The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #102
Jane: Hey, and welcome to episode 102 of The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Jane Jazrawy, co-founder of CarriersEdge and with me as always.
Mark: Mark Murrell, other co-founder of CarriersEdge.
Jane: Cool beans.
Mark: I queued you in a little bit badly that time. I did this wonderful conducting
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: moment to bring you to where the intro music stopped and you were so responsive, you started immediately. But you could have sat for a bit. So
Jane: So just so everybody who isn't in this room with us, I can't hear the intro music, but Mark can because I don't have any headphones on. And so he's doing this big conductor thing for me.
Mark: That I did badly.
Jane: And what the hell music major. Music education major.
Mark: Well I think normally I do that, and then you take a breath and then start.
Jane: Oh, I was
Mark: But today you were so eager to get started. You just went right into it.
Jane: Yeah. Sorry about that. I was just being
Mark: That's fine.
Jane: You can't go by well, I know what would happen if you got on my case about not coming in, I would just tell you that I can't hear.
Mark: Yeah, that's fine. We have so much to go through.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: So many exciting things that have happened that we were just dying to get to it.
Jane: But you know there is something to be said for us doing this on video because you you doing your little your little high school band intro would've been kind of fun.
Mark: Well, I'm looking at you right now and thinking about the video. Jane is not dressed for video right now.
Jane: I am not. I am not because I just washed my hair. So it's.
Mark: Yeah this is the behind the scenes look.
Jane: The behind the scenes look. And when you have curly hair, as I discovered during the pandemic, when my hair was kind of on its progression to from wavy to curly, you know, courtesy of I think getting old and what do you call it? When women get old, that so my hair got really curly, and I didn't know how to how to do anything with it. So there's the you're not supposed to brush it, and you're supposed to basically either put it in a terry cloth towel, like a t shirt towel to dry it. Or just let it go by itself.
And so I don't want wet hair all over me, so I have it in a t-shirt towel. As per the instructions on YouTube. So if anybody who has curly hair wants to know, look up t-shirt towel on YouTube for curly hair.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: That works.
Mark: It does seem to work for you
Jane: But
Mark: The finished product is very good.
Jane: The finished product is good and you're used to me looking like this.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And I would not be on video. I would probably have taken a shower earlier if, this is what working. This is the promise of working from home is that you can take a shower on your own schedule.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: You don't have to get up and take a shower. You take a shower when it's convenient for you.
Mark: When you need to clear your head and prep for something different.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Stop thinking about what you were thinking about before, start thinking about the podcast.
Jane: And the other thing is because we're on different time zone than most of our staff, then, you know, I have to basically get up and go to work.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Or I'm getting up at five in the morning and I'm not as much as getting up early is better. It's easier out here. I'm there is a point before six that is very difficult to get up.
Mark: Yes. Absolutely.
Jane: Okay. So we have a lot to talk about as you said.
Mark: Yes. So the last time we did one of these was the Monday after Easter. It was the beginning of April.
Jane: Oh we hadn't done
Mark: Much has happened since then. So the last episode, we were doing our final prep.
Before we moved
Jane: For the event.
Mark: Moved to Toronto and then to Charlotte to get ready for our big event, big event, and we have now completed that and then, just to keep things interesting, gone back to Toronto a week later for Truck World. It has been a busy couple of weeks.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And we have had our fill of the airport area and the vicinity of Toronto Airport.
Jane: And the lunches that you get on a Porter flight to and from Victoria.
Mark: In general restaurant food. Yes.
Jane: Oh, yeah. I'm done. So done with restaurant food. I just wanna eat things out of cans now. Give me a can.
Mark: So much better.
Jane: Yeah. Even if it's cold, I don't even care. I just don't want it to be prepared badly by someone else.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Or
Mark: And stuffed full of gluten when it shouldn't be.
Jane: I know. Like, what is it with shoving everything full of bread? Everything must have bread in it. You can't make anything without bread.
Mark: Well, going back to the main thing that happened for us, in the three weeks since our last episode, our event. It has happened. It started. It ended. We left.
Jane: And we were present for it.
Mark: We were present for it.
Jane: And I think it went well.
Mark: I think it went well. And I don't know if we mentioned this very much during the last episode, probably not because I wouldn't wanna curse it. But you did an opening keynote address of a state of the industry or state of the Best Fleets. Which was absolutely fantastic.
Jane: Thank you.
Mark: I thought it was an excellent bit of writing. And many people were quoting it afterwards, quoting, you had a couple of good catch phrases in there. So those are being quoted and that's now our blog, the Best Fleets blog for April. That has got some pretty good positive attention already. So
Jane: Oh, really?
Mark: I think that went well.
Jane: Excellent.
Mark: Yeah. People like it. I mean, people were asking for it. They were looking for copies of it. They wanted to have the full speech, so it was great.
Jane: Well, the two things that I kinda coined not really meaning to, but it kinda happened. And it's hard. It's hard to write a speech. It's hard to write a keynote. Where you're basically not trying to necessarily, a keynote is different than a workshop and most of what I've done over the last thirty years are workshops, some sort of training.
And this time, I was actually doing a doing a prepared speech. Which has a little bit of education, has a little bit of inspiration, has a little bit of kind of summarization. And what I was trying to do is trying to make points. And when you want to make a point, having kind of kind of having a phrase is a really good way to do it. So the first thing that I introduced was reckless
Mark: Not reckless.
Jane: Ruthless reflection. Sorry.
Mark: Relentless.
Jane: No. Ruthless. It was ruthless reflection.
Mark: Ruthless?
Jane: Yeah. Not relentless. Although, we could say relentless, but it was ruthless. And it was I was trying to say
Mark: R-U-T-H.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Ruthless.
Jane: Ruthless. And I was trying to say is, you know, what is the secret to being a Best Fleet? And that's what I was thinking about for, you know, a couple months before I actually wrote it. It's like, okay. Well, what is the secret? And really, the secret to being really good at anything is to look at what you've done and look at it hard and look at it without any sort of generosity and then say, okay, what did I mess up? And how am I gonna not do that again?
Mark: And keep doing that.
Jane: And keep doing it. It's this just constant churn of, okay, that went well. But even though our Best Fleets event went well, we're looking back on it going okay. We're not doing that next year. We're not doing this next year and we wanna some feedback from people so we know how to mold it because it cannot continue the same way and still be as good as it was the first time. If we just do the same thing, That's not gonna be that's not gonna be good. You need to, okay, what do we wanna change? What do we wanna add? That's ruthless reflection, and that's what the Best Fleets do is they say, okay, what do we need to change? What do we need to stop? What do we need to add? And, you know, people don't think of, they don't think of those words necessarily, but that's what they're doing. And that's what all of them do. They keep at it.
Mark: They have no ego and they just keep at it and going back and forth.
Jane: Yeah. You have to do it with no ego.
Mark: Over and over again.
Jane: Or when your ego starts going wahhh it starts whining at you, you have to tamp it down and sort of move on from that.
Mark: That was one very good catch phrase that came out of it.
Jane: Ego is the worst. That is not a catch phrase, but ego your ego is your enemy.
Mark: Yeah. The other one that was so good, we are now going to make it a tagline for the program and put it front and center on our website was
Jane: Culture is not a fixed object.
Mark: That is excellent. I love that because there's there's a subtlety in there that people inside the industry will know exactly what you mean and people outside the industry won't have a clue what you're talking about.
Jane: I think they would look at the words fixed object and think, you know, something that's stationary.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Umm.
Mark: But it's not the same. They missed the nuance.
Jane: Yeah. There's a nuance for trucking for sure. And another thing that I was trying to do in that keynote is think about why I hate it when people talk about their culture. About their great culture. We have a great culture. Our culture is great. It's wonderful. You know, come and come and join us. We have a great culture. It's like, the new open door policy.
Mark: Yeah. They talk about it like it's a statue in the middle of their reception area.
Jane: Yeah. Or that if they have donuts on Friday, that's indicative of their culture. Or if they are, you know, having if their driver their driver advisory board meets twice a year. That's that's their amazing culture. Well, no. It might be a little bit of it. And it might be something that people like or they hate, but their your culture is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It's and it constantly changes. Your culture, no matter how much attention you pay to it, your culture is evolving without you knowing it.
Mark: Yeah, you also gave the analogy of the garden, which sort of expanded on that and was a really nice way of talking about how it's constantly developing and growing
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And things will sometimes grow where you don't want them to, so you have to replant them or split them off
Jane: Dig 'em up
Mark: Or kicking them out altogether, but it was a really nice analogy that and culture as a garden would also be descriptive but not quite as powerful. It is. Culture definitely is a garden that you have to tend to on a regular basis. When you're running a business.
But as far as how we describe what we do and how we describe what the Best Fleets are doing that make them Best Fleets, very much that idea that is not a fixed object. It is something that is always in motion.
Jane: Yeah. And I think that's what I I think during the the what I was saying, I was saying, you know, people don't know. People don't know what their culture is. They don't know what culture is period. What I know after a lot of years of experience, not only listening to the Best Fleets, but trying to have a good company myself is that if you're not constantly attending to it
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: It is going to blow up in your face. Things that you don't want are going to happen. And things that you don't want happen anyway, and it's just what you do and how you can respond to it, but it's constant. It's not. It's just it's like a garden.
Like, you know, we we left our house couple of weeks ago and today or yesterday or on the weekend, what day is it? On the weekend, we came back and it's completely different. Yeah. You know?
Mark: Stuff has grown, new things have popped up, things that we thought were dead are now showing life.
Jane: Yeah. And, you know, things that there's a catastrophe at, like, our big icing. Like, in the winter, we had a week that was ten below, and in Victoria, that does not happen. So all of the plants that are used to it being around zero all the time did not like it. And basically reacted or responded with a big I'm dead.
Mark: Yeah. They're punishing us.
Jane: Oh, yeah. And they're not dead. But they're looking dead. They're playing dead right now because they're very miserable. So we're trying to coax them back into come on, you're okay. You're okay. Give them some TLC.
Mark: Yeah. And that is of how culture develops. That is a lot like what happens in a business.
Jane: So if you are interested in that, you can check out the Best Fleet Best Fleets newsletter?
Mark: Well, it'll be in the newsletter when that comes out, but it's on the website as well.
Jane: And it's a short one. It was only ten minutes, so it's not long read.
Mark: Yeah. It's normal a blog. Normal blog length. But, yes, that was only ten minutes of a very busy two days.
Jane: Oh, yes.
Mark: We have many other things that were happening that were surprises and well, the things that we're working well and things that we have learned we wanna do differently. But there wasn't very many that were kind of major problems. A lot of little things that we wanna do differently. But in general, it worked. I was very pleasantly surprised by the venue.
I had seen pictures of it and had a sense of it, but I hadn't really got the true scale of it until we arrived there and looked at a thing and wow, it is really something.
Jane: It's impressive. I don't think that people really think about venue very hard. And what I mean by that is you can really easily default to a hotel. Yeah. It's really easy to do that.
And I know that some events are really big and you kinda have to do them in a hotel because there aren't any other places that you can
Mark: Or a convention center.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: You have to have a venue that's big enough for the size of the exhibit hall or the number of attendees and things like that. But when you are a smaller event and you have some options, it is really nice to get out of the hotels.
Jane: Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm so tired of hotels. I don't know how people can well, I I spend my last, you know, the last thirty years in and out of hotels and it's it's not nice. They're dry, they're nasty, often the decor is some version of mustard. And
Mark: Or grey.
Jane: Gray or light grey or like if it's if it's new, it's light gray, kind of white to cover the dirt, but make it seem like it's been painted recently. Or it's old and it's that mustard yellow.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So getting out of the hotels was nice doing something a bit different. The venue was really good that way. There was things to look at and people could explore the hall and learn about all of the details of NASCAR and it's history and all of the people that have really excelled there. And I thought that was really nice.
That was part of why we wanted to do that is to get our hall of fame next to another hall of fame and sort of compare them and let them feel good about what they've accomplished, but also have some fun. And that NASCAR hall, they really have some great activities there and I have to hand it to them, and I will give credit to our team who said to me No. We should have all of these things available. We should be pushing these things. Having the the attendees play with the simulators and the pit challenge and all of the racing games and all that, and it'll be something different and fun. And my thinking is, ew, that's way too much socializing and that's gross. I don't wanna do that. I just wanna stand there and eat and drink. And I am not the target market.
Jane: You are not.
Mark: I acknowledge that I was wrong. They were right. And it was fantastic. The the attendees had a great time. They had a lot of fun with the simulators and getting to know each other in different ways, which was really good because a lot of the people that come to our event see each other not infrequently through other industry events, whether it's benchmarking groups and captives or other conferences and things.
So it's not like they are eager to catch up with the other people that they haven't seen. They've saw them a few weeks ago or a month ago. For me, I wanna catch up with them because I don't see them that often, but they wanna do something different. They wanna have some way to compete with each other or play? Or
Jane: Well, I know driving simulators, like driving. This is driving. So Yeah. You know, how It's apt. A lot of people who are part of the Best Fleets used to drive or drive.
And and I'm not I'm not talking about drive a car or a race car, but although I didn't realize Scott Manthey actually has driven race cars.
Mark: Oh, wow.
Jane: Yeah. I didn't know, he's like, oh, yeah. I used to do this. I'm pretty sure he said that.
Mark: While we're accrediting him.
Jane: Yeah. So if you're listening to this Scott, sorry if I if I got that wrong. But I'm pretty sure he said that because it really surprised me, it's like, what haven't you done? He's you know, every once in a while, people drop this. You know, oh, yeah.
I used to do this. And you're like, what? You did what? You know, lots of people say, oh, yeah.
I drove a truck for, you know, fifteen years or something like that and then moved up. But sometimes they're like, you know, I was a pilot. I was this. I was that. I was a, you know, I was a teacher. I was a, it's crazy. It's like this catchall of all of these different experiences that end up in the Best Fleets. And I think that changing careers is actually a really, I think if you didn't start in trucking, I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing if you're if you're trying to run a trucking company because you bring a non trucking view to your job.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah.
Jane: And some of that is is some of that I don't necessarily think yeah, you you don't wanna have your entire trucking company without trucking experience. You you don't want that. But there is something to be said for experience that comes from elsewhere.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. A world view that's a bit broader a bit informed by things that are working in other places that can be adapted. For sure.
Yeah. That makes sense. So we had a good time. I think one of the downsides for me is really not getting a chance to talk to anybody though. And we did talk to we talked to Scott at the end of it because he
Jane: He hung around.
Mark: Hung around. He didn't have a flight to catch right at the end of it. But during both days of the event, I barely had a chance to talk to anybody because I was running around, making sure everything was sorted out and making sure we are ready for the different presentations and that the staging was gonna look okay and all the pieces were there. So that was very nerve wracking since it was our first time at this venue, and I had never been there before. We had these plans and I had kind of I wouldn't say assumptions, but we had prepped it based on an understanding of what it was going to look like, but at the same time until you get there and see it, you don't really know.
You're not really sure what it's going to look like. Is the screen gonna work? Is it gonna look the way we want it to look? Is the the decor gonna work the way we wanted to, is the audio gonna work? You know, we had soundtracks for different things.
We had intro movie that had a custom soundtrack and are people gonna even be able to hear it? Is the audio gonna be super quiet? Is it gonna be way too loud? All of those things need to be addressed. And I didn't know what we are gonna be getting in terms of AV.
They said that we would have an AV tech there to work with us. But I don't know what that person is gonna be like. I've had a lot of experiences with AV techs that can barely function.
Jane: Can barely spell AV.
Mark: They don't wanna do anything. Yeah. That they look at you as a problem and you're the person that's in between them and getting stoned.
Jane: So just to be clear, the the AV tech that we had at NASCAR Hall of Fame was very good. He did a great job. But what Mark is used to is when he was on the road, playing bars and
Mark: Sound man at the crappy bar.
Jane: The quote unquote AV tech was probably some guy who also was a bartender. And not
Mark: No, it would often be dedicated, and sometimes they owned the PA system, but they were not interested in helping. Like, they didn't really care about you because there was a new band new band in there every week. So why be nice to you? Why help you out? So you had to learn to befriend them and just kind of gently nudge them towards doing the job that they're supposed to be doing anyway. And god forbid ask them to do anything beyond that because, you know, they can't be expected to do that. That's crazy. So that's what my experience. That's what I was sort of conditioning myself for. How am I gonna handle this?
How am I going to coax this person into doing that? What happens when they're supposed to do this, but they don't. So all of those things I was ready for and turned out to be fine that the guy was there, he was dedicated. He was on the ball. He caught a couple of things that I hadn't as far as when mics should be turned on and off.
Did a beautiful job of all of that. Managed the house lights really nicely. It was fantastic. It was a dream.
Jane: It was. It was really nice. And when you, I think I know what you mean by coaxing people.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Because early in my career, when I was doing stand up training or classroom training, I did a lot of trying to get people to help me with information. And you know, trying to convince people or coax people into doing what I needed them to do because I needed them to well, I used to coax you guys in tech to come in and do come and talk to my classroom about tech problems with a piece of software. And you know, so you're always trying to think, okay, what can I give them?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: What can I what can I do for them that they're gonna think is really is really good and they're gonna wanna do things for me and your constantly think of thinking of that negotiation?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Whereas if you basically, you know, when you have a good a venue that's good or you're working with a company that is doing what they're supposed to do, then it's a really easy transaction. You know, you you've given them money and they are gonna do this and give you the service that you asked for or that you paid for and that you were so used to that not happening.
Mark: Well, I think there is only one example of that, and it wasn't even that significant. So we had some if anybody saw the picture, we had a bunch of plants that came in that were delivered
Jane: The hedges
Mark: A carpet, yeah, boxwood hedges, and a carpet, a red carpet that was delivered, and all of that was delivered on Monday afternoon after we finished with the session. So we finished our initial block of sessions. All the attendees go upstairs to the reception. And then the plants the hedge hedge walls arrive and the carpet along with it. So they initially showed up to the loading dock, which fair enough. That's where they should be going, a normal place. And then the guy who was our contact said, well, there's actually an easier way to get it in there because you're gonna have to go down a level and this stuff won't fit in the elevator, so we're gonna have you move to a different spot. And so it turns out that if they would move from the loading dock to out to the street and turn left and, like, about thirty feet up the street, is the doors, the sort of outside doors that let you in, and it's right in the backstage area. And so all they had to do is park their truck on the sidewalk there, and they could just run it into the back stage, and it'd be like no trouble at all, it'd be thirty feet. Fabulous. And they're like, great. Sound sounds fantastic. Except that they didn't do that. For some reason, they put all of that stuff on on carts, and they manually walked it all the way around, the long way around the building and came to the front door of the venue and they're sort of knocking to get in there and our staff are like, why are you here?
And so I found out about it. And ran said, oh, no. Not there. Go around to on the street and hold them whatever the name of the street was. I don't remember, but our contact at the hall said, no, go around to the street and he's there.
So they walk from there and push it all the way around. So they've now completely circumnavigated this building on foot with these things and they show up at the door we have the door open waiting for them. And at this point, they're, like, all sweaty and exhausted because they've been pushing this stuff manually. Instead of going the other direction, for forty feet. They took the longest possible route. And then when they finally got there, like they're exhausted and have to load in these plants and carpet and stuff and took way longer than it should have. That's the kind of crap that I'm used to when you're setting up a show.
Jane: That's weird because the suppliers for both of those things apparently had done work with
Mark: Yep. But not this particular delivery crew.
Jane: Oh, man. Doesn't it, it just kinda highlights what drivers have to go through?
Mark: I guess. If they don't pay attention.
Jane: Well, they don't well, the thing is is that that's, they kinda, it's kinda not their, is it their job or isn't it their job? You know? The person who's receiving the directions may not
Mark: Yeah. Oh, and then so we wanted a red carpet. And the idea was we wanted to have the red carpet fifty feet long. Right. Because the full width of the stage was seventy feet and I wanted the carpet to go from one side, a little past center and be kind of the endpoint where the fleets stand when they go out on stage. Here's the endpoint. You go to the end of the car, but stop there. You'll be in the right spot. So they don't have a carpet that is five feet wide by fifty feet long. So what I had arranged with them is they have it as a ten foot wide roll and they will cut it down to size and they get there.
So they gave us a carpet that was ten feet by fifty feet. And in these instructions, it said cut down to five by fifty on-site. Basically, they bring the thing here, cut it in half lengthwise, and that's it. Except that the guy nearly cut it very wrong. Because he misunderstood that instruction and was going to cut a bunch of five by ten chunks.
Like, no. No. No. No. I don't want a whole bunch of scraps and, yeah, end of the roll bits.
I want one long piece. And then we're gonna at the break, we're gonna unroll it up there and tape it down and that will be it. So we nearly had a problem there, but we did finally get that done.
Jane: I didn't realize that. You never told me.
Mark: Well, you were upstairs at the reception, or either you were
Jane: I think I was rehearsing
Mark: Practicing your parts. You were rehearsing your parts until they arrived. And then once they arrived, you couldn't rehearse with all of that disturbance happening, so you went upstairs to the reception. But that's why I got to the reception kinda late. Oh, and also discovered that there was a mix up on the catering because the food can only be out for ninety minutes. So They put the first batch of food out at five thirty, and they were gonna pull it out at seven. What we had said, split the food order in half, give us half at five thirty and half at seven so that we can keep it out for a longer period. So they didn't do that. They put all the food out at five thirty. And at ten to seven, they're like, yeah, we're gonna pull this in soon.
So if you haven't eaten, you should be getting it. What are you talking about? We want this set for the whole time. Oh, no. It can only be out for ninety minutes.
Well, so we think that's the kind of stuff that we have to deal with for next year to make sure we fix. But
Jane: Because most of the time, the person who's not eating is me,
Mark: and me. I managed, yeah you and I ran up there at, like, ten to seven and made sure that we grabbed a couple of quick bites. Definitely not enough.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Even talking about it, I'm getting hungry now.
Jane: Well, I my memory of any time that we're doing this is that I can't eat.
Mark: You never end up eating. Now part of that is self inflicted because I keep saying, go sit down somewhere and eat and you don't and you run off somewhere else and go talk to somebody.
Jane: Well, when we were having lunch, Dave Nemo wanted me on the radio and I know you
Mark: Yeah. That was one of those things that happened on-site that I hadn't planned for. I had planned a segment for you and had a a block aside for you to do have some lunch and talk to a couple people and then go on the radio after. But he said, no, come on with these people. Come on with these other segments.
Jane: Yeah. And that's you know, the stuff I really can't
Mark: You can't say no to that.
Jane: And it's also really hard when you're in performance mode where it's hard to get out.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You kinda actually need, like, twenty minutes and then you can eat. And so what was happening was I was getting I was in performance mode, and it's like, okay. Go eat now. And I can't. Like I physically can't eat.
Mark: Yeah, you can't eat when you're like that. And if you calm down, if you take yourself out of performance mode, you decompress and then you go eat, you've then got to get back into performance, but that's another twenty minutes. So you need an hour basically to have twenty minutes of actual eating time.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So you end up not really eating much at all until the whole thing is done. So
Jane: And then I just wanna fall asleep.
Mark: Yeah. I had a little bit. And It was late in the lunch when I finally managed to sit down and get something and I couldn't tell you what I ate or what it tasted like there was food that went in there and my brain registered
Jane: Food went in.
Mark: That box had been checked. But there was some stuff that I couldn't eat because if you try eating the wrong thing when you're in performance mode. You just get nauseous.
Jane: That's the thing. Yeah. It's like you can't when I say I can't eat, it's because I feel really sick
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: If I'm trying to eat. So you just kinda want I don't know, coffee.
Mark: So you have, like, a coffee or water or something, but then you're just endlessly running to the bathroom.
Jane: That's the other thing is you're trying not to fill yourself up with liquid so that you're Yeah. It's a, so basically
Mark: I found actually on that, that if I am right in the proper zone. A little bit of that agitation is actually helpful when you're on a stage. It gives you that extra little bit of energy agitation.
Jane: What having to go to the bathroom?
Mark: Yeah. A little bit.
Jane: Really?
Mark: Not too much.
Jane: No.
Mark: Only a little bit.
Jane: No.
Mark: Because if you're too relaxed well, I can work with it, but it gets to be a problem at a certain point. So then it becomes distracting. But up until that point, it's actually not too much of an issue.
Jane: I yeah. I hate bodily functions when I'm when I'm on stage. I hate them. Doing anything. It's like, okay.
Mark: Well your entire your entire existence is thrown out of whack when you're in that kind of performance mode. And for this particular one, so you and I both had a lot that we were going through. So you had not just the keynote speech, which was new to you, and then two sessions, one session on your own, and one session that you did with Rick, which were probably the most relaxed parts of the whole day for you. Was those two things
Jane: Oh, yeah. Those are the easiest things to do.
Mark: And then the award, which is always really challenging. It's always navigating through a minefield because there's so many different moving parts to the way we do that award presentation. We've got all of this hoopla around it that we've developed over the years and we want it all to run very smoothly. It ends up being just this monumental challenge of moving parts that we're trying to coordinate. And so when all of that's done, then you go straight into pictures and radio.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. It's
Mark: For me, I had my sessions and at the same time, I'm managing all of the other sessions that other people are doing and prepping for the awards, making sure the whole thing is kind of running fairly smoothly, that there's no problems that the outside the theater people that couldn't deal with and everything is being handled backstage and all of that stuff. So as it turns out, the two sessions that I did, I had miscalculated how much content I need, and I was looking at it beforehand when I finally got time to look at the content start prepping my session. I was going through it and I was thinking, this is gonna be way too much. I gotta chop something and I chopped a section from each of the blocks, and it ended up that I shouldn't have cut it.
So my first block, I ended up being nearly fifteen minutes early, which I'm never early, and I hate that. I hate doing a one hour session that ends after forty five minutes.
Jane: Yeah. The thing is though with content is having a little bit too much I I kinda like airing on the little bit too much.
Mark: I should have. Yes. And usually I do, but this time I thought, well,
Jane: We have some other things
Mark: We've talked about these things we've talked about these things a fair bit. It's okay if I cut it. It's gonna be too long anyway. I didn't wanna run long and cut into Marli's session. Because I knew we had to be done in time to get to the reception.
I didn't wanna have that too late. So I also didn't wanna be keeping people till, like, in the sessions until, like, five thirty or six o'clock or whatever it was. So we had that to, well, we were keeping them to five thirty anyway, but I didn't wanna keep them wait and keep them sitting in the room until six o'clock without feeding them. So All of these things are going through my head while I'm trying to deliver my content and think about, okay, if I'm gonna end early and Marli's coming up next, She's outside the theater. Does she know that I'm ending early and she's going to have to start? And fortunately, we did kinda catch that. And I didn't have to dance around for very much.
Jane: Or do a excuse me, for a minute while I rush out and yell Marli because we had it. One of the issues that we had was we were all supposed to have walkie talk, well, not me, but all of the all of crew
Mark: all support staff.
Jane: Was supposed to have walkie talkies so that they could communicate and nobody, we were supposed to be able to, the walkie talkies apparently had jacks for headsets, and we were all just gonna supply our own headsets except what people normally have for headsets, the jacks didn't fit.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And they were to the the heads the walkie talkie or the yeah they were walkie talkies. They were too small, the the jack was too small. And so that was I think the biggest snafu, and we were kind of thinking about how we could do it so much easier. But that communication between on stage and off stage wasn't happening properly. So we did really well considering.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You know, it wasn't I think now that we know, I'd like to make some changes the actual award presentation and, like, have people's logos come up on the screen?
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And it would be then whoever's off stage who's handling the people coming on can time them better or can time them better.
Mark: Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of those little things too
Jane: Because they couldn't hear. Nobody could hear outside what was happening on stage and they had the door closed. So there's all of these, like, really, really small little details that you you cannot handle them all when you have never done it before.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So as far as anybody knew, it was kind of going as planned, but no.
Mark: Now they know the chaos that was happening. Outside.
Jane: It wasn't chaos, actually. It was absolutely not chaos. Our heads were really full. I think that was
Mark: Yeah the chaos was just in my head.
Jane: Yeah. And you had a lot of things that you were worried about and wanted to make sure went well, but we had a and we have an amazing staff. They were all, you know, our team was they knew what they were supposed to do. They were, you know, they were definitely working it and they all were all as committed to having a really good event as we were, which was really. Was really nice and we couldn't have pulled it off without them.
Mark: Yeah. Absolutely, the team did a great job.
Jane: You know, the people that we kinda had some familiar faces for this one because it's our first one and going with, you know, complete strangers is a little, you know, we wanted to kind of keep it to the community. So we had Chris Henry and Marli Hall, Chris Henry, what I don't even know how to right now, he works for KSM Transports
Mark: Transport Advisors.
Jane: Transport Advisors and but he also was part of the TPP groups with TCA. He also worked with us for a little while. And we knew that he would provide a lot of really good information that complemented the Best Fleets information really, really well. So his, you know, he has a lot of good financial information and how to on running your company, and then we have the HR side of it. And also, we had Marli Hall who we worked with for a really long time. She is now with the
Mark: NMFTA
Jane: NMFTA not MCIEF. Oh my god. NMFTA. We worked with her for a really long time on the Best Fleets and she's now she's a really good session on cyber security.
So we had we had that kind of familiarity. It was really nice to have.
Mark: Well, we also brought in as much familiarity as we could in in the other services as well. You mentioned that Dave Nemo Show earlier and having Radio Nemo on-site broadcasting live, I think added a really nice element to it. So the the winners and the the various members of the the audience got to do sessions, the sponsors got to do a a segment there. So that was really good. And we know that team pretty well, and it's one of those things that we can put together as part of the program that is fairly familiar, but we know it's gonna go pretty well we don't have to worry about it too much. We just have to make sure they have the things they need and they have the guest scheduled and then it goes off very nicely. Similarly, we brought in a photographer that we had worked with or yeah. We have worked
Jane: We have worked with her at past events.
Mark: For six years or so that she was shooting TCA conventions and got to know the Best Fleets program pretty well. So she knew how to shoot the awards and the winners and how people were gonna act after and it's funny how many of the people she knows by name. And she could talk to and, you know, comment on what they're doing and get them to pose properly and things like that. So
Jane: Oh, nice.
Mark: Yeah. I had a good conversation with her about what she has to do with certain people to get a good shot of them that she knows from experience. And I think that really paid off because the pictures coming out of there are really good shots of everybody. Not only are they nicely structured, but they're good pictures of the individuals as well. Even me, some of the pictures are not terrible.
Jane: Did you did that link go out with the Best Fleets is it going out with the Best Fleets newsletter?
Mark: Which link?
Jane: The link to that photo album, the Flickr.
Mark: I went on social media, I think, today.
Jane: Oh, okay.
Mark: So, yeah, it's being put out. Looks like they've done the day one, so I think they're staggering it. But those pictures are up on our Flickr on our new Flickr page.
Jane: Yes. We have a new Flickr page.
Mark: They're looking very good. So after
Jane: You you you are not aging badly, my dear, Mr. Murrell.
Mark: Well, usually I'm making some face there. It looks like I'm about to sneeze or I'm in the middle of a stroke or something. So or I am doing my best impression of a hunchback or some other kind of troll. And these pictures, I'm standing up straight. Yeah.
My mouth is open appropriately. My eyes are open appropriately. I look neither crazy nor asleep. These are the challenges of getting a good photo.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: So they worked well.
Jane: What I realized a couple of years ago actually is that I'd never smile when I'm speaking.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah.
Jane: And some people are some people are great at that. They kind of have a smile on their face or I don't know how you speak, what you're thinking
Mark: I think you look like a crazy person when you do that. If you're smiling while you're talking, you either look like one of those over the top sales consultant people or you look like a psychopath.
Jane: Yeah. But the picture's coming out a lot better.
Mark: Yeah. The audience thinks you're nuts though.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So I'll take the trade off of the audience having a good experience and the picture maybe not looking like I'm smiling.
Jane: I'm always, you know, looking like I'm giving a lecture whether I am or not.
Mark: You're making a urgent point
Jane: Because at that point. I'm thinking about what I'm saying so hard.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: But it was nice to have It was nice to have that big wraparound screen.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It was really nice. I it was a nice stage. It was nice to talk on.
Mark: Well
Jane: And those seats were really nice.
Mark: The media that were there did a good job too. Got some good media stories coming out of it. So that was nice. Always good to have those. And was something that I was also concerned about.
Are we giving the media enough content that they're feeling like they got good value for attending there?
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And they all said yes and they thought it was really good. And of course, the high point was something that neither of us had anything to do with and that was the webinar that was delivered live from from the venue at one o'clock on Tuesday afternoon that Rick was in the back staff room running it. And Deanna, I don't know where she was.
She was kind of, like, the the guest a commentator on there, and then they had color commentary from the sidelines with Selase running around the venue with his phone grabbing people and putting them on camera. As a live performance.
Jane: I had no idea what he was doing, and I was I think I was at the Dave Nemo setup. And I we'd finish, though, and I was just talking to Dave or talking to somebody. And Selase came running up, and I was basically, like, waved and that was about it. I had no idea what they were doing, but I thought it was really good. I haven't actually watched that webinar, but I wanna see it. I wanna see
Mark: I would call it frenetic energy.
Jane: Okay. Have you seen it?
Mark: I watched bits of it. Yeah. I watched part of it.
Jane: Hey, it's fun.
Mark: It was fun, the audience that was there enjoyed it. They got some questions and I did speak to somebody, talk to somebody at Truck World who was there, or who attended the webinar and thought it was great and really enjoyed it.
Jane: Oh, okay.
Mark: For people that couldn't go to the event I think a lot of them watched the livestream, and then they could go to the webinar afterwards and get a recap. So that worked pretty well.
Jane: So if you wanna go and see that webinar? Where can you go and see that?
Mark: It's on our website.
Jane: Okay. On our website on the resources?
Mark: Yeah. Under the webinar section on the website.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: So it's up there. And, yeah, it was fun. They had a good time, and I think they did a nice job.
Jane: Yeah. The Rick and Selase show, I have now dubbed it.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Hashtag Rick and Selase.
Mark: So they do a good job with that.
Jane: Yes. And if you do ever see the two of them together, then they are entertaining.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: If nothing else, they may not be informative, but they're definitely entertaining.
Mark: Yeah. They have some content. They can be informative on things, but they definitely make the time go quickly.
Jane: Yes. They do.
Mark: They're easy to spend time with, which is fantastic. So so that was our event. And then we came back and had a weekend where we did absolutely nothing and then had a couple of days of what technically was regular work but was insane as well. And then we went back to Toronto for Truck World.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And we can talk about that a little bit. We've talked about Truck World. Having done this podcast for several years now, we've covered many Truck Worlds. This was as good as all of the others. I think their Saturday attendance was down, but their Thursday and Friday attendance they said was at pre COVID levels. So they're very happy with that.
Jane: What I found really interesting was that throughout COVID and, like, in the last four years, I guess, the last two Truck Worlds the attendance has been really weird because we would always be like, okay, Thursday is executive day, and so you dress up, but you won't be very many drivers, but there won't be very many people, but you'll see people that you know because insurance people walk the floor, that kind of thing.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And then Friday is a little bit more drivers and less executives. And then Saturday is just like all drivers all the time. That's not what it was like this time.
This time, it was kind of even. There was a bit I mean, Saturday was more drivers. I would say it was busier.
Mark: But at the same time, we had a lot of fleet people coming by. Most of the sales conversations we had were on the Saturday. The Thursday and Friday was catching up with people that we already knew, existing customers and partners and things like that. The fleets seemed to be coming on Saturday. So, yeah, the vibe is very different.
It wasn't swarming with families like it has been in past years. Sometimes the Saturday is
Jane: There was a few
Mark: nuts with kids grabbing at everything and people bringing their whole families and dogs and all of that stuff. We didn't really see that. It was a few. Certainly more than there had been other days, but it wasn't the It wasn't the mall on a long weekend that you normally get
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: at Truck World on to Saturday.
Jane: But you did get the, we did get the swag people with the swag swipers.
Mark: Yeah. We unloaded a lot of excess inventory there. It was very nice.
Jane: We actually had it and it disappeared very quickly.
Mark: Yes. It went fast.
Jane: So I kept some Best Fleets pens.
Mark: Yeah. We kept some pens and some portfolios.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: We got rid of a lot of the stuff that otherwise would have gone into the storage unit.
Jane: It's funny because it kinda reminds me of putting things at the end of your driveway.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. You just put it out and it disappears. Yeah. Turn around and it's gone.
Jane: Well, we did a little bit of an experiment with one pen.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: If there's a single pen on the table, will anyone take it? And there was a single pen that lasted for, like, I don't know, an hour, hour and a half.
Mark: Yeah. Nobody will touch it.
Jane: Nobody will touch it, but then I put two. I put two out.
Mark: And what happened? Did one go or did they both go?
Jane: Within five minutes, they were both gone.
Mark: So weird.
Jane: Five, it was not
Mark: Somebody probably came and grabbed both.
Jane: Well, no, two two people each grabbed one.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: But you know, even though it's like sitting there, there we go. Nope. No one no one grabbed it. And I'm okay with giving things away. But what I really noticed is the giving things away and not paying attention to anything that you're selling.
So there were people who did not even glance at anything except the thing that they wanted.
Mark: Yeah. They are conditioned to just look at the table and see what they can grab.
Jane: Yeah. And that's a little
Mark: Which is why giving out that kind of stuff as a marketing tactic or a sales tool?
Jane: It's not that effective.
Mark: Yeah. It's pointless.
Jane: I mean, you can do it as a service to drivers, I guess, if here have some pens.
Mark: But drivers are not gonna come and buy a trailer from you because you gave
Jane: them a pen.
Mark: They're not gonna be thinking about it. They most often end up in the hands of people that are not gonna be useful for you.
Jane: What I thought was damn it, we should have had the Best Fleets website underneath a logo. Because we had the logo and it's big, so it's hard to get a pen to fit the logo because it's a very it's not a nice it's not a nice, you know, thin logo. But it would be good if we're gonna give them a way to drivers and I want to have the nomination.
Mark: I would say that if you can't figure out how to get to Best Fleets to Drive For dot com. From Fest Fleets to Drive For, I don't really need your nomination.
Jane: Okay. Fair.
Mark: If you go type into your browser Best Fleets to Drive For, you're going to get all of our all of our sites coming up.
Jane: That's true.
Mark: And now the website, I mean, that's old people stuff. Where's the hashtag? Where's the at? Those are the things that people need as much as anything. So
Jane: Well we don't have them either.
Mark: We didn't have any of it on there because there wasn't space. It would've looked way too cluttered.
Jane: But can you put a QR code on a pen?
Mark: Yeah. It was fine. It's a pen. It's not a
Jane: We have a symbol that's like, you know, Prince before he, you know, the artist formerly known as Prince, that little symbol. Yeah. Do we all have little symbols? I guess that's that's called language. Right. A variety of symbols?
Mark: When it's wrapped around a pen, a QR code reader won't pick it up either. So
Jane: True. True.
Mark: Yeah. So anyway, Truck World was another excellent three days went very fast. It's just so weird that that eight hours each day at the show goes by so quickly and you barely have any time where you're sitting around. It was like the last half hour on Saturday where we're kind of hanging around because there wasn't many people around. And at that point, you have people starting to tear down their booths and stuff and
Jane: And I had the weirdest experience right after the end.
Mark: Oh, when the driver came up.
Jane: Was he a driver? I guess he was.
Mark: Yeah. I don't know. That was never really very clear. He was one of your fans though.
Jane: Well, it was really weird because he said my name properly.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So I was standing with my back to him and I heard my name. And it was perfectly pronounced. It was
Mark: By a voice you didn't recognize.
Jane: Yeah. It was like Jane, Jane Jazrawy?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And I was like, I thought it was someone I knew, because who else can say my name? And well, everybody who listens to the radio.
Mark: I hear you all the time on Road Dog.
Jane: And Yeah.
Mark: Wants to come and meet you.
Jane: Road Dog and Nemo, they both know how to say my name so they say it properly. It's like
Mark: Well Road Dog is the station.
Jane: Sorry. I mean, the Road Dog News.
Mark: Road Dog News.
Jane: Yeah. So the Mark Willis show knows, Dave Nemo knows, everybody on the Radio Nemo knows how to say my name. So I shouldn't be surprised. But this guy was taking pictures of me as well.
Mark: While talking to you, yeah.
Jane: He's holding up his camera taking pictures of me and I was like, I knew he was doing it. But I didn't know what to do as, like, okay, why are you doing that? I'm not.
Mark: Yeah. That was a that was a good way to end it off. You have a a fan combined Yeah. And you have fans.
Jane: Completely perplexed by that. I mean, it was It was fine. He's a very nice man, and we had a you had a good chat and everything like that. But it is the first time that's ever happened to me where it's been obvious. An obvious, I guess, my first fan.
Mark: Obvious that somebody knows you from the radio and is coming to introduce you.
Jane: And not?
Mark: Introduce themselves to you.
Jane: Yeah. That was so weird. I do have the experience of people knowing me and I don't know them.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: But it's much more subtle because they will they may not or I may have met them once and they know me I'm more familiar to them because they see my name more.
But that's really weird too. That is really odd to
Mark: Yeah. It does happen. It's strange. But it was a good way to end an excellent three days.
Jane: It was. It was a nice ending.
Mark: So now we are getting back to normal for a little bit. We have no shows really for a little while. The craziness is done. We can try and get back to remembering our regular jobs and getting back to those.
Jane: Normal diet?
Mark: Yeah. I don't even know what's happening sort of on the product side anything that's new to talk about. So I think we can leave that for the next episode.
Jane: I think so.
Mark: Oh, we can wrap this one up now.
Jane: Alrighty then. See you later, Mark.
Mark: See you later, Jane.