A Trucking Executive on Driver Shortages, Driverless Trucks, and the Regulation Drivers Hate Most

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] I don't even know what the question is other than to say like, yeah, I've been on, I've been in docks late at night. Right. And that's rough and tumble work, and it's rough and tumble people.

Camden Civello [00:00:08] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:00:08] There. But to imagine that you would have to go talk to your boss through glass is Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:00:14] It's,

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] It's actually really jarring to me. Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:00:16] It's, I mean, there's so many, so many parts of kind of the truck driver lifestyle and how these individuals I think are, are treated in the industry. That's, that's a shame. This is the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:33] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. This week's episode is with a guy that you've probably never even thought you would want to meet, which is the executive of a trucking company. And we had a fascinating conversation sitting around talking about how do things move all over the country? Why does it matter how truckers are being treated? What are the big infrastructure problems that are going on all over the country? I was so excited to sit down with Camden Civello, and I think you will enjoy this conversation. Before we head to that conversation, I did wanna let you know that if you are in college and involved in Farm Bureau, there is going to be a very large collegiate Farm Bureau conference up at South Dakota State University, and it will be held on October 11th through 13th. And this is one of my stops on my fall tour, which is coming right up. So I'm pretty excited about it. They invited me, this is their first time they've ever held a collegiate conference, so they're, they're pulling out all the stops and trying to make it really popular among universities around the Midwest. So if you are in College Farm Bureau, or if you have a student that you'd like to get involved in, farm Bureau in the future, collegiate Farm Bureau has been time and time and time again, a great place for people to learn skills, get lots of networking opportunities, and, and they've invited me to come talk. So I'm, I'm excited about doing that. So hopefully we'll see you there between October 11th and 13th. If you want to find out more, I'll put some in the show notes.

Vance Crowe [00:02:06] So, without further ado, we're gonna head on over to the interview with Camden Civello, the executive from the trucking company here in St. Louis Ill, or Missouri called LTI, Camden Civello, welcome to the podcast. Thank

Camden Civello [00:02:21] You.

Vance Crowe [00:02:22] So the first time we met was in a restaurant in St. Louis, Missouri, and we were sitting in this little booth with our wives, and you told me that you were in trucking, and I was surprised by that because you do not look like a trucker.

Camden Civello [00:02:38] Sure, yeah, no, I've gotten that before.

Vance Crowe [00:02:41] And so, so the, the reason I had you in here is because trucking is everywhere, and yet I know nothing at all about it. So I thought that I would invite you in, but maybe to start off,

Camden Civello [00:02:52] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:02:53] If you're not a long haul truck driver yourself, what is it that you do?

Camden Civello [00:02:57] So, I'm the executive vice president of a trucking company here in St. Louis. It's called LTI Trucking Services. My responsibilities pertain to a couple different departments in the company. One of those is our maintenance department. I've also worked quite a bit with our safety and insurance group driver recruiting, and our, we have a couple business analysts as well. So that's kind of everything that comes across my desk.

Vance Crowe [00:03:23] So, shockingly, when we started, when we arranged this podcast and I put it out on Twitter and Reddit to see like, Hey, does anybody have any good questions about this? I got flooded with questions Sure. A lot. And one of the very first ones that, that kept repeating, which I'd be really interested just starting off with right away, is automation and trucking. Like, is it, are we, are we just about ready to see truckers go off the road and, and driverless trucks everywhere?

Camden Civello [00:03:50] You know, I, I don't think it's gonna be as quick as everyone thinks. I, I think it's, I think it's coming. I mean, e eventually, I don't know what way it's gonna, you know, manifest specifically. Where

Vance Crowe [00:04:03] Is it right now?

Camden Civello [00:04:05] Well, probably the same level to where, like, cars are vehicles. So, you know, a lot of the technology that's in your car with cameras and sensors, that's, that's in trucks as well. And that's kind of, I guess like the foundation of the precursor that everything would be built off of. You know, we, you know, I, I stay close with a few of the manufacturers like Freightliner and Volvo, and they're all actively working on it. And some companies have been test driving them, not trucking companies, but manufacturers have been doing test test runs with trucks. So, I mean, it is, it's around the corner. I don't think it's, you know, a year away or, or even three or four years away. I think it's gonna be longer than that for a couple reasons. But I mean, it's going in that direction, I think.

Vance Crowe [00:04:51] What do you think is, what keeps it from being right now?

Camden Civello [00:04:55] I, you know, I I think two things. The first is gonna be just the general public. You know, people don't necessarily feel safe around trucks just to begin with. I mean, passing them on the highway can be, you know, kind of, you know, stressful or, you know, a high stress situation trying to get in front of them. But, you know, I think people get uneasy if all of a sudden this, you know, truck is barreling down the highway, you know, it, you know, 65 miles an hour, you know, with a ton of weight behind it, and a ton of power, and there's no one behind the wheel. So, you know, does that make people feel safe? You know, I think it should personally, IIII think it's, you know, it'd be a step up for, you know, just general safety conditions and stuff like it, taking the human element out of it, out of the driver's seat. But still in general, I think people get a little hesitant. So I think there's gonna be like some big hangup with the public adopting, you know, the fact that, oh yeah, there's gonna be no one behind that, that big rig barreling down the highway, and I'm okay with that. I'm okay being in my car next, next to them trusting the technology. So I think that's one big hurdle. And, and interestingly, I think the other hurdle is where the risk and like the, the insurance and liability is gonna, is gonna land. I think that's, that actually doesn't get talked about a whole lot. And I think that's gonna be really interesting to see kind of how that shakes out. 'cause

Vance Crowe [00:06:22] Meaning that, like if somebody gets into an accident, who's responsible? Is it the coder? Is it the video cam manufacturer?

Camden Civello [00:06:28] Exactly. Exactly. And, and right now, you know, these, these equipment manufacturers like Volvo or the people that develop the, the engines like Detroit Diesel and all these other companies, they, they've been removed from, from that liability. You know, for the most part it falls on the truck and carrier. The, the liability is, is we're the ones who shoulder that. And if Volvo of a sudden you have an autonomous truck and it gets in an accident, and, you know, people are gonna start saying, well, how, how come, you know, this is written specific, the code's written a specific certain way, it's supposed to act in a certain way. Did that not happen? And why? So once you find the break, well, who's liable, you know, for that. And I think that it's something that, like all the equipment manufacturers are, are building autonomous technology because they don't want to be left in the dust. They're, they're doing it to kinda keep up with one another. No one wants us to get away from 'em, but I actually don't think they're overly enthusiastic of pushing it too hard because they, they're, they're probably very concerned about, you know, having just a tremendous amount of liability exposure all of a sudden that they didn't have a year ago or two years ago.

Vance Crowe [00:07:33] It's interesting, I wouldn't have thought before you said this, but how similar that is to agriculture. Yeah. So in ag certainly you could make the comparison that they have GPS guided tractors, but I think maybe the better comparison is just drones in general, or, or any kind of autonomous vehicle where there's no person there. In addition to the liability question, you also then have, it literally changes the nature of the business because now who is the farmer? If, if they're not the person in the, in the truck and in the trucking world, if, if you're not, if it's not a truck driver, it's a, it's an autonomous vehicle, then what is the role of a trucking company? And actually, maybe that's a good place to head in the conversation is what is the role of a trucking company? What do you guys do?

Camden Civello [00:08:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, I mean, that's a good question. So essentially, you know, all all, all these companies are making goods and products, and they eventually need to get them out to the, to the consumer. So it's the trucking company's job to be able to have that portion of the, you know, value chain or the process. You know, we take that on. So, so that no one needs to be concerned about, okay, well I built, you know, this, this product in Dallas, and you know, I have consumers in St. Louis, you know, obviously we just, we, we, we take care of that. We, we deploy their goods for them on a, on a large scale. So we don't do one-off things like, you know, FedEx or UPS would. Instead, we're doing full truckload stuff. So we're going to distribution centers, we're going to manufacturing facilities, and we are filling up our trucks with, you know, 40,000 pounds of cargo. It could be food products, it could be electronics, it could be anything. And, you know, we are, we are bringing it to a regional distribution center. And then from there, it, it'll be deployed out on a more kind of specific level. But in general, that handling the, the distance piece is what a trucking company does.

Vance Crowe [00:09:40] So you, you do a lot of moving things from one warehouse to another, and then it gets delivered on a smaller scale from, from that second warehouse?

Camden Civello [00:09:49] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's over the road trucking, which is kind of that manufacturing center to DC to distribution center or DC to dc. So that's what over the road trucking does. And then there's LTL trucking and LTL trucking are typically, they're smaller trucks. They're gonna have the same trailer size, but the truck itself is smaller 'cause there's no sleeper berth in it. Those drivers typically get home every night. And those drivers are the ones doing your kind of like, you know, local deliveries. So if a, you know, shipment of goods goes to a distribution center, then that needs to go out to a number of grocery stores. They will go and, and deliver to a couple different loading docks at a couple different grocery stores. And that's what an LTL carrier does. It stands for less than truckload because the entire trailer, all that cargo might not be devoted to one customer. So there might be a few pallets that need to get dropped off at location A, and then a couple more pallets are gonna be dropped off at location B. So that, that's a part of the business I don't have a whole lot of knowledge in. We've never really done LTL, but the over the road piece is kind of my more ex expertise. But that's kind of the breakdown of how it, of how it works.

Vance Crowe [00:10:59] So your people are long haul truckers then? Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:11:03] Yeah, yeah. They're over the road on, on the road for thousands of miles at a time. Weeks at a time,

Vance Crowe [00:11:09] Weeks at a time.

Camden Civello [00:11:10] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:11:10] How do you find somebody that is willing to leave their, their home and their family to go weeks at a time?

Camden Civello [00:11:18] It, it, it's incredibly hard to find truck drivers right now. So finding someone that's willing to do that is a, is a challenge. Now it's kind of the status quo. So if you're in the industry, it's something you've come to expect. So if you're a truck driver and I ask you to be on the road for two weeks at a time, you're not gonna, you're not gonna see that as odd or unusual. That's, that's normal. You're used to that. Trying to make the case for someone to choose trucking as a career. That's where all of a sudden they're gonna have hesitation to say, you want me on the road for how long? You know, I need to be away from home that long. Where, where am I sleeping? Where am I, where am I showering? Where am I getting my meals from that, that's where it gets more complicated. But if you're in the industry, it's something that, that's normal.

Vance Crowe [00:12:02] And so how are they, you know, where do they sleep? They sleep in their truck. I mean, you see those, yeah, they shower at truck stops, like what's going on in a, in a two week span?

Camden Civello [00:12:11] Sure. So the way, the way a truck is, is, you know, in the front you have your normal controls, like what you'd have in a, you know, in a car, you know, your, your shifter, steering wheel, radio, ac, all that stuff. And then behind the driver's seat and behind the passenger seat is a sleeper berth. So like all of our trucks have double bunks, but typically there's, there's one bunk lower. And then on, you know, like what we have, we have a, almost like a bunk bed style, secondary bunk on top. And it's, it's the size of a twin mattress that's back there. There's a few cabinets. Occasionally there's a space or a compartment for a refrigerator, like a college dorm, fridge, something smaller like that. And that's essentially the driver's living space. So I would say on, you know, in an average truck, it is, you know, maybe six feet by nine feet is, is probably what it is there in the back of the sleeper. So it's, it's closed quarters. I mean, it's, it's pretty confined. But I mean, that's essentially where they're, where they're hanging out and where they're, where they're living when they're not behind the wheel of the truck. So that's inside the truck. They're obviously, there's a network of fuel stops and rest areas that drivers utilize. That's where they take showers, that's, you know, where they shop or get, get food or get essentials on the road there, you know, there are fuel providers that, you know, you fuel up your truck and whenever you fuel up your truck, you know, you get a, a coupon for a free shower. And that's what a lot of drivers do. So when they fuel up, they go in there and these, you know, these facilities have shower areas and

Vance Crowe [00:13:47] Is it like a locker room back there, or what is it? Is it nicer than that? Less nice.

Camden Civello [00:13:51] It varies. It varies. So, you know, some of 'em are nice, clean, pristine facilities and Yeah. But, but it typically, it's like, you know, individual shower stalls and, and you kind of run out and, you know, drivers, it's kind of a tough gig. I mean, sometimes if it's a peak hour of the day, you know, you might need to wait like an hour to get a shower. I mean, there might only be, you know, six showers available. And when you go, you know, put your, put your name in and the front desk literally calls you and says, you know, Hey, you're up. It's, it's time for you to go back there. So it's a, it's a very kinda unique and interesting lifestyle and, you know, regarding food, I mean, they're eating at, you know, truck stops essentially. So there's, there's fast food locations there. Sometimes they're kind of like larger restaurants sit down locations at a, at a rest area, or they're just going to, you know, a grocery store or trying to go somewhere that they can get the truck in and park the truck and the trailer, go inside and get something to eat or get groceries and bring 'em back into their truck.

Vance Crowe [00:14:52] I, it would be so difficult to be driving for two weeks at a time, having only access to like, what's right off the interstate to eat

Camden Civello [00:15:00] Yeah. Healthy

Vance Crowe [00:15:01] At all. Like, they must be having huge caloric meals, and that's gotta be really, really tough. Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:15:08] Yeah. It's, I mean, it's, it's super hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle and, you know, a lot of, a lot of people just, just don't, you know, we, I mean so many truck drivers are, are unhealthy and, and it's, I guess easy to see how that happens. It's the, the infrastructure isn't in place that's kind of conducive or encourages the healthy lifestyle. There's, there's a few people that have been, you know, putting stuff out there online trying to promote healthy lifestyles and trucking and, you know, a few kind of workout enthusiasts that are truck drivers and they

Vance Crowe [00:15:40] Post videos. Oh, of course there are. That's a great idea. Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:15:42] There's kinda like a community out there that's, that's being developed. And I think people have put out statistics, like if you walk around the truck and trailer, I think it's 36 times maybe, or 37 times, it's equivalent to a mile. So to kind of like, you know, gauge if you wanna like exercise a little bit, you can literally take a couple laps around the truck and get a sense of how, how far you went. So yeah, there's some interesting stuff out there.

Vance Crowe [00:16:03] Do you know any of the video, the, the makers of those videos off the top of your head?

Camden Civello [00:16:07] You know, I don't, not off the top of my head unfortunately, but yeah, they're out there. If you're able to YouTube and, and I know, I think like two or three years ago, men's Health actually did a segment on healthy truck drivers. So that was a, a thing that was in the print magazine.

Vance Crowe [00:16:22] And so when somebody comes in that's new, how long does it take them to get adjusted to this lifestyle? Do you have a whole bunch of people that fall off within the first year?

Camden Civello [00:16:31] Yeah, if, if they've, if they've never driven a a truck before, it could be a pretty long learning curve, not just to get the mechanics of the job right, but just to get, you know, familiar and comfortable with the, you know, the living experience. So it's not an area that, that we dabble in a ton because we, you know, we have a fairly small training program. It's not a huge

Vance Crowe [00:16:54] Oh, you train your own drivers? Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:16:56] We do. Yeah. Yeah. We have to because of, because of a, a huge driver shortage. So we take people that don't have experience now they, they have a CDL, so they have, they have the driver's license to be able to do it. And we will put them with a trainer for a couple weeks. Typically it's a six week period. And another driver, essentially a veteran driver who's, you know, that that, that we trust and is qualified to provide some coaching, we'll take this other driver out on the road with them for six weeks. And during that time, they typically, obviously they, they get to know how to do the job and, and what kind of trucking's all about. But it's also the, you know, man, can I do this? You know, can I, can I get comfortable with this lifestyle? And I would say maybe 40% of the people, 30 to 40% of the people we bring into our training program end up withdrawing for that very reason. Just saying,

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] Oh my God,

Camden Civello [00:17:49] This isn't for me. Like, I didn't know what this was, what, what this entailed. And quite frankly, they say, you know, this is, this is too stressful or just too, too different of a, of a, you know, lifestyle.

Vance Crowe [00:18:01] Can you pick out the sort of personality types that, that are successful in, in trucking? You,

Camden Civello [00:18:09] You know, there's like, there's just a tremendous amount of diversity in terms of like our driver population. I mean, they, they're all so, so different, you know, and, and their backgrounds are so different in terms of like keys to success, you know, that's, that's kind of interesting. You know, someone that can be a little bit, you know, of a, of a coer, you know, I I, I don't want them to like, have to endure a, a terrible situation, but people that can kind of roll with it, you know, so to speak and, and, and kind of just like make do and not get hung up on any, you know, one roadblock. Those, those people are gonna be pretty, pretty successful. Now, the, the drivers that have been with us the longest and, and are the most successful in the company, I mean, they, they are all about drive time. So you, you need to be like hungry to work because, as opposed to, to maybe other industries in trucking truck drivers get paid by the mile. So someone who is really ambitious to kinda rack up miles and say, keep me on the road, keep me busy, keep me, keep me, you know, under loads. Those are the people that, that typically are the most serious about the, about their career and are the most successful in the role.

Vance Crowe [00:19:25] And so what does that look like? How many hours a week are they working? Are they, they're going for a month at a time? Like if somebody really is grinding,

Camden Civello [00:19:33] What's

Vance Crowe [00:19:33] The most they can do?

Camden Civello [00:19:36] So it's, it's probably easiest to measure it on miles per week. So our average driver drives between 2020 200 miles a week. That's, that's kind of average work. Someone who is, is really getting at it week after week after week is probably gonna average upwards of 26, 2700 miles. Anything beyond that is gonna be pretty hard to achieve just because of the hours of service regulations. So drivers are regulated in how many hours they can drive in in a day's period, in a week's period. And, you know, that that, but kind of put some restraints on them. 'cause a lot of drivers that I know, if they had it their way, they would just go, go, go, go, go. But for, you know, safety and compliance reasons, they can't.

Vance Crowe [00:20:20] How long have those rules been around?

Camden Civello [00:20:24] I've been in the industry for all I guess 10 years now. And they, I mean, they've been there since I've been around, so, you know, I think they've been there for some time. The the big transition though was drivers logging their hours of working per day on paper logs now transitioning to electronic logs. So that's in the last couple years that's now been mandated. So

Vance Crowe [00:20:47] Yeah, from the Twitter and Reddit comments, it does not appear as the trucking industry likes the EODs they're called. Is that right?

Camden Civello [00:20:53] Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's an electronic onboard recording device or something like that. Yeah. So that's essentially what an what an e-log is an electronic log. And a lot of drivers don't like them because it's incredibly, well, I mean, it's, it's very precise and very specific. So the moment the, the wheels turn on your truck, even if you drive, even if you drove 10 feet, your, the computer in your, in your truck's engine is, is hardwired into your electronic logging device. So the moment you begin moving it, it trips you into the, to drive time. And, and what that, what that means is that that's when your hours of service clock starts for the day. And that, that causes a lot of issues for drivers. And this is why there's so much pushback by drivers and by by companies is because a lot of times drivers and trucking companies get in really tight spots where let's say like, like, here's, here's a great example. And this happens all the time. A driver pulls up to a loading dock to be, to be unloaded. So they, they arrive at a distribution center, they pull up to the loading dock, and it could be three or four hours before they get unloaded. And they might have arrived, let's say like two in the morning. So the driver's thinking, okay, well I have a couple hours before they even touch my truck. They don't need to do anything with me. They're, they're just gonna go open up the trailer doors and start unloading. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to sleep, or I'm gonna start my break. And what they'll do is they'll, they'll log themselves on break, and then if they get unloaded, let's say four hours later, someone's banging on the window of their truck saying, okay, we need you to move your truck.

Camden Civello [00:22:26] Now I need another truck to be able to pull into the stock door. And the driver says, well, I'm, I'm in my brake right now and if I start driving, it's gonna interrupt the brake and it's gonna log me as as drive time. And even if they drive just a hundred feet to another parking spot, the the the electronic log isn't gonna, is, is gonna treat it as as drive time. So it completely throws, throws a major wrench in it, and it, it's gonna make the driver restart a, you know, a 10 hour break. It's going to completely mess up, you know, their, their hours of service and it's gonna have repercussions for what loads now we can put them on. So it's, it's a really unfortunate situation that we don't have a lot of control with and we still kinda struggle every day. So from a

Vance Crowe [00:23:07] Planning standpoint, it seems such an easy fix. Like why, why is it that, that if it's such an obvious problem, they don't just say like, you know, there's a way to put in a

Camden Civello [00:23:15] Well, because I mean, I guess if you're getting, you know, specific about it, you know, the driver was in fact interrupted from their break. So, you know, the, the driver wasn't able to get alone time or rest, you know, they weren't able to get continuous sleep, so technically that driver was interrupted. So the brake should be, have to be reset. They, they just haven't figured out a way to, to kind get around that or justifiably say, no, no, no, you know, let the driver slide. You know, so with,

Vance Crowe [00:23:47] I used to work on a, I used to work on a ship and the we, but in order to be able to work on that ship, you had to go to what they called sea school. And one day of sea school is, you know, learning what to happen if the ship capsizes, you know, how are you gonna get in the rescue boat? Another one is firefighter safety. Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:24:04] So,

Vance Crowe [00:24:04] You know, you're seeing these things where it's like really big important things. And then they spend one full day on sleep. And that one day of class, I, I think every human being should take a class on sleep because it taught me all these things about if you're gonna take a nap, it should only be for 30 minutes unless you can sleep for two hours. Because if not, you fall into REM sleep. And then if you're waken up from that, then then all of a sudden you're groggy. And then if you can't sleep for, if, if you can sleep for two hours, then you better sleep for, if you sleep more than two hours, then you better sleep the whole night. So, I mean, I can totally interesting recognize the value of, of wanting to have those rules in, but I, I can, I mean, like of all the times I've ever asked for questions Yeah. The times that I got like people, like having visceral anger in their questions was all around EOD of, of

Camden Civello [00:24:58] All the

Vance Crowe [00:24:58] Podcasts I've ever done.

Camden Civello [00:24:59] Sure. Yeah. I mean, 'cause you, you know, the thing is with, with paper logs, drivers were, you know, essentially saying that that break never happened, that interruption never happened. I moved my truck, you know, from here to here a hundred feet away, and they would not log like a breaker, an interruption like that because it was in their, it was in their best interest not to, you know, they, they were thinking, well, I wanna, yeah, I want to, I'm paid by the mile. I want to, I wanna get another load under me as soon as possible so I can get moving and get paid. And that's why so much, you know, like animosity is a, is around the eloc system because it's, it's incredibly specific and it, and it's kind of restraining the company and the, and the driver

Vance Crowe [00:25:38] And then with these rules on how many hours a trucker can drive.

Camden Civello [00:25:43] Does

Vance Crowe [00:25:43] That, that has to really be hard on a trucking company if you're finding out like, Hey, we, we, we have trouble hiring people and we can't max out any more hours on these people.

Camden Civello [00:25:53] Yeah, yeah. I mean, a truck can drive 10, 10 to 11 hours a day. A driver can drive 10 to 11 hours a day. There's, you know, there's nuances that make it one or the other, but essentially they, that's how much drive time a driver can have legally in a day's time. Now, our trucks, for instance, are only averaging six and a half to seven hours of drive time a day. So there is, you know, three hours of like kind of capacity, like, you know, under utilization that a truck has. And that's, that's really because of just the nature of, of loads appointment times and then the hours of service. So you kind of have to accept and go into things, you know, anticipating that you're not gonna be 100% efficient because of, you know, regulations or just the nature of, of loads and load planning.

Vance Crowe [00:26:45] So when you think about load planning, what is that like? Because you have a, you, you're basically doing the traveling salesman, we talked about this a couple weeks ago where it's like, you know, you have a bunch of paths, you have to get to all of the cities. You don't want to pass through a city, you're not, you know, delivering something into, so what is the shortest route between these

Camden Civello [00:27:04] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:27:04] That's your world, right? Where you're scheduling drivers and saying, go to Kansas City and then you're gonna drive to Dallas and then somewhere else.

Camden Civello [00:27:11] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's, that's where like the logistics, you know, really, really begins to rear its head. We have essentially, you know, we have a, a number of customers, they have freight that they have committed to us that we've, that we've bid on and we've won and, and it's secured for us to move. We

Vance Crowe [00:27:29] You bid on that. So that's how you get jobs. It's not like, Hey, we've got a relationship with this company and they want us to, like, how does that, how does that happen?

Camden Civello [00:27:38] Al? Almost really. I mean, we have, we have some really strong relationships with customers, which, which we're fortunate on now because of that, we we're considered incumbents on certain lanes. So certain lanes aren't put out to bid. They say, Hey, you know, you guys have done a a great job on this lane, good on time service, your rates are competitive, we're gonna leave this on you. And we have good relationships to make sure that happens as much as possible. But really ever since the recession, it's commonplace now for pretty much all major shippers to go through like an RFID bidding process where they put out their lanes out, out to hundreds and thousands of carriers and you essentially say, Hey, I'd like to, I'd like this lane, I could do X number of loads on this lane a week or, or a day. What

Vance Crowe [00:28:25] Is a lane?

Camden Civello [00:28:26] A lane is like just point A to point B. So St. Louis to Chicago or Chicago to Dallas. That's, that's a lane. Okay. And, you know, I guess I, I guess kinda getting back to your question of, of planning and what you need to kind of think about is you have all these customers that you've entered into agreements with to handle their cargo. And you have drivers, you, so you have a terminal, which ours is here in St. Louis, you have drivers, they're their home location, so where they want to get through home and stuff like that. And, and you, you have kind of this network, so, so to speak, where you need to be able to plan, okay, I need to get this truck from here from point A to point B, and then from B I'm gonna get them unloaded reloaded on load, going to sea after sea. They're gonna be close to home. It'll be about two weeks into their, their trips. I'm gonna let them swing by home for a couple days and then I'm gonna get them back on the road. Then I'm gonna get 'em a load out of their hometown area up to this place. And all that needs to, to match the, the volume commitments that you've given to your customer. It needs to, you know, match the seasonality of the business. So some customers, you know, freight shoots up during some months and dips down on other months. So you need to take that into a factor. And then, this is kinda what we were talking about the other day. Another big part of it is the balance. So you need to accept freight and, and plan loads based off of how many inbound loads and outbound loads you have out of a certain market area.

Camden Civello [00:29:57] So I can't send, I, I, I just can't automatically accept 10 loads going from St. Louis to Denver, unless I know that I have 10 good options coming out of Denver. So that's kinda where the balance factor comes in, comes in.

Vance Crowe [00:30:11] 'cause if you don't, then you're sending a truck empty somewhere else and you're footing the bill for all the fuel and the time.

Camden Civello [00:30:16] Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, in the trucking industry that's called deadhead is is when you have to drive a truck empty to go pick up another load. And it averages about 11% of our total miles are deadhead miles.

Vance Crowe [00:30:31] And so how, how do you solve this problem then? I mean, like of logistics? Sure. How do you, how do you possibly manage all of this? Is it, is it five people in a room pen penciling it out or?

Camden Civello [00:30:42] I, I mean, yeah, we have a, we have a whole team of customer service reps who are the ones taking loads from customers. And then they in turn are feeding that information to load planners. Load planners are looking at what customer commitments have been made in what market areas and making sure that we have the right number of inbound outbound trucks in each area to be able to service all of those loads. And then you have fleet managers, which essentially dispatch the driver to the load, give them the instructions, make sure that they get from point A to point B as planned. There's a lot of software involved that, that kind of helps that. So software that is helping you see all the options and helping you kind of manage your network of trucks. You know, when you have 300 trucks and you're doing, you know, 900 loads a week, you know, it, it's just outside of the human capacity to be able to analyze every option yourself. So the software's doing that, doing that for us, it's load optimization software. It is there, there's profitability softwares out there that we use trying to help us say, well, I'm gonna put more emphasis on these loads because they feed me into this market area which pays more coming out, which works well with this customer that we have, and we get good rates from it. It, it puts all those factors, you know, into consideration. And then our, we also have dispatch software, which makes sure that the load optimization options that we have matches with the, the driver schedules we have and the driver hours that we have and the driver events that we have. You know, drivers need to get home for weddings and doctor's appointments and stuff like that.

Camden Civello [00:32:17] So that all needs to be factored in the planning. It's not just a matter of planning loads, it's planning all those factors and making sure that they can do it all legally as well. And

Vance Crowe [00:32:25] The, the computers, do they go as far as as being like flipping you a flag to say, Hey, this guy hasn't been home in, in a couple of weeks and we wanna make sure he has time with his family? Or is that you

Camden Civello [00:32:38] And I, so, so all the, all the software is set up to be able to create a driver profile. So every one of our drivers has a set of preferences. They have, they have a home time. So we have a home address on system for each one of our drivers. Sometimes our drivers, they, they like taking home time somewhere else. Maybe another family member. So we have that put in the system and we have some drivers who don't have homes. They literally live in the truck. They have no home address. They, they're just saying, just keep me rolling and when I wanna take a break for a couple days, I'll just park the truck and sit in the back and hang out for a couple days. And then

Vance Crowe [00:33:13] Are there a lot of people like that?

Camden Civello [00:33:15] Not, not a ton, but it's, it's out there. I mean, I would say we probably have, I mean, out of 300 drivers, I bet you 10 of 'em. Okay. You know, I, I could probably come up with 10 names of individuals I know just live in their truck. I have some drivers who live in Alaska, believe it or not. And you know, we don't, we don't haul loads up to Alaska. But the arrangement is, is that, you know, this driver works for six months at a time and then they'll park the truck at the terminal, fly home, be home for 2, 3, 4 weeks, and then they'll fly back, get back in their truck and get back to work. It's just, it's different for everyone. So those, you know, regarding those driver profiles, we also have their preferences set up. So this driver really wants to be home on the weekends, you know, can we accommodate that with where they live? The software kind of helps us be able to do that. And we have some drivers that say, Hey, I like being on the road six weeks at a time and then I like being home for one week. We'll plug that into the software too. So we're able to kind of incorporate those preferences.

Vance Crowe [00:34:15] And what allows you to be competitive, to get drivers to come work for you versus some other company?

Camden Civello [00:34:22] Well, it's, you know, it's really hard and, you know, it's something that we haven't, you know, quite frankly we haven't mastered, I don't know if there are many companies out there that have turnover is almost inevitable. I, gosh, I think the last time I checked industry statistics, I think the industry turnover is 92%. So 92% of your fleet is, is having to be rehired every, every year. Every

Vance Crowe [00:34:45] Year. 92% every

Camden Civello [00:34:47] Year. Yeah. Yeah. We'll, we'll probably hire 285 drivers or something like that this year.

Vance Crowe [00:34:52] Your HR department must be enormous. Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:34:54] I mean, we have a full-time driver recruiting department. So we, we are hiring, we have full-time recruiters that are putting ads out there, talking to prospective drivers, lining them up for orientation. We have orientation to onboarding new drivers every single week so that that never stops while we're bringing on orientation classes of, you know, five to six drivers and get 'em in a truck. And that's, that's really just to, just to, to, to make sure that, that your fleet isn't shrinking. You know, that's just keeping up with what you've, with what you've lost. So I think, I mean, with that said, I don't think it's just, you can't just write it off and say, well, turnover's inevitable, so there's nothing you can do from a workforce management standpoint. I think there are things, you know, the, the companies that are the best for the, for the driver, you know, are the ones that can kind of, you know, I guess honor the, the agreement that was made. So if a driver says, Hey, I'd like to be out on the road for 12 days home every, you know, home for two days. If, if, if a company can kind of hold up their end of the agreement on that, then drivers like that. If a recruiter promises drivers, Hey, you know, on average you're going to be driving 2200 miles a week, or you're gonna be paid at a pay rate of 50 cents a mile. Drivers kind of, you know, banking on that money. It's not a consistent paycheck. So the ones who can actually again, kinda hold up their end of the deal and get those driver, get that driver, those miles each week are gonna be the ones that are gonna be better for the driver. And that's gonna lead to their kind of retention.

Camden Civello [00:36:25] And then, and then some creature comforts, you know, so they're, you know, a lot of trucking companies don't let them have pets in the truck. You know, we, we do. So, so we let drivers bring dogs along.

Vance Crowe [00:36:37] Are they your trucks?

Camden Civello [00:36:38] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:38] And then so then you say, if you have a dog, you're welcome to bring

Camden Civello [00:36:41] In

Vance Crowe [00:36:42] The

Camden Civello [00:36:42] Truck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we try to, you know, we try to put some guidelines to it, you know, size of the, of the dog and things like that. But to be quite honest, it still kind of gets away from us, you know, we'll, we'll give someone a thumbs up and say, yeah, you know, you can bring on, bring in your dog, you know, what kind of dog is it? Oh, it's a, you know, how big is it? Oh, it's, and then all of a sudden we see a German shepherd and the dog like a week later. And, you know, I think we, we try to kind of pick our battles. If, if a driver is caring for the equipment, well, keeping their, their inside of the truck relatively neat and tidy, the, the dog's not like chewing up the seats or something like that. You know, we, we will, we will let it slide. Just because we understand that they're, they're making a ton of sacrifice away from, you know, loved ones and friends and family

Vance Crowe [00:37:22] Communities. It would make such a huge difference. So it's a game changer dog. Yeah, yeah.

Camden Civello [00:37:25] No, it's a total game changer. And you know, right now we say dogs and cats, but I mean, I, we had one driver who, he had a parrot with him, literally a talking parrot. So he was driving down the road and he had a parrot up on his shoulder and, you know, I guess it knew a few phrases and, and it would just be like talking to him as he's going down the road and like, you know, that's, that's what it took for that driver, you know, I mean, that's what he liked. That was his, that was part of the deal and, you know, we were able to accommodate it.

Vance Crowe [00:37:51] And you guys are pretty rare for having pets in the truck?

Camden Civello [00:37:54] Surprisingly, yeah. Yeah. So we, we benchmarked ourselves against a few other, a few other trucking companies. And it's not as common just because it, it just creates a hassle, you know, when you have all these pets in the truck there, there's not real good evidence for it being like a safety concern. You know, if anything, it probably makes her more like comfortable, like stress reduced driver, but just from like a cleaning standpoint, because, you know, we like to think that it improves turnover, but still, inevitably we're gonna have some turnover. So just cleaning a truck and getting it ready for the next driver, you know, and a, a driver coming out from orientation saying, Hey, I've, you know, I have allergies, you know, and there's pet dander in this truck, or, you know, you guys guys weren't able to get all the, the dog hair off the, the passenger seat, you know, stuff like that. It, it just makes it to where, I mean, we have a, we have two people who their entire job is just detailing trucks. Oh, really? The the entire, yeah. Every single day they're just cleaning trucks, getting it ready. So, you know, those, those are the things we have to do in exchange for allowing drivers to, to have pets.

Vance Crowe [00:38:55] So you have 300 trucks, are they pretty nice? Are they new? Like what, what is going on? Like how do you choose what truck to put a driver in?

Camden Civello [00:39:04] Yeah, trucks are, so our average fleet age is about three years old. Your

Vance Crowe [00:39:09] Trucks only are three years old. Only

Camden Civello [00:39:11] Three years old. Yeah. And to be honest, that's, that's even a little bit older than what it is at a lot of other trucking companies, like big trucking companies. I mean, smaller mom and pop ones. There's no way that you can make that

Vance Crowe [00:39:21] Work. This business model sounds insane to me. You have 92% turnover and you have to change 300 trucks out every three years. I mean, the capital expense on that alone seems unbearable.

Camden Civello [00:39:35] Well not change out every three years. So like, we're on a five year trade cycle.

Vance Crowe [00:39:39] Okay.

Camden Civello [00:39:39] So at this point in time, our trucks are about three years old.

Vance Crowe [00:39:42] I see.

Camden Civello [00:39:43] But a lot of, a lot of companies do what you were just saying, you know, even that

Vance Crowe [00:39:46] They're swapping equipment

Camden Civello [00:39:47] Out, you know, I mean it's a, it's, it's a financial calculation, I guess. You know, they're, they're looking at the debt payments on the truck and, and they're depreciating it at a certain rate. They're keeping their eye on the resale marketplace for these, for these trucks three years later. And, you know, they just, they, they just kind of plan for it, you know, I mean, they're, they're fuel economy benefits. They're are maintenance benefits to having newer equipment. And if, you know, people are looking at the numbers, they can make the case where financially this is gonna be better as opposed to me holding onto a truck for five or six or seven years. And, you know, again, it all kind of depends to what's happening in the secondary marketplace. So right now, the used truck market is not, is not good. It's flooded with inventory. But you know, what that kind of means is, oh, I might hang on my equipment a little bit longer. I don't wanna trade it right now. Or you're, you're looking for buyers in, in Central America or Mexico that want, that, want these trucks. I mean there, there are all sorts of creative options that trucking companies sometimes need to, to try to figure out in order to be able to have a trade schedule. But going back to your, you know, kind of to your, to your question, I mean, it is an insane model too because the, the equipment is so expensive. So trucks are upwards of $160,000 for just the truck itself nowadays.

Vance Crowe [00:41:09] And that's a semi right?

Camden Civello [00:41:10] Yeah, that's, that's a semi truck Now that's not the trailer, that's just the truck. The trailer itself, we do all refrigerated freight. So we, we have refrigeration units on the, on the trailer trailers are more than $60,000.

Vance Crowe [00:41:25] Oh wow.

Camden Civello [00:41:25] Yeah. So it, they

Vance Crowe [00:41:27] Don't look it

Camden Civello [00:41:27] Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just a, it looks like a box, right? So what's really remarkable is we are, we are, like I said, we're hiring five, six drivers every single week. I, you know, we've done some basic due diligence. We've checked their background records, you know, we feel 'em out in orientation, make sure that, you know, this is someone we feel comfortable with, but really we, you know, we just don't know. And, and, and we're taking a driver that we've, we've known for two or three days and we're handing them the keys to, you know, over $200,000.

Vance Crowe [00:41:59] Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:42:00] Yeah. Of, of equipment. Not to mention the cargo, you know, cargo on average, I mean, could be worth $50,000. It could be, if it's high dollar cargo, it could be $200,000 of, of cargo. And you're just, you're giving the keys to this driver that you've never met and don't really know and who knows, might only be with you for a month or two or three months, and you're just kind of saying, okay, well there you go, here's your first load. So it's, it's very, it's very strange. It's, I mean, I, it's the only industry I've ever worked in really. So I don't know it any differently, but I'm sure that's not the way it works, you know, in other, other, other fields.

Vance Crowe [00:42:37] So you, you know, is full disclosure, both of our wives are physical therapists and, and, and quite good actually. But I would imagine that the seat that a truck driver sits down in all day long has gotta have a big impact on how long they want to be on the road or how long they even can be on the road.

Camden Civello [00:42:58] Yeah, yeah. I mean the, the seats are nice, you know, I mean, they're called like air ride seats and, and they spring up and down to take out any sort of vibration or any sort of bump. It, it keeps the driver level and, you know, they're, they're pretty expensive. I think to swap out a seat is, is pretty much, I think, I think a thousand dollars to, to swap out a driver's seat. So it's expensive and it works. But I mean, still, I don't know if I could, I dunno if I could do it, you know, to, to sit at, at the driver's seat for seven hours a day, maybe, maybe more for weeks at a time. It's, it would, it would be tough.

Vance Crowe [00:43:33] And what do you think, like, do you have a sense for what people do to keep themselves alert and awake or podcasts? I mean, I, I actually know 'cause there are podcasts out there 'cause I looked them up and they're,

Camden Civello [00:43:43] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:43:43] Pretty fun. And, and I was listening to some of the issues that they bring up. But what, what are they doing? I mean,

Camden Civello [00:43:50] A lot of the drivers that, that I know are pretty techie. So they, you know, they're, they're active on social media. They, they do a lot of messaging and, you know, they're, they're doing a lot with their, their smartphones. So that, that seems to be pretty, pretty commonplace. There are still CB radios around, so the radio inside the truck where you can kinda get on there and it'll transmit a signal and other trucks in the area. And honestly, there's no, there's no real purpose for that other than just kinda shooting the breeze, you know, with, with other drivers going down the road. So, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:44:22] I guess 'cause you would have ways in any of those apps that would tell you where police are or how bad traffic is,

Camden Civello [00:44:27] Anything like

Vance Crowe [00:44:27] That. Yeah,

Camden Civello [00:44:28] There's actually, I, I wish I knew

Vance Crowe [00:44:29] It more,

Camden Civello [00:44:29] But there's a whole secret code of, of that drivers use on the radio that, that says certain things, like alerting one another of where cops are, or hey, is this was station open or not? And they just, they, they, they use this code language to communicate with one another. And there's a few sites on there that kind of, it's like a dictionary of all the terms that, that these drivers use.

Vance Crowe [00:44:51] I remember my brother at one point, my older brother, he, he somehow got access to a CB and he was talking on it and, and, and then the guy came back and said, I, I think that guy just called me gay because he was using some coded language and he didn't know.

Camden Civello [00:45:04] Yeah, yeah. You know, so many, I I think people would probably get the impression that truck drivers are like loners, you know, I mean out on the road by themselves. I mean, we allow drivers to take a passenger with them, so if they wanna take a spouse or someone they can, but for the most part, I think people think, oh, you know, these people are out on the road and, you know, country.

Vance Crowe [00:45:23] That's my impression. Yeah. Country

Camden Civello [00:45:24] Songs sing about it and that sort of thing, but they're, they're incredibly social. I mean, obviously not all of 'em, but a lot of the drivers I know, I mean, they'll strike up conversations with strangers, you know, all the time. I mean, that's what they're doing at the fuel stops, at truck stops, at the shipper receiver. I mean, they're just, they're striking up a conversation with everyone and, you know, it's, it's kind of funny, you know, when I get on the phone with a truck driver wants to call to discuss something, I'm, I'm on the phone for 20, 30 minutes. I mean, that, that's how much time I have to budget for a driver call just because I, you know, they, they're so many of 'em are so talkative, you know, and they, they, they want to just see what's going on. They, it's, you know, I wouldn't say it's like a form of entertainment, but it's just, it's just something that so many of 'em do.

Vance Crowe [00:46:10] Well, some professions become more comfortable talking on the phone. Yeah. Like, I know as I've gotten older, I'm way less comfortable talking on the phone. Like, sure, if somebody just calls me up, I don't want to do it. But some professions, like, you know, if you're talking to your spouse that way or your kids, you just get kind of

Camden Civello [00:46:26] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:46:26] Used to that.

Camden Civello [00:46:27] Yeah. You know, and, and so much, so much communication is, is going electronic, you know, for, for drivers too. So I mean, when we are transmitting the load over to a driver, giving them directions saying, Hey, your appointment time has been changed. Or just even sending 'em a message saying, Hey, I need you to swing by the maintenance department to have your truck service. I mean, all that now is electronically, it's all through a, you know, a satellite communication device in the truck. So we're sending messages to them, you know, and there are, there are efficiency reasons for that. But yeah, you're right. It's almost like to kind of compensate for so much of, of, of how so much of the conversation has gone to just these electronic messages. These, they, they thrive when they get on the phone and they're just able to like talk, you know, like, like the way it probably once was, one

Vance Crowe [00:47:14] Of the comments on Reddit that I got about this interview was somebody asking do, does he actually talk to drivers it? And it was an interesting thing 'cause it caught me. I wasn't expecting that to be a question, but they were like, you know, we want to know does he actually treat 'em like humans? And

Camden Civello [00:47:28] It's unbelievable. Yeah, no, I, I talk to drivers all the time, every single day. And drivers have, drivers have direct line to me. A lot of 'em have my cell phone number. That's, that's, that's incredibly rare and it's a total missed opportunity for so many other trucking companies and their management teams in terms of kind of creating the culture for, you know, that's, that's a, you know, a driver culture. And, you know, we have, we have open door policies. I meet every driver that comes through orientation, our, our, the owner of the company. Whoa.

Vance Crowe [00:48:02] That's a lot of dedication. Yeah. To, to, to be doing five, six new people every single week. Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:48:07] I mean week

Vance Crowe [00:48:07] And week out.

Camden Civello [00:48:08] You know, it's, it, it's not as, it's, it's not as probably as big of a deal, you know, as, as it probably sounds, you know, I, I swing into orientation. I thank for, for choosing LTI, I thank 'em for their, their, their service of being a trucker in general. 'cause I mean, it's such thankless work so often and, you know, I, I think that's a shame. So I just like popping in and saying, thanks for being a driver. Thanks for, you know, what you do for, you know, the, the country, the economy, our communities, our neighborhoods. I mean, everything that's on the store shelf touched a truck. And so many people forget that. So, you know, I have an opportunity to say thanks for that and thanks for doing what you do and doing it here at our company. That goes a, that goes a long way. And, and our, our owner and CEO does the same thing. He, he comes in and he shakes hands with every single driver, every single week. And you'd be amazed at how many of 'em are like thrown off by that. They're like, whoa, I've never, I've worked at, you know, I've worked at umpteen companies through the years and I've never met the owner of, of the company before. And I mean, that's, you know, it's a pity so many trucking companies don't even have direct face-to-face access with their fleet managers. So the, the people that they are talking to, communicating with essentially their manager they've never seen before, they've never met before. And if they want to have a face-to-face kind of sit down meeting with them, you need to jump through all these sorts of hoops. You need to go to the corporate office, you essentially go, it's almost like a prison. You know, you, you, you're going and you're talking to your fleet manager behind glass and it's, it, it really, yeah.

Camden Civello [00:49:40] Yeah. No, a lar a lot of large companies do that. I, I suppose

Vance Crowe [00:49:44] Just because it's just such a, a rough and tumble like industry or what,

Camden Civello [00:49:48] Yeah. I suppose it's for safety reasons. You know, a a couple times, you know, drivers have, you know, become irate or made threats or something like that. And this is the way the company's kind of responded to be able to protect against that. You know, luckily we haven't had to do that. If, you know, we, we have a corporate office and the elevator door's open and it's, it's all open air. I mean, you know, you walk right out there, you can walk into my office, you can walk to, you know, your fleet manager. So, I mean, we haven't had to had to do that, but I would imagine that's probably the reason behind a lot of these companies having to do it. But yeah, I mean, drivers talk about it all the time. It's, it's a very kind of cold, impersonal, you know, environment

Vance Crowe [00:50:26] And, and I mean, it sounds colder than many other environments, but it may just be the, the, that, that aspect of culture that I just don't know very much about. I, I don't even know what the question is other than to say like, yeah, I've been on, I've been in docks late at night. Right. And that's rough and tumble work, and it's rough and tumble people Yeah. There, but to imagine that you would have to go talk to your boss through glass is Yeah. It's, it's actually really jarring to me.

Camden Civello [00:50:54] Yeah. It's, I mean, there are so many, so many parts of kind of the truck driver lifestyle and how these individuals I think are, are treated in the industry. That's, that's a shame. You know, I think for one, there's terrible stereotypes out there. Everyone thinks that the truck,

Vance Crowe [00:51:10] Well, the time you see 'em in the news is when they've, they've, you know, solicited a 14-year-old girl at a truck stop or, or the sex trafficking is blame Exactly. On truck drivers. Yes. Yeah.

Camden Civello [00:51:18] Yeah. It's stories of that, or Tracy Morgan, right? Was it Tracy Morgan who got in the, in the really bad accident and the driver was out of hours. So driving illegally, and I mean, gosh, daytime tv, every, every personal injury attorney is saying ads have, you've been in an accident with a big rig. You know, there's just, there's so many things coming from all directions that paint this truck driver as this wild cowboy who is not following the rules is, is on drugs driving like a maniac. And, and it's just, to be honest, it's unfortunate because, I mean, so many of them, you know, are, are the complete opposite. I mean, these are like blue collar, hardworking, making tremendous sacrifices. They just like putting their head down, doing their work. It's, it's all a, you know, like a, a matter of respect, you know, I just, I, I want the job that you sold me on that sort of thing. And, you know, they, I mean the, the conditions again, are, are so tough. I mean, finally, shippers are starting to realize that, you know, in order to kind of do their part in this whole kind of ecosystem, they need to be more accommodating to the driver. So, in other words, our customers, so many times our drivers go to deliver, and they don't, even a bathroom on site that the drivers can utilize. There might be like, you know, a, a like a, like an outhouse or like a portable potty, that type of thing. And that's where the driver's expected to go to the bathroom if you need to use the restroom. Now, a few of them are starting to finally wake up and provide a little, like, you know, a lounge and a restroom.

Camden Civello [00:52:54] But then for so long it's just been conditions like that, you know, rude people occasionally drivers kind of get in it. And I mean, so many drivers, I mean, some drivers, you know, stand up for themselves and dish it back, you know, and they, they don't tolerate rudeness. But I mean, so many of, of the drivers that I've met, they just, I mean, they're, they're, they shrug it off. They have such thick skin. I mean, they're, they, they do not kinda like get their feelings hurt, You know?

Vance Crowe [00:53:21] And what is, what's in, what's a beginning driver making with a guy gets through orientation? What, how much are they pulling down?

Camden Civello [00:53:29] They, they're probably pulling 40 cents a mile. 40, maybe 43, 40 4 cents a mile. And if you extrapolate that over the miles, they're probably making lower 40 thousands.

Vance Crowe [00:53:43] Okay.

Camden Civello [00:53:44] So relatively compared to other industries that you don't need to have special qualifications for or special education for. I mean, you can make a pretty decent, decent wage, easily make $50,000 a year or, or more.

Vance Crowe [00:53:57] And then the more experience, does that add on how much you get paid per mile?

Camden Civello [00:54:02] It, it does, yeah. Yeah. So typically experience matters, but what a lot of trucking companies do, and what we do is tenure with the company really matters. So if you've had 20 years experience but hasn't been with our company, well, you know, that's worth something in the marketplace. And, and, and wages do go up for that, but really there's, there's kind of a floor, like a ceiling rather, that drivers can be hired in a company with. And then from that point on, you gotta stay with us if you want to get these raises to, to be getting the most premier pay.

Vance Crowe [00:54:32] Yeah. Interestingly enough, that's the same way the airline industry works. And I know because I was, a couple weeks ago, I was in, I dunno, Omaha, Nebraska or something, and I was talking to some pilots and they said, yeah, I made the mistake that I kept switching companies

Camden Civello [00:54:45] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:54:45] Instead of staying with one. And if I had stayed with one, I've had all this longevity because I don't get paid for the number of years I've worked. Only for the only, yeah,

Camden Civello [00:54:53] Yeah. You, you really get, like partial credit is, is kind of what it, what it seems like. I mean, the, the, I mean our, our highest paid drivers and the drivers that are pulling, you know, $60,000 a year, I mean, they're the ones that have been with the company for 15, 15, 20 years. I mean, which is remarkable. But yeah, so many drivers end up having to start from square one again. You know, they're, they're starting and lack of a better word, kind at the bottom of the totem pole. And then having to work their way up at a company. Meanwhile, they're getting offers thrown at 'em from every which direction. Recruiters are just, you know, bombarding these drivers with calls. And you, you're kind of in a perpetual state of, oh man, is the grass greener on the other side of the hill? You know, I'm, I'm seeing these sign-on bonuses, I'm seeing these new rates per mile. I gotta give this a shot to see if this is real. And we actually get a lot of, we, we get a lot of rehires. So last time I checked over, over a quarter of the drivers, we hire a year, worked with the company before. So they're, they're rehires and I think it's, it's for that exact reason, they, they were lured away to another better o offer and then it kinda lost its luster, and then they figured it out and came back to, to our company.

Vance Crowe [00:56:03] And so if we were to zoom the camera back a bit and kind of look at the overall picture of trucking and logistics, what, what percentage of the cost of a good, because you were saying everything that's in a store was delivered by a truck. Do you have a sense for how much the shipping adds to the cost of a good, I'm sure it varies, but

Camden Civello [00:56:23] You know what, I, I don't actually, I don't, because from my perspective, we're getting tons of pallets of, you know, a let's say a food product loaded on a truck. I know that, that, that cumulatively cumul cumulatively weighs, you know, 40,000 pounds of cargo and how many pallets it is. But I don't know how many, you know, boxes of pasta that that equates to. So it, it's kind of hard for me to, to, to say exactly what the, what the dollar amount is. I know shippers pack the truck full, you know, I mean, they maximize every cubic inch that they can legally of that trailer in order to reduce the transportation costs. So I, I don't know what percentage of, you know, the price of a gallon of milk is attributed to the transportation of it. But I will say it's, I mean, it's, it's not that far away of like a leap to realize that an increase in driver wage is, is gonna be passed on to the consumer. I mean, you, you can see it all the time. I mean, the, the, whether it's in insurance or maintenance or, you know, because we're in a driver shortage marketplace right now, you know, we're having to pay so much more for drivers. I mean, we have, the margins are so thin in trucking, we have no choice but to go back to our customers and, and ask for rate increases and try to earn those. And it's inevitable they're gonna have to be raising the prices of their goods in order to kind of absorb it.

Camden Civello [00:57:57] I mean, I, I don't think any one person's gonna be able to absorb the, the total increasing cost of, of all the different parts of the, the value chain. I think eventually it, it, it always inevitably goes back to the consumer. So I, I, I don't know the specific numbers, but I just know it's, it's so directly linked and I think people kinda like lose sight of that. So, you know, where that kind of brings it back to like why people should care about trucking or why people should care about e even certain, certain policies. I mean, right now the industry is short. I think a hundred thousand drivers is what the industry short right now. So there's that much, there's that many more trucks sitting empty needing drivers. There are driver jobs posted than there are drivers to fill those jobs. And that's just drivers mechanics, same way. So diesel mechanics and

Vance Crowe [00:58:46] Are they not being filled because they're not getting paid enough? I mean, like the free market economics would say if there's that many jobs out there, you're not paying enough.

Camden Civello [00:58:55] Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I can say is that I've seen, I mean, when I first started, our average pay was 37 cents a mile. That was 9, 9, 10 years ago. Now we're paying drivers 50 cents a mile. So it, it, it's been adjusted in order to kind of compensate for that change. I, I, I would love to pay a driver more if we could, if we could be successful in the rate increases that we would need from customers. I think it's warranted for a job like what they have. But really what it boils down to is that there's just, you know, too few people getting into the industry. No one is, very few people are raising their child to become a truck driver. You know, people are on track to go to college and do this or do that. And very rarely is trucking a part of the conversation. And in addition to that, another reason that there's such a driver shortage is because legally you have to be 21 years old to drive a truck. And almost every insurance policy I've ever seen for a trucking company mandates that your drivers are 23 and older. So really what that means is, you know, a a 23-year-old driver is pretty much the youngest driver that I can really hire.

Vance Crowe [01:00:06] Wow. And then you wouldn't be getting those people that are straight outta school looking for something. Exactly. They're already in another industry.

Camden Civello [01:00:11] So if someone is, you know, like, you know, let's say finishing up high school, they're, I mean, they're gonna be landing in another trade if they're, if they don't wanna go to college and they, or they wanna go to a trade school and get into construction or carpentry or something like that, they, I mean, they're not gonna hold out for their trucking job five years later, you know what I'm saying? They're gonna land in another industry. And that's going back to the autonomous trucks. So if the job got more automated, I'd be curious to see what sort of regulations could change regarding the age restrictions of

Vance Crowe [01:00:47] A driver. But do you think that a lot of the driving in autonomous driving will be sitting at the wheel being the human, if something goes wrong,

Camden Civello [01:00:54] Mo monitoring the, the command center, the controls, you know, making sure that that things are going okay and if things need to be adjusted. I mean, I don't know how a pilot works, but you know, I know so much of flying that plane is automated, you know? Right. I would imagine there'd be somebody monitoring the, the movement of the truck and intervening if necessary, if something really wonky happens. If that happens, I think that that sounds a lot more techy, that sounds more innovative. That could attract younger people. If, if it was proven to be safe, I think the, the general public and regulators would be more comfortable saying, okay, well it's okay to have, you know, a, you know, lower ages if we're just monitoring equipment or if that, that person, that could be a truck driver could be behind a desk monitoring trucks moving in more of a dispatcher roll. Or is imagine like drone flights would or something like that. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:01:49] I mean this is remarkably like agriculture.

Camden Civello [01:01:51] Yeah. I mean, it, it, it could switch to that, in which case, you know, maybe you don't need to have a 23-year-old behind the desk. Maybe you can have someone who has an interest in these things and can be able to monitor things from a computer. So I mean, that's, that's, that's a possibility. But those are reasons why there's such a driver shortage right now. And, and personally I think diesel mechanic shortage is 10 times harder. I mean, to hire someone like that. And you know, what's, what's so interesting is these things matter. 'cause your, your goods are gonna go up more in price. And I mean the, I I just, I can't, you know, be, I can't ignore the fact that like, immigration could be a huge benefit to you fixing something like this. I mean, there's so many jobs available. So many companies need these people and there seemingly aren't enough people that want to have these types of jobs, at least not when they're in their thirties. You know? So if, if someone can kinda get smart about the fact that there's so many people that want to, you know, come and, and earn a good wage, which you can in trucking and are willing to sacrifice, which they're already making a lot of sacrifices, typically, I, you know, I would love to see somebody put together a, an intelligent solution with immigration as opposed to just the extremes of the discussion. There's nothing productive coming out of it. It really could. In an industry like trucking,

Vance Crowe [01:03:09] Do you right now hire people on visas or is it, are they all American citizens?

Camden Civello [01:03:14] You know what, I don't know. I'm, I'm not, I'm not really familiar with what programs we're doing now. I, I haven't worked directly in the recruiting department and what our policies are there. I know we, we have done some things before where we have sponsored people and we've, we've tried to help, help be a part of the process. I know we've done it, not necessarily in immigration, but we've done it on like criminal reform. We've taken people that have been nonviolent, you know, they, they, you know, they've been released from from prison. They're from

Vance Crowe [01:03:50] Nonviolent offenses,

Camden Civello [01:03:51] Nonviolent offenses. And they're part of these second chance programs. And we've worked with judges and with almost like parole officers to get them in a trucking job. And, you know, they're, they're administered more drug, random drug tests than our other driver population per the stipulations of the program to get those people, you know, back into a job like, like that. We've even had a few kind of outside of the box conversations with some local homeless shelters that are here in town. Because if you think about it, trucking could be a perfect solution for someone that is down in their luck and literally homeless. I mean, you get a job in a home all in one now it's, it's,

Vance Crowe [01:04:35] Wow,

Camden Civello [01:04:36] I

Vance Crowe [01:04:36] Wouldn't have expected that. If,

Camden Civello [01:04:37] If you think about it, and, you know, naturally you need to train them. You need to, I mean, we have, we have, you know, truck simulators that we can help kind of train them on. We can put them on a training program, help them point them in the direction of getting their CDL license. But if all those pieces were in place, I mean, that could be a solution there too, as long as, you know, insurers were on board and, you know, all the other parties. I mean,

Vance Crowe [01:05:01] It sounds to me like you guys are like facing a real, real challenge if you're saying, Hey, we're going to the, we're going to the jails and we're going to the homeless shelters in, in looking for people. Yeah. At at what point does it become a problem for our economy?

Camden Civello [01:05:17] I, I personally think it, it's, it's influencing the economy right now. I don't think, I don't think the, I mean the stock market was a little weird this week, but I, I don't think in general the economy is in as sound of a, is a state, state is, is a people thought for the last couple years. And I think it hasn't been drawn a lot of attention. But I, I think this is influencing it. I think our inability to hire drivers to fill the seats, let alone high quality drivers, you know, I mean, that's another issue too. I mean, your, your accident rates go up, your cost and maintenance go up, your costs and fuel go up when you get somebody who's lesser quality. 'cause you're compromising on what you're gonna put up with because, you know, at the end of the day you need someone behind the wheel. So I think those things are impacting things right now. And you know, I mean, where we're at right now in, in the summer of, I mean like 2019, they're, they're below what the freight forecasts were. What

Vance Crowe [01:06:16] Does that mean?

Camden Civello [01:06:17] So we're always working, the truckload carries of America has, you know, a a team of economists that are trying to put a finger on what do you, what, what do forecasts look like for shippers? So how much product are they gonna be? Are they gonna be, you know, producing that is gonna need to be shipped at some point? 'cause that helps us kind of strategically plan like, Hey, what's the rate environment gonna be in a couple years? Should we add capacity and add trucks or should we kinda stay the same size we're at now? And everything was gonna be, you know, I mean, everyone's talking about just a tremendous amount of loads that needed to be shipped and we're not seeing it as much. So I think very subtly and kind of discreetly a lot of shippers are kinda like letting their inventories build. They're not pushing out as much product as we thought they were going to. So it, I mean, and if you think about it, I mean, it's one of the earliest stages of kind of the economic implications of things, you know, because I mean, we're, we're on the earlier end of people buying their goods. So,

Vance Crowe [01:07:20] So if things start slowing down in trucking, it's, you can say exactly. Somebody thinks it's gonna slow down further down the line. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:07:25] It's, it's like a barometer for, for kind of what's to come in the economy. And, and right now things, things are not catastrophic by any means, but it could be so much better. And, and right now you can tell that there's, that there's some pain points. And I think, I think this is a big part of it. Is that

Vance Crowe [01:07:41] Accelerated over the last few months or?

Camden Civello [01:07:45] Yeah, I would say the, the, for the entire 2019 year, it has, you know, 20, 20 18 was decent, 2017 was great, 2016 and 15 were, were okay. The years before that were still lackluster. It was like a residual effect of, of the recession. But yeah, 2019 things seem to be a lot slower than, than they have been. And it's,

Vance Crowe [01:08:07] Would you lay this at the feet of the China trade war

Camden Civello [01:08:10] That's impacting it. I know, I mean, I, I know it is. You can just, you can tell, but

Vance Crowe [01:08:16] I don't, that's interesting because, you know, you hear about it in the news, but if you're just a regular consumer

Camden Civello [01:08:20] Yeah. You

Vance Crowe [01:08:21] Don't see this, I mean, maybe baseball gloves go up 25 cents or, you know. Yeah. It's

Camden Civello [01:08:25] Hard

Vance Crowe [01:08:25] To get like your little knickknacks, but not really. Yeah,

Camden Civello [01:08:29] Yeah, exactly. Now, I mean, we don't do a whole lot of transportation with ports, but we can tell they're all of a sudden, I mean, we've always stayed refrigeration space and we've always typically been in the Midwest East coast. We don't really go a whole lot west of, of Denver. But still, we've seen a lot more trucks appear in our marketplace. So I think what that's sending, what that's saying to us is a lot of people that have been working outta the port of Long Island or, or not Long Island, long Beach, you know, in California and or people that are down south in Texas or Louisiana, I think they're, they're, they're slow. So they're, they're hauling instead of hauling cargo containers, they're moving their trucks up and they're, they're all of a sudden in the dry space or they're in the refrigeration space. So dry is just non refrigeration, refrigeration, temperature controlled cargo. 'cause we're seeing a lot more trucks all of a sudden be flooding, you know, in the same arena as what we operate in. And I would imagine a lot of that is being diverted from, from the coast and the ports because of the situation with tariffs and, and the uncertainty behind it.

Vance Crowe [01:09:35] Wow.

Camden Civello [01:09:35] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:09:36] And so what happens in a market where you start having more and more trucks in your, in your space?

Camden Civello [01:09:42] Well, I mean, it impacts the, the rate environment. I mean, that's, that's for sure. It, it impacts the, the trade cycles on trucks if, if you think about it. Because if there, if there's a, you know, all of a sudden more equipment available geographically in the same area that, that you operate in, you're gonna get less for trucks. You're gonna hang onto your equipment longer, that sort of thing. It just means, you know, a lot more competition, you know, so just being able to do kind of the basics, right. Of, of load planning, try to maintain profitability, compete with drivers and that sort of thing. The, I mean, just kind of the, the back to basics,

Vance Crowe [01:10:22] One of the things that I think we'll hear more in the presidential election coming up is infrastructure.

Camden Civello [01:10:27] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:10:27] Which, you know, regular people, the most of the infrastructure they see is they cross over their bridge on the commute or they, you know, when they're gonna grandma's, but your, your business probably sees it a lot. Yeah. What is the state of infrastructure in the United States interstate and bridges and

Camden Civello [01:10:42] Y you know, I, I don't know directly a, a lot about the infrastructure piece. I know that, you know, the, the taxes that we pay by, you know, for every gallon of fuel that we purchase is going

Vance Crowe [01:10:54] Towards, you pay an added tax on that.

Camden Civello [01:10:55] Yeah. Yeah. So every gallon of diesel we buy has a, has a tax that's changing depending on laws that are passed that go towards infrastructure, same sort of thing. The, we, we get license plates that we can operate in all, you know, all 48, lower 48 states, the price of these plates are, are going up. So all of those are

Vance Crowe [01:11:14] For what does the, what does the license plate cost? That's like the cost of doing business right there. Right. So,

Camden Civello [01:11:18] Yeah. Yeah. It's about $2,200 for a year.

Vance Crowe [01:11:21] You're kidding? Yeah. So for all of your 300 trucks Yeah,

Camden Civello [01:11:23] They all have to have one. Yeah. And we have

Vance Crowe [01:11:25] To every single year.

Camden Civello [01:11:25] Yeah. Every single year when we have to, it, it, it's kind of crazy. We, we literally have to write a check. I mean, it's, it's not a pay overtime thing. Every, every march you have to do your, it's called IRP renewal and you have your list of, of trucks and how many you need to renew license plates for. And you times it by, you know, it gives you a dollar amount. 'cause it's, it's a different dollar amount for every company because every state has a different rate that they apply. So you need to show how many miles you drove in each state in order to kind of get your custom number, oh, I did more Illinois miles than I did Missouri or this or that. And typically it average is about $2,200. So times that by all your, your fleeting,

Vance Crowe [01:12:06] Every single truck. And then divide that around every single consumer that's paying for the Wow. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:12:15] Yeah. So,

Vance Crowe [01:12:16] So, and then that money you, you were talking about goes towards infrastructure.

Camden Civello [01:12:20] Yeah. So, so that goes through towards infrastructure. The only other probably thought that I have an infrastructure is the shortage of like, rest areas now. I mean, there's private rest areas, you know, like what you see at these fuel stops. But then there's also rest areas that are, that are maintained the same way roads are maintained. They're just, you know, just like exits off the highway and there's a tremendous shortage. So even though there's like a, a truck shortage and a driver shortage, we, we have a, a parking shortage that's even worse than, than that. I mean, with the trucks and drivers, we do have on the road, there's not enough place for them to all park.

Vance Crowe [01:12:58] I never thought about

Camden Civello [01:12:58] That.

Vance Crowe [01:12:59] So Yeah,

Camden Civello [01:12:59] Like

Vance Crowe [01:12:59] They could show up at a rest area thinking, Hey, I'm gonna get some sleep in and there's no,

Camden Civello [01:13:03] And it's full. Yeah. So that, that's something that happens along

Vance Crowe [01:13:04] The

Camden Civello [01:13:05] Driver community is people kinda sharing tips and tricks of, Hey, you know, this, this rest stop off of, you know, exit so and so on this highway after this time, you know, you're gonna be able to get a spot, but don't even try if you arrive at this time. You know, so people kinda share that information. But yeah, I remember the first time I saw it. It's, it's a pretty wild, wild thing. I mean, if you happen to be taking a road trip late at night and you know it's 10 or 11 o'clock and you're in a really rural area, you might all of a sudden you, I mean, you drive right by, you don't even realize it. But if you drive by a rest area, just like gaze over at it and look as you're passing on the highway, I mean, every single spot is full with, with a, a driver sleeping in it. All the trucks are lined up there. And not only is it full, it's overflowed. So there are drivers parked on the shoulders of the exit, the on and off ramps for the, for each truck stop. And that's the way it is for every single truck, truck stop that I've seen on the highway for the last couple years. I mean, in the middle of the night it is packed. And there there's not enough of 'em and there's not enough room. And technically it's illegal. I mean, if you're, if you're parking on the, on the shoulder, you're, you're not allowed to do that. And if you know a state patrol officer, you know, they, they kind of tolerate it because they understand this is a big issue. So sometimes, most of the time they look the other way, but occasionally have somebody who has a bad day and they'll just write tickets to every single one of those drivers and put it in their windshield. And, you know, the companies typically pay it because they understand the driver has no choice. But that's a, that's a major infrastructure shortfall.

Vance Crowe [01:14:39] How does a problem like that get solved?

Camden Civello [01:14:46] You know, I think what, what happens is it, this kind of speaks, I guess to the interconnectedness of trucking. You know, I, maybe it's like this at other companies or in other industries, but again, it's just, it's a factor that needs to be figured into the entire environment of, of trucking. So the, the rate that a customer is willing to pay per mile to, for you to move their freight needs to accommodate for the fact that fuel taxes are gonna go up, registration costs are gonna go up, driver workforce is gonna go. I mean, all these things need to need to happen so that we can, so all those things need to happen. So we need a, a rate that can accommodate it without a bunch of trucking companies going outta business and having to shoulder the cost of all this, all these increased costs. So in, in terms of that not being totally pushed to the consumer, then the other things need to happen. Like outside parties can supply or, or create gateways for people to get into trucking, you know, drivers, mechanics, that sort of thing. Those sorts of things can make a big difference. A logical and rational regulation would help, you know, ease up the burden of trucking companies. We can, we can operate more efficiently, therefore we can be more competitive with our rates.

Vance Crowe [01:16:09] What are some rules you would change that are going on right now?

Camden Civello [01:16:13] I, I think the, the, the break interruption one needs to be changed. So if, if a driver is out of hours and,

Vance Crowe [01:16:22] And they can drive 10 to 11 in a day, if they've had a certain number of, if they haven't worked more than 12 consecutive or something like that.

Camden Civello [01:16:29] Yeah. It's a, it's a 14 hours of on-duty rule. So, so the moment you start working the morning, you have 14 hours later before you have to call it for the day. So that could be a combination of getting your truck weighed, fueled driving, all of that is considered on, on, on duty time. And then after that, you have to take a 10 hour break. It's a, it's a mandated 10 hour break. And if you get that break interrupted and any point in time, even if it's for two seconds, you have to restart your break. So if you're seven hours in to your break and all of a sudden someone at the shipper, you know, knocks on your truck window and says, move your truck, and you get the next one in here and you're like, like, you know, man, I'm, I'm six, seven hours into my break, I, I like, I gotta stay here. That, that needs to happen. So there, there should be driver coercion rules to where shippers need to be regulated. They need to have regulation imposed upon them to be, in order to be accommodating to the regulations that truck drivers and trucking companies have. So it should be illegal for a shipper to mandate someone to move their truck. If, if a driver, you know is, is in the middle of their break, there should be designated, you know, parking areas or something like that for, for trucks. There should be same sort of thing, believe it or not, the, the rest stop dilemma. A cop very well could say, you need to move your truck driver's sleeping. It's gonna trip their brake, they're gonna have to start over again. That, that rule needs to be, needs to be changed.

Camden Civello [01:18:01] I don't think you can, you either need to provide a safe place for the driver to park uninterrupted or there should be some sort of rule or regulation saying that you cannot force them to move their truck if they're in the middle of their break. 'cause this is gonna wreak havoc on the rest of the schedule.

Vance Crowe [01:18:15] Do you think that'll happen?

Camden Civello [01:18:17] Yeah, the, the, there's a lot of discussion and driver coercion rules and, and it is, I don't know what the enforcement is gonna look like, but that, that will have to, something will have to happen there. And there seems to be some discussion around it. Just 'cause I think, again, shippers are starting to realize that the pain it actually puts on them as well. So I mean, if trucking companies have to go through all this and the end of the day it's gonna have to mean, you know, higher, a higher rate, higher cost of doing business. So I, you know, I'm, I'm optimistic that something could happen there. Kind of on a different note, I think there needs to be some more, more kind of developed regulation around food safety. So we, we do all refrigerated trucking, so everything is temperature controlled and cargo controlled. But occasionally there are refrigeration malfunctions. So this, they call it a reefer device. If the reefer device malfunctions, it's not blowing cold air and you have pallets of, it could be frozen beef or chicken or something like that. Something that if, if it rises up to a certain temperature could be unsafe, you know? And right now there's very little, there's like the Food Safety Modernization Act and there's some other regulation that's out there, but it, it doesn't go far enough to help us give good line, good guidelines on why product should or shouldn't be refused from a, from a receiver. So what'll happen is we will load a product, you know, let's say it's frozen chicken and the refrigeration unit, let's say malfunctions, right?

Camden Civello [01:19:51] It it, a fan belt tears off or something like that. So the unit is shut down, there's no cold air being pumped through there. Now the trailer's insulated and it can get really cold in the trailer, but after a certain period of time it's gonna rise up to temperature. Right now we have no choice 'cause we, we obviously don't want anyone to get sick or, you know, we deliver the chicken, don't say anything and they don't notice. And then all of a sudden someone gets sick and it, it'd be a terrible situation. So we always take the conservative approach by saying, Hey, just to let you know, during this trip there was a, a, a reefer unit malfunction. The unit was off from this period to this period, it got back up to temp at this period. It, you know, there was only disruption from this certain time period. And, and we just were forthcoming with that information. We have to be, and a lot, a lot of times the response is, okay, well you're gonna have to dispose of the product, this is a cargo claim because they don't wanna take the risk either, just like we don't. So I think there should really be some regulation out there for, you know, that's kinda like science-based saying, you know, hey, this is, these are the temperatures that the, for these durations of time that if this type of product is exposed to this, it's no longer safe for consumers to, to, you know, eat it or consume it right Now. That, that isn't really out there to our knowledge. And what it means is that everything's gotta go perfect. And if not, you just, you're having cargo claims out the nose.

Vance Crowe [01:21:14] Oh, and then that makes all refrigeration more expensive. More expensive.

Camden Civello [01:21:17] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:21:17] One of the things, a few years ago, maybe a year ago, I was in Indianapolis and a woman that was in the livestock industry and I were talking and she said there was a major problem with the, with the amount of hours that a trucker can drive when they're driving livestock and that those rules were gonna change.

Camden Civello [01:21:36] Yeah. So I don't know a a lot about that, but I do know that they actually are regulated differently than like our drivers are. So because we're hauling cargo, you know, you have your normal hours service, that's it. End of discussion. If you're hauling livestock like, like pigs or cows or something like that, it's more of a time is of the essence deal. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:21:55] So

Camden Civello [01:21:56] There are actually certain di times of the day that you can legally move and cannot legally move. And temperatures as well, I believe like outside ambient air temperatures. Because if you have 200, let's say, let's say pigs on a truck and you are driving during rush hour and stop and go traffic, it's a hundred degrees outside. I mean, those animals are gonna start dying right.

Vance Crowe [01:22:18] In

Camden Civello [01:22:18] Transit. And, and you know, that's, it's an unsafe situation for the animal too. So a lot of times they, I believe they drive through the night and they're allow, they're allowed I think more often not to drive straight through. So if it, it, it doesn't matter if it, if their clock ran up at this certain time, they can continue going because you can't just shut down the truck for a night with having a bunch of cattle, you know, on, on, on the truck. So they are regulated differently and I, I, from my understanding, it's a lot more lax in order to make sure that it's safe for the animal.

Vance Crowe [01:22:51] Yeah. I, I remember her talking about how she thought the rules were gonna change and that this would cause a great, I mean, she was really distressed. It was one of those times where really in a public place and you're like, whoa, this, this woman is genuinely upset about, about

Camden Civello [01:23:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:23:05] Trucking rules. And I would've no idea that this is a big deal.

Camden Civello [01:23:08] Interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:23:09] Yeah. So what are the aspects of trucking that, you know, you're, you're at a party and you wanna impress people with your knowledge of the, of the trucking world. What, what is something you bring up that surprises people?

Camden Civello [01:23:20] Well, I guess probably like two things. Like really I'm always kind of pounding this drum and always bringing it up. 'cause I think it's cool to talk about, and we, we already touched on both of 'em, but the first is the just awareness for how trucking is all around us. And, and it's a huge part of the economy. It's a huge way that the world goes around that I don't think a lot of people realize. So, you know, I always like to point out that everything that you see in this room, or everything you see in your pantry, or everything you see at the grocery store at some point in its journey touched a truck. So it really is all around you. And, and it's happening all the time and it's something that you don't think about all of a sudden the food just appears at the grocery store, you know? So I always, I always kinda like reminding people about that. I think that's a really kind of powerful, you know, image to, to drop. And the other one is just the resilience of the driver. You know, I, I, I mentioned too how these, these folks who have thick skin, they're out on the road for weeks at a time and they're just, they're cos I mean, they, they just, they find ways to make it work all the time. And I mean, one, one story I remember that I, that I liked, like, I think the moment I kind of realized this, I was, I was pretty early in the, in the trucking world. I, I, I was downtown St. Louis and a driver came by to visit and him and I went out to lunch and we went to a grocery store down the street that had a big prepared food prepared food section. So we were there and they had like a little area you can eat and that sort of thing. So he, he bought like this cold, it was like cold prepared foods and it was like, it was like a burrito or something, or like a, like a wrap.

Camden Civello [01:24:56] And it was cold and we brought it upstairs and there's like a balcony kind of cafeteria we can eat. And the microwave was out of, out of order. And I was like, oh, do you, do you wanna go get something different? Like, you can't warm that up, you know, he's like, no, it's cool. And he just like, he ate it, like it ate a cold burrito just like,

Vance Crowe [01:25:12] Like

Camden Civello [01:25:12] Didn't hesitate. And then it kind like, kinda like the thought, just kind of the light bulb came on and I was like, man, I was like, this guy must encounter the equivalent of a broken microwave situation, like on a daily basis. You know, like you can't let it just like completely ruin your day or throw your plan off. Like how many times does he does something not go to plan? You know, he goes, goes to the truck stop and every spot's taken. Oh, well, you know, he goes to the shipper and it takes him eight hours to be loaded. Oh, well, you know, you know, these things are just happening all the time. And the drivers, they, they just roll with it, you know.

Vance Crowe [01:25:47] Do you in your life have like a stoic mentality about, you know, just, you know, fat Moore?

Camden Civello [01:25:55] I, I don't have any like specific, you know, philosophy at least not that I could articulate. I'm sure there are, you know, things behind the scenes that are, are, you know, like positions I have. I think having a little bit of struggle is probably a good thing. So it kind of like goes to like the driver thing, you know, to not have everything perfect I think is cool. So I kinda like challenging myself like that. Like if it's really, really cold out one day I'll like drive the car with no heat on and just see if I like, make it in my trip like, you know, it's zero degrees outside and I'll be like, I'm just gonna wear my jacket and like, just like tough it out. Like little things like that are kinda like, fun kind of corny ways of toughen, toughening it up a little bit and just like exercising your ability just to make do and, and kind of deal with it and roll with it. So aside from that, not not a whole lot, but I like kind of doing those little things.

Vance Crowe [01:26:40] And the reason we couldn't do the interview yesterday is 'cause you mountain bike.

Camden Civello [01:26:45] Yeah, yeah. In

Vance Crowe [01:26:45] Missouri.

Camden Civello [01:26:46] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Believe it or not, you know, I live in Missouri and everything's flat, but I like, I'm like a mountain enthusiast. So there aren't a whole lot here, but any like, sort of outdoor mountain sports, like I really, I really like, so I love mountain biking, I love rock climbing. I'm even, I like hiking, trekking, that sort of thing. And I'm really, I'm trying hard, it's really tough and I'm trying hard to get into mountaineering. So it's, it's hard to do in St. Louis, but I've been able to, to do a little bit here and there, like up in Alaska and stuff to try to learn that. And I think that'd be really cool to like, create some trips around. But yeah, that's the type of thing that I like to do.

Vance Crowe [01:27:23] And you have two tiny little girls who are, who are upstairs at the studio Yeah. Hanging out with our wives right now when they are 18 years old.

Camden Civello [01:27:33] What

Vance Crowe [01:27:33] Will trucking be like in the United States?

Camden Civello [01:27:40] Trucking will be, well it's, it's gonna be more advanced than it is today. It's incredibly technologically based and I don't think it gets credit for that. I mean, there's so much data and there's, there's so much, you know, like it behind what's, what's happening on there. I think that'll be, there's so much more room for that to skyrocket. So I think there's gonna be a a, a ton of tech diverted towards trucking. I think that it's gonna gain a lot of attention. I don't know if it's gonna gain a lot of attention from like, techie companies like Tesla or, or Uber. I mean, all of 'em are starting to touch trucking for like the fir even Amazon, you know, they're starting to like graze, you know, up against it a little bit. I think that these

Vance Crowe [01:28:29] Are semis all electric at this point. Is that the future? Do you think?

Camden Civello [01:28:35] It's It's possible. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think it's gonna be like natural gas. I don't, I don't, it might be a diesel hybrid mixture. It, it might be all electric depending on, you know, like the things that Tesla's doing. I think it'll be more automated. I don't know if it it'd

Vance Crowe [01:28:50] But you don't think trucks will run on natural gas?

Camden Civello [01:28:52] I don't think so,

Vance Crowe [01:28:53] Man. I wish I would've known you a few years ago. I made a large bet on that. Lost did. Yeah,

Camden Civello [01:28:57] I know sort of like t Boon Pickens and all those

Vance Crowe [01:28:59] Guys. Yeah. That was follow his lead and I got, I got my ass handed to me.

Camden Civello [01:29:03] Yeah. We, we even, we, we even had Freightliner come by and show us one. I mean, we were, we were like, man, is this something we need to have on our radar? So, I mean, we looked at it, but I think it'll be more automated. I don't know, like I said, what way that's gonna be, I don't think it's gonna mean hundreds of thousands of people out of a job. I think I, I honestly don't, I don't think that about automation. I don't think it's gonna like, displace a ton of workers in the long term.

Vance Crowe [01:29:27] Really. I,

Camden Civello [01:29:27] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:29:28] I, and I mean like, you're not just saying that because you run a company and you have employees.

Camden Civello [01:29:32] No, no, I mean, I honestly, I think, I think, I mean, you know, I I I would imagine that any big discussion about a huge burgeoning tech trend had a lot of fear around it in the past. I think everyone was like, man, what's, what's email gonna do? What's Excel gonna do? Like, you know, maybe not those specific things, but stuff like that. Computers in general and you know, man, it's gonna, I, I, what's gonna happen to my bookkeeping job? What's gonna happen to my, this job? And you know, in hindsight, I mean, look at how many jobs it's created. It's created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. I mean, there weren't SEO positions 20 years ago.

Vance Crowe [01:30:10] Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:30:10] 25 years ago. I mean, digital advertising, I mean, you can make a huge list of new jobs that have been created as a result of a new, of a new kind of society. So did you ever read

Vance Crowe [01:30:23] That PDF that was floating around called Bullshit Jobs?

Camden Civello [01:30:28] No, I don't think I did.

Vance Crowe [01:30:29] Where the guy, so, so it

Camden Civello [01:30:30] Sounds familiar. I'll

Vance Crowe [01:30:30] Look up the author of it Yeah. And

Camden Civello [01:30:32] Throw

Vance Crowe [01:30:32] It in the show notes. But the guy had an interesting point of view that I had not heard before and basically he was saying, you know, you guys are all worried about the robot revolution. Yeah. Taking an automation, taking all your jobs. Well guess what it already did. And the way that it did it is that most office jobs, instead of being 40 hours a week of work, are actually about four hours of work a week. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:30:57] And

Vance Crowe [01:30:57] People are spending the remaining aspect of their time trying to convince their boss, trying to develop enough metrics to prove to their boss that they're busy. And then their boss is coating those and saying to their boss, look at how much I'm managing all these people. And most of the time that they spend is in meetings Sure. Not actually producing things. And Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:31:19] Because

Vance Crowe [01:31:20] Email made it so much easier to communicate, Excel made it so much easier to get your, your finances done. And I I, yeah, it's just strikes me during this conversation, because that's probably true in corporate America from what I've seen. Yeah. Like a huge amount of people. But it's not true in trucking. Like you need those hours right now.

Camden Civello [01:31:38] Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't, but I don't think, I don't think a a bunch of people are gonna be, you know, on the unemployment line, you know, for, for that. I think the nature of their jobs will change. I think it might be more of a monitoring, you know, the engine, the way maybe a train conductor is monitoring things. I think it could change into that. It could change into more of a dispatch behind the desk position. It could, it could just mean platooning, you know, something like that where trucks are just linked up with one another all in a line going down the highway and they enter the platoon, they disengage manual control and the truck goes down the line. I mean, it could

Vance Crowe [01:32:18] Almost more like a train then.

Camden Civello [01:32:19] Yeah, yeah. Like a train going down one lane of the highway.

Vance Crowe [01:32:22] Wow.

Camden Civello [01:32:22] Essentially, you know, it, it couldn't, like I said, manifest itself in any of those ways, but, so I think it will be more automated. I think it'll be more automated because I think it'll be, it'll be safe and I think that it will, it'll, it'll, it'll be in response to a workforce shortage.

Vance Crowe [01:32:41] And what do you think of, so, because right now the automation fear is being used by some of the presidential candidates to say, the reason you should vote for me is because automation is gonna take things like, and they specifically cite trucking every single time and they say transportation is 12% of the economy.

Camden Civello [01:32:59] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:32:59] And if that gets automated, all those people are out of work, therefore vote for me because I will get you universal basic income. Yeah. Meaning I'll, you'll get a thousand dollars check to

Camden Civello [01:33:11] Do what you will to

Vance Crowe [01:33:11] Do what you will with it. Sure. What, what are your thoughts there?

Camden Civello [01:33:16] Well, I, I guess first off, you know, I wouldn't say that this is the case to take these jobs away because it's, it's a lot of people's livelihood, but seemingly too, these are, these are jobs that a lot of people don't want, you know? And I think, I think this is, that's just a fact. I mean like, like I don't think we're arguing with the fact that a lot of people aren't raising their kids to become truck drivers. And there's all these stereotypes and all these reasons behind it. But these are, I mean, we, we can find other jobs and like I said, I think it's gonna, it's, it's gonna change the way they, they work and the style of, and the nature of their job for, for the better. So it, it's gonna change a truck driver from having to, to drive 120,000 miles a year. You know, they, they might be able to, to do something where they're home every night. Now all of a sudden they might be able to do something, they might still be involved in the industry, but in a different way to where it's, it's healthier and happier for their lifestyle. I, I mean, I think optimistically it can go in, in one of those directions. You know, I, I forgot your question about a

Vance Crowe [01:34:27] Universal basic

Camden Civello [01:34:27] Account. So Yeah, universal ba yeah. I

Vance Crowe [01:34:29] Mean, if you don't think the jobs are going away, then

Camden Civello [01:34:31] It's, yeah, it makes it to where like, I'm not all the way there yet. But I think that taking that same concept on like more of a, like a specific, or like micro scale. I mean, if a driver's not behind the wheel, they could be in the back sleeper birth playing a guitar or Skyping with family or learning a new skill or, or a language or playing a game. Or it frees up time for them to do what they wanna do. You know, they, they, they don't need to have their hands tend and to monotonously look staring down a road. So in terms of like quality of life and freeing up your like own human like capacity to do the things you want to do, I think you can achieve those things without, you know, saying, well everyone gets, you know, 8,000 bucks and you know, do what you want with it. I think think you're gonna get like the same sort of effect, but just on the less grandio packaged. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:35:28] That's really interesting that the automation in and of itself give

Camden Civello [01:35:31] You free the

Vance Crowe [01:35:32] Free ah, yeah. Would be the heard that before

Camden Civello [01:35:33] Will be the freeing effect. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:35:35] That's a, that's a very, that's unorthodox. I had not heard that in all of the discussions so far.

Camden Civello [01:35:41] Yeah. I mean that's the way I would, I would think it's gonna shake out, but we'll

Vance Crowe [01:35:44] Say, do you think our interstates will remain the same or our kind of roads or will we make some

Camden Civello [01:35:49] Dramatic

Vance Crowe [01:35:49] Changes? Well, I,

Camden Civello [01:35:50] I'm hoping, I mean, 'cause I, I, I personally care a lot for the environment, so I would love to see less pavement and less concrete. And I think that staying on the topical automation, if that were to happen, you could actually reduce, I mean a lot of roads and a lot of roadways. 'cause you'd be able to reduce the number of trucks out on the road. You could, you could.

Vance Crowe [01:36:14] 'cause you could have 'em running 24 hours a day. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:36:17] I mean if, if, if our drivers are driving on average a certain number of days, I mean, yeah, you can, you know, have 'em drive 24 hours a day the theoretically, you know, so if you could do that, you could, you know, decrease your fleet size by, by a third or something like that. And being able to just, you know, get greater utilization outta each one of your trucks. So if you have fewer trucks on the road, maybe you could have, you know, you don't need an eight lane highway. Maybe you could have a, you know, a six lane highway or something like that, you know, rest stops and things like that. Maybe you won't need. 'cause drivers are, are remotely, they're not in the truck or you know, that they can get their rest while the truck's moving maybe. So maybe you don't need those as much.

Vance Crowe [01:36:58] You know, one of the interesting, as I travel around the country, I go to a lot of ag speeches and Yeah. And get out to conventions. There is a huge cultural divide between people living in the cities and people living in rural America. And a lot of people don't realize, yeah. That one third of all Americans live in towns of 10,000 people or less. Sure. And that's a lot of people. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:37:22] When

Vance Crowe [01:37:22] Automation comes, if, if that happens, it, it will be, it would seem to me to be very isolating though. Those people like you will continue to have like essentially different countries within the United States because the people living in the country and the people living in the city be very, very different. And that's already happening right now. Like, you go to the countryside. Sure. It's different than what it is in the city. Hmm.

Camden Civello [01:37:44] That's interesting. I never heard that. I never thought about that. Yeah. I guess I guess in that, in that sense too, like diversity would, would go down, right? I mean you would be staying with your community and that's, and that's it, you know, so Yeah, that'd be, that'd be interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:38:03] The other interesting part of automation, and you were talking about not wanting as much pavement and concrete is Sure. Grocery delivery and like, I think this is the most, I think, I think this will have a huge impact on the way our cities are built. Because like, if I can order, if I have enough foresight and I'm disciplined enough, I get all of our groceries delivered and then occasionally we'll go to pick up milk or something. You know that I need, if you limit, if you lower the number of people that are going into a grocery store, then you can change. 'cause right now, a grocery store's parking lot is based on its size, is based on how many square feet of grocery do you have Now we multiply that out to make a certain number of parking spaces. And those parking spaces are for Yeah. Maximum capacity. Could, you don't ever want people to come and not be able to get a seat Yeah. Or be able to get a parking spot. But if you have all these people getting their groceries delivered Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:38:56] The

Vance Crowe [01:38:57] Amount of parking lot space that you're gonna need is gonna be cut.

Camden Civello [01:39:00] Sure. In

Vance Crowe [01:39:01] Half. Yeah. In 75%. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:39:03] And

Vance Crowe [01:39:03] Now you're gonna have all of this space to do something with Who knows what they're gonna do with all that parking lot space.

Camden Civello [01:39:10] Yeah. Yeah. I know. Just restore it to, to grassland or, you know, just like, like do nothing to it. That'd be a novel concept. You know, rip it up and let the dirt become something, you know? Yeah. I mean, that'd be, that'd be pretty interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:39:22] It, it, I think it'll make a big difference. I mean, a lot of our culture in suburban America at least is roads with, with buildings that are set far back from the road because of a huge amount of pavement that you have to have to be able to get on there. I mean, it's gonna change the actual landscape of our cities, I think.

Camden Civello [01:39:41] Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting too. There's always been this, there's always been this, this concept in logistics called The Last Mile. So that's always been the, the, I supposedly the hardest part right. Is the last mile problem. So if you, if you have this good, you know, how do you, how do you get it The final mile? And society has fixed that by creating stores, you know, well, we're just gonna have, you know, a dumping ground for all this product and people are gonna go to the store. And, and our last mile then is nothing more than an LTL delivery. Like what we were talking about earlier. You know, I'm gonna go to this grocery store, I'm gonna go to this grocery store, this supermarket store, whatever, and drop off my freight there. Really though, what's interesting is, in, in delivery like grocery delivery, they're re bringing up the last mile as something that they're not putting on the consumer. They're, they're, they're, they're saying, okay, yeah, we'll, we'll handle this. We will have our, have the, the gallon of milk at, at the, the Whole Foods. And then, you know, one of the Instacart people is gonna bring it to you. And that's always been like the, the hardest part of anyone's logistical challenge is how do you make that, make that happen? You know, especially like given all the different factors, right? People live, live differently or live in different areas. There's like peak shopping times and, you know, Thanksgiving week and this and that. How do you logistically make it work? And, and no one's really ever been able to figure it out.

Camden Civello [01:41:15] There've been a bunch of cases, even in like New York City where we have concentrated people, where a lot of companies have always failed trying to, trying to master the, the last mile delivery solution. This is like the first time where it's been like resurfaced and like people are pretty confident about, no, we can make this happen. You know? And, and I, I don't, I, I'd be curious to see how it shakes out and if they're able to do it, if it stays economical and if consumers use it, adopt it, and companies continue to offer it. You know,

Vance Crowe [01:41:43] My prediction is that there will be a, a way to put some sort of refrigerated box outside of your house Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:41:50] That

Vance Crowe [01:41:51] You can also lock.

Camden Civello [01:41:52] Sure.

Vance Crowe [01:41:52] And once you have that problem solved, then you don't even have to limit the delivery to when people are home. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:41:58] Now

Vance Crowe [01:41:59] You can, now you can put it like, just put it right there in their box. Well, I

Camden Civello [01:42:02] Mean, yeah. Some people are like letting them, letting delivery people have access into their home. Yeah. You know, like they, they remotely like unlock the door and just go in and, you know, put the stuff in the fridge. Yeah. Kind of, kind of crazy. My parents had an idea about that. They were like, yeah, you know, with Amazon deliveries and grocery deliveries, like we need to create a set of planters that go out in front of people's homes that the, the under section of the planter is a secure lockbox for your, for your e-commerce package.

Vance Crowe [01:42:31] I totally agree. Your groceries. Absolutely.

Camden Civello [01:42:33] And maybe, yeah, maybe it could be temp controlled so that you can leave your eggs and

Vance Crowe [01:42:35] Stuff. And who better to do it than the guy that runs a refrigerated trucking company. I wanted to ask about Amazon and how much that has impacted trucking. Is it something you can detect or they've always been there and so in the time that you've been in, in trucking?

Camden Civello [01:42:53] Well, me personally, I've, I've probably been a little bit more immune to, to the Amazon effect because my, my experience has always been rooted in the refrigeration cargo piece, which it's, it's less to do with, you know, books and furniture and clothing and accessories and the stuff that Amazon is, is, you know, pumping out to everyone, you know, and, and, and also, you know, we're, we're talking like large scale deliveries, so something's gotta get to the Amazon warehouse. You know, what Amazon's really mastering, I guess is the, you know, I'm gonna send you this, this widget, you know, to your house and I'll have it there in a day, but how does Amazon have a warehouse full of this stuff? That's still probably the over the road trucking piece. So

Vance Crowe [01:43:41] Do you think they'll try and vertically integrate and when come into your market? Well,

Camden Civello [01:43:44] It, it'd be interesting. They're starting to, but there's been a history of companies vertically integrating in the past, and a lot of it used to be commonplace where a lot of trucking companies had private, or a lot of shippers had private fleets. So, you know, you would have a, a, a company that would maintain stores like brick and mortar shopping stores and they'd have their own fleet of trucks to service those stores

Vance Crowe [01:44:08] Like Sears and JC Penney's,

Camden Civello [01:44:10] That thing. Yeah. Tar Target. You see a target truck. Sure. Or, or you would see, you know, home Depot might, might have their own trucks. Coca-Cola might have their own trucks. Walmart, Walmart, that sort of thing. Walmart still has a, a pretty large private fleet, but so many of those private fleets have gone away. They've outsourced it. They, they say, we don't want to be in the trucking business. You

Vance Crowe [01:44:29] Know, come to think of it, that actually was the selling point of natural gas when they were, when they were going around telling everybody that they were gonna do this, it was,

Camden Civello [01:44:35] Oh really?

Vance Crowe [01:44:36] The target fleet is gonna do it. Or the Walmart fleet. I I, if I recall the marketing correctly, that was like,

Camden Civello [01:44:41] Oh, really?

Vance Crowe [01:44:41] A big way to, because, and it's probably because I didn't have any o otherwise a regular person like me would've no idea that a person like you exists in these trucking companies. But anyway, go on.

Camden Civello [01:44:50] Yeah, yeah. So, so many of these companies were like, you know, we don't wanna be in the trucking business. You know, we, we, we make clothing, we make, you know, we sell food products. I don't want to be, I don't want to be dealing with insurance. I don't want to be buying trucks, financing trucks, maintaining trucks, hiring mechanics, networking with or contacting repair shop vendors. I don't wanna be hiring drivers, managing drivers. This is something that, that it just doesn't make sense for us to, to do and I don't want to do it anymore. It's kind of what it boiled down to. And, and not to mention another reason that the private, the private fleet model just wasn't, wasn't as successful is because, you know, we, we talked about the lane balances. I need to have x number of loads going in to get that truck out. Well, I mean, if you have a private fleet, you're, you're delivering all of your product. Well, unless you were just, you, you nailed it with your network of where your stores are and where your product's going and what your trucks gonna be

Vance Crowe [01:45:48] Want, you're going one way not the other.

Camden Civello [01:45:49] You're going, yeah, you gotta get back somehow and you either drive back empty and that's like, that's a hard pill to swallow a lot of cost and a lot of waste. Or you're gonna, you're gonna be trying to find a, another customer's load or or another, another shipper's load. Sure. That that can be brokered to you and you will, you will agree to, to bring that load back to subsidize the cost essentially. And that becomes a, a logistical monster, you know, to be able to, to manage that. And again, it just kind of, they ended up throwing their hands up and saying, I don't want this. And that was actually something that our company did a couple years ago, was we were finding people who want it out of their private fleets, and we rolled them in to a customer dedicated fleet. So we will buy your trucks, we'll buy your trailers, take on all your drivers, and we will guarantee you capacity. So we will maintain these 30 trucks. We'll manage the drivers we'll, we'll rehire them if someone has to quit and you know, they're at your disposal. So you, you give us a fixed fee and we will move freight however and whenever you want with your 30 trucks and we'll just manage it for you.

Vance Crowe [01:47:00] Sounds like a pretty clever Yeah, and it worked. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:47:03] Yeah. No, it did work. It did work. And I mean, there, there's a, a few companies that we did it with and yeah, it ended up, it ended up working.

Vance Crowe [01:47:14] Okay. Last question. Yeah. What is the most interesting cargo that, that you think you can think of that you've moved

Camden Civello [01:47:22] Our, our cargo's kind of, kind of boring, you know, I, I mean like, like I said, we're, we're doing a bunch of food products. I mean, we will, we'll haul beer and stuff like that. A lot of, a lot of frozen foods now I think some people get like, into like pharmaceuticals and stuff like that, that gets pretty interesting when you're talking about cargo theft and, and stuff like that and cargo security. But it's not a, not an area we've really kind of done a whole lot with. I I will say, instead of saying like the, a specific type of product, just know this, we, we haul like ice cream for instance, a lot of ice cream that is set, the set point on the refrigeration unit is minus 20 degrees. And, and it, it maintains it. I mean it's not just like blow off numbers. I mean, we will program that refrigeration unit to pump out minus 20 degree air and there's a return sensor on there and it's minus 20 degrees coming back to us. So those, those rectangular cubes attacked to the trailer are, are pretty amazing actually, in terms of how cold it can get in there. And I remember like just the other day, we had, there's this thing in the industry called o, s and D where it's overage, shortage or damage. So if our driver goes to deliver product and they say, Hey, there were supposed to be 40 pallets on this truck and there's 41, we don't want this extra pallet. Sometimes it's kind of different, but sometimes they say, oh, dispose of it or take it to this location.

Camden Civello [01:48:53] And when that happens, we need to get in the trailer, the trailers drop to our yard and we facilitate doing, you know, something with it. And we had frozen ice cream on there, or it was like gelato or something. And they're like, yeah, dispose of this product, it's set at minus 20 degrees. And I was like, okay, well let's get that product off of there because that's a lot of fuel to be, you know, cooling down that unit. So I was like, let me go in there. And I, I, I just am curious, I want to, because very very rarely do I get to see the inside of a trailer because I mean, they're, they're locked on it. They have these clips on it for cargo security reasons. So you never break the seal of a trailer that's being loaded. So, because this was an OSD, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna look inside and I, I opened up that trailer door minus 20 degrees. And I'm telling you, it was like frostbite. I mean, you'd be amazed at how cold it gets. It was like a winter storm in there, just like hitting you in the face. I mean, there's not like ice crystals or anything like that, but just in terms of like cold air and like it's a chem light insul install or installation on the side and like these aluminum floors, I mean, it gets cold in there. So again, something you wouldn't think of. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:49:58] You're driving down the road at 75 miles an hour and it's a hundred degrees outside and you look over and you're looking at minus 20 degrees. Yeah.

Camden Civello [01:50:05] It could be minus 20 degree ice cream. I mean, you know, I guess they do it just to make it hard as a rock, you know, that, you know, you don't wanna be like, oh, call it 20 degrees and it's frozen. You know, I think, I think for like quality purposes, you just, you wanna like get it so, so cold. So the customer, when they say minus 20, we say, okay. And we set it to minus 20 and fascinating and roll. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:50:24] Well this has been a very enjoyable conversation. I'm so glad you were willing to come over here so early in the morning to, to do this. So thank you so much. If people wanted to get ahold of you, you're on Twitter?

Camden Civello [01:50:36] Yeah, yeah, I'm on Twitter it Camden Civello and it's C-A-M-D-E-N period. C-I-V-E-L-L-O. So yeah, feel free to reach out.

Vance Crowe [01:50:46] Okay. I'll throw it in the show notes. Maybe somebody looking for a new job opportunity or wants to hear about logistics.

Camden Civello [01:50:51] We're always hiring. Alright,

Vance Crowe [01:50:53] Well thank you so much for coming by. Alright,

Camden Civello [01:50:55] Thanks man. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:50:56] Well that's it for this week's interview. I want to thank Camden Civello for stopping by the podcast. So, so early in the morning. The other people I wanted to thank this week are you. My podcast has continued to grow with leaps and bounds. People are obviously sharing this with their friends and posting it out on social media. And I am so deeply grateful. I love doing these interviews and it makes it gratifying and all that much more worthwhile when I see that people are putting it out in the world and sharing it with others. There are two people that I wanted to mention in particular. There's one, an Irishman named Buck Mulligan, and he goes by at that buck guy on Twitter and Buck and I have known each other since I worked at Monsanto. He was one of the three League of Nerds. And they did one of the first interviews that anyone ever did with me when I was working for Monsanto. And to put that in context, at the time, almost no Fortune 500 companies were doing podcast interviews at all. And Buck Miles and James reached out to me and, and asked me if I wanted to do an interview. And that really kicked off a whole part of my career. And I've always been grateful to those guys for, for getting me into the podcasting world. And Buck and I have maintained a friendship and continue to talk. And one of the things that I find really interesting about him is he's always putting out ideas that range everything from stoicism to libertarianism. And he's got all these interesting perspectives on Brexit because he, he's an Irishman, he lives out in Ireland, I believe Ireland maybe in Northern Ireland.

Vance Crowe [01:52:28] I I never can remember quite, but I always enjoy talking with him. And I think that if you're looking for somebody interesting to follow on Twitter that'll give you interesting ideas that you haven't heard before, I highly recommend you follow at that buck guy on Twitter. He's totally worth it. The other person I wanted to mention is a woman that I have met in person and her name is Hannah Morgan Miller. And she goes by at Hannah Mo Miller on Twitter and, and Instagram. I I think that she's one of the most refreshing and exciting people that I ever encounter on social media. She has an incredible knack for creating communities and getting those communities to share ideas with one another, to to get them to talk about what's hard, what's difficult, and then to go on and talk about what, what they're doing well. And I think it's a rare person that is so good at being able to enrich a community, make that community better, and have all the ships rise up. And Hannah and I speak on the phone every once in a while, probably not often enough, but whenever I do, I come away invigorated with a person that says, I'm gonna think about social media strategy differently. I'm gonna think about branding and marketing differently. And if you're looking for a person that is just always driving forward with new strategic social media ideas, definitely follow Hannah Mo Miller on Twitter and reach out to her. If you've got questions about how should I be running my social media, how do I do these in large scale campaigns, you could not possibly do better than her.

Vance Crowe [01:54:01] So anyway, I want to thank both Buck and Hannah and hope they're both doing well. And thank you for listening. I want to just say, if you, if you keep giving me those reviews and comments, they really help me out. And next week I have no idea who I'll be interviewing. I have gotten a lot of great recommendations. There have been, people have really started to open up and say, Hey, I know this really interesting person, I'd like you to meet them too. And now it's just a question of scheduling them all. There's, everything's from people involved in the chess world to art and music and, and out in firefighting, all different sorts of domains. So I'm just gonna keep it coming and if you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to find me on Twitter at Vance Crowe or to visit my website, Vance Crowe dot com. So thank you so much for all of your time and attention and we'll be back next Wednesday with another great interview.