Driver Orientation is Not a Handoff

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Bill Dorfner: Alright, we’re just gonna give this another minute or two. There’s still some folks logging in.

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Bill Dorfner: And then we will get rolling.

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Bill Dorfner: Well, good morning, everybody. I see some folks are still logging in, so we’ll go ahead and get started with some housekeeping things, and then, get rolling along.

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Bill Dorfner: And I see that,

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Bill Dorfner: Got a message that chat was disabled, so let me see if I can set that back up.

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Bill Dorfner: All right, well, good morning, everybody. We are here this morning to talk about orientation, and how it is not just a handoff. We’re joined by a couple of guests today, who I’ll introduce in just a moment.

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Bill Dorfner: Just a quick background. INFINITI, we are a leading learning management system and digital checklist. Fleets are able to see a return on safety for better CSA scores, lower operational risk, and more profit per mile, and I know that’s important to a lot of folks attending today.

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Bill Dorfner: I’m so glad to see you here. We are going to try to get this chat open. I understand there might be some issues with it right now, but we’re going to try to get that open for everybody. Please let us know, once we do, where you’re logging in from, and type any questions you might have in the chat. Just a reminder, this session is being recorded, and we’ll have that available to you shortly after the webinar is complete.

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Bill Dorfner: We’ll make that available for you for replay. And also, for those of you who have certifications through NATME, we are a very proud partner of NATME, and if you need a certificate for additional continuing education points, please just let us know when we’re all done.

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Bill Dorfner: So, with that.

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Bill Dorfner: We’re going to talk about how your greatest asset today, and your greatest liability is the behavior of your employees, and the best way to modify and to set that correctly, right from the start, is through your orientation program. So today, we’re going to be talking about that with Todd Womble and Gavin Holloway from Savannah Logistics, who have an awesome program that I’m excited for you to hear about.

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Bill Dorfner: But before we go to them, I want to play a quick video that they provided from, from their group.

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Todd Womble: I don’t think there’s any audio to it, Bill, maybe not.

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Bill Dorfner: All right, so with that, we have Todd Womble here. He is the CEO of Savannah Logistics Group. Todd and Jan have built Savannah Logistics Group from the ground up with a people-first mindset, and having known Todd for a long time, I can say that is absolutely true.

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Bill Dorfner: They have… they love what they do, they love the people they work with, and they’re committed to making everybody a success. Also with us today.

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Bill Dorfner: We have Gavin Holloway, who’s the asset manager at Savannah Logistics Group, and is heavily involved in their safety program as well. So with that, I’d like to turn it over to Todd. Todd, can you just tell me a little bit about Savannah Logistics Group and, you know, what you’ve done to, you know, from start to finish?

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Todd Womble: Yeah, so we started the company in 2017. I had been in logistics for about 20 years when I decided to,

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Todd Womble: you know, go out on my own and do it on my own, and you know, started with the four trucks, as you well know, Bill, and started in the, Agent Mile, the one, the Carolina National.

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Todd Womble: That we operated, in that agent model for a few years before going out and securing our own, insurance and growing from those 4 trucks to, close to 100 power units today.

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Todd Womble: We’ve branched out into the warehousing and distribution space. We’re heavily involved in drayage, you know, truckload, flatbed, do some out-of-gates, so we have a very, diverse portfolio.

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Todd Womble: Of services, and yeah, we’ve been able to grow a, younger, dynamic, team and workforce. As we were laughing earlier, I’m… I’m the old guy around here now.

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Todd Womble: So, yeah, so we’ve put a lot into our, you know, not only our workforce, but, you know, our drivers from, you know, orientation and educating them, and I know we’ll get into that a little later, but that’s always been…

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Todd Womble: Very near and dear to my heart, as I, you know.

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Todd Womble: Started in the business at a young age, and grew up in the trucking industry, I feel like.

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Todd Womble: You know, I think,

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Todd Womble: every company that I worked with or worked for, I always felt like there was a gap between, driver training and education and, really pouring into the drivers.

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Todd Womble: And so that… that really led me, you know, to create

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Todd Womble: Big Rig University, which we’ll get into later, and I feel like it’s, all of that has been a big part of our success.

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Bill Dorfner: That’s awesome. I appreciate that background, and Gavin, can you just give us an introduction about yourself and what you do with Savannah Logistics Group?

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Gavin Holloway: Yes, sir. So, I graduated college in May of 2023. Directly after college, I joined Savannah Logistics Group as a recruiter, in…

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Gavin Holloway: During that time, the first two years, learned the business operations, was able to assist with a lot of the growth that we experienced on the driver’s side, helping with orientation. Bigger University, like Todd said, we’ll get into that in a little bit later.

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Gavin Holloway: And then about a year ago, I was moved into the asset management position, where I now oversee

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Gavin Holloway: Our trucks, compliance of them, FMCSA and DOT compliance, making sure they’re sticking to their regular, PM schedules, DOT schedules, and so on.

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Bill Dorfner: Awesome, thank you for that background as well. So, we’re going to be talking about orientation and the Big Rig University program that you all have. Let me ask, before we get into that, what are some things that you’ve seen in the past? What were some of the problems that you saw in orientation, and how it was being done in the past that kind of caused you to say, hey.

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Bill Dorfner: We maybe need to do something a little bit differently.

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Todd Womble: Well, I mean, I think everybody gets caught up in that cycle, you know, especially when you’re a young company.

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Todd Womble: And I’ve even seen at companies that do orientations, maybe at the terminal level, and being a terminal manager, man, it’s how quick can I get that truck up? How quick can I get that truck earning?

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Todd Womble: And I think for a lot of younger companies, when every truck matters so much.

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Todd Womble: It can drive you to, you know, cut some corners when it comes to orientating a driver, and… and, you know, I feel like that happened at a lot of companies that…

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Todd Womble: I work for, and I feel like early on, we certainly did it ourselves, because every truck meant so much for the livelihood of not only me, but the survival of the business.

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Todd Womble: So coming from a startup to growing to where we’re at today, and been, you know, we’ve been doing it 10 years.

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Todd Womble: you know, it was just an area that we felt like we really needed to dial in on. I think a happy driver is a safe driver, and for me, a happy driver is a well-informed driver.

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Todd Womble: He has to be a part of your operation, he’s the biggest part of your operation, so from the relationship, meeting the fleet manager from day one, to downloading all the apps and technology that we have today, and that we ask them to update.

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Todd Womble: Their fuel out, so that they can get fuel at the… at the right places. How they get their dispatch information. So, just making sure that they’re well educated and equipped.

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Todd Womble: They don’t feel rushed, they have time to ask questions. They meet the accounting staff. They meet, you know, the people that’s gonna be doing their driver settlements. They meet their fleet manager.

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Todd Womble: They meet the safety and compliance people. They meet our shop. They walk around and meet our customer service reps. And we do that

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Todd Womble: Because we want them to know, hey, you impact all of these lives, and all of these lives are gonna impact you. When you’re on the road, you’re gonna know that guy you’re calling at the shop if you have a breakdown.

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Todd Womble: you’re gonna know who that fleet manager is when you’re… when you’re calling in and you have an issue. You’re gonna know who that customer service rep is that’s trying to get you that load, or trying to resolve an issue for you. So, I think all of that was really important, and not to…

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Todd Womble: Not to bring them in and rush them out the door, and they don’t know anybody, and… and half the things operationally got explained to them, and it just, you know.

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Todd Womble: it creates a lot of uncertainty for them down the road. It’s gonna make your operations clunky because, you know, they didn’t… they’re not downloading paperwork right, or they’re not following process or procedure the way that maybe you meant for them to follow it.

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Todd Womble: at some point, companies don’t have process and procedure. That’s why they’re kind of running through it. So, we feel like the recruiting and orientation piece from beginning to end is a process that never stops.

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Todd Womble: you know, with the continuing education, as long as they’re… as long as they’re a driver here, we’re going to continue to coach and pour into them. So, it continues well after that onboarding and orientation, but that’s certainly the biggest part of it.

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Bill Dorfner: Thank you so much for that. Now, you have…

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Bill Dorfner: take an orientation to another level, and I know that, you know, it’s important to make sure drivers know the policies, maybe their routes, all sorts of other things that, you know, company-specific, but, you know, in general, every company is doing. You’ve decided to, address another problem, or another opportunity, as far as, like, actually partnering with your drivers.

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Bill Dorfner: you know, get into… can you get into that big rig university a little bit? But also, can you talk to me about how you, view your drivers as… as partners in the business?

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Todd Womble: Yeah, I mean, I think whether a driver owns the rig, whether you’re financing the rig, or whether they’re a company driver, they’re a partner.

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Todd Womble: They’re the most critical part of what we do. And so, when we got into Big Rig University, and creating Big Rig University.

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Todd Womble: It was,

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Todd Womble: You know, it was designed to, you know, we were financing the rigs for the guys, so it was designed to, not just put a guy in a truck, but to teach a guy, you know, how to be an entrepreneur that owns his own rig.

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Todd Womble: you know, guys can go to school, they can get their CDL, they can do all those things. We even see a lot of owner-operators that went to the bank, and they were able to, you know, borrow money and buy their own rig, but it still didn’t make them a successful business owner.

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Todd Womble: And, you know, I know a lot of companies are out there, and they do lease purchase, and I’m sure a lot of people on this webinar have heard all the horror stories and that kind of thing. You know, ours has certainly been successful. I think we got about 10 drivers that have gotten titles.

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Todd Womble: We got 2 female drivers that’ll be getting their titles in the next two to three weeks, and one of those female drivers, that’s their second truck that they pay for. Her name’s Deidre Jones, that they paid for, you know, through this program.

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Todd Womble: And when we got into Big Rig University, and we started teaching, you know, these entrepreneurs, we’ll call them, we started teaching them, hey, here’s how to own a rig, and here’s how to be successful at owning a rig.

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Todd Womble: And it was built on the model of, you know, no different than, you know, our business. We got a safety department, an accounting department, a dispatch department. We tell those guys, hey, you’re all of these departments now.

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Todd Womble: You know, you gotta take the right loads for your business, you gotta communicate the right way to your fleet manager, because that’s your customer.

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Todd Womble: So once we got into it, we were like, man, it doesn’t matter if you’re a company driver, a lease purchase driver, an owner-operator.

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Todd Womble: People really need to understand and hear this. You know, we teach them about their fixed costs.

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Todd Womble: You know, they’ve got a truck payment, they’ve got tags, they’ve got heavy highway use tax, they’ve got physical damage insurance, you know, to take care of their rig. They got occupational accident insurance to make sure if they get hurt, they’re taken care of.

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Todd Womble: So, we had to teach them how you got a certain amount of fixed costs, and then you got these variable costs, like, you know, maintenance and fuel, and you know, we wanted to teach them about spending proactive money, on their rig versus reactive money, so…

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Todd Womble: You know, we have a shop called Big Rig Truck Repair, and we can help them facilitate all their repairs.

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Todd Womble: Through that shop, and what we really try to teach them is, you know, we’re gonna help you look at your truck like no one else is gonna look at your truck, because

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Todd Womble: We don’t want you down on the side of the road, because it doesn’t benefit anybody. It doesn’t benefit us as a company. It doesn’t benefit them as a driver, whether they’re a company driver, a lease purchase driver, or an owner-operator.

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Todd Womble: I’m sure there’s a lot of folks on this call that get frustrated because you got a company driver who’s not even responsible for the repair.

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Todd Womble: But they might not call and report what’s wrong with their truck.

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Todd Womble: So, just trying to dig down deeper and say, hey guys, we’ve got to be partners, and we’ve got to teach you how to run a business. And, you know, a company driver, if you think about it, you know, he’s kind of his own little independent employee out there. A lot depends on him.

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Todd Womble: you know, reporting an issue with his truck, making sure he’s planning his route right. So, when we took Big Rig University and we were teaching guys how to own their own business, manage their own business, and run their own business.

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Todd Womble: You know, we found a lot of synergies, like, hey, every driver needs to know the deeper why we want to take care of our equipment, outside of the safety and the compliance and all that, and that’s the right thing to do.

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Todd Womble: But the pain points that it’s gonna cause you, and the loss in revenue, the loss in time for you,

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Todd Womble: And, you know, just the whole hiccup in your week, right? If you’re down long enough on the side of the road, it just throws a wrinkle into your whole plan, and it’s just such a ripple effect. So, you know, I think that was a big thing, is being proactive with your business, and not spending reactive money.

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Bill Dorfner: Absolutely, and of course, the reactive money usually tends to cost 2-3 times as much, at least, as the proactive money.

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Bill Dorfner: And just real quick, looks like we got the chat fixed, so please go ahead and put your, location in there, and if you have any questions. So Todd, you’ve… you’ve gotten the driver’s application, you’ve run them through the driver qualification process, you decide, yes, this is going to be a good partner for us.

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Bill Dorfner: and bring them on day one to do that orientation at Bay Rake University. Can you kind of walk us through what that day looks like for a new driver, and what their process is? Because we talked about that, and I really love the way you introduced them to the entire team and to the business.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, so we take a whole day. They’re on site, a whole day. We start about 7 a.m. in the morning. They’ll usually start up over at our shop.

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Todd Womble: And kind of, you know, learning about the maintenance side of things, you know, walking through, a pre-trip inspection.

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Todd Womble: With some of our shop personnel. You know, I think that’s the assumption, right, is these guys, they have a CDL, we bring them in, well, they should know how to do a really good pre-trip inspection.

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Todd Womble: And we kind of take that to the next level. We call it, you know, an SLG pre-trip inspection. And so, you know, we’re going above and beyond, and you know, we’re having our diesel techs walk through what that looks like with the driver when they’re doing those pre-trip inspections.

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Todd Womble: And just knowing that that guy has been shown and trained how to do it our way, and that we feel good that he knows how to do it. So we spend, you know, we start out there and spend some time there.

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Todd Womble: And then they’ll come over to our driver training center, which is here at our corporate office, and that’s where fleet management and all the admin offices are.

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Todd Womble: And, you know, I call them cast members. We’ll start to have cast members that’ll… that’ll flow into that orientation. Gavin is heavily involved in it, and our fleet managers will come through there, and…

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Todd Womble: You know, the accounting team comes through there, and then we have some breaks, so that they can just walk around and see the operation and know that they’re a part of something that’s a lot bigger than themselves, so that’s…

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Todd Womble: you know, kind of the first half of the day, and then, you know, after lunch and the second half of the day is where we get into Big Rig University and kind of the finances around owning a truck and creating a budget, a budget for their business, and then we encourage them to create a budget for their home.

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Todd Womble: And one of my favorite, when I was… when I was doing Big Rig University.

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Todd Womble: full-time, and Gavin can kind of speak on it, because he’s… he’s kind of been there as we’ve developed it over the last 3 years, but my favorite thing to do, with even the owner-operators and the lease purchase guys is, hey, how much money does it take, do you need to bring home every week to take care of your household?

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Todd Womble: And you had a lot of guys that knew exactly how much money they needed to bring home to take care of their household, but you also have a lot of guys that didn’t have any idea, like, you know, I don’t know.

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Todd Womble: So, you know, I feel like we’re… we were giving back to them. I feel like Big Rig University hopefully impacts a lot of their life outside of just work, right? Like, hey, you need a… not only do you need a budget for this business that you’re about to start.

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Todd Womble: owner-operators that you’re already in, and I feel like there’s a lot of our guys that brought trucks and leased them on to us that’s went through

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Todd Womble: our big rig university that’s gotten a lot out of it. But I think, helping them create a budget around the lanes that they’re gonna be running.

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Todd Womble: You know, whether it’s local is different than regional, and flatbed is different than container, and truckload is different than all of them. So, you know, showing them real-life examples of the type freight that we run, real-life examples of the lanes that they’ll be running.

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Todd Womble: And we give them a real-life example of, if you work this many days, and we take their load pay, we teach them how to calculate fuel mileage.

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Todd Womble: And we teach them how to create a P&L based on every load that they run, and then they’ve got their fixed expenses, so we work out, we work through a spreadsheet, and basically we help them, you know, create a weekly budget.

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Bill Dorfner: Sure, and, you know, just to make sure that everybody out there understands, these aren’t drivers who are just coming right out of a driving school. These are experienced drivers who have been from company to company to company and have found their way to Savannah Logistics. Would that be accurate?

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Todd Womble: Yeah, yeah, you know, so, you know, typically, yeah, typically 3 plus years of experience, and we got guys that have, you know, a lot more experience than that that have come to us.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, and so, you know, it’s interesting to me that, you know, these folks that have come from all these different companies, sometimes they’re hearing this information

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Bill Dorfner: for the first time, which means that there are so many companies out there who are not taking time to really kind of nurture their drivers. Love to give Gavin a chance to kind of share, some, maybe some of your experiences, working with the drivers, recently. Any kind of stories or light bulb moments that you can think of that, you know, where… where you really feel like you made an impact with, with some of these new folks?

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Gavin Holloway: Yes, definitely. I know that there’s a couple of driver partners that have come to me several months or even a year after hiring them and putting them through Big Rig University that they tell me what a difference it’s made in their business, thinking about it differently, especially being proactive as opposed to reactive.

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Gavin Holloway: We’ve got a driver, a local driver, Jamarcus Hill. He struggled with being reactive, and now he’s being extremely proactive, and you can just tell the amount of stress that it lifted off of his shoulders, and the amount of enjoyment that he gets out of his day-to-day duties has just increased substantially.

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Gavin Holloway: Also, I think that with Big Rig University, it sets the expectations clear. We use a real driver settlement. We black out the name of the driver to keep it confidential, but we have that driver run through an exercise using somebody’s settlement from the previous week. That way, they’re able to see if

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Gavin Holloway: exactly what their settlement’s gonna look like. There’s no questions about it. They get a true insight into what the business operations look like.

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Gavin Holloway: And that’s beneficial from both sides. You know, if there’s somebody that they’re wanting to make an unrealistic amount of money, then that alerts us ahead of time, and it allows us to jump on it before the driver partner comes on and before they start running for us. So, it’s a really cool program. I’ve really enjoyed being able to see people graduate from it and see them

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Gavin Holloway: develop their business and see where their business has gone. Roberto Cuevas is actually the driver on the screen right now. He finished his lease purchase program. We brought him in, and he was really eager to get to ownership of his truck, and he did so extremely quickly.

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Gavin Holloway: He’s still on with us, and he’s still enjoying it, managing his business extremely well.

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Gavin Holloway: And it’s just cool to be able to see situations like that, or examples like that, that just remind you that, you know, this is why we’re doing it. This is the fruit of the labor of doing it.

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Bill Dorfner: Sure. And I can imagine this has got to help with retention of drivers. You know, tell me a little bit about what retention looked like before you implemented this program, and what it looks like today.

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Todd Womble: Oh, man, I mean…

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Todd Womble: our turnover rate was probably like everybody else’s. It was probably, you know, in those early days, it was, shoot, probably 100%. You know, we… we really hadn’t found our niche. We were… we were sloppy and messy with our onboarding and orientation. We were, you know, we were new in the market.

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Todd Womble: And we knew that we had to change, and so we, you know, we started working on building our brand and building our culture, building our safety culture, building our driver culture. And I know Gavin checked the numbers, so our retention rate is 78% right now.

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Todd Womble: And I can tell you, for the 22% that we lose, we’re divorcing them more than they’re divorcing us.

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Todd Womble: Due to safety and compliance issues, maybe, maybe other issues, attitude issues. So, you know, we, we set the expectations and orientation.

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Todd Womble: We certainly let the drivers know what our safety culture is. We’ve got about 7 behaviors that we grade them on every week.

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Todd Womble: That we extract data from their motive, and it comes into Power BI.

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Todd Womble: Something that I think’s unique about us when they meet their fleet manager, the guy that’s going to be talking to them about their driving behavior, and about safety and compliance more than anybody in the company, is their fleet manager.

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Todd Womble: And we have a saying around here, you know, we don’t have… we don’t have a director of safety here at SLG. Everybody is a director of safety.

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Todd Womble: So our fleet managers, every week, their fleet’s not judged on how much freight they deliver, it’s judged on how many events their drivers… how many unsafe driving events that their fleet has, and we’re able to drive that down to the fleet level, to the fleet manager level.

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Todd Womble: And we’re able to look at it week over week. Are there events trending down? Are there events trending up?

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Todd Womble: We get to look at their coaching in that, and we get to show those drivers when they come through orientation, hey guys, this is our safety culture, like, we’re gonna… driver behavior is really important to us, and Big Rig University teaches them that, hey, they’re their own safety and compliance department.

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Todd Womble: And here’s the safety and compliance rules that you gotta live by.

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Todd Womble: And here’s the attitude that you gotta have when you’re talking to your best customer, which is Savannah Logistics Group and your fleet manager. So, we really do, we teach them how to run a business.

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Bill Dorfner: And, you know, you bring up safety, how do you feel, like.

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Bill Dorfner: training in general, you know, going through this process versus, you know, just kind of doing a quick orientation and sending them on their way. How do you think that has helped your safety scores, maybe your claims or accident frequency? Have you seen a difference in that since you’ve implemented these programs?

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Todd Womble: Yeah, we certainly have. I mean, we feel like we’ve got a good safety culture and a good safety program in place. We…

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Todd Womble: You know, when a driver comes to orientation.

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Todd Womble: all of us are going to talk about a lot of the same things, right? We’re gonna talk about seatbelt usage and driver behavior, and we’re gonna talk about

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Todd Womble: Compliance from logs to, pre-trips. So, a lot of us, we’re gonna go over those same… the same thing that they’ve heard at every company.

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Todd Womble: Prior to coming to your company.

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Todd Womble: And I felt like, I feel like Big Rig University, I feel like, you know, I would challenge people, think about what you can give back to that driver that he hasn’t gotten at another orientation.

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Todd Womble: They go to orientation after orientation, they watch the videos, they may hear some of the same stuff. You know, what’s gonna differentiate you, from the next carrier? And that’s really what we’re… what we have tried to do. It’s gonna be what we continue to try to do.

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Todd Womble: What are some services that we can offer, to our drivers? What’s some, is it home budgeting and home finance? Is it…

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Todd Womble: what are some of those things that, rather than a driver coming to orientation saying, hey, this company’s about to tell me all the things I can do for them, I gotta drive safe and do all these things that, in their mind, they think, well, it’s gonna benefit the company.

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Todd Womble: Let’s show them how it benefits them, how it benefits everybody as a whole, but then what’s something that you can give that driver that they never got anywhere else before? What kind of coaching or training outside of that orientation

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Todd Womble: Which I think’s what Big Rig University, we’ve invested the time and energy, and I think that

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Todd Womble: people know when you invest time and energy in something that’s investing back in them. They sense it, they feel it, or at least the right ones sense it and feel it. Not everybody’s gonna be as successful

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Todd Womble: entrepreneur, not everybody’s gonna be an SLG, entrepreneur, and that’s okay.

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Bill Dorfner: I think that’s such an important point, as far as, you know, investing in them and giving them something that other companies don’t want. I think we’ve all… we’ve all been there, we’ve all, you know, pulled up to the truck stops or whatever and seen the sign in the window, handwritten in black magic marker saying, need driver, call number.

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Bill Dorfner: And, you know, instead of treating them as commodities, treating them as true business partners is such a different mindset than we see in a lot of other places.

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Todd Womble: We’re not afraid to… we’re just not afraid to part ways with a guy. I know a lot of times.

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Todd Womble: In business, you’re like, man, we got X amount of unseated trucks, and Fred’s doing… Fred’s not doing very well, but we’re gonna keep him on.

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Todd Womble: You know, I hear the stories time and time again, man, we need drivers so bad, we need driver so bad, and it dilutes your culture, so your driver culture and your safety culture will be defined by the lowest level

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Todd Womble: of safety and compliance issues that you will allow. So, if you allow Fred

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Todd Womble: to stay on board, he’s gonna dilute the whole pool.

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Todd Womble: And we, you know, we’ve just, we’ve put ourself in a situation where That…

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Todd Womble: safety, compliance, having the right person in the truck, driving that truck for SLG is the most important thing for us, and we’re okay with being without someone who’s not going to perform on the level that we need them to perform on.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, absolutely.

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Bill Dorfner: So my question to you is, what advice… what would you want to tell other companies who maybe right now are just fast-tracking, or the onboarding process? They’re doing, you know, what’s kind of depicted in the faded picture there. They’re… here’s your… here’s your driver regulation book, here’s your ELD, here’s the keys, and here’s your… here’s your first dispatch. What would you tell them when they say, hey, we don’t have time to do what… what Todd’s doing, we don’t have

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Bill Dorfner: the money to do what Todd’s doing, and drivers don’t want to do it anyway.

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Todd Womble: Well, I think they’re probably already spending the same amount of time. If they’re rushing the guy through orientation, it’s gonna come back to them on the back end from operational issues, safety and compliance issues, so there’s gonna be issues on the back end, I would say.

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Todd Womble: With that… with that driver partner, that’s gonna eat up a tremendous amount of time over his… maybe his first 6 or month, or if he even makes it that far, because I think the orientation and onboarding is such a critical part of that retention piece.

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Todd Womble: But I’d say not taking that front-end time is gonna cost you more time than that on the back end, and I think your turnover’s just gonna be, from a turnover standpoint.

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Todd Womble: from where I sit, you can’t afford not to take that time on the front end.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, and that’s a… that’s a great point of saying that you’re going to be spending that amount of time one way or another. You can… you can do it right away, and… and do it right, and do the explanations of how this is how it’s done, or you can be answering those phone calls, you know, all day long, or into the evening, or late hours of the night.

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Bill Dorfner: Well, one way or another, they’re going to have the questions that you’re addressing.

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Bill Dorfner: Might as well just do it right out there on the front.

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Bill Dorfner: One of our favorite, statistics here at INFINITI is that, I mean, it’s not a… it’s not…

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Bill Dorfner: A good thing that this is a statistic, but 80% of your accidents actually will occur with someone who’s at your company for the first year, and that’s not their first year in driving, that’s their first year at a new company, because they have those questions, they’re not familiar with the routes, they’re not familiar with the lanes.

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Bill Dorfner: And maybe orientation wasn’t done right in the first place. So that’s a great point. You’re gonna spend the money one way or another.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, and I mean, I’m thankful, you know, I did work for some companies that did invest in INFINITI, and I, you know, a lot of my ideas came from the, the Dan Baker, the old Dan Baker videos, you know, I love Dan Baker, and you know, got a chance to

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Todd Womble: catch up with him several years ago, Bill. We had him out at an agent meeting, over at Carolina, but…

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Todd Womble: you know, early in my career, you know, and throughout my career, I had some exposure to Dan’s videos, and that drove a lot of, you know, I can say that drove a lot of my thought process about… Dan talks about

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Todd Womble: Driver communication, and educating the drivers, and training the drivers, and that was a big part of,

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Todd Womble: you know, a big part of his motivation, and you know, I think… I think that’s probably always stuck with me, and I think it remains… it remains true today in this digital…

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Todd Womble: this digital world that we live in, I still think relationships matter, and I think orientation is the very beginning of that relationship, and having face-to-face interaction, and allowing them to talk to real people.

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Todd Womble: And you know, we’re still… we’re still in the relationship world, no matter… no matter how much tech we get. We’re humans, we want to interact with somebody, we want to be treated kindly, and in the day-to-day craziness of things, we can… we can lose sight of that, and all of us have done it. We’re not perfect either.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah. Gavin, what has been your favorite thing about, working with, Big Rig University and the program that you all have?

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Gavin Holloway: Working through the financial exercise with them has been my favorite thing, because it’s something they haven’t had before, going through the settlement and breaking down the fixed cost versus the variable cost, and then my favorite question is, you know, what do you want your salary to be?

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Gavin Holloway: and have them think about the answer to that, and then whenever they do give me the answer to that, I ask… I follow up with the question of, is that the salary you want, or is that the salary you need?

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Gavin Holloway: You know, you need to start thinking of this as a business, you need to start running it as a business, and you don’t need to be pulling all the, you know, financial tools from that business for your own good, because your business is going to struggle from it. So, diving through those financial exercises with them and making sure they understand the numbers behind it.

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Gavin Holloway: Has been a really cool process to undergo.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, I think the coolest part for me is guys that save up money in their business, they’re able to take their families on vacation, and they… they can say, hey, I’m gonna drop a check off for my truck payment, and

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Todd Womble: For last week since I was on vacation. You know, we have guys that’s been proactive enough to do things like that, and I think that’s… I think it’s really cool.

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Todd Womble: When stuff like that happens.

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Gavin Holloway: Definitely.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, that’s gotta be exciting to see.

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Bill Dorfner: So… Again, you know.

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Bill Dorfner: so many companies are just doing… just… just pencil whipping the orientation process. And, you know, folks that are out there right now, maybe… maybe, you’re… you’re not, you know, just rushing them through, but, you know, I’ve… I’ve talked to…

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Bill Dorfner: hundreds of trucking companies, and so many of them, you know, I’ll ask them, what do you do during your orientation process? And they’ll go through about 10 or 11 different items, and then I’ll ask them, how long does that take you to do that? And they’ll be like, maybe 1 or 2 hours. And it’s like, there’s no way they’re doing it thoroughly that way.

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Bill Dorfner: And it sounds like, Todd, that your entire team is involved in this, invested in this, willing to spend time doing this. I’ve heard from you and Gavin about your favorite things, but in general, how has your team, your back office support team.

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Bill Dorfner: I kind of embrace this idea of working directly with the drivers.

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Bill Dorfner: And with the partners, and putting them through this process.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, I mean, you know, every… everybody knows that our driver culture is, you know, they’re the most important, they’re the most important.

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Todd Womble: Person or partner that we engage with, from the accounting team, making sure that the weekly settlements are right, and we’re darn good at that.

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Todd Womble: You know, we look at, the stability of settlements, who’s up, who’s down, so the accounting department looks that weekly, they send it out to the fleet manager, so, you know, even after orientation, we’re looking at, you know, we’re looking at what those drivers are bringing home.

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Todd Womble: What the average that a certain guy brings home. When they start to drop down, we want to identify, well.

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Todd Womble: why are they dropping down? Is it, you know, have they had a lot of maintenance issues? Have they… is it, you know, is it…

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Todd Womble: You know, are they missing loads? Are they late? Are they… so what? What’s causing that? So…

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Todd Womble: you know, I think that gets buy-in from, you know, the fleet managers, so operations through accounting, and then, you know, our shop knows that these guys are… they’re the best customers that we have, they’re the most important customers that we have. We got a vested interest to get their truck in and get it back on the road, so…

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Todd Womble: I think with what we’ve created with Big Rig University, which is our education piece, Big Rig Leasing, which is our finance piece, and Big Rig Truck Repair, you know, all of those ties them together, and then, you know, obviously Savannah Logistics Group as a whole.

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Todd Womble: You know, everything touches every department, and everybody has a vested interest in making sure that that driver partner is taken care of. And it’s fun to see everybody

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Todd Womble: you know, buy into that. We… actually, we just signed, you know, Gavin Terrence Berg yesterday. We just, we just signed… I signed the title yesterday, to,

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Todd Womble: to give to a driver, and it was cool to see, one of our customer service reps come running through the office with the title saying, hey, Terrence Bird, you know, just paid his truck off. So, it’s cool stuff. You guys can follow us on LinkedIn. We’re gonna start highlighting

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Todd Womble: you know, these, these driver partners that have paid off their trucks. So, you know, we’d love to have, invite you guys to follow us there and see some of the,

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Todd Womble: Upcoming, exciting things that we, that we have.

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Bill Dorfner: Awesome. Well, I appreciate so much you guys jumping on and sharing with us this morning about your program. Not seeing any questions in there right now from our guests.

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Bill Dorfner: So it sounds like you covered things really, really well. It’s exciting to hear how everybody has buy-in. You know, everybody understands that they benefit from doing it right in the first place, and you know.

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Bill Dorfner: I can just picture being there in your office again, and seeing the excitement on folks’ faces when that driver gets that lease for that brand new truck and gets into the process.

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Bill Dorfner: So, you know, and knowing you for as long as I have, I’ve loved, I’ve really enjoyed seeing the progress and where you’re at today. It’s exciting. So, what you’re doing, you’re obviously doing right, and it’s working. I do have a couple of questions coming in now.

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Bill Dorfner: One of them, it says, what are those 7 behaviors you gauge the drivers on every week?

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Todd Womble: Alright, let’s see here if I can get them. So, following too close, seat belt, stop signs, speeding, erratic lane change, hard braking.

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Todd Womble: And following too close, if I didn’t mention that already. Gavin, how’d I do?

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Gavin Holloway: Pretty good. You mentioned distracted driving and self-.

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Todd Womble: The strap, they’re driving, sorry.

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Todd Womble: So we have driver-facing cameras, we have, we have driver-facing cameras in 100% of our trucks, and we have forward-facing cameras. So those are, those are the behaviors that… that we’re… we’re grading our drivers on every week, and that’s downloading in the, in the Power BI, like I said, so…

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Todd Womble: Sounds like they’ve done pretty good there.

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Gavin Holloway: You did.

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Bill Dorfner: Alright, nicely done. Another question that came in is, how long would you say it takes to get a program like this up and running if you don’t already have one?

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Todd Womble: Man, you know, I think probably the most time-consuming things are, you know, creating your finance lease. So, our lease is a finance lease, and it’s a $1 buyout, at the end.

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Todd Womble: It’s gonna depend on what type trucks you’re buying. So, you know, we started out buying some used trucks, back when used trucks were reasonable. So, you know, we’ve been at this for a little while now.

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Todd Womble: And our model has been, you know, a lot of folks paid those used trucks off, and then some folks choose to

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Todd Womble: After they’ve been with us for a year, two years, and they’re really proving themselves.

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Todd Womble: For example, in the video, we bought 5 brand new rigs at the end of last year, and so 5 drivers were able to come out of their used rigs and go into brand new rigs. You know, I mean.

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Todd Womble: If you’ve got a traditional bank that you’re… that you’re financing those trucks at, we… we try to make our… we try to make our payments mirror, the way that we have the rig financed at the bank.

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Todd Womble: You know, obviously you’re going to want to allow some fluff in there on that lease payment, you know, because it is, you know, you do have some risk there. You’ll have to work on getting you a finance lease.

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Todd Womble: That lays out the terms of that lease, and so you can deduct the payment from that lease, every week.

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Todd Womble: Define what’s your maintenance escrow.

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Todd Womble: It’s gonna look like, what you’re gonna make that guy put back every week.

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Todd Womble: Because you know he’s gonna have maintenance, but it’s really not a terrible long time. If you’ve already got trucks in your fleet, let’s just say you’ve got a used truck in your fleet that you want to do it.

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Todd Womble: You know, I mean, then you can get creative. If it’s, if it’s a truck that you only got… have two years on at the bank, well, you can turn around and finance that thing for maybe 2 and a half or three years, to… to a lease operator, so…

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Todd Womble: You know, it can start up relatively quick.

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Bill Dorfner: Sure, and as far as the actual… the training program that you’ve put together, the one-day training program, how long would you say it took you to develop that?

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Todd Womble: Man, it probably, you know, off and on, it probably took, you know, 2 or 3 months to really, you know, kind of dial in and get our, get our first, our first

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Todd Womble: draft and our vision, and you know, you’re always gonna… gonna critique it as you go, as you should with anything, so it’s a living, breathing thing that you wanna make better and get better.

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Todd Womble: Today, I would encourage you to, you know, look at the lanes that you’re currently running, and what that would look like to transition that

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Todd Womble: you know, to a lease purchase model. You know, what’s that owner-operator gonna be able to make on those lanes? What are you… what do you think your lease payments are gonna be that you’re gonna need to collect from him?

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Todd Womble: How much maintenance escrow are you going to want to take from him? What are those… what are those fixed weekly costs? And kind of modeling it out based on what you think he can run in a week, what that means for him in terms of

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Todd Womble: Gross revenue, and backing out his fuel, and putting money back for maintenance, and taking out all those fixed costs, and where does that… where does that leave that guy at, on a weekly basis, based on what you’re running today?

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Bill Dorfner: Okay, a couple more questions here. So, aside from the onboarding process,

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Bill Dorfner: What would you say, you know, we talked about how you scaled your business over time. What was your biggest asset to you in scaling that business as fast as you have?

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Todd Womble: Man, I would say definitely the lease purchase model. You know, I think it allowed us to go out there when people struggled to recruit and retain drivers.

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Todd Womble: Gavin can probably speak on this a little bit. He was in recruiting, but when you talk about recruiting, you know, the true owner-operator.

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Todd Womble: or when you talk about recruiting, you know, a company driver, really, when you start a program like this, you’ve got something to offer people.

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Todd Womble: That not everybody is offering to them. And when you add some education to it, and when you, when you show those guys that you got their best interest at heart.

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Todd Womble: I would really say it’s the, you know, the lease purchase allowed us to scale it. Obviously, we had to go out and get business, and find business to put on those trucks, and…

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Todd Womble: For anybody that’s lived through the last 2 or 3 years, you know, the freight recession has certainly been a real thing.

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Todd Womble: But as we come out of that, and if you’re looking to ramp up, you know, I think, I think the lease purchase model is, is somewhere that… that can certainly, benefit you on the… as far as,

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Todd Womble: Trying to scale your business from where it’s at today, or trying to add additional capacity to take care of maybe a new account that you’ve gotten.

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Todd Womble: Or a new account that you’re looking at taking down.

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Bill Dorfner: Okay. Question on, driver rewards. Do you reward your drivers for good behavior? Do you have, you know, safety bonuses built in place?

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Todd Womble: So, we have a quarterly, driver partner of the quarter, that we recognize and give some things to. We’re certainly looking at

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Todd Womble: what… what kind of spend we would want to… that, you know, so we’ve been kicking around, you know, what it looks like to reward guys on a monthly basis for their driving behavior. Very good question. I think that is something that… that every company needs to do.

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Todd Womble: And it’s something that, that we’re gonna do based on, you know, motive and their events, and we’re really trying to work out the particulars and the parameters around, you know.

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Todd Womble: what that monthly… what that monthly, you know, bonus could look like. Clean inspections. We reward our guys for clean roadside inspections, certainly.

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Todd Womble: Gavin can talk a little bit more about that, but you know, we do recognize a driver of the quarter for both our Charleston and Savannah locations.

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Todd Womble: But we want to go above and beyond and do more than that, and I would encourage that. I think… I think safety… I think in this day, safety bonuses and safety incentives are certainly… certainly a must for that percentage of the fleet that you know is doing the right thing.

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Bill Dorfner: Sure, absolutely. Now, when you get that, that event from the Motive camera, does that go, you know, is there your driver manager then, is that you coach them? Do you assign any additional training, or how does that look?

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Todd Womble: Yep, so that report comes out every morning, and it’s, anything that happened the day before is downloaded into Power BI.

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Todd Womble: And every fleet manager gets that, that report, and that way they’re doing, you know, daily coaching. Also, you know, outside of that, and something that I didn’t mention that I think is more important than anything we do, is when we see a guy that’s had events, and they start trending down.

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Todd Womble: And we see that we’re changing their behavior. Man, we start calling that guy, and giving him high fives through the phone, and telling them, you know, how proud of them we are, and thanking them for taking it seriously.

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Todd Womble: You know, and I think that… I think them being able to hear from their fleet manager the good and the bad is very, very powerful.

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Todd Womble: I think in our industry, they always got a call from the big bad safety guy, and that’s the reason we’ve got a safety’s everybody’s responsibility culture, and I think there’s a lot of power in that guy that

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Todd Womble: Has somewhat, control over your money, and he’s willing to talk to you more about safety than he is about the money.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, and that’s a great point about making sure that you’re contacting the drivers on those videos that come through where they performed really, really well. I’ve always found, you know, at a safety meeting, those are actually even more powerful

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Bill Dorfner: to show to drivers to say, hey, you know, this is a great example of why you do things the right way, versus, you know, showing that crash that happened. Everybody thinks that’s not going to be them anyway.

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Bill Dorfner: But yeah, that’s a great point to make sure, you know, that message out to that driver saying, hey, you know, great job avoiding that, you know, that car that pulled out in front of you.

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Bill Dorfner: Any of those things is such a good, such a good point.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, I mean, we get alerts where, you know, cars might cut a guy off, and he’s able to back off of them, but maybe not before he gets the alert, but we’re looking at it. We know that he was trying to do the right thing, but it might have caught him in that threshold of he didn’t get to back off

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Todd Womble: Timely enough, and we still get to call that guy and say, hey, man, we recognize you were doing the right thing, and thank you for doing that.

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Bill Dorfner: Awesome.

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Bill Dorfner: I’ve got a question in here, it says, did a dispatching software assist in the growth? Do you have a… I don’t need to know what company, but do you have a dispatching software that you use, and how would you say.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, I don’t mind sharing it. You know, we’re heavily, heavily into the container drayage business, and we use a software called PortPro.

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Todd Womble: And it’s certainly done a lot for our business. It certainly helps us organize and manage our freight and our drivers better. Gives us a lot of visibility and a lot of functionality. So I think, you know, once you get to a certain number of trucks, you,

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Todd Womble: you know, you certainly need a high-powered TMS. You know, once we got to the 50, 60 truck model, I think we were around 60 trucks before we ever pulled out of that agent model.

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Todd Womble: And in that one year, you know, in the… many of you know, in the agent model, they provide the funding, and they provide the software, and they provide all this stuff.

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Todd Womble: you know, we kind of ripped the band-aid off and went out and got our own software. Thank God, that first year was certainly bumpy with the software.

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Todd Womble: We had to learn it, and they were kind of new, and we were kind of new, but, you know, PortPro’s done a great job with their software and with the, you know, visibility and the functionality, so, smooth selling now.

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Bill Dorfner: Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for spending the time that you did with us today. It’s been great to hear about the program that you have put together, and what you’re doing. And, you know, just as a reminder to everybody, again, your greatest asset and your greatest liability is the behavior of your employees or your partners. And, you know, addressing that on the front end is so much easier and so much more effective.

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Bill Dorfner: than trying to address it on the back end. So, great job for y’all for doing that, for recognizing that.

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Bill Dorfner: Just a couple of reminders, folks. INFINITI has a library of over a thousand training videos. You know, maybe you’re not ready to set up a, you know, a program such as Todd’s, or you want to ramp up your orientation process. I’m not sure exactly how to do it. We have orientation templates, all sorts of videos that we can put together for you

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Bill Dorfner: So that you can go ahead and get started in putting that process in place. We’ve been in the industry for 26 years, and you’re able to start a free trial today. Just contact us. You can go to our website, look for that. In addition to that, if you’re a safety manager and you’re just, you know, looking for some additional training or, you know, want some new insights, we would love to see you here in our office in Irving, Texas.

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Bill Dorfner: training center right here. We’ll put on two-day boot camps where we’ll bring you in, and cover a whole range of topics from, you know, reptile theory, depositions, building that culture, creating custom content, building your own training programs. And so we would love to see you down here. Our next one is in July 22nd, and then we have another one scheduled in August, August 12th and 13th, so we would love to see you here down in Irving.

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Bill Dorfner: Come visit me.

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Bill Dorfner: Thank you all so much for being here. Again, we’ll have the recording ready for you shortly, and we’ll send that out. I appreciate your questions and your participation, and again, thank you, Todd, Gavin, for your time today.

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Todd Womble: Yeah, thank you, Bill.