Joanna McFarland explains how PopScoop Drive builds trust with schools through a 15-point safety certification designed from a parent's perspective. The company publishes annual safety reports without regulatory requirement, uses real-time alerts and driver behavior tracking, and treats safety as non-negotiable even when it slows growth.
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Mason, do you want to jump on? Thanks, Mike and Joanna. Thank you very much. Congratulations on scaling such an impressive business, and thanks for sharing that with all of us. My question's about how you earn trust, and I think you call it the right to win with school districts, with policymakers, and with the public to the extent that that's applicable. I'm adding something there. You had mentioned the 15-point certification process and a few things within that. I also imagine there's, you know, more beyond that in conversation with regulators, in mass communications, et cetera.
Yes. I mean, I think safety is in the DNA of literally everything that we do, right? When we first started, because trust is an out, is an outflow of safety, right? And so when we first started this, you know, we designed everything, that 15-point certification process, which really hasn't changed. We designed that with the, you know, what would it take for me to put Jackson or Sam in a Hop Skip Drive, right? What would I as a parent want to see? And that's really what guided the initial conversations. And then it was also, you know, I came from a tech background. How can we use data and technology to continuously innovate on safety? How can we design something, it goes back to being specifically designed for kids. What does this need to look like when the person who is in the vehicle didn't arrange the ride, may or may not have a cell phone, and may or may not be able to say like, hey, I don't— I think we're going the wrong way, or I'm not comfortable with this, I'm just going to get out and, you know, get it and get into a different car. Like, you can't do that. A 7-year-old can't do that, right? And so how do we design this? So it was also our whole Safe Ride technology platform where we are— we've created a series of proactive and proprietary alerts. We have a team that is a Safe Ride support team that is monitoring every ride live in real time, in addition to the full transparency that parents and schools have. And we're constantly innovating on that and using, you know, using telematics to track driving behavior. We publish. So I think it's all about the brand and how you— you have to have a very authentic brand that talks about your safety and transparency in a very authentic way. And I always tell the story, our very first ride, right? It was my co-founder's son going to gymnastics. We had built this whole thing. We had— it was a Care driver that we had all 3 personally met. And we were watching on the computer as Gus was going to gymnastics. And we were also watching Janelle, and she was really nervous. And she'd been a whole part of this thing. So it was like, if she's nervous, this is, you know, it just was such a clarifying moment for us of how much empathy had to go into the brand. And so you see it everywhere. And it's why transparency Transparency is so important to us. We publish a safety report. No one's making us do that. We don't have to. No one in school transportation actually does that. We do it every single year because we believe that you can't measure— you can't manage it if you're not measuring it. And we believe that if we're transparent, then hopefully others in the industry will be transparent as well. So far they haven't been, but we're hoping that that will change because we believe there's a lot of room to improve. And so I think that transparency speaks for itself as well as the constant innovations. Every year we publish that safety report, it's like, here are the 5 new products and features we're releasing this year that are going to improve on safety. So we view safety as we're never done. It's also about culture. You have to build that into your culture. And I remember somebody asked me once, you know, how do you think about the trade-off between growth and safety? And I said, there's no such thing because if we're not safe, we don't grow. And so there will never be such a thing at PopScoop Drive as a trade-off between growth versus safety. And so we talk about that here a lot, right? So it's about, you have to build it into the culture. You have to be very authentic about, you know, you can say, oh yeah, we're safe, we're safe, we're safe. But if you're not authentic, it's very obvious. And then you have to make sure that you're building behind that to continue to innovate on that.
That's amazing. I can feel it and hear it from you. So thank you. It's both a really helpful combination of the softer empathetic and like the data-driven AI technical parts combined. So.
I'm very passionate about safety and using data to actually determine whether something makes— there's a lot in the school transportation industry that it's just about checking boxes. I'm just going to check this off the checklist. I've done that. We're safe. And so I'm very passionate about data when it comes to safety.
