Freight 360

Creating & Using SOPs in Freight Brokerage | Episode 253

• Freight 360

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Leadership and growth take center stage in this episode. It's not just about what you do but how you show it. We underscore the importance of hands-on leadership, effective delegation, and the pivotal role of SOPs in building a resilient organization. Learn how to transition employees to self-reliance, leverage tools for training documentation, and prepare for unexpected events. From handling every task yourself to creating a self-sustaining company, we provide strategies for fostering a knowledgeable and independent team. Tune in for real-life examples and actionable insights on building a robust, self-sustaining organization that thrives, even when key personnel are absent.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back. It's another episode of Freight360 Podcast. If you are brand new, make sure to check out all the other content at our website, freight360.net, as well as on YouTube. You'll find us on all the podcasting platforms. Make sure to share us, leave a review, comment. All that good stuff and you can check out the Freight Broker Basics course by checking out Freight360.netnet. You'll find our educational option right there. Um ben, what's happening? I like the gen logs hat. I dig it. Yeah, you like that. What's going on? How's the new house?

Speaker 2:

it is coming along minus the refrigerator yeah, other than having to figure out what's wrong with the freezer that all of a sudden just stopped working. Yeah, an electrician here yesterday, plumber doing some little things, but all in all they were pleasant surprises what they found Wiring things that needed fixed, little things could have been really really expensive. Thought we needed to rewire like a portion of a whole room, move plumbing, all of which seemed to be able to be done in a day or two. Nice, very close to getting that a day or two. Nice, very close to getting that punch list knocked out Perfect.

Speaker 1:

Hey, on sports. This might be speculation at this point because it's Wednesday morning right now, but I'm hearing talks of Devante Adams being traded in a blockbuster deal to the New York Jets traded in a blockbuster deal to the New York Jets and this has been Dan Orlovsky, the ESPN. He's a former quarterback but he's on ESPN. He says it's basically a done deal, just waiting to get all the details worked out. I'm curious to see if it actually happens. But as a Bills fan, they're getting the band back together with Aaron Rodgers and Devontae Adams because they were on Green Bay together. And basically Orlovsky is saying if the Jets don't go all the way and win the Super Bowl, it'll be one of the biggest wastes of talent ever in NFL history. So we'll see what happens there. Yeah, let's see if Aaron Rodgers makes it to the NFL season.

Speaker 2:

What did he play? Like one play last year. Who?

Speaker 1:

Devontae Adams.

Speaker 2:

No, Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, well, four he got hurt I think it was his ACL on the fourth snap, monday night football against the Bills and the Bills still lost that game. But anyway, what's interesting is the article on ESPN or it's actually the New York Post, which you can judge how reputable the New York Post is. But the New York Post article about this pending trade or potential trade is they're referencing the Netflix receiver series, which is basically they had the quarterback series that highlighted a bunch of quarterbacks in the 22 season receiver series, which is basically the they, you know they had the quarterback series that highlighted a bunch of quarterbacks in the 22 season, and then this receiver series comes out and highlights a bunch of wide receivers and george kittle is a tight end and the 23 season and davante adams is one of the one of the guys that's like they follow around throughout the season. So they're like, yeah, you know, watching the show, you could see x, y, and I'm like they're going to base like what they think is going to be a trade-off of a Netflix series.

Speaker 1:

But hey, who knows, who knows, stranger things have happened. True, I will say, man, netflix has definitely come a long way with a lot of their sports, like documentary series, like full swing, like the golf one's really cool F1 series has been around for a while. The obviously quarterback and receiver, they've got a tennis one. It's pretty sweet man. It gives you like a little bit of an inside, inside scoop on what goes on with a lot of these pro athletes.

Speaker 2:

So Agreed, really enjoy the full swing golf one. I mean, there's not really anything even remotely similar to watch related to golf. You're either watching the actual tournament, yep, or just somebody talk about the tournament. It's pretty cool to see what's kind of going on, yeah well, behind the scenes, behind the scenes in their families and their households.

Speaker 1:

All that Steven added in women's NBA is having record viewership. They went from 440,000 regular viewers in 2023 to 1.4 this year. That's huge. That's like triple. You know what's coming up? It's the Olympics. Yeah, what do we got here? Olympics July 26th, so next Friday. So when our next episode drops, we might have to have our intro song. Be like the Olympic little tune, whatever it is, national anthem, no, it's like the Olympics song.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I'm going to have to actually get my TV connected, probably by then. There you go it's still on my list of things to do.

Speaker 1:

Right that one? Yeah, alright. Good thing that my memory's still there. But yeah, olympics coming up Alright News. What do we got here? Did you read the whole article here? But yeah, olympics coming up All right News. What do we got here? Did you read the whole article here? Steven put this in about. I did. We had it in our newsletter yesterday and Freight Caviar had it in their newsletter today. Freight Waves talked about it. Just want to just want to be honest, guys. I'm pretty sure we were the first newsletter to get this news out there. Jd Vance VP pick for former President Trump, big supporter of truckers. What are the big bullet points takeaways here?

Speaker 2:

JD is VP. The key trucking legislative priorities are $755 million for truck parking and I pulled up the bill and basically it says you know the DOT grants. They're basically going to facilitate these for public safety, for motor cares, commercial vehicle drivers, private providers of commercial vehicle parking, guarding the project. Grants must be used for projects on federal aid highways or a facility with reasonable access to such a highway or a freight facility. So I mean big issue for drivers being able to park. Where can they park when they do need to take their breaks? So I mean welcome news, I guess, guess, I mean I'd be curious to see how it kind of plays out.

Speaker 1:

But seems like positive for the industry did you see ken adamo from dat has? His uh post on x was pretty comical, he said. I'll just read it off here. He said the conflict of being a hardcore maga and also hating jd vance because he's from the state where TQL is headquartered is the most FreightX thing of all time and no one can convince me otherwise. So I guess I get what he's saying. But what is he just? Is it just hating JD Vance because TQL is in Ohio or is it because the JD Vance do something that involves TQL?

Speaker 2:

No, but I think I mean, at least from what I don't really follow much of politics anymore, but from what I was hearing one, jd Vance is the first millennial to ever be on a presidential ticket, so it was clearly younger. But also he was a huge like a criticizer I don't think that's a word I was looking for but like a critic of trump previously, like literally said some really terrible things. So to me it probably seems like there's probably some trump supporters that just still don't like him because of what maybe he said previously. I don't know, he's from ohio. That's the only correlation I got with tql. But yeah, trying to piece together, yeah, I think it's just.

Speaker 1:

I think it's just probably just his sarcasm like that. Yeah, that's the word TQL is based out of. So we'll see. But yeah, we're, yeah, wild week with. You know, national news. It's not really related to freight, so we won't dig into it, but we're not, you know, we're not blind. We know that everything that happened with trump over the weekend and whatnot, but we'll, uh, we'll, leave that to other news platforms to correct. So good stuff, man. Well, what are we talking about today? You and I?

Speaker 1:

so peace, yeah we're we're trying to think about a topic and I love what you said.

Speaker 1:

You're like, what are you working on this week?

Speaker 1:

And we're, you know, we just kind of are talking through um, like some of this stuff that we're working on on my end at pierce is looking at structure and future build out of the support team.

Speaker 1:

So you know whether and it had a really great meeting with some folks yesterday about potential how to how to build out after hours, weekend support, basically like shared services across the broker, the broker teams and agents and whatnot, for anything from carrier sales to RFP teams, account management. You know all kinds of stuff, but a lot of the basic things is like, in an after hours thing, what is the SOP for approving an override on a carrier that doesn't pass our standards, or credit increase or something like that, basically like exception management. And it got me thinking like yeah, like you and you know I've been talking with you about it over the last two weeks like different SOPs, standard operating procedures, basically what a well-functioning freight brokerage. You should be able to remove anybody from the organization at any point, whether it's the president or someone in the trenches, and replace them with somebody else who's trained on the SOPs and it should function properly. That's the big takeaway here.

Speaker 1:

You're going to have turnover in your employees. Your management will likely have turnover, whether it's promotions, people moving on, et cetera. But this is a really, really good episode if you are either in a organization that is growing or you have at some point hope to build out your organization like that. So if you're just you know, let's say you're just a solo agent, hey, maybe you want to grow your agency at some point and have ops folks and you got to have some sort of SLP in place.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and here's why I would add this to that too Like, honestly, kind of no matter where you are in your journey, I think this conversation should be valuable because these are the things you want to be able to think about, even if you're one person. Right, and I did an episode of my mind's just blanking last week we were talking about it'll come back to me in a minute. We were just talking about like how and why. Like, just like I structure my day in certain ways, right, like I structure my day even for my own personal things very similar to the way I think about the SOPs for lots of people. Right, because if you group tasks in ways where the workflow kind of works and you think through that, it prevents a lot of unnecessary work, stress issues. And even just a simple example in freight I was talking with the team this morning is, like you know, making sure you're calling your driver before the appointment, an hour before they're supposed to be there, asking the driver to confirm their equipment, their MC. Right, that the reefer's set, that it's pre-cooled, right, like, because how many times brokers, anybody, broker and freight has been there where the truck showed up, the dispatcher told you it was this type of equipment. It isn't. They sent in the wrong one, there was some mistake made, and then your customer finds out before you. So now they're calling you, they're sending emails. You got to stop what you're doing and now you got to unwind this whole mess that you could have prevented with a better procedure.

Speaker 2:

Just for yourself, right? Just knowing when and how you can get ahead of things. And if you're systematic and you turn them into habits like that's the other thing I was thinking of when we were talking about this is like a lot of the things I do literally were habituated from TQL. Like you just do it a thousand times, it becomes second nature, you don't think about it and that's really why it prevents a lot of the other issues I don't have to deal with because I'm just so used to doing it that way. But when you bring a team together, you need to think through these things, whether it's one and two people, three people, 50 people or a thousand people.

Speaker 2:

Right To your point, things need to work, even if you remove somebody and we have lots of exceptions in our industry, lots of things that come up that aren't expected, and you need to have a policy in place, like the three you mentioned I ran into last weekend like somebody needed credit on a Saturday afternoon, like that person wasn't there in accounting. Who then fills in to do that? Or do you just say, hey, we can only do this on Mondays, right? Because then there's a dozen emails going to every which direction, everybody's chiming in and no one really knows who's responsible. Everybody's doing work and nothing's getting done. Is what happens when you don't have these in place, right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, actually, what you. The weekend thing is interesting and had a discussion about this yesterday. So in the past I'm going to go back like five or six years now. At a previous company I work at, we had, let's see, our after hours and weekend support went like this we had early morning support, starting at like, I think, 630. Someone was on call. Then we had normal office hours like eight to five 6.30,. Someone was on call. Then we had normal office hours like 8 to 5. And then from 5 until, I think, 10 or 11 at night there was somebody remote that was actively working for like carry requests etc.

Speaker 1:

And then weekends there was like very, very strict four-hour block on Saturday and on Sunday and if you sent a request in you had to also call a phone number to let them know you had an after hours or weekend request. And the reason was you don't want whoever's on on call on the weekend. We didn't want them sitting at their computer just waiting for an email that might or might not show up. We would rather have them just be accessible but have the phone on you in case it rings. So we were talking about this yesterday and the way we've been handling it at Pierce lately is it's been a little. We've got to tighten it up, because I think what's been happening is we have been just having people monitor email all day long and it doesn't really allow for those folks to enjoy their weekend or really be productive in other ways than just monitoring their email. So we're talking about things like hey, one option is you call the phone number right, and that lets the person know that the after-hours phone is ringing. Boom, there's a request.

Speaker 1:

The other option that came up and this one I never heard of was having like a one, two, three, basically like an order of who's first, second and third. So like, hey, I'm going to call this person first or the primary. If they're not available and they don't answer, I'm going to go down to number two and I'll call them, and if they don't answer I'll go to number three. And if that don't answer, I'll go to number three. And if that doesn't work, you know, then the system has failed itself, but ideally one of those three people should be able to answer their phone.

Speaker 1:

If there's a request that comes through on a weekend like that, I'm curious what is your? So? And again, there's no like perfect, right way to handle that and as your company grows, you might just have 24 hour support regardless because you've got the business to support it. But what is your take on like, I guess, what are you guys? What are you guys looking at on your end for weekend coverage? Have you thought about what the SOP looks like? I know it's kind of an infant stage for the company that you're helping build right now, but what's the take on it? Probably just a very manual, like whoever's available type thing, or what.

Speaker 2:

Well, and here it's a really good example, right, and I also think there's some good lesson in here that it really reminded me of. One is when things don't go right, right, there's usually some opportunity there, right. So the loads over the weekend that we had this weekend, like, we had two issues One was the driver that was there, the shipper was telling them they didn't have a load available, right, and it's like middle of the afternoon on Saturday, right. So we just really brought a larger team together fairly recently, right. So what was happening is everybody's in a group text message, right, so the person dealing with the carrier is messaging everybody.

Speaker 2:

Well, everybody on our team's really experienced, like some, like literally 20, some years, 30 years, like myself, so, like, everybody kind of knows what to do, but it all ends up being kind of like the too many cooks in a kitchen where someone adds a little paprika and then someone else adds paprika and the other person didn't realize and, like, pretty soon it doesn't taste very good.

Speaker 2:

And it really created a lot of unnecessary stress because, like, we all knew what needed to be done and it did get assisted, Right, you know, I, we all jumped on the phone and kind of resolved it there right. But also on Sunday there was and again it was a smaller issue Driver had issue accepting tracking before the load picked up and we wanted to make sure because it was like a hot shipment, similar things right. So we were able to resolve it. But for me, watching it play out right and the messages and all the emails, I I'm like there had to be two dozen text messages amongst a half a dozen people, right, five emails for honestly, which is probably two phone calls, a call to the carrier, a call to the customer, right, and then I need a kick.

Speaker 1:

I want to hop in here because I I get a kick out of this, because I've seen it happen, dude. I've seen this in text email teams, chats, slack, like whatever way you communicate. I've seen it happen where, like you ever come in or like you ever like open your email in the morning and there's literally like 40 emails in one thread and you didn't even need to be on them and you're like why that's?

Speaker 1:

or you just kind of wish like could someone have just summarized this to me? Afterwards I will literally take an entire email thread, sometimes throw it into chat gbt and say summarize this for me. And it spits out like here's who is who's, here's who's in the email thread, here's the takeaways.

Speaker 2:

And I'm like, okay, I don't have to read 40 emails now, perfect I had the same thing happen with some of my agents and I did the exact same thing you did. I threw it in GPT and went summarize this, tell me where it begins, ends and what the opinion is Right, yep, and to your point, right, like that's exactly kind of what I was feeling as I'm doing this Right. But also it was really good for me to see because I got a really good take on people's personalities how they would have addressed it, what they were thinking, how they were doing. You could read a lot of the subtext when you're just paying attention to like how and what people are frustrated, were worried, who's a little more I don't want to say level headed, but like kind of working towards the solution. So it was very, very helpful for me to, when I was writing the SOPs and coming up the structure, for this to go wrong. It was actually better that these things happened than if they didn't, because it made me think of a lot of the exceptions for, to your point, after hours and the weekends that I needed to think through OK, well, if the truck, if the load, isn't available, right, who's going to reach out to the customer?

Speaker 2:

You don't want three people from ops, all sending a message to your customer, right? That are phrased three different ways. You don't want them to conflict with each other. Like that, opinion of the customer's perception of us is important, right? So making sure one person is accountable for those in those scenarios, right? Making sure one person is accountable for the carrier piece and that communication and making sure it is defined as to when and who reaches and messages the customer regarding all of the issues that could come up right, load isn't ready. Driver's been there two hours and they still don't have the load ready.

Speaker 2:

What are the detention policies? What are we going to pay on a truck order not used? When do we call it a truck order not used versus possibly a layover? If he's there six hours waiting for a load and we cancel it, are we going to try to give the guy $150 or $200 truckloader not used? No, we're going to try to get him paid for his time.

Speaker 2:

Where do you draw that line? Right? Is three or four hours now considered like a layover or almost the better portion of the day? What customers pay for what and how do they draw that line? Some customers two hours free. They pay a certain amount for detention, and how do they draw that line? Some customers two hours free, they pay a certain amount for detention. Some say, after five hours we'll pay you $350 or $400. If it's eight we pay you a different rate.

Speaker 2:

And getting all of that stuff in one place also that everybody can see it so that everyone knows what you're working off of, because if you're talking to the carrier they have questions when am I going to get paid? What am I going to get paid for my time? Right. How is this policy work? Making sure all of those things were at least outlined so that everyone knows what the procedures are on a customer per customer basis Right. And even further, there are customers that do blind shipments and pickups from places that aren't them and they have different detention policies for different facilities. Different layover policies Right. Policies for different facilities, different layover policies right.

Speaker 2:

So it was great because it gave me so many exceptions to think about, to start writing the processes out and at the end of the day you're right, like it was very clear after. And it also I think people learn faster. I think all of us do Like when you struggle or need to really try to do something and you can't, and then you get the answer right, like it sticks, like you learn that way, like if you don't struggle, you don't typically learn as quickly. So I think everyone also going through a situation that was clearly frustrating. Everybody was eager and willing and wanted to know who's responsible for what on the accountability in these scenarios. So immediately after we got together and outlined this like they're implemented within 40 minutes, right Once we were able to create the direction to your point and I think it's really worth thinking through these things, even if you're a small company.

Speaker 1:

So I wanted to pull up. You had me thinking about something there, and so when you're creating like an SOP or a list of these exceptions or these processes, I want to. You know it's never a finalized product.

Speaker 2:

Okay, no, this is always a living, living, breathing document.

Speaker 1:

Living, breathing document, exactly, right. And so reason being things change and you've got new processes. Prime example right, carrier vetting before 2022 looked very different than it does today, right? You just kind of assumed that if they met safety ratings and whatnot, that you were good, and now it's like well, no, our biggest issue now is fraud. So now we've got to. You know, we had to revamp the way that we look at these processes. So anyway, back to the point of it's a living, breathing document. I have I just pull it up on my other screen I have a training outline that I use for whenever we've got somebody new, okay, and it goes through a lot of basic things and I update this, like probably every couple of months when we have something new that pops up. But it goes through things like literally the basics of how to use our software, like how to use our system, and then it goes through the office hours and what to do in after hours, weekend requests, our requirements for carrier vetting and if you're going to get a carrier overridden, you've got to do x, y and z as a uh, you know, precautionary safety measure.

Speaker 1:

Um, how do we handle advances? How do we handle claims? How do we handle the invoicing process? How do we handle um commissions, uh, how do we handle uh, ltl, intermote, like all these different things? And like, if you go back like four years when I started to build out this agent division for Pierce, you're going to end the strategic landscape around us changes as far as, like, fraud enters the system two and a half years ago. You're going to have a constant need to revamp and polish and refine that SOP. And more so, you need to communicate that with everybody around you, because if there's 100 people in your company and one person changes the SOP but no one else knows about it, well, that's pointless because no one knows the procedures or the processes. And I'll take it one step further If you have this living, breathing document and it's not used by people, that is just a waste of time in and of itself. Right.

Speaker 2:

And I've had.

Speaker 1:

I've had an instance where, like somebody new comes on, I'm not available. The person gets, goes through, like their orientation or their training or whatnot, from somebody else. They don't follow the outline or the steps in order or they don't cover everything in there. Stuff gets missed. And then the person we've just done them a disservice because now they have no idea what the processes are Right. So you got to use them, you got to share it amongst the crowd.

Speaker 2:

A few points Right Like, and I think about it in steps. I'm like first, you need to know the direction and the guide rails or guardrails you want to put around. Whatever the process is Right, like you said, whether it's invoicing, the process of load. What are the steps? Right Like, just for load? Okay, load comes from the customer. Who's responsible for making sure the rates is secured with the customer? Negotiated, this individual right. Once they have that and they have the details, who's responsible for confirming all of the details in the load, from equipment to commodity type, all the way to load value, pickup, delivery times. It sits with this person. Okay, next step who's responsible for building that load? And how does that information get from that person to this person? It needs to be sent to this email address In our case, like, we have a group email like dispatch at that company, so like, it goes there and the carrier team sees it.

Speaker 2:

Okay, now who's responsible for building a load? Who's responsible for verifying the details in the load are correct? Who's now responsible for communicating what we want to pay for the load, highs and lows, what's the target rate, what's the range you can go to right. Who's responsible now for vetting the carrier? Who is responsible for bringing the carrier into the system? Who's responsible for the rate con, the dispatch steps, confirming the equipment, overseeing track and trace all the way through delivery, calling the driver, making sure they send in the BOL, that the BOL is clean If they're in detention, what happens from that point? And then who handles the steps after that? In regards to invoicing, did the BOL get uploaded in the TMS correctly? And then who's responsible for it after that to make sure that the carrier gets paid, the invoice goes out and days don't pass where someone thinks someone else is responsible for it. Right, so those are like just an example of an outline of one process, but, to your point, you one need it written down so that people can refer to it and, second of all, without adoption, meaning like people actually reading it and paying attention to it. All of that work means nothing, right, like, because it's like. It's like. And the funny thing else that I was thinking of too, that you had said right, it's like that other proverb. Right, the most dangerous phrase in the English language is we've always done it this way. Right, it's like that other proverb. Right, the most dangerous phrase in the English language is we've always done it this way right, and you and I have talked a lot about that.

Speaker 2:

It's great to bring experienced people into a team as well as new folks. People are always going to have their habits and the way they've done them, and people hold on to that because that gives them comfort. They've been doing it that way, they feel a sense of control and they know what to expect when they do them that way, so there's like a very valid reason why people want to keep doing it in a way they have. However, if the landscape to your point of the industry has shifted recently and maybe they're just not aware because maybe they're insulated from that risk and I'll give you a decent example right, I was talking with somebody that hired a pretty senior person onto their team and they were overseeing the carrier side of things. However, the company they came from had a very stable carrier base that was developed over like 20 years, so just in the past year or two, to your point, since, like 2022, they weren't bringing a lot of new carriers into their system, so it was very infrequent that they needed to vet carriers for fraud because they had so many on the lanes for their customers. It's just not something that needed to be done and now they're at a different company where they've got to grow the customer or the carrier base quickly. They're vetting carriers all day and they want to do it to your point, the way they did it in 2021 or 2020 or even 2017 or 16, right, when they did this a lot and everything's changed right, like you'll literally just get your cargo stolen. You will. I mean, everything we've talked about on the show related to fraud comes from these processes.

Speaker 2:

If you're not doing them, getting somebody to realize that the way they have been doing it is no longer effective and needs to be changed Sometimes. Also take some leadership, not just writing an SOP and going you're wrong. Do it this way. Like that shit never works. Like you've got to. In my opinion, on the implementation or adoption, I did a video on this a few months ago. Like I feel that if you are leading the company whether you're the owner, the broker, the president, the CEO, whatever if you are pulling the team together and ultimately, you're responsible for these SOPs and procedures, you need to be able to put that hat on and do the thing you're asking them to do and show them, not tell them how and why. And the why is important, it needs to be done. Like for me, when I've done this training on like carrier vetting.

Speaker 2:

I start with the context. I'm like, hey, are you familiar with what's been happening in fraud? And most people are like, oh, a little bit, I've read some, but what do you mean? I go through basic examples we talked about with you know, erica, a couple of weeks ago. I'm like how fraud's being stolen. I mean cargo is being stolen, you know, impersonating an MC, pretending to be a broker, sending another truck in, changing the BOL to send it to a warehouse where they can steal it. Right, a couple of big examples.

Speaker 2:

Because now, when people understand what is happening as a threat, why they're going to change what they have been doing, starts to make sense.

Speaker 2:

Right Now they start to realize, oh yeah, if I was going to do it the way I used to, like, I wouldn't have noticed any of those MCs could have been someone that wasn't who they thought they were A different email address, a different phone number, for instance. Right, then I get into okay, well, do you see how these processes that we just discussed protect you from these situations and why? Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now the adoption becomes far more effective, easier People are willing to do the new thing when they understand why it's necessary and what it actually solves as a problem, whatever that thing is. And doing it yourself in front of them, letting them see you do this, vetting carriers, talking to them, going through the process even for an hour, to me is a step that most leaders don't do. They just give the SOP, say follow this. That person keeps doing what they used to do. Then they yell at them, then they get frustrated and then nothing changes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so much of what you said is so good there. So the understanding, the why is, I think, is extremely helpful and someone learned, like if you're brand new or just learning something new. Understanding why gives you context and it is definitely yeah, and it's very, very effective, right, instead of going, yeah, this is just what we do, it's like no, here's why we do it and I think, something that I do as well, that, I think, is really good. It's kind of like a check on learning, usually like, let's say, something happens, a situation happens and we have to figure it out, fix it right.

Speaker 1:

When that's all done, like over with, I kind of go through with what was involved, like you know, if I know it was their first time experiencing that, or if I know that they're not very well versed in what happened, I'm like did that make sense to you? What is your, what are your thoughts on what just happened there, right, and then we kind of like we read, we kind of like go through that whole thing again, we talk through it. They call it like an after action review in the military, like an AAR, and we go through like all right, what happened there? Why did we do the steps that we did and we explained everything that happened, why it happened and if there was hey, if this happens again in the future, are we going to do it the same way? Maybe we'll do it a little bit different, but there's always know, there's very, very valuable um opportunities for learning and mentorship and coaching along the way.

Speaker 1:

And if you're a leader and you just do stuff yourself and you never really explain to other people why you're doing that, like you, you might feel like you're holding all the power to yourself. But you're also creating like this, like, uh, you create your own, like misery, like because you really can't be replaced or duplicated and if you want to take vacation time or you want to, whatever it is like take stuff off your plate. You're not, you're limiting yourself and not allowing someone else to be able to learn and grow and understand the processes that you need to have in place to be able to you know, to do that, but yeah, it's a great example.

Speaker 1:

It's an ongoing thing. Like this is a mentality, not just a here's when you do it and how you do it.

Speaker 2:

It's about when I say growth, it's not growth for more, it's growth for improvement. Right, you're growing as a person and you're willing to adapt honestly, hopefully to make your life easier and everyone around you to do more with less effort. Right, like that to me is like growth in this context, right, and I'll give you like another one. And the saying that comes to mind is you're saying that it's like some people are just only happy when they live in a prison of their own making. Right, they literally create the situation that is that prison and it has this ton of stress, but like, they like almost thrive in it and people like move in that direction. I think it's some of it's like personality tendencies, but I'll give you another example that came up recently with a client and this client this is the way they were operating Every single email from every customer came through one person.

Speaker 2:

Every single email from almost all the carriers went through one person. Then that one person, who was the leader of the company, the president, right, distributed those emails to who needed to work on it. Right, and when you think about this, right, that now requires this person to literally be tied to their email all of the time, moment by moment all day, in order for communication to even get to the people that need to do it. Now, when that person needs to do something else, it's next to impossible. They can't sit in a meeting to take care of the other things they need to do for the business. Even talk to a customer to bring in a new customer, to do a sales call, because now you've got a load change in it or you've got an appointment shift right, or whatever hundreds of emails you get every day all flow through this one person. They create their own bottleneck right. And again, one of the simple things that we were talking about is and this was a new concept was hey, have you guys thought of using a group?

Speaker 1:

email Email distribution list or a group email Email distribution.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, those are huge and not everybody's working.

Speaker 1:

Take people out, it's great.

Speaker 2:

It's amazing and not everybody's familiar even with what some of these things are. Right, and again like this is, I think, helpful for anybody out there, even on a small team. Right, even for your own customers. If you're one person I've done this where it's like hey, all of my loads get sent to this inbox dispatch at whatever brokerage, right? So now all the customer load tenders all go into one place. Now you can add your team to it so everybody has visibility as they come in. Right, they can mark those emails as they work through them, so you can still see what they're getting done.

Speaker 2:

You're not cutting yourself out. You're just not requiring yourself to be involved in every single piece of communication. That happens to everybody you talk to and work with. Right, and to me it was ironic because the initial conversation with this client starts with I just can't get to anything. I don't have time to do business development. I don't have time to talk to customers. I can't get to the things that I want to work on that we've talked about.

Speaker 2:

I'm like walk me through your day and then I start. I'm literally in a Zoom and I'm like let me see how and what you're doing when you go in and I'm literally watching them do this, like literally sending every single email to everybody. I'm like, let me see your sent folder. There's three times the emails in the sent folder that are in the inbox right Now.

Speaker 2:

When you think about this this is the thing with email most people don't think about is every time you send an email, you're likely to get another one back. It doesn't get less work when you work on your inbox. You actually create more work as you do this, because if you send me an email and I send it to Steven and Steven sends it back to me and he goes hey, I got it. That's three pieces of communication that needed to happen once you to Steven or to a group inbox, instead of you to me, me to Steven, steven to me, maybe me back to you. Right, like these little things add up so much in freight brokerage because there's so much communication. I would say it's the number one area people can look at to improve their procedures, right?

Speaker 1:

I agree, man, so so much agree. The. I want to stress the. What do you call it? Is it a group email? What is it Like?

Speaker 2:

a distribution. I think they're called group inboxes, like there's a special section, and I'll tell you exactly what it is. We use them all the time.

Speaker 1:

So we have like credit one, carriers one, commissions one.

Speaker 2:

Accounting one.

Speaker 1:

Account, like billing. There's an AR and AP separate one, and what's great is you just basically the email address always stays the same, but you can add, remove whatever the members of that group. So, like I have, I have I don't know, I've probably seen them change like every few weeks something like someone gets hired or someone gets added to a new, whatever. It is Right and those are great because they're the same for your customer at all times. Um, if you're not using anything like that now, I highly encourage you to do it. What's crazy to me is when you're talking about, I'm like, of course, everyone knows this, and then I'm like, no, not everybody knows, we take it for granted about this stuff uh, and here's another example, right to that one.

Speaker 2:

Like the first time I think I remember really setting this up I was at, it was at TQL, and like the first two I did were SSL group because I was managing all the steamship line customers back then. And then we had the DOD group and it was exactly for that, right, because, to your point, we had, I had team members all over the country in different offices, so we needed to be able to plug people in and take them out if they transitioned to a different department or left the company. But the customer needed consistency, right, like they needed to know when they sent an email for help, for a load, a change, a cancellation, any of a number of things that they email you about. There's a team monitoring that all the time, full stop. You don't need to worry about who's behind it. Someone is always behind it. And to me, why that's important.

Speaker 2:

For another reason and this is the other question I get a lot when I talk with someone about setting this up is but my customers are used to emailing me. I don't want to go to them and inconvenience them and ask them to send it somewhere else, like I feel like I'm asking them to do work, and I'd rather just do it myself. The first thing I would say is how you frame this to your customer is how they will perceive it. So what I've always done is I've framed it as an additional service to them. Hey look, I know you like emailing me and you can text me and I'm always going to be here, but I wanted to let you know I have additional resources allocated to your account now to you, to help you when you need it. I am occasionally on other things for your account, like I might be dealing with a customer or a carrier or a shipper or whatever for you guys. I got six people behind me on this inbox all the time, 24, seven.

Speaker 2:

So I what I first do is I go, please start copying my team in the emails to me. They get used to that for a week or two, and then what happens is is I go, please start copying my team in the emails to me. They get used to that for a week or two, and then what happens is is the responses to all of their questions are coming from the team. So they just start emailing the team and start CCing me and then eventually I'm no longer on it and I have it in my inbox anyway, like I can see the team emails and respond the same way the team does.

Speaker 2:

But it's slowly, step by step, instance by instance, helps your customer work into a way that benefits them more and ensures how it benefits you and your team more and now doesn't require me to see and read everything that happens the entire day. I can be involved when they need to pull me into and I think you can do that for a lot of situations. If you don't have, like, even a dispatch at your brokerage set up for, like your tenders versus your other things. Like you should set that up soon, I think, because even just having your tenders sent into one inbox and knowing they're all in one place saves you so much mess in your other inbox that you need to communicate for other things.

Speaker 1:

And I'll say this too like, this is all relative to where you are in your journey. So, like day one, you don't you don't need to have like 18 different email groups. Um, this is when you grow and you've got team members and all of that good stuff and I will say, uh, I thought back to an earlier thing. We were talking about, um, living, breathing, document your SOPs, right? Steven added a good thing in the notes saying, like if you can create some sort of searchable document, that's always a good thing. So I am a fan of having and this is just me, but you can kind of pick your own way to do this I like having our SOPs in multiple different ways to access. Okay, I typically have a video for our basic processes and those are what we.

Speaker 1:

We basically created a knowledge base on our website for within our company and it's got. That's basically our, our SOPs live there. It's got everything from here's how your email signature should look. Here's the proper logos. Here's the step-by-step how to do this. Here's 15 videos that show you the most common tasks that you're going to do within this organization. Here's a downloadable sheet. That's got all of our points of contact at different departments the office hours, the process for advances and quick pays, etc. And then, guess what? That knowledge base literally gets updated. Like once a week a new insurance document gets added in there, a new video gets updated once we've updated our product. Like that is literally a go.

Speaker 1:

So everyone knows, hey, if I need X, y and Z, or how do I do this, I can go right to our knowledge base. But again, that didn't exist day one. We had to create it over time. It started with all right, let me do a screen recording of how this process works and then let me do a little tutorial, step-by-step checklist of how this works. And then you slowly refine them, you make them better, you make them a little bit prettier, and then you get them all saved into one space and next thing you know, boom, someone's new. Here's a link to the knowledge base here. Boom, someone's new, here's a link to the knowledge base, here's a password to get in there. Follow all these steps, boom, boom, boom, you're good to go. And then they've always got a resource there to go to, to read, to watch, and it should explain exactly how to do their job.

Speaker 2:

So couldn't agree with you more right, you don't need to do all of it to start, right. Like you can just start, and you can just. I think a great way to start is whatever issues are creating confusion, if there is, write that on a notebook, write that in your notes, and that's a good place to start. Hey, nobody knew what to do in this scenario. Write that down. What do we want people to do in this scenario? And then, from that step, the next step is okay, who and how do you want the accountability for this to be performed? Because I think one of the overlooked steps in writing any SOP or procedure, right, is that, like, you need to know where the buck stops, right? Like who, ultimately, can you go to if it doesn't get done right and ask why? That, to me, is the very important piece in the procedure is who is actually responsible for each of those steps? Right, because not just for accountability from like management, but so that they know oh, this is my task, I don't need to worry about should three other people do this? No, it says right here my title does this in this instance, right? So it's clear. The other thing I was thinking of when you were talking about this because I spend most of my time on implementation right, like in coaching, as opposed to probably doing as much of what you just outlined Like. I'm writing these again. I haven't done this in a while, but I talk to people all the time about how to get their teams to follow the SOPs when they aren't especially new team members. And the thing that I think is really important if you have one of these or if you're creating one right, is that you need to make this very visible and almost point to it regularly until you create the habit of your team of going there to your point. And one of the things I think is really helpful If you have a small team, what we used to do is let's just say I have my SOPs for a customer.

Speaker 2:

This happens in this scenario, this is their policy, this is what you do, right, and it's just written out on the customer's preference, right? Okay, the thing that's important is I would write it just like you said. It's shared to everybody. Everybody knows where that is, but what would almost always happen, especially if we're in an office together, is as soon as they have a question, if I'm close by physically, or even in my office and my doors open, rather than them going and looking it up and finding the answer. They're like well, it's just faster if I ask Ben anyway, and I know I'll have it right and I don't have to worry. So then they just come to you and then you answer the question. That is literally written down. You're creating the habit that you're trying to fix. You're literally teaching them to come to you more, which creates more of the problem you're trying to solve.

Speaker 2:

What you need to be able to do once you have this and when someone comes to you, you need to say listen, is that in the SOP? And they might look at you and go, I don't know. Be like okay, well, first take a look. It should be in there. If you know where it is, be like hey, it should be on page one or two. Go, take a look, see if you can find it. Then if you have any questions after you read it, you can come back to me. But do me a favor and go and look there. So now, every time someone comes and wants the fast answer to get back to what they're doing, you direct them at the document so that they start establishing the habit of going there to use it.

Speaker 1:

I got it. I want to give you an actual example. This literally happened to me this morning, right? So we had a.

Speaker 1:

We got a newer tool that we're using and the process of how we're using the tool. We're trying to basically create the SOP of when we're going to use it, how we're going to use it, etc. And one of our guys it's his first time ever having used it and I was like, do you need help with it? And he's like, yeah, I haven't used it yet. And I said perfect, here's a video that shows you exactly how it's going to be used. Here's an email address. That's a group email address for support if you have issues in this thing, right, um, but and you know, literally like he came to me initially because he's normally like nate answers the questions when I have this issue.

Speaker 1:

But instead of me just being like, yeah, let me tell you how to do, it's like no, here's the SOP, here's the email address you can go to if you're having issues with it. That way, it's not like I have to go to Nate with everything, it's more so you train them on. Oh okay, there's all this stuff here that I can use on our knowledge base. There's email addresses for the different departments in our company that can assist with X, y and Z. I literally do that all the time. When someone asks a question, I still pride myself on being able to give them the answer. Yes, but I give them the answer and also the future solution so they don't have to come back to me Teach them how to fish.

Speaker 2:

Yep, you don't give them the fish, you teach them how to fish. Right, and it's funny because, like, where most of this comes from, like even in my head, is it's still stuff that I do, even at my age. And then, definitely in scenarios I'll give you an example right, like we were setting up a new TMS and a grading a lot of the backend, right, and I did go through all of the videos and training at first, but then I, the questions I had I thought weren't really covered, and like a month or two passed when the instance came up, so, like I just didn't remember. I'm emailing the rep going like hey, can you clarify this, can you do this? And they were doing it with me, like that should be in the knowledge base. And then I would go there and most of the questions I look back, right, like maybe the 10, six were in the knowledge base, right, and I definitely should have looked there first, right, and I'm like, oh, this is literally me doing the same thing, and again, we're paying for it. But I'm like this is the principle, right, I'm like going and finding it and again, not all SOPs are written clearly, not all videos that you get are as clear and answer every question. So you still do need to help, and that was the one other thought I wanted to bring up. This isn't something else I do that is really helpful for somebody new or with a new tool.

Speaker 2:

If I bring a team together to introduce something, we record that session on a Zoom right and then everybody asks their questions and then we do the whole process and then everybody gets that recording and then I use Otter so they get a summary to know where in the video we talked about what. So now any question that comes up related to that tool, I'm like hey, take a look back at the video. Here's the summary. You should be able to find the section and watch it. If you can't find the answer, let me know. But what you're asking me, like in my head I'm like I know it's in that video, like we definitely did that. My head I'm like I know it's in that video, like we definitely did that and to your point, that's a good short step before an SOP too, right, if you don't have the time to write out all these procedures yet, but you want to get your team up to speed on either a new tool or a new vetting process.

Speaker 2:

Bring them together, do it, record it, let them answer all the ask, all the questions. At the end, send everybody that recording and now every question. From that point you send that over. That's your first training video, right? Literally. Say that in your G drive or wherever you do so people can access it, title it so that is easily searchable, so that people can find what that video covered. But you don't necessarily have to sit down and write out all of these documents just to get started. You can just do it simply, and now it's not redundant, like I did that work. Once it's saved, I don't have to retrain, like you can watch the video again. It's the same process, like it's not different.

Speaker 1:

Precisely Exactly, man. What I do is I know we're getting towards the end here but YouTube you can create like a free YouTube account or Google account for you know your business or your brokerage and you can just like what YouTube account or Google account for you know your business or what your brokerage and you can just like. What I do is for Pierce is. I have a Pierce worldwide logistics agents YouTube account and I just have a bunch of unlisted videos that are stored in there, which means that, like, some random person is not going to stumble across my video, but I have them saved there and I can email them out, can embed them in our password protected knowledge base, um, so that it's there for people that need to see it, but it's not out there for people that don't need to see it. For that, you know matter. So, um, yeah, I mean great, this is awesome, this is really good stuff. We haven't talked about sops or like process or any things like this in a while. I think it's really important because this will make or break your growth trajectory.

Speaker 1:

I have seen businesses where they just can't get to the next level because of something that you said earlier. It's like the boss is the person answering every email. It's like, well, what happens when that boss wants to go on vacation? The whole system implodes. Right, you need to have some sort of um like redundancy and who backs up who and who backs up that person? Like, you need to have the redundancy. You need to have just clear, you know, like flow chart style, how do things get done? Right, and if and if you don't, you could you'll end up being one of those people that's on the freight brokers Reddit page just saying, like I've had it, I'm done with this industry. It sucks, I'm frustrated, I'm stressed out. Like it doesn't have to be that way. There's the inevitable problems and stress we deal with and brokerage, but you can spread that frustration across a team of people and everyone takes a little bit of it, right.

Speaker 2:

So and you know what I think a lot about too. Like I think this is really closely tied to delegation too, right? Like when you're developing a company. Sure, when you start, you do everything. So you work 11, 12 hours a day and you've got to do every single task and everything. I think that's really good because you get to learn everything. So later, as you grow, right, when you delegate those things, you know how and what should be done, first of all, to be able to hire the person to do it and to show them, which is clearly helpful. But also, like that is the trajectory of growth of a company from one person to an organization. Right, I always look at it as, like it starts as one person where you got to do everything, and it's very stressful. But as soon as I can, the first things I want to start doing is delegating things to create more space. And, to your point, my goal with any company that I'm building is that, like it should exist as its own thing, like its own entity, not a part of me that's just a sole proprietorship. Like that's not really a company. Like I look at a company as in.

Speaker 2:

You said it a bunch of times in this episode. You should be able to take any person out at any given time and everything still happens and works exactly the same as if you were there. So people need to know that, even if you are doing something every day and you don't take vacation or haven't yet, that like if you weren't there, who would need to do it? Even if they aren't doing it yet, because things happen and that creates stress, whether you are going to take vacation or not, and it ends up becoming this self-fulfilling loop with owners where they're scared to take vacation, they don't want to leave their business because they think it's literally going to burn to the ground, because they're doing everything and if they weren't there or they had to call in sick, nobody would know what to do without them telling them, like that is not a company, that's just you with some people helping you. Like to me, that's before and the after.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and ask yourself this question too if you're the business owner or the leader if, if you got in a car accident and were in the hospital for a week, what would happen? Right, I was thinking the same thing. Died is like the extreme. But like, if you're hospitalized, if you have a family emergency, if x, y and z happens, like, you can choose to not take a vacation, but you can't choose when a family emergency or something bad is going to happen.

Speaker 1:

And if your business cannot run, um, it doesn't have to run perfectly if you're not there, but if it's, if it can't function successfully, then you have to take a look in the mirror and figure out what needs to be different for this to be able to happen.

Speaker 1:

And oftentimes I think, as companies grow, um, that just, you need to have redundancy through experienced leadership, like having a general manager in an office that can back up literally every department head, right, someone who can, if they need to. They can handle credit requests, they can handle carrier overrides, they can handle a contract, because the owner likely can do all that stuff. But the owner shouldn't have to always back up a department head. You should be able to have somebody else that maybe is cross-trained, maybe someone that does credit can also do contracts or something you know. But yeah, again, this stuff happens over time. It's all part of the process of getting where you want to go. But really good discussion, good takeaways, so anything you missed, I mean we could go on and on and on, but those are really really good points, yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think we got kind of the gist of it across from like a principal standpoint. You find an issue or something and everyone was confused, or people didn't know what to do, or you didn't after that. That's a great indication that you should have an SOP for that thing. Whatever that is.

Speaker 1:

If you guys have any questions on specific SOPs, let us know, send us an email info at freight360.net, or just use our contact form on our website or leave a YouTube comment, for example, like hey, what should the SOP look like for X, y and Z? And we'll we'll answer it. We'll give you our feedback on what, maybe what we do or what we think you could do. We're here to help. So any final thoughts, Mr Kowalski?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm like just in building companies, right? And in this conversation, this has this thought in my head it's like I don't live to work. Right, I do challenging things and try to build companies to have a better life, not the other way around, right? And in order to not live in a prison of your own making, you need to think about these things. You need to think about how you can let this company still operate when you do need time away, whether you feel like you do or not. Right, like it is not a negative thing for an entrepreneur to plan and to be able to take space from their business. I know the hustle, culture and the push and the work 80 hours a week and everyone feels like they need to be super busy, but like that is not a long-term recipe for happiness, well-being, health, family. Anything you want in your life outside of this is going to suffer without these things in place. So it's really important to start thinking about it, even if you aren't there yet. Again, to your point, like you don't need to do this all at once, but sooner rather than later, for sure. And again, if you're at a point where you're almost unable to keep up with your own work and you're thinking about hiring that second person.

Speaker 2:

Steven put a really good comment there.

Speaker 2:

He's like he just started doing this a few months ago was just writing down for himself what he does for each customer, what he knows in his head regarding to each shipper, receiver, maybe like what he knows and preferences to people to call at different facilities.

Speaker 2:

Like there's so many things we keep in our head as we work in logistics that it's really good to get them on paper, even if it's just you and you're now considering that second person, because that is going to make it far easier to bring them on. You don't need to literally tell them everything that's in your head. They can read it, then you can talk through it, then they can refer to it. It reduces the time to get someone up to speed with what you know. So getting those things on paper, I think, is really important for anybody, even for yourself. Like forget things. Being able to go back and reference it. Don't move along with that customer for two months and you forgot what the procedures are. Having that in one place and organized to go back and reference saves so much headaches, problems and issues.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I have a notepad on my desk at all times to write down thoughts so they don't slip my mind. And again, update whatever it is. Sop knowledge base, send an email to a bunch of people about whatever that item was to get feedback. But yeah, it's a great way to go about doing things. Yep, all right.

Speaker 2:

Lastly, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

Speaker 1:

And until next time go Bills.

People on this episode

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Benjamin Kowalski

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Nate Cross

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