The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #101
Mark: Hello, and welcome to episode 101
Jane: 101
Mark: Of The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Mark Murrell, co founder of CarriersEdge, joined by
Jane: Jane Jazrawy, the other co founder of CarriersEdge. Hello, Mark.
Mark: Hello, Jane. And we are right in the middle of the hurricane
Jane: Insanity.
Mark: Right now
Jane: Yes.
Mark: As of This moment, it is one week until our big Best Fleets event. Jane and I are both trying to find time to actually build the content for our portions of it. We are both sick.
Jane: I think I may not be as sick as tired.
Mark: Yeah. Well, tired and sick always go together.
Jane: Yeah. But I don't I don't think I don't feel like I have any symptoms anymore except just feeling like crap.
Mark: Your brain is just foggy as you try and parse the numbers together.
Jane: You, on the other hand, have your
Mark: I am starting to
Jane: Customary
Mark: the other end of it and feel a bit better, but I sound awful. So I expect there's gonna be a lot of editing necessary here to remove hacks and coughs and with any, like, no no sneezes at least.
Jane: Oh please, no sneezes. Oh my lord. Your sneezes are, like, huge amounts of decibels.
Mark: Yes. I will not deafen people with those. So, well, it seems like we're probably gonna talk about content for our event because that's mostly what we have been buried in.
Jane: That is what we have been doing for the last little while. I would say the last month or so has been getting more and more of Best Fleets, Best Fleets in the house. It's like a fever pitch now.
Mark: Yeah. And it's been more and more urgent to try and actually get the time to put the content together.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: For our last episode, I talked about our session at Mid-America that we were about to do.
Jane: And how did that go?
Mark: I think it went well, which is a phrase rarely uttered by me. Usually, when people ask me how it went, I have a litany of gripes of all the little things I wish I'd done differently. But at that point, I thought You know what? I was actually pretty happy with how it went. It wasn't a big audience.
That was my big question mark going into it is who comes to this these things, who comes to these education sessions at a truck show, how many people are coming, and what is their make up? I didn't know if it was gonna be all drivers, all fleet people. If it was just gonna be vendors looking for a seat, who knows? Well, it was all of the above. We had built our slides kind of intentionally vague with some broad statements on them with the thinking that we would poll the audience at the beginning and then tailor the content to fit the audience.
Except that on that stage is bright lights in your eye and you can't really see when you ask people to show a hands who does this and who does that, you can't necessarily see all of them. So Yeah.
Jane: You have to get off the stage and go peer at them and then go back on. So
Mark: Yeah. So from what I could tell, it was a pretty even split of owner operator, company driver, carrier people and vendors. So that kind of checked every box, so we just kind of did a generic version of the content. But it was good. I find it fascinating to do a session like that and have so many people come up afterwards and make it clear that they'd never heard of the program before this.
And I'm like, how is that possible? This thing has been going on for sixteen years now, We are in the media all the time. We had a four part story in the in the media and Heavy Duty Trucking last week going through the results of the best leads program? How are there people that still haven't heard of it?
Jane: I think that people, unlike us because the way that we consume the news is we look at everything that everybody sends. So we look at ATA, Heavy Duty Trucking. We look at CCJ. We look at the Canadian news, we look at, you know, we might look at the owner op Landline magazine as well. So we're we're kind of everywhere.
We're consuming a lot of different places where the news comes from, but I can see that some people have one source of news that they use. So they are only getting their trucking news from ATA or they're only getting it from their state association or they only they're only going to not maybe not even Truck News. Maybe they're looking at a smaller magazine that like a recruiting magazine you know, maybe they don't read news at all and really assume that, you know, if you're not at the show that I go to, then you don't exist. So I think that's kind of like we try really hard to sort of spread ourselves out around everybody, but there are still like tons of people who have never heard of CarriersEdge, never heard of Best Fleets to Drive For and I feel like we've saturated a whole bunch of stuff.
That even if you don't wanna be a customer or participate, you still know who we are. But it's a huge industry and there's so many different little bit sectors and bits. And, you know, some people are only they're only dealing with fuel hauling and they don't really wanna deal with anything else. So they're only agriculture and they don't wanna hear about, you know, LTL or over the road and that kind of thing.
Mark: Well that's that's a very good observation because I see people say, oh, it's a small industry. It's a big industry, but it's a small industry because you see the same people over and over. What I've realized, it's actually a lot of small industries.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And, yes, there are little pockets where you see the same people and there's a lot of overlap, but those pockets are completely disconnected from other pockets.
So private fleets are completely disconnected from a lot of the for hire people. Tanker people are in their own world doing their own things and like livestock haulers are doing their own things. And all of the owner operators that living that are living in the spot market, same kind of thing. So there's a lot of these little pockets of small world kind of things. And once you're in one of them, you see a lot of the same thing over and over.
But I guess that's it. There's a lot of these small pockets that we haven't got to yet, but It's
Jane: I mean, unless we are at every single show that exists on the planet, we'll probably still miss people and it might be that they haven't gone to a show for a few years and or they haven't done anything. And they're just, you know, kind of doing their own thing, like, just trying to get their freight and move their freight and collect their fees and whatever. Kinda like, I think for us in the e-learning world, like, sometimes we just have not paid attention to it.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that's true. That's true.
Jane: And, you know, something will kinda come out of left field and take us by surprise, and it's because we're not following the industry that we are from
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Because we're following the industry that we serve.
Mark: Yeah. Okay. That's a good observation. Good point. Yeah.
Well, it always strikes me because anytime I do a presentation about Best Fleets stuff, I start at the beginning by talking about the program itself and how it works and why we do it the way we do. And I've done it so many times that I always think ahh do we really need to do this. Like, didn't everybody know all this stuff? We're even going through it prepping for our event next week.
Do we really need to go through all of this stuff? And, yeah, we need to go through it because there's people for whom it's new.
Jane: Well, we are gonna have to go through it because the press may not have heard it. And we're getting, I think, the press most of the press that are coming to our event are people who may not know because the ones who are more experienced or are gonna take off to Sweden, is it?
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Yeah. They get a nice trip to Sweden.
Mark: So thanks, Volvo, for that. Yes. We booked our event and booked media to come. And then the started kind of sheepishly saying, well, you know, I'm not actually gonna be able to make it to your event because Volvo's doing something in Sweden and how could I pass up a trip to Sweden? So we're gonna send a a different editor we have a new editor and it's gonna be a good way for them to learn.
So we're getting some of these editors that are newer to the newer to the beat. So, yeah, we will have to cover that.
Jane: Well, we also that happens a lot to us and that that whole we end up teaching people.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: About the industry or about their you know, sometimes we have a customer who has a new admin and then we end up teaching them how everything works at their carrier.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And we did that when we did custom work too.
Mark: Oh, yeah. You always end up educating your customers
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: On how their own businesses work.
Jane: Yeah. And it is a bit, it is a bit of a pain, but it's I know that it's very much appreciated by the people who who need that knowledge because they may not be able to get it from their own company. So, you know, get it where you need to get it.
Mark: Yeah. Well, one of the other things that came up at MATS that I was really happy about the thing that I really enjoy about going to truck shows more so than conferences is actually getting a chance to talk to the drivers that work at our customer companies because I can't always talk to them. I don't do frontline support anymore and even when you're doing frontline support, they're calling in when they have a problem. So it's a different kind of situation.
They're often trying to get something done so you just need to help them you can't be picking their brains for an hour about life on the road or anything. But when they come by our booth at a show, well, that's fair game. So if it's a driver working for one of our customer fleets, they often will come by just to say, hey, we use you and have some questions about it. Sometimes they have a bit of a gripe or something and often it's just how the program is being administered so I can talk to them about that and take away notes that we can follow-up with their their safety people about. But it's always great to talk to them about how they're using it, what they think about, what they like to see more of, get that kind of direct feedback.
And I I always love seeing when they pull out a phone and bring up our app and there's some content and there assignments on there that they're working through or they have questions about it, so it's very cool. So I got to talk to not as many this time as I have in past years, but maybe five or six
Jane: Well, what's the total attendance for MATS kinda down?
Mark: Definitely down. Yes. They were advertising something like fifty five thousand people, which is fairly low for MATS for other shows that would be huge. But for MATS, that's starting to shrink. And the vendor count was definitely down.
The exhibitors, there's a bunch of there's always some who don't show. You you can tell that they booked a booth and then didn't show, but there's more of those than normal. There was a good number of spaces that clearly didn't sell because there's not even a booth there. They just put a pathway or they put a bench there or something where there would
Jane: normally be a booth.
Mark: Yeah. Where it makes sense to have a booth. You know, there's a bench where that doesn't make any sense for there to be a bench. So you could tell that there's somebody who who or they either didn't sell the space or somebody pulled out, you know at the last minute. So there's a bunch of that, but that's to be expected in a down economy and lots of people that were griping about the economy.
And some of the education sessions dealing with brokers and load boards did get a bit heated from what I understand. Because there are people that are unhappy about what's happening with the spot market and what's happening with rates and how much brokers are still making off of those loads.
Jane: And the transparency that of what people are getting and what the load board is getting that was I I think that is what makes people really mad if they're not getting the whole story and they feel like they're being fooled. That's gonna cause a lot of anger.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Which brings us very nicely into one of the things that I know you're working on right now, which is digging through the driver surveys
Jane: Oh yes
Mark: To put together your content for your general session next week
Jane: Because that's what I do. I dig through the surveys, and it's one of the most difficult things to do because I find the most interesting thing is what drivers say that isn't the answer to a direct question. It's well, it is kind of the answer to a direct question, but it's we have two questions at the end, which is what do you like the best at your company? And what basically, what do you like the least?
Or what do you think should be improved? And I've been looking at these these answers for a lot of different, you know, multiple years. And I did a I I did a seminar series with Great West Casualty in 2018. And I did a presentation that had the same I was looking at the same information and the difference between 2018 and 2024 is or 2023, let's say, is quite interesting because things have definitely changed in the industry.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I have to when you look at the, what do you like the best and what do you like the least, you have to look I mean, there isn't any direct answers. You have to look to at the comments.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And when you look at the comments, what are you looking for?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: I mean
Mark: You see are there any trends? Is there common answers? Yeah.
Jane: And what you look for is how many times do people say the same word over and over again
Mark: Certain words, certain combinations of words that mean the same thing.
Jane: Yeah. And you can and and the way that I used to try and figure this out is by doing a word cloud. Because when you use online word clouds that'll pull out the most common words and you can go and edit it and and get rid of like the. You don't want the is gonna be very common. But now, there are more you can find these tools that will basically, you know, suck at all the text and do that analysis.
A little bit for you. And what I found well, I don't know if I should tell you what I found.
Mark: No. Well, you can tease it.
Jane: I can tease it.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: It is so what I would say is that in general, people like the fleets that they're working for better, but they're very unhappy about specific things. So the satisfaction with certain things has gotten lower but the overall satisfaction has gotten higher.
Mark: So overall, they like their companies, but they have some very defined gripes.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And those gripes are not getting better.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: It's they I well, they the gripes are so when I look back at the last couple of years, pretty is much the same. The numbers are not that different, but when you look five years ago, they're very different.
Mark: So that's what I find interesting about what you're doing. It's easy to look at a set of numbers that come in for a year and say this thing is more popular than this thing or people like this and don't like that. And within the context of that specific block of data, that might be somewhat useful And that's what a lot of people do as they look at that. And that's the obvious starting point is to see where the most common things, where is the popular stuff, the unpopular stuff. But what you started doing here is looking back over years because now we've got such a mountain of past year information to compare to.
That you started to look back and compare it to previous years. And what I thought was interesting is you started I think going back five years or something. You went back to like 2019, which is a really interesting time because since then, there's been such a whipsaw effect of COVID and then post COVID crazy and then post post COVID depression and everything sucks and where are we at now? So we still aren't really back or not really reset to where we were at pre COVID. It's kind of whipping around wildly from one side to another or sort of the pendulum swinging wildly.
And it hasn't really established a a balance point yet.
Jane: Well, there's different things pulling now. And I would say that retirements are starting to become an issue.
Mark: I find that so fascinating.
Jane: Well, it's not it's not the fact that people are leaving the industry. It's that people are more interested in retirement savings now. And when we were doing the Best Fleets like in the twenty teens
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: No one cared.
Mark: No. But what's fascinating about that is you're also finding that the age is starting to skew lower.
Jane: Yeah. So, well, there but it's it's not that the skewing lower, and I need to do a little bit more digging, but I think with contractors, it actually is the older the oldest generate like, the oldest category of age, which would be 60 and above. I there were very few. Like, that was the smallest. And I think I think we had no no contractors 60 and above in our this year.
Yeah. So or it was, like, very few little or none. So I wanna see what the trend was going back a couple of years to see if it is, you know, if it's an anomaly or if it's has been trending like that, because the and for company drivers, it's still kind of the same. But for contractors, it's definitely not.
Mark: Interesting
Jane: It's different. It's very different. And because when I was looking at it, I was like, oh, yeah. I gotta get the contractors in there, and I thought it was gonna be pretty much the same, and it wasn't.
So I don't want it to go into any more detail than that because then what's the point of going to the event?
Mark: Well, there's a whole lot of other stuff and you got a lot of details.
Jane: Yeah. That's just what that this is like the one slide I'm working on right now. Yeah. But there's other there's other interesting things. I don't know if it would be surprising, but it would probably be comforting for people to know that it's across the industry.
It's not just you.
Mark: Interesting. Yeah. That's very different.
Jane: And what are you working on when you're doing your stuff?
Mark: At this point, I'm going to be doing a little bit of of work because we've got two guest speakers that have sent me their decks, so I've got to work their deck into our master template. And that's a little bit of administrative work. I did have a look through Chris Henry from KSMTA has sent us his deck on traits of profitable companies. And he's got a very interesting thing that he's doing as kind of a fun opening he's doing a worst companies to drive for, worst fleets to drive for.
Jane: Is he really?
Mark: Event he's got a few slides talking about the the traits of the worst companies to drive for.
Jane: He doesn't name any companies
Mark: No. No. These are the things that will set you up for failure. So I looked through the slide. He said, hey, this is my attempt at humor to do some of this in there.
And I think it's gonna be fantastic it's gonna be really fun.
Jane: Oh, good.
Mark: Or it may be a dismal failure, which in either case, it'll be fun to watch. Yeah. That that's what
Jane: Aww
Mark: Yeah, that's cruel
Jane: That's kind of mean for Chris.
Mark: That's kind of cruel. No. I'm sure it'll be good. Chris is a good speaker. He's got lots of great information.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: And I think it is kind of a fun way to spin it and talk about the things that they see that caused problems down the road. And he has some things that are pretty obvious. I think it's something about trying to make your lease purchase program into a profit center. Or, like, creative settlements finding new ways to deduct from driver pay and stuff like that. Like, yeah, that stuff is just going to irritate the crap out of drivers.
And, of course, they're not gonna be happy about it, and it doesn't end up saving the company any real money.
Jane: As we know, as we have seen in over the last little while, been a lot of different ways to try and make money or try and move money around in such a way that less of it gets to drivers. Or more of it goes into the owner's pocket. But
Mark: Fudge the numbers, basically.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. It's an updated version of cooking the books. You're not really a better business, but you can make it look that way.
Jane: What's really sad is that what ends up happening is that drivers paint every carrier the same way with the same with with that brush.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And they just assume that every carrier is trying to take advantage of of them by, you know, cheating them in a lease purchase program or or trying to, you know, fudge their miles so that they don't have to pay them as much. And it's really unfortunate because it's not it is not I don't even know if it's the majority of carriers, but there's a certainly very solid group of carriers who want to actually treat drivers well. And that's what
Mark: That's crazy talk.
Jane: I know. I know. But that's what we found over the last fifteen years of the Best Fleets is that people are trying really hard.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think Chris has got some good points on there. I think I think it will align very nicely with some of the stuff we're talking about. And, you know, you're talking about people trying to squeeze drivers in different ways and that actually fits in with one of the things that I'm gonna talk about in my opening session is things that end up getting dumped down onto the driver that really shouldn't be the driver's problem.
If you manage properly, you can pay drivers for these things and then you solve the problem higher up the higher up the chain there and then it's not stuck on the driver and they're happier and your business is more efficient over the long run.
Jane: Yeah. Andrew Boyle of Boyle Transportation used to have a used to have a saying about that is basically take it off the backs of the drivers.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And, you know, manage it yourself.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And it's a little bit harder to do, but you're gonna make your drivers a lot happier. I can't remember what exactly he said, but I remember him talking about it.
Mark: Yeah. Well, I'm also tying it into the fact that it's better for the business overall. If you're dumping the stuff down onto a driver that really shouldn't be a driver problem. That's a business inefficiency.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: That will bog you down over time. And the sooner you can identify and fix these inefficiencies, the faster you can improve your profitability.
Jane: The one thing that I am seeing a trend and I probably have talked about this before. Is this using AI as a replacement for a human being with a driver? So having AI answer a driver, like, kind of like an Alexa for drivers.
Mark: Oh boy.
Jane: Yeah. I've seen it, and I've seen I've seen a couple of stories about it where people are thinking, hey, you know, I don't have to I don't have to answer the phone. If a driver is calling anymore, if they have a common question, then, you know, someone, you know, AI can answer it. And I find that such a dangerous way to go. People do not like talking to computers.
Mark: Oh, yeah. People have been screaming at their automated call director things for years.
Jane: I know.
Mark: Those those cues that are like everybody's having to shout what it is that they want and they're just saying agent agent agent
Jane: English!
Mark: Yeah, operator please
Jane: I know.
Mark: You know because it always wants you to speak something, then it badly tries to interpret what you said.
Jane: Or it just tells you it doesn't understand and sends you back to nothing.
Mark: And tries to be friendly about it at the same time.
Jane: Oh, it's a very pleasant voice that's not helping you at all.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: But it's very very annoying
Mark: Nobody wants more of that. And it also is a great example of solving their own problem. My goal for a session is the wrong problem, the things that drivers say they want and fleets focus on that aren't necessarily the right thing. So in that case, if you're getting the same questions over and over again, don't put an auto attendant on it.
Don't put chatbot to answer it, figure out why nobody understands it, communicate properly.
Jane: Exactly. I know. I know. And it's not, you know, when you when you look at the, you know, what drivers like the best, it's not an automated attendant.
That doesn't come up.
Mark: Yeah. This company uses AI for all their communication. That never came up.
Jane: Thank goodness. This is finally I finally found the answer.
Mark: Where does that fit into the we treat everybody like family and you're a name, not a number.
Jane: You're an insert name here instead of a number.
Mark: Yeah. You're an interaction with our chatbot.
Jane: Yeah. Exactly. Well, yeah, that whole chatbot thing, I don't like chatbots. They never, my questions are never answerable by a chatbot.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And sometimes it's not answerable by AI either. I've had many questions to chat GPT come back with either they're not allowed to answer it or they're not, you know, or they
Mark: They don't have that information.
Jane: Yeah. They don't have that information.
Mark: Suggest you go some obvious place that you went. Well before going there.
Jane: I've never heard of I remember one of the I had I went to chat GPT to do some experimenting, and I was doing it right before a show with Dave Nemo. And I said, who is Dave Nemo?
Mark: Okay.
Jane: They had not heard of AI had not heard of Dave Nemo. At all, they needed more information. So I had to basically do the Google search for them or basically tell them he's a deep, you know. And then they kinda had some information.
Mark: Then they read the about paragraph from the website. Right?
Jane: Exactly. Exactly. So I don't know. I don't I I think that AI is probably very helpful in some instances, but I don't think that trying to replace humans with AI is going to work in the long run. I think people are gonna try it and realize that even if their drivers are happy with it to begin with, they're not gonna be in the long term.
They want people to talk to. They want a human being who understands their issue. Yeah. Who can make them feel safe.
Mark: Well, that was one of the things that I noticed at MATS this year is less of that AI powered everything and all of these tech pros that are gonna solve every problem in trucking. There's a notable decline in their vendor presence and the amount of them walking around. So that definitely changed.
Jane: For the good.
Mark: What took their place. Weirdly, it was factoring companies. We had to have six or eight factoring companies come by our booth wanting to see if there's some way to work together and
Jane: How would we work with a factoring company?
Mark: I don't know. So for anybody who's not familiar, a factoring company basically buys your receivables. So
Jane: It's collection agency. Right?
Mark: Yes. A factoring company is like a collection agent. They go out and get the money from your customer at 90 days or 120 days or whatever, but they pay you now. So you get the money soon. They do the waiting and they take a piece of it.
And there's tons of them out there now. I don't know why.
Jane: Oh, I know why? Because people aren't
Mark: Everybody wants their cash now.
Jane: Well, people aren't paying for their services. Or their
Mark: Yeah. You know what? That's exactly right. Everybody is sitting on their cash. So the terms have gone from 60 to 90 days and 90 to 120 and they're, they're taking their time paying their bills and small owner operators can't wait.
They they can't sit and wait three months or four months.
Jane: I remember when we were the equivalent of a small owner operator and we wanted like getting net 60 was not a very happy time.
Mark: Yes. Net 60 was not a great time. Well, then there was, I remember, in the '08 '09 recession, it was 60 or 90 days, but then we only do a check run twice a month, so it'll be on the next run after 60 or after 90 days or whatever. So it could end up being a lot longer. Oh, and then we're gonna put it in snail mail for you.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: That's our policy. They are doing everything they can. The only thing that I haven't seen yet that used to happen periodically then is the check arrived arrived with no signature on it. That was a a great trick when they
Jane: Did that happen a lot?
Mark: It used to happen periodically. That's a a trick with smaller organizations that have manual signatures is they then they can say they paid, they put the check-in the mail, And, yeah, it's on its way and then you get there and you can't cash it because there's no signature on it.
Jane: And then you have to call and then you have to do it again.
Mark: Okay. We'll get it at the next next pay run.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So factoring companies solve those problems. They deal with all of that crap, and so you don't have to. So I could see them being much more popular with owner operators now. For sure. So, yeah, very interesting seeing the shifts and the decline of the AI powered everything at at MATS and very interesting what you were seeing in your research so far for drivers. What drivers like and what they don't like. Any other tidbits that have jumped out for you thus far?
Jane: Not really that I can go into. I'm going to be investigating some more things, but I haven't. I have I know that what I wanna look into, So what I generally like to do is compare the driver's surveys, what the the sentiment is, to what the carriers are doing. So are carriers so for example, if if there are people are interested in retirement programs and are carriers offering them.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And of the top 20, are they offering them? Is it the general rule? Is it, you know, something that is going on? Is so it that kind of thing that's kind of what I am doing right now
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Is is doing that comparison. Because you're not gonna get that even if you do get a report, you're not gonna get the entire
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You're not gonna get the entire picture.
Mark: Well, that's also stuff that is perfectly suited for you because it's a mass of information that needs to be sorted through and need someone to make sense of it. And that is definitely where your strength is to go through that and compare it to see where the trends are, what are the surprising things, what's unexpected, where is there a gap between what drivers are asking for and what fleets are doing that's really useful kind of macro information for that opening session.
Jane: One of the things that I'm not gonna talk about, but I have noticed, is that the number of women have really not changed.
Mark: Oh, I find that interesting.
Jane: I think that's I'm not sure if that's because Now, I don't know why that is because definitely the number people are trying to increase the number of women. Definitely, there's a huge increase in the efforts to you know engage women in the idea of becoming a driver. But I'm and I think that some fleets are really having success in it, but overall, not kind of meh.
Mark: Yeah. It hasn't made much of the difference.
Jane: It's kind of kick it like, and and I've noticed that when they talk about in the States. Now in Canada, it's been around three, three and a half percent for ages. In the US, they're I know that Women in Trucking a while ago was saying it was up to ten, but it never was. I don't believe that it ever was. But I think it's really around seven.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Maybe seven and a half, seven to eight, and that is about how it is. Well, I think it's around I have to look at the actual numbers, but for the driver's surveys, it's around ten.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And it has been around ten.
Mark: So ten percent of our driver surveys come from women drivers.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: Which is more than the actual units of women drivers.
Mark: So a disproportionate number of our surveys are being done by women. If there's only seven percent women in the fleet
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Then seven percent of our surveys should be from women, but we're above that. We're
Jane: always like that. It's always I my suspicion and I can't really verify this one one way or the other, but I think that if you are in a team, it's mostly the women. If there is a husband and wife team, it's probably gonna be the woman part of the team who's gonna do the survey. I think that's where it skews. I think the teams actually kinda change that a little bit, or it might be that women are more likely to do the survey. In general.
Mark: Could be, but what I find interesting about this is that we assume that the results that we get the feedback that we get from drivers in general is kind of indicative of the industry. Even though it's a smaller sample. It's not a a huge sample. It's not the entire industry by any means. But we assume that it is a representative sampling of drivers across fleets and certainly across the industry if we look at the type of fleets that participate.
But these are also the better operators. So the companies that participate in our program are the better operators in the industry because they are the ones that have their act together enough to get nominated, to be able to go through the process, to complete things in the time it needs to be completed.
Jane: Get all their driver surveys in
Mark: Yeah. Get their surveys done. They have a mechanism for getting driver feedback. So that pushes them into the higher portion of the chart there as far as the the quality of the operation of the fleet. But I would say because of that, they probably are likely to have a higher percentage of women working for them than other fleets do.
Because if you're a woman looking for a fleet, are you gonna put up with those garbagey or fleets that, let's say, are less mature? Haven't got there to act together yet are maybe more struggling, that are still emerging, or are you gonna go to one of the better operators, certainly the people that are recognized as better operators, and feel that you're in better hands there.
Jane: I think with the fact that our surveys are a little bit skewed, I think it's because we have some fleets that are very high in women.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: That just are they have been Boyle for example is forty percent, forty five percent women I haven't looked at it lately, but I'm sure they hover around fifty percent as it is. Prime is also, like, twenty seven percent women. And so there are some that skew higher and that might have the numbers a little weird. That's why I don't really pay attention to it anymore. The other I I don't think I I don't think that the the women drivers in the industry is increasing that much. Yeah. I don't think it's statistically significant.
I think that it is more significant the age the age range is dropping. Yeah. I think that is definitely significant
Mark: younger drivers are coming in.
Jane: Yeah. And you might have more women in a younger driver set, but it's not I don't think it's really happening yet.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: I do there's a lot more talk about it, but I don't know if that's actually increasing the number of women.
Mark: So you just raised an interesting point that maybe it's not there's more younger people coming in. Maybe it's just the older people are leaving. So there's less of less of them in the sample, so it looks younger in comparison.
Jane: Well, you have to have the younger people doing it
Mark: Yeah, the younger people are there, maybe the same number of younger people that it always was, but fewer of the older people.
Jane: No, because the numbers are similar to what we had pre COVID.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: So the number of surveys are
Mark: In terms of absolute numbers.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And so it's not like we only have 3,500 surveys done and, you know, 1,000 of them were old people, so they they're not in there anymore. It's we still have the same number of surveys.
Mark: Right.
Jane: So it's just that and it's funny because it's not you don't see the change from year to year. You have to go back.
Mark: Yeah you have to go back over 5 years
Jane: And that's when because it's such a gradual change. Like, everything is super gradual. I think we probably don't see like every so often, we see something usually because of regulations that happens.
You know, like tech.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Tech happened in a couple of years. Tech really changed. And for demographics, you can't look at like, that's not gonna happen. You're gonna see, like, little gradual bits of change.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And but if you look back and that's why I'm looking back five or six years because I wanna see I'm not gonna ever see a jump from year to year. I'm gonna see a gradual little tiny bits. What I was looking for is when did that jump happen? Like, when how far do I have to go back to actually see a significant change?
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And in 2018, is pretty much it.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: Yeah. But 2018 and 2019 were interesting because 2019 was a crazy period. Everybody was just like 2018 was pretty good. 2019 was like it was like the roaring twenties.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And then 2020 hit, and it was like, and then everything everything kind of reset in a bad way and everything is kind of now turning back to normal. I will say that one of the biggest changes between 2018 and now is education. Education has gone, like, I I wanna look at the number of new entrant programs.
Mark: Oh, okay. New entrant stuff.
Jane: Yeah. Because new entrants and you know
Mark: Well, I've noticed that as well. Just anecdotally looking at how we score it every year. And it was, like, completely skewed and weird through COVID. And then it was, oh my god, we need drivers. Let's get some new entrant programs.
And then this past year, I think it sort of shifted because there's people that weren't really looking for new drivers. They were just trying to keep the course, so that changed things a bit. But it's been very topsy-turvy for the last few years.
Jane: Oh, yeah. And we know that people are interested in how to create a driver trainer that's going to create the drivers that you want. And that has been I think that's been a been of a kind of a theme. And, you know, we sponsor Education Station, which is a RadioNemo show that think it's once a month on last Friday of every month and or first Friday of every it's it's on Friday, once a month. And it's talking about, you know, how to create a driver. How to you know, what is the best way to train a driver? What is, you know, a good what does a good school look like? And I think that the carriers are looking at that as well.
Like, they're trying to figure out how do we create a program that's going to give us a repeatable success rate because they don't want to have people come into the programs and immediately or not be part of the industry. They're not doing it to make money. They're doing it to make drivers because they need drivers. So how do you make a repeatable, sustainable method of creating a driver who is able to function on the road? And wants to stay there. I think that's half the battle is, how do these people actually how do you make them wanna stay? So I am gonna look at that as well.
Mark: Fascinating.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that will build nicely on one of the things that I'm going through in my opening session about solving the wrong problems and make sure that you look at the actual cause of things as I'm going to break out turnover and just thinking about this because you're talking about new entrant programs and everybody always thinks that if you have a new entrant program, you're gonna have higher turnover. And year after year, we find that's not the case.
Jane: Well, it can be the case, but it doesn't have to be the case. There one does not equal the other. And that was the problem that we had before where people were saying, oh, well, I got a new entrant program, I have higher turnover. And you have a new enter program, but if you have higher turnover, what are you doing in that program that is not addressing something. There's a gap. You have a gap. And I think the people who have been successful with their new entrant programs have figured out what that gap is.
Mark: Well, what I find interesting is the numbers end up very similar every year. So I look at it when I'm doing the final calculation before we figure out the winners, I look at that and I want a control for it to see is there a difference, you know, if it is the case that certain certain types of program, skew the turnover numbers, then I want a control from that control for it in the final scoring. So what I do is I look at the average retention across all of the fleets, then I also break it out by their score in the new entrant question because we score that. So we're going to assess the quality or how robust their new enter program is. And I will break out the driver retention or turnover rates by those different categories to see what happens.
And it turns out that actually the people that have no new entrant program end up having worse turnover. So I think this year it was scored. It was between zero and four were the different point value. So if you didn't have any program, you got zero. If you had a very basic program, you got a one, and then it went up to very elaborate at four.
And the people who scored one definitely had better turnover than the people who had a zero who didn't have any program. But then there is a gap, the two and three those scores end up being people that have higher turnover. And then the fours have great turnover. So if you have a moderate program or a very robust program, it actually improves your driver retention quite a bit. But those kind of midrange twos and threes programs, it actually hurts your driver retention.
Jane: Because your program isn't developed properly.
Mark: It's yeah, it's maybe turning more people. It isn't I think it's not developing the instructors quite the same way. But yeah, it may also be that the ones, the very basic programs, are kind of a newer new entrant program.
So there's a bit of novelty and excitement over that and people are sticking around
Jane: Or it's a small number.
Mark: Small number sometimes.
Jane: Because if you're doing one on one training with someone, then you're gonna have a better experience than if you're if you have a more formal program that isn't really developed yet and is a little bit more haphazard.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Then that's why I think that the, you know, your turnover is gonna be better on that lower end. And we had the same results with, we're talking about time away from home.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: Remember when we were looking at that? And it was
Mark: We used to score that for a bit, or we would track it to see if it was going to make a difference. And the last couple of years, it hasn't made any difference.
Jane: Yeah. Because fleets have figure out how to
Mark: Yeah. It's not meaningful.
Jane: No. It's interesting. Like, the more that the fleets try and figure out how to make something not palatable, but something more what do you call it when you make it more likable? Can't think of the word.
Mark: More palatable?
Jane: Not more palatable because that makes and does make it sound like the job is
Mark: Attractive?
Jane: That's it. So when you try and make the job more attractive for a specific route or a specific set of days that you're out or some specific thing and you put effort into that, then it's going to have I think you're going to have a much better, bigger effect.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You know, when you pay attention to different groups of drivers' needs, So what I found before, like, when we started this program and ten years ago, people would just sort of say, oh, we can't. It doesn't work. You know, we have to do it this way. There aren't enough dedicated routes. We're not we don't we don't do this.
We don't do that. But people are not saying that as much anymore and they're saying, okay, how do we how do we do this? Or how do we Okay, here's where our retention sucks. So, you know, how are we going to make it better for this group of people? And they're becoming more specific than people aren't going ah drivers, they're just they're just this mass that or they're all the same. They're looking at specific drivers, new drivers, younger drivers, older drivers are looking at these different segments and trying to figure out you know, what's going to appeal to them. So I think that's the difference. And the industry has definitely matured.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: I would say,
Mark: I would say so. Yes. Well, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: And so I think that will probably bring us near the end for today. Our next episode though will be after this. We will either be very relieved, very happy, or very heartbroken, or some combination. Either way, it will be done, then we'll be able to talk about something else.
Jane: Yes. We'll be able to talk about our overall awards.
Mark: And we'll be able to talk about Truck World, which we are doing as well. We've got a very busy April ahead of us.
Jane: I'm very much looking forward to truck world since we're we've been out here in Victoria. I mean, it's it's weird, you know Ontario's
Mark: You've only been to one event since then
Jane: No
Mark: Since we moved haven't you?
Jane: Yeah. I think no, I was at the Fleet Safety Council and that's it.
Mark: That's it.
Mark: That was
Jane: I'm looking forward to it
Mark: Coming up on six months ago. Yes. So we'll have much more to talk about then. But in the meantime, there's still time to register for the Best Fleets conference and we will be excited to see everybody there.
Jane: BestFleetstoDriveFor.com/event.
Mark: Yes. Okay. Well, that's good to wrap this up.
Jane: Have a good day.
Mark: Bye