The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #115
Mark Murrell: Hello. Welcome to Episode 115 of the CarriersEdge podcast. Or, if you prefer, episode 1-51, or 319, or Season 7, Episode 48—whatever combination of numbers you like. You can use that as the episode number, specifically for you, Lindsey. Hello and welcome to the CarriersEdge podcast. I'm Mark Murrell, co-founder of CarriersEdge, and today my guest host is—
Jane Jazrawy: Jane Jazrawy, co-founder of CarriersEdge.
Mark: And I don't know what we're gonna talk about today. I think we'll probably come up with some things since we've had an adventurous few weeks, but I didn't have any time to really plan much for this. So let's start with—I'm gonna do a random throw, a dart at the board—and let's start with MATS.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: We have our review of MATS. So I guess it would be two weeks ago now. We were at Mid-America. And it is Mid-America. It was what it always is.
Jane: I liked the layout better.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: I like that they took out the nasty hall that we're usually in.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: The old one that's very dark and the low ceiling and—so if you've ever been to the Mid-America Trucking Show, or Truck Show, it's in the Kentucky—
Mark: Kentucky Exposition Center.
Jane: That's what I thought it was. And it's a pretty old building and they're—I think they're renovating.
Mark: Well, parts of it were pretty old. Yes. The West Hall and Pavilion were older buildings. Really has the feel of a farm show. You kind of expect to have livestock walking by you down the aisles there, but that's where it's always been. And it was always kinda weird because they have the newer part of the Expo Center kind of on the—I don't know, I guess that's the east side and then the south side. And they've been using less and less of that South Hall over the past years, but they always used that west side. So you would have a big bunch of the show that was in kind of the north and east wings, and a little bit of the south wing, and then you had to walk around the old arena—or the big arena that's there in the middle—to get to the West Wing where the other exhibits were. And yes, it is kind of an older building and it was closed this year. It's now getting renovated. Unsurprisingly, they're going to be—I think—knocking it down and rebuilding something completely new in there. So the whole show was over on that same side—the east, north, and south wings of the exhibition center—and it was much nicer.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: You're a hundred percent right that it was a way better layout. It was kind of an unknown because we didn't know what the traffic flow was gonna be like. We didn't know where people were gonna come in, how they were gonna wander, but it worked out pretty well.
Jane: Well, the other difference is that it seemed like it was scheduled around spring break.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Which is—all the spring breaks are different, so—
Mark: Yeah, every week in March seems to be somebody's spring break.
Jane: Yeah. So there were a lot of kids there, and the normal crazy Saturday was not crazy, actually. It was one of the slower days.
Mark: Yeah. It was bizarre.
Jane: Friday was really, really fat. It was really, really busy. Thursday was relatively busy, and Saturday was kinda—
Mark: Yeah, it wasn't crazy.
Jane: So it was a little bit different than it normally is. But I think it's interesting because we go and no one else goes that we know. Like, it's not a—well, it's not true. We know people there.
Mark: But it's not a show where a lot of tech companies are exhibiting.
Jane: Yeah. But I think that's a real error. And maybe this is like a nicely kept secret. I don't think anybody listening to this podcast is gonna change their show strategy based on what we say, but we're the only ones there that provide what we provide. And we can provide it to really small fleets and much larger fleets. So we have a lot of flexibility. And that flexibility makes MATS a really good show for us, because people who have seven drivers can come and say, "Can you help me with training?"
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And we can say, "Yes, we absolutely can."
Mark: Well, I think that's one of the great myths about that show—is people say, "Oh, we're not gonna go there because it's the driver's show, and we don't sell to drivers." But that suggests that it is exclusively drivers walking that show, and that's of course not how it is. Any fleet in the area is walking around that show. If you are in the trucking industry anywhere within a couple hours' drive of Louisville, you're going to Mid-America because you wanna see what's new.
Jane: And tons of carriers go there.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Because they're trying to get drivers. So we saw a lot of—I thought it was very good marketing. There were some fleets that provided really large bags.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Like really big bags. Because one of the things about the Mid-America Show is that drivers come and get as much free stuff as they possibly can carry. And it is absolutely true, because there are vehicles that get filled up. There are bags that get filled—and multiple bags. People in—
Mark: They all bring in the giant bags with the green dragons.
Jane: Carting things away. And there's bizarre things that people can actually get. So there's, you know, sort of the New Orleans–style beads—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: That people had hanging around their necks. There was—well, we call them meter sticks, but I guess there it was a yardstick. So many yardsticks—
Mark: What was it? The GEICO?
Jane: The GEICO booth, yes. That was a little ways away from us. There were people trying to sell all kinds of stuff—a lot of wellness.
Mark: Yeah. A lot more wellness stuff this year.
Jane: Yeah. Like, there was a booth across from us that was trying to sell things that relieve pain. So, vibrators that kind of—you can attach—and then you can—I guess you can use a cell phone to control it? But they were really expensive. So people were, you know, getting a demo, but they weren't really buying.
Mark: Yeah. They were sitting down in the chairs and enjoying a free massage for a few moments as they're moving on.
Jane: And there's a real focus on free stuff, not so much buying stuff, but definitely—definitely.
Mark: Always that focus on free stuff, and it's always very interesting to watch people walking around and all the things that they're collecting—the pens and caps and tumblers, all of those bits and pads. So that's the normal part of the spectacle that is MATS. And it was good. It was a busy show.
Jane: Yes. People—was busy.
Mark: It was very busy for us. But people were expecting it to be lighter. Everybody that I talked to was kind of surprised at how busy it was, because the economy is not in great shape and it certainly hasn't been getting better. And there was a lot of concern that it was going to be kind of a slow show that way. And I think the recruiting side of it definitely was. There were very few fleets compared to what it used to be.
There were very few fleets there recruiting. Maybe ten? I don’t think there was even that many. And they were certainly much smaller in their presence. But the show was busy. There were lots of people. Lots of aftermarket parts people that are selling all kinds of things to make life better for drivers—and lots of services and everything under the sun.
Jane: And, of course, there were the owner-operator-centered things like Overdrive and the Ocado booth, and SiriusXM was there. So I got to hang out with the Dave Nemo Show in the morning.
Mark: Talking about that—it was the last ride of—what do they call it? The last ride of the Road Gang or something? Dave Nemo’s official end to his career was, I guess, on the Saturday.
Jane: Well, I didn’t—I wasn’t able to go because we were at the booth. But he’s not really retiring.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So I think the tales of Dave’s retirement are a little—what does Mark Twain say?
Mark: Yeah. Greatly exaggerated.
Jane: Yeah. I mean, he is—ish—but he’s still gonna be on the radio. He’s not gonna be on it every day, but he is definitely going to be a presence. So I’m not totally sure if it was really like, sort of the last draw. I think he will be back at MATS. I think he will be—he’s still there. So I think that maybe it was—that's what they were planning to do, but as the year went on it kind of morphed into, well, what do we really wanna do?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And so I got to chat with them for a few hours.
Mark: You did a couple segments while you were over there at their house?
Jane: I did.
Mark: And you went to their reception—their, I don’t know what it was, kind of a celebration of Dave’s career at one of the hotels downtown. So it was good.
Jane: It was a very cool hotel. It was across the street from where we were staying.
Mark: It was a downtown hotel, and this was—
Jane: It was a Hilton that we were staying at—or was it at the Hilton?
Mark: It was actually at the Hilton, which apparently has got quite a prohibition history and used to be a speakeasy in the basement, although didn’t seem very well hidden, so I don’t know how—
Jane: Well, I think they opened it up. But it's got a really cool—like, the architecture is very interesting. It’s got—you know, the roof and where the bar was, or the ceiling—not the roof—but that was all very—you know, you did have to go down a bunch of stairs.
Mark: Yeah. It was downstairs and kind of around the corner a little bit.
Jane: Yeah. So it was kind of speakeasy-ish.
Mark: The Sealbach Hotel. Sealbach Hilton is the place, which is apparently quite a historical place in downtown Louisville. So that was very cool.
Jane: And it was interesting because we stayed downtown Louisville, which we normally don't. Normally, we stay by the actual show, and we decided not to because airport hotels are just becoming—blah.
Mark: They're nasty, and I just couldn't do it. Yeah. I just couldn't go back to MATS and stay at those hotels out by the fairgrounds there. It was just too much for me. I'm too old.
Jane: Not nice. And it was nicer. It was definitely nice, but what I'm noticing about the downtowns of a lot of different American cities is that they're all trying to be a little Las Vegas.
Mark: Oh, yes.
Jane: So downtown Louisville had its own little—
Mark: Yeah. They've got the covered street there where they're trying to do bars and live entertainment and turn it into kind of a party center. Yeah. I guess Nashville has had success with that—replicating the Vegas vibe—and other towns are trying to do it as well. And I guess it draws people into the downtown area, but it's not really very nice staying in a hotel that's a block away from that because it's noisy all the time.
Jane: Well, I think if we were thirty years younger, we probably would have a different appreciation of—
Mark: We would have loved it if we were not crusty old people.
Jane: Yeah. Who are trying to get up early to go to a show and stand on our feet for, you know, eight hours. But it is interesting to see that the downtowns of different cities are kind of changing. I don't think downtown Toronto is—I don't know if it's happening in Canadian cities, and I don't know how widespread it is. Because, I mean, New York has definitely got that. Times Square is crazy.
Mark: Yeah. They've had that for—
Jane: Yeah. Ever.
Mark: But they did have that area for a long time now.
Jane: Oh, okay.
Mark: We just haven't stayed there.
Jane: Alright.
Mark: But I think it is expanding. It definitely seems more built out than what I remember from—
Jane: I think it's a good idea to—if you're interested in having or trying to attract more of that kind of tourism—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Then, yeah. Yeah. Go for it.
Mark: Well, that was one of the high points of Mid-America—not staying at the airport hotels out there. But the show itself was really good. We didn't do any presentation this year. Last year, we had done an education session, and it was in some ways kind of like a vacation. We had been talking about this before—that we don't have to speak at this show. We're not responsible for this show. We just have to go there and sit and see who comes by. And it was much easier. I prefer that.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Organizing the whole thing—that's a pain.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Yeah. So that was good. We got a lot out of it, had good conversations with a number of, like you said, fleets. And fleets of all sizes as well—not just seven- and eight-truck people. We had some people with a hundred trucks and at least one that was a few hundred trucks, who was just walking around the show looking to see what's there. And it was good to have those conversations and good to talk to some of our consultant partners—some of the people that are reselling our service. So that was really nice as well. You get a good chance to talk to a lot of different people there. Some drivers, some big customers that came by. I always like talking to the drivers. We didn’t get to talk to as many of them this year as we do in other years, but I always find that really, really enjoyable—talking to the drivers about their experiences with the product.
Jane: Well, sometimes we had one driver who was not happy. That’s not always fun.
Mark: See, I want to talk to those people too. I want to talk to those people as well and find out why they're unhappy and what the issues are. And sometimes when I hear them talking about their issues, I roll my eyes and I'm like, well, no wonder you're unhappy. That should not be happening, and then we can do something about it. So it's always good to know what's happening and good to have those conversations with them.
So, yes, Mid-America was a fine experience, and we will be back there again next year. And, as it happens, I'll be back in Louisville in a few weeks for the ATA Safety Conference, which will be a very different vibe.
Jane: It's not at the Expo Center, is it?
Mark: No. It's at a downtown hotel. I think it's a Marriott downtown. So I'll be staying in the same area that we were—just not leaving the hotel, really.
Jane: Oh, well, hopefully they'll have a—oh, we were—we were at the Embassy Suites.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Hopefully you will have a place where there's a restaurant that's open at night.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: That was hard to find food. If you didn’t want to go to a loud bar. But we did find very excellent Mexican food.
Mark: Yes. I have to see if I can find that place again to go back to it. But yeah, so that’s Mid-America. Well, what else have we been up to? Well, we came home from Mid-America and probably got sick—or got sick on the way home—and spent most of last week being laid up. That’s been a bit of a drag, but now we’re getting back to it. And you’ve been busy on a course that I’m very curious to talk a little bit about, because you were back doing some design work on a new course. So tell us a little bit about that course.
Jane: Difficult Conversations, which is nearly done. So it’s kind of in the same grouping as Emotional Intelligence. It takes Emotional Intelligence concepts and applies it to having a difficult conversation. So we’re using some of the same color palettes and things like that. But we needed to get it done and I was down a couple of graphic artists, so I decided that since I wasn’t feeling very well, I would do something relatively easy and actually decorate a course.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So I did—I finished up the design. But it’s really about how to handle a difficult conversation, how to prep for it, how it can—if you handle it well—how it can benefit you, if you handle it badly, what happens, different approaches to take. And then there’s a bunch of examples. So there’s some scenarios about, okay, so here’s this issue that’s happening. What does the supervisor do to mitigate—you know, or not mitigate, but to mediate—mediate between two other people? And so I was—yeah, I was basically finishing it up.
Mark: Sounds like a really useful course. Kinda building on—you said Emotional Intelligence—but also the Leadership Styles course that we had. Just building out more of that leadership package of courses for people that are kinda new into these roles.
Jane: Yeah, and it kind of is—it's not really a workplace investigations course. It is more about, okay, you've got someone who is not performing. And you've given them reminders, you've done the things that you're supposed to do. Okay, now you have to say something. Now you have to have a conversation—say, look, you're doing this wrong.
And how do you do that so that the end result is that the person who you're talking to feels positive, you feel positive, you haven't broken the relationship or anything like that. And that's really what it's about—is how to have those kinds of conversations that you really don't wanna have. That's why they're difficult.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that's really useful. I think that may be something that we have people take internally as well. And not that I'm thinking of anybody that has a particular gap in that, but everybody has discomfort in those situations. And that's part of leadership—is learning how to deal with those kinds of things in a productive way.
And we've long had requests from our customers for those kinds of courses because so many of our customers are moving into leadership as kind of a new thing. And whether it is a safety manager who is really a compliance expert and isn't really that comfortable in the leadership parts of the position, or it's fleets building out their coaching and road trainer programs and moving drivers into a leadership-type position, these are all situations where people struggle with the softer sides of it—the parts of it that aren't the hard skills. And there's a lot of need for those kinds of courses to help people build those skills. So this is gonna be really useful for them.
Jane: Yeah. I think even drivers could use it because—and I know that people have difficulty saying anything. You know, it's sometimes it's difficult to just sort of—you don't know what to say or who to say it to. And that's one of the things in Best Fleets where we talk a lot about: how do you communicate? How do you communicate with drivers?
How do you communicate with those drivers who don't want to communicate back to you, or how do you reach everybody? Because there's no issue between two people, but sometimes they just don't know how to approach a topic. They don't know where to start. And, you know, it can be someone talking to their supervisor or their supervisor talking to the team member—going both ways.
Like, when you're busy, or if you're inherently kind of lazy, or you really don't like doing it at all, it's difficult to sort of move yourself sometimes to do this. And this course helps because it kinda gives you cues, and you understand the kinds of things to say to people. Because a lot of the time, you don't really need to say very much. All you need to do is sort of say, "Hey, I'm noticing this. Are you having an issue?"
Like, "I need you to do this—so what can we do to figure it out?" But it's kinda like, I don't know—dieting or exercise. It's not that bad once you actually do it, but it's getting to the doing that's really hard.
Mark: Well, I think a lot of people overthink it. As you point out, often you don't have to say that much. It's more how you say it than what you're saying, and people sometimes overthink it—that they need to have a whole lot of perfect phrases and they need to say an awful lot to address the situations. And in many cases, that's not really the case.
It is more a series of questions than a series of statements. It is a conversation. Like you say, "We need you to do this. It's not happening. Let's talk about why. Why isn't it happening?"
And through that, you can get some really good insights. You can find out why people aren't doing things. And sometimes, it really has very little to do with them. It's something else that's happening that's blocking them or making them really uninterested in doing something. And through that conversation, if you handle it the right way, you can get a lot of good insights and really improve a lot of things.
Jane: One of the things that I think is really important to understand is that most of the time when a conversation is difficult, it's because you're having an emotional reaction to it.
Mark: Oh, yes.
Jane: So if you need to have a conversation with someone because they're doing something that you don't want them to do, or they're doing it wrong, or you think that they're taking advantage of you, or whatever it is—before you have the conversation or before the conversation happens, whether it happens or not, you're angry or unhappy or something.
And that is the point where you need to actually think about, okay, how is this going to be solved? And usually, the solution is talking to someone. But what do you say? Do you call them and start yelling at them? Or do you—you know, what—like, that's the hard part. So that's the barrier.
And what this course does a little bit is it gives you some ideas on how to get through that. Get through that—the anger. And if you leave it and leave it and leave it, the anger just gets more and more and more. And I'm gonna say anger just because that's most common. That's the frustration of people not doing what you think they should be doing—because they can't read your minds or they have something else going on.
It's just—there's a lot of separate brains that don't have direct connections to each other. The connections get crossed.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. Interesting.
Jane: That's not in the course. That's just me summarizing it in a very bizarre way.
Mark: That can go into the press release or the—yeah—the reason why we're doing it.
Jane: Yeah. People get their brains crossed.
Mark: Yeah. Well, okay. Well, I'm looking forward to this one. I do enjoy all of these leadership courses when they come out because they're all really good. What I like about all of them thus far, and I imagine this one will be the same, is that all the scenarios are very specific to transportation. They're not generic scenarios where you're hearing stories about a bunch of sales reps or people in an office that have no connection to the transportation industry. It's all scenarios that people can really relate to.
Jane: Absolutely.
Mark: I think that was really good with the leadership styles course and really showed you how to apply this in the real world of trucking.
Jane: We have this one part where we talk about trying to set up a meeting and doing it all three ways that you can do it. So either phone call, leaving voicemail, email, or text message. And, you know, you can have the—depending on how you're communicating with your team—like, if it's a driver, then you might use text message or a satellite macro or something like that. But you need to leave them a message in a certain way that they know that they are—there's something required of them. So, you know, just talking about the generic "reaching out."
You know, people say, "Oh, you know, I'll reach out," but when you're doing training, you need to be really specific about, okay, so how are you actually doing that? You know, how are you reaching? How are—how are—how are you?
Mark: Hate that phrase.
Jane: I know.
Mark: And I hate the phrase because it's so vague and it just indicates an effort without any kind of response. Right? I'm reaching out right now. I'm not getting anything. I'm not touching anybody. But I'm reaching out. Reaching out just says I made a phone call. Well, did you leave a voicemail? Did you speak to somebody? No. I just dialed the phone and when it rang twice, I hung up, but I still reached out.
Jane: I like the word "contacted" better, but even "contact" doesn't really tell you.
Mark: Contact indicates that the other party met you. You actually touched something. Right? The word contact means I actually connected somehow. And it might be a voicemail, it might be a text message that I can see somebody read, or I saw them and spoke to them. But there is some closing of the loop there, whereas the "reaching out" is just—I made an effort, but it may not have been very much of anything. I sent a fax into oblivion. Well, I still did my part.
Jane: Yeah. I think "reaching out" is very soft. It's not an affirmative action. You didn't do anything. You just kind of felt around a little bit. And people don't say on their business cards "reach out" information. They say contact information. Yes. Here's how to contact me.
Mark: And it's very vague and very lazy.
Jane: I don't know if it's lazy. I think what it is—it's a word that people have adopted because it sounds nicer. I don't know. I also don't understand why people put an "s" on the end of "emails."
Mark: Oh, yeah. True.
Jane: Something I don't know.
Mark: Thing I don't know. We do hands to yourself.
Jane: Why did "gifting" become a thing?
Mark: It's not.
Jane: What I think is quite hilarious when talking about changes in language is when you see a movie that supposedly is set in, you know, an earlier time like the eighties or the seventies, and they say "gifting."
Mark: They still use modern language.
Jane: Yeah. And it's like no one said that. It was not a thing. No one used that word. We said "gave a gift."
Mark: Yes. Gave something.
Jane: Gave—yeah. You gave something. And you gave it as a gift if you really wanted to use the word gift. But "gift" was a noun. There was no "gifting."
Mark: And you definitely were not reaching out.
Jane: No. No reaching out and gifting.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: But what was that? What was that "reach out and touch someone"?
Mark: Oh, yeah. See, and touch someone. That was Yellow Pages? Or was it a phone book thing or long distance? I think it was—
Jane: A long distance. It was—
Mark: "Reach out and touch someone."
Jane: I think so. We're gonna have to look that up because there was a jingle. Yes. There was a tune that went with it, and I'm not gonna try and sing it because I don't remember it. But there was—for everybody who's old—"reach out and touch someone" was a thing.
Mark: It wasn't just the reaching out. Didn't count until you touched someone.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: But that whole point of it was the long distance—actually go call somebody and talk to them.
Jane: "Reach out and touch—" See? I don't see—
Mark: You said you weren't gonna sing it.
Jane: I can't help it. It's like it helps me remember if I—
Mark: Well, now you're gonna put it in everybody's heads that's listening to this. All of the old people will know what you're talking about.
Jane: I think it was "reach out, reach out and touch someone." It was like—it was repeated. Yeah. Okay. Sorry for that earworm there.
Mark: Oh, now you've distracted me. Yeah. So we have a new course coming.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And additional leadership styles course.
Jane: Yeah. Leadership skills course. Number three in the series.
Mark: And we are going to be—Air Brakes is getting to the end of development. We're kind of in the finishing touches. So I think we're ready for voice. We have a whole bunch of—there's a whole bunch of diagrams that we have to get right. So that's happening.
Jane: Also, Coupling and Uncoupling—we finally have a course that is dedicated—
Mark: Just Coupling and Uncoupling.
Jane: Just Coupling and Uncoupling.
Mark: Nice.
Jane: And that is moving through development. We have a bunch of French stuff that has been done. And Driver Ergonomics—
Mark: Is Ergonomics. Okay. Yeah. It's gonna be—sort of like the blockage is gonna clear and we're gonna have a whole flood of new titles.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. There's been like a six to eight month—I don't know.
Mark: Things were going slowly.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And part of that was that Air Brakes monster course.
Jane: Yes. Because Air Brakes was very—there's a lot to it. But I think it'll be very cool when Air Brakes does come out. People really like this. There's some really good stuff in it. And you'll be able to, you know, do different subsystems by themselves, or do inspections, like have a really thorough Air Brake Inspections module, but also just that understanding of the air supply, the supply subsystem, the—yeah. I can't remember. But there's, like, four that I really didn't quite under—I understand them a lot more now.
Mark: Excellent.
Jane: It's—yeah. It's going to be an excellent course. And we are fixing the Cargo Securement course so that you can mute it.
Mark: Yes. I know that's coming this week.
Jane: No. It's coming next week.
Mark: Well, the new template is—
Jane: The new template is coming this week and then we'll switch it next week while we're off.
Mark: That's good planning. While we're off, somebody else will switch it . Okay. Yes. Oh, that's very good. So we got a lot coming.
Jane: A lot is coming.
Mark: Well, we have been dangling a lot of these things in several episodes of podcasts and not really talked much about product stuff for a bit. So it's good to kind of have a rundown of what's new on the content side, and there's lots new coming on the LMS side as well.
Jane: Was gonna say—because you had the very, very, very big release—that there was a little bit of fallout from that.
Mark: Yes. And that was a really large technical change that almost nobody outside of platform will care about. But when you build these things, you start off with the design of a system, and there's always something that you don't get quite right. There's been a couple of things that were technical fails. Things that were bad designs and, like, from the beginning, I wasn't happy with them.
Jane: So just to clarify, we have had this system—
Mark: Coming up on twenty years.
Jane: Yeah. It's a twenty-year-old system. And any system that you have is going to need basically a facelift. And not just a facelift, but kind of like a butt lift too. I mean, it—the technology changes so much, and the whole approach to technology changes so much that you have to do some massive changes. And when you're bootstrapped the way we are—so if you don't know what bootstrapped is, it basically means we didn't get any outside funding for our company. You know, it's been self-funded from the beginning of time, whereas a lot of modern companies basically, they start out and five minutes later, they're off begging someone for money or someone is trying to invest in them.
But when you're bootstrapped, you don't always—and like, you have to think about this. This was not too far off the beginning of learning management systems.
Mark: Yeah, they were about eight years old at the time.
Jane: So we were still really, really early on.
Mark: I still knew what I wanted to do in the initial design. And just for time and resources, it didn't happen. And it's been a problem that's been compounding ever since at the architecture level, and we finally solved it.
Jane: Yeah. So basically, we had a crack in the sub-basement.
Mark: Yeah. It's kinda like you discover that your spine is made out of rubber when it should be made out of steel, and so now we have replaced the rubber spine with steel. And I know that is a crazy analogy, but—
Jane: I though my analogy was better.
Mark: The crack in the basement? Yeah. I guess you realize that your basement, instead of being poured concrete, it's just plywood. And actually, that's a good analogy because when we first moved into the house that we're in now, we saw a house up the street that's a historical designation house. And they had it up on—kind of propped up on stilts—about a foot or two feet above the ground, and they were building a basement underneath or completely rebuilding the basement. I'm not entirely sure, but it was a very delicate operation that happened for months and months and months, and that's kind of what we just did in our system.
Jane: It was very odd to see it being lifted up and you could see into the basement.
Mark: Yeah. Or the hole where the base—
Jane: Yeah. It was just a hole.
Mark: So that's what we've just done: the technical version of that at the very lowest levels of the system. And because it's the lowest level of the system, it affected every single other element. So it was a huge change with tons of testing, and we had to go through an outage in order to make some really low-level changes, but to do that and update—I don't even know how many tens of millions of records—because some tables had, there was one table that had fifty million records in it. And there were several other tables that needed to be changed as well.
Jane: That's after we've archived some of the—
Mark: That's after doing the archive. Yes. So that is all done now, and there's definitely some fallout, and there's some things that aren't working as we would like them to, and we're in the process of finishing up fixing all of those. But the performance is dramatically better in the things that are fixed now, which is great. So you got an architectural problem that is solved and you've got a performance improvement as a result, and that is much nicer. So we finish that.
Jane: So patience, please.
Mark: Well, yeah, by the time this episode comes out, I think we will have wrapped up the last of it. There were a couple of issues that came out as a result of it, and the cure was more painful than the illness. So we had to deal with that as well, but it is largely resolved. And now we are moving into the next batch of projects because, well, we finished those big technical changes and also continue to overhaul the interface.
So we have done a lot of user interface updates, and the next round of them is going live this week. The way we view and manage and organize programs is completely redesigned. So we continue to work on those. And now that we've wrapped up some of these other larger things, we are also moving on to the new spring batch of projects.
And one I'm really looking forward to is clamping down on some of the things that—let's call them—the less scrupulous members of our community may have been taking advantage of. So we continue to look for opportunities to improve security, but also to prevent less scrupulous people from misusing the system in certain ways. And they are very creative. The people that—I won't call them what I want to call them in a public podcast—but there are people that are not really the finest members of society that are sometimes looking for ways to misuse our system.
Customers. I'm not talking about thieves that aren't customers or outside hackers or anything like that. There are customers that are not always the finest representatives of the industry. And so as we find these things, we clamp down on them. So we've got a couple of projects that we are undertaking now where we've found some pretty creative things that people were trying to do to get around being honorable and being honest, and we are going to have those in place in the next month or so, I think. So I'm very happy about that.
And also, completely overhauling the way we do reporting. And the types of reports that we have available, and how people can pull data out, and things like having an audit-specific report that is designed to give you exactly what the auditors want to see when they review.
Jane: That's nice.
Mark: Yeah. And compliance reports—changing some of that. Like knowing how people want to look at training data, we can customize reports a fair bit and give people things that are gonna make it way easier when they've got an insurance audit or they've got an enforcement audit coming by. We've got a lot of things that we're working on there. So it's—again, there was a bit of a blockage because we had a huge release that we were working on. But now that that's out of the way, we've got some very cool things that we're gonna be doing over the next couple of months.
Jane: Alright.
Mark: Oh, and in terms of other cool things that are happening, we have a webinar this week that I am very much looking forward to.
Jane: Yes. The dark webinar.
Mark: Yeah. I couldn't just call it the dark webinar. It's officially called Inside Driver Files. Yeah. And so we're doing this one with TruckRight. And I've done webinars with them before as our kind of HR system partner. We've done some webinars in the past, but this one is gonna look at the ins and outs of driver files—what needs to be in them and what to watch for, how to make sure that you're doing it right, and particularly for background checks and employment verification and all of those things that need to happen as part of that driver qualification.
And I think it is going to be very interesting because Dirk Coupar, founder of TruckRight, is doing this with us. And I've known Dirk for a long time. And he is not what you would call a chatty, very effusive guy. He's kind of quiet. He knows a lot about the stuff that he's doing. He definitely knows his stuff in terms of the HR side of trucking, but he doesn't usually say a whole lot—except in this area.
When I gave him one question and he talked for like a good ten minutes of all the things that people need to think about on that one thing. And I was thinking, okay, we're not gonna have any trouble filling the hour in this webinar. Yeah. I'm gonna have to keep it contained because this is obviously something that Dirk is very passionate about, knows backwards and forwards for any number of different jurisdictions around North America.
So I think it's gonna be really interesting. And we've got a lot of people registered for it already, so there's a lot of interest. I think we're gonna get a lot of questions, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
Jane: Well, maybe you should think about doing a sequel or a part two.
Mark: Oh, I like that. Do a sequel. Or do this as kind of a periodic thing, like—
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: —times a year we do something. Yeah. Well, they are very busy at TruckRight right now. As people probably saw, there's been quite a seismic shift in—I don't know if I wanna call it the HR side of the trucking space—but applicant tracking—
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Tenth Street taking out their competition with DriverReach and effectively shutting down. You know, they bought the competition, they're just shutting it down and trying to keep as many customers as they can. But, of course, a lot of those people that are with DriverReach were using that product because they didn't want to go to Tenth Street, so they're looking for alternatives.
And it's been very busy for TruckRight and Avatar Fleet, and I think EBE and anybody else who's got another HR-like or driver applicant tracking system. They've been very busy.
Jane: I had totally forgotten about that. But yes, that was a big surprise.
Mark: Yeah. Kinda was. And going back to your point about investors versus being bootstrapped, that kind of thing can happen when you have outside investors and they can decide to cash out and just sell you to somebody. And we're fortunate that we don't have that situation—we don't have any outside investors that can make these decisions and end up in a situation like that.
Jane: We watch for that kind of stuff as well. Because we're a tech company, we watch other tech companies, and there are—they—what did you say? It's like a five-year cycle?
Mark: Three to five years. Yeah. Three years would be the short end. But yeah, five years, sometimes seven on the longer end of it. The people that put an investment in, they want to see a return.
And sometimes, they're investing money that's part of a fund that from the outset has a window. So if you are an investor, you give your money to a private equity company or venture capital company as part of one of their larger funds. And part of the prospectus is that it's going to have a certain lifespan or you're going to get a return within a certain period. It's not locking up your money forever.
So the people that are putting the cash into those funds, they know that they're gonna get it out at some point—a fixed point in the future—which means the venture capital and private equity people need to have some sort of liquidation where they can get the cash back to give it to their investors.
So the companies that get those investments need to have some sort of liquidation of some sort. Either they sell to somebody, or they do another round—an investment round that raises the valuation, or they go public. Or something needs to happen.
And now we're at a point where it's been a few years where there's been a downturn in the trucking industry. The freight market has been down. Not a great time for a lot of these investor-backed or venture-backed tech companies. They are facing some challenges because it's hard to grow, it's hard to maintain profitability, it's hard to hit any of the milestones that they're committed to hitting.
And sometimes, there are going to be outcomes that come that maybe aren't what people would have chosen—what people would have ideally liked.
Jane: I think there might be more of that in the coming—I expect a couple of years.
Mark: Over the next year, I think it's gonna be more, especially now that we've got kind of everybody accepting that the downturn is not ending in the next month or two. Yes. It is gonna be another six months, easily, maybe even another year. And people are gonna try and get their money out and just go. I mean, we're seeing it on the fleet side. We're starting to see that. They're kind of giving up—the ones that were coasting on fumes are realizing they can't keep it going. They need to do something different.
I have been hearing tales that the OEMs are starting to pull back the trucks rather than just keep those things out in the field. They're starting to repo them. And it's gonna be—there's going to be an effect over the next six months, I think, for sure.
Jane: It's really unfortunate because things were starting to look up.
Mark: Things were slightly starting to turn up last fall. Yeah. It did look like it was starting to get better, and then it kind of held at that point, and then it sort of settled. And now everybody's just kind of on pause. So we'll have to see what happens over the next few months.
But if we go back to the conversations we had at Mid-America, there's lots of fleets out there that are still pretty busy. Lots of fleets out there that still have stuff that they're trying to do, that they're trying to grow, and they're trying to do the right thing. So there's still a thriving industry. I mean, the headline might be that there's a downturn, but there's still a thriving industry there.
Jane: Absolutely.
Mark: That's me trying to turn it around to a positive.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: If we had sort of the long diatribe about the dismal state of things, we try to turn it around to a positive as we bring it to a close.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: So before we go negative again, should we just wrap it up there? At the positive point?
Jane: Sure. We can wrap it up.
Mark: Yeah. There's still a thriving industry out there.
Jane: There is.
Mark: And with that, we can wrap it for today. Great. Listen.
Jane: Bye for now.