This week on the Oakley Podcast, host Jeremy Kellett chats with Scotty Crisco & Jeremy Paul about key safety topics for owner-operators and the trucking industry. The group delves into the importance of safety, communication, and proactive measures within Oakley Trucking and how little things make a big difference in safety. The discussion also explains safety meetings and the Driver AI app, which helps drivers monitor their alerts, the need for balanced feedback in the industry, the significance of transparency and teamwork in maintaining high safety standards and fostering a positive work environment, and so much more.
Key topics in today’s conversation include:
- New Podcast Recording Setup (1:14)
- Previewing Upcoming Episodes (3:15)
- Stickers Mailing Update (5:46)
- Importance of Communication and Safety (8:22)
- Reasons for Driver Meetings (9:46)
- Understanding Camera Alerts (12:29)
- Importance of Face-to-Face Meetings (14:17)
- Addressing Driver Performance (15:34)
- Connecting Alerts to CSA Scores (17:34)
- Understanding Speeding Alerts (19:27)
- Following Distance Alerts (22:09)
- Importance of CSA Scores (27:05)
- Driver Expectations and Communication (32:02)
- Driver AI App Introduction (00:37:18)
- Promoting Safe Driving Habits (38:33)
- Liability and Safety Implications (39:27)
- Value of Safety Meetings (41:12)
- Final Thoughts and Takeaways (42:30)
Oakley Trucking is a family-owned and operated trucking company headquartered in North Little Rock, Arkansas. For more information, check out our show website: podcast.bruceoakley.com.
Transcription
Jeremy Kellett 00:12
Welcome to the Oakley podcast, trucking, business and family. This show is brought to you by Oakley trucking, headquartered at North Little Rock, Arkansas. The purpose of this podcast is to communicate with Oakley owner operators and their families by giving them up to date information concerning Oakley trucking and the trucking industry, from business advice to safety updates to success stories, also to give an insight to outside truck drivers that might be interested in joining the Oakley family. Hey, welcome to the Oakley podcast, trucking business and family, once again, I appreciate everybody tuning in to the Oakley podcast. We have got a good episode for you today, this one I’ve sat down with Scotty Crisco and Jeremy Paul goes by JP in the safety department, and we actually got some good information that I want all our owner operators to hear and to understand. And we talk about some of the meetings we’re having. We talk about what they mean. We are talking about some alerts that are happening. We just got a lot of good stuff that’s in this episode that we’ve already recorded. And I just want you guys to, sure enough, listen to it real good, and it’s not your typical safety episode that we’ve done in the past. It’s got some really good information for owner operators and how to be more successful as an owner operator. So we’re gonna get to that in just a minute. But first got Megan joining me. Megan, this is officially the last recording of this set. Is this the end of an era as soon as me and you get out of here, Annabelle can’t wait to demolish this. Yeah,
Megan Cummings 01:43
get out of here. Animals are gonna be hard, or it’s gone.
Jeremy Kellett 01:47
So we’ve got, we just received the news. It’s gonna be like a desk form type, you know, that’s gonna be really neat. We just got it in. We still got to put it together. But, you know,
Megan Cummings 01:57
I told Corey, he was showing me pictures of it, and I was like, that looks so familiar. Do you know what that table is? They use the same table on the duck, not Duck Commander ducks, unlimited podcast, oh, really, yeah, it’s the exact same one.
Jeremy Kellett 02:12
I didn’t know you were a frequent listener. Limited podcast, it just
Megan Cummings 02:18
That’s what Corey said. Oh, okay. He’s like, you listen to that? I was like, No, it was like, a scary story about hunting or something like that came up on one of my feeds. Okay, yeah, so I recognized it right away. So we’re
Jeremy Kellett 02:31
speaking of feeds. We’re gonna do, you’re gonna do a little deal, get with Annabelle, and you’re gonna put something out on Facebook so we can because, you know, last week you talked about you really liked reading the responses of our listeners and stuff. So what tell me about what you’re gonna
Megan Cummings 02:48
do? I was thinking about maybe a weekly question. I’m sure we can tie it into whatever we’re talking about in the future, and that way, we can have a little segment on each show where it’s just like the comment segment. So we’ve got some. You can hear my name. I think it’s really exciting to hear my name on a podcast. Yeah, personally, so, but it also helps people. You know, if you’re not very active on social media, you know, you can kind of see what everybody else is thinking. So
Jeremy Kellett 03:15
Next week’s episode is about fuel. Yes, we’ve got me and Corey. Is going to sit down and talk about, you know, fuel issues, fuel cars, fuel discounts, fuel fraud. I mean, we put together a good little episode that our own operators and actually truck drivers all around the country need to know about some of this that’s going on with fuel so what we’ll do, let’s do this, and Annabelle can add to it on our social media, on the Facebook page, but we’ll just say what is your favorite truck stop, and why? Give us a little bit of information about why this is your favorite truck stop. Some of you probably don’t even like truck stops, but you got to stop and get fuel. So let us know where you like to do that and why, and Annabelle may add a question or two to that to get some more feedback. So check out our Facebook page. We don’t know when the day that’s going to go out, so you’re just going to watch every day,
Megan Cummings 04:12
all the time. I know you guys are never, ever on Facebook or TikTok or anything. Me, personally, I just, I don’t even have a smartphone.
Jeremy Kellett 04:19
So some of the stuff here real quick before we get to the episode. Speaking of fuel, we have some new fuel discounts from pilot flying. J, not much of a change, but a little bit better at location. So you really need to make sure you are spot checking the fuel app, discount app where you are fueling, because they’ve gotten a little more aggressive at some of the popular stops that we’re at all the time. So check your fuel, maybe a better discount than anybody. So be sure and check those. Also, We have a new hotel we’re using for orientation and for owner operators. Some of you have already been there. It’s the Windham down the street. It’s not just a couple miles down the road. I got it. The shuttle service was really good. They got a great buffet breakfast, not just a continental breakfast, but, I mean a full blown, really buffet breakfast for our owner operator. So if you want to stay in town, you know, if the owner operators want to spend the night here, you just call the Windham and they’ll fix you up over there with a discounted rate. Beautiful. Yeah, great breakfast to boot in a nice restaurant over there. Yeah, really, Benny, honest. Oh my gosh, yes, I’ve been over there. Super nice. Yeah, that’s really nice we went through the room. She took us, I mean, ran off through the room. Super nice. Been redone. I mean, there, it’s a nice place right next to you, right next to the baseball park, Dickie Stevens and Simmons. Yeah, baseball So, yeah, good little spot. So we’re anxious to try it, and they’ve been really good to us. Oh, if the Yes, give our owner operators an idea on these. If the stickers
Megan Cummings 05:49
okay? So we mailed out the stickers on 31st of December. So most of you guys have already gotten it in the mail, we’d be getting a few phone calls about, well, haven’t received mine yet, or maybe they just moved. They have to get their mail forwarded. Give us a call if you haven’t received it by February 1. Until then, we’ve just been letting people know to wait on them, because sometimes it takes a little bit longer, especially with all the after holiday mail traffic, make sure you have those stickers on there by February 28 so have your stickers on your truck. A lot of I mean, around here right now you couldn’t put them on anyways, because of the weather. So clean, dry them warm before you put them on. Make sure you don’t put them on top of any other stickers. And then as soon as you get them, I mean, as long as it’s after the first of the year, which we are, but for next year, for any future reference, after the first of the year before February 28 Okay, so that stuff should be coming in the mail, but I’d wait to give us a call if you haven’t received it. Yeah, so until February 1. Okay, that’ll work in time.
Jeremy Kellett 06:53
All right, we got new episodes coming up. Just mention about the fuel coming up here next week. We’ve got ATBS. Some of you have requested the tax service people again. We’ve had them on. They’re going to come up. I think they’re going to be in February. We talked to them. They’re always willing to come talk to us about taxes. Give you some good information. I’m sure we’ll get a lot of back on. I hadn’t talked to Louis, but I need to get in touch with him and get him back on. I’ve got some financial guy that I want to talk to that wants to come do it. The dot officer, he’s coming pretty soon. So we’ve got some good episodes lined up for you and creating new content all the time. So appreciate all you guys listening. Let’s get to this new episode. Thanks. So here’s kind of the stuff, you know I want to talk about today. First of all, you know, this company, Oakley, is big on communication. We’re big on safety, we’re big on customer service. I mean, those are the things that have gotten us to where we are today, and we’re always striving to figure out how to continue that and make it even better, because communication is and customer service and safety is an ongoing process. It’s not like you can knock it out one week and check that one off. We’re done with safety. You know, it’s a constant battle. So JP, sitting in with me from the safety department, Scottie Chris CO from operations, and we’re going to talk a little bit of detail of what’s been happening at Oakley, what were the purpose of some of this stuff. You know, we’ve had that, we’ve had countless meetings with owner operators. So we’re bringing in a lot of guys, and we’re having a sit down, face to face conversation with them. And we because we know how beneficial that is for one. It works, but it’s not, you know, I think everybody, when we’re gonna have we’re calling in all these drivers to sit down and talk with them, everybody gets a little standoffish. Oh, my God. I don’t want to have sat down with anybody, but it is. It’s so beneficial to both parties. And I want to talk a little bit about what we’re doing in these meetings, and what brought this stuff about? And I think to do that, you know, having JP from safety has gone through a bunch of the meetings, and Scottie set a bunch of them too, with the drivers and to you owner operators out there. I mean, I mean, this is really for you, because we want to, I mean, the ultimate goal is to be a better company, right? And it’s all on the same page. So the long way we know how to do that is get you in here and tell us what page we’re on and make sure you’re on that page. And so we’ve been doing that over the past. What couple months? JP, probably started. I
Jeremy Paul 09:33
would say, Yeah, two to three months. Sure. Two, maybe three, three months or so, yeah.
Jeremy Kellett 09:37
So let’s, I guess, first talk about what brought these meetings on, what made us decide to start doing these meetings? Yeah,
Jeremy Paul 09:46
That’s a good question. So when what started all this and these driver meetings that we’re doing in person, was our CSA getting out of whack. You know, we’ve talked about this in a previous podcast, but, you know. We have thresholds on CSA to abide by. You have seven threshold seven basics in CSA out there, and three of those we had got over the threshold on those three were unsafe, unsafe driving hazmat and vehicle maintenance. So how you get over the threshold is receiving violations on a roadside inspection. So unsafe, for example, that’s guys getting speed and violations falling into clothes, not wearing seat pelt, cell phone usage. For hazmat, it could be having the wrong placards, not having placards, plaque flying off and not replacing it. And then for vehicle maintenance, it could be typically, your normal ones are tires, brakes and light violations. So we had accumulated enough of those in each of those three categories to put us over or not. I wouldn’t say over in every category, but we were getting really close to getting over in those three categories. And when that happens, it you kind of get in this ditch you can’t get out of, because now you’re gonna the owner operators are gonna start getting pulled into skills more, and cause
Jeremy Kellett 11:06
They’re getting red lights on the prepass because DLTs were in the I don’t know you’d say alert status, but they’re aware of over the threshold or close to it exactly. So
Jeremy Paul 11:17
now they’re more prone to pull you in. And now if you’re getting pulled in more you’re getting more inspections, and the likelihood of finding more on more inspections is pretty high, so it’s a tough battle to get yourself out of it. So what, that’s what brought us on, is, what do we do to fix this? And this is what we’re trying out so far. And I think
Jeremy Kellett 11:34
what we saw was, with CSA and roadside inspections, we have a tendency to react, you know, we started trying to figure out, okay, instead of reacting on a bad inspection, or, I shouldn’t say bad inspections, inspection with violations, road side inspections, instead of reacting to that, and how do we react to that? We’ve moved to the proactive way, why maybe, is this individual getting written up on these things? Or how do we prevent this from happening? Sure, any way possible. Can we get on the front side of this, you know, so they don’t get all these violations? What do we find out? I mean, what took us that took us to the
Jeremy Paul 12:22
alerts, right? Yeah. So when, when you actually look at these alerts and break them down, you know, let’s tell somebody what alert, what a week? Yeah, it’s a good point. So camera alerts, this camera keeps up with, with things that the driver behavior, in a sense, you know, it’s going to look at. And the logs do two, nine days, you know, as far as ECM data. But it’s going to look for things like speeding and measuring falling distance. It measures when you come to a complete stop at stop signs. Same thing for red lights. You know, kind of go to a red one. It looks at a lot of the heartbreaking events, you know, several things and well, you know, we’ve been on this camera system for about four years now, I guess it’s been and so we’ve had time to finally, you know, look at the information and kind of see, you know what it entails. And it makes sense when I say this, that if you see someone, for example, with a very high number of speeding triggers, well, if they continue down that path, I mean, it’s going to get eventually, for speed, for example. So obviously, if you’re speeding more often, then you will probably get stopped for speeding. So that’s why, which
Jeremy Kellett 13:25
leads to inspections, right? Exactly?
Scotty Crisco 13:28
Yeah, let me not to cut in here, but I guess it’s the old adage of you know, well, let me start off by saying a lot of I’ve sat in, I would say over 30 of these so far, and the majority of them are with the owner operators whose current CSA score is actually zero. Yep, we’re not, you know, but we’re bringing you in based on your camera alerts. And it’s kind of like JP said, you know. It’s like, you know, it’s kind of like your dad told you growing up, you play with fire enough times, eventually you’re going to get burnt. So, you know, the way is being proactive? You know, these drivers are such an investment to us, and they’re so important to what we do here. I mean, I couldn’t put food on my family’s table or shoes on my girls feet without the driver. So I feel like what we’re doing here is beneficial from the standpoint of letting them know. And, you know, there’s something special about a face to face, man to man talk. We can send out emails or make phone calls. You know, there’s just something impersonal about that. But I think it’s important to sit down and talk, you know, face to face. And you know, because we’re all on the same team, and that’s
Jeremy Kellett 14:37
something I want our owner operators to know, that this is not just bringing you in because of camera alerts. What else is discussed in these meetings? Scotty, oh, well,
Scotty Crisco 14:49
once you know we go through and you know kind of JP or Dustin, whoever, whatever safety personnel is sitting in the meeting with this, he kind of they kind of lay out you. You know, it’s almost like a scoreboard type deal. So what we’re doing is, with each dispatch board, we’re identifying the high trigger alert drivers and bringing in and bringing them in first. And you know, what’s been really eye opening is when, when you tell an owner operator, well, you know, you rank second on Peyton Clark’s board, and you rank 19th in the fleet on speeding alerts. And then, you know, a couple of them, like, What do you mean? 19th out of all 900 plus drivers, I’m ranked 19th, yeah? Like, and that’s not a good thing. This is not, yeah, you’re in college football, you know? So, and we kind of identify them, you know, so that that is kind of eye opening to a lot of them. And then, you know, there’s a little bit of, you know, like you mentioned earlier, transparency is huge within this company, and openness and honesty. I mean, you can look at the way our office is designed. There’s no secrets in this building between dispatchers and whatever, and we couldn’t be successful with what we do. If we weren’t, you’d set up the way we were. There’s a lot of yelling and hollering, you know. So, you know, we feel like the transparency should be mirrored with the driver coming in and sitting down and talking. So once we kind of, the driver kind of understands, okay, this is not a slap you on the wrist, or a got you moment. You know, meeting this is like, generally, for the betterment of you and your career and
Jeremy Kellett 16:29
and that’s, yeah, that’s part of what I was getting at. We talk about customer service. You talk about trailer issues, how often you keep the trailer clean. You talk about paperwork, sending in paperwork. I mean, all these other things are discussed. I just didn’t want them to think we’re just bringing them in and beating them in the head over safety. But so we’re using that. I guess that’s the starting point where we’re using this meeting as an opportunity to talk to all of our owner operators, and hopefully, eventually we’ll get them all through here and talk to them, but we’re, you know, talking to them about all these things that help make our company be successful. Then be successful. And all only back to the alert because, you know, I guess that is the initial thing, and us trying to be proactive on, on decreasing, or, you know, the CSA violations overall. And you mentioned Scotty, we had a bunch of guys who have zero CSA score, but they’re high on alerts. What does that tell you? JP, I mean, how do you connect that? So it tells me, and
Jeremy Paul 17:35
what, what I’ve been relaying to them is, look, you’re doing a great job, you know, I think, on your maintenance and everything, because you, you’ve been here for, say, five years, you got zero CSA scores. I know you got to keep up your equipment, or else you’d have something by now. But I said, you know, I might tell the driver, Look, man, you’re, you know, you got a bunch of speeding triggers here, and if you don’t slow down, it’s going to lead to something happening. You know, whether, you know, getting involved in an accident, some kind of incident, or the most likely thing happening, like I mentioned while ago, is you’re speeding, and no dot cop sitting there that you didn’t see, and bam, now you got clocked for speeding, and now you’ve got 12 CSA points when you would have had a clean record. So, and that’s what we, we’ve kind of been seeing there is, you know, a driver that has a high number of alerts, yeah, may have a zero CSA score, those high number alerts are likely going to be trending to eventually getting CSA points, and usually in the unsafe category.
Jeremy Kellett 18:29
What are some of the top alerts? What some of the alerts you look at said, Okay, we need to talk to him about this.
Jeremy Paul 18:35
The two biggest ones that we look at are going to be speeding and falling distance. You know, because those are two very important ones, obviously, ones, obviously, you know, if you’re speeding, you are setting yourself up to potentially get put over speeding. You’re setting yourself up for, you know, something to happen, you know. And as far as accident related, and if you’re following too closely, you know, you’re setting yourself up for, you know, potential rear end chance and rear end accident. You definitely want to prevent that. So those are two major ones that we look at. Another, you know, we also look at the heartbreaking triggers pretty closely. We actually get video films on hard, breaking events. And a lot of those are, can be a guy just shifting his load in his trailer, which is perfectly fine. They’ve got to do that. But we’ll look at those video films and try to find, is there a potential accident we didn’t know about ? We need to try to get out there and correct an action on so those are the three main ones
Jeremy Kellett 19:26
we probably need to if you can briefly describe how they get an alert. Yeah,
Jeremy Paul 19:33
so we can do that. So I’ll start with speeding . The speeding alert is triggered by a driver going six plus miles an hour over the speed limit. So if you were on a strict diet it does it every 30 seconds. So how this works is, when a driver passes a speed limit sign, it’s going to grab that sign and it’s going to say, Okay, let’s say the speed limit sign is 55 well, they have 10 seconds. Is to get down to within five miles an hour of that speed limit on you know, so say 660 be the threshold. So if they get to 61 plus on that stretch of road, it’s going to start dinging them every 30 seconds. It’s what it’s going to start doing. And so if you’re on a 10 mile stretch, you’re going to get dinged every 30 seconds. If you continue at that speed. Every ding is an alert. Every ding is an alert. Yep. So every 30 if you’re like I said, if you’re going five plus over on a 100 mile stretch, it’s gonna be ding you every 30 seconds, and keeping that as an alert. And I said, over time, that can tally up. And they don’t know that, do they? They potentially can, you know, the upper operators, we used
Jeremy Kellett 20:39
to have the camera where it would Yes, audibly talk to them, yes, but we turned that off,
Jeremy Paul 20:45
yeah. So we decided to not do that fleet wide. Back when we got on this camera system, we decided to give it the owner operators choice, you know, try and keep the owner operator feeling for them. Now we have had a lot of reception today. We’ve had a lot of owner operators want that turned on. After these conversations, after these meetings, also show how these cameras work in orientation. I actually get, usually the majority of them want an orientation. Okay, so we’re getting more and more on our operator’s call and want that, which is good, you know, it definitely helps them. Because that could be, they could be Lane changing, you know, and just miss a sign. That easy, you know, look to their left, the signs on the right, bam. They didn’t really see the sign, so it’s good to have that reminder, because it doesn’t now, I think more on the operators, and hopefully this will encourage them to get this feature turned on. I think a lot of them think it’s just going to chirp at them all the time, you know, which can be a nuisance, but it’s really not the way it works. So it’s not going to, you know, I mentioned a while ago that it’s triggering every 30 seconds on a speeding event, but it’s not going to say anything to you every 30 seconds. It’s actually just going to alert you the initial time. It’s going to say, hey, please slow down. But if you continue, you know to speed you up, which hopefully you don’t, but if you do, it’s not going to continue to keep saying it over and over again. It has to reset to a new speed zone. Okay, do it again. So that’s how the speeding works, and the following distance is set. Basically what the camera does is it pulls the ECM speed, and then it picks up the vehicle in front of the driver, and then it comes up with the following distance per second. So if they get within a second, it’s going to start dinging them. Anything outside of that is considered more of a safe zone, per se.
Jeremy Kellett 22:26
So the parameters are pretty fair. Oh yeah, they’re absolutely fair. And they’re pretty, I mean, normal, yeah, I guess you would say, yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Paul 22:33
They’re, you know, we, and it was, is tough for us, you know, setting the parameters because you gotta, you know, you want to make sure you’re doing the right thing as far as safety, and trying to come up with that, that can be difficult, but I think they’re definitely more than fair. What about
Scotty Crisco 22:49
like, say, you know, I was driving home last night and there was a wreck out here on 30 and I was, you know, in stop and go traffic just kind of almost bumper to bumper. Is it sitting? There’s off? No,
Jeremy Paul 23:01
That’s actually a really good question. So there’s two things I’ll say on that. One is, you have to be over 30 miles an hour for it to kick in, okay? And even if you get over 30 miles an hour, if you think about it, at 30 miles an hour, you can travel a lot closer, because as far your falling distance at, say, 35 miles an hour is a lot closer compared to if you were doing 60 or 70, because it didn’t take as long to slow down, right? So it’s a lot. You won’t, they don’t, won’t have any issue with that at all.
Jeremy Kellett 23:32
I don’t get too deep into the alert zone, you know, we’ll lose some people here getting off too deep in it. But I think it’s good that they should know. You know how an alert works, and if you’re getting a bunch of them, it’s not a good idea right? It’s not a good sign. Which is why, you know, we initially, hey, this guy has this many alerts, and we got with all the dispatchers, and they all got their list of who needs to be brought in first? You know, per dispatcher, these are the guys that have the most alerts in the company. We need to get them in here regardless of their CSA score. We’re trying to be proactive. We need to get them in here and talk to them and communicate with them and let them know their alerts and what’s going on with them. And it’s a matter of time before those bad habits cause problems, which is what we’re doing. Like I said earlier, we’re also taking the opportunity to talk to them, because dispatch is in there. You know, whether it’s operations and their dispatchers normally in there, right?
Jeremy Paul 24:35
Yes, yeah. Usually I like to have a recruiter, safety recruiter, dispatcher and dispatch manager like Scotty. Like to have a whole crew in there. Yeah.
Jeremy Kellett 24:42
So you come in as an owner operator, you come in and call into a meeting, and you’ve got about four people staring at you, and you feel like, wait a minute, you know? Why? What am I doing here? Don’t feel like that. We’re not here to tear you down. No, we’re here to help. You and help us, because we have realized there’s a possible liability and that, and that’s something I know, people listening may not understand all these independent contractors are running under our authority, Oakley trucking authority and our liability insurance. Yeah, it’s important to know we’re responsible for you, and how you drive reflects us. So that is, that’s part of it, but I really like the part of having a recruiter in there and having operations and dispatch in there, because then we can touch on some of this other stuff that we don’t get a chance to that has been pretty refreshing, hadn’t it, Scottie, to talk to these guys about customers, about trailers, about home time. That’s what I
Scotty Crisco 25:45
was going to say. What’s good about having somebody in there from each department, if you will, it, you know, because all of us are looking at the situation through a slightly different lens. So a dispatcher views the CSA issue, you know, from one standpoint, you know, and JP and safety, and then obviously the recruiter, we all kind of are attacking the issue from different corners in the room. But one thing that I always try to bring up to all the drivers that they may not think about, but from my point of view, the chair that I sit in, which I tend to be, you know, kind of more from a sales standpoint, because I’m trying to book freight and stay out ahead of the trucks. And I’m not going to sit here and list a name by name of customers that look at this stuff, but I will say, you just use your imagination, your major chemical companies, your major petroleum refineries, your major food manufacturers and whatnot, like any and especially companies I’ve found that are publicly traded and are under their microscope. They look at our CSA score when they’re going out to try to find a carrier to move their goods from point A to point B and keep them running. They are looking at your CSA score. And like more and more, we are getting asked, you know, questions about how we, you know, where we stand. And, you know, I think it’s important for the drivers to hear that because, you know, I mean, that’s miles, that’s money, you know, so, yeah, I think it’s just important to mention that, you know, the CSA, it affects, you know, not just your weekly settlement if you’re an owner operator. But you know, it affects what loads you could be or might be hauling a month or two or a year or two from now. Well, it’s an opportunity for the owner operator to talk about his miles, his money problems. He doesn’t have dispatch, his problems he has with the trailer. Y’all discovering some of that too, in there, in these meetings we are, you know, and like, I’ve sat in a couple of them where, you know, you got it, you look at it like, oh, man, we need to do our game and do a little bit better, you know. And we’re asking a lot of times, you know, we’re not ever gonna tell a driver to, quote, unquote hammer down, but, you know, a driver can pick up the phone and we’re in trouble on a load. He feels the angst on the other end of that line, you know. So we, like, sometimes we it’s you. We have to take a strong look in the mirror at ourselves, you know, are we asking, we can’t ask these guys to hurry, but are we asking them to hurry? And then we’re gonna, you know, and then we’re coming in and talking to them about their speeding alert. So, you know, like some of that, you know, we can clear the air on some of that, and it’s good to talk to the drivers, one on one, face to face. Have you had some of that? JP,
Jeremy Paul 28:21
We have had a little bit of that. You know, it’s been, you know, Sky hit the nail on the head. Whether there’s a couple times where we’ve spoken to the driver and, like, well, you know, just last week, you know, dispatch told me how to get the load there. And, you know, we have to explain. Well, look, we’re just telling you to, you know, try and keep the door shut as much as you can. We’re not saying push the pedal down to the metal. We’re just saying that we should take minimal breaks. You know, it’s important to get it there, but we still, you know, when we say that same breath, we weren’t done in a safe manner. That’s exactly right. So little difference there. But we found out so many things in these meetings, and they’ve been great. You learn a lot about the owner operator. I can’t remember his name. He’s one of the first meetings I set in when we started doing this about two or three months ago. Three months ago. But he learned that his grandson is playing college football, and got some pretty big opportunities coming up. So you learn a lot of cool stuff in these meetings that you normally wouldn’t
Jeremy Kellett 29:11
get to talk about. I said, in one, I need to sit in some more. But I said in one, and we were talking about this guy, and super, super nice guy, you know? And he said, I need to work on that. It was paperwork, you know, it was, you know, he was struggling, labeling his paperwork, sending it in right correctly, so we got it right. And it was, it’ll affect everything, you know, if we don’t get this stuff right. And he, you know? And he said, Yeah, I need to work on that. And by the time the meeting was over, there were several things he said, Yeah, I need to work on that. I really do understand what you mean, but I felt like, you know what, we should have written this down and given it to him. This is what you need to work on. Because I know he walked out of there and probably forgot all those he needs to work on, because, I mean, you just do. You know, and that’s why I told Webb, I said we need to have something written down and give to them about, here’s what we discussed, and here’s what Oakley needs to work on. Here’s what you need to work on, and let’s see if we can improve it, kind of a recap, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, that’s how you make progress. Now you’re going back. JP, I guess, and we’re, well, not to get to that, I want to talk to some about some guys you’ve revised with because we’ve been doing this for a while, but I still want Scottie to talk about some of the stuff that we’re taking the opportunity to talk to him about in here, that it’s not associated with safety. Well,
Scotty Crisco 30:39
we before, you know, we always want to make sure earlier. When you said we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page. Well, a lot of times we need to make sure we’re on the same page from the driver’s expectation standpoint, you know. And you know, I think it’s important that we convey to them that we’re doing all this because we are all on the same team, and, you know, they’re, they’re a major cog in the wheel that makes this machine run. So where was I going at that? I
Jeremy Kellett 31:08
had one guy. I was reading one of the summaries they did with it, and it had on their trailer, you know, any trailer problems, issues. And he had been here a few months and had not yet washed the trailer, not one time. Oh, wow, on the outside, yeah. And to me, I look at that, and I go, Are you kidding me? He hasn’t washed the outside of the trailer since he’s been here. So I’m trying to put myself in his shoes, right? Is that something he needs to be told to do? We tell them not. I mean, you need it, it needs to be washed. You get it washed every week or two. Yeah,
Jeremy Paul 31:44
it could have been. It came from another company, yeah, around here and didn’t want it. That’s exactly right. Got
Scotty Crisco 31:49
in trouble for washing, yeah, whenever I was dispatching trucks. And we have that for I think the one of the most important sequences that happens inside this office is that initial handoff from orientation, recruiting to dispatch, and then dispatch sits down and has their first meeting with the driver, you know, I’m saying. And I remember I used to tell all my new hires that, you know, I certainly do not mind spending money on getting your trailer washed and looking good. And you know, kind of my rule of thumb was, if you feel like your truck needs to be washed, and you want your truck, you know, it’s time to get your truck washed. Please go ahead and wash our trailer, you know. So, yeah, what I was saying earlier, what I was saying earlier with expectations, is, in some of the meetings, there’s been some things brought to light where I think some drivers maybe have been keeping some stuff bottled in on, you know, maybe what he expected when he came over here. And it could be little things like home time or, you know, the length of the runs he’s doing, you know. And like, sometimes we don’t do that great a job of explaining, like, say, a percentage load, you know. We sat down with one guy that really didn’t even understand that there were certain loads he was doing one week. He was worried that his settlement was going to be so bad, and he kept it inside. And he was doing short holes all week, but he didn’t know he was getting paid a percentage off, you know, just little things like that, you know. And then I the driver’s like, I got myself, and I couldn’t believe it, it was exactly what it needed to be. But you know that he was somebody who dropped the ball and let the driver know that he was getting paid and whatnot, just meeting expectations, making sure everybody’s holding up their end of the deal.
Jeremy Kellett 33:21
Yeah, that’s ultimately what you know, what they’re about. I think it starts out with these alerts, which is something that when you get close to that threshold, and you get over the threshold and some categories, it kind of puts you in a, I wouldn’t say a panic situation, but boy, it sure does shed a lot more light on we know we’re not this kind of company that has violations. We know we’ve got the best owner operators in business. We got the best equipment in the business. How is this happening? Yeah,
Jeremy Paul 33:51
you’re right. I mean, you feel like you got these pretty trailers, these pretty trucks, the professional looking owner operators, but these D O T officers are just like a shaggy, raggedy old truck, you know, they’re pulling them in there based on that score. So I hate to be kind of a group with that. Yeah,
Jeremy Kellett 34:06
yeah. Because, I mean, it comes and goes in waves. We’ll, you know, six months from now, this, you know, our CSA scores are going to be fantastic, but where they’ve always been, it’s just, we’ve seen it in the past. It comes and goes in spurts like that. But what’s some of the let’s go to the follow ups. You know, we’ve, you’ve had some hard conversations with some owner operators that were shocked. They were number two in the company of alerts on something, you know, and that we tell them. I mean, what do we tell them there? You gonna have to change your habits or else,
Jeremy Paul 34:40
yeah. So we got a lot of information here, you know, actually, as far as camera alerts go, we’ve been talking to people about these for a long time. It’s just been over the phone, you know, and we’ve kind of critiqued to finally get to this. So some of the conversations you’re having in there, it depends on whose health we’ve talked to him in the past, but we’re you. Many are talking to him about getting the alerts down. And you’ve seen some one, I’d say completely 180s you know, there’s some of mine right now. That was just way up there. You know, it was like number one, the fleet had a heart to heart, sit down conversation. And it was a look. You look, you know, we talked to you in the past about this with multiple conversations, but we never did it in person. And we got in person, and Lord And behold, the next month, we just told him, Look, this is gonna get corrected. And the next month he did. He had, like, no alerts, awesome. And then, I want to say something with that too. That’s a driver that’s working. So he went from, because the camera actually shows you how many minutes were analyzed as far as that truck being turned on, and it has a register, ECM data, so the truck has to be actively working for this all to take effect. So it’s not like the guy wasn’t working and didn’t have any wheelchairs. So yeah, he went from, I mean, way up there, to completely, just almost getting rid of all of them, you know, had some here and there, which is going to happen. Going to happen, but so it can be done. Yeah? It can absolutely be done. Yeah. So you’re having that conversation with a gentleman that may be really high, like, look, you’ve got to fix this. You know, there’s no if ands or buts about it. It’s got to get fixed. So you’re having some, some more stern conversations on those that are serious, but then you got some more just your shit, just shedding light on like, hey, you know, you got little bit alerts here. You’re not, you know, number one or nothing, but we need to get that down. So it’s different conversations. But at the end of the day, all we’re doing is being constructed with each and every one of us, you know, our ourselves here in the office, and then trying to help the driver too, to minimize, you know, damage.
Jeremy Kellett 36:38
They were having a US talk with Barnett and safety, and he was telling me, Ben, Ben Hu min ski, which is part of our safety department now, and the former owner operator Oakley trucking, was with us. I don’t know what, six months now, maybe, yep, something like that. So doing a great job, and he’s part of this. But he was telling me, actually, Dustin told him that Ben had called one of the guys, the owner operators, to tell him how good he was doing. You know that he had made a turn around. It was one of the examples, and he was going to tell him how good he was doing. And that arm said, Oh, I know. I know exactly how good I’m doing, because he had looked at some app y’all told him he could log in and he could see his progress. Yeah. What is that about? I’m
Jeremy Paul 37:18
I am currently working on that right now. Netra dine has an app called driver i. That’s the app that they use. And I wish we would have set this up from the get go when we started with them, but we didn’t. So anyway, we’re working on getting it set up. But yeah, basically what we can do is download this app called driver eye. They can go into this app, and they’re able to see their alerts, you know, pretty much however they want to filter it, you know, obviously they can’t look at it while they’re going down the road, but they can stop at any point in the day and see if they picked up any triggers on that little stretch they were on. They can look at it, you know, daily, weekly, however they want to filter it and see it. So I’m working with nature down now to get everyone to log in, set up, so that everyone can get in on that. Because, you know, it’s obvious. It’s one thing for us to sit the driver down and let them know each month, or however, that’s how often we look at it, you know, if we’re looking at this. We look at it more often the monthly as far as talking to them and coaching them on that, we did that monthly to get enough data to go off of. But, you know, it gives them the ability to look at this in real time and be able to correct these actions and help themselves better, you know. And we’ve had a couple guys, even, you know, come into the office where we sat down and talked to him like, Yeah. He just talked to so and so the other day. You know, he always sounds like I’m doing better than he is. But so you’re starting to get a little bit of competition here. The guys comparing each other, yeah. And I think hopefully getting them on this app will kind of do that and maybe promote, you know, more safe driving habits across the fleet. So that’s definitely coming for everybody. Yeah,
Jeremy Kellett 38:43
Iron sharpens. Iron, right, yeah, right. Good, yeah, good, good. I think we covered everything we need to
Jeremy Paul 38:49
good. I think. So I was just going to go back to just one little quick final note I wanted to mention, because you said something to me that can be thought about. These aren’t operators under our liability, you know. And I want them to also think about the big picture, you know, what it can do to not only themselves, but the US as a whole. And I’m not going to dive off really deep into this, but I want you to think about something here, you know. And let’s take speeding, you speeding a lot, but you know, if you were to be speeding tomorrow and getting involved in an accident, it’s your fault. They can, you know, pin that on yourself and Oakley trucking, because you shouldn’t have been in that safe spot here to have that accident. And I don’t think a lot of times we think about that, you know, we just, we’re just trucking along. It’s a nice, pretty day. We’re not really looking at our speedometer, you know, and next thing we know, somebody is spinning down in front of us. And, you know, that’s what it can literally lead to. So that’s like, the huge, big picture of what these bad habits can do to us, and we just want to be sure to be mindful of those and correct them. That’s what,
Jeremy Kellett 39:47
yeah, good point I mean. And I like the part you say about the big picture, because people need to think about that. If you had a company, a trucking company, and you had 900 owner operators and all nine. 900 of those owner operators are running under your insurance. Yeah, you might want to know a little bit about those 900 that they’re driving pretty safe, because it could happen anytime. And you know, that’s what Oakley is doing, you know, is for paying that liability insurance bill and hoping we got safe drivers, which we do. If you know, we CO we talked about this episode on whether to do it or not. And, you know, because of some of the stuff we want to talk about, but you know, we just go back to, we just go back to being transparent to our owner operators. We’re all in this thing together. We want to be as successful as possible. And I can’t tell you, I mean, these meetings have been one of the best things we’ve ever done, the most cost effective things we’ve done, with retention, with safety, with communication, with dispatch, with equipment. And that’s something you need to think about if you’re an owner operator out there and you’re thinking, Oh Lord, I hope I don’t get called into the office, because that means I’ve got high alert that we’re going to try to go through everybody. It’s just going to take time. And don’t wait for your name to be called or you want to come sit down and visit with us. Let’s do it. I mean, call us in here and let’s sit down and talk. And because you as an owner operator, have got needs too, and we got to do our job to meet your needs, and we just got to understand it’s your truck pulling our trailer. Always say that, you know, and get to make a living for all of us off of that. So we just got a communication we’ve known about for years. It is the best part of doing that, and that’s why we’re having these meetings. And they are going very well, a lot better than people think in the beginning. They’re going really well. Yeah, I think it’s important to note that, just real quick, that we, you know, we work in an industry where you’re typically not getting patted on the back very often, you know. And that goes for, obviously, out there on the road, and that goes for inside this office, you know, it’s not, you’re not going to come to work every day, either get behind that wheel or get behind that desk and that computer, and somebody tell you how good you’re doing all day long. Most of the time, you’re only going to hear about when there’s a mistake made. So you know that when you were telling that story earlier about Ben calling that driver to tell him he’s, you know, I think it’s important for us to let everybody know. I mean, we’re 99% of the time we are hitting the nail on the head on all different facets of the business. So let’s, you know, let’s focus on that. And you know, all the way to get better is to focus on your weaknesses, but don’t forget about all the things you’re doing, right? Yep, very good point. Scottie, appreciate it all right. Thanks for joining me, guys. I appreciate y’all doing this today. Good episodes coming up in the future. I appreciate everybody listening to us this week, and we got some more coming. Talk to you next week. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode with Oakley podcast, trucking, business and family. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate or review the show in the podcast platform of your choice and share it with a friend. We love hearing from our audience. So if you’ve got a question, comment or just want to say hello, head over to our website, the Oakley podcast.com and click the leave a comment button, we’ll get you a response soon, and may even share some of the best ones here on the show. We’ll be back with a fresh episode very soon. Thanks for listening.