Brent – 00:00:01:
Welcome to Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast where we explore the fascinating world of trucking and freight management. We dive deep into the freight industry and uncover why the trucking industry is more crucial to our country now than ever before. Stay tuned to uncover the driving forces behind successful trucking businesses and hear from the hardworking truckers and leaders who keep the world moving. Let’s hit the road. All right, well, welcome back to Freight Nation. a podcast by Truckstop. We appreciate you joining us today. And I like to talk about this industry, as you guys know, and this is hopefully why that you come and listen to these great stories about the people that have worked in transportation or beginning their careers in transportation, and they come and give great advice about their lives and their careers. And today, I’ve got somebody joining me on Freight Nation that is an old friend of mine. And in trucking, that’s a good thing. That’s a great thing to be able to say is you have some old friends in trucking. And I like to think of this as part of our legend series. Like when I started in 1998, that I got to get to know that I saw them as legends in this marketplace. There’s about five or six of them that I call legends. And joining me today on Freight Nation is my good friend, Dan Doran of the then Ace Doran and now of Diamond Transportation. So Dan, thank you so much for joining me on Freight Nation.
Dan – 00:01:17:
Thank you for having me.
Brent – 00:01:20:
Well, Freight Nation, you may notice that I’ve got my internet Truckstop, the old name of Truckstop. I know Dan’s there smiling about it. When Truckstop started, we were the internet Truckstop. And then we took the V off and now we’re just Truckstop. We’ve evolved too. So all these things, and we’ll talk a lot about the evolution of transportation because look, Freight Nation, getting perspective on anything in life is great. Going to that wise counsel is one of the things that is so important to your career, to your operation, be able to really have trusted wise counsel. And Dan falls in that category when you’re talking about transportation. At least he does for me because of his perspective and because of his character in this market. And so he’s had a great history. He literally was born into trucking. So Dan, the story is always the most fun. When you tell your story about how you got into this, I know you’ve got a great one. So talk about where this whole transportation career started for you in your life.
Dan – 00:02:14:
Well, again, thanks for having me. And like I said earlier when we were talking, that I was actually born into it. My dad and his family, that was their business from years back when they were growing up and built it into a business. And my dad, in 1941, started the company Ace Doran and Hauling and Rigging. So when I got to be about 14 years old, and one summer, I was getting under my mom’s skin. I remember asking my dad, don’t you have something that he can do and take him to work with you? And that’s how I got the boot out of the house from my mom over the summer because I was probably being a pain in her butt. So I started going to work with my dad and started in the office doing this and that and filing papers. I wound up moving up into the supply room, which was, we had at the time, 60 or 70 terminals around the country. So they all needed freight bills at the time and paperwork and other supplies. So that all came out of Cincinnati. So that was my next job.
Brent – 00:03:23:
So that was a lot of work before the electronic age, right?
Dan – 00:03:26:
Yeah, a lot of paper. We always hated when we would get long books in by the semi-trailer book.
Brent – 00:03:33:
Oh, goodness.
Dan – 00:03:34:
That was one of the worst days of the year is when you got the call that the log books were sitting at the dock because they were heavy and lots of them and we had flex space for them. So that was one of my jobs, running to get the mail, sweeping floors, cuddle grass, spraying for weeds around the different properties. And it was funny because my two boys started in the business and that’s how they got their start as well, spraying weeds, working on trailers and cutting grass, doing all that manual labor.
Brent – 00:04:08:
Yeah, so I love to talk about this on Freight Nation because your description of you working with your dad and now your son’s working with you is the exact description I’ve got working with my dad and a little steel processing company. We worked out in the warehouse. We ran forklifts. We sweeped the floors. We took inventory. We were out in the hot warehouse in the summertime and the cold warehouse in the wintertime. And so my dad said, you don’t start in the office. You start out where the production is. So the same sort of things. But I got to ask you, I love to ask this question. What was it like working with your dad?
Dan – 00:04:41:
Well, my dad was bigger than life. He had started this company, and at the time, it was 1,000 trucks. And it was all owner-operators, and he had a lot of good people.
Brent – 00:04:54:
1,000 trucks. Now, that was way back in the day, man.
Dan – 00:04:57:
Yeah, that was before deregulation.
Brent – 00:04:59:
Yeah.
Dan – 00:05:00:
Late 70s. Telling my age, but Ace Doran was one of the first owner-operator-based companies, hauling steel and so forth. It was a lot of regional work. There was some long-haul stuff, but most of it was regional and revolved around the steel industry. But they also had built a name in Cincinnati for hauling machine tools and the rigging business and the oversized stuff. So we did a fair amount of that as well.
Brent – 00:05:31:
Yeah, so Ohio-based. But you worked all over the lanes that you had contracts for during the regulation period.
Dan – 00:05:38:
Right. Right. Yeah. And then in 1981, things were deregulated. It changed the whole world.
Brent – 00:05:44:
Oh, gosh. Talk about that, because a lot of the people listening to Freight Nation joined this industry maybe 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, if it’s a long time. So what was it like when the industry actually deregulated? I know I didn’t put that in my notes, but man, that is a great thing to explain. What was that transition like? I mean, you lived it. What was it like going through that?
Dan – 00:06:03:
Well, I was still pretty young. I didn’t probably realize the impact. I don’t know that anybody really understood it at the time, but there was a lot of effort, a lot of work that went into authorities. You asked this earlier about the name Ace Doran. Well, Ace came from a piece of authority that they bought. It was Ace Machine Removers, and they put the door in with it.
Brent – 00:06:28:
I always wondered that.
Dan – 00:06:28:
So before deregulation, you had to apply to the Interstate Commerce Commission for authority. And you had to prove that there was a need for another carrier in the lane. So your big steel mills had the regular lanes. Chicago to Cleveland, Detroit, Middletown to Detroit, those kind of lanes. And in order to get authority to work for somebody like Onco at the time, you had to apply to the Interstate Commerce Commission. You had to get the authority for that lane. And you had to go to the Interstate Commerce Commission in D.C., and there was a hearing, and you had to present witnesses, which would have been the shipping supervisor at Armco or any one of the steel mills they support, and say, yes, I need another carrier because I can’t get enough trucks as it is to move my freight. So just think of all the expense there. All the people that had to go to D.C., if it was a two- or three-day trial, you had the expense of putting people up and getting them there, getting them home, putting them up while they were there. Lawyers were involved and so forth, and so you had all that expense. So when things were deregulated, now you sent an attorney $500, and they got you 48 state authority. At that time, the states were still regulated. So any intrastate movement, you still had to get authority. And you still had to have authority to move from Cincinnati to Cleveland within Ohio or Indianapolis to Chicago. Kentucky was a big move at the time. So you had to have the authorities to move within the states. So there was still some regulation, even after the deregulation of interstate traffic. So it changed things. And they were assets. The authorities were assets. The cows kept track of what you had involved and what you had invested. And that was the cost of your authority. And then it had a value. So if you had a $100,000 piece of authority on the books. After deregulation, that went to zero. It was a big effect on the financials for a lot of companies.
Brent – 00:08:44:
Right. I know that I talked to Noah Perry, who has a great over four decade experience in this marketplace, and he’s always talking about the top hundred fleets that were around prior to 1980, prior to deregulation. There’s only four of them left today, post deregulation. So obviously deregulation changed how the operational factors, some of the valuation factors of these businesses. What did that do to Ace Doran at the time? And what did you guys do to adjust to it?
Dan – 00:09:14:
Well, it fragmented the business. So a lot of our large fleet owners saw the opportunity to go get their own authority and become their own carrier. So you take a fleet owner with 30 or 40 trucks, and now all of a sudden that truck count, that capacity, those customers, it all left and went somewhere else. So… There was a big adjustment in revenue and size and truck count. And I think we probably, by 1984, we were probably in the 500 or 600 truck range. So the size was cut in half, basically.
Brent – 00:09:58:
Right.
Dan – 00:09:59:
So it took time, but it fragmented the business because it was a lot easier to get in the industry. And if a fleet owner or an agent had a good relationship with a customer or a shipper, they went to them and said, hey, I’m going to get my own authority. If you’ll support me, I’ll be providing the same service on the same trucks. It’s just you’re going to be paying somebody different.
Brent – 00:10:26:
Well, that’s fantastic. So Freight Nation, you can see where deregulation changed everything. That opened the doors for people that wanted to start a business and get into this business. No longer did they have to go and do what Dan was describing about going to D.C. And really, if you didn’t have the ability and have a decent amount of money at that time and good support, you were going to have a difficult time getting into the trucking industry. But in today’s marketplace, there’s almost no barrier to it. So that’s made it a good thing. It’s made it a challenging thing. Right, Dan? I mean, there’s been some challenges. So what would you say has been like the number one sort of benefit of deregulation? And then what’s been the challenge of deregulation? And then I want to jump into the modernization of the current modernization of the overhaul freight marketplace.
Dan – 00:11:07:
The number one challenge is the competition.
Brent – 00:11:11:
Right. Okay. Increased competition.
Dan – 00:11:13:
And the fragmentation of the business. So instead of having. 10 big carriers and all the trucks are working under those 10 carriers. Now you probably have 200. And I think in a way that’s lent itself to the rise of the brokerage business. And Ace Doran got his brokerage authority in 1988, I believe, was one of the first carriers to apply for it.
Brent – 00:11:40:
Yeah, it was really early, super early.
Dan – 00:11:42:
But that was a result and supported the fragmentation. So rather than have five carriers knocking on a shipper’s door, now they got 50. And the traffic departments and the big mills and the big manufacturers lost their meaning because they didn’t have to support the applications for authority. And it was formal of a process. Everybody had authority. And now you got all these people knocking on your door. And the guy sitting in the shipping office doesn’t want to answer 50 phone calls. Or make 50 phone calls every morning to find trucks. He wants to make one phone call or two phone calls and move on to the rest of it. Duties. That’s where the brokers step in.
Brent – 00:12:29:
Yeah. Hold that on brokers. But that answers a really big question to me. I always wondered why out of the, say, roughly 4 million shippers that are out there in today’s marketplace, only about 15% of them can even move their own freight or desire to move their own freight and they trust everybody else for it. Well, that makes a lot of sense. The competition out there, when it’s just a cost for somebody to move their goods to market, if you’ve got 50 people fighting for it and they can give you good efficiency, why do you need the department? That answers a big question. I want to back up a second though, because you took over at Ace Doran and it was a $11 million company with 100 trucks. And your leadership was there for more than two decades. And you grew it in a very healthy way. So when your dad, before deregulation, had 1,000 trucks, after deregulation, you guys were going down because you said it was fragmented, 500 to 600 trucks. And then when you took it over, it was 100 trucks. So what got it to the 100 trucks? And then what was in your mind where you said, okay, this is what I need to do to grow this business back to the health that you wanted it to be at? So talk to Freight Nation watchers and listeners, because this is good, Freight Nation, because this is like you’re inside the mind of somebody who’s been through it all. He’s been through regulation. He’s been through it where it changed and then where it’s a family business, working with his dad. So this is a big one. So listen up. Dan says on this one. What happened? And then what was in your brain to get it to where it needed to go to?
Dan – 00:13:52:
Well, there were several things, and we just talked about a lot of it. The deregulation was a big part of it. It continued to fragment the industry. And the industry was changing, and brokerage was starting to become a thing. So that all changed the structure of carriers. And, I mean, even to the point where I remember when I started… The big steel mills, you had to have a physical office within, I don’t know, 15 or 20 miles of their facility.
Brent – 00:14:26:
Well, it’s kind of like modern Bentonville, northwest Arkansas today. You’ve got all these manufacturers have offices within a few miles of Walmart and Tyson Chicken and people that are up in that area of the country.
Dan – 00:14:37:
Yeah, because everybody congregated at a facility. So all the drivers, this is before cell phones, drivers and trucks would come to a dispatch office. And they hung out there until they got a load to go somewhere else. Right. So you had to have a facility on office in all these locations. Well, with the advent of brokerage and computers and cell phones, that all went away. So now there’s people on the West Coast moving freight out of the middle of Ohio. And you don’t know how they got it. They’ve got a salesman that knows somebody or is some history or whatever the case may be, but all those things took its toll on the old businesses, the old traditional trucking companies. So they have to change. You have to adapt to keep up. So that in my dad’s health was suffering. He started failing in the late 80s, early 90s, went through a rough stretch where he was the guy, he made the decisions, and he didn’t want to give it up. And it was hard on the company. There were six of us. I’m the youngest of six.
Brent – 00:15:51:
Are you really? Okay.
Dan – 00:15:52:
Yeah. And there’s 26 years between myself and the oldest. So it came down to us kids whether we wanted to keep it going or not. So we decided to try and keep it going for a while.
Brent – 00:16:06:
Okay.
Dan – 00:16:06:
My mom was still alive, and we wanted to try and support her. And we’ll keep it going. Make sure she had an income where I was on support. So we kept it going and started building a team. I started with the people that were there that I could trust and built on that. That led to other people and opportunities when other companies, some of the older names were falling off the wayside, the Eckmillers and the Dallas and Mavis companies. So we built a team of people, added agents, developed the system, added trucks, and just kept building on. You find good people and they attract good people. Once you get to a certain point, they start coming to you. It’s less work. So I was fortunate to have a good team and a lot of loyal people around me that helped us get it back up to speed. And we made it successful and took it as far as we can take it.
Brent – 00:17:09:
Yeah. So you were predominantly moving specialized freight, or what was the focus of your freight? And then I want to shift into how you started growing your business through the addition of your brokerage.
Dan – 00:17:19:
Well, a good portion of it was specialized, but not anywhere near most of it. So the biggest part of it was the steel commodities and flatbed freight. But we did a fair portion of the caterpillars and the machine tools and that sort of thing. But the bulk of it was the steel industry.
Brent – 00:17:39:
Right. So open deck could have been rebar, coal rolled steel, coiled steel, things like that.
Dan – 00:17:45:
Right.
Brent – 00:17:45:
Look, I’ll never forget the day my dad said, hey, I’ve got a big coil of steel coming in. And I went, well, what’s big? He goes, well, it’s 30,000 pounds. And I was like, how does that get on the truck? He goes, don’t worry about that. He goes, go over to the where there was a, we were at a big industrial complex and our neighbor company next to us had a giant forklift that could lift 40,000 pounds. And he goes, yeah, just get on the forklift and just get it off the truck and get it onto the dock so we can get it over the machine. I’m like, I was scared to death. Being my brother Randy, my older brother, my dad always taught us, hey, somebody else has done it before you. Go figure it out. You can figure it out. And he goes, it’s really not rocket science getting a coil on a truck. Just be careful. So we moved a lot of that stuff. Plate seal, rebar, coils, mostly coils because we split them into different sizes for manufacturers. So that’s fascinating that you and I have that in common. So you guys were moving a lot of open deck kind of stuff, and that was really your focus because of where you were in Ohio.
Dan – 00:18:45:
Yeah, pretty much so, but the location led itself, but most of our agents and company offices were in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois.
Brent – 00:18:57:
Right. Part of America. It’s things that make other things. So you took the company from 11 million to 60 million, from 100 trucks to 400 trucks, and that’s a big accomplishment. So you talked about, number one, and this is really important, Freight Nation, you talked about having really good teammates and hiring really good people. And then you talked about, really looking at it in how things were modernizing. In other words, how can you be more efficient with the movement of your paperwork and communication, that sort of stuff. So talk a little bit about as that sort of started changing things, really what you started to invest your focus in to serve the customer better.
Dan – 00:19:32:
Well, even going back to my dad, he was a big proponent of computers and what computers could do.
Brent – 00:19:39:
Oh, wow. That’s fantastic.
Dan – 00:19:40:
So we had an IBM AS400 system back from the time. I can remember working there. We had one whole room, sizable size room. The whole computer took it up. And now you can do more on your desktop than probably that computer could do.
Brent – 00:20:01:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Dan – 00:20:02:
So going back even then, but I do remember trucking has always been a paperwork intensive business. Every freight mill had nine parts and it got split up. Each department had its own, and then you had three or four pages of shipping order and wait receipts and maybe permits to go. So you had a stack of, you had a book for almost each load. So I can remember first hearing about imaging and what you could do with that. So trying to get that implemented into our company and into our system and get people to buy into it and be comfortable was probably one of the biggest, jumps of faith. At the time Landstar had a system and some other people were using it. And then there was a guy that had split off of that and started his own system. And that’s what we took as our first step.
Brent – 00:20:59:
Do you remember the name of that system?
Dan – 00:21:01:
If I heard it, I’d probably recognize it. But I want to say Pegasus.
Brent – 00:21:07:
Oh yeah. Pegasus Transtec. Bob Helms. Good guy.
Dan – 00:21:10:
That was Landstar’s system maybe.
Brent – 00:21:13:
He lived down in the same area, so I didn’t know it was connected to it. But it wouldn’t surprise me.
Dan – 00:21:16:
I think that may have been like the first system. If you give me some time and maybe by the end of the interview, I’ll remember, but I don’t think that was the name of it. But I remember the lady who took care of all our paperwork and the look on her face when we explained to her what we were getting ready to do. And it was. The uncertainty and the change and the… Being uncomfortable with something new. But God bless her, she got the hang of it, and she became a pro at it. If you needed to find a piece of paper, she knew exactly where it was, and that’s something to say for that much paper going through it.
Brent – 00:21:52:
Pegasus was definitely an imaging company, so I know them well. So the modernization of your operation, how did that help you guys grow?
Dan – 00:22:01:
Well, I’m not sure it helped us grow. It helped us become more efficient and do more with the same number of people. So in a sense, I guess maybe that allowed us to grow because people could do more. But the brokerage, like I said, late 80s is when we got this brokerage authority. And we were all owner-operators, a lot of agent business. And a lot of those people are uncomfortable turning their customer over to somebody.
Brent – 00:22:32:
When a good agent leaves, so does the customer database. And that’s why CRMs, customer management systems, have become so popular. Because a company can keep their data. So absolutely, yeah. It’s still a big problem, yeah.
Dan – 00:22:43:
There’s the data, but there’s also the personal side of it. There’s the relationship. That’s hard to replicate. But the brokerage business, with computers, I hope that freight was becoming more decentralized, I’ll call it. You didn’t have to be 20 miles from somebody to get freight from. So we always struggled to get it over a certain point. And some of that… That was by design. We didn’t want to have the perception that, we were broke on freight before we were given our owner-operators the opportunity to move it.
Brent – 00:23:20:
Yeah, well, yeah. Taking care of the home team, yeah.
Dan – 00:23:22:
So we kept a lid on it for that reason. So it was a part of our business. It was for a long time. Never became a majority of our business. It was probably 15% of our business at the most.
Brent – 00:23:36:
Okay. Not uncommon at that time that it was around 15% because the marketplace itself is still establishing itself. So in the modern marketplace, you got to a point of operation, and I’m guessing were your family members still involved while you were the president?
Dan – 00:23:51:
Yes.
Brent – 00:23:51:
Okay. So you guys got to a point after 2010 where you were starting to think about what’s next for the business, and you guys got to a point of thinking, okay, maybe it might be right to sell the business to somebody. How did you guys get to a decision point, and then what was it like going through selling the business that you literally grew up in?
Dan – 00:24:11:
Well, that was tough. I mean, it was something my dad had started. He gave birth to it, basically. It was something that in the back of your mind is, am I going to be able to face him the next time I see him?
Brent – 00:24:23:
Now, was he still alive when you guys sold the business?
Dan – 00:24:26:
No. He passed away in 1992.
Brent – 00:24:29:
Okay, yeah.
Dan – 00:24:30:
But like I said before, I was the youngest of six. Right. We had just gone through. There was a big challenge in 99 and 2000. Just about every steel mill had filed bankruptcy in the year 2000. We took several hits in that market. So that was a strain on the business. But as you go along with partners, things are always a challenge. And when it’s family members, it’s even more challenging. Me being the youngest, there was, like I said, 26 years between myself and the oldest. We started getting into the challenge with the banks financially. The banks were starting to tighten up credit and wanted the credit and wanted more collateral and so forth. So it all started to take a strain on the family. And finally, it was like, maybe we ought to just try and find somebody. And we looked for quite a while. We went through all the big players and it wound up selling in 2013.
Brent – 00:25:33:
Right. So I know a little bit what that’s about, selling a business and then waking up the next day going, what am I supposed to do now?
Dan – 00:25:40:
Yeah.
Brent – 00:25:42:
Right. So did you take some time off after you sold it or did you transition right into something else?
Dan – 00:25:48:
I actually stayed on for a couple of years. I was currently doing it.
Brent – 00:25:51:
And operated it. Yeah. It’s usually the workout, how it works out, some of the continuity. Right. But there came a day when you said, all right, it’s time for me to move on to the next season of what Dan Doran’s going to do. And so did you take any time off or did you like just say, nope, I’m going to transition to something else? That’s how I’ve operated. I just want the Freight Nation watchers and listeners to hear this. Because one day they might be faced with it. Whether it’s at a small level or a big level. It’s still the same emotional feeling.
Dan – 00:26:15:
Right. It was very emotional because like I said, it was a family business. My brothers and sisters were involved. My kids were involved. It was something my dad had started. There was a lot of emotion. But at the end of the day, it was best for the company and the company still operates.
Brent – 00:26:34:
I was going to say, it sounds like you protected the business and the people that worked in the business by breathing some new life into it. Sometimes. Let’s say you have to do it in a way that you might not have wanted to do it that way, but it was the best way to do it.
Dan – 00:26:44:
Right. And it’s still has a good name. And I’m sure my dad wouldn’t be proud of that.
Brent – 00:26:49:
What’s your dad’s name?
Dan – 00:26:50:
Robert.
Brent – 00:26:50:
Robert. Okay. I knew Robert would be. I’m sure he’d be proud of it. So you did your workout for a couple of years and then did you transition to working for another carrier or what was your next part of your next journey in transportation?
Dan – 00:27:02:
Yeah, I took some time off. And at the time I was, in the succession, the chairs for, I was actually right in the middle of my chairman year at the Ohio Trucking Association.
Brent – 00:27:14:
Yeah. I was going to make sure I asked about your leadership stuff with the associations, both the Ohio Trucking Association and TCA.
Dan – 00:27:20:
Yeah. I was actually in the middle of a two-year term as chairman there. And then I was also in the officers group at the TCA. So I had to tell those people what was going on and so forth. And I was approached by… Folks at Bison and they wanted to do something in the States. So after I took a few months and started to work for them, they wanted some sales help in the States for cross-border traffic and so forth. And then they wanted to try starting up a flatbed operation in the States. That was a challenge, but that’s what attracted me to it, the challenge of it. We did that for three years and ran it right into COVID and that’s where it ended.
Brent – 00:28:05:
Was that when you went into working for Diamond or?
Dan – 00:28:08:
Well, I just started at Diamond here originally since the first of the year and I’ve known John Koka and I’ve known Diamond back from many years from the Machinery Haulers Association and got involved in that several years ago. It was actually before John took the company over, but got to know John. So John, come in to the association and got to know him a little bit. We want to try and build a flatbed and division to complement what they’re already doing with the RGNs. They’re already moving the big machines and there’s a lot of fall-off freight, a lot of flatbed freight, a lot of step-deck freight that associates with those machines and a lot of inbound material into the same plants that they’re already hauling out of. We’re trying to build a group of agents and a group of trucks to service that part of it.
Brent – 00:29:00:
Right. So you bring a legacy. This is why I call it the legend series Freight Nation. He brings a legacy of growing up at 14 years old and his mom kicking him out of the house and said, go to work with your dad in the trucking business. And so you started learning and your dad really put you in the place where you could learn the value, as my dad used to say, the value of honest work. He said, all honest work has merit. He said, so just go do it really well. And so I’m so you grew up and into that all the way to taking over the business and running it with your family members, which is even more challenging and learning and growing and endearing. And then you guys made the decision to sustain the company by letting somebody else own it and run it, which is good. That keeps the legacy going there. And then You tried to help one of the really great fleets in North America, Bison. I know the guys, Robin and guys up there, great fleet that’s there. And then you’re now working at Diamond, heading business development for them, bringing all that legacy, all that executive leadership, you know, working as a team to Diamond. And so where do you see the opportunity for you to grow Diamond? I know you talked about the agents and the trucks, but I mean, there’s a uniqueness about every transportation company. So where do you see the opportunity there?
Dan – 00:30:16:
Well, on the flatbed side and the stepback side, there’s, like I say, they have a front row seat to a lot of freight that’s associated with the machines that are already moving. There’s a lot of parts loads. There’s a lot of accessories and fallout loads associated with some of those big machines. Also, the steel industry supplies the big manufacturers like that. A lot of those parts come in a sheet and they’re bent as well as I do. Bent and rolled and formed into parts. And that’s a whole other side of that market and those customers that there’s an opportunity there. And it’s all in the lanes, the same lanes, basically, that we’re already servicing with the big trucks. The RGM is a double drop. So that’s the opportunity.
Brent – 00:31:06:
One of the great things Freight Nation, I love about Dan is wherever he is, he brings his passion into creating excellence. Wherever he is. And it’s one of the reasons why whenever I see him at the TCA show, the ATA show, wherever I see him, I always try to get a few minutes with him just to like, like, listen to the wisdom and listen to his point of view, because you don’t get this a lot in any industry that you’re in. And so when you get an opportunity to learn from somebody who’s done it, been there and can tell you what potholes not to step in, do a little more of this and maybe a little less of that. That’s the counsel that you need. And so, all right, so Dan, last couple of questions and then we’ll wrap it up for this session of Freight Nation. All right. So you’ve seen a lot. You’ve seen, man, before deregulation, you’ve seen after deregulation, you’ve seen growing a fleet back to the profitability you want after it had a heyday in another type of marketplace. You’ve seen modernization or the computerization, the digitization of our industry. For the Freight Nation watchers and listeners, where would you tell them to invest most of their time?
Dan – 00:32:09:
I guess I would have to say, don’t lose sight of the networking and the personal side of this business. One thing I’ve noticed with the, I’ll call them younger people, much like yourself.
Brent – 00:32:21:
I’m not that much younger than you, pal.
Dan – 00:32:24:
They get comfortable with not leaving the office and getting done with what they have to do. And I understand it because there’s a lot more demands on families today, kids’ activities, both parents are working, but not to lose sight of the relationships that come from networking. And just like our conversation, and I was trying to think of where you and I first met, and it had to have been Mid-America when you were…
Brent – 00:32:53:
It was Mid-America, yeah.
Dan – 00:32:53:
And Overdrive.
Brent – 00:32:55:
That’s right, that’s right, it was, yeah.
Dan – 00:32:57:
But those relationships, I’ve made a lot of friends in this business. We compete day to day, but we go to these association meetings or we go to the truck shows. And there’s a lot of camaraderie as well because we’re trying to make the industry better. We’re trying to get our voice out there and trying to make Washington understand our issues. Or we’re trying to make the drivers understand why we would be a good place to work or sign on their truck or become part of in some way. I was listening when I was getting ready to sign on here. I was listening to some of your old broadcasts and your interview with the Brenny people.
Brent – 00:33:42:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Joyce Brenny. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah.
Dan – 00:33:44:
And her comment was, it’s hard for her to tell people about themselves, because they are themselves. Right. You don’t understand how well you do things because you’re consumed with what you’re doing. But once you get out and you see other people and get associated and you start to understand, well, we’re doing that already. We’ve been doing that for 10 years. I’m so glad that we don’t have those issues. That all relates. One of the biggest and probably you don’t want to hear his name, but Marvin Shefsky.
Brent – 00:34:19:
I do remember. Martin Shefsky. Yeah.
Dan – 00:34:21:
Marvin Shefsky had the talent of talking to you at the truck show and picking out, at least to me, he picked out, that should be in your ad.
Brent – 00:34:32:
Oh, yeah.
Dan – 00:34:33:
And I thought, well, yeah, you’re right. And it came down to three things, revenue per mile and owner operators and something else in that mix. But that’s what we drove home. So you don’t get those wisdoms like you mentioned. If you’re not out there talking to people and associating with them.
Brent – 00:34:53:
Well, man, what great advice. What a great advice to end on there. So Freight Nation, from Dan’s point of view and mine too, bring your passion to it. The relationship is the most powerful thing you have. And you got to use your feet to go get it. So you got to go be present to go get it. Dan, man, thank you so much for your wisdom today. As always, I just cherish hearing from you and being with you. And thank you so much for spreading your message. Spreading what’s good about trucking to everyone’s out there on Freight Nation. So thank you so much for being a guest today.
Dan – 00:35:24:
Well, I appreciate you getting me involved. Glad to be a part of it.
Brent – 00:35:27:
Thank you. Well, this industry is better because of you. So thank you so much. So Freight Nation, that’s a wrap. Appreciate you joining us today. I know you got a lot from this episode. Man, what a history. Just to be able to pay attention to, learn from, so to learn from a legend in the industry. And so we’re so thankful that Dan could be on today. But thank you for joining us for Freight Nation for another episode. We hope this has been a great value to you and to your operation. And let us know how we can continue to help you improve. And as we like to say at Freight Nation, don’t forget to work hard because you’re in trucking. Don’t forget to work hard, to be kind, and to stay humble. Thanks a lot, Freight Nation. We’ll catch you the next time. On behalf of the Truckstop team, thanks for listening to this episode of Freight Nation. To find out more about the show, head to truckstop.com/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. Until then, keep on trucking and exploring the open roads with Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast.
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