Driver Recruiting Happy Hour Podcast

Darin:
Cheers everybody, and welcome to the Driver Recruiting Happy Hour podcast. My name is Darin Williams. I'm the president of CDLjobs.com. With me, as always, is the President of Ten4 Recruiting and a man who is fluent in four separate languages, Matt Beach. Beach, what are the languages again? I, I can't remember,
Is English one of them?

Beach:
English is one.
Um, French. I don't know if you It's French is a little, it's redneck French.

Darin:
Is that Cajun?

Beach:
Well, no, it's not even Cajun. It's not. I I took two years of French. French and didn't learn anything.

Darin:
Soddy Daisy Tennessee has French classes?

Beach:
My, my French name was Mateau Cloche. Yeah. And so [inaudible]. And so I'm getting at is blue is bleu, spelled B l e u r

Darin:
As in the cheese?

Beach:
I spelled it. I I like, I can hear my French teacher. Mateau Cloche, Mateau Cloche, can you say blue? I would go blur <laugh>. No, it's not <laugh>. That's not, but that was, I would just pronounce it how, how it sounded or what it, what it had on paper, but that's not, not so,

Scott Dismuke:
So, so Beach, my dad always used to tell me a joke that he could say, cut the grass in French and it was mow de lawn.

Beach:
<Laugh>. That is good. I like it.

Darin:
<Laugh>. Very good. Very good. What, what are the other two quick? So you got English and French.

Beach:
You've got it's, it's red, redneck, redneck. I can speak redneck. A lot of people can't speak redneck.

Darin:
I can't.

Beach:
You, you can drop someone in a, in a bar that's a redneck bar and if you don't speak redneck, you're out. You're out. And it takes a while. It take, you gotta be able to know when to throw that y'all, that slang.

Darin:
Well, there's a difference. There's a difference between country and redneck as well.

Beach:
And then I can also speak mountain folk.

Darin:
So basically, English and Hillbilly.

Beach:
Mountain folk is one of those. Well that's like, yeah, Mountain folk is just similar, you know, it's like, you know, you look at someone man and it just don't look good. Like, that boy, he like uglier than a mud fence gah. And you just gotta be able to understand what that means in the sense of he, he just doesn't look good, you know? And so there's just some different, different languages, different lingos that I think if I were to create a resume, I think if you looked at that, he'd be like, that's pretty impressive. Let's talk about that.

Darin:
Four languages. I was.

Beach:
It would work.

Darin:
I don't know that I would specify them out. If you list that on a resume, just put biling or bilingual. That'd be quad lingual.

Beach:
It could be.

Darin:
If that's a word.

Beach:
It could be,

Darin:
You know, who looks good, who's not uglier than a mud fence and probably is bilingual if I had to guess.

Beach:
Who's that?

Darin:
The Vice president of Operations at PDA, Scott Dismuke.

Beach:
No, idea.

Darin:
Scott Bilingual?

Scott Dismuke:
I too speak redneck. I grew up in southeast Missouri.

Darin:
Yeah, that's right on the cusp of redneck.

Scott Dismuke:
Southeast Missouri that's, so I speak very fluent speak very fluent redneck. I'm actually in our Arkansas office and my, my mother-in-law is from Arkansas, so I joke with her cuz I grew up in the boot heel of Missouri. And so I always tell her, if you cut the boot heel of Missouri off and give it to Arkansas, it'll up the IQ of both states.

Beach:
<Laugh>. Did your I have a question. Did your did your mother-in-law buy that thing back? That piece of artwork behind you?

Scott Dismuke:
<Laugh>? I, I gotta, I gotta be careful because my boss's mother-in-law did.

Beach:
Oh, ah, so it's an interesting piece of artwork. I would like, yeah,

Scott Dismuke:
It's

Beach:
Is that copper, looks like actual silver. We could have some gold.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure what that is. My my wife is actually an interior designer, so she would, she would probably know. But yeah, that's

Beach:
I mean, you're one step away from having a wooden sign that says Live Life Love, I'm just saying.

Darin:
Yeah. Also realizing

Scott Dismuke:
The rest of the office,

Darin:
Scott, that you're taking some guff here from two guys who have matching Smokey and the Bandit. <Laugh>.

Scott Dismuke:
Hey, listen, Smokey and the Bandit, one of the most underrated movies of all time

Beach:
And needs to be remade.

Scott Dismuke:
Ya think?

Beach:
Yes. Yes. And I, here's, here's, and the, the who would play Johnny Knoxville would be the Bandit. No, Snowman. I think Ashton Kutcher would be the Bandit and his wife Myla Kunis

Scott Dismuke:
Mila Kunis. Yeah,

Beach:
That would be, that would be Frog.

Scott Dismuke:
That would be Frog. So who, who plays, who plays Jackie Gleason?

Beach:
That's, that's the key. I I don't know Jackie Gleason and his dumb son,

Darin:
Mike Coble.

Beach:
<Laugh>.

Darin:
Now we're gonna find out if Coble listens to this podcast.

Beach:
I hope Coble hears it please tag me in it. That would be brilliant. I would, I would definitely, yes. That that would be it. That's, that's the next thing I've gotta, I've gotta do some Photoshop

Darin:
<Laugh>. Let's make it, we can do this.

Beach:
Yeah, we can tell him.

Darin:
Well, Scott, before we remake Smokey and the Bandit tell us a little bit about PDA and what you do.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah, so PDA stands for People Data Analytics, and we are in the employee retention space. Most of our, our customers are, are in the trucking industry. And so what we really do is we, we focus on the first 180 days of employment, particularly within the trucking industry. That is usually the, the highest turnover when we're looking at, at drivers. And so what we do is just really kind of provide a personal touch to that. So our folks in our home office in Brentwood, Tennessee, our folks here in in Van Buren, Arkansas, we literally reach out to drivers every single day on the phone. We check in with them, we see how they're doing.

Beach:
You personally call them, your team does?

Scott Dismuke:
Yes. We pick up the phone. It's a personal touch. Literally making thousands of phone calls every week. I would say probably 25 to 30% of our phone call volume is actually incoming calls from drivers. So we, we assign our individual retention specialists to to our, our customers. And so the drivers are hearing from the same person every single time, so they know who's gonna call them. We, we use that to develop a relationship because ultimately that's, that's what has to be done because what, what we talk about here is it's really not the driver that we talk to today that tells us they're fine. What we want to be able to do is have the type of relationship with the driver that that same driver who's fine today, who gets mad and wants to leave tomorrow, will pick up the phone and call us and say, here's the problem.
I have help, you know, help me solve it. And so what we do is drivers who are having repeat issues, drivers who are imminent quit situations we will escalate that directly to the carrier so the carrier can, can get in front of that issue, call the driver, intervene with that driver as quickly as possible to keep that driver in in the truck. All at that time, we're also collecting data on what those drivers say. If it's an equipment issue, if it's a compensation issue, if it's a home time issue we collect that data and we put it into our system and all of our customers have their own data portal, secure data portal where they can go in and in real time see what their drivers are saying. And our portal allows the company to drill down on particular issues so they can see specifically what the driver is complaining about.
And they can also see which drivers are complaining about it, how many of them are complaining about it. So it's, it's kind of twofold. It's the individual touchpoints. It's reaching out to those drivers, communicating with the drivers, and then it's the data on the back end of it. So ultimately driver are, so ultimately companies can look at the data, look specifically at what their drivers are saying, and then make data informed decisions. And, and let me give you an example of that. So we've been collecting data for about five years. Anytime you go into a company and say you've got a compensation problem, the first place that a a a company goes is, okay, well let's look at pay rate. That's always the first place they go. And we've got data, five years worth of data that I can tell you drivers are complaining more about miles than they are about pay rate.

Beach:
Huh?

Scott Dismuke:
And so what we want to be able to do is take a core issue like compensation or like equipment and drill it down to the root cause and tell a company exactly what compensation exactly what kind of root cause they're talking about with compensation. Is it pay rate or is it miles? And then we do the same with equipment issues. We wanna know, are we talking about general maintenance issues? Are we talking about the truck breaking down? Or more importantly, a data point of what does that truck look like coming out of orientation? So equipment assignment and, and what we tell companies is that equipment assignment is the first impression you make on a driver. So you've invested a lot of time, you've invested a lot of money bringing a driver in for orientation. So you've had advertising costs, you've got hotel costs, you've got travel costs, you've got food costs, then you're gonna put 'em in a truck. This truck is gonna be their office and it's gonna be their home. And if you're assigning trucks that are already broke down or are dirty, then you're already off on the wrong foot with that driver. So we separate the data even to that point so they know what's a breakdown and what's an issue that you have literally at the time of assignment,

Beach:
Y'all really get into the weeds with all this information.

Scott Dismuke:
Very much, very much

Darin:
I could see it even helping on a, like a customer issue. Right? What if, I mean, if, if, if 10% of the driving population complains about one customer, does that information get shared and say, "Hey, we got a problem."

Scott Dismuke:
That's, that's a, honestly, I couldn't have you couldn't have tossed one up easier. Literally had a customer.

Darin:
Well, I'm really good at what I do, Scott.

Scott Dismuke:
Well, there you go. So

Darin:
I carry this show a lot.

Scott Dismuke:
Well, I'm not gonna jump into that one.

Beach:
Give it 30 seconds, he'll drop off somehow some way.

Darin:
That hasn't happened in a long time.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. So we literally had a customer today that they do some work for some folks, and we're having a lot of live load unload delays and it's really at one of the customer's locations. And so they literally asked me for a report today, from the last three months. I was able to pull that report, all of the driver's names, what the, what the location was, where they were having the unload delays. And then they're gonna take that information. And this includes drivers who have voluntarily left probably as a result of that. Because when you have those live load and unload delays, then ultimately that's gonna affect the driver's miles. It's gonna affect the driver's paycheck.

Darin:
Yeah.

Scott Dismuke:
So they're taking that data, they're going to the customer and they're saying, you're, you're costing us drivers. We've gotta get something. We've gotta get something fixed here.

Beach:
I remember the first time I met you, it was a long time ago, Scott, I don't know if you remember that magical moment or not.

Scott Dismuke:
I, I, I do actually. It's, it's, it's seared in my head.

Beach:
And I was like, Scott, he, I'm with PDA and I was like, people like me. And there's not that many people out there in the LinkedIn community for our industry that are like me, but there are a few. And you said, I'm with PDA. I immediately went public display of affection and I thought, this guy is going to reach out and gimme a hug. I would've hugged you and

Scott Dismuke:
I appreciate that

Beach:
You didn't, it's still up for grabs, just so you know, I'm still throwing it out there.

Scott Dismuke:
All right, well, we'll let's let's email, let's email offline about that

Beach:
<Laugh>. But here's here. So let's say that I have a trucking company, a large truck, small, it doesn't matter, right?

Scott Dismuke:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Beach:
What's fleet size? Do y'all?

Scott Dismuke:
We, we work with large, we work with small and anywhere in between.

Beach:
So the one thing that I see, this is just me personally, right? And the one thing I always see is carriers want to put, you know, recruiting. It's, it's re it's recruiting's responsibility for retention. It's operations to know they're responsible for retention, safety, it's y'alls. And then you'll hear people go, it's everybody's job. The I get that. But you have to, to me, you have to have someone who owns it, right?

Scott Dismuke:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Beach:
And sometimes these people who own it also are over recruiting. They're over this or over that. And it's like, it needs to be al almost, it almost needs to be its own entity, its own little department in a sense.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah.

Beach:
Are y'all aware to, to a point to where it goes, PDA, we can come in and be that for that carrier?

Scott Dismuke:
Absolutely. So I, I will tell you, there's a couple folks that we work with that have told us after being on the program for a year or so. Matter of fact, the President of a company called our President of the company and say, you know, you guys are doing a great job. We're looking at this, we're trying to figure out how you do it, and we know how you do it, but we can't do it because we don't have the manpower to do it. But, but you do. I will tell you that the programs that are most successful are the ones where we do have a person that is solely in charge of retention. That it's their job to call drivers and, and get in front of issues and help a driver walk through an issue. But they don't have the time to call all of the drivers.
So what we do is a lot of the heavy lifting, so we'll call those drivers and then when we come across an imminent quit situation, we get it to that retention person that's on staff at, at the carrier. And they do, that's when they do their job. We, we say, Hey, this, we talked to this driver. The driver has this problem. Sometimes it's something as simple as the driver not not really understanding their pay stub. So there's times that our folks will walk them through that pay stub. There's times that we'll just escalate that to the carrier based on what they want. And then the carrier will call 'em, say, okay, let's walk through this pay stub together and, and problem solved. And so we have a lot of folks that we work with that basically we act as their retention staff and, and help the person that's in charge of retention. The retention. Cuz it's usually one or two people who are in charge of calling literally hundreds and in some instances thousands of drivers.

Darin:
And so you're, you're coming in sometimes as the entire retention effort. Sometimes its as an assistant effort, but you're assigning a team specific to each carrier.

Scott Dismuke:
Correct.

Darin:
Yeah. That's and in addition to that, you also drop these quarterly reports from like a bird's eye view, right?

Scott Dismuke:
Correct.

Darin:
Like the 30,000 feet here's what's going on, here's what we're seeing

Scott Dismuke:
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>

Darin:
For everybody to look at, not just your specific client base.

Scott Dismuke:
That's correct.

Darin:
Right?

Scott Dismuke:
That's correct. So our, our client base usually gets, matter of fact, we're gonna be releasing Q4 tomorrow. Just approved everything today. So our, our customer base already has a copy of the Q4 data report. Everybody else will have have the, have it tomorrow. It'll be on our website for, for folks to download. But yeah, that's you know, we, we wanna be able to say these, this is what drivers are saying, you know? And I I, I did one of these about a year ago and somebody asked me, why isn't truck parking on your on your list for data? And no doubt truck parking's an issue. That's not, I'm not breaking any news here by saying that. But, but the data that we focus on is a lot of what's in control of the trucking company itself.
What is something that a trucking company can do about a particular issue that's affecting a driver that they can go in and improve that situation to keep the driver in the truck? And so our data is really focused about the driver experience when they're in that truck. Yes, truck parking is an issue, but if we go to a company and say, you've got 60 drivers that are complaining about truck parking, I'm not gonna break any news to them. They're all gonna know that it's a problem for everybody. But if I go into a company and that's got 60 drivers and 40 of 'em are complaining about their paychecks always being inaccurate because there's a problem in payroll, they can go and fix that. That's an issue they can fix. And so that's the data that we, we really focus on and, and we want folks in the industry to be able to see what drivers are saying about specific issues.
And so, we'll, we'll drop Q4 tomorrow. There's some really interesting data points in there. For instance we have been putting out these reports for two years. And in the two year time period, the top issue has always been equipment. So it's either it's gonna be breakdown issues, you know, things, things of that nature. Equipment's important because equipment, like unlike any other issue, usually cascades into other problems for a driver. So if a driver's spending this week in the shop, more than likely next week we're gonna have a compensation problem because the driver wasn't logging any miles. So equipment has always been at the top. In Q4 of last year, for the first time ever in the two years we've been putting out the reports and the five years in which we've been collecting data, compensation overtook equipment. And we started to see that trend in Q3 because we started to see freight slow. And so we started to see compensation issues tick up, and then it overtook.

Darin:
And again, relating back to what you said, it's not really, it, it's not necessarily a compensation issue. It's a mileage issue.

Scott Dismuke:
100%. And I will tell you that of the drivers that complained about compensation in Q4, 60% of them said miles. And it broke down to, to really two issues, load's not available and inconsistent miles, is what it broke down to.

Darin:
So what about the trend? And I I, I mean I think Matt could attest to this as well, but a lot more carriers out there offering guaranteed, minimum guaranteed rates per week. Does that combat that at all? Or is it,

Scott Dismuke:
So

Darin:
Is there too many caveats to it that it just doesn't really matter?

Scott Dismuke:
So there, there's, there's the, there's the key with, with with what you just said. And there, there is a company that we used to work for that will remain unknown. They were one of the first to kind of roll out some of this guaranteed pay. And I'll be honest with you, it's not guaranteed pay. It's, it's conditional pay. Because there was a list of about 40 things that a driver had to do in order to qualify.

Darin:
Conditional pay doesn't look very good in an ad.

Scott Dismuke:
You are exactly right.

Darin:
<Laugh>, <laugh>.

Scott Dismuke:
And so so what was happening was there was 40 things on this list. A driver didn't understand it or, or a driver would do 39 out of 40. And then, and then they would have to, you know, say, well, you're not getting the guaranteed pay because you didn't, you know, do this. You didn't, you know, replace your blinker fluid. And so they would, those drivers would be gone because when a driver hears guaranteed pay, they think one thing at the end of this week, I'm gonna have X amount of dollars. And so, so what we've told folks, particularly in the last couple years as the guaranteed pay model has become a little more popular is, number one, if you're gonna do it, then make it simple. Make it easy for the driver to understand and to some degree make it easy for them to obtain.
Because if you don't, you're gonna lose that driver pretty quick because it's again, not guaranteed. And so that's, that was the advice that we were giving to a lot of carriers when it came to the guaranteed pay. Some, some did it, some tried some hybrid models of it. I, I, I think and this is just Scott's opinion, I have nothing to back this up on. I think the driver or the companies that stayed relatively consistent with their pay model through the Covid freight surge are gonna be sitting in a much better position now as freight starts to slow down. Because you had tons of companies out there raising pay while they were able to get good rates on freight. And now freight's slowing the rates are coming down and once you've got that toothpaste out of the, out of the tube on pay, you can't put it back in. And so I, I think those companies that stayed relatively consistent with their pay models through the Covid Freight are, are gonna be in a, in a more of an advantageous position going into this year when there's a lot of uncertainty about the economy and, and the freight market.

Beach:
Now, Scott, I've, and I'm sorry if you've already mentioned this, I'm kind of going back to all the data information, getting, getting in the weeds, which a lot of carriers are not, I wouldn't say not used to just a company like yourself to be able to provide that info going here It is. Cuz a lot of, they rely on internally

Scott Dismuke:
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>,

Beach:
It's surprising enough they don't have that. And for them to start to get that information, I mean, there's a lot that takes a lot of time. So be able to use, you, use y'all, it's super quick. But how quickly can y'all turn that information around for let's say, one carrier of a, of a midmid-sized carrier?

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. So our, our data literally is real time. So as our folks are, are making phone calls and they're inputting the information into to our system a a a company can go in, we've got a date slicer on our data portal. So they can go in and say, okay, I only wanna see data for today. So I could go in and and do 1/17 to 1/17 and anything that's gone in there today, they're gonna see it. So they can look at their data by, by a, a single day. They can look at it weekly, monthly, quarterly, however they choose to do it. The, the date slicer in our portal will allow them to see it. So it, it literally goes the, the data literally shows up on the portal as our folks are inputting the information into, into our system.

Beach:
Gotcha. Impressive. Very impressive. What's the, what if you had to say, Hey, here's the one thing that I can't say this word, I am struggling with it, differentiate that I didn't say Right.

Scott Dismuke:
Differentiates.

Beach:
Thank you. See, it's the redneck. I've got that lingo going on. I'm stuck on that.

Darin:
I'm adding that to the list. There's several words you can't say. That one's going on the list.

Beach:
I, I tried to say lutheanean at the other end. I still can't say it.

Darin:
Why were you saying Lithuania? I assume you're trying to say

Beach:
There's a reason I was trying to learn a new language, but there's a reason I couldn't say that. And I can't say differentiates.

Darin:
Or culture,

Beach:
I cannot say cult. Don't even wanna try it. It's weird. It just, it's a complete roadblock, Scott.

Scott Dismuke:
Culture?

Darin:
Culture

Scott Dismuke:
Culture

Beach:
Oh so, its so easy too...

Darin:
So Scott, are the drivers receptive?

Beach:
Hold on, I had a question.

Darin:
Well, you went off on a thing about all the words you can't say and everybody, the whole audience turned off.

Beach:
What makes you, what makes you different than say others who are trying to, who are already in this, in this pond of retention? What makes y'all different? What, what, what makes you guys stand out?

Scott Dismuke:
Well, I, I think probably first and foremost, and, and I think this is very important when you're talking retention is having the ability to quickly identify and quickly intervene with a driver. If, if you look particularly in a driver's first six months that they've joined a carrier, I would say nine of 10 of those drivers have five or six other offers sitting in their inbox on a daily basis.

Beach:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Scott Dismuke:
So, so having the ability to quickly identify a driver with a problem and quickly intervene with that driver and get in front of that issue before it becomes a, a voluntarily separation, voluntary separation event which is fancy words for quitting. That I think that's really important. And I'm, and I'm not, I'm not gonna sit here and say, cuz I, I honestly don't know what other people in this space how exactly they do what they do.
So I'm not gonna say others don't have that ability to do that, but I will say that we do because of that personal touchpoint, a lot of times we'll be talking to a driver and have an issue escalated to a carrier before we even hang up with the driver. So the carrier knows about it. Then ultimately it's gonna be up to the carrier what they do with that information. There's only so much that we can do. There's only so many, so many issues that we can help a driver walk through or talk them off of the ledge. But when it comes to the action behind that and getting a situation fixed or addressed, a again, only the company can do that. But in order for them to do that, they A. Have to know who's having the problem, and B. They have to have the ability to know the, the problem going into that conversation. And so we, we are able to provide them both of those things in a timely basis.

Darin:
Scott, you mentioned that about 25 to 30% of your calls are inbound, and I'm assuming 99.9 of those are not pleasant inbound calls. Are the, the outbound calls, are drivers receptive to that call or do they do it begrudgingly, or, or I mean, is it they're part of the process here, let's help, let's fix everything together.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. So, so, so our program is introduced to the drivers in orientation and, and one of the things that we tell the carriers is, Hey, when, when, when you introduce this to, to your drivers, take credit for it. Say, you know, we care about your longevity here. We want you to have a long career here, and we want you to be happy. And because of that, we've hired a third party to come in and, and walk beside you your first 180 days. They can answer questions, you can tell them things that you may not feel comfortable telling us. And, and so here is your, here is your retention specialist's name and email, and here's their phone number. Plug that into your phone right now before you leave orientation, so you know when they're calling and when they call, answer the phone and, and be honest with them. Be open with them. We want to know, we wanna know the good, we wanna know the bad. We wanna know the ugly. Because if we're going to make your experience here top-notch, then we've gotta know the ugly so we can fix it and we gotta know the good so we can continue to do it. And so because of that and because of the way that we introduce this in orientation, we, we have somewhere between an 80 and an 85% contact rate with these drivers coming out of orientation.

Darin:
Wow. And do you have maintenance programs that you offer to somebody past that six month? Yes. I mean, they're just out there, they've been there five years. They can still give you a call and say, Hey, we got an issue here.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah, we, we've got multiple programs. You know, the, the one that we've been talking about in the first 180 days, that's a, that's a weekly reach out. We're calling the driver, we're helping the driver walk through issues. And then we've got several carriers that kind of go into more of a maintenance phase. What, what what we call retention monitoring which is they hit that, you know, 180 day mark and beyond and we call 'em a couple times a month. There's some that we call 'em once a month. And then we have a, we have a texting platform for drivers beyond that that drivers can send in information and, and companies can be alerted to if they're having an issue. You know, they can, they can use that beyond that, you know, beyond that 180 day mark. So there's, there's plenty of of opportunities and plenty of, of programs that we have that go beyond that first 180 days. The 180 days though is the, is the focal point and is is where we have the high touch rate because it's such a high turnover period.

Darin:
What other nugget can you share with us regarding the the, the report that's coming out, which will be out by the time we have this published, by the way? So,

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. Yeah. So

Darin:
The only people that you're really spilling the beans to are me and Beach

Scott Dismuke:
<Laugh>. You know, it's really interesting. You know, I told you about drivers complaining about miles. So that issue went up 21% from 21 percentage points from Q1 to Q4. Ironically, at the same time, drivers complaining about their pay rate, it dropped nearly 13 percentage points from Q1 to Q4. And, and so I think one of the things we can learn from that is it doesn't matter how high your pay rate is if a driver's not logging miles. So that's, that's the first thing you can, you can say, I'm paying 75 cents a mile, but if a driver's only getting 700 miles, you know, they can go somewhere else for a,

Darin:
It really just kind of verifies what we all kind of were thinking, right? I mean, everybody raised their pay because miles were going down and, and the balance just wasn't there enough to to, to make it work.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. the, the other thing, a couple of other things that I, I would, I would point out is because of what the last two and a half, three years have been like from a freight standpoint, if, if you have brought in drivers that are new to the industry, so student drivers, drivers that you may have hired back in June of 2020 that didn't have any experience, they have enjoyed a extremely good freight market, and now we're, you can call it a freight recession, you can call it a freight correction, whatever you wanna call it. At the end of the day, these drivers that have come through in the last couple of years that were new to the industry, when you hired them, they are now experiencing a freight slowdown for the first time. And I would say mild panic is setting in with some of them.

Darin:
That's a really good point. I had not thought of that.

Scott Dismuke:
Some, some of those drivers who are used to maybe waiting 15 minutes to hear where their next load is, are now waiting two hours and three hours. And so a lot of conversations that we're having with drivers is, number one, be patient. Number two, make sure you're, you're managing your hours of service, so make sure you've got that available drive time when you need it. Communicate with your driver, you know, manager, your fleet manager, whoever's in charge of, of getting you freight. Be patient with them because they're moving a bunch of shells as well. But now is the worst time to jump and go somewhere else because this isn't a choose your carrier. This isn't a problem there. This is a problem everywhere. It doesn't matter if you're at a large carrier and you go to a small carrier, or if you're a small, if you're at a small carrier and you go to a large carrier, you're going to have the same issue. Freight has slowed, period. So, so stick it out. Make sure you're somewhere where a lot of carriers do have contract freight, because we know what the spot market looks like right now. So stay with a company that has, has contract freight. So you know, it's going to be somewhat consistent. It just may not be as quickly as you've had it in the past.

Darin:
Do you have enough historical data that you can start to see patterns cyclical patterns and make predictions on, we think this might break in second quarter, third quarter, that kinda thing. Or is it too volatile? I mean, there's just too many variables.

Scott Dismuke:
And yeah, I think there's a lot of variables. You know, I I think that when you get in the, when you get in the business of making predictions, you end up like a weatherman. And you pretty much make a lot of people unhappy. Right? what, what I want to get in the habit of doing is talking trends, right? So, so I know for a fact that miles-related compensation issues since Q3 of last year are trending up. They were up in three, they were up in four. I don't foresee any massive changes to the economy in Q1. I would assume that it would go up in Q1 or be relatively the same. But I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it will be because as soon as I do, we'll be back here, you know, in, in April. And equipment issues will be number one again. So I, you know, I we can certainly surmise we can, we can certainly hypothesize about it. But I I, I'm not quite comfortable with the predicting part yet.

Darin:
Yeah, that's.. No, I, I certainly, I can understand that it, it's a volatile volatile market and the variables are just yeah. Far too many to juggle to try to figure things out, man.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. I, I, I just think so many folks right now are unsure. I think a lot of people are just kind of pressing the pause button. I think a lot of folks are kind of preparing for the worst, but, but hoping for the best. You know, there's just conflicting data. There's conflicting, you know, opinions about are we in a recession? Are we not in recession? You know, if we are, how long is it gonna last if we're not, you know, how quickly is freight gonna rebound? Is it is really ever gonna be to the Covid standards again? Maybe, maybe not. I, I, I think, and these are the conversations we have with drivers, this is a new normal at least today, <laugh>, and that normal may change tomorrow. But I think there's just a lot of people right now, based on conversations I've had with folks that are saying, let's get through the first quarter. Let's see what happens in the first quarter. Is it, is it what we think it's gonna be? Or, or is it gonna be better than we thought? And then we'll make a decision about what we're gonna do, you know, in, in Q2 and Q3.

Beach:
Yep. Yep. Is there, going back to like overall communication to what, what, which, which is your preferred method? I know you got

Scott Dismuke:
Phone, phone
All, all the time, phone. All the time. I mean, there're, you know what we, we normally like to mirror a driver's communication habits. If a driver's not answering our, our phone calls, but will answer a text, I would rather a driver be texting us than, than not talking to us at all. But I much prefer if, if you're gonna build a relationship with a driver, it has to be over the phone. There's just so, so much more that you can tell from a driver from their tone. You know, you, you could have a driver that's frustrated with their home time, but they tell you they're okay. But you know, by the tone of their voice, they're, they're not. And you, you can't ever do that with, with a text.

Beach:
Yeah. I like it. I like it a lot.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah.

Darin:
Well, it's a valuable service to to the industry. It's a much needed service to the industry, and you folks seem to be doing it very well. Well,

Beach:
Especially here. Tell me again, the, the fact that you guys can step in and take it over, you know? Yeah. And, and provide that immediately, that data without having to build something completely from scratch. You guys can jump in and, and go, which that's to me is, that's huge.

Darin:
Yeah. I think back to all the meetings I went to in my former freight life at a truckload carrier in the Monday morning meetings getting beat over the head because all the drivers that had quit the, the week before and me being asked why, and just the dumb look in my face that said, I, I don't know.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah.

Darin:
I mean, it would've been nice. Where the hell were you 25 years ago?

Scott Dismuke:
<Laugh> Well,

Darin:
I would still have hair

Scott Dismuke:
<Laugh> You know, one of the other things that we have the ability to do in our portal is I, I would love to sit here and tell you that every driver we work with doesn't quit, but, but we know that they do. But what we have the ability to do is, is we separate terminations in our, in our portal from a voluntary quit, meaning the driver decided to leave on their own. Or disqualification where a company had to get rid of a driver for various reasons. And so what, what we have the ability to do is we term those drivers out in our system based on what the carrier tells us. And then you can actually go in and you can, on one of your slicers, you could say voluntary quit. And it will only pull up data for drivers who have voluntarily left you.
And what's great about that is you can look at your overall data and see what that tells you, and then you can segment out the data from drivers who have voluntary left and see how that matches up. And that's great for, for, for the carriers to use, but we use it as well. So we will go in every month, and we're looking at all of our customers voluntary quit data. So when we're having a conversation with a driver and they start mentioning those issues that historically have shown to be a reason why drivers have left that carrier, then we're gonna upgrade the turnover risk for that driver. So we know, hey, we've gotta pay more attention to that driver and Mr. Carrier, you need to pay more attention to that driver because the data backs it up.

Darin:
Yeah. That's I would imagine a very complex matrix to try to figure out every, every week <laugh>,

Scott Dismuke:
We've, we've got a lot of, a lot of, a lot smarter people than me that are, that are working that stuff. <Laugh>

Beach:
A whole lot smarter, a whole lot.

Scott Dismuke:
A whole lot smarter

Darin:
<Laugh>. He only speaks two languages for crying out loud, Beach. I mean, holy cow.

Beach:
Look at this. Did you ever see the movie,

Darin:
I'm afraid what you're going to pick up?

Beach:
<Laugh> did, did you ever see the movie, As Good As It Gets?

Scott Dismuke:
Yes. <laugh>.

Darin:
Awww.

Beach:
Look at this. Look at this. Stealing the show. Dadgummit, bit me.

Scott Dismuke:
So do we have, do we have a name?

Darin:
Dog Loves you?

Beach:
Yeah. <laugh> Get outa here. Lulu.

Scott Dismuke:
Lulu.

Beach:
Lulu. Yeah.

Darin:
For those of you who are just listening and not watching the podcast, Beach's own dog just bit him live on air.

Beach:
No, she didn't bother me. She came close <laugh>, she came

Darin:
She definitely gave him the dog warning shot.

Beach:
<Laugh>

Darin:
Put me down.

Scott Dismuke:
She did not wanna be on tv.

Beach:
No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Darin:
Scott's giving us the same look. So before he bites one of us, ah

Scott Dismuke:
I could talk about this stuff all day, man.

Darin:
He's a busy guy, man. We're gonna let you get back to work. We don't have anything to do, but you seem very busy.

Scott Dismuke:
Well, see, I, I had this blocked off, so, you know, now you're gonna make me go back to work. I mean, that's,

Beach:
Yeah, we're getting ya outa here.

Scott Dismuke:
That's no good. That's no good.

Darin:
The beauty about this show is nobody knows what time we're taping it so we could just start drinking.

Beach:
Which

Darin:
<Laugh> there's always that.

Beach:
Yeah, there's always that <laugh>. We can have a heck of a show get fun.

Scott Dismuke:
I'm, I'm gonna go continue to decorate the office here.

Beach:
I wasn't making fun of it at all. I would just say it's unique. I haven't, we haven't, everyone has something different. Like we have this behind. This is, this isn't a unique pattern that you have behind you.

Scott Dismuke:
They're, they're

Beach:
It's not a Scott Dismuke that I would say that I would, that would be behind. This is my normal

Scott Dismuke:
If, if, if you were in my office, if we were doing this when I was in Brentwood in my home office, you would, you would see St. Louis Cardinal's memorabilia.

Beach:
I like it.

Scott Dismuke:
You would see

Darin:
I'm a Cubs fan. We would've had to blur that out.

Beach:
Oh, that would've been

Scott Dismuke:
Now see Darin, we were, we were off to such a good start.

Darin:
Well, it's not like you can hate me because I'm a Cubs fan. I mean, for crying out loud. I've gone through enough.

Scott Dismuke:
Well, yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

Darin:
You know, except we're kinda just, this, the, the clowns you just kind of tolerate and you know.

Scott Dismuke:
Well, Darin, we'll have to, we'll have to figure out a time either to go to go to Wrigley or Busch and, and catch a game.

Darin:
Absolutely. You know,

Scott Dismuke:
You won't have to, you won't have to twist my arm for that at all.

Darin:
As much of a Cubs fan as I am, Busch Stadium is so much nicer, <laugh>, it's just such a better place to watch a game.

Scott Dismuke:
I, I took, I took my son to Wrigley for his 13th birthday. That's what he wanted to do for his 13th. So I I clearly raised him right.

Darin:
Yeah.

Scott Dismuke:
And I will tell you, we had a fantastic experience. The people there were fantastic. I would go back in a, in a second. It was

Beach:
I'll, I will tell a story on me. I've been to the Cubs Stadium one time, and I only caught the seventh and eighth inning. And the reason for that is we went to the John Hancock building.

Scott Dismuke:
Oh yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Beach:
We went to the top of it, which was beautiful. One up there, had some drinks. I mean, it's got a nice cocktail bar at the very top. And to get down was a very, very long line. And it was taking a while. And I looked at it and was like, guys, we gotta get on this train line that's gonna take this, it's going to be a while. And they're like, well, we can't go, man, look at the line. I was like, I got this. And that was the moment my <laugh> my best friend was like, no, no, no, no. I got

Darin:
<Laugh>.

Beach:
I started kicking the, the windows like, just get me outta here. Just help me, I want to get out. Like I was having a panic attack. It was like you gone. Immediately to the front of the line on the elevator down. And I was like, okay, let's go <laugh>.

Darin:
Did they not question you or take you in? Or I thought, maybe

Beach:
No, down y'all, you're outta here. And we got down and we walked, right out the door, jumped on the train. We caught the seventh inning.

Scott Dismuke:
And, and that is the, that's the brilliance of Matt Beach, that story in and of itself.

Beach:
But it was that moment where I said, I got this, and my buddy's not, it's not,

Scott Dismuke:
No, it's not gonna end well.

Beach:
It's not.

Darin:
I'm not sure that it's brilliant to be kicking windows 200 floors up, but

Beach:
There's never worked. They're fine. It worked out. But I still had to pay full price for a ticket.

Scott Dismuke:
<Laugh>. Well, you at least you didn't have to wait in line to get down.

Beach:
They're like, it's a, it's a, it's Wrigley field. You're, you're gonna love it. You're gonna catch, it'll be, you know, memorable. I'm like, this is a memorable piece of crap. This

Darin:
<Laugh>.

Scott Dismuke:
Oh it's coming from a Cardinals fan, Wrigley's beautiful. I love Wrigley.

Darin:
Oh, it is beautiful. It's it's beautiful in its own way. It's historic.

Beach:
Yeah, it's historic. It's great. Awesome. Yeah. Loved it.

Scott Dismuke:
Nice. Well, well, why don't, let's, let's figure out a time this summer, take this on the road. We'll go to St. Louis, we'll catch a game and then maybe we, maybe we film this live from Busch Stadium. We'll do another, we'll do another data update.

Beach:
Can we do it in the actual Budweiser place, isn't it, right across the street?

Scott Dismuke:
It's not right across the street, but that is definitely a tour that every at least every male human being should go on for sure.

Beach:
I, I, I don't remember the last time I went to a bar and said, you know what? Just gimme a good old Budweiser. When was the last time you said that?

Scott Dismuke:
Actually, the best place to go is Grant's Farm. So Grant's Farm is where they have the Clydesdales. It's where they keep the Clydesdales. You can get your picture taken with the Clydesdales, but after you do the whole tour, they've got this huge facility there, and you can go in and get any Anheuser Busch product that you want.

Beach:
Nice.

Scott Dismuke:
That's a, that's a nice tour. But so is, so is the brewery as well.

Beach:
Nice. Scott, here's a question.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah.

Beach:
If, if we have listeners, which we have about a million. 1,000,001

Scott Dismuke:
1,000,001, yeah.

Beach:
If they wanted to say, Hey Scott, you know, Darin we wanna get on a call

Scott Dismuke:
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>

Beach:
And, and you know, quick 30 minute call, one hour.

Scott Dismuke:
Sure.

Beach:
How do they get ahold of you and what's some information that you guys got right now that you

Scott Dismuke:
So they can go to our website www.pdateam.com. They can email me at scott s c o t t Disu, d i s M U K e, all one word, all This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Or they can call me on my direct line, office line. I'd be happy to talk to anybody. That's 6 1 5 3 9 8 2 3 0 3.

Beach:
Nice. And just pick up the phone, give you a call set, and you'll go through everything that you just need.

Scott Dismuke:
Yeah. We give them a demo of the data portal, show 'em how it works go over the program in a little more depth. And this issues that we will handle. Ultimately that's really up to the, to the carrier, what they want us to handle, what they don't. And yeah, we can, I, I can talk about this stuff for days, so anybody that wants to

Beach:
Oh, we know

Scott Dismuke:
Call or chat.

Beach:
Trust me. We know.

Scott Dismuke:
Hey, listen.

Darin:
Yeah, we've been trying to get you off here for like 20 minutes.

Scott Dismuke:
Yes. Yeah. Sorry, I, I was trying to fill time, right?

Beach:
<Laugh>

Darin:
<Laugh>.

Scott Dismuke:
So yeah.

Darin:
Hey Scott, seriously, thank you very much.

Scott Dismuke:
Thank you guys.

Darin:
Thank you for coming on. We know it's a busy time for you, and we appreciate little hints you dropped there about what the, what the outlook's gonna look like here. And folks, if you haven't done it, take a look at the PDA quarterly Outlook. It's good stuff and it's stuff you should incorporate. So Scott, thank you very much for coming on.

Scott Dismuke:
Thank you, gentlemen.

Darin:
Beach, it's always a pleasure. Listeners, be safe and keep on trucking. Thanks.