The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #96
Jane: Hey. It's time for The CarriersEdge Podcast. It's episode ninety six. I am your host co founder of CarriersEdge, Jane Jazrawy, and with me as always.
Mark: Mark Murrell, other cofounder.
Jane: Hey.
Mark: And I like that. It's time for The CarriersEdge Podcast. Like, it's a children's show or something.
Jane: It is. It's time because someone downloaded it and pressed play on their podcast app.
Mark: It's time because my big wall calendar told me it's time to go and record another one.
Jane: Yep. That's right. Twenty mile marching.
Mark: Yes. And five minutes before? It's time to think about what we're gonna talk about.
Jane: Oh, man. I hope that you thought about it more than that.
Mark: Actually, we thought about it a couple of days ago. On the weekend, we were talking about it. And we both said, oh, that'll be good for the podcast.
Jane: Yeah. The problem is, then I forget because twenty thousand other things come into my mind.
Mark: Well, it's good. It'll be fresh.
Jane: Alright.
Mark: When we get there
Jane: Do you remember what it was?
Mark: I do remember.
Jane: Well, that's good.
Mark: Yes. But first, we are going to go through what we have to go through as the first topic. Given the time of the year, we are in the home stretch for Best Fleets interviews.
Jane: It's the most wonderful time. For everybody who's not us and anybody we're interviewing.
Mark: I think some of the interviewed people have had a good time.
Jane: No. I think that the actual interview is fine. The problem is prepping for that interview can be not fine. You know, you're doing that extensive questionnaire and then I think there's some nerves for people who haven't done it before, which it's interesting, nerves come out differently in different people. And sometimes, people are just they look nervous and sometimes they look really annoyed with you.
Mark: Sometimes it turns into them talking a lot and sometimes it turns into them just being silent.
Jane: Yeah. The ones who don't say anything and you're like, yeah. Come on. You wanna tell me something about your company, don't you?
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. It's been very good. So we're at the point where we're starting to see some things.
Jane: Well, I often find that one of the things that I always do when I'm doing an interview is try and make people laugh.
Mark: Yeah. Me too. Especially if her first timers, you gotta break the ice.
Jane: Yeah. And so you crack a lot of jokes and hopefully they don't take offense to any of them.
Mark: Yeah. Well, if you throw yourself under the bus, then you're okay.
Jane: Yeah. Well, that's the idea. That's generally how I approach it. My sense of humor is pretty self deprecating. So
Mark: Yeah. I've found that it's been okay so far. I haven't done very many people that were new. Trying to think of it now. I've sat in on a handful.
Most of them are people that have been through the process before. Sometimes it's been some new people that are part of it even though the fleet has been around. Definitely seeing that this year. A lot of new people.
Jane: Yeah. People who have moved on and now there's a whole other set of people taking over.
Mark: That's how old we are, the next generation is getting settled in.
Jane: Kind of. Yeah. I think for the, like, the ones that I had today, it was just people who just weren't there. They were there at the company, they just weren't there for the interview. But it's nice that I think in every interview that I've been at, there has been an executive who have been present, which I think is always really good to have that executive presence.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: They're the ones who are gonna know the story of the company the best, and they can answer the most questions and they are you know, they're just generally better to talk to about a company.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. They're in a much better position there. So I've been finding some interesting things, and I haven't shared any of these with you so this will be fresh.
Jane: Yes. I tried to get you to share things.
Mark: Yes. And I refused.
Jane: You did? Well, I was getting coffee, and I'm like, hey, how's it going? And you said no, not until the podcast.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Hate those entire conversations we can't have until we're positioned behind a microphone.
Mark: Exactly. Until the record button is pressed. Yeah.
Jane: It's a weird relationship for us to have Mr. Murrell.
Mark: No regrets here. So one of them I actually did post into our Slack channel for interviews, and that is we are seeing so many people where the truck count has shrunk. The driver count has shrunk. People have shifted from employee drivers to owner operators and like all of these things that are just a pure result of a bad freight market.
And the truck counts have gone down sometimes it's well, in a lot of cases, turnover has gone up. A lot of times we've seen the numbers have have really gone up there in terms of drivers leaving just general things that tell you that the freight market is in has been in bad shape.
Jane: Well, I don't there are a couple that I think have gone up. I have talked to a couple of people who have done who have done okay, but it's still been. Like, nobody's been enjoying the last six months.
Mark: Yeah. Well, normally when we see significant or notable changes in those kind of things, we would ask about it. But after sitting in on a few interviews where they very much did not wanna talk about those things. I realized, oh, it's not anything where they've made a conscious decision to do this. It's just the nature of the market and there's no real benefit to talking about that anymore anymore. We already know the market's been crap for the last year.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So why belabor it? So I just told everybody, you know, let's just skip that this year. We know what's going on. We can see what's happening. We don't need to say.
So see the turnover is up and your truck counts down. What's going on? Well, yeah. No reason to make people uncomfortable. We're trying to get stories of what they're doing, the new things that they're working on, what's happening within their businesses, within their own communities, all of that kind of stuff.
So we're focusing more on that. Than anything else, and we know that the truck counts are down.
Jane: One of the things that I wanted everybody to start doing because I was getting tired of everybody gets bogged down on those first two sections, which are, like, just introductory sections, which is your business information and compensation. And really, as long as you've got the right like, as long as you've got accurate things in there, there's really not a whole lot to talk about so this year, I finally got fed up reviewing the reviewing questionnaires where people are asking all of these questions about compensation. I'm like, We don't care.
Mark: Yeah. We don't score it.
Jane: We don't care about the ins and outs of, you know, how many people have family benefits as opposed to single. We don't care about that. We care that your the company has benefits for drivers and possibly family, but we don't, you know, that's not the conversation that we should be having. What we should be having is the conversation starting with HR.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And I think that that change has been really good.
Mark: Yeah. We've started doing the interviews differently, where we used to go through the interviews in the order of the questionnaire so we would start with the business info, then go comp, and then benefits, and then get into things like HR strategy. But now we've shifted and we start with the HR strategy and go through those. I find that people have a very different conversation when you start that way because they're thinking more about the specifics of what's happening within the business. I think part of the challenge that we had before and this is funny that this is
Jane: taken fifteen years.
Mark: Sixteen years, we've been doing this thing. And finally now, we're like, hey, we should change the order. But I think when people are starting with the business info, which is really like truck counts and how do you pay drivers and or those kind of things and you get into comp. They kinda default into, like, their recruiting pitch. Recruiting sort of mindset of, here's what we offer, here's what our different positions are, how much you can make, and they kinda go on autopilot for that.
And it skews the interview a little bit versus when we go a different direction and we start with HR, we start with new entrant programs and the efforts to bring back drivers that have quit and what you've done to improve retention. All of those things shift the conversation quite a bit. Gets people out of that kind of default. Rut of just talking about comp and we pay this much for this much waiting and we pay an extra bonus for New York and all of that kind of stuff that we really don't care about. So it really shifts it around nicely.
Jane: Not that we don't care about it, that's not really the right words, but our shorthand is we don't care about that. We care about everything we ask about. But what we don't, it's not something that we want to have a discussion about. We know that drivers are paid a certain way and as long as you've told us how drivers get paid, that's kind of all we need to know.
If there's something really odd about it, like when we started noticing the whole guaranteed pay change then we'll talk about that, but we don't necessarily need to talk about numbers. As long as we have them there, like, that's the most that we wanna talk about the numbers because we wanna look at the numbers, those comp numbers and the, you know, how many trucks are in your fleet and all of that stuff. We wanna look at that more at the end sort of as a we don't wanna look at your individual company. We wanna look at it as a group.
Mark: Yeah. That's a good point because we're not doing it as something that we score individually.
Jane: Right
Mark: For the most part, it is trend tracking Yeah. To see what happened year over year.
Jane: And that's why I was explaining today that the reason that we don't want everybody's individual, like, for example, when we do we do an interview and sometimes people answer the comp question about how much city drivers make and how much regional drivers make and then how much the over the road drivers make? Well, they I think that's because they're assuming that we wanna know those differences and what we don't really. We kinda wanna know the big average of what drivers are making. And we look at the same number every year. So for us, it's not a number. We we could look at it. Over the road in regional and local. But what we want to notice is, is it going up or down?
Mark: Yeah. And by how much?
Jane: Yeah. And we don't I mean, other than that, that's really all we're looking at. And what we found over the last four, three, or four years is that it's gone up.
Mark: It has been going up. Yeah.
Jane: What's going to be interesting is to see if it goes down. Yeah. And what that you know, and what the trend from 2022 to 2025 is? Yeah. That will be interesting because, I mean, it's going to tell us whether there's is freight sort of settling down?
Are things settling down? Or are they still in flux and are things still all over the place and are people still kind of struggling? And that's kind of like the entire world not just the trucking industry.
Mark: Yeah. Very interesting. Now with all of that being said, I did have a conversation this morning that I think will prompt us to change one of our compensation questions.
Jane: Oh.
Mark: Possibly add a new one. So
Jane: Do tell
Mark: Yes. This came out of kind of bullet at the end of an answer.
Jane: As it usually does.
Mark: Yeah. These things sort of come out of nowhere. And so the question was about how owner operators are paid. And again, most of the time, we don't really care that much about it because, yeah, you're paying either as a percentage or per mile, you never paying owner operators by hour. On long haul stuff.
So it's that kind of thing, and we normally track, you know, how many of them pay percentage, how many of them pay per mile, that kind of stuff. So this one had their notes on how they do it and at the end they had a bullet that said no administration fees. And I was like, Now that's interesting. That suggests to me that other people do have this and you don't. So tell me more about it.
And so what they found is there's or the the story that they get from owner operators is that other fleets will offer certain rates and whatever it is they're paying, but there's certain admin fees that get tacked onto that that actually reduce the amount that the owner op makes. So this company, what separated them in their package, what they did differently is they're not charging any of those things. So if this is what it says that you're gonna make on this thing, you make exactly that. It's not that much, well minus as much for this or minus as much for that.
Jane: Huh
Mark: So that got me thinking and I said, but you know, tell me about these other things that people are doing. And for them, it's only secondhand. They're hearing it from the owner ops that they're hiring. But it got me thinking.
And I said, well, you may be responsible for us adding yet another question into that questionnaire because this is very curious. I wanna know now who's charging admin fees. To me, that is a slippery slope into a kind of a bait and switch or the feeling that there's a bait and switch you say you're gonna make this, but you don't actually make it.
Jane: And what's the clawback for?
Mark: Yeah. How do you justify that? And why don't you just like, tell people what they're actually gonna make.
Jane: Yeah. Like, why subtract it? Like, just tell them that they're gonna make well because they don't want it to look like they're making less. Yeah. But they are.
Mark: The whole industry is just competing on dimes.
Jane: Yeah. It's funny how companies will, it's like they think that once people find out they won't be unhappy? Well, it's like people think that, you know, when drivers find out what their actually going to make they won't be unhappy and somehow you will have skirted some issue. I think it's much better to be telling people up front what they're going to get. And if you think that it's not gonna look as good as somebody else's offer, then you have to explain why your offer is better.
And it can't just be on price because that's just where you start getting into these. You don't wanna do it with tricks. And I think drivers feel like they've been tricked over and over and over again. And they, as a group, don't tend to like it.
Mark: Yeah. Oh, yeah, competing on prices. Never the thing you wanna be doing.
Jane: Well, you end up with I think competing on price is when you end up with the what you get for your money is less and less and less. And then at some point you wonder, when are you gonna have to change the entire packaging of your potato chips? Because, you know, you're putting less and less and less and to the bag. You know, people are noticing that it's mostly air.
Mark: Oh. Very good to pivot into a whole rant about shrinkflation.
Jane: Yeah. Well, I mean, you kind of see that and you don't wanna be kind of nibbled on around the edges.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: I don't but going back to I wanted to go back to what you were saying about having a better conversation by starting at the third or fourth. One, two, three, it's the fourth section? Business, comp, benefits, human resources. It's a better conversation. The other thing Well, because we didn't do it. Like, we always went for the last fifteen years. You and me are constantly just going in order. But I think the difference now is that other people are doing it and where we learn to get out a comp pretty quick, it's harder for other people to learn it because they're not living and breathing it all the time. So when you're teaching other people to do it, you start real. Like, when you look at when you listen to someone else do an interview, and they're stuck in comp for twenty minutes or half an hour and you're thinking, huh this doesn't sound like the kind of interview that is going to give good information. And you think, okay. Well, how can I make it so that it's better it's a better quality interview for everybody? Without brow beating people into, okay, you gotta go fast. You can't get out.
You have to get out of comp. Well, why don't we just do comp last?
Mark: Yeah. That was a really good idea. Because also, it gets us into the things that really do distinguish the fleets.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Because the the nuts and bolts of those comp packages are never really that noteworthy. What's noteworthy is the way they handle collecting feedback from the drivers, the way they do their onboarding, the way they manage their committees, and handle their performance review process, all of those things are much more interesting.
Jane: The one thing that I think that you and I do that is hard to do is connect things from different parts of the questionnaire. Yeah. And that is something that happens when you've doing these interviews for literally years, you start recognizing when people, like, just say two words in one area. So performance and you're like, oh, wait a minute they said something about that and operational strategy, and then you have to go and connect the two.
And it's a very small words, and it's kinda like what you said about the owner operator admin fees. It's just one bullet. And a lot of the time you can get a really good conversation out of one little bullet or a couple of words that you were seeing out of context in something else or the name of a program and you're like, wait a minute is that program this program that you described without naming it earlier on? And you it's almost like I have this thing about I really like it when I read the same author over and over and over again, and they talk about the other books in later books.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: It's not like series. Like, I'm not talking about a series. It's just when the guy who wrote The World According to Garp does this a lot. He refers to the same, and Steven King does it as well, the horror guy. They refer to the same places.
So everything's always in Maine for Stephen King and for John Wyndham. John Wyndham, no he's
Mark: Irving.
Jane: Irving. So, yeah, Wyndham is The Day of the Triffids. It's John Irving has I think he's in Maine too or Massachusetts, some eastern place, and they're always kind of in the same neighborhood. So you don't talk about the same characters, but they're always in the same neighborhood. And I love that.
Like, I've always so I think that I just naturally pick up things and connect them to other things when I'm reading a new interview because I really like it.
Mark: Well, it allows you to get a more complete picture of what's happening because you're seeing it from different sides.
Jane: Different angles.
Mark: Yeah. And when you're really in the zone, you also can hear those little bits of things and know, oh, that belongs at the bottom of performance management. Oh, that belongs halfway through operation. Yeah. And that's a challenge.
It takes a long time to kind of ramp up. There's a hundred and ten questions that we ask people and nobody coming into it fresh is gonna have a sense of what is in each of those sections and why until you've gone through it a few times.
Jane: And you score because Selase, who is our partner title.
Mark: A partner title.
Jane: The partner.
Mark: There you go.
Jane: He's a partner guy. I know we have his title.
Mark: A partner guy.
Jane: He's a Director of Partnerships.
Mark: You could just say Selase and then move on
Jane: Selase, I don't remember what I was gonna say about Selase.
Mark: He said that related to scoring, I'm guessing.
Jane: Oh, he said and it wasn't to me. It was to somebody else who told me later that he once you go through the scoring, then you really understand the questions.
Mark: Yeah. You interview very differently after that. Yes. Unfortunately, most people go through it and start with interviewing and then go to scoring after.
Jane: But But you have to.
Mark: That's just the nature of the way it flows.
Jane: Well, no. It's not just that, you have to do an interview before you can understand what you're scoring.
Mark: Yeah. But then you'll do a better interview after you've scored it. Very circular that way.
Jane: But I think that if you go through all the interviews and you start hearing the same things over and over again, and then you see the same things written over and over again, in the scoring process, you start to get a sense of what the industry tends to do and what sets apart the ones who are special or the ones who are operating at a higher level. That's when you start kinda going, okay. I see this. I see, I understand.
Mark: Well, part of it as well is that we have people involved in this process as an education piece for them because it's a great way to learn about the industry. They learn so much about the industry by going through this interview process and going through the interviews, you have to see all of the questions in all the different categories and get a sense of all of them to have that conversation with a fleet, and that's where the really good education value is for each of these interviewers. So when you're scoring, yeah, you get very deep into a question, but it's just one question
Jane: Mhmm
Mark: and then you might get very deep into another one. But through the whole process, you've gone through maybe eight questions and scored them. And that's it. So you get very deep in some of them, but you're not getting that breadth that you get by going through the interview process. Now, what I'm finding that's interesting is this year for the first time, I think we've really got enough interviewers.
I think this is the first time I don't have any fleets. Allocated myself. I got no direct interviews. It's in some ways, it's glorious. I don't have any interviews that I have to manage on my own.
I'm just helping other people and shadowing them. But the downside of that is that they are not immersed in it quite like they used to be. It used to be that we never had enough interviewers and everybody was kind of buried in it for the four weeks, four to six weeks that it's really a grind of interviews. And the upside of that is because they're so buried in it, they learned so much and they kept it fresh and they were able to get a much deeper experience out of all of that stuff that they're learning. Now because there's enough interviewers, nobody's really buried in it.
Everybody's able to do it within the scope of their existing work, so it's not so disruptive, but they're also not staying in the zone quite the same way. Kinda going in and out, and they almost forget some of it.
Jane: I I think I'm okay with that.
Mark: Yeah. I think it's okay. It's a good problem to have.
Jane: Yeah. It's really tiring. I mean, I did two today, and I'm and I'm beat. It's I I don't have I guess, I don't have my legs right now, but I was well, I also only had a bowl of cereal to eat, so that probably
Mark: Makes a difference.
Jane: Yeah, makes a difference. Like, once I eat, I really, really want, like, a big gooey eclair right now because I'm just dying for something sweet.
Mark: Yeah when we're done here, we will go down to the gluten free bakery.
Jane: Oh, okay.
Mark: So Jane's gonna talk fast now.
Jane: Well, no. Doesn't it close it four? I don't know. Anyway, that's not for you guys to know or care about. What I'm eating on any given day, how much sugar I'm taking in.
But yeah. Like, if you're doing four interviews in a day, that kills you. Three is pretty tiring.
Mark: Almost nobody's ever done four. You've done them once. Yeah.
Jane: I've done four. Trish has done four.
Mark: Trish did four one time. Yeah. But it's not a regular thing you did like one time.
Jane: No. I've done done it a couple times.
Mark: Three is normally the max that we will put in there.
Jane: Three is yeah. And that is really tiring. But and I did two interviews. No. I had interview, meeting, interview, meeting, and that that is tiring.
Mark: Yeah. Well, also, they're all on camera now. Everybody wants to be on camera and get their screenshot done. So you have to be sitting up straight and looking sharp the whole time, that's the worst part for me.
Jane: The way that you have set up your desk, you need to sit up straight. I can lean on my desk and still look okay. So, I mean, that's all of your setup. That's nothing to do with.
Mark: I contend that it was way easier pre-COVID, when nobody was on video and I could slouch in my chair with my headset on just listening to people talk and I could type, nobody cared what I was looking at or any of those kind of things. Was way easier.
Jane: Well, I find it actually, and it's not that I mind it. I I do find it a little bit challenging when people are sitting in a boardroom with a camera.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: Because I know and I've talked about this before, but I know that I'm on big, huge screen. Yeah.
Mark: You know that you're four feet across.
Jane: Yeah. And they're all they look far away, but they're not. But I'm look like I'm super close.
Mark: Those screenshots are hilarious because you have your giant head and and all these little tiny people at their
Jane: I know.
Mark: Conference table.
Jane: I don't like it. I don't like the idea that my head is that big in anyone's, you know, boardroom.
Mark: Yeah. Well, in any case, we are grinding through.
Jane: We are.
Mark: We've got, I don't even know how many we've done. I don't know how many are left to do. It's fabulous. Trish is managing all of that, but the process is running along and we are seeing definitely seeing some interesting things coming up.
Yeah. And next time we're in an episode of this podcast, we should be deep into the scoring. So we'll have lots to talk about there. And one of the things that came up, the thing that we were talking about on the weekend is the whole idea of passive language.
Jane: Oh, I love this. My favorite topic is passive language.
Mark: It's something we see in some of the questions and it is something that we've seen in people that we interact with through work in different ways. And that is people who revert to passive language and sometimes they're just conditioned to only speak in passive language. Sometimes it is like a defense mechanism or it's it's something that you can tell that they're falling back into when they don't know what else to say. But it is something that we find fascinating, and I know you have a substantially refined opinion on this subject, so
I will hand it off to you.
Jane: I think that we may have talked about passive language before.
Mark: A little bit in the context of education material.
Jane: Right. So
Mark: But sorry. The thing that we were talking about on the weekend is about how corporate
Jane: Oh, yeah.
Mark: trains you to use passive language, and kind of avoid using any active language and that's sort of why people fall back on it when they're scared or where they don't know what to say and they they kinda wanna pass the buck. It's a great way to pass the buck.
Jane: So passive language is when you don't identify anybody doing anything. Things are just done.
Mark: It just magically happened.
Jane: Yeah. Well, actually, that was a passive sentence too. Things are just done. So you you know, you don't know who did them, you don't know who they were done to or what the you know, it's all very vague. And one of the things that I was thinking about when we were talking about this was talking about the the term reaching out, the phrase, reaching out to people.
Because that is it's not passive because if I say I reached out to you, that's that's definitely active because I know who did it. I know who who it was doing too. Like, it's very clear. But the language, what is reaching out? Like, what does that mean?
Mark: Yeah. It could mean any number of different things.
Jane: And the fact is that it sounds nice, but it's very inexact. And one of the things that I have kind of trained myself to do over the last, like, in my career. Like, even from the first time I wrote anything, it was to be direct and clear. And that term reaching out is very unclear. It's very murky.
Like, you don't know really what's happening. You make a you make your own assumptions about what that means. But that may not be what the person who's saying it means, and that's when communication can really get bad. But that whole going back to passive language, that the reason that it is a really good defense is because it doesn't identify anybody in the, so if you say something about how I was told, I was told to do it that way. Yeah.
So that's a, you know, because if you say something like, oh, why did you why did you make the clouds red? I was told to do it that way. Who told you? Now, sometimes, people have said something like that to me when I told them to do it. So so I you know, so look good to the scenarios.
And I said, you know, two months ago, two one of my graphic designers. This has not happened to say, you know, make these clouds red. And then two months later, I forgotten what that was. And why are the clouds red? I was told to make the clouds red.
Well, that's a ridiculous conversation because I was the one who said, the person who did the graphic designer knows full well that I was the one who said, but they are feeling threatened and they don't wanna say so that I was told. You know, and it's like the so I have a, I have a hard time with that language because I am weird, and I would like everything to be clear even when it will make me angry. Or it will give me a more negative feeling.
Mark: Well, it's funny because all of that is defensive language.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Like I was told, another one that I love is the word approved.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: I've started to really have
Jane: It was approved.
Mark: Yes. But or even, you know, you approved it or, you know, this has been approved. Even when it's tied to a person you approved it, there's a passing of the buck in there. Yeah. And that's always kind of a defensive mechanism.
And this is sort of coming up for us now because we see this as we're going through all these best fleets questionnaires that sometimes people will have a really good explanation of the things that they're doing and then when they get to the diversity question, it's all of this passive marketing crap.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: I was like, okay I know why because you don't have a good answer and you don't wanna talk about it or you don't have anything to say. So you're trying to color it with all this other stuff. We see through that.
Jane: Well, especially when everybody has been very careful in their other answers, the ones that you don't have a good answer for stick out like a like the red clouds.
Mark: Yeah. But we're also seeing it in lots of other language as well. So reaching out is another one that I can tell you the moment that entered the corporate lexicon. It was in the fall of twenty sixteen, and I thought it was stupid at the time.
Jane: Why was it?
Mark: The first time I heard it and it was like I'd never heard it anywhere and then, like, within a month, I heard it like, different people said it, saw it written down, and it just all of a sudden it appeared, and all of a sudden it was just pervasive. Like TikTok, just appearing out of nowhere and all of a sudden it's pervasive. And I thought it was dumb, but then the person who said it was somebody I didn't have a lot of use for so kind of stuck in my head is like, that seems about right. It was a corporate person who was always using this kind of flowery BS language. So it's stuck with me.
Jane: Yeah. I think flowery BS language. That is
Mark: It doesn't tell you anything. And it's like you're trying to make something more important. It's like the LinkedIn description of everything. Right? You can't just say what you're doing. You've gotta turn it into this giant accomplishment. I reached out to that person. Well, what did you do? Did you grab at the air until you found them. Stop.
Keep your hands to yourself. Did you actually send them an email? Did you call them? Maybe you sent them a fax. Who knows?
Like, you might not have done anything that's useful or you might have actually called them and left a voicemail and you're waiting to hear back, okay, that's at least done something. You posted something on their Facebook wall. Who knows what stupid thing you did to reach out?
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: But every time I see it in the media, anytime I see it in a new story that we have reached out for comment, I think, yeah, you didn't do anything.
Jane: They emailed.
Mark: If that.
Jane: Possibly.
Mark: Yeah. They might have sent an email to a general info account and, oh, we didn't get a response immediately, so that's it.
Jane: Well, that's the other thing is that reaching out sometimes the method of reaching out could be not the best method and if you don't tell someone how you're going to do something, then like for example, with Best Fleets, you know, you email. Best Fleets is done all through email so if someone started to do use LinkedIn, to get to someone, like to try and contact someone, that probably wouldn't be appropriate. So, you know, it's still reaching out but emailing is the preferred way of reaching out and LinkedIn is not or calling them, that's not.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Well, I mean, calling them is okay sometimes, but there are preferred methods of reaching out and if you're not specific about it, then there can be that misunderstanding which can turn into an issue later on.
Mark: But that's also where a lot of our follow ups on the interviews end up being. Because people will say, for instance, in the question about this company have a program for trying to get ex drivers to come back. And they will say things like we reach out to any driver who's qualified to come back. Well, the first thing we're gonna say is, what does that look like? What are you actually doing?
Jane: And it can be a bunch of things. It can be a it can be a phone call. It can be a text. It can be email.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like, they all do it differently.
Mark: And a lot of times you get some really great insights when you get beneath that layer of the corporate speak, you get to the actual detail. You get some really great information.
Jane: It's like shorthand and it's not a good shorthand.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And there's another shorthand that doesn't have to do, well I'm sure that this word is in the Best Fleets questionnaire is the word gifting?
Mark: Oh.
Jane: I know.
Mark: You had to press that button. Did you? Gifting is not a verb. You can't a gift is not a verb.
Jane: Well
Mark: I do not accept it.
Jane: I'm coming around to it because
Mark: Nope.
Jane: Well, no. I'm I'm thinking about how people use it and especially in advertising and marketing, it is way easier to use that word rather than gave a gift. It's shorter.
Mark: But why not just say give?
Jane: Because sometimes it's not obvious whether it's a gift or you're just giving some something. Like, a gift has a connotation of something special. There's a specialness. Right?
So sometimes it's during a holiday season or it's for a birthday or another occasion. But sometimes you just give something to somebody and it's not a gift.
Mark: How if you've given something, you're not asking for something in exchange, you're not selling it to them. You're giving it to them.
Jane: Well, you're not okay. So if you were at a tradeshow booth and you're and you have magnets and you give them away, they're not you're not gifting them.
Mark: Depends how pretentious you are.
Jane: Well, if you are, that's pretentious. Yes. I mean, the the value of the gift, you assume that there is a little bit of value to the gift.
Mark: I think that you've hit on the nail. Hit the nail on the head right there that when they call it gifting, they're assigning some greater value to the thing that they're giving away. A giveaway is some cheap piece of crap that you give away for free at a show, but a gifting of something. Yes. Oh, that's a lot of value. That's something very fancy. Even though a lot of the times is just junk as well.
Jane: Well, I hear it a lot in terms of, you know, giving somebody a present of like jewelry or, you know, give people used to say give them the gift of blah blah blah. Now gifting is kind of in there. Instead and sometimes in my head, I hear the word gifting and I think, okay, I don't like that. How can I rewrite it? And sometimes, I don't have a better way to write it.
So that's what's going on in my head. If you say gifting to me in a sentence, I'm rewriting it in my head.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And I'm trying to figure out if if there's a better way to say it or if if I should just be angry at the word gifting for the rest of my life.
Mark: Well
Jane: like I am with the word emails.
Mark: Yes. Mail and email putting an s on the end of those. But on the core subject of imprecise language, it causes problems.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: It is if somebody is using it within the organization, it's usually a sign that they feel defensive or threatened or that they are uncomfortable not using it for any good reason. Nobody uses that kind of passive corporate speak for good reasons.
Jane: Well, I I think a lot of it is they don't know or they don't have a good answer. It may not be a defense it's to fill up the space.
Mark: Yeah they don't have a real answer, but I would say the thing that we've realized in the last little while is anytime somebody's doing it, there's a reason why they're doing it and we can either elect to just skip over it if it's a Best Fleets question and we know that that means they don't have a good answer. Or if it's an internal person, we can get to the heart of what the actual issue is. What are they concerned about? What are they feeling unhappy about?
Whatever the issue is underlying it. Address that, and then the passive corporate speak disappears.
Jane: It is quite funny how amazing amazingly fast it goes away. Yeah. When you make people flip around the the language, And writing I find especially people learn to write in a passive manner. They don't necessarily speak in a passive manner as much, but writing for sure.
Mark: Well, you really notice it. If somebody is actually speaking like that, oh does it stand out? Somebody's speaking in passive language.
Jane: It's hard to follow I find it really hard to follow when someone is doing it because I have to flip around the I have to do the conversion to active language in my head.
Mark: Yeah. It's like you're listening to some royal giving a formal speech or some prof who is wanting to make sure you know that he or she has tenure.
Jane: That one has tenure.
Mark: That one has tenure. Yeah. The tenure has been achieved.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Yes. Things that we notice going through this over and over again. So that's where we're at with interviews and with our current thoughts on the state of language, but all of that is building up to our big event.
Jane: Oh, yes.
Mark: The Best Fleet's Education and Awards Conference, and we can now make a few other public statements about that. So
Jane: I'm gonna let you make the public statements.
Mark: Well, we announced today, we announced our guest speaker, our one and only guest speaker.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Chris Henry from KSM Transport Advisors is gonna teach people how to be profitable.
Jane: I what is it? The five or six
Mark: Well, they have twelve traits, but there isn't gonna be time for them so he's gonna have to pick some, I don't know, five or six or something like that traits of profitable companies. And they kinda do a similar thing to what we do, but they do it more on the financial side, they look at operational and all of the accounting data and from there, they can see the things, the common traits that help fleets to be more profitable, and things that are pitfalls to watch out for. So he is going to be at our event talking about that, and that should be a very good addition as well.
Jane: So anybody who has missed him from his benchmarking days
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Can come and see him speak.
Mark: So, yeah, I I think it's gonna be nice. It's a good compliment. It's a little bit of a a different angle to similar kind of things that we're talking about, you know, we're talking about assessing the state of the business and looking at it from different angles and finding ways to be more efficient and operate a little bit more smoothly. And he's gonna talk about the same thing just from the the finance side. So that will be fun.
We also had a good story in FleetOwner last week that was talking about the event and all of the things that fleets can get out of it and why they should attend even if they've never been part of the Best Fleets program.
Jane: That's very important.
Mark: Yes. This is not just for the finalists or not just for the Top 20. This is for think there's probably as much or more value for people that have never been involved in the program because you can see, number one, why people are winners. What they're doing that makes them winners. And from that, start to get a sense of how to look internally, assess the strengths and weaknesses and have some ideas about what can be done to improve.
Jane: Absolutely. And I think, you know, there will be the Top 20 and the Hall of Fame there, so if you want to talk to them directly, this is a great opportunity to do that. If you don't want to hear it from us, then you can hear it from them.
Mark: Yeah. We're gonna have several hours of education sessions going through what we've seen and all of the the stats and trends and innovative ideas. But after that, people can go and talk to the fleets directly to say, how do you make this work? Or how do you deal with this issue when you try to implement it? They're around. They all love talking about this stuff. So it should be a really good event for that. And I think since our last podcast, we've confirmed that RadioNemo is going to be there too.
Jane: Yes. I'm very happy about that. We're going to have, well I'm going to assume it's Dave. Unless there is some strange thing that happens, Dave is going to be there. And Dave Nemo, of RadioNemo, which I'm really looking forward to because we haven't seen each other in a while.
Mark: Yeah. I guess it's been quite a while since you actually saw him
Jane: Yeah. He keeps on saying, are you gonna be here? Are you going to be here? I'm like, no I'm never where you are. So this is how you this is how you make sure you see someone is you make sure that they're at the event. But he's going to be able to, he'll be talking to the Top 20, he'll be there for most of it, I believe.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And so, yeah, he'll be sort of holding court in the sort of front I guess he'll be sort of in the front entrance.
Mark: He'll be in the Great Hall.
Jane: The Great Hall? Okay. That will be at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which I'm starting to look forward to, I'm starting to think, maybe I should do some of these activities that Trish keeps talking about in that you have poo poo'd, but I'm more adventurous than you.
Mark: Yeah. I gotta give credit to Trish for that because when she came up with these ideas of at our reception doing the with the pit crew challenge or using the race car simulators that are all things that we have access to as part of it.
Jane: I'm gonna be using that.
Mark: I don't wanna do that. Nobody wants to do that. They just want to hang around a chat. But then I had the meeting with the sponsors last week, and one of the first questions was, will we have access to the simulator in the pit crew challenge? I'm like, yeah, I guess if you want that sure.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: So Trish was right. I was wrong.
Jane: We have the whole thing for a day and a half. So it's, you know, it's ours, so we can have a lot of fun there. Which is why everybody should join us.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Come and hang out and do some do some pretend racing.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And actually, Dave said he's never been there, which is weird. I thought he'd been everywhere. So we'll have to see if I can get him into the simulator.
Mark: Oh, yeah. It could be fun.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Okay. I actually said it. That stuff could be fun. I don't think I'm going to have much fun until after it's over.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: I'll be feeling very good when it's done and it's been successful until then I'm going to be worrying about every little bit of it, but it's starting to come together. Yeah. It's starting to come together. So I think with that, we can probably wind things up for this episode.
Jane: Sounds like a plan.
Mark: This will be it for us this calendar year. We will be back in the new year with the next episode.
Jane: Have a very merry Christmas and a happy holidays.
Mark: That time, yes, for merry Christmas, and happy New Year, happy holidays, all of that stuff for people.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: Okay. Thanks for listening.
Jane: Have a good day.