Riding with the Turntable Trucker to LA: Day Two
(The most intense customer development I’ve done in my life)
Summary
I’m riding with the Turntable Trucker aka Charles aka DJ Joonie C from Des Moines, IA to Los Angeles. We’ve got 48 hours to get to LA to deliver the goods in the trailer and I’ve been doing my best to capture my experience along the way.
I’m traveling with Charles to learn as much as I can about the trucking industry straight from the source: the driver. With 20+ years behind the wheel, Charles has some brutally honest insights about the industry and has been a great guy to hang with / learn from.
This is “customer development” in its grittiest form: digging in to intricately understand the profile, habits, demands, and emotions of prospective customers / users. I’m a huge believer in this process, as it will be vital as Andrew and I build WorkHound during the Straight Shot accelerator.
Combining this trip with my interactions with a number of other drivers, these are aggregated insights of what I’m learning about the trucking industry.
You can find the pre-trip post here: 48 Hours to LA with the Turntable Trucker.
You can find the Day 1 recap here: Riding with the Turntable Trucker to LA: Day One
Day 2: From Laramie, WY to Las Vegas, NV
That view though
The Rockies. The Arizona canyons. The desert. All in one day!? It’s just another day in the life for Charles. He said I took pictures like a Japanese tourist, but I didn’t care. The scenery in America’s western frontier is incredible.
Running from the sunrise
We woke up around 5:30am and Charles jumped in the driver seat and started the truck. Hip-hop started blaring, so I knew it was time to roll. As we hit the road, Charles said he set a goal to get 300 miles in before our first stop. Miles traveled continued to be Charles’ success metric. We headed straight west with the sunrise chasing us for a few hours before catching up and rising over. We finally stopped to eat breakfast in the back of the truck around 10am.
The rest of our day routed through Utah, a brief stint in Arizona and the desert of Nevada riding into Las Vegas.
Hygiene
Charles mentioned that to stay in good shape as a driver: controlling the germs was one of the top priorities. He frequently wiped his hands with disinfectant wipes and recommended I do the same.
Charles knows he’s the machine that moves the truck. If he breaks down, his whole way of living breaks down. So preventing sickness is key.
In the same vein, we finally got to Las Vegas in the late afternoon and stopped at a Petro truck stop to fuel up and take a shower. When I asked Charles how the truck stop showers worked, he roared with a deep belly laugh. “I’m sorry, I’ve just never had anyone ask me that.” My embarrassment is your gain.
So here’s how they work:
There’s an ATM like machine where you purchase showers. They cost $13!!! Luckily Charles had enough free coupons from buying gas over the years that he gave me a free one.
The showers were like a hotel room bathroom. Large shower / sink area and a toilet. They were pristinely clean. Still, I wore shower shoes (remember — control the germs) Once we cleaned up, we headed to a trucker-friendly casino: The Orleans, to grab some dinner and drinks.
“Back in the day” won’t die
No matter who I talk to from the trucking industry, “deregulation” is always seen as the source of the increasingly rough conditions for drivers.
In short, deregulation was the game changer in 1980 that busted the door wide open on the trucking industry. The number of companies jumped from 20,000 to more than 1 million, driver unions were steadily crushed and driver pay remained static since then.
Even though Charles wasn’t driving in 1980, he speaks of deregulation like an old soul knowing it forever changed the industry. The change in regulations has forever crippled driver pay, as drivers barely get paid more than they did in the late 70s.
I found it fascinating that despite this shift in the industry happening 35 years ago, drivers struggle to let go or embrace life after deregulation.
On the flip side, executives of trucking companies see deregulation as the catalyst of entrepreneurship, as really strong innovators such as JB Hunt of Arkansas were able to go from 50 trucks to thousands in just a matter of a few years.
History is all about perspective: deregulation was great for the consumer as prices lowered, great for entrepreneurs that created massive carriers, but tough for the driver, as the golden age of the driver disappeared quickly.
Truck Stops
One of the biggest cultural icons of the trucking industry, truck stops have certainly evolved over the years. There are now a handful of big truck stop chains that reel drivers in to fuel up, eat, shower, and purchase way over priced stuff.
Charles does his best to avoid truck stops. Here’s why:
•A lot of accidents happen. The longer your truck is in the lot, the greater chances your truck will get backed into. We hear about hit and runs with passenger cars, but for trucks it’s probably more prevalent. Except this costs thousands of dollars and can cause huge ripples in the supply chain if there’s an accident.
•The prices are crazy expensive. There are all sorts of gadgets sometimes sold at 200% retail cost. Amazon exists, yet a lot of drivers haven’t latched on to online purchases. Luckily Charles is savvy and knows about the beauties of e-commerce.
•The food usually isn’t good for you. Fried, fast and filling, but not healthy. The “trucker bod” isn’t in yet and with good reason — it’s tough to stay healthy going to truck stops. Charles usually loads up on food at a Walmart and will get some salad while there to keep a balance.
•Trucker stories. After 20 years on the road, Charles is tired of the “trucker stories” — the half truth / half lie trucker tales while on the road. Of course I was immediately drawn to that idea, but Charles gave me plenty of stories on our journey.
First class travel
Riding in a truck is super comfortable! If you ever need to get across the country in style, the passenger seat of a big rig is pretty cozy. There’s air injection to control the amount of air in your seat. Truly like riding on a cloud.
Electronic (E) Logs and the evolution of how drivers operate
There are some major feelings out there on the expected requirement to have electronic logs in trucks by 2017!
Quick definition: E-Logs are computers in the truck that track a driver’s location and the number of hours the driver has been on duty. This helps drivers keep track of the hours they work and stay within the federal regulations around “hours of service”
Quick breakdown on “hours of service” laws for drivers:
Drivers legally have 14 hours each day they are allowed to work. Within that, 11 can be used for driving. The remaining 3 are for delivering loads, fueling up, tending to the truck and other non-driving activities. The rest of the 10 hours in a day are required for rest. Drivers have to take a required 10 hour break in order to start driving again.
In the past, drivers have been able to “fudge” their numbers to get the job done, but that is getting harder with the rise of electronic (e) logs.
Charles’s view: He can’t stand the idea of E-logs. “It’ll be the end of small business as we know it,” he roared with frustration.
Since Charles primarily hauls refrigerated goods, he believes e-logs can take away days of shelf life around a product. This could make the customers choose to not accept products because they aren’t sellable.
Another note worth mentioning is that the clock is still ticking when drivers are stuck in traffic or waiting to get unloaded / loaded at distributors. This means less miles and less money per day.
The e-log is certainly evolving the wild west era of the driver where drivers would do whatever it takes to get the load delivered. The goal is making driving more safety oriented, which helps all of us, but it hurts drivers ability to make a good living under the current system of pay per mile.
I’ll explore more about how the industry can evolve with this in the next couple of days.
Finding new jobs
Early in the morning Charles got a call from a new driver on the east coast. The driver asked about how to perform a specific function in his truck and then started talking about new job offers.
Truckers are always wooed by shiny job offers. “They promised me this much of a rate increase” “I’m gonna get twice as much home time” “The bonus I’m getting is huge!” — these are all common phrases for wide eyed drivers.
This particular driver calling Charles got a recruiting offer from a top 100 carrier with the packaged sales pitch and Charles was able to quickly belt off the pros and cons of that carrier, even though he never drove for them.
How? — Word of mouth. It’s the primary method of new driver recruitment.
Every place Charles has worked was because of word of mouth. He’s from North Carolina, but ultimately hopped to Des Moines because of opportunities via word of mouth.
We all trust our friends, but drivers trust their trucking friends with their careers! It leads to frequent hopping around, but it was fascinating to see and hear how the insights Charles and other drivers have heard over the years can influence where others ultimately work.
An unnecessary machismo
Drivers often face personal issues. Being on the road takes its mental toll and family issues can arise from being gone frequently.
These issues do affect work. Not just in trucking, but any industry. But these issues are never mentioned. So when issues outside of work trigger the decision to quit, it’s often too late for companies to do anything.
Charles mentioned some instances like this and it helped confirm my developing hypothesis: drivers need a way to voice issues on the road, even if it’s not directly work related.
My bet is that companies would gladly talk through driver issues (even non-work related ones) if it means keeping a driver. Usually it’s too little, too late when they try to solve these issues.
If we’re honest with ourselves, companies and drivers need to accept the fact that non-work issues do affect work, embrace it and have honest conversations to resolve things.
“A man’s word is all you’ve got”
Charles has worked for about 6 different companies and usually left for two reasons: better pay and mistrust.
Pay is crucial because Charles has to make enough money to support himself and his family in North Carolina, so a company has to meet that basic need. Sometimes companies couldn’t so he had to leave.
The other reason is mistrust between the company and the driver. Charles has run into instances where he was promised certain routes, certain amounts of pay or disrespected by office staff of the company.
Charles knows drivers are the backbone of a trucking operation and the moment he feels like he’s treated like a number and replaceable, he usually looks for another company. This is why Charles almost always works with companies with 50 or fewer drivers.
Charles echoed this thought about keeping drivers on the road longer than promised by saying “You tell a man he can’t go see his family when people in the office see theirs every night and weekend? It’s just wrong.”
To summarize: Once companies miscommunicate with a driver and start doing things that weren’t agreed on, drivers can no longer trust the company and will start to look elsewhere.
Picking a route
When I found out we were traveling to LA, I did the quick Google Maps search to see what route we would take. Google Maps said the best route was through Colorado, but Charles prefers traveling through Wyoming.
He had a number of reasons: the number of weigh stations, the traffic, the weather (there’s still chances of snow in the Rockies this time of year), construction and leisure.
Charles showed me there were three ways to LA: through Wyoming and Utah, through Colorado and through Kansas City / the southwest US.
Depending on what company a driver works with, either the company picks the route or the driver picks the route.
Charles prefers picking his route, for the autonomy, the thrill of riding out his decision and his confidence that the selected route will help him get the load delivered on time.
Companies will usually add a few more variables in their route decisions: fuel efficiency, price, distance, and the ability to get the load delivered on time.
Regardless of how a route is decided, I found it fascinating that so much thought goes into getting from point A to point B.
In closing
I was awestruck today. The beauty of the western frontier is something I’ll never forget. After a whole day on the road we needed some R&R. We were too beat to stick around Vegas long and we headed back to the truck soon after to get some shuteye. Riding that hard for that long is exhausting, but as Robert Frost wrote:
“…I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
The journey continues and LA awaits in the morning.
One More Day in the Journey!
Here’s the Day 3 Post
About the author:
Max Farrell is co-founder ofWorkHound, a software company tackling driver turnover issues in the trucking industry. Max also spends time driving innovation inside corporations with Create Reason. Prior to WorkHound, he worked with Iowa-based payments startup Dwolla. In addition to professional efforts, Max is also a facilitator for Startup Weekend. In his spare time, Max is a sound hip-hop artist and avid sportsman.
