Episode 051: NAFA I&E 2022 Preview

Hey everyone, Josh here from the Fleet Success Show. I wanted to just take a second and make sure you know about the first of its kind Fleet Success Summit. It's happening right here in Phoenix, Arizona on April 20th and 21st. This is a— it's a 2-day event. It'll be unlike anything you've ever seen before in the world of fleet. We're bringing in 12 speakers to the stage to share the best in business, leadership, culture, and technology, not just from fleet, but other industries as well. All to help you drive success in your fleet. Go out, grab your tickets, register to attend at fleetsuccesssummit.com. And if you enter the code PODCAST at checkout, you'll get a 15% discount. We really hope to see you there. This is going to be an amazing 2 days. Go sign up now. fleetsuccesssummit.com.

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today by Jeff Jenkins.

Hey, welcome to Columbus, Ohio.

How is everybody doing out here? This is fun.

It's always fun.

So, well, it's been a lot of fun getting back out on the trade show circuit again. It's seen a lot of people like we were at NTA a few weeks ago. You were at MATS and Um, SORA. Yeah, you know, so doing a lot of those, but, you know, definitely been a lot more people out in the event space this year, so it's nice to see kind of everybody coming back out.

It, it actually is funny because it depends on like the industry on what the participation level is on people coming out or not.

True.

There's still a lot of, um, I think there's still a lot of governments that are a little bit cautious not allowing as many people to go out, which is typical.

Like, you know, they're going to be a little bit, they don't laggards on that, you know, slower to move out. Depends on where the government's at too.

True.

You know, if you're in California, it's very different than it is out here in Arizona. I know talking to a lot of the guys that are in the NAFA chapter in Pacific Southwest, you know, they're still not having in-person meetings, whereas like we're pushing in-person meetings quite a bit.

Yeah. So it just hits different, right?

So today we're talking a little bit about NAFA. We're at I&E 2022. Later today, I'm going to be speaking about avoiding death by meeting and using social media to advance your career. But, Jeff, you just had a session on DOT compliance.

I did. So it actually was Steve's, and, you know, we're missing Steve. He's got some family deals going on right now, so he, he can't be here with us, and he wasn't able to teach his class. And so I, I don't know if I'd say graciously, because DOT compliance isn't the most exciting topic out there. That's a boring topic by any means. But, you know, talking about just some of the different things that go along with the Department of Transportation and the rules and regs they got going on, there's a lot out there.

So I say like it's a boring topic, but it is critical.

Very critical.

There's reasons why the DOT regs exist in the first place. You know, it's like for people who didn't attend that class or weren't able to come because it was like a special add-on, what are some things that you talked about in that class?

Well, I mean, we talk about just, I mean, to start from the basics and the basics talking about how you've got to get registered with the Department of Transportation. And we'll go into, we go into how we do that. But then we go into certain things like that are requirements with the Department of Transportation and the rules you have to follow. You know, and I speak from a trucking background. So a lot of times when I talk about just different DOT rules when it comes to compliance, it is from that trucking space. Right. But there's certain things that you have to do when you're running a trucking company. As far as, you know, random drug tests and how you have to do, you know, your background tests. You have to go through and do the motor vehicle division backgrounds to get back, hey, what are the violations they've had? We talk about CSA scores and what the different categories are, you know, a little bit into how you can improve those scores and some of the things that you can do to make them better. Talk about roadside inspections, the things you have to have in your vehicles. I mean, there's a myriad and a long list of things that go into DOT compliance.

This is a 3-hour session, right? Like 3 or 4 hours.

It's a 4-hour session.

So if you want a good nap, right? Like, it was a good nap for Sunday afternoon.

Big lunch, go to sleep. So what I should have done is I should have talked like Ben Stein in this, because that would, you know, uh, Bueller, Bueller, as we see here, when the power carries to the exponential differential equation. Then it really would have been a good nap, but hopefully people got something out of it, right? I am by no means a DOT compliance expert, although I spent a lot of time in trucking. I actually had safety people to help with that, but I had to stay up on the rules and regulations and the things that, that you needed to do to stay compliant. And this actually, it's not just trucking, it goes across all fleets, right?

Utility fleets, commercial fleets, you know, Anybody that's got a liability on the road needs to have a USDOT number on the side of their vehicle. They do.

And you can tell because it's always posted right there on the side. So, I mean, there's certain levels of insurance you have to have. There's just a lot of things that go into this. It's a very— I'm not going to say a complicated subject. It's just a very detailed subject. And it seems like, as with most with the government, there's just more and more rules and regulations get added on top of it. So it's important. When you talk about compliance with the government, that you stay up to date on what those changes or additions may be.

Yeah. So on more exciting topics.

Oh, please.

I'll be talking later today about, so the one I get to do by myself, I was super excited when NAFA told me I got to teach this. This is something I got from Lencioni's book. You know me, I'm a big Lencioni super fan. It was a book called Death by Meeting, but it's also something I learned about. You have Patrick Lencioni who talks about it, but then I learned about it from several of my mentors. And so I took what he had and then I added like a bunch of Cajun spice to it. And like really, we talk about meeting rhythms and how to avoid death by meeting, which is like nobody likes wasting time in meetings.

Nobody who's productive likes wasting time in meetings.

Right. Like, I think about The Office. You remember how many wasted meetings Michael Scott had?

Yeah.

Right? You were just like, oh my gosh, like, this is so painful just watching this. I can't watch The Office.

But it's reality. That's the sad—

that's the—

it's a story of that time. Like, you know, like, it's funny, you see like memes that say something to the effect of, you know, just had a meeting that could have been an email.

Yep. So the idea is like, how do you avoid meetings like that? How do you make sure that you have a healthy meeting rhythm? What's the cadence between too many meetings, not enough meetings? So I go, I talk about like, what's the most important thing you're supposed to get out of your meetings? What kind of things should you be talking about at different types of meetings? Because I think a lot of people get sucked into that where the reason their meetings suck is because they're spending too much time talking about the wrong topics.

Yeah.

Or they don't have enough time to give to the topic, you know, that they need to talk about in depth. They're trying to fit a 30 or 40 minute discussion into 5 minutes and And everybody just gets frustrated. Like, what was the point of this?

Well, you got to have an agenda going into a meeting, right? You don't put out a meeting invite and say, hey, today we're going to talk about lunches at work, and then the whole meeting talks about what time you show up, right? It just defeats the point of that meeting.

Now, I will— I do have one slide in there talking about our weeklies where we actually don't have an agenda. We have a framework but no agenda. So I'll teach you guys how to do like, you know, real-time agendas and how to build that out so you have really fun, productive meetings and how meetings are a lot like movies and TV shows, or at least good meetings are a lot like movies and TV shows. Yeah, because we can sit through a 2-hour movie and not interact at all with the screen, right? Like, unless you're that guy in the theater who's like, "Don't go in there!" You know, or the gal sitting next to me when I watch Star Wars laughing at Yoda jumping around with a lightsaber, you know. Like, you just don't interact with the people on the screen. But here we are in meetings talking to people in a real live face-to-face situation, and we hate it. And so I'll talk a little bit about why that is. And that's, that is something straight out of Lencioni. He taught that to me, and I was really proud of that or happy with that. Something I've tried to incorporate into every one of my meetings. When things are getting a little bit stale, we start stirring up the pot a little bit.

Spice them up.

That's right. Throw in some Cajun spice. That's what I'm saying.

You know what I like about our non-agenda meetings that we have is I like how we go through, we talk, say, hey, these are the topics we want to discuss, and then we vote on them and we only talk about those topics. But if there starts to be a sidebar conversation, it's cut off immediately because it's really easy to segue and then not talk about the real issue. Correct.

And that's definitely something like a root cause of death by meeting, you know, is when you're not talking about the most important things or you let those sidebars go on, or now 2 or 3 people are having 3 different discussions. That drives me crazy because I'll have that and I nip that right out and I'm like, nope, nope, nope, bring it back. We're focused on this topic right now, you know, because somebody will be talking to so-and-so and they've now, you know, just totally taken a tangent. And then the rest of us are left talking about the main topic and these 2 aren't participating anymore. That's actually probably the most frustrating thing is the sidebar conversations, like a legitimate sidebar, like 2 people talking at the same time in a meeting. That is not productive at all. So we talk about killing that and how to make sure your meetings are really focused. It's gonna be a fun hour, like, so I'm looking forward to it.

Do you, do you— this is like kind of on topic, kind of not on topic— do you recommend, yeah, do you recommend when people are in meetings that they take notes?

Yes. Well, so it like, and I teach people, I'll talk about this in my session this afternoon, but taking notes, but really not— the notes aren't as important as capturing decisions.

Okay.

Right, like capturing the, the outcomes and the takeaways. Like, what are the things we need to know and the things we need to do? Um, for one, like, you know, you have somebody that just like records all the minutes of the meeting.

Yeah.

And I know like some people, like, you have to record the minutes because it's required by your charter or whatever, right? You know, people want to be able to review that and look at that. But for the most part, like, how many people actually go back and look at the minutes of last meeting?

None.

None. And some meetings, like, well, we're gonna spend the first 30 minutes reviewing the last minutes from the last meeting. Wait a minute, we already did that meeting. Why are we doing it again? You know, it just is a total waste of time.

Yeah, I don't typically take notes on the meeting. I'll write down like my takeaways or, yep, tasks that I have to do after the meeting. But I used to get really upset when I would call a meeting and no one would bring in like a pen, a paper, and a pad, right, to jot notes down. And maybe they've all got photographic memories, I don't know, but it made me always feel like whatever we're talking about just isn't important.

It isn't important enough to keep in store and stuff like that, right? Uh, I do like to institute a like a no laptop, no phone rule in my meetings.

Yep.

Uh, you know, people will pull up their laptops and pop something out in front of them, and you know, as soon as that, like, they've disengaged.

Oh yeah.

And now the people that you need, like, this should be the most important topics that you guys are dealing with right now, facing your business, facing your fleet. And if somebody's got their laptop open now, unless they're taking notes, because I've had that happen before, but I'd honestly rather them like take it in their pen and paper and then transfer it because it's too easy to get distracted. That's why I don't like Zoom meetings. It's because it's too easy to get distracted by everything else going on, email notifications, Teams notifications, whatever, that you forget what you're there for and you forget the purpose of why you're even in that room in the first place, which is to listen, weigh in, buy in, make a decision.

That's actually why I don't like virtual conferences or meetings as well, because you don't pay attention. No, you're multitasking the heck out of that. It's in the background, but you're not giving it any credence. It's just side noise.

It's a lot less value.

Yeah.

Um, so yeah, so I— as far as notes go, like, I like notes, but I'm more interested in what were the decisions and what are the tasks. And then I'm fine if you want to follow up next week. In fact, I think this is key part of having healthy meetings and accountability. Follow up the next week with, hey, this is what everybody agreed to do. Where did we end up? Like, did we do what we said we were going to do? Did we miss anything? Is there anything we need to go fix? You know, sometimes it's easy to like, wait a minute, didn't we say we're going to do that 2 or 3 weeks ago? And then you forget about it. And so like building those systems of accountability into your meeting structure is a really good practice.

Agreed.

The next session I'm teaching this afternoon is a— I get to actually co-teach with one of our super fan listeners, Michael Braband. He's been a guest on our podcast before.

He has. Hey, Michael.

And we're actually going to be talking about leveraging social media to help advance your fleet career. You know, a lot of people in fleet, I see quite a few people on social media, but a lot of people don't know how to use social media or haven't been exposed to it. Michael has done a terrific job using channel, his YouTube channel. He's got a Fleet Management 101 channel as a medium. He's got a ton of speaking opportunities going from basically like an unknown to, you know, now like a lot of people know who he is and know his face, you know, in a relatively short amount of time, like within the last 6, 7 months. So he's going to be talking about his journey and, you know, how you can do that same thing. And it helps get you noticed. I'll be talking about LinkedIn and some of the, the things you can do with LinkedIn to really advance your career where— and maybe not even advance your career, but just get to learn, network, because you never know when you might need somebody to come join your team, or you might be presented with an opportunity to go join another team. And the LinkedIn networking is like that ongoing, you know, we love going to trade shows because you get to see all the people and and all your friends from Fleet and meet new people. But LinkedIn just has that kind of networking happening all the time.

It does. And if you throw some controversy on LinkedIn, you're going to get all kinds of people looking at you, just FYI.

Oh yeah, if you really— if you want to drive traffic, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's a good vanity metric, but if you want to drive quality traffic, then there's a whole formula that you follow. You know, we call it the 10-3-1 Challenge. We got this from a LinkedIn influencer. And it's worked pretty well for us. And so we'll share some of those results.

It's done good. I would actually venture to say that I don't see a lot of fleet people on LinkedIn or social media.

They're not active.

No, no, they're not.

They have profiles, but they're not active.

No, you don't see a lot of posting. And a lot of people are, you know, they— and you guys are going to talk about this, but it's because people, most people, I don't know what to say. I don't know. I'm not going to provide any value, so I don't want to say anything at all. Or I don't want to waste people's space or have them scroll through and see something stupid. Right? There's always these, these, uh, self-doubts that creep in.

Negative tapes and things like that. And so it— all of that comes into play. We talk about how to get over that. We'll talk about some of our successes, you know, as a company leveraging LinkedIn, but then also some of the, like, quasi-success stories where people were able to move on to a job that paid them double. I've got a post out there, like, if you want to know, well, who should I be following on LinkedIn? I've got a whole post that talks about the 10 or 15 people that I think are really big influencers so far. And it'd be awesome to see more and more people jumping on that and getting onto that list and getting onto like, "Hey, wow, this is somebody who's sharing a story that really resonates with me." Yeah.

And here's the thing about social media. You're never going to get a million views or likes just by doing it casually or doing one post. I think I've thrown up some pretty good things on LinkedIn in the past, just about my past experiences, life, and it's gotten like 7 likes. And I'm like, dude, this is like hard-hitting stuff. What the hell? Don't you people recognize how important I am?

Hardly any interaction. You got 200 views and 2 reactions.

But then I post a picture of my shirt and ask everyone what color it is. And I got like thousands of people saying, oh, it's pink. No, it's orange. No, it's red.

It's like, what the hell? So sometimes the conversation is a bit trivial, you know, but for the most part, like there's been a lot that I've learned connecting with people on LinkedIn. There's been awesome questions, you know, like just this last week we had a question about, you know, cost per mile and how you should do that, which I think we're actually gonna do a podcast episode on. But I thought it was a lot of fun that we were actually able to have a conversation and, you know, Facundo contributed and a couple other fleet professionals had opinions on it. And so like having that type of conversation, NAFSA is interesting because they have a whole communities page, which is another extension of social media that not a lot of people tap into, as you know, online forums, things like that. So that's what that session is going to be all about is, you know, ways that you can expand your influence and be influenced by people in the, in the community digitally, you know, using social media and using those platforms that are available to us now that we never had before.

I bet you I learn something almost every day on LinkedIn. Just by scrolling through.

Yeah, at least one thing. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot. Like, it's definitely gotten— I will tell you, in the last year or two, it's definitely gone from being more of a, like, strictly business environment to a lot more personal. And not necessarily a Facebook environment, but it's, it's definitely brought the personal side of business.

I, I think that that helps relate it to people better. Yeah, right. So I'll tell stories about something that happened to me or my kids or whatever, but then I'll try and add a business principle behind it because I think people get a better understanding when you, you know, make it more realistic.

Right. All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for us today. Hopefully we'll see you guys at our session later this afternoon. If not, we've got our Fleet Success coming up, coming up next week.

Oh my goodness.

This thing has come so fast. It's awesome.

I heard there's like a pinch-hitting speaker that's going to be there too, who's just phenomenal.

Phenomenal.

Phenomenal.

So although I will admit that they put me to sleep one time, so I don't know how phenomenal they are, but probably not that much. Mesa, Arizona, April 20th, 21st, literally next week. fleetsuccesssummit.com. It really is going to be awesome. We've got the book coming out. We just looked at proofs last week. We should be— by the time we get back to the office, we should have prints in our hands. We're going to be handing those out at the Fleet Success Summit. You know, we'd love to see you guys, you know, have a copy of that. And until then, I guess next time.

Peace out.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleetsuccess. See you next time.