This will go down on my permanent record...

(@otterinthewater, not threadjacking, just replying to R&R’s comment then, I’m out. And I wish you much success out on your own. )

There was this old hand that owned a small tanker company. Had great drivers. He decided that he wanted out. Another guy approached him about a business deal with a contract to be a carrier for a beverage company. Hmmm, would tanker yankers be cool with pulling a box?

They were one of 4 companies pulling for this beverage company, but they run only local and regional, home every day. The other 3 companies are megas. The beverage company is stumped and are trying to figure out how and why this small company is CRUSHING the rest. The megas have the loads shift, spill, roll out the trailer when the rear doors are opened, and the small carrier makes it look easy. 70 mph trucks, no cattle prods, no handholding, home every day, full benefits, W2, 100%dropNhook, $1200-1500/week.

It’s funny, because the beverage company is trying to figure out how this small company has been able to decimate all others. They’re monitoring the loads, watching the security cameras at the plants, taking pics…if you put all the stats on paper, they should all be fairly even. But they’re not even in the same ballpark. Why is that?

 

Talent costs money. The whole industry is based on the least common denominator, and they level the playing field…and everything should be equal. At least on paper.

They see trucks and truck drivers. The thing that they didn’t factor in was this guy started with an entire crew of tanker yankers. Of course they are going to greatly outperform the average mega carrier box jock at beverage loads.

 

@otterinthewater
Good news indeed. It is always nice to see/read of someone successfully reaching a goal. Your diligence has paid off well.

 

You need drivers that are professionals and you need to motivate them.

I was on Shell dedicated and we did six loads of gasoline per truck per shift. We never let a station run out and we swapped loads with each other and delivered in the order we felt was right. We made about 4 1/2 hours of bonuses every night or $112.

In comes a company bidding the job less but they don't do bonuses. It went to five loads from six, stations were run dried, and drivers were no longer allowed to change the order of loads.

Hire professionals, pay them what their worth. Let them run.

 

Old retail slogan:
Why do people pass a door, to patronize another store,
The answer I believe; is in the service they receive.
Holds true in any service you provide.....

 

As has already been mentioned, starting with experienced tanker yankers is a big step up. There is a key word in that sentence which lays at the heart of the question.

"Experience" is not the same thing as "tenure". @otterinthewater has 4 years of tenure, but has knowledge and skills that belie his short time as a driver/LO.

I'm a big fan of quantifying things - breaking down ideas/processes to their base concepts, finding metrics to make apt comparisons. When I was a young swim coach I spent an outrageous amount of time tracking and analyzing yardage, energy zones, heart rates, 'test set' times. It was one of the things that set me apart from other coaches and a big part of why I got better results. After a few years I realized that all of the data I was accumulating was leading me to false conclusions. I had all the key stats, but they didn't account for the underlying narrative. I was starting to miss the intangible and worse focusing on numbers that seemed important but were actually not correlated to performance. Stroke counts were important, but only in the context of stroke rate. Taking 14 long strokes and gliding into the turn is slower than 13 long strokes and 2 short shorts to set up a powerful turn, which is slower than just taking 16 strokes. Then on some athletes, getting the hip rotation needed to cut stroke count increases crossover kicks which increases drag. It's not that the metric is bad, it's that I wasn't using it effectively.

One of the common themes I've found in trucking is we don't use metrics effectively. It's MILES MILES MILES, it's drop and hook is better than live loading, it's idle time, or the most recent stupidity at my company - looking at how much time a driver spends on line 3. Someone has equated 'drive time' to revenue.

The "number 1 driver" in my division in terms of time logged on line three for 2nd quarter is a new driver. This driver is a hustler, but I'm ready to pile drive the #@@&*$! into a granite slab. We'll ignore for the minute his wearing of slippers (not flip flops, slippers - they have cotton soles), and his phone use while backing, and the number of tires he has flat spotted by doing a 90 degree back with the tandems all the way back. We'll focus on just the logs, ma'am. We have a 'geo fence' around our customers which logs our arrival. It hits the same for every truck, give of take 10 seconds. I hit line 4/yard move within a minute of arrival, while "Ken" doesn't hit line 4 for 8 minutes. If I logged the same way Ken does, I would have at least another 30 minutes on line 3 a day.

When you look at who logs the most line 3 time in the division, the top 20 drivers are either newer drivers or guys whose average length of haul is over 750 miles. I'm way down the list for two reasons. First, I'm doing a lot of short haul loads that are a high revenue stream. As near as I can figure, the 2,100 miles I ran last week earned the company more than the 2,500 that Ken ran. I also earned more (adjusting for base pay differences) than Ken did - by a huge margin.

This has been a long way of saying "is the shipper looking at the right metrics and are they weighing the data appropriately"?

We have a driver who was having an excessive number of load shifts. The customer was blaming the driver, but it wasn't the driver's fault (mostly). That driver just happened to be getting a disproportionate number of loads with "H" bales, which are hard to band and are prone to break their banding. Those pallets also need to be pinwheeled in - the bales are 40'x'40, so on a 40'x48' pallet if you don't pinwheel there is an 8' gap. As soon as we got the driver going into complain about how the trailer was loaded, he stopped having load shifts (and the customer stopped loading the things wrong).

A few weeks ago I called into the OPs manager to complain about being given an email address that I can't check, but due to my involvement in technology testing people are sending mail to. While we were talking she offered me a 5/2 out and back schedule for after I am done "helping out" the dedicated account. At first I wondered why it was being discussed. Then I realized that for the last 10 years I've had weekly "Time at Home" set up. It's not really TAH, but just the easiest way for me to swap out students. I'm running 30-40 days at a crack, but get routed into "the house" on Saturday, drop Tweedle Dee and pickup up Tweedle Dum, then leave out on Sunday. On paper it looks like I want to be home every week, but that doesn't match with what's actually happening.

The metrics that the beverage company are looking at aren't telling them the real story.