The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #114
Jane Jazrawy: Hey, welcome. Hey. Hey. Welcome to episode one-six-four of the CarriersEdge podcast. I am your host, Jane Jazrawy, co-founder of CarriersEdge and Best Fleets to Drive For. And with me, who can probably speak more eloquently....
Mark Murrell: Mark Murrell, other co-founder of CarriersEdge. And that opening illustrates very perfectly where we are at right now.
Jane: Yes. Operating on three brain cells.
Mark: And one of those was not used up to store the episode number. It is actually episode one-fourteen, one-one-four, not one-sixty-four.
Jane: Oh.
Mark: You said one sixty-four.
Jane: Yes, I know, and I thought I was being really good about remembering the number. But I've had to—okay, in my defense, I've had to schedule a lot of things today.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And scheduling is not my forte.
Mark: Numbers and scheduling.
Jane: Numbers and dates and times and time zones and—
Mark: That is not your forte. No. Organizing words and images and files are absolutely your forte. But when it comes to numbers, no.
Jane: Oh, and measurements. And we had a bit of measurements in there. And it's not like I can't do it. I am perfectly capable of doing it, but I also had four meetings. And back and forth on, like, trying to schedule—it's not even scheduling. I can schedule a meeting without a problem. But when I am scheduling two different parties through email, while I'm at a meeting, who are in different time zones, and I have to go back and forth because the times keep changing—
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Then my brain starts to leak out my ears.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And that's kind of where we're at. The leakage has occurred.
Mark: Well, the leakage has occurred, absolutely. And, of course, we are going to talk about the main reason for that brain leakage.
Jane: That sounds gross. Sorry about that, that little picture in your brain. So, the main reason for the leakage, yes, for the lack of brain cells—even though it's been a while. Like, it's March 17, St. Patrick's Day. Happy St. Patrick's for everybody. But, yeah, we had the Best Fleets Education and Awards Conference 2025—
Mark: Yes.
Jane: —Nearly two weeks ago, and we're still not recovered.
Mark: Well, that whole week was gone because, after the thing was done, we had wrap-up and other housekeeping things that we had to do, and then we had travel. And then, after travel, we only got here—even though the conference ended at, like, 2 p.m. on Tuesday, we didn't get back until mid-afternoon on Thursday, and we were just fried.
Jane: We were, because we totally forgot—well, we had to do a little bit of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. We had to go to a third—well, we had to fly back to Toronto, then we had to drive to Waterloo, get stuff, get back in, go back to the airport, and haul around these suitcases that were so freaking heavy.
Mark: Stuff that we had to drop at our storage unit.
Jane: I did not realize until the very last leg of the journey that, oh yeah, there are carts. Remember carts?
Mark: Yes. It was only finally when we were at our final destination, waiting for our luggage, that I saw a luggage cart and went, oh yeah. We should use one of those.
Jane: And we were hauling around a lot of stuff.
Mark: Why didn't we think of that?
Jane: I don't know. And you know what? We were with all of those other people.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like, we weren't just by ourselves. It wasn't just our brain fart. It was also, like, five other people.
Mark: Who will blame the staff?
Jane: Who, you know, were watching us drag all these things around and thinking, oh, Jane's limping. Maybe she shouldn't be dragging this thing around. Yeah. But, like, well, one, there weren't any carts that I could see.
Mark: Oh, I think we walked right by them and didn't—
Jane: Even notice—
Mark: —Them, because they're so ubiquitous at an airport. You don't even notice them. We don't use them most of the time.
Jane: Well, they used to not be ubiquitous.
Mark: Yeah. They—
Jane: At Pearson, they used to—you know, if you got a cart, you were super lucky. Mhmm. Now, there seem to be a little bit more abundant, but, oh, it was ridiculous. I couldn't believe it, because my back is killing me.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It is killing me.
Mark: It was quite a funny sight—the morning of our main day of activities, before you went on for your keynote, you were doing physical therapy on the floor of our staff room.
Jane: Thank you, Tommy.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And the show must go on. Right?
Mark: Yep. And—
Jane: I must be upright. Yeah. I can't wear heels, so I did not wear heels, but I was— I did manage to be upright, and I didn't limp that much.
Mark: No. It was good. And there was nobody in the audience that would have thought you had a limp. You weren't limping on stage.
Jane: I am. I do definitely have a limp. Right? Well, especially not too bad now.
Mark: Yeah. So—
Jane: I'm going to the chiropractor tomorrow.
Mark: So we had a whole week of basically written-off time from the conference and coming back. And then last week was all of the things that we put off till after the conference that were waiting for us, and that was trying to dig through all of those and get sorted out.
Jane: Yes. So we—we dug through stuff, and this week is kind of business as usual, but it feels like— we need a vacation, basically. We need a break. We need a proper break. A weekend is not a proper break. We need to have time to just go and do something completely different for at least a couple of days, yeah, to get our brains back into— you know, to, like, clean up all the mess from the leakage. The brain leakage.
Mark: Pack that back inside the head.
Jane: You know, our complaints notwithstanding, it was a really good—it was a really good time. Yes, it went really well. I was really happy with it. It seems like the fleets were really happy with it.
Mark: Yeah, I would—I would absolutely agree with that because I think it went off pretty smoothly. The guest speakers that we had all did a really nice job. They all had lots of great information to share. The press that was there got lots of stories, and the pictures looked good. The fleets that were there seemed to have a good time. I actually got to go to the reception this time and have some food on Monday night. I wasn't just rushing in as they were taking it all away, so that was good. I would call it a success on most fronts.
Jane: Yes, I think so. Yeah. I think—yeah, there seemed to be—well, we had a lot of improvements. I think we learned a lot from last year, and we implemented some things that were better about how the fleets were presented on stage. I had the idea of going through the historical data on every fleet that was in the Top20 in the Hall of Fame—about how long they've been in the program. When did they actually get on the Top20? Because sometimes they started, or they were nominated in a year, and, you know, I think there was one that was, like, seven or eight years later before they finally got on the list.
Mark: Oh, wow.
Jane: Yeah. And it kinda shows you how, you know, how hard fleets work to actually do it. Sometimes, you can get on the list, and then you're—you know, you're at the top of the heap in a couple of years. But that's not—generally, that's not typical. So I enjoyed doing that, and I was wondering about that, about how it was gonna go, but I think it went really well.
Mark: Oh, it went well. Yeah. And it looked good having their logos up there with their key dates in history as they came out on stage. That was really nice.
Jane: Yeah, I enjoyed that. I didn't get to hear the speakers, though. That's the problem with, you know, running the thing—you don't get to hear what people are saying. So I'm glad that the press has actually run stories about it, so then they can—I can kind of—even though I was there but not there—I can find out about it. So there’s a couple of stories, and I think Truck News has covered it.
Mark: Truck News has done a bunch of stories. Shout-out to Krystyna for that. I think she got five stories out now. So she definitely earned her keep at that event, and she did a lot of stories. So that was good to see. Yes, the speakers were good. Stephen Bojan from Sentry did a really nice job talking about an insurance perspective on workplace culture and the things that insurers can learn within an hour of looking at a company—or how to tell how good a company is within an hour or within a few minutes, like very quick things that they noticed. So he did a really nice job of that, and it really overlapped well with the things that we were talking about in terms of providing a good workplace culture and the benefits of doing that beyond just improving driver retention.
Jane: I—there was a question, and we talked about it afterwards, but there was a question that I had on my panel, because I did a panel with Halvor Lines and Transland. Halvor Lines is a Hall of Fame Best Fleet, and Transland has been, I believe, there for four years. So next year, it will be their fifth if they make it. And one of the questions from the audience was about, you know, how does safety—
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: How does safety sort of affect, you know, whether you're on— you know, are you a safer fleet because you're a Best Fleet? And you had a really interesting response. Their response was, No, not really. There's no correlation. It's really about making your drivers happier. But what I said was that you have to have a good—like, your numbers have to be good to get on the Top20. It's not—you're not—we're not—it's not a safety contest, but you have to have some decent numbers because the driver experience in a collision or when there's a problem is going to affect how satisfied you are with the company.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: So that was the point that I made, but you had some other thoughts on that.
Mark: I had a very strong reaction to that. And if I had been in the room when that question was asked and when they gave that answer, I would have walked down and taken a microphone and corrected them because, yes, their safety programs absolutely tie into this. You can't have a good workplace culture and bad safety—or vice versa. Well, you can have good safety and a terrible culture. And eventually, if you're doing the wrong things to improve safety—
Jane: It will affect your culture.
Mark: It will absolutely affect your culture. So, good workplace culture and safety go together, especially when you factor in retention. There are things you can do to improve safety without improving workplace culture, but they’re unpleasant—like making it really unpleasant anytime somebody gets a violation. That’s going to spike turnover. People will not stick around for that. But if you do it the right way—when people have violations, you coach them, you help them improve, and you take a collaborative approach—then drivers buy into what you're trying to do. They feel like part of a team. All of that ends up having a positive effect on both safety and turnover. So I think, for both of the people that were on that panel, their workplace culture and their safety programs are very interconnected. They all work together. The things that Halvor Lines has done to improve its safety and improve its culture end up being essentially the same things, and it's the same for Transland.
Jane: I think that that's a panel for next year.
Mark: Yeah. Safety and Workplace Culture: How They Fit Together.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: I'm definitely gonna write a blog story about it.
Jane: Well, I think we could do—we could absolutely do that. People are interested in safety and workplace culture and how they fit together because it's one of those things where there’s always a panel. There’s always, like, some sort of talk about safety culture. Mhmm. And is it about a safety culture as in having a good place to work, or is it about having a safe place to work? Like, where is the focus? It’s like, you know, when people talk about good culture, who are they talking about it for? When we talk about it, we're generally thinking about the entire thing. It’s not just for millennials, and it’s not just for safety, and it’s not just for attracting women, and it’s not for—it’s like everything has to fit together. At some point, you have to stop thinking about target groups and start thinking about the general direction that’s going to bring everybody with it—in terms of safety, in terms of feeling like you are part of a team, in terms of feeling like the company has your back.
Mark: Yeah. That's interesting because the industry tends to want to approach these things as if they're silos. Like, I want to focus on safety. So is safety going to be better? I want to think about the things that’ll improve safety. But you can’t think of these things as individual silos. It isn’t just fix safety or fix workplace culture. They’re all the same. Fix safety or fix turnover—they’re all the same. All the same things work. And like you say, it’s got to be for all groups. You have to approach all of the groups in order to get real success with it.
Jane: Yeah. You need buy-in from everybody. Yeah. And I think that’s really what culture is about—having agreement from everyone involved, from the executive team to ops, to safety, to recruiting, to, you know, HR, to drivers. Everybody has to have some input into how you move forward. And from their particular lens. Whereas the executive’s job is to figure out how to make sure that you’re addressing as much of the needs of everybody as you possibly can—without, like, without kinda going lopsided. You know, you don’t want to go too far into operations—you don’t want to make sure that it’s all about getting everything there as fast as possible, because then you have safety issues. If you’re too focused on making sure you don’t have any incidents or collisions or anything like that, then you may actually, you know, your customer service may—
Mark: Well, you have to balance all of those things.
Jane: Yeah. That's what we're—
Mark: Yes. You have to focus on safety, but a focus on safety that also considers all these other elements ends up creating more operational efficiency. So, your customer service ends up better. And then drivers are happier. They stick around. They give better feedback on how to improve things. That, in turn, improves safety. And then you get that flywheel that everybody is looking for.
Jane: I think the—the important part is to figure out what is the basic need that has to be met.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And then try and figure out how everybody else can fit into it.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You know, if you want to make sure that you are not—you know, people are not getting injured. Okay? So you want to have zero accidents, what does that mean for, you know, this weekend when there were tornadoes everywhere? How are you going to keep people safe there? And then we have a question about that. What about natural disasters? And people go, Oh, there aren’t any—except, you know, the tornadoes across the entire Midwest.
So if you don't think about it. If you don't consider it as part of your safety or your operations, if you are, if you have a blind spot where you think nothing's gonna happen, but then you have something happen. You need the input from a number of different parties to make sure that you are actually addressing the problem correctly. If you think about it only in terms of operations, then your customers might be fine, but your drivers won't. If you think about it only from the safety point of view, your drivers might be fine, but your customers won't. It's a give and take.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. I think that will be a really good panel to have for next year, and we can talk about that. I'm already starting to get some ideas of who would be good to be part of that. But, yes, other things that were real high points of the event—our other guest speaker, Kevin, who was talking about the legal side of things and what’s kinda happening in transportation litigation. Those are always fun sessions. And he also talked about the overlap with workplace culture and how that can be helpful in court, and things that people should be doing to kinda prep for it—for the inevitability of a court case. So that was a really good session.
So that one—well, I think we probably will do some write-ups on some of those, but we’ve got our own sessions that we’re gonna be turning into blogs. So all of the stuff that you went through in your keynote had a mountain of information in it. I think we may end up getting a couple of months' worth of blog stories about what fleets are doing well, where they’ve got opportunities, what drivers are thinking, what drivers like and don’t like. You covered a lot of ground on that.
Jane: I did. There was a lot of data, and I think I've talked in previous podcasts about all the data that I've been sifting through.
Mark: But your—your sound bite this year—we had a couple of them. One of them was the great—what? The Great Disconnection?
Jane: Yes. The great—what did we call it?
Mark: The Great Resignation has turned into the Great Disconnection.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: That is what’s happening. We talked about the Great Resignation a couple of years ago—when all of these people who were supposed to be going back into the office just quit their jobs. And a couple of years later, it’s sort of playing out in trucking, where drivers are very much feeling disconnected from their companies now.
Jane: Absolutely. And just to note, the Great Resignation didn’t really happen in trucking.
Mark: Well, it did during the boom time of 2021.
Jane: That was just more regular turnover, when people were thinking, Oh, I can be an owner-operator. I’ll go and get more money here. There was a lot of money happening because there was a lot of freight. So people were job-hopping, because that is traditional. It wasn’t like the Great Resignation, where everybody just kind of quit their jobs all at once. That was bizarre and unusual. What was happening in trucking wasn’t unusual.
But what’s happening now—what I’ve seen throughout the years—is that fleets have been making a real, concerted effort to bring drivers closer. When you have a geographically dispersed workforce—which is what drivers are—they’re away from the office. You can’t hold them close.
Mark: The original remote workforce right now.
Jane: Yeah. And it’s difficult to—when you’re in an office, you can maintain a connection with someone.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Because you see them every day. But when people are far away from you, it’s much harder. They have other things taking their attention, and other people may be saying, Oh, but this is better here, and this is better there. There’s a chance that people may lose connection with you when they’re far away and you don’t know what they’re doing, who they’re talking to, or anything like that.
So what fleets have been doing over the last few years—and especially through COVID—is keeping drivers closer. I think retention rates have improved over the years. And maybe not in all fleets, but certainly in the Best Fleets. Like, you know, people have been seeing routinely that drivers are staying longer. They have more word-of-mouth hires instead of having to spend money on recruiting. They can use a recruiting bonus, and sometimes they don’t even have to do that—they just have a waiting list.
But now, that connection they had built up is starting to fray.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Because of the economic difficulties over the past couple of years. And drivers are like everybody else—because we’re seeing it too. Everybody is looking at inflation. It’s everything. It costs more to live. It costs more to buy a house. It costs more to do everything.
And now, because their income isn’t improving at the same rate as inflation, they’re starting to get annoyed.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And there’s this—well, you know, for a while, they were okay with it. They were thinking, Okay, eventually, this is gonna stop. Eventually, it’s gonna become affordable again. The company’s gonna start making money again, and we’ll just get sorted out.
But that getting sorted out isn’t happening.
Mark: Yeah. We're not happening. Quickly enough. No. Keeps getting kind of punted down the road a bit.
Jane: And I think drivers are starting to get fed up. It’s not just that their pay isn’t increasing—it’s that their equipment isn’t getting upgraded. Everything else about their job is starting to… it’s like when you buy a house and you don’t paint it for five or ten years. That new house that looked so good when you first bought it is starting to have chipped paint, and things are starting to go wrong. And if you don’t fix them, it’s gonna start to look junky.
Mark: Yeah. That was definitely the case, and we saw that with the driver comments about equipment.
Jane: Oh, yeah.
Mark: Yeah, definitely getting worse. And at the same time, you talked about drivers kind of feeling disconnected in terms of technology—the new technology that’s getting put in the truck. They’re not so much against it, but they don’t feel that they have very much of a say in it. They don’t feel like they’re really being consulted.
Jane: Well, it wasn’t just that. It’s about not being consulted—which we’ve talked about before. When you put in a new system, you really have to get buy-in from the people you’re putting the system in for. If they don’t like it or don’t know how to use it, it’s not gonna succeed.
But what I saw from the comments and from the driver survey responses—it’s about ongoing maintenance.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: But not ongoing maintenance of the vehicle. It’s ongoing maintenance of the technical equipment that you put in your—in your truck.
Mark: Uh-huh. That's really interesting because a lot of this is hardware powered by software. And the software is where the companies put a lot of their effort.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And hardware is difficult. Hardware—I remember my earlier jobs in tech. People said, Oh, whatever you do, stay out of hardware. Hardware is the hardest thing to do because it’s so breakable, and you don’t want to help people who are gonna use it in the field. It can be a real pain.
And I think people that produce these technology add-ons to the truck—tablets, cameras, and all of these different devices—are learning that trucking is a challenging industry to support. Yes, the kind of sales pitch pieces work really nicely. And when it’s working smoothly, it can be a really big benefit.
But what happens when it breaks? And what happens when the driver drops it in the mud? Or something happens, and it’s too hot in the—the cab, and, you know, it sucks in malfunction or something goes wrong, or it doesn’t have a great connection? Like, there are all of these things that can cause problems, and that’s where the frustration for the driver comes up.
Jane: I remember—and this is an old story, you’ve heard this before—about Maury saying, Put your modem in the freezer. Yep. And this was—"modems in the freezer" is a story from when I was first employed in my first high-tech job. I sat—there was a wall separating me from the main tech support guy behind me.
And the product that we had was a conferencing thing. It was email, and you could send messages, but you could also use—basically, a communications thing, and you did it over a modem. So everybody had to connect via modem to a bulletin board or, like, to a main number.
And on the server side, you had to have all these modems so everybody could call in. So you’d have, like, six modems. And if everybody was using those six modems, you could have six people online at the same time, you know? I don’t know how it worked, but it was something like that.
But on the server, those modems would get really hot. Especially if the server was popular and you had a whole bunch of people calling in at once. And I remember hearing Maury say, Put it in the freezer. And I was like, Put it in the freezer? What is he talking about? And it was—a modem overheated, so put it in the freezer.
Mark: It stopped working for a good reason. It just got too warm. Yeah.
Jane: Yeah. And apparently, these particular modems did overheat—
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: On a regular basis. So, it was okay to freeze them. Like, you know, stick them in there, they cooled down, and then—Bob’s your uncle—you could keep going.
But you can’t do that sort of thing when people are in a moving vehicle that they don’t stop for hours and hours and hours. Like, how do you keep that going?
Mark: It also kind of put the onus on the user to do a little bit of maintenance on their own—fix the problem on their own. And in that particular case, it worked fine because people were kind of early adopters to connectivity, and they were willing to do some of that work on their own.
But truck drivers don’t want to deal with that crap. They just want something that works.
Jane: Well, they’re okay with doing it on an engine—like, replacing wipers or something like that. Or if—yeah, if they’re mechanically minded and their engines aren’t super computerized, they can do some of that.
I don’t know, maybe fixing a tire? Probably not even that anymore.
Mark: Well, replacing a headlight.
Jane: Yeah. That's a better example. But, I mean, what do you do when the thing that you were supposed to be recording your logs on breaks down?
Mark: Yeah. Or breaks down regularly and repeatedly. That's where the frustration comes—
Jane: Out. Yeah. And you report it, and nobody does anything—because there isn’t anybody to do anything.
Mark: Yeah. The shop is trying to figure out from the manufacturer what to do about it.
So that’s an interesting point. A lot of these things are designed and built in a perfect situation—sort of a perfect environment. And then you put it in the mountains, or you put it on the road in bad conditions, or bad-quality roads getting bounced around, and see what happens. And sometimes, it doesn’t work that well.
Jane: Well, vibration. Vibration is nasty.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Well, it doesn’t have to be, but it can be. Vibration can really do some damage.
And—and obviously, if you’re making something for a truck, you’re going to consider that. But, you know, I think there are things that work better than others.
And that ongoing maintenance—I’d like to add a question about that. In, you know, what do you do? Like, software updates?
Well, even software updates—because a lot of fleets are ransomwared—now it’s become a verb, ransomware—because people don’t do security updates on their back-office system.
So why would they do an update on—
Mark: On the in-cab stuff.
Jane: On the in-cab software.
Mark: Interesting. Good points. But yes, these are all the things that came up that you were talking about in your keynote and lots of great data there.
Jane: Yes. And people, I will say that I think, as a whole, drivers are less satisfied with their jobs than they were two years ago.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: For sure.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It’s not getting better. I think that it’s kind of limping along right now.
I don’t think there’s gonna be a mass exodus, but drivers are unhappy, and it’s going to be harder to attract people into the industry if it doesn’t improve.
I don’t know if improving is in the cards in the next year.
Mark: Tricky. Yeah. Gonna be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Yeah. So that was a very good session. A lot of good information there.
One of the things that I look for every time we do our conference, and every time we do a breakout session or any education session that we do—I wanna see people writing notes. And I wanna have a sense that, when they’re leaving, they have multiple pages of notes.
And I saw that this time. I was very happy to see that the portfolios that we gave out were getting used, and people had multiple pages of notes. People were telling me that they had six and seven pages of notes out of the sessions to work with, and I think that’s about right. You should go home kind of stuffed with ideas.
Jane: Yeah. That was great. I mean, I think—well, my session with Laura and Debbie. Laura is the president of Transland. Debbie, who is the director of driver services for Halvor, had a great session.
What I was trying to do was get at the questions they did really well with and sort of say, Okay, you know, what are you doing that makes you have a high score?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And, you know, what kinds of programs do you have?
So, one of the things was Dial-a-Driver, which is not a new concept. This is from Halvor Lines. What they did—well, they basically put a name to the program.
The executive—or actually, I think it’s just the president, John—gets a bunch of phone numbers from drivers. And every week, he calls a certain number of drivers. The program is called Dial-a-Driver, which isn’t unique. I know that other fleets have done this.
But I liked the fact that it’s actually going out of popularity. I think it’s because it’s difficult to keep the calls going when you have other things to do. But it’s still really important to people.
And it’s a simple idea—a really good, catchy name for the program so that drivers can identify with it and easily share it.
So that’s the kind of thing I like highlighting when we do these kinds of things—saying, Okay, you’re doing this program. Why do you think it’s valuable?
Mark: Yeah. That was good. It was a good session.
And then the final session we had—I was interviewing Tim Chrulski from Garner Trucking to talk about their process for reviewing all of this information and how they decide what to do with it every year. Because there’s a lot, and you can easily get overwhelmed and end up not doing anything. But Garner has a real process for going through it, itemizing where their gaps are, and prioritizing which things they want to work on.
And it goes throughout the year. It’s not just something they do for an hour after they get the results book. It’s something that continues throughout the year, where they do reviews. And then, even when they’re prepping their questionnaire in the fall, they review that as well to make sure they’ve captured everything. But then they’re also starting to think about things they didn’t do that they want to do in the future.
Jane: Give me an example of something that kind of stood out to you, because I was on the radio with Dave Nemo at the time you were doing that.
Mark: Well, what got me thinking about this—and what prompted me to ask them to do it in the first place—was a picture they had posted on social media.
It was about two years ago, and they posted this picture with a caption like, Digging into the results from the Best Fleets program. It was a picture of about six of them in their conference room, all around a projector, with printed copies of their final report and copies of the results book—going through it and discussing it as a team.
So what they do is, they each get a copy and go through it, and they kind of mark it up where they think they have opportunities or ideas about doing things. Then, they discuss it as a group and kinda look at—not just places where they didn’t score as well as they would have liked, but also look at driver comments and feedback on things they could be doing.
And a good chunk of it—and they said this—even after all this time, a good chunk of it is looking at the results and realizing, Oh, we actually do that. We do do that, we just never said anything. We still forgot to mention it after all that time.
Jane: And they’ve been the overall winner. They’ve got three overall wins now.
Mark: Yes. Because they were last year’s winner of the Stratosphere Award—the highest-scoring Hall of Fame fleet.
And then they went and won the damn thing again this year.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Which I was not happy about.
Jane: But—not any— That’s not, you know, a slight against Garner. We just don’t like having repeat winners.
Mark: We don’t like repeat winners. And two of our three overall winners this year were the same as—
Jane: Last year.
So—both women-owned.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: If that matters to anybody anymore.
But I think what I personally like about women-owned companies is that, for the longest time, they didn’t do any better in Best Fleets. In fact, they actually did worse.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I found that women-owned companies were not—you know, like Whoop-de-doo, it’s owned by a woman—but, you know, I don’t see any difference.
Mark: They weren’t better on diversity.
Jane: No.
Mark: They weren’t handling anything any better.
Jane: No.
You know, often, when it was a women-owned company—and this is not the case with K&J, I don’t believe. I think K&J was started by two women.
But anyway, I know Garner was a family-owned company.
What I found—like, ten years ago—was that women-owned companies, you know, you got the company, you inherited the company, and then you just kind of ran it the same way with the same people. And you didn’t really do anything differently.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And even though you were the owner as a woman, you still had six men informing your decisions. And there was really no hope for diversity.
But what I’m seeing now is that gradually, there have been more and more women involved in Best Fleets, which I think is important.
Because I think women—and not just women, but when you have diverse points of view, and you’re thinking about all of them—you can move ahead faster.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And when women are involved, they tend to bring that different type of point of view. So now, we’re getting to the point where women-owned companies are kind of finding their place.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And they are performing better. And that diverse point of view—it doesn’t have to be women. It just has to be—
Mark: Diverse. Diversity.
Jane: Yeah. It's going to help you with that.
Mark: Yeah. No. That's a good observation. That's a very good observation. There definitely is a trend in that direction.
Jane: When you’re completely objective with your scoring and with how you evaluate things, and you’re not just looking at who the in-group is, then you—you know that you’re gonna start to see this.
And I think it’s really important that people understand that objective scoring is essential.
You’re not gonna improve if scoring is subjective in any way. Then no one has any way to know how to get better.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that’s why we spend the time that we do digging into the scoring that particular way and getting so granular with how we score each question.
But then also sharing all of that information.
Here’s what we found. Here’s what’s happening in this particular question. Here’s the most elaborate thing that somebody is doing. Here’s the default thing that people are doing.
All of that information is so that everyone can make an informed decision about what they want to do.
Yeah. And compare themselves against that and say, Okay, well, the industry seems to be moving in this direction, so maybe we should pay attention to that too.
Jane: What's really interesting about your point about getting better at something is that you don't have to get better in the same way.
Mark: Absolutely.
Jane: And that’s what’s key in Best Fleets.
You don’t all have to have the same safety program to be at a certain level. Do it the way you want to do it. Just make sure your drivers are happy with the improvements you’ve made and that you give them the opportunity to have input.
Do whatever you want. If it works, it works.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And I'm happy to hear new—actually, I like hearing new ideas.
Mark: Mhmm. Fantastic. So, we've spent much of the time talking about the conference because it was most of what we were thinking about for the last few months, and it seems to have gone off relatively well. People were happy, and they left with lots of pages of notes, so that's very good.
And now we've had a couple of weeks' break. Next week, we're off to another show—a very different kind of show and much less work for us. A very, very different kind of work.
We're off to Mid-America, which I always look forward to because it's an odd show. It's not easy for us to get to Louisville, that's for sure. It's a pain for us to get there now, but it always provides a great opportunity to talk to customers, talk to partners, and see what's going on in different parts of the industry.
So, I'm curious to see how it's going to play out. We're not doing an education session this year—we're just exhibiting there.
And they’ve changed the whole thing around because they're renovating one of the major wings of the convention center. So, they've mixed up where everybody is exhibiting, which will add a new dimension to the whole thing. But I think it will be a fun time, as it always is.
Jane: Yes. It would be nice—it’ll be like a bit of a vacation because I don't have to do anything except talk to people who come by the booth.
I'm not—you know—I'm not presenting. I'm not on the radio.
Although...
Mark: Oh, you'll be on the radio.
Jane: Possibly. It depends on it depends. I'll walk by the radio and wave at them and see if they—
Mark: This is also the last ride of The Dave Nemo Show.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Oh.
Mark: So, Dave will probably have you on for a segment. He often has us on for a segment during Mid-America.
Jane: That's right.
Mark: —reception and things happening.
Jane: They don’t broadcast right from the floor either.
Mark: On Saturday, I think they do. But Thursday and Friday—yeah, the Nemo group—they rent a big house for their whole team, and they set up in the dining room and broadcast from there.
Jane: See, if I can go there, I'll probably hang out there all day.
Mark: Yeah, you'll never show up.
Jane: Just chat.
Mark: I'll never show up at the show.
Jane: Well, this is the problem. You know, we've been working with Radio Nemo for so long that—we just start chatting.
Mark: Yeah. But Dave is a chatty guy, for sure.
And especially with this kind of being his—I don't know—his final show or his final—he’s been doing his final tour, his retirement tour, and now he's at the—
Jane: He's gonna be like The Who.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It’s never gonna be his final tour.
Mark: His retirement tour is gonna have final tour 40 times.
Jane: Yeah, something like that.
I remember the first time I met Dave. I had no idea who he was. He kind of came up, and—it was GATS, the Great American Truck Show.
Mark: The dearly departed and missed Great American Truck Show.
Jane: Yeah, which was in Dallas, right?
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And so this gentleman comes up to the booth and says hello.
And I'm like, Yeah, can I help you?
And he’s like, I'm Dave Nemo.
Oh!
Mark: You had been on his show a couple of times.
Jane: I had, yeah. And I had no idea. It never connected.
I never really looked at them—I just heard his voice.
So now, I kind of joke with him. If I'm talking to him on the phone—if he calls me or texts me and says, You know, it's Dave—I'm like, Oh! Dave Nemo! Calling me. I'm so excited!
Mark: See, this is why we look forward to the show.
We get to meet up with a lot of people, even though we see them somewhat regularly. Like, we saw Dave two weeks ago at our conference—but we were working.
That was the whole idea.
Jane: That’s the problem. When you're working—or when you're responsible for more of the show—
Mark: Yes.
Jane: —at other conferences, even when we're speaking, we still have time to relax.
But when you're the host—
Mark: Well, and I—I shouldn't mock it too much because we are still working.
We're still gonna be working a booth all day. There’s gonna be a few of us there, and we're still working.
Jane: But we’re not responsible for it.
Mark: Yes. And, like you say, even when you're speaking, that takes it up a level.
But when you're planning the whole thing and making sure it all goes off smoothly—yeah, you gotta make sure registration is okay, meals are alright, AV is taken care of, and nobody walks on stage at the wrong time.
It’s like a million things you have to sort out to pull off the whole thing on your own.
When you don’t have that, everything else looks easy.
Like even here—if we were doing an education session, that’s it. Stand at the booth, then speak for an hour. Oh, that’s easy.
Jane: No problem.
Well, and just to remind everybody—we didn’t just do it, the two of us. We had a team.
Mark: We had an excellent team.
Jane: Yeah, an excellent team who owned so many things.
I just—yeah. It was awesome.
But it is different. You still have to be aware that those things are happening and make sure that you've put in all the things to make sure nothing goes wrong—or if things do go wrong, that you have—
Mark: —contingencies.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Now, just a correction on that.
The one thing that I think we both had very little idea about was what was happening backstage during the awards presentation.
Deanna and Tommy—shoutout to them—did a fantastic job.
I know it was much better this year because we had a live feed coming off the stage so everybody could hear what was happening. That helped a lot.
And Deanna has learned how to wrangle the backstage winners.
Jane: Apparently, the wrangling didn’t happen this year because of two things: the backstage feed—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: —and the fact that I had told her, They have to make sure their logo is what’s going on.
So, people were paying attention to where they were in line. They had visuals.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I think that’s something to remember.
If people don’t have a visual of what they’re supposed to be doing or when they’re supposed to—or, you know, they don’t have that cue—then it’s a lot more hair-raising for them.
I think people felt a lot more comfortable crossing the stage when they know their logo was on screen and know it's right.
Mark: Yeah. Absolutely.
Jane: I like protecting people like that.
I like making sure that when people are on stage with me, they’re not thinking, Oh my god, oh my god!
Like, you know, we had a little bit of an issue with audio—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: —during the first part of my panel with Debbie and Laura.
And you took care of it. I took care of it. It’s not for them to worry about.
Mark: Right.
Jane: You know?
Mark: Yeah. Exactly.
We took care of it so they don’t have to. That’s part of why it’s so much easier when we’re just going to somebody else’s show. Right?
But it’s their problem to sort out.
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: And we can make sure that we get fed and complain about the quality of the liquor and all of that.
Jane: Yes. How was the liquor at ours?
Mark: I didn’t even taste it, really. I had a drink. I had food. I had a drink. I couldn’t tell you. It was fine.
Jane: Yeah. I don’t remember.
Mark: Yeah. You don’t even really notice those things.
Jane: That’s the problem.
That’s why Mid-America is gonna be like a vacation.
Yeah. A vacation in a place where I probably wouldn’t vacation.
But—you know?
Mark: No.
It’ll be a good time. It’ll be a good time.
Jane: And we’re staying downtown too.
Mark: Yes. So that’ll be fun.
I do not like the hotels they have out by the airport and the convention center.
Jane: Airport hotels are the worst.
Mark: Yeah. They’re not even great.
Jane: We went through a whole thing with the airport hotels around the Toronto area.
And they’re all—
Mark: —all the hotels. Yeah.
Jane: Yeah. Just awful.
I think airport hotel is just code for ick.
Mark: Yeah. Code for ick.
Jane: Yeah. You stay in them because you need a chance to—
Mark: —catch an early flight.
We’re gonna have to drive a little bit, but it will be worth it, I think. It will be worth it to stay downtown.
We have that coming up next week.
And somewhere in between all of this stuff, we do have some actual course development happening, some system development, and a whole bunch of things.
And I think maybe what we’ll do is save that for the next episode.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: We keep pushing it off, so we’re gonna have to have, like, a big reveal—like, a whole episode that’s actually only about the slate of training stuff.
Jane: Not Best Fleets.
Mark: Well, this was the last big thing.
Now we’re shifting into lots of core content development and system updates. The team has been doing a great job on these, so we’ll have lots to talk about—probably on the next episode.
Jane: Alright.
Mark: I think, for now, that’s gonna wrap us up for today.
So, thanks for listening, everybody.
Jane: Bye for now.