA broker authority MC653998, active, registered since Nov 2011, $75,000 surety bond on file
- Absent from CBP's permitted customs broker list, checked against the official CBP file
- 3Gtms confirmed first-party: their client login points at rocksolid.3gtms.com and their booking form asks for a 3GTMS password
- 18 lifetime US bills of lading at the exact Brighton address, most recent 15 July 2026, PVC vinyl from China
- Import origins: China, Germany, Colombia, Panama, Belgium; top port Shanghai
- Actively hiring a Logistics Coordinator in Brighton: "Rock Solid Logistics is expanding"
Estimated or contested, handle with care
- Headcount 18 to 25 depending on the source; the LinkedIn 51-200 band is self-selected and not credible
- Revenue $2M to $5M net as the working range; gross freight billings could be several times that, since brokerages book gross
- Founded 1993, 1995, or 2008, all three sourced; best read is an early-90s family lineage with the current entity from 2008
- One directory reports a Feb 2025 FMCSA authority-revocation event, single-sourced and contradicted by a second directory showing plain Active. Treat as unconfirmed and do not raise.
- FMC / NVOCC status unverified, the public query endpoint is behind a login. If ocean matters, ask.
The signal that matters
Eighteen bills of lading across a multi-decade history says Rock Solid is not the importer of record for anything meaningful: they appear on ocean paperwork occasionally as consignee or notify party for client freight. The volume story here is inverted from a normal prospect. Their own paper trail is tiny, but they manage transportation for a book of Midwest manufacturers who each carry their own import exposure, and they quote ocean and air lanes where duty is the one line they cannot price today. The scale that matters is the client base, and only John can size it.
The Reality Check
- The email asked whether they classify through CargoWise or Descartes or by hand. The true answer is neither: no CBP licence, no filer code, no customs software, no customs language anywhere on their site.
- "Broker" in their profile means FMCSA freight broker, surface transportation. The source registry was near-certainly a freight-broker list, not a customs-broker list.
- John still replied warm off that email, which means the conversation is alive but the frame must change before the pitch starts.
- Open the call with discovery questions, never with the broker-workflow pitch. The first minute decides whether this reads as sharp or as a mis-target.
- Their clients are Midwest industrial and component manufacturers, the kind of companies that import inputs and carry real HTS and tariff exposure.
- Rock Solid manages those clients' freight across six modes, including ocean and air, but hands the customs side to whoever the client uses.
- Their whole sales motion is built on giving value away first: the free freight-network analysis.
- Ripple through Rock Solid, offered to their client base as a tariff-exposure read, is the same free-analysis motion they already trust, in a lane they currently cannot serve.
- They quote ocean and air lanes for importing clients, and duty and tariff is the piece of landed cost they cannot answer, so it gets deferred to the client's broker.
- In the current tariff environment that deferred line is often the largest and most volatile part of the landed number.
- Their marketing already sells "freight cost engineering" and "AI-assisted analytics", so a duty line inside the quote fits the story they tell.
- Classification-driven duty estimates would let Rock Solid quote a complete landed cost. A real gap, though a nice-to-have rather than a bleeding neck.
- Somebody licensed files the entries behind those ocean and air shipments: either a broker partner Rock Solid routes to, or brokers each client brings.
- That party classifies for a living and carries exactly the workload the platform automates.
- A warm introduction from a trusted freight partner lands very differently from a cold email.
- One question, "who handles clearance when you book an import?", can turn this call into a route to a genuinely qualified account.
- Their rebuilt website leans on AI language: "AI-assisted analytics", "AI-assisted shipment monitoring". John's boss handed him an AI pitch and he moved on it same day.
- They are hiring into operations and describe themselves as expanding.
- Whatever John's mandate is, "improve efficiency" and "possible overlap" in his own words, they are actively shopping for capability.
- Even with no direct classification desk, this is a company in buying mode with an AI vocabulary. The partnership frame gives them something concrete to buy into.
Where the Opportunity Sits
Rock Solid does not classify goods, so this is not a direct classifier sale and pitching it as one will stall in the first ten minutes. Treat the call as a channel conversation: they sit between Ripple and two groups who genuinely carry the pain. These are the three plays, in order of strength.
Play one: their client base of Midwest importers
Rock Solid's clients are industrial manufacturers who import inputs and carry HTS and tariff exposure right now. Rock Solid already wins business by giving away a free freight-network analysis. Handing them a free tariff-exposure scan to put in front of those same clients extends a motion they already run, makes their optimization pitch stickier, and puts Ripple in front of a book of real importers through a trusted intermediary.
Play two: landed cost inside their quotes
Every ocean and air lane they quote is missing the duty line, which today is the most volatile part of landed cost. Classification-driven duty estimates would let Rock Solid quote a complete number where competitors quote freight only. This is the angle that makes the platform something Rock Solid itself uses, priced against the value of winning more freight, not against a classification desk they do not have.
Play three: a warm route to their customs broker partners
Whoever clears their clients' freight is a licensed, entry-filing operation with genuine classification volume: exactly the buyer the platform was built for. If the direct conversation goes nowhere, the referral question still makes the call worth the thirty minutes. A broker introduced by a partner who routes them freight takes the meeting.
Questions for the Call
Watch-Outs
Do not run the customs-broker pitch
The cold email treated them as a classification operation. They are not one, and they know exactly what they are. Opening with "how does your team classify" or the Pentagon Freight proof point as if it maps to their desk will read as a mis-target and burn the warmth John showed. Open with Q1, let the answers place the volume, then pitch the play that fits. The Pentagon proof still works later, but aimed at their broker partner or their clients, never at them.
Numbers and claims not to say out loud
- Revenue. Estimates run $2M to $5M and one indexed $380M figure with a fake Series B was rejected as placeholder data. Any number used will be wrong.
- Founding year. Three sourced answers: 1993, 1995, 2008. Say "you've been at this a long time" and let him fill it in.
- Headcount. Reads 18 to 25. Do not name it.
- The Feb 2025 authority-revocation event. Single-sourced, contradicted elsewhere. Never raise it.
- Any "customs brokerage services" claim found online. Those snippets belong to same-name companies, not them.
Identity traps in the public record
rocksolid.net is a Texas broadband ISP, not them: the real domain is rocksolidlogistics.com. There are unrelated Rock Solid Logistics entities in Illinois and Indiana, a Rock Solid Shipping that likely spawned the stray customs claims, and a genuine New England customs broker called JF Moran that surfaces on Moran searches. Verification anchors for the real company: 5918 Meridian Blvd Suite 3, Brighton MI; MC653998; rocksolidlogistics.com. Also: John Moran himself has no public footprint, which is normal at this company size, so nothing about him could be independently verified. And Carla and Dan Vaughan are near-certainly family: handle any question about the two of them with that assumption in mind, gently.