What Makes a Freight Brokerage Employee Profitable? | Episode 352

What makes an employee successful in freight brokerage? We break down how to measure whether someone is covering their true cost, why being busy does not always mean being productive, and how realistic benchmarks, incentives, and feedback can drive better performance.

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Transcript

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What Makes An Employee Successful

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right. What makes an employee successful? I guess is how we can kind of label this episode that we just wrapped up there, Ben. It was a it was a good one. We were we were gonna be talking about like, you know, what it takes to cover your own seat. And we do get into that. We talk about, you know, the expense of an employee, what makes them uh what criteria would you deem as successful, whether they're a revenue producer or you know, just a straight uh a cost type of role, like someone that's uh in accounting or something like that. But we also talk a lot about towards the end, we get more into like, you know, giving honest feedback to employees and you know, someone should never get fired and not understand why they were fired at failure as a manager for sure. Yeah. So what do you what do you got takeaway on this uh this episode here?

SPEAKER_02 0:45

I really enjoyed the conversation. Like we dug into like benchmarks, clarity, incentives, evaluating employees, how to set up incentive structures. I mean, I thought it was a really good episode. We also covered quite a bit about the recent lawsuit, and it really kind of kicked the conversation off because CH was sued because they technically borrowed an employee, which was the truck driver. So really good episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Let's hop right into

Welcome And Sponsor Mentions

SPEAKER_00 1:12

it. All right, welcome back. Another episode of the Frey 360 podcast here. We're gonna we're gonna go down a little bit of a rabbit hole today and we'll talk about hiring employees and you know, kind of setting expectations and what does it mean to cover one's own salary? There's a there's a lot that can go into that. Um, but first, if you are brand new, there's a ton of other content. Check it out at freight360.net. Um actually, somebody asked me recently, Ben, they're like, why do you guys have.NET and dot com? And I was like, well, some other person has dot com, and we, you know, at this point, who knows what they'd want to charge us to get the domain. But they're not even using it. But.NET, it is what it is. We've been rolling for like five years or six years or whatever at the.NET. So we're gonna keep it going. But um, make sure you subscribe and share us with your other colleagues, friends in the industry. Um, and if you want to get more information about training for your team or yourself, that we have a full um educational course created called the Freight Broker Basics Course. It's on the website uh hosted by Teachable, and YouTube's full of great uh resources as well. And leave us comments, that's where we get all of our questions from for the the QA session that we put out, the final mile. It comes out every Tuesday. Um and this episode is brought to you by a send TMS. So if you're looking for a TMS option, great option for small, medium-sized uh brokerages. 90 days absolutely free, no card required. You need a referral code. It's down in the description. Check it out. All right, Ben. What's going on? Uh what's going on down in Florida,

Florida Heat And Disney Reality

SPEAKER_00 2:55

man? You guys sizzling up down there late in July here?

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Stay inside, to be honest, for the most part.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

It's so funny. I was at a family reunion this past weekend, and my my uncle he takes his takes his kids to my uncle's like younger, so he's he's like an older brother to me, age-wise. Like his kids are still like kids. And he's taking them to Disney like later this week. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I was like, my wife and I went to Disney World in July once, and we both agreed never again. Like, I get it, there's less crowds and all that, and it's it's Disney, so if you like, you know, if you like the environment of Disney and all the stuff to do, like it's still Disney, but like, dude, it is still hot. It is so hot, and you're outside and you're walking around and it is just brutal.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Like, I mean, there's literally just a heat advisory every day, and also like it's like not even healthy for you, but I'm it's like I don't mind it once I'm like doing stuff outside where I'll stay out. Like, if I'm gonna go outside or like play tennis in the morning or do like yard work, like once I'm sweating, like I don't mind being out there and I can get used to it. It's like when you're inside or like I work from home, like walking out to like the mailbox or to like go to my car, I come back and I literally have to change my shirt. Like I walk like 40 feet. I came back in and I'm like, I'm literally soaking wet. And I'm like, I will change my clothes like three times.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Wild. And there's no trees at Disney World. Like, that's the one thing I noticed the last time I was there when I saw you is I'm like, I mean, intentionally moving to buy things, but like there's literally not shade or a bench to shit on sit on. There's like one little area where there were trees where all the strollers are parked by the one restaurant where everybody just like huddles under like three trees. And I'm like, I can't imagine just being out there all day in July.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Yeah, you have to be like on an indoor ride or at a restaurant spending money in a restaurant or a store to get some air conditioning.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

So I feel like you should walk around with like the umbrellas like they used to do back in like the 20s or 30s back in the day.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Dude, we bought I think it was actually the trip that we met up with you a couple years ago. We bought one of those like spray bottle fan things that like has a fan on the end of a spray bottle and you like can miss yourself

The $604M C.H. Robinson Verdict

SPEAKER_00 5:15

or whatever. So anyway, um let's get into the news because there's a the big story in the last week is this again, C. H. Robinson always making headlines, right? $604 uh million dollar verdict. I'll just I'll read the blurb we put out in our newsletter earlier this week, and then we can kind of break it down. But um here it is a Dallas County jury just handed C. H. Robinson, Lupus Superior, and the carrier's driver a massive $604 million verdict tied to a deadly 2021 crash that killed three people and injured two others. The driver allegedly falsified his logs, drove more than six or 160 miles off-route, said that he was sick, and then continued driving before slamming into stopped traffic on I-20. C.H. Robinson was found to be the least responsible of the three defendants, and the final payout will likely come in well below the headline number, but $604 million still gets everyone's attention. Biggest takeaway for brokers is how the plaintiffs attacked C. H. Robinson's carrier selection process. They argued that Robinson went beyond the traditional broker-carrier relationship, failed to intervene after learning the driver was sick, and relied on the carrier's satisfactory FMCSA safety rating without also monitoring its SMS scores. According to testimony, Lupus Superior, that's the carrier, had exceeded FMCSA thresholds for unsafe driving and hours of service compliance throughout the year leading up to the crash. C. H. Robinson said it did nothing negligent and plans to appeal, but the bird is another reminder that a satisfactory rating and a history of successful loads may not be enough to keep a broker out of the courtroom. So if you're not aware of the uh it mentioned the the two it's we call them CSA categories, but it's really the it's the basics SMS. It's the it's those five uh publicly reported safety categories, which by the way are are being um changed. They haven't released like a date yet of when that is going to be um completed, but they're gonna change the names of some of them and change where certain violations fall into certain categories. But hours of service, driver um, was it driver safety was the other one? Um unsafe driving and and hours of service.

CSA SMS Scores Explained Simply

SPEAKER_00 7:40

But so what anybody alerts, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Unsafe driving, hours of service violations for over a year before the crash, despite a satisfactory rating.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

I have this little cheat sheet that I leave. I'll put it up to the camera here. I like leave it on my desk at all times. Um this is this is so like if I talk to a carrier, I can help explain to them what's going on. And a lot of carriers don't understand this, and a lot of brokers don't either. But um, if you're using a a carrier vetting software, or if you have some integration into your TMS and you see like, oh, they're flagged, or some people say they fail in a certain category. It's not really failing or passing. What happens is the five categories are unsafe driving, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, controlled substance, and driver fitness. And what happens is based on the size of your fleet and the violations that you have and the recency of those violations, that will give you a score in these five different categories. So the more recent a uh violation, the more severe it is, points-wise. I believe it's if it's in the last three months, it has a 3x multiplier. If it's three to six months, it's two X. And if it's six months to two years, it's just a single multiplier. And if beyond two years, it falls off of your off of your scores. But basically, they take all of the carriers, all of their scores, and then there's an intervention threshold. And what what that means is it doesn't mean that you're failing or that you're out of service. It just means that in unsafe driving and hours of service, those are the two that are identified as the most um related to or correlated with crashes, they have a 65% intervention threshold. What that means is that the if you're in the top 65%, you're good. The bottom 35%, so if you're over that 65%, 65th percentile, meaning the the bottom worst 35%, you are at the intervention threshold, which all that means is that you'll get um, you know, you can get safety letters, warnings, um, you know, you'll have a higher priority for intervention. Um if you get pulled over, they might do a a more a more in-depth um thorough inspection for you, like a full, you know, not just a single driver or walk around, but a full um full inspection. It's like 10 different categories of them, but it would be like, you know, you're gonna be prioritized for that. And then the other three, vehicle maintenance, controlled substance, and driver fitness has an 80% threshold. So you have to be in the bottom, bottom 20% of carriers um to be over threshold on that one. And after the Montgomery case, a lot of guidance was put out saying that, hey, as an industry, we're going to recommend that you you can we we are going to deem a carrier as unsafe if they're at intervention threshold for more than one. So if they're at just one, okay, you can say it's isolated, right? But if they have two or more, they're considering it a trend of safety issues. And that is where in this case, the court, you know, to credit to the folks that said, hey, two or more is bad, the court argued that um because they exceeded the intervention threshold in two of those five categories, that it was an unsafe carrier, even though their safety rating was satisfactory. And this is like the big issue now that we've been lobbying for for years is that like the federal government like should we're basically saying, like you guys tell us what is safe and unsafe because we're having to pay for external third-party software and services, and like you guys tell us they're satisfactory and safe, and you guys keep them in service, blah, blah, blah. Um, yet here we are getting dragged in as brokers to lawsuits with $604 million price tags on them. So crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Aren't you like also not able to sue the federal government? Because I feel like to your point, like you should be able to counter sue and be like, uh, you you guys said they were satisfactory. We used your system. You are the ones that write these and enforce them. And also, how many carriers? I mean, how many trucks did they have? Because, like, you could have multiple alerts for unsafe and hours of service, but like you also could have 500 drivers where like that might not be super so that's where they the one thing I didn't mention is they group you into uh peer groups based on the reported mileage and size of your reported fleet.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

So a single owner operator who has one violation is you know is one thing, right? A single owner operator that has five violations, it's a big deal. A megafleet that has five violations, it's a very small deal because they have a lot of trucks. They are gonna need to have hundreds of violations. Um and I'm overgeneralizing that, but they do group them into like you know, like-sized peer groups. Um the math behind how they do these scores, I still can't figure out. I do understand the the intervention thresholds, but like if you go to highway or you know, RMIS or whatever, um MCP, and you see like the basic score, and then you see like you'll have uh um I think it's like zero through ten is the one score, and then you have their percentile and another one, and it's like I don't know. It's I wish they would just give us a way more easy to digest like uh scale or grading, right? Or just a safe red, green, yellow, unsafe, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which red, green, yellow is kind of what we thought originally with like satisfactory, conditional, and unsat, but I don't know, man. You said Leftwork had a good tweet about this, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Yeah, so his tweet, and then we did a little bit of research before this was like, um, he basically his tweet is like, how does a freight broker that hire how does a freight broker that hires a motor carrier with a satisfactory safety rating no less find itself on the hook for 600 plus million? Question three of the jury charge in the case says it all. And it is related to truck drivers are borrowed employees. That means the driver is an employee of a broker. Now, the the questionnaire, right, to the jury was on the equation, on the occasion in question, was the driver acting as a borrowed employee of C.H. Robinson? Definition of borrowed employee. One who would otherwise be in the general employment of one employer is a borrowed employee of another employer if such other employer or his agents have the right to direct and control the details of the particular work inquired about. So, one, the right to direct and control the details of the particular work inquired about. Like this is we've talked about this on the show a lot. Like, this is what we learned in transportation, like 101 is like you are allowed to determine where and what is being picked

Borrowed Employee And Broker Control

SPEAKER_02 16:28

up and when, and where, what, and when the thing is getting delivered, but nothing about how they get from point A to point B. Like that is where you are. Not when they're driving influencing in any way and operating as if they are you are in control of that and operating like a dispatcher for a trucking company, right? Now, the interesting thing when we look this up was it seems, again, very little bit of research through like Claude this morning was basically where this crossed the line, it seems, is the clearest fact pointing toward control in the record is that CH was the one directly told that the driver was ill and did not feel he was up to driving. And CH was the one who made the call not to reschedule the delivery rather than leaving that decision to the motor carrier. And that I kind of feel like maybe you could make that argument where like the driver told the broker, hey, like, dude, I'm sick, I shouldn't be driving. Now, I think this goes back to the thing we talk about in training. Like, that's where you would defer back to the carrier and say, Well, like, I can't tell you whether you're safe or not safe to drive. Like, that is a decision that like you and your company need to make. Let me know what you decide, put that in writing, that likely would have avoided a $600 million lawsuit. Like that very small detail that we talk about, this is why these things are super important, right? Like, I again, nobody knows if that wouldn't have gone that way, but like that's where it really looks like this entire case hinged on that very specific thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, like, you know, if you flip it, right? Had the broker, had C. H. Robinson's rep said, like, dude, if you're sick, don't drive. And the guy's like, No, I, you know, I can't afford to have a service failure. I might lose my job, blah, blah, blah. And he drives anyway. And if that conversation was recorded, right, you'd have some defense there. But here's another question.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Yeah. And I genuinely have no idea. But like, from like a layman's point of view, I'm like, because somebody in this comment said, like, here's the other one. Well, in every industry, business, and is even true of homeowners, you're responsible for the actions of those you hire, be it an employee or a contractor. If you hire a contractor to cut a tree down at your house and it falls on your neighbors and they don't have insurance, the court will make you pay. This is true in every industry. But here's the thing, right? Like, I don't think that's the same at all. Because like if you borrow an employee, like if you like, if I'm borrowing an employee, I'm gonna pay them directly. So, like, to me, how you would define if I had control over them was did I pay them directly or did I pay you? Because if I paid you, they work for you if you paid them, right? Yeah, I guess they're saying, like, if your employee comes and does work for me and I tell him what to do, it's like my responsibility, but like he doesn't work for me. Like, I'm so confused as to how that line actually would be drawn in some of these things. Because I'm like, how in the world are you just take a simple one? I literally just had an electrician come over this morning to like do a little bit of like install some lights. I'm like, okay, so as a homeowner, you're supposed to what vet the credibility and education of everybody. Like you call an electrician and a guy comes over and somehow shocks somebody else or doesn't wire something correctly. Like, how are you supposed to gauge whether or not like the guy who showed up actually passed training and is certified whatever? Like, I mean, like every time like to me, that just like makes zero sense. And also, like, I still kind of feel like that shouldn't have happened, but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

Yeah, yeah, agreed. Agree. I I think what's so I guess the takeaway is like, yeah, don't exercise control over a driver because it's not as a broker, it is not your uh position or it's not your lane to do that. It's just that should be on the carrier, and this is a lesson for for folks to take away. And the other thing too is that those if you're not looking in depth at these CSA categories, you really should. And if you don't understand them, you really should educate yourself on what they are, what violations fall into what, how the scores are calculated, etc. Even though I just said it's confusing, um, you need to understand and have um have some sort of uh rules in your carri selection process and SOP that dictates what are we okay with. Some brokers are okay with um, you know, exceeding threshold in one, some are in two. In this case, CH Robinson got you know kind of hammered on this one for allowing two. So that's you know, take that for what it's worth. Um, there's brokers that aren't aren't okay with any. You're gonna vastly um, you know, shrink your carrier pool um by being more strict, naturally, and in any regard, whether it's about safety scores or authority history or whatever. Um it's a decision you have to make, though. And if you want to have what the big buzzword, buzzwords here are a defensible carrier selection policy, you need to really look at what are we okay with? What can we defend ourselves with? And not just the objective, okay, if they're over in two thresholds or more, um, but how are we going about the process of interacting with our carriers when they're contracted on a load? So telling a driver who is sick that you're not going to reschedule his delivery appointment because he's sick and that you're pressuring him to do it, well, now we have precedence set. We've been saying since the Montgomery case in the Supreme Court that it's going to take a big nuclear verdict for us to see what kind of precedent is set. And I don't believe that this is going to um, I don't think it's gonna end up in the, you know, in the same situation that it is now with 604 million and whatever percentage being pinned on C. H. Robinson, I'm sure it'll go through appeals. Um, but I mean, they're I don't I don't think they're gonna get off the hook with nothing. Like they that they definitely had some wrongdoing in this, that's for sure. So as did the carrier and as did the driver. What I don't understand though is like the driver, I I don't remember the exact percentages, but the driver was handed like the majority. Authority responsibility in this, I believe. Um even if it even if the driver wasn't, but they're still given some. Like let's say they were given 20%, like 600 million, like how do you he doesn't have arguably doesn't have 20% of $604 million. Like, what are you gonna do then?

SPEAKER_02 24:25

45% fault to the driver, 32% to the carrier, 23 to CH. Got it.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

So it's big news though. Big news. Um sports NFL is around the corner. I'm going to training camp this weekend for the bills. Can't wait. Um any news in uh Steelers Nation?

SPEAKER_02 24:49

Hold on. That borrowed employee funding is what matters financially. It made CH vicariously liable for the driver and carrier shares too. Yes. Pushing its total exposure to 68%, likely because the carrier's assets, insurance, and the deceased driver's estate won't cover much of the judgment.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Okay. Oh, the dri oh the driver died too?

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Oh. Oh. Tragic story. Um yeah, this is gonna be an interesting one. Um sports, I was saying uh training camp is is underway for the NFL, so the season is around the corner. Um, any you you still listen to your like Pittsburgh Sports Radio? Anything going on?

SPEAKER_02 25:38

I do every morning, not much, just mostly that it started and some nothing, honestly, for as a ready for noteworthy.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

All you fantasy football players, get ready for your drafts. I know I'm I'm in like four different leagues, so I gotta go, you know, do all my all my different uh fantasy drafts. So I think they said let's see, Josh Allen naturally like a very strong um fantasy quarterback. An interesting one I saw too is Cam Ward, second year quarterback. He plays for the Titans, said he's gonna be a top 10 quarterback for fantasy leagues this year. So we'll see. All you Titans fans. Um all right, you got anything for sport uh anything else for sports? Let's talk. Let's talk some content here. So speaking of employees, we're talking about CH Robinson and borrowed employees. Um, we were talking off-air a little bit about you know, what it like, you know, if you're hiring an employee and talking about what are you doing all day and what are you contributing to the company? What does it mean to cover your own salary, things like that? And I was like, this would make for a good discussion, so let's just talk about that today. Um because oftentimes when we like I have seen people get hired in brokerage, and I can usually tell fairly early on if they're gonna last or not. And usually it comes down to like are they doing revenue producing activity? And like I'll I'll tell a couple of like a couple of real stories about people that were hired in brokerage that didn't make it, and I kind of saw this early on. These weren't people that worked for me, but they were people that I was aware of that were hired in various roles. But like had a guy that was hired to come in and like be like a business development director. Like his goal was like, come in, you're an experienced broker, bring some of your customers with you, go get new customers, build a team, you know, build like a little brokerage operation, right? The guy comes in in like week two and week three, he's like trying to look into like health insurance plans for his future team and like looking into like new software to use for his team, like things that are they're relevant at some point in your journey. But like step one should be like, let's start putting some numbers up, right? That guy lasted about four months and was let go because he never even covered his own salary, meaning the um brokerage revenue or gross profit that he produced um after expenses. Well, first of all, the prof the gross profit that he produced didn't cover his salary, not to mention his employee, you know, taxes and benefits and things like that. Um and that's the gross profit that doesn't take into account the cost of like you know, all the expenses that go into his operation, like his you know, utilities, the heat insurance, air conditioning, insurance, all the things, right? And then you have uh another guy, different um different

From Lawsuit To Hiring Reality

SPEAKER_00 28:46

um office, similar role, you're gonna come in and like grow an existing sales team and very well experienced in the industry, and he spent a year doing things like just he hired a bunch of people trying to get them to make calls and was going to like local colleges trying to recruit like kids out of college to like basically like the TQL model, go get these young, hungry kids. Um, but like wasn't doing any of the customer calls or visits himself. It was just like, oh, I'm gonna come in and like be the boss, and it's like, yeah, at some point being the boss is a vital role in an organization, but you kind of have to like do the

Why Some Hires Never Produce

SPEAKER_00 29:30

ground level work first. And he made it a year and was let go. And I remember the dude called me and he's like, I don't really understand. Like, and I asked, I was like, Well, what did you guys like how much did you grow in the last 12 months? And he's like, Well, we kind of like stayed we ramped up a lot. He's like, Well, yeah, he's like, we kind of like stayed the same, like might have grown a little bit. And I was like, But you added seven employees and all their expenses, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, and I was kind of explaining like what what you know what we've done on in my in my area in the last 12 months, and it was like hey, that's just to rem just to remind you, this is how this works.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Money comes in, that's income, revenue, money goes out, those are expenses. What's left is what the business has. If the revenue doesn't go up and you spend a bunch on expenses, we actually lost more money this year. Like yeah, that's how this works. Like it's pretty straightforward. Like, it's not like rocket science. To your other point, I was talking with um one of my partners yesterday about this, and he runs like third or fourth generation um like seafood company, food manufacturer shipper. And like his approach has always been like learn every job in the entire business because like his grandfather started it, right? And then you do everyone's job, you learn how to do all of them, and then you lead people by doing it and showing by example, not by hiring people and having them do the thing, right? I'm like, I do the same thing. I'm like literally any company I've ever come in will for any period of time to like actually run, operate, or own. I do everybody's job, do accounting, do the IT side, literally learn everything. Not because you should continue to do everyone's job, but like you need to be able to know where are the most likely things to go wrong, right? And doing it gives you like firsthand experience, right? Like again, I was redoing accounting this year, and I'm like, oh yeah, I one, it was a good refresher, but two, really quickly, I'm like, oh, doing it like this, people are gonna make mistakes. I'm like, why? Because I'm making mistakes. And I'm like, I am going very slow and paying attention, which means that anybody doing this full time will make an error because this system is not standardized. Everything's an exception. So like it has to be standardized, or there will just be mistakes everywhere, right? Like, and you can literally apply that to like almost every role in an organization. That's why you will often see, still to this day, there was somebody recently I just saw, it was in a headline article. I didn't read it, but like some huge company, the guy basically started as an intern, is now a CEO. And the article was about like how you go from like intern to the CEO role, stay there his whole career. And he's like, Oh, it's kind of simple. Like, I just always did a little bit more and like tried to learn the people's jobs around me and to help people, and I just did that for like 25 years. He's like, I didn't really overcomplicate it. Like, I just did a little bit more than everyone asked me of me every single day and helped the people around me and just kept getting promoted. Like, kind of the same instance. Yeah, it's like rags directly. Yeah, yeah. Like, so well, here, like I want to ask you this question too. So, like, how would you define is an employee as a broker covering their own salary or their own expenses or their own seat, you'll call it. Because, like, every broker has a book of business. That's not like a random term we picked. Each broker runs his own little business. Like, they have support, they have revenue, they're in charge of both what they charge their customers, pay their carriers, the money that is left over, which is profit. Like, they're all little business units. So, like, how would you say, like, very round numbers? Should people start to think of this or look at this? Big picture.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah, so I think the easiest way, and I did this, I did this very early on. Um, and this doesn't cover all of it, but it's a good starting point, at least, if you're not doing anything. And this is to look at gross profit produced compared to um the cost like you just your salary and commission. Like the one that I mentioned early on, that's I would say is a starting point to so it let's say if you make fifty thousand dollars a year as a salary as a broker, and you know, let's do round numbers.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

Do sixty grand because it's five grand a month. So five grand a month.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

So let's say if you make five grand a month, um the the back of napkin math would be you should be putting up five thousand dollars in gross profit, right? To be considered covering your seat. Now, that is a starting point because that is not all inclusive and there's way more expenses that go into it. If you want to get really granular on it, what I would say is for the specific employee, you have to look at not just their paycheck, but also look at what is the cost to actually have them operating. So if you have a computer, phone line, you know, their portion of the heat, air conditioning, electric, all the things, right? And you figure out, okay, here's our overhead for this person. They need to be covering their pay and all of that, right? That's break-even. That is if they're just break-even, it's a waste of time and a waste of money. What I really look at is what is the ROI for the um company? And this is where I'm a big fan of that.

SPEAKER_02 34:47

Before you get to that, just on the one for the break-even, right? Yep. We were talking about this recently, right? And I went back and did some research again on industry to see if this has changed much in the past 10 years, right? But like you mentioned TQL. So to keep your job at TQO, you need to be doing $4,000 a week in gross profit. Your commission is typically 25%. Your salary for round numbers is about four grand a month. So their number is four times your take-home salary before you're earned commission. That's break even. So, like at four grand a week and GP, that's 16 grand a month, your salary is four

Covering Salary With Gross Profit

SPEAKER_02 35:25

grand. You have to generate four times your salary to continue being an employee there, right? And they do it on a 12-week average because numbers go up and down. So it's not like, oh, you had a terrible week, you lose your job. Like, and like to me, like round numbers, like here's the other thing that was interesting, right? Theirs is four times. But if you look across the industry, what I found is like it's a third, a third, a third. So basically, if you take every dollar of gross profit for a brokerage, a third goes to all of the company's expenses, insurance, tech, real estate, whatever, every single thing and every bill that company has, a third of their GP should go to all their bills, a third of it should go to salaries and commissions, and a third of it goes to retained earnings of the brokerage. Now, here's where this shifts a little bit. That's for a stable brokerage. If you are hiring new people, which take anywhere four to six months before they get any customers, and probably eight before they're at break-even, that third the business gets goes into that bucket. So basically the business's third is actually really 20%. And a growing brokerage will take 10% and move that over to the employees and salary. And it's basically like new hire training for like that six to eight months. So, really, 40% kind of goes to um your staff, salaries, and commission, and overhead and support, right? And that's why I think TQL has ended up being a fourth. Because when I look at this again, I'm like, that makes sense. TQL hires trains and lets go a ton of industry people. Like there was always that joke that like basically Integrity Express and TQL in Ohio have trained like half of the industry at this point because like they just train so many people that that just end up in the middle of the street. Exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

So it's funny you brought up the third, third, third thing because I remember out of college, actually, no, when I was in high school still, I worked at a restaurant locally, and the guy that was running it, he used the same mentality. He's like, I was like, how do you price like a menu item? He's like, well, he goes, basically, when you look at every dollar that comes in, a third of it is gonna pay for the food, a third of it pays for your job and everyone else that works here, and a third of it is company profits and money that we can use to buy, you know, a new refrigerator or fix something. It's it's it goes into your operating funds, right? Um, and then to your point on ramp up timeline, this is what I think is very important too, and I want to speak on it for a second, is you know, it I I work in a world of primarily agents where most people already have an established book of business. So we we have different, it's not a third, a third, a third, um, because there's a lot more money being paid out, but there's way less that goes into training. But whenever we hire, whether it's a W-2 or maybe it's somebody that waited out a non-compete, non-solicit, whatever, I always set an expectation, and it's different for everyone, depending on what's realistic. But one that I had recently was like, all right, you're coming in after a one year um sitting on the sidelines, working on a different job because you had a non-compete, non-solicit, whatever. So what I, you know, we kind of came to agreement of, well, what does success look like during those first few months? And it was, all right, in month one, we agreed activity is what we determined as success. So the number of touches you're making, the number of calls you're making, the number of follow-ups, the number of customer or prospects in your pipeline, that was kind of like the benchmark that we had set. It wasn't dollars of revenue or gross profit. It was just activity. And then month two was we want to see loads moving. We want to see steady growth in those weeks of that second month of both your revenue and gross profit. And then month three was you need to round out, or I guess not round out, but complete your ramp up so that by the end of month three, you are at a certain weekly or monthly uh rate of production that we can both agree on that is realistic and successful. And there's not like an arbitrary like all in number that works for everybody there, but like to TQL's point, it was a 12-week rolling average, and you have what, six months to get there or eight months or whatever it was. Um IUC if you ever like look, if you're ever hiring or recruiting for brokers, um, it's very funny the amount of resumes you'll find online from someone that was at TQL for roughly five and a half to six months. Because they didn't make it, right? They tried it and they didn't make it and they got let go. Um but yeah, I think that's funny because that that ramp up timeline.

SPEAKER_02 40:12

I agree because I noticed that after when I would talk to people, when people were like looking at my resume, they're like, Oh, like you're probably pretty good at this. I'm like, Well, how do you know? I'm like, it's like a resume. I'm like, you can kind of say anything. They're like, oh, because you were there for like years. They're like, anybody that's there for like more than two years can like actually do the job because like 5,000 people or whatever work there at any given time, and like 80% of them aren't there like a year later, whatever the number was, like it's super high or super low success rate, super high attrition. Yep. The other thing I wanted to add to what you were saying, too, is like I think if you create the right incentives,

Ramp Up Plans That Actually Work

SPEAKER_02 40:45

like one, it reduces so much oversight need. And like these things kind of take care of themselves. Meaning, like, there's a I think I know it was a Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, had that saying that was like, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the behavior, right? Like, tell me what they're getting paid for and how I'll tell you what they're doing really well and what they're probably not doing, right? And to me, like if these are structured correctly, like you just don't also need as many managers. Like someone asked me at the one time, they're like, Well, how many people are actually overseeing like an office of like 150 people? I'm like, there's really like one manager. There's like team leaders and people that help, but like there's really one manager. And it's because like if you don't charge enough margin to your customers, like you don't get paid. So like nobody's walking around going, Hey, did you make sure like there was you weren't running loads for breakeven losses all day? Like nobody does it because like you don't make any money at your job. You basically go to work for free. So like nobody has to do those things, right? The other thing is like you don't get paid until your customer pays the bill. Then guess what? No one has to worry about the broker making sure they get the PODs from their carriers, making sure they get the paperwork from the carriers. Why? Because if you don't send it to accounting, you don't get paid commission. Nobody has that job. You don't need to hire for it. That's why you have like at the time there were, I think there were literally like maybe 15 or 20 accountants at TQL in their whole department, and we were like four billion dollars when I was there. So, like that amount of revenue is getting processed by like two dozen people because it's all standardized. I've gone into brokerages that are like 25 million that have like four people that are in accounting. Yeah, I had one client I went and looked at, they were like, Oh, we need to hire another accountant. I'm like, Well, what's your staff now? They're like, We got two, we're paying 150 grand a year, and we need a third because like it's just so hard to keep up with the accounting. I'm like, but like, why is that happening? And then you just look upstream and it's like, oh, because the brokers like don't get the PODs from the carriers, don't get the paperwork from the carriers, don't up their rates. Basically, all of this work just fell downhill to the accounting department. And they're like, we need more accountants. I'm like, no, you need your employees up front to do what they're getting paid for, and then you don't need this massive overhead in the back end. And like, that's why, like, when you structure these correctly, these some of these things just kind of take care of themselves. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Yeah, so

Incentives Shape Behavior

SPEAKER_00 43:05

it's funny. So I looked up your quote there. It is Charlie Munger, and the quote is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So it's like, um, to your point, right? If if a broker is paid commission when the customer pays, the broker is very incentivized to make sure that customer gets invoiced and pays their bill, right? We have the same thing uh if the like our brokers are paid on if the customer's invoiced, right? And there's a cutoff every week, and there's a lot of people that are hustling and rushing to make sure that they get paperwork from their carriers submitted by that cutoff so that the load gets invoiced and they get paid that week, right? Another example, and the episode we did with Beth Carroll about compensation plans is I highly recommend it if you guys haven't listened to it. It was a couple years back.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

I forgot we did that. I have to send that to somebody because like I literally recommended that book to three people in the past two weeks. Yeah. And I forgot we have a whole interview that we did that I could send them. Yep. Very good.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

She's she was great. Um, I think her company is a prospero group. Um, but anyway, don't remember, but we had a great conversation with her, and it made me think about like if you have a carrier sales rep who is straight, oh, actually, this is I'll give you a real example. It's a guy I used to work with 10 years ago, and he didn't commission any of his carrier sales reps. He's like, I just pay him a great salary, that way they know that like, you know, they're well taken care of, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, but I'm like, they have no incentive to like try to find a better rate for a truck, they're just gonna take the first truck. And that's an issue that he ran into was thin margins. And he ended up having to play the volume game. And I was like, dude, I was like, if you were to incentivize them on, you know, if they hit a certain goal for average profit per load or margin percentage or total gross profit in a certain month, or a combination that's weighted of all of the above, well, now to Charlie Munger's quotes point, that's going to, you know, influence the outcome, right? They're going to make you know more phone calls to carriers and they're going to try to negotiate a carrier at a better rate. Or if it's a you know, a customer sales rep, they're going to try and get you know a little bit more out of their customer. I used to do this exercise with folks a while back that was like, you know, we looked at everyone's performance for the last like quarter or year, whatever it was. And I was like, if you were able to increase your gross profit by one, two, or three percent on your numbers, here's how much more money you would have put in your pocket. And some people were like, can you put like a can you add to the TMS like a little thing that tells me my commission the same way that they have like tips? If you do 12%, 15%, 20%, 22%, whatever, like just kind of visualize that number. And I was like, that's pretty genius.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Great idea. I so I did the same thing, right, with somebody last week where they were at like 11% margins and I I think they did like 250 loads a month. I was like, okay, like for an example, if you were able to negotiate $21 less on every load you ran this month, right? And just got like $21 more out of your customer on every load, their margin went to like 16%. Like just on those numbers, right? And it's like people don't realize that like this job is not try to make a killing on any one load. It's doing it consistently a little better. That's why odd pricing is a really good negotiation strategy. Like if your customer's willing to pay $800 or $1,200 or three grand, they'll probably pay $3,021 or $1,821, right? And there's a psychological benefit where you go, like, dude, I just need like an extra $21. Where people are like, oh, like that sounds reasonable. Okay. Right. And you do the same thing on the other end. And like if you do that over like even a pretty low volume brokerage, it it was like, I think like that 4%, I think they were on track to do like 80 grand that month, they would have made like an extra $15,000 or whatever it was. Like it was like two full salaries for somebody, just in those little numbers. And like those are the things that I think really make an impact if you focus on those. I think that tool is a great idea. The other thing I wanted to add to the Beth Carroll part, because I just did this last week, is the incentive for the dispatch or the people covering the loads, I think is great because it makes them want to strive for a better margin. The outcome takes care of itself with the right incentive, but there's an exclusion. And Beth Carroll had a really good example of this in the book because there's an opposite or inverted aspect of our industry where actually your most profitable loads usually take the least amount of work and cover the fastest because you have enough money and it's a good lane. The ones that take you four to six hours where you work all day to cover those loads, you usually lose money or break even. So what happens is in that like the Chicago model where you have a bunch of carrier dispatchers and then you got salespeople in the other department, is nobody will work on those loads because their margin percentage, they know they'll get basically um penalized for doing a load that needs help. And also, those are the loads your customer almost always really needs help and you want to get covered, and nobody wants to jump at. So the way I've been suggesting is like you basically have like either a button in your TMS or just a spreadsheet where like these loads are excluded is one way. So they don't weight them against their profit percentage for a career sales rep if they're getting paid commission on it. Or you give them like a multiplier. Like if you cover one super hard load at break-even, basically you can your next three loads are worth double the commission. So you actually increase your commission percentage because you went and jumped at those loads. And however you do that, like to me, that really matters because every broker I talked to on the sales side that has this model of a brokerage complains like nobody takes their hard loads. And then the career sales are like, Oh, yeah, like I had a really good margin percentage this month. If I covered that load, I fall below my benchmark and don't get paid commission. So, like, you need some way that you're excluding these either from that comp or you put in like a multiplier or a kicker. So, like when the broker goes, this is a hard load, you indicate it somehow. And then the carrier sales rep again, however it plays out, every broker's a little different, but like it's two or three times the margin on like the load they cover right after or before. And also another way to solve this is like when I had this problem, I would go like to my customer, hey, you give me a really hard load. You and I both know the budget isn't on this. Okay, Nate,

Paying For Hard Loads Fairly

SPEAKER_02 49:55

my customer, what can you give me two more loads to make up for this one? Because you know that I'm gonna have three guys work on this all day. Give me two long haul loads so you got a decent budget in, and I'll take this one that no one else took off your plate. Now, I helped you, you helped me. Then I take the two easy-to-cover loads and I give them to my carrier sales rep that covered the hard one. So then they get three covers and it actually offsets. So there's multiple ways to address this, but like it is not just one formula, I think, because you do end up with that incentive, but then your service rates fall into your customer because everyone just avoids those loads.

SPEAKER_00 50:29

Yeah. I'll uh the la the last thing I want to hit on here is, and this kind of goes to the early on when you're first hiring, training, onboarding a new rep is to set the expectation for what does you succeeding look like? And I heard I remember hearing, I think it was Dave Ramsey like four or five years ago. What he was put out something about like, whenever they hire somebody new, um, and it's different for every job, right? If you're a salesperson, it's gonna look different than if you're an accounting or whatever, but um, your performance ultimately needs to meet a certain level for your the cost to hire you to be worth it and to create an ROI. And to have that conversation with your employees early on is um is gonna be important. So, like if you were to look at a you know, in brokerage, right? For a salesperson, it might be like to your TQL methodology, like you need to be doing X amount per week on average or per month or whatever you know time period you want to use. Um, you need to be doing this amount and this time frame on average in order for your for you to be considered successful at your job. Otherwise, if you're below that, you're at risk for um us to have you know for negative performance reviews and potentially um, you know, getting fired or terminated because you're costing us and not earning us an ROI. Right. And the same thing. And it should be clear, like you said.

SPEAKER_02 51:58

Like it needs to be clear and discussed, and it shouldn't be vague. And also, like, I think if you're ever doing this, like you want that time frame to be as close to the behavior as possible. And what I mean by that is like if you do this every quarter, it's too far away. And in your brain, you're like, oh, I'll get a new customer next month and I can be slow this week. When it's a month, it's still too far out. You want it weekly and daily almost because now you've got a metric of like, did I have a productive day? Right. And did I have a productive week? And was I above that metric? Because the smaller the chunks of time, the more effective the incentive is.

SPEAKER_00 52:36

Yeah, exactly. And if you're in a a non-revenue producing role and you're just a straight expense, there's gonna be other metrics that you would look at. So, like let's say, um, let's say you're in accounting, right? It should be, all right, well,

Benchmarks That Stay Close To Work

SPEAKER_00 52:50

we're gonna be looking at how many invoices can you process on average per day or you know, whatever, whatever the case might be. Um, but there's ways to put metrics on any role that's out there, right? Um if it's like if you're an IT person, it's like, you know, and again, I'm gonna oversimplify processed. What's that? Tickets processed.

SPEAKER_02 53:13

Well, most IT systems have a ticket.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

You can look at like, you know, what's our uptime, right, compared to like downtime? How many issues do we have um that are getting reported on because you know the IT department didn't maintain something properly? I'm not an IT guy, so I'm probably you know not speaking to that perfectly, but it's an example. Here's another one.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

The other one that's super prevalent, which is why a lot of and like I do agree, like this administration was kind of pushing to get rid of quarterly earnings reports. Now, like the upside is like it gives investors visibility on a quarterly basis to like know what's actually happening with their investments, which is the upside. The downside is when you look at all these companies' productivity, like they all ramp up significantly the last three weeks of every quarter, right? Production, sales, everything starts closing, everybody's super busy, right? And it's like honestly, you kind of don't even want your employees to be like working on this like emotional roller coaster. You want it to be consistent, which is why, like, if you had benchmarks that weren't quarterly that were closer to weekly or daily, like one, the employee or human emotional toll is lower, the productivity is higher, and everybody just tends to do better, which is why I think like that's a ridiculous system. Like, I when we work with large companies that are earning Fortune 500 or publicly traded, everyone has some version of this happening in there. Misaligned incentives because of quarterly earnings. Like they'll want to do objectives that are a year to a year and a half, and like you just can't get them done because at the end of every quarter, it goes out the window to just make the earnings go back up, and then you got to start back over. It's like shoots and ladders.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

I'll give you a great example. And this is this is to show you an example of why I think incentives can be, it goes back to your Charlie Munger quote. I'll show you the outcome. Like, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Um, and why it can be done wrong is I I worked in college and in post-college, I worked at a Fortune 100 company, Ingram Micro. They're a an IT distributor. Um, so we would sell like software, you know, hardware, anything in that space. It we would we would sell it to resellers who would then sell it to an end user. But every quarter end, um, we would work till like midnight processing orders and you know, all of that. And we had this like slush fund of money that was set aside that you could apply on your orders if it was approved by management to add additional profit into the load, so like, or into the orders. So we would literally have orders that were processed, like we would

How Quarterly Incentives Break Companies

SPEAKER_00 55:45

bid on something and win it, and sometimes it was at a loss, and then we would just apply the slush money to make it look like it was profit. We're just basically making up profit out of a slush fund at the end of a quarter because you have your quarterly earnings reports that would go out. And I think they're like number 90 on the Fortune 100 list. But that's a great example of like at the end of the day, you're are you really? Is it really as profitable as you're reporting it to be? Not really, because you actually kind of did it at a loss. Um, but anyway, yeah, I think to put a bow on all this, have that conversation up front with a new hire of what success looks like because the examples I gave earlier at the beginning of the episode about you know, folks getting let go and they were kind of doing the wrong things and not growing. Well, what didn't happen in those scenarios is the person that hired them um didn't set clear expectations on what is your first, second, third month look like as far as meeting benchmarks and you know success criteria. There was no the guy that made it a year and was like let go, surprising to him. Um never had any regular like uh performance reviews or you know, meetings with uh his boss, like stuff like that. So there was no like pulse check temperature read along the way to know. And then all of a sudden it's like that person's shocked when they're let go. But then you know, an outsider like me looking in is like, well, how did you not hold yourself accountable? Like it's kind of gotta be obvious. But it's like, yeah, you know, you might think that, but if you don't, if you're the person hiring them, you might think, yeah, well, they obviously have to know that they have to be producing enough to cover their own seat, but they might not think that. Like when I, you know, think about your first like jobs when you were younger, like you didn't know what you had to do to be successful, you were usually told. And if you weren't told, you would have had no idea. You know what I mean? So I wanna do that. And that's why I also think like people that hire their friends or family and they like they're easy on them, and they don't say, you know, it's like that's a it's a different relationship. You have to wear a different hat when that person is. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 57:54

But you're not doing anybody a favor by not not giving them feedback as to what is expected and where they are in relation to what that benchmark is, right? Because one, some people aren't a fit for whatever job they're in, and maybe it's just this stage in their life, maybe they were and now they aren't, maybe they are now, but they won't be later. But like that changes. And also, like you should let them know so that they can determine if this is the job they want to stay in and if they are meeting the expectation. So, like, that is I think incredibly important to be clear on. To your other thing, the two things I wanted to add to is like um the other side of an incentive, okay. And this is something that like became apparent to me later in brokering was like when you have to make significant margin to make commission, right? In a model where you gotta be able to do four times your salary before you earn a dollar a commission. You basically need to operate at like 25% margins what you're moving. And you don't get help until you hit that number. So you're like literally you're on an island. Everything's cradle to grave. You got to get your customers, you got to cover your trucks, you got to schedule your appointments, you got to do all of those things. There's a limit in a day, right? And like that is kind of around for most people, like 25 to 30 loads a week for one human. Like, you kind of run out of time, depending on like the customers and the freight you're moving, right? So you have to get really good at leveraging problems to get higher margins, right? And it reminds me of a customer I had where I was moving, it was um Cooper Consolidated, and I actually ran into them last week. But they had huge service issues with they brought in whole boats of bulk steel in from South America, and they were like, listen, our other carriers and brokers, we've had horrible service issues, things are disorganized because it was bulk. So the broker had to like literally manage the POs and the Stevedors loading the trucks from remote. Like you had to literally let them know like this goes on this truck, this goes on this truck because they went to different places. So I was like, Excel sheets and making sure this is all done. They're like, we have tons of issues. Can you help us? And I'm like, yeah, but like for me to do all that, this is what my number would be, right? And I think I was probably like around 30%. And I did this for like six months. A boat would come in every month, and it would take me a little less than a month to get the whole thing picked up and delivered, right? And after six months, um, I remember her name was Karen, was the customer I was working with. She was like, Ben, like, I love working with you guys. Like, I've literally not had any issues, but like I have to find somebody cheaper. So, like, doing really good at that and being able to get those margins up also had this inverse effect of like, I kept losing customers after like four to six months because they're like, service is great, but my boss is yelling at me because like we're just spending too much on shipping. Like, I haven't had any problems. This is great. My job's super easy, and all my customers love me. But the guy who's in charge of our finances is screaming at me to reduce the shipping costs. And I realized as this is happening, I'm like, oh, like you kind of have to thread this needle. Like, you can't just keep pushing for more because the other side of that is your customer is also losing a little bit at a certain amount, right? So, like, there is a reasonable number you kind of need to be able to stay at so that like you're not putting undue negative incentive on your customer's bottom line, but you're profitable enough. And those are the relationships I see with smaller brokerages. That's why they'll have customers for like 20 years. Like, you don't see that in big companies like that. That's why they're not really worried if they lose a customer. They know they'll pick it back up in a year or so. They don't try to keep them forever, they just know their model won't sustain those things. But in smaller companies, which is why I think there's a huge advantage if you work at a smaller brokerage, is like you can really learn about your customer and find a happy medium where like they don't have any problems, you're making a reasonable profit and they're not getting gouged.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:54

Yep. Last thing I'll I'll head on, this kind of goes back to like giving feedback to to your reps, is I do um and I I kind of adopted this from a company I used to work for. Um, like a the annual review, there's a a self-review done by the employee, and then the actual review done between the employee and their supervisor. So I created this, um, I think it was like three or four years ago for one of the guys that we hired um as an employee to help up help us out. And I'll just kind of rattle off. These are the things that we that you know, so basically I say, here's here's the self-review, fill this out, send it to me, and then we'll meet together and we'll discuss my such a good idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:35

Yeah, I forgot about that. I'm so glad you brought that up. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

So here's like in um I'll I'll can send you this offline, please. But here, here's for anyone listening, here's here's what it kind of goes through. So um, and it has they're gonna self-rate themselves and give comments. So the first one is quality work, unsatisfactory, fair, good, outstanding. So they have to select which one they think they're in and then give comments as to why. Um, adaptability and flexibility, communication, planning and organization, job knowledge, teamwork, problem solving decision making, and then overall performance. So they're grading themselves on all those categories. And in the Army, we do a very similar thing with um non-commissioned officer uh reviews and officer reviews. Um, and then employee feedback on a scale from one to 10, how would you rate your satisfaction with your current position? What is most important to you in your career? Example, compensation, time off, work-life balance, et cetera. What are your future career goals? What more can you and the company do to help you achieve these goals? And what other topics would you like to discuss? So um, and then you know, they would fill it out, send to me, and then I would do my review on them given their self-review, and we'd have a conversation. And what you'd oftentimes find out is like what's really important to somebody is not always what you would think is important to do. It's almost never, they're almost always different.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:00

Like the assumption of what people think is important to other people is like almost always not correct. Yeah, like almost a hundred percent of the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:08

Yep. We I mean, I remember talking with we had Trey Griggs on. This is probably years ago. I lived at my old house. I remember when we did that that

Reviews, Feedback, And The Platinum Rule

SPEAKER_00 1:04:15

episode about like employee like incentives and and things like that and compensation, and like it just really is different for everybody. But um, yeah, I'll I'll send a copy to you, Ben. Um anything else on the uh we kind of went we did a wide array of discussion there on like hiring and expectations and employee development and whatnot. But anything else that you wanted to add in? Any other quotes? You always have a good quote.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

No, but there is something I'm trying to find real quick. Um there there's like a category that because that what this was reminding me of is like this is like a super common thing in like marriages where the one person um appreciates a certain type of affection and the other doesn't the five love languages or whatever. Yeah, and it's acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. And the person who wrote this was Gary Chapman. And I've read this book in years, but it reminded me of this because my buddy was telling me this too, like, because I've known him and his wife since like high school, they've been married forever, and he just like read this recently and he's like, Oh, it was so true. He's like, for like years, he's like, My wife and I just like we showed affection the way we wanted it, but the other one wasn't that category, right? It's like I might appreciate receiving gifts, so I buy you a bunch of gifts, but you actually just want quality time and physical touch, right? And then you give me quality time when all I want are gifts because that's how I see affection. And then we both feel like we're doing the thing that is important to the other person, but it's someone else told me this there like it's the golden rule versus the platinum rule. The golden rule is treat other people how you want to be treated, the platinum rule is treat other people how they want to be treated, yeah. And you need to ask questions to know that first, but I do think that's incredibly important.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:10

Very good. That's a good add on there. All right, final thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:15

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

And until next time, go bells.