Free Passes to TruckWorld

TruckWorld 2008 is coming up next month and like most industry people, we'll be there. We've got a booth in Hall 5 by the classic truck showcase, and I'm really looking forward to the event.

Since the TruckWorld organizers encourage exhibitors to pass out badges to staff and customers, we're going to be providing complimentary badges to all of our customers. If you're an existing customer (or you've been talking to us about signing up) you'll see more information shortly.

We're providing badges for the 'primary contacts' at each customer (generally the manager who pays the bills or administers the system), but this got me thinking - why not provide badges for all the drivers as well?

In fact, if you're a trucking company exhibiting at TruckWorld, why not provide badges for all your drivers?

For drivers, TruckWorld is like a big toy store and I know thousands of driver will be wandering the halls during the 3 days it runs. As a carrier, you can save those drivers some time (and a couple of bucks) by ordering the badge for them. Not all of them will take advantage and attend, but that's not important. What's important is the gesture. If you ordered badges for every driver in your fleet (without them having to ask), you'd demonstrate that you're thinking about them and want to make it easy for them to get involved. Some would take you up on it, some wouldn't. But it's one of those "investment in the emotional bank account" things that creates goodwill and helps improve the overall team dynamic. Plus, it's very simple to do.

So, with that in mind, I'll go a step further. If you're not exhibiting at TruckWorld, but would still like to order badges for all your drivers, let me know and we'll do it for you. Send me a list of names and we'll register them for badges. As simple as that.

Broken Download Links

We've recently been having some problems with the file downloads area on our website. This is the section where brochures, columns, and magazine articles get posted for public download. With some recent updates to Adobe Reader, it looks like the pdf files haven't been downloading properly for some visitors running Windows XP. These are fixed now and the downloads should work fine for everyone again.

Of course, this is one of the joys of the Internet - software vendors (especially Microsoft and Adobe) sometimes release new versions of their products, that get installed during middle-of-the-night auto-updates, and break half your code!

Most of the time, we get advance notice of these updates through developer notes and pre-release test versions, offering lots of time to test and debug. However, every once in a while something unexpected happens and the final version breaks the live code.

We have people to investigate and resolve these issues so the impact on our production systems (both the CarriersEdge system and our public website) is minimized, but other companies aren't so lucky. If your business is moving freight, you probably don't have a team of technicians standing by ready to tackle these issues. Most trucking companies I know have a few IT people that are responsible for everything - network and desktop support, website development & maintenance, procurement, and anything else that relates to computers. That's a big job and most of these people are constantly on the run trying to keep up.

More and more companies outsource their website and application management and it's easy to see why. The Internet has matured tremendously in the last 10 years, but it can still be a jungle sometimes. Staying current with browser and plugin updates, new security measures, and emerging platform standards is nearly a fulltime job. On top of that, users are getting more comfortable with technology and have less patience when things don't work - they expect things to be up and running reliably all the time. That means more things to watch out for, and less time to fix stuff when problems do come up.

Nobody ever said the Internet was simple, but it's still a very cool place to be. Kudos to all the people who work tirelessly to tame the savage wilderness!

Tight budget? Let's cut training!

I'm talking to a lot of people these days that are concerned about a slowing economy and its impact on the freight business. There's lots of talk about cost-cutting and just as day follows night, execs and bean counters start talking about cutting back on driver training programs. Some of you may be dealing with this internally now - having your budgets cut or getting grief about the cost of training programs.

This will come as no surprise to you, but I think cutting training is an incredibly bad idea. If you're facing this prospect at your organization right now, here are some things to help you in that battle.

The first thing to do is look at why you train drivers in the first place. You don't train drivers because you have nothing better to do with your time. You train them because you want them to perform their jobs better, because performing their jobs better means more revenue and less expenses.

Regardless of whether the economy is good or bad, businesses need to run efficiently to be successful. That means reducing unplanned or unnecessary expenses as much as possible. In trucking, those expenses take the form of collisions, violations, damaged freight, late deliveries, poor fuel economy, etc. All of those things cost money, lots of it, and those are all costs that can be significantly reduced, if not eliminated. Training is by far the more effective way to reduce those costs.

When times are tough, businesses need to get serious about identifying and eliminating those unplanned expenses. 

Now, the quick answer might be to axe the drivers that cost you money in those areas and try to replace them with better drivers. That misses the point for a couple of reasons:

• Those troublesome drivers may be incurring expenses in ways that can be easily fixed, with the appropriate interventions. Helping a driver improve their skills can do wonders for their loyalty and you could end up with a tremendously profitably (and grateful) driver
• There may be drivers who are about to start costing you money, but up to now they've looked good on paper
• After your investment in replacing the 'problem' drivers, you could end up with someone who's no better (and may actually be worse)

A much better strategy is to use training and assessment programs to:

• Identify the drivers who have gaps that will cost you money (whether or not those gaps have turned into actual costs to date)
• Determine why those drivers have gaps
• Wherever possible, close those gaps and help those drivers become successful

That strategy builds the business for the long term. And training programs are the most cost-effective way to accomplish it.

Budget freezes, staffing purges, and blanket policy changes are at best stopgap solutions - in most cases they do more harm than good. Building a solid foundation and using the tough times to strengthen the team are always the best strategies for success.

Hopefully some of these tips will help you preserve your training budgets!

Do You Have a Purple Cow?

This week I finally sat down and read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. For any of you who haven't heard of him, Seth Godin is a writer and very entertaining speaker on marketing and business topics. In Purple Cow, he argues that since people get bombarded by so much advertising and promotion everyday, they've basically stopped listening. And since they've stopped listening, the only way to get through to them is to make sure your product or service is so remarkable that people feel compelled to talk about it to their friends. That's the Purple Cow (and I have to admit, a purple cow would certainly be something I'd discuss with my friends).

He also notes that it's not enough to get people talking about it, you have to get the RIGHT people talking about it. The right people are those people in every group who are the influencers, the resident experts, the gurus. Get those people talking about your product or service and you'll have success. If you don't, you'll wither and die.

Very cool stuff, and especially useful when it comes to attracting quality drivers. After all, recruiting is about spreading the word that your company is 'the' place to work, making everyone want to be there, and creating a situation where you get to have your pick of the best in the industry.

How do you do that? How do you spread the word that your fleet is the best one to work for? If Seth is right and people have stopped paying attention to print ads and banners, then something else is needed.

A Purple Cow - create a workplace and job opportunities so remarkable that people are compelled to talk about them. 

Simple, eh? ;-)

Of course, you can't do it just by tweaking a pay package and advertising a family atmosphere at the terminal. You have to do something that's truly different. You have to take some chances - do some things that no one else is doing.

If you can do that, you'll get people talking. And you'll get the right people talking as well.

A good example of Purple Cow thinking is Coastal Pacific Express, aka CPX. CPX is based in BC. I live in the Toronto area. I don't think I've ever seen a single CPX truck, yet everywhere I turn someone is talking about this company. Profit sharing for drivers. Innovative training programs. Comprehensive benefit and career path packages. If I'm not seeing it in the magazines, I'm hearing someone discussing it. They've created an environment so radically different, so remarkable, that people keep talking about them. 

CPX does all this stuff and still makes money. That's the payoff. But when they started down this path they couldn't have known that it would pay off. They took a chance and it worked.

Are you creating a Purple Cow in your company? What are you doing to get people talking?

When Do Drivers Start Making You Money?

I've been talking a lot recently about tactics for hiring the best drivers and different approaches to retaining them. Something else that we should always keep in mind when thinking about those things is the whole idea of when drivers start making us money.

In any business, a new hire represents a cost. Even before you hire someone, you've spent money on them - posting the position, looking at applications, interviewing, etc. By the time you make that hiring decision, you could easily have spent a few thousand dollars.

Once that driver is hired, they have to work for you for a certain period of time before they recoup the investment you've made in them. If they stick around past that point, you make money on them. If they quit before then, you lose money (which then has to be amortized across the other drivers, pushing their break even point out further).

The break even point is going to be different for every company, but I think it's important to have at least a rough idea of what the number is. Understanding the break even point provides a solid benchmark for measuring the success of other programs, and may also offer insights into how well your existing programs are working as well. 

For instance, if your break even point turns out to be 6 months, and the bulk of your drivers stick around for 9 months, you're not doing too bad. But if your break even point is 10 months, then that 9 month turnover is a much bigger problem.

In the HR world, hard numbers can sometimes be tricky to document, so this is a tool that can be very helpful for budgeting and planning as well. 

The goal is to hit that break even point as quickly as possible, so drivers can start being profit centers as soon as possible. At the very least, the break even point should be comfortably below the "average length of employment" number.

There are two ways to move that break even point forward:

1. Reduce the cost of finding, hiring, and ramping up new hires
2. Improve their out-of-the-gate margins so they can recoup more quickly

Of course, cutting the hiring/ramp-up cost isn't always the answer, since that tends to reduce the out-of-the-gate profitability as well. In many cases, increasing (or redirecting) the initial investment makes drivers more efficient more quickly, allowing for a faster time-to-profitability.

Over the next little while we'll look at some specific examples of things people are doing to hit that break even point more quickly. 

In the meantime, how long does a driver have to work for you before they start making you money? How many of them don't make it to that point?