The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #113
Mark Murrell: Hello. Welcome to Episode 113 of the CarriersEdge podcast. I am Mark Murrell, co-founder of CarriersEdge, and with a special guest today—
Jane Jazrawy: Jane Jazrawy. Other co-founder of CarriersEdge, and we are in very busy mode. We've had a very busy New Year and it will finally be over next week when we do our fabulous Best Fleets To Drive For education and awards conference.
Mark: We are absolutely in grind mode right now.
Jane: We are in grind mode. I am working on my keynote. I found a quote that I investigated. And it's a quote that— I'll shall I tell you what the quote is?
Mark: Sure.
Jane: Okay. I was thinking about using the quote: "May you live interesting times." And–
Mark: The old curse.
Jane: Well, it has become believed to be, incorrectly, that it is a Chinese curse.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: But it is not.
Mark: I didn't know it was Chinese. I always thought it was sort of offered as a bit of a double edged sword.
Jane: Yes. The whole idea of that phrase is very— we all understand what it means. That it's not good. Interesting times is not a good thing, and it can be very bad. But it was actually said.. someone investigated and there's been a bunch of people research quotes and and they try and find the actual origin of who said it. And it was actually said by, I can't remember the guy's name... Robert Chamberlain or Richard Chamberlain. No, not Richard. Robert Chamberlain.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And he said it around 1898, and it started being repeated in the 1900s and people just started saying... that he was actually a British parliamentarian.
Mark: So this is not Chamberlain that was a prime minister? No. Okay.
Jane: No. No. No. He was a liberal. And it's hard to say whether he was a representative, like he was a member of parliament, or if he was just somebody who is close to the government. Winston Churchill said that he was quite like one of the most influential and powerful people who wasn't part of the government. But he was, like, around forever, and he was liberal. Yeah, really interesting guy. And he ended up, as he had some kind of title, like, sort of minister of the colonies. So that's what his title was, because he had this title, apparently, he had some titles. He could have whatever title he want under an agreement where all of the different parties in Britain, I guess, there was a bunch of parties, and they were all kind of saying, okay, well, who gets what—and they were debating about who's gonna control the government. Because in a non two-party system this is the kind of thing that happens until this negotiation. And he was not allowed to have secretary of state. Like, there was a bunch of them he was not allowed to have, but he was allowed to be in charge of the colonies. And, you may not know this if you're an American, but the colonies means Canada.
Mark: Canada, Australia, India. Australia. Yeah. All of all of the Caribbean and African countries that the Brits would have had.
Jane: So he would have about absolutely been in charge of us. Now, I can't remember if his name is actually Robert Chamberlain, but it's something like that.
Mark: He's some kind of Chamberlain.
Jane: Yeah. Well, you know, he's British guy. So this British guy at the turn of the 19th century, 19 to 20, because the turn of the century, there's been a couple.
Mark: So at the beginning of the twentieth century then.
Jane: It was coming into the 1900s. So it was 1898.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: As he said this, and he said something about, you know, We are living in interesting times and how it's a source of anxiety.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: So he says about three lines and it's actually more interesting than just the "May you live in interesting times" because the really interesting thing is what was happening around 1898.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: A bunch of stuff happened.
Mark: Tell us, history professor. What was happening in England in 1899?
Jane: It wasn't just England. There was about four different wars—
Mark: Okay.
Jane: —that were happening. Cuba got its independence. The Spanish American war just ended. There were two other ones that.. Is it Germany and Turkey? There was a couple of European wars, the Spanish American war, and the States had just kind of— Hawaii wasn't the state, but they just kind of got it. I can't remember how they— but they basically took over Hawaii, so they did that. They had just ended a really bad economic period. It was the worst economic period until the Great Depression.
Mark: Wow.
Jane: —this was just second to the Great Depression. So there was a lot of stuff going on, but also the things that were happening... Marie Curie discovered radiation with her partner. I can't remember his name. I just remember hers. Someone else discovered x rays.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: The War the Worlds got written.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
Mark: Wow.
Jane: Like, think about all of those things that were happening at the same time. And there was many, many fewer people in the world. Can you imagine the chaos that must been happening at the time because all of these countries are at war, things are getting switched around. Apparently, Panama got—
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: That was when Panama became independent. So that was happening. Like, things don't happen like this. Like, wars are kind of chaotic. Independence, fights are kind of chaos. Cuba and Panama... You know, people are writing bizarre stories.
Mark: Yeah. Now, at the time, people probably didn't realize that those were gonna be such enduring classics, but still there's a lot happening at that time, and these are probably kind of an outcome of all of that. Craziness that was going.
Jane: World's. Yeah. There's a lot of war going on and someone wants to write some science fiction about it... I think if you look at the— there's so much being written all the time now. It's really hard to tell. But there's a lot of interest in science fiction. There's a lot of interest in fantasy. That is probably not, you know— One of the hugest franchises now is, you know, comic book franchises.
Mark: It's not so coincidence, really.
Jane: Yeah. Because, you know, what is happening around you? That's what artists and writers— they are reflecting those times.
Mark: So is all of this working its way into your opening speech?
Jane: Well, I'm going to be mentioning that. And sort of mentioning— When does this thing go out afterwards?
Mark: This is out on Wednesday.
Jane: So this Wednesday.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: So, you know, you get a sneak peek if your—
Mark: —you're a diligent podcast listener. You'll have a sneak peek in advance. Advance in a sense of what's going to be included.
Jane: And you also get a sense of the rabbit holes that I will go into when I'm sort of thinking, oh, yeah, I like this quote "May you live in interesting times." It's not a stretch of the imagination right now. Right? We are living in interesting times.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: What I always do is I don't just kinda go, oh, I like this quote and slap a quote on there or slap, you know, whenever I do a presentation that uses a quote, find the source.
Mark: You have to now because you use a quote and then somebody comes and complains about it or opens up a tweet storm about how you misused it or didn't actually mean that or you attributed it to the wrong person, and it was really said by this other person two hundred years earlier, or it's now a problematic quote, or it's a great quote that person is now awful. You can't just use a quote. You have to go and research it now.
Jane: But at the same time, I think that's kind of good because you should. You shouldn't just, you know, get a grab a quote that you don't know where it originated.
Mark: Or the full context.
Jane: You need context. And I think that kind of goes into what we're trying to do with the Best Fleets conference is provide context. I think that's our main goal is to say these companies have won this award. Why? Why are they better than others? And, you know, provide some context around. Even, you know, basically starting with "They try."
Mark: Yes. Yeah.
Jane: "They beat you." If you're in the Best Fleets To Drive For program and you didn't get on the Top20, it basically means that somebody scored better than you. It doesn't mean that you're not a good company. It just means that somebody else is working on it, and specifically for this award, and it can't really stop people from working on this award, particularly.
Mark: Well, the one thing that I always say about that—and I'm sure I've mentioned it here over the years—is that becoming a best fleet is partly about doing things. And certainly, you have to be doing a fair number of things to keep up with and surpass the other fleets on that list. But just as important is your ability to tell the story of what you're doing and why. And that's what I find most interesting as I watch companies come into the program, go through this process of going through it once and then getting their results and reviewing them, come back again and, okay, maybe they make it as a Fleet To Watch, and then they get their results and they review it and they change some things and they come back again, and eventually they make it under the Top20. It is really interesting to see the evolution of how they tell the story of what their company is all about. And that I think is just as important as all of the things that people are doing because— Building a good company, you have to have a vision for what you're trying to accomplish in the world. And it can't just be: we deliver freight on time and safely. Well, so do ten thousand other companies. What makes you different? And it can't be either: we deliver freight using freight liner trucks. Okay. So does everybody else. Like, what are you doing that's actually different? And that's where it's important to be able to say, this is the vision of who we are, what we are creating, the kind of workplace that we are building, how we wanna deliver that service... And the better you can articulate that, the better you're going to be able to attract the kind of people that are a match and that are a fit for that and want to do the same thing the same way and then have more success as a business and become sort of a flywheel that allows you to build the business more effectively. So I think there's a lot of value in fleets taking the time to learn how to tell that story because it will come through in their marketing. It will come through in how they attract drivers. It will come through in all of the communications that happen within the organization. They will be much more of a cohesive team and much more effective at building the business.
Jane: I absolutely agree. Telling your story is not just a marketing and sales tool. It's kind of encompasses everybody has to be able to tell the same story.
Mark: Well, and one of the things that is different about the Best Fleets program is that we need to hear that consistent, cohesive story from everybody. So it isn't just one marketing person who writes an essay about how great the company is, submits that and then gets a prize. You need to have a bunch of people that are part of the interview that are also on the same page with that, then the driver surveys need to reflect that as well. And you put all of those things together, that's when you start to get a sense of Does this company actually have a story? Do they know what that story is? And how well are they able to communicate that to other people? And if it's just a marketing person doing it, get lost, because they're just gonna use all kinds of words that nobody else ever uses, and it's gonna be generic as anything.
Jane: Well, there's also... The thing is with marketing and sales kind of take, whatever they can get and pair it down into sort of bite-sized bits that they can use for marketing and sales. You don't get a lot of time, so you'd have to do a very—what do you call it when things are compressed?—a very compressed version of your entire company's value proposition. So it has to be bite-sized and easily remembered and all of that stuff. If you only know those words and you don't know the history and the belief system behind it, then you are gonna come come across as very two-dimensional.
Mark: Yeah. Well, when you try to fill in other stuff beyond those basic compressed descriptions... when we say, okay, tell us more. And maybe there isn't more. Right? Because marketing is about having a concise message. Okay. Well, now, we are going to ask you for a hundred variations of that message through the questionnaire and we're going to follow-up with those in the interviews and we're going to get your drivers to tell us their version of it.
Jane: And I think this is why we really emphasize having some executive presence in the Best Fleets because the executive or, you know, someone in senior leadership is going to know the entire scape of of this. You know, someone who is in a junior marketing position is not gonna know. Someone who's only been there for a year and a half is not gonna know, unless they go and get that information from other people. And I think that we've seen definitely— It doesn't happen as much anymore, whereas just some recruiting. People who are trying to get this going, that doesn't seem to happen that much anymore. Especially when people are serious about trying to get onto the Top20, they're actually doing some work. And I think that's the message that we've been trying to send for the last fifteen or sixteen years is like, this is a serious one. You can't just, you know—
Mark: You can't phone this one in.
Jane: You can't fill in some nice words because we're gonna ask you what those words mean.
Mark: Yes. And now is the point where we're getting to share with everybody all the things that we found. And so we've got the million things that have to be done before the conference. We've got three quarters of a million finished.
Jane: Maybe eighty nine million.
Mark: So we've got the books, the results books that went off to the printer, and I got told today that the books are finished and they're ready to ship. So those will be shipped out today, which is good. And we've got all of the other tons of things that we have to do, pens, and lanyards, and portfolios, and I don't even know what all the other things are. Oh, the badges go into the printer today, and what else? The printed agenda, like, everything under the sun, there's so much minutia that has to be dealt with. Like, today, we were looking at the final details for how many bottles of water do we want out at each break, and do we want juice and soda or just soda or what kind of coffee and how long can the coffee stay out for?
Jane: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: Oh, yeah. And this is before we even... It's just how much yeah. How many vegetarian lunches, and pescatarian, and all of these things that you have to deal with. And which things are gluten-free and garlic-free and soy-free and everything-else-free.
Jane: And I know this is your absolute favorite thing to do.
Mark: I am terrified of doing this stuff because I'm sure I'm going to miss something. And I'm sure there's something that I'm going to overlook, but I am very thankful, I have to say publicly, probably not for the first time. I'm very thankful for Lindsey who is very into the details and will pour over all of those things in check and found all kinds of things in the catering order that I hadn't even noticed that are worth exploring. And they all probably are good ideas. But we wanna confirm that they're all intentional. She's gone through all of those and asked a bunch of questions about it. So that's part—
Jane: Thank you, Lindsey.
Mark: Yes. Thank you, Lindsey. And we've done the same kind of thing with all of the graphic deliverables because we got signs all over the hall. We've got a giant movie that plays in the main hall. Plus all of the signs at different places. So all of that is sent off and, like, the list of things that you have to do before you even think about: What am I going to talk about for an hour on stage?
Jane: Well, we have to not forget social media. And Martha has been slaving over, you know, three different social media feeds with different size everything and different character limits and, you know, trying to figure out the exact wording that we like to use and, oh my goodness. So the attention to details is great. We're hopefully not gonna have to do as much next year.
Mark: Well, we are fortunate that we have a pretty thorough task list for all of these things that we went through last year. And then we did a postmortem of all the things that we'd missed or we wanted to change, and we put that together with the task list. And we've got a pretty good sense of it. So I think we're actually in pretty good shape. There's a lot of little loose ends. Like, I've gotta send a message to all of the media and make sure that they know where to go and what to do, send a message to the sponsors, make sure they have everything, remind them to bring collateral to when we can do the final stuffing of the portfolios with all of their flyers and things, get all of that kind of stuff coordinated. I do have the guest speakers mostly coordinated. I've got a few things that I have to do on that, but they are shaping up to be really good. So... There's a lot of stuff to do, and I'm sure there's something that I'm forgetting right now that needs to be done today, but it will hit me at four o'clock tomorrow morning.
Jane: Oh, great. This is not great for my sleep.
Mark: Sleep?!
Jane: Hey, I need sleep. If I'm gonna stand up in front of people and be coherent, I need sleep. It's unfortunate, but it is true. I am not one of these people who are like, oh, I only need four hours and I'm fine. I think that there is maybe one percent of the population and I don't know how non-psychotic they are.
Mark: Yeah, I resent those people.
Jane: Well, maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's not, but I don't think there's any shame in saying, yeah, you know what? Nine hours. Nine hours is good for me.
Mark: Yup.
Jane: I am happy with nine hours.
Mark: Yeah. Well, what happens to me when I get into one of these kind of zones we're in now where we've got a lot of things and it's hard to really turn it all off is— I have, like, all of these songs that jump into my head about not sleeping. Like, that Bon Jovi song,
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Until I'm six feet under.
I don't need a bed.
Gonna live while I'm alive.
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
And Barenaked Ladies had a song "Who Needs Sleep. You're Never Gonna Get It." Yeah. So there's things that come up that you just sort of have to kind of power through. And the worst thing is when you think you're in good shape and you're like, okay, I can relax. I can go chill out and actually get some sleep and then at four in the morning, oh, crap. This thing. Like, a couple of days ago, I woke up and remembered, oh, we actually have to go and pick up the backdrop from our storage unit, the way down there. Would be very bad if we were at the airport and we're looking around like, okay. So who's got the backdrop? Oh, nobody.
Jane: So this is the thing to have photos in front of.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Does that have the backing as well? Like, do we have to cart that entire thing? I'm just asking.
Mark: Yeah. It's in the storage unit now. It's got a hardshell case. We brought it back from Charlotte last year, and now we have to take it down there and set it up.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: Things like that that you kind of remember, oh, we need to get that, the table cover, the steamer so that we're not taking pictures in front of all wrinkled things. All the things we've learned the hard way over the years. And when you go and look back ten years ago at an event or five or six years ago at an event, you're cringing at something, Well, now we have those things on the checklist to make sure we deal with, but we have to remember them as well.
Jane: So what else about the conference do you wanna talk about, besides all the minutiae?
Mark: Can you tell what I was working on before?
Jane: Yeah. I was I I am telling you, but what I was just working on.
Mark: I'm looking forward to the guest speakers. I think they're going to be excellent. I look forward to the things that we get to share because I think we've both got some really interesting things to go through. And I'm really looking forward to the guest, the panel people. You've got two panelists that you should be working with. I've got, I guess, a speaker on one of my sessions who's going to be excellent, but then we also have two outside speakers that are, I think, going to provide some really nice content. So one of them is Kevin Mulvaney from Wilson Elser, who is a transportation lawyer, will talk about the litigator's perspective on workplace culture, and why it is better to have a good workplace culture, and how that actually helps in court, which people often don't think about. People have a ton of safety policies to try and cover their butts if they ever end up in court. But actually, the good workplace culture helps too. It doesn't just help in that it prevents crashes, but it helps when you actually get to court. Which is kind of a different angle. So I think that's gonna be really cool. And the second one is Steven Bojan from Sentry Insurance, one of our insurance partners, and one of the larger insurers in the transportation industry. And he's gonna talk about the insurance perspective and the things they notice when they go in to do an assessment of the risk because it isn't just about loss ratios. They certainly look at those things. They will look at the loss run of a fleet to see where the crashes are, but they're gonna look at all of the policies and not just pieces of paper stuffed in a drawer, but all of the processes how the company operates, and how the company finds its drivers, manages them, builds them into safe professionals, and really all of the same things that we evaluate come back into insurance risk assessment. So he's going to talk about that, and he's got a slide that I'm really interested in. How To Spot a Problematic Fleet. In one year, in one month, in one day, and, I think, in one hour, or something like that. There's things that you can assess really quickly to determine whether or not it's going to be a good fleet or a problem fleet. So—
Jane: We have that too! I mean, we have started to notice that there are things that fleets do when they're going to do well and when they're going to not do great.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: There is a difference and it's like first impressions, like sometimes fleets will give us a terrible first impression and then kind of overcome that. And then it's fine and they're on the look— We've had fleets who are on the Top20 and in the Hall of Fame now, who gave us a terrible first impression. So things, like, not being able to get an interview date, or not doing their surveys properly, or just giving us a lot of back and forth on something, you know, not answering a question in time.
Mark: Or waiting till the last minute to book an interview and then trying to beg for an extension, or claim that they are so busy, or their dog ate their homework, and they need to to be able to do the interview at some other time. Yeah.
Jane: That's the one. And during COVID, that was the—
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: That was really problematic.
Mark: Yeah. We waited till the last minute, and then our whole office got COVID, and we're out. So, well, why didn't you plan for that?
Jane: Well, COVID is kind of an outlier.
Mark: But it was also five years ago.
Jane: And so you you tend to see, you see patterns. You start to see patterns. Like, something will happen and you'll be like, oh, that was weird and I didn't like that. But, you know, we don't judge people because we don't judge the Top20. It's scores. But what we find is that our impressions are reflected in the scores because the driver surveys have the same kind of thing. You know, if you can't get a hold of someone, it's likely the drivers can't get hold of them either. It's not like that's just how some people operate. So you start to see these patterns and it's interesting that, well, I think even when someone goes in legally or for a risk assessment and things like that, I think there's other things that pop out at you in terms of how you are treating drivers, how you refer to them, just the feeling of the place? Does it feel like, you know— Do you have a whole bunch of people who are not speaking and get talked over or that kind of thing? And you can start to kinda get a sense and you often see it reflected. I'm not saying that it makes that much of a difference to our scoring because you may do the interview and somebody else may do the scoring and it won't make any difference.
Mark: Well, I think what stands out for us is we see that and it kind of, like you say, first impressions matter. It gives us a sense of the company. So then, yes, you go through the interview, and it might be like, there's a couple of parts of it. One is scheduling the interview. Another one is looking at the questionnaire, and then the third part of it is actually conducting the interview. And by the time those three things have happened, you've got a picture of that fleet.
And then, when you get into the scoring where it's a completely different thing, you might look at, you know, you might find that the company did really well or did really poorly on the few questions that you scored, but you don't have a sense of the overall picture of how well they're doing. You have in the back of your head your experiences with them. And then—when you look at the final results, when it all comes together, all the scores are put in and it's all weighted and all that other stuff—then what sticks out for us is we go through it and we're like, okay, yeah, that doesn't surprise me how well that fleet did based on my experience with them. What does stick out for us is, Oh, okay, I didn't expect them to do at the place there where they did based on my experience, I thought they were gonna do really well, it was a great interview. Or I thought, Oh, hell, I didn't think they had that much going on, but they ended up having great scores. So it's when it doesn't line up that it really sticks out for us. And we tend to notice it. And the ones that are kind of like that, sometimes you get these dark horses that come along and you're not really expecting it. And all of a sudden, there they are very close to the Top20, and that's often how they get to be Fleets to Watch.
Jane: Well, it's kind of changed as well, because people are getting better at filling out those questions. And so you don't have to follow-up with so much. It used to be that I had to follow-up with everybody on how you prevent harassment and violence and blah, blah, blah. I don't I almost don't have to. I mean, you know, you go through it and go, yep, there's an answer there. I don't have any questions about it.
But before, like, five years ago, we were still trying to get people to come on, do something. And now people are doing something. So it's kind of a nonstarter now, or the question about how to get feedback. I mean, there's a lot of information that people— You may not do it. You may not cover it in an interview because we only really— I don't want to say only but we tend to try and make sure that we have all the information. And to score, not go and talk about anything particular.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And the interview is important, but it's not as important as making sure that you are filling out that questionnaire really well. Because the interview, you know, there's a hundred questions and the interviewer can only ask so many things in an hour and a half.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And, you know, you may have a great conversation, but it may not actually fill in the blanks for every single question that there's a blank. We try. But, you know, every so often— And we have to be really vigilant about numbers. We have to get the numbers. And so if there's a fleet that has never answered any of the number of questions properly, then we have to go through those before we can have a conversation about what the fleet wants to talk about. I think that's why we can get surprises now.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in terms of surprises, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the driver surveys because you've been digging through those for the last week or two. Getting your content for your general session. And you found some very interesting things.
And I think it would be good to give this audience a bit of a sneak peek at what you're finding, what you're gonna talk about on the driver side.
Jane: They're not happy.
Mark: Alright. Thank you for that.
Jane: Well, everything is down, and in some cases, it was down last year, and now it's down more. And what I would say is that with the economy, the way that it has been with inflation, with all of the things that are continuing to go on, I think some fleets are not paying attention to the effect it's having on their drivers, and so things like trust... Trust is going down. The number of positive responses to the— So we have a question "I wanna recommend my carrier to other people." The negative responses are definitely going up.
Mark: Really? Yeah. Interesting.
Jane: And it was very interesting, because most of the time people are saying, yes, I'm gonna recommend, like, if they're gonna do this survey, they're probably gonna recommend their company. So the top line the "strongly agree" is going down. So I'm starting to see, like— And this is out of 5200 surveys. I'm starting to see the top line—the strongly agree—go from, like, you know, 70% to 59%.
Mark: Wow.
Jane: Not from this year and last year, but from a few years ago, it would be, like, 70-75%. Everybody was really happy. And now it's basically just going down, down, down, down. And there's really interesting one where the question is about, Have you been given enough opportunity for input into technology?
Mark: A good one.
Jane: That is a surpass. That is by far— And contractors hate it even more. It's way down for contractors where the negative response is much higher. I think it might be— The most negative responses is up like around 5% or 5 to 6%. And you have to understand that when you look at negative responses for these surveys... I am looking at generally 1% to 2% is the strongly disagree.
Mark: They are really unhappy. It's never very high. So it doesn't take a lot for that needle to move a fair bit. So if you're seeing it's at 5%, that's like double what it typically is.
Jane: Well, it used to be that every single time. Every year it would be routing. It would be about, you know, not happy about routing. And routing is still down. It's like 3% strongly disagree, but no. Input into tech is by far the lowest.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: Which is interesting, because they're generally okay with the tech that they have.
Mark: So it's not that they're against technology. They just don't feel that they were consulted. They feel that—
Jane: They're being thrown at them.
Mark: Yeah. They're being given it whether they want it or not.
Jane: Yeah. And routing continues to be a problem. The relationship with the dispatcher, I think, is becoming more and more of an issue. People are saying that, you know, there's two dispatcher questions. One is your dispatcher cares about you or listens to you. And the other one is your dispatcher can does something about your problems when you report them. And the first one—that your dispatcher cares is or listens to you—is not bad. I think it's, like, 3%, which is on the low side, but it's not might be in the twos, which is not bad.
Mark: This is the people that are unhappy.
Jane: The "Strongly disagree." I'm only talking about the "strongly disagree" right now. But when you ask them, you know, How does it go when your dispatcher—
Mark: Can they—
Jane: Can the dispatcher fix a problem? No. That's in the 3.5-4. So they're really, you know, they are—
Mark: And again, this is over more than 5,000 surveys, so it isn't just two or three unhappy people.
Jane: No.
Mark: This is hundreds.
Jane: Yes. And the top line... What I find is the strong agrees are really going down. Like, just kind of in general, think people are moving to somewhat agree in neutral. Like, I see a lot of movement towards neutral where the drivers are like, "Yeah. Okay. I guess they do it." I haven't put this in a presentation, but I think this is an interesting thing where we asked about the lease purchase program. And we said "not applicable" is an option. 7.5% said not applicable.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And it's a chaotic response. It doesn't show really anything. And so I read the comments, and the comments are like, "I didn't know there was one." A lot of it was, "Is there one? I didn't know." And then you have the odd, "Yes. It's great," and the odd, "No. It's terrible." But those are... It's impossible to tell from that whether it's valuable or not. It just tells you that it's all over the place. People are doing it or not doing it, some are doing successfully. Like, it's kinda like how you would envision the answer to "How is your lease purchase." It's kinda negative, kinda positive, and a lot of chaos in the middle.
Mark: Mhmm. And all over the place. Interesting. You had a slide where you referred to this as the great disconnection. I thought it was an interesting concept. Is that the drivers are not feeling connected to their companies anymore?
Jane: Yes.
Mark: So it's not just that they don't trust the companies, or they're not happy but the tech. They're losing that sense of personal connection that they had.
Jane: Yes. I would say, 'cause I got that from the great resignation and that was, you know, everybody quit their jobs. I don't know how many people actually quit their jobs in trucking, but in other industries after 2021-2022, everybody was running around trying to get a job.
Mark: Yeah. Everybody was quitting the jobs when they didn't wanna go back to the office. They had better options.
Jane: A lot of chaos around that. This one is just... I'd really get a sense of just, "I don't care anymore. I almost give up."
Mark: Wow.
Jane: You know, the pay, the remarks, the comments about pay are not improving. They don't think they're fairly paid. The drivers don't think they're fairly paid. Some do. You know, there are people who are happy about it—
Mark: Have drivers ever thought they were fairly paid?
Jane: That question... the routing question was always the lowest scoring one.
Mark: Right.
Jane: "I'm not getting good routes."
Mark: Yeah. Fairness of the routing is always the same.
Jane: It was, you know, it was okay. It was like not... There were people who didn't agree, but it was in the 1-1.5% strongly disagree.
Mark: What you would see is drivers always want more, but they typically would understand that the company is doing what it can.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And so you would see comments said, well, "It would be nice, but I know they're doing what they can."
Jane: And I think you still see those comments. And if that's what your driver survey tells you, then you're you're fine. But there are people who are unhappy, or who are very unhappy. The other thing about dispatchers that I felt was very interesting was the "It depends." That was the overwhelming answer that I got from reading through the comments: "Mine is fine," "I don't know about anybody else's," "It depends," "I had this person before and they were terrible. This person is better." So I think the consistency of quality and dispatch is a real issue in the industry. That there isn't a standard of how to build your skill set in your dispatcher operations, like, whoever is dealing with the drivers. And what I noticed this year is that there's more companies who are saying, well, there are now two different entities looking after drivers. One is the driver services part, which does not deal with dispatch. Fleet manager. Like, if you were a driver manager, you're dealing with the well-being of the driver, not where they're going.
And then there's another part where they have planning and dispatch together. And they do the routing, but driver services has input into that in terms of home time. So driver services worries about home time and getting the hours, but the planning in dispatch is... that part of operations is worried about the business side of it. And those two parts of the organization are talking to each other, which I think is a much better plan than having the person who dispatches, be responsible for making sure the driver's okay and making sure the freight's okay.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: That's a lot; that's a tall order.
Mark: Well, and what's always been an issue is that those people generally aren't trained to be sympathetic counselors or overseers or supportive managers. They are generally tasked with getting freight delivered. We've started to look at that where we ask how these people are evaluated, what are the incentives, what are they being measured on. And a lot of times in the past, it was purely about revenue production. It was mile production, profitability, revenue production, some different set of metrics that are really all about generating revenue for the business and not really about the driver. And it is starting to shift. I did notice when I was looking at the scores in that area this year, much more commonly we see fleets saying that they measure productivity, but they also measure safety and retention, driver satisfaction, and a broader range of metrics that give you a better picture of how well that person is doing, not just at getting the freight delivered, but also keeping drivers happy and safe doing it. But it's an area where there's really very little training. Like, drivers get a ton of training on the safety side of it, and they will get best practices and things like that. But we don't see a lot of training for fleet management on leadership skills, interpersonal skills, any of those kind of things like, How to how to effectively manage a team of drivers.
We don't see very much of that.
Jane: No. The other thing that I was just thinking of when you were talking about that is, I think, the shift—and I don't know why I didn't think of this before, and maybe other people have—but I think the shift in dispatchers and drivers might be being at odds or this whole... Like, there's a general level of frustration at dispatch. Just as a general, like, that's what the survey is basically... That's the tone of the surveys is that they're not that happy with that sort of management of how that's done. But I think it probably shifted when just in time deliveries started becoming really common.
I think twenty years ago, thirty years ago, you didn't expect to have freight there when you wanted it. You couldn't go and buy whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. It was, you know, things would be there or not be there, and sometimes you had to wait, or sometimes you had to order it. There's Sears catalogs where, you know, you had a lot of catalogs and people would order from them. And you had you didn't expect it the next day.
Mark: A bit more flexibility for delivery.
Jane: So you had you had the times that that drivers were required to be at a certain place, or the way that you organize freight. And I think brokers were probably not as common as they are now. They were probably much much less required, because now you need freight brokers to to manage some of that load. To manage that, you know, all of the, you know, who goes where and which and how fast and all of that stuff. When we first started Best Fleets, I didn't really hear about them, but now I hear about them a lot. And it might be because I just read a lot of Freight Waves. But I think that just in time that we need everything now has really transformed the trucking industry, and we never really focused on it.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: You know, when Amazon started getting big, that was around the time like 2005-2006, that was kind of when we were—
Mark: —not too long before we launched the Best Fleets program. That was when we launched CarriersEdge.
Jane: And Amazon didn't become—
Mark: They didn't start with this two-day shipping thing for a while. No.
Jane: Yeah. Or even overnight or same day and all that stuff, that was not on the table, but I never really heard very much about it, like, through conferences and stuff like that. Nobody really talked about just-in-time deliveries and how that effects—
Mark: Or how pervasive it was. Like, that's been a part of manufacturing for a couple decades, but it's now in everything.
Jane: Yeah. So how like, what kind of feat are you are you accomplishing just to get things from A to B? I mean, that's pretty impressive. And that's why, I think, AI is becoming so necessary in transportation is because it's just getting so complicated. Because we only have this much here and we have this much here and you have to put together all of these puzzle pieces. So I think that that might find its way into something I talk about at some point.
Mark: Okay. Well, putting together the puzzle pieces is what we are doing this week, finalizing all of the bits for the conference and getting our content ready, and we've just scratched the surface of the content that we are going to be going through.
Jane: Well, if we did all the content, then
Mark: Oh, we haven't even been we barely talked about one session. I've got a session. You gotta... I've got two sessions. You've got another session in addition to the one that we just talked to us. So there's lots more. And if anybody's interested, go to bftdf.com—Best Fleets To Drive For dot com—and you can get information on the conference and register. There is still registration available. And it's 300$ to go to this thing. So it's a great deal. And we will be seeing people there. I think this is a good place for us to wrap up and get back to it because now you've given me some ideas to go and add into my own content. So let's wrap it up there.
Jane: Okay. Sounds like a plan. Have a good day.
Mark: Thanks. Bye.