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Taking the Hire Road is a podcast dedicated to providing tips to help manage the driver recruiting process while addressing the ongoing challenges related to the driver shortage and driver retention. Hosted by Jeremy Reymer, Founder and CEO of DriverReach, this bimonthly podcast shines a light on the challenges that carriers are facing and aims to help companies hire quality drivers with greater efficiency.
Show ID [00:00:00]:
Jeremy Reymer [00:00:08]:
Welcome to a new year of Taking the Hire Road, a special show dedicated to the trucking industry, primarily around the confluence of recruiting, retention and compliance in the fifth year. As the host of this show, I bring over two decades of industry experience, both on the carrier side as well as the vendor side. Throughout the year, I interview industry experts and thought leaders who bring their insight to the driver life cycle as we discuss the industry's greatest challenges. I always appreciate your feedback, good or bad. Don't forget to leave a rating and a review. I'd also like to thank and highlight the show's valuable sponsors. Their dedication and commitment to the industry and to the show is greatly appreciated. If you're interested in being a sponsor of the show or joining me for an interview, please email jeremy@takingtohighroad.com this week, I'm honored to be joined by a great industry friend and passionate leader, Trey Griggs, Founder and CEO of Beta Consulting Group and Director of Operations for the Broker Carrier Summit.
Jeremy Reymer [00:01:00]:
Trey, so great to finally have you on the show.
Trey Griggs [00:01:03]:
Hey, thanks for having me today. And I'd love to play on words with your title of Taking the Hire Road with Hire spelled H I R E. Very clever. Well done, my friend. But thanks for having me on.
Jeremy Reymer [00:01:11]:
Yeah, it's awesome. We can talk about that a little bit, but before that, I'd love to get into your background and learn how your journey led you to the world of trucking. And perhaps you can share a a bit about the work that you do with Beta Consulting Group, the company that you founded in 2019. I'd love to know what you're seeing and hearing across the industry and what your thoughts might be on just the outlook for the industry in this new year and beyond. And I also want to make sure we spend some time discussing the Broker Carrier Summit, especially as one of those meetings will be taking place right here in my backyard in late April in Indianapolis. And then lastly, we'll answer a question during our newest industry segment of the show. It's called Industry Health, which is sponsored by Project 61. Does that work for you?
Trey Griggs [00:01:51]:
That sounds great, and I'll try to do my best to give a little background in under two minutes, but no guarantees, right? I like to tell stories and sometimes they drag on just a little bit longer than I anticipate.
Jeremy Reymer [00:02:02]:
Great. But. But before we even get into that, one of my favorite ways to kick off an episode is to ask my guests a favorite book or books that they might recommend to the audience. And so, do you have a specific book that you'd like to share?
Trey Griggs [00:02:14]:
I do. I do. Probably my favorite book for business, but I think it also impacts personal as well, is a book called Fans First by Jesse Cole. And you may or may not recognize that he is the founder owner of the Savannah Bananas, and he's the yellow tux guy. And so he wrote a book called Fans first, and it's a tremendous read about how to do everything that you do with your customers and your fans in mind, how to take customers and turn them into fans. And everything you do have them, you know, at the forefront of your decision making. And that that is true for every business. You know, it doesn't matter if you're selling, you know, ice cream on the side of the road or if you're moving, you know, $100 million worth of freight every year.
Trey Griggs [00:02:53]:
You want your customers to be your biggest fan. Like nobody says, I don't want my customers to be a fan of mine. Everybody wants their customers to be a fan. This book is really good about breaking down what they have done at the Savannah Bananas to turn what usually are just typical baseball fans into absolute physical fanatics for their banana ball, which is a completely different game. And they outline the whole thing. And so it's really easy steps to follow, things that you can implement in your own business, no matter what your business is, to really build your brand and turn customers into fans.
Jeremy Reymer [00:03:22]:
I think that's an awesome suggestion. I have not heard of that book, so I wrote it down and I'll add it to my Goodreads list. But I am familiar with the Savannah Bananas. My daughter's name is Savannah, but I can tell you, as a kid growing up, the Harlem Globetrotters come to mind. You know, of course, that's basketball versus baseball, but I hear nothing but amazing things about Savannah Bananas and the fact that I. I think it's impossible to get a ticket to see them. They're that popular. Is that right?
Trey Griggs [00:03:45]:
It's very difficult to get a ticket. The waiting list is hundreds of thousands of people long. It's insane how crazy it is. I had the good fortune in 2022 to go to a Savannah baseball game in Savannah. And I got to. Not only that, but I got to meet the president who was the keynote speaker at the event that I was emceeing at the time, which was the TMSA Elevate Conference. And not only that, but I shot my shot. All right.
Trey Griggs [00:04:08]:
On one of the pre calls with Jared Orton, the president, I said, is there any chance I could get a Jersey with my name on the back. And I was willing to pay for it. I'd pay for shipping, whatever. I just wanted a custom jersey. And right away, without even thinking about it, he goes, oh, yeah, absolutely. Just tell me, you know, what number you want and how to spell your name. We'll have it ready for you. We get to the event, we go to the game.
Trey Griggs [00:04:29]:
They have the jersey waiting for me at the game. Like, they really live and preach everything that they. That they talk about. I mean, it's. It's really amazing.
Jeremy Reymer [00:04:37]:
That's fans first.
Trey Griggs [00:04:38]:
That's totally cool. I mean, they'd have to do that, right? But it's one thing. What they say often is do for one what you wish you could do for all. Yeah. Like, I'm sure they wish they could give every customer, every fan a custom jersey, but they can't. But I asked for it, and they said, yeah, no problem.
Jeremy Reymer [00:04:52]:
You're going to tell this story for a long time.
Trey Griggs [00:04:54]:
I have told this story for three and a half years on almost every podcast that I'm on that remotely comes up, right? I tell the story or from wearing the jersey, because I like to wear jersey jerseys at conferences. That's how I stand out, is I wear jerseys. I don't wear polos or ties or like that. That's not me. So I wear jerseys and I. I wear my Savannah Bananas jersey, and people like, oh, have you been to a game? And then we tell the story, and then I tell them how I got the jersey.
Trey Griggs [00:05:17]:
So it's. It's just bringing positivity to everybody about this brand, Savannah Bananas, just by that one act of kindness to one fan who just asked for it.
Jeremy Reymer [00:05:25]:
That's. That's really cool. And speaking of jerseys, I do want to ask you about supply chainswag.com, what I see that you're wearing right now, but maybe a good segue into that is just a little bit about your background and kind of where you're from. So I'm curious just how your journey into trucking began. How did you find your way into this great industry?
Trey Griggs [00:05:42]:
You know, I grew up here in the Midwest. I grew up in Kansas City. And after, you know, graduating college and trying to figure out life, I really wanted to be a high school teacher and a basketball coach, golf coach, baseball coach, whatever. And so that's what I did. I taught high school physics for three years at Raytown High School, coach a lot of sports, and then made a transition when I got married into youth ministry and then went back to teaching and did part time youth ministry. And my whole life for about 10 years was all about, you know, being with kids and coaching kids, teaching kids, educating kids, all that kind of stuff. And then my wife and I, we, you know, we got married, we had our first daughter and then we had our second daughter. And you know, one of our values as a family was we wanted her to be able to be home to raise our kids and to impart those values that we wanted.
Trey Griggs [00:06:22]:
And that was really, really important to us. And everybody said, you're crazy, you can't do this on a teacher salary. And we said, well, we're going to do it anyways, we don't care. So we did that and we made it. We survived for two years, but we just started to realize that this is only going to get more expensive with kids. And you know, it was just very difficult. We were just getting by. We weren't getting ahead, we weren't getting things paid off.
Trey Griggs [00:06:42]:
And so we made the difficult decision to get out of teaching because I didn't want to be a principal, I didn't want to go into that aspect of education. I really love the kids and so it was a tough decision. Still to this day, that's my favorite job, is being a teacher and a coach. And I wish I could go back to it and maybe someday I will. I had a friend at church that said, hey, I think you'd be good at sales. And so I was like, okay, maybe, I don't know. I'm not a big fan of car salesmen. Like, no, no, every business has sales.
Trey Griggs [00:07:05]:
It's professional, it's different, you'd be really good at it. I'm like, okay. So we happened to be relocating at the time to Portland, Oregon to do something fun and crazy. We just wanted to live out, out there and have a good time. Our kids were super young, they didn't know what was going on. And the only job I could get was door to door office supply sales. Going business to business in Portland, Oregon, where mind you, it rained six months out of the year. So I'm walking around in a suit, I'm selling, I'm slinging paper and toners and, you know, toilet paper and pins and anything I can sell.
Trey Griggs [00:07:33]:
Trying to do that, it was very, very difficult. It was definitely a shock to the system from being a teacher and a youth pastor where I'm just serving kids and I don't even worry about where money comes from and I'm not really selling anything. I mean, I kind of was, but only vision and nobody Was paying me money for it. They were just showing up. With that being said, it was a shock to the system. It was really hard for about six months and. But I stuck with it. I was making a little bit of money, I was learning as I went along the way and I eventually figured it out.
Trey Griggs [00:08:01]:
My wife was really pivotal in that. She encouraged me at one point, just don't focus on education, on learning and not about making money. Because as a provider I was feeling embarrassed that I wasn't providing well enough. She said, don't worry about that, just learn. She's like, for the next six months, learn as much as you can and then we'll get a professional sales job. Well, all that led to 15 months total in door to door sales. I finally figured it out, started to become one of the top reps in the office that we had there. I broke a couple office records, which was really fun.
Trey Griggs [00:08:27]:
I started to make a little bit more money, all good things. And then when it was time to find a real job, I went to a recruiter and I said, hey, I'd love a sales job. You know, something with a base salary and some benefits. That'd be great because door to door sales is 100% commission, no benefits. I mean, it was very, very tough. The recruiter that I spoke with, she had a relationship with Janice Compton of DAT in Portland, Oregon. I didn't know anything about dat. I didn't know anything about the technology or about freight or brokers or really anything.
Trey Griggs [00:08:53]:
I didn't know anything about it. But I interviewed for the job, I was able to get the job. And then because of doing the door to door for 15 months, which is so hard, selling dat was easy. I mean, the second call that a trucker makes when he buys a truck is DAT to get loads. The same thing with a broker, you know, after they get their MC up and running and whatever bond that they need, they're calling DAT to get on the load board. So it was relatively easy to do that. All the things I learned in door to door sales really came through of just how to really make friends, make people laugh, connect with them, be indifferent, challenge what they want, they think they want, try to upsell them a little bit, but at the end of the day, ask them how they want to pay and get them signed up. I mean, it was relatively easy in that regard.
Trey Griggs [00:09:35]:
So I did really well. And that was my entrance into the, into the industry. I worked there four years and then I, I started working with startups. I'm not really a corporate Kind of guy. And as Dat grew and they were 30 years old, kind of had the corporate structure and I, I like the idea of doing startups. I worked at a TMS startup, I worked at Trucker Tools for a year. I did a little work with Lean Solutions Group and the Nearshore staffing. What I realized that every step along the way is that all of these startup companies, they don't have any marketing support, they don't have any sales processes, their CRM's not set up.
Trey Griggs [00:10:06]:
It's usually a founder who has an idea who starts a company and sells it to their network as best they can. Founder led sales are almost always network based sales, but they're not really salespeople. And at some point if you're going to be successful in your company, you need to start building a sales structure. Processes, marketing, you know, how are you going to market this, how are you going to talk about it, how are you going to brand it? All of those things didn't exist. And so as I was trying to sell those products along the way I was also doing the marketing and the messaging and getting customers to speak on our behalf and you know, getting this slide deck created and the processes in the CRM, how to use HubSpot most effectively and how to automate, you know, getting agreements out. All of those things that are just really important to speed up the process. Startups don't have that and I really love working with startups. And so in 2022 I officially launched Beta Consulting Group.
Trey Griggs [00:10:52]:
I did start the LLC in 2018, but I didn't do anything with it because I was afraid. Just like every entrepreneur, it's hard to take the jump. But in 2022 I took the jump to work with companies on their sales and marketing strategies and been doing that for the past three years and having a lot of fun along the way, making a lot of mistakes along the way, changing and pivoting a little bit along the way and here we are.
Jeremy Reymer [00:11:12]:
Well, I was going to say getting into the trucking industry, I'm sure you recognized the special nature of the industry where relationships really matter and getting to know people. And I know that you, at heart you're a connector. You know, we've known each other for several years. I think we first met pre Covid. Yeah, you got just this special set of skills. You're talking about marketing and sales. Like this is many things that this industry is really in need of. Can you just share a little bit about Beta Consulting Group? The kind of stuff that you're doing There, the work that you're doing now especially, it sounds like primarily focused on certainly in the transportation sector, maybe, but definitely startups for sure.
Trey Griggs [00:11:50]:
I mean, I only work with trucking companies and logistics companies, freight brokers, and then the service providers and the technology companies that service them. So if you're a logistics tech company, if you're a recruiter in the space, if you're a marketer in the space, those are the companies that I work with, along with freight brokers and truckers. And what I would say is this. You know, the one thing that I've learned in my career is the beginning of all great sales and marketing starts with messaging. It starts with how you communicate your product, who you are, how you're helping, the value that you're providing, what makes you unique. That's all linguistic, that's all words. And you know, we're in a unique situation where we just had a presidential election, we just had the inauguration that just happened. And what are the parties doing right now? The parties are evaluating their messaging, especially the Democrats, since they lost in 2020.
Trey Griggs [00:12:37]:
The Republicans were doing this. Hey, did what we say resonate with our voters? It's all messaging. And that's a big part of selling. It's in fact, one of the biggest parts of selling is how you communicate with your audience. And so that's the work that I love to do. I tend to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a wordsmith, a bit of an ideas guy, creative guy. And I love sitting with customers to ask them about their product, about their service, about the problem that they think they're solving. But I really love talking to their customers, because your customers is where the gold is.
Trey Griggs [00:13:06]:
From a marketing standpoint, if you don't talk to your customers, you're not going to get your messaging right. You're not going to understand your true value proposition, your differentiator and why they purchased it. You go to the customers and say, why did you choose us? You were evaluating three or four other pieces of technology. Why did you choose us? You go to shipper, why did you choose us? To move your freight as a broker or a carrier, whatever you're doing, why do you continue to choose us? What do you like about us? What do we do really well? Most companies don't even know what they do really well because they don't ask these questions. They don't find out. And a lot of times what they do really well, they don't even realize or the value they're providing. They don't even realize what they're really providing their customers and what the result is that the customer is getting. So by talking to customers, that's where the gold is in marketing.
Trey Griggs [00:13:49]:
And that's what we do is we love to help companies with messaging, with how they're communicating their proposition, whether it's on their website or emails or social media or you go to a trade show and somebody says, oh, Beta Consulting Group, what do you do? What do I say? Most people just show up and throw up. They have so much information about their company in their head, they just start talking. But there's no real strategy or plan. If you want to hear my two sentence elevator pitch, I would say this. You know, Jeremy, it's really hard to sell your product when people don't know who you are or what you do. The Beta Consulting Group, we clarify your message so nobody has confusion about what you do and how you're going to help them grow their company. That's it.
Jeremy Reymer [00:14:27]:
Yeah. So necessary, so, so important.
Trey Griggs [00:14:31]:
So simple. And every company has that. They just don't know how to say it. Sometimes they don't know how to simplify it down to just two sentences because you just know so much. So I love helping companies with that. The other thing that we really specialize in is customer advocacy, because again, your customers will always sell your product or service better than you. Don't take offense at that. It's just the truth.
Trey Griggs [00:14:51]:
Your customer will always sell it better than you. It's the psyche of buying. Think about this. If you and I were going to go to a new restaurant in Indianapolis tonight, one you've never been to, one I've never been to. We want to try something new. There's a couple things we probably do. But I can tell you one thing we would never do. Okay.
Trey Griggs [00:15:07]:
Neither of us would ever think to do this, and we, we shouldn't do this. None of us would call the restaurant and say, hey, are your steaks good? You know, how's the dessert? Is it good? Right? You wouldn't do that. Nobody would do that because you know that they're trying to sell you the food. They're probably going to say they're the best in town, you know, or tell you whatever. I want to talk to the person that went there, that ate it and that paid for it. I want to talk to that person. I want to know what they think. That's why reviews are so big nowadays.
Trey Griggs [00:15:34]:
If you're going to buy something on Amazon, you're going to read five reviews. If four of Them are positive and one is negative, you're probably going to buy it. If four are negative and one is positive, you're going to keep shopping more than likely. Like, we want to know what customers think, and that's really powerful. And most companies, especially in this industry, do not tap into their customers to help them sell. So we help with customer feedback, we help with customer testimonials, we help with organizing customer references. If you have $100 million shipper that you're working with as a broker and you're trying to get another $100 million shipper, you want those two people to talk. You don't want the $10 million shipper to talk to the $100 million shipper.
Trey Griggs [00:16:11]:
They have different needs and different problems. So how do you organize your customer references? How do you geolocate your customers and your prospects on a map to try to find the clusters? Oh, hey, we've got five customers in Philly and we've got 20 really good prospects in Philly that we haven't gotten over the finish line. What if we went to Philly and got a suite at a Phillies game and brought them all together and let them talk for four hours? I guarantee you, your customers, the ones that are happy, are going to sell your prospects better than you ever will. You're going to walk out of that game and prospects are going to say, hey, I think we should start doing something. I'm going to send you a load. Let's see what you guys can do because your customer sold it for you. Like, these things are so powerful and a lot of companies don't think of these things. Those are the two areas that we really love to help our customers.
Trey Griggs [00:16:55]:
And then all the other stuff, the marketing support and those types of things, we have partners that execute really well on social media management and website updates and emails. We farm that out to our partners to do a phenomenal job.
Jeremy Reymer [00:17:07]:
Well, I was going to say you're getting me excited about starting a trucking company just so I could work with you because that stuff is. It's gold. To your point. And I know aside from Beta consulting, you're also heavily involved in the Broker Carrier Summit. And. And I realized as a carrier long ago, awful experience. 05 to 08, not the best years for trucking. Certainly not towards the latter part of that.
Jeremy Reymer [00:17:29]:
I realized there's a love hate relationship, you know, or can be anyway, between carriers and brokers. So I think the idea of this sort of networking event is fantastic. Can you just share a background on the broker Carrier summit and what it's all about.
Trey Griggs [00:17:41]:
Well, I think you're absolutely right. I think historically there has been a love hate relationships between brokers and carriers. And I almost kind of equate it to love hate relationship between Democrats and Republic. But here's the reason why they're never in the same room talking. Like if you're a Democrat or Republican and you talk to the other party, you'll probably realize that you're 98% aligned and there's like 2% of issues that you disagree on and you can handle that. But that's not what the media wants us to believe. And I think the same thing is true with brokers and carriers. The main reason why brokers and carriers don't like each other or talk bad about each other is because they've never actually spent time together.
Trey Griggs [00:18:14]:
When you think about technology these days, you can book a load on a load board digitally without even talking to a broker. Or if you do, you might talk to one person at that broker for a brief amount of time. It's very transactional. The majority of loads and loads that are moved on carriers are one and done. They're not repeat loads. That's, that's the tendency. It's been around for a long, long time, especially since load boards came on, on the scene. And so you end up with carriers who just get these grievances about brokers, but they never talk to brokers.
Trey Griggs [00:18:41]:
And you get these brokers who complain about these carriers and, you know, lying to them and blah, blah, blah, not tracking whatever, but they don't talk to him. And so the origin of this event, which I think was genius, this is Dan Lindsay's idea. He's a former freight broker out of Indianapolis Linkage Logistics. He recently sold his brokerage to go all in on this idea because it's so powerful. He's a former Marine and he's used to collaboration and working together and talking together. And so he just kind of got frustrated with why is nobody talking to anybody? Why are we just complaining about it? What would happen? What would happen if we brought brokers and carriers together? So they had the first summit in Indianapolis back in 2023. They marketed it for two months. They got 35 people to show up.
Trey Griggs [00:19:21]:
And the very first thing that happened, Jeremy, is wild. And I wasn't there. So I'm telling a story, I wasn't there. But this is what happened, is they were small enough that they could go around the room and do introductions. And one of the carriers stood up at the very Beginning and he said, my name is so and so. And, and I'm here because I hate brokers. And everybody kind of like, what's going to happen here? Are we about to get in a fight? We need to call the police. And then he followed it up with, but I've never talked to one and that's why I'm here.
Trey Griggs [00:19:48]:
And it really set the tone for, let's just talk like, what does it take to run a brokerage? What does it take to own a truck? You know, most brokers have no idea the cost of owning a truck. Most carriers don't understand what it takes to run a brokerage and what goes into that. Carriers think the brokers set the pricing and they steal their margin. Brokers think that the carriers are, you know, lying all the time or driving different places, not tracking, not answering their phone. Like there's all these kind of grievances. And in that meeting they were able to talk about it for the first time and come to some agreements like, oh, this isn't as bad as we thought it was. We have more in common than we think. I want to help you out.
Trey Griggs [00:20:24]:
I'll answer the phone calls at 7:00 at night when you carrier, when you call and have a question, I'll answer the phone. And carriers started to understand that not all brokers are like the big box brokers that don't answer the phone and just lower the rates. And all these brokers started to realize that these carriers aren't like some of the carriers that are fraudulent and, you know, not delivering on time, taking the load hostage, all those kind of things. And there's a real commonality that it was special. And so Dan just kept that going. And that's when he invited me in to simply emcee the event in Tampa, because that's what I do. I do emcee services and keynote speaking. So he invited me into MC the event.
Trey Griggs [00:20:58]:
I had no idea what I was getting into. But in Tampa we had 226 people come, which was a great growth. These conversations were like conversations I never heard. And the relationships that were built were so authentic. And we had brokers who were tendering loads to carriers at the event. It was crazy. Like I'd never seen anything like it. And our sponsors loved it because we didn't have booths.
Trey Griggs [00:21:18]:
So all the sponsors were immersed into the conference and hearing the sessions and the problems and talking and all those kind of things. And so it was really special. And so we kept it going. We did Kansas City in the spring of 2024, we had 360 people attend. So it kept growing. And then we did Fort Worth this past fall in October, we had 500 people at that event. So we're seeing an increase of about 150 attendees per time. And what we're really excited about is that Fort Worth was the first broker carrier summit where we had more carriers than brokers.
Trey Griggs [00:21:47]:
And we know how important that is because one carrier can service one or two brokers. One broker could potentially feed five, six, seven carriers. So we know the ratio needs to be three to one, four to one. That's what we're working towards in Indy. We're really hopeful that we hit those numbers of three to one, three carriers for every one broker. We believe that's the ideal mix for everybody to get maximum value out of this event. And so we're anticipating somewhere between 60750 in Indianapolis. And it just continues to grow.
Trey Griggs [00:22:16]:
It's really exciting. It's the only event in transportation that brings these two parties together. And the whole tagline that we have for the event is the broker carrier summit is where brands are elevated and deals get done. We want the small and medium sized brokers and carriers that many people don't even know about. We want to elevate their brands, make them known in this community and then we want them to do deals together. Whether that's brokers and carriers or whether that's tech vendors with brokers, tech vendors with carriers, Whatever it is, we want people to do business together with like minded people. And so it's been incredibly exciting. It's a crazy journey that we're on.
Trey Griggs [00:22:52]:
And being able to come on as Director of Operations only solidifies just my role within the event. So now I'm managing a lot of things. I'm still emceeing or coordinating the schedule and getting speakers. It's been a lot of fun. I love event management a lot more than I thought.
Jeremy Reymer [00:23:06]:
Well, a tagline you might add to that too is building trust. Because you know, bringing all these people together, you're really, you're building that foundation of trust and breaking down that barrier, that love, hate, relationship barrier that existed. How can the audience learn more about the summit itself and consider attending? Is there a website we can send them to?
Trey Griggs [00:23:24]:
Absolutely. BrokerCarriersummit.com has all the information and when you click on those links it takes you to the CVENT registration page. That's where the agenda is, information about the hotel. Let me tell you about a couple of really exciting things about this that Your audience will definitely want to know. We definitely want carriers to come to this, but we know that it costs more money for a small carrier to come to this event, have to pull their truck off the road. If they're owner, operator or a small trucking company. That costs money, hotels, all those kind of things. So we've intentionally lowered the price for carriers.
Trey Griggs [00:23:54]:
Everybody else pays more and we've told them, we're like, listen, you're going to pay more. We're dropping the price for carriers because we want them to be able to say yes, easier. So it's $500 for the entire week for carriers and that includes every session, all the meals, everything including free truck parking. So with our friends over at Truck Parking Club, we set up lots to provide free truck parking. Fort Worth was difficult. We didn't handle that one as well. We get it. We struck out on that one.
Trey Griggs [00:24:18]:
That was not great. But in Indianapolis and at all future events, we're only looking for hotels that have big parking lots right on site or very close nearby. So we're currently working on free truck parking right there in Indianapolis at a large venue, pretty close to the hotel. You might be able to pick it out since you live down there. We're working on all the details for that so that trucks can park for free in safe places really close to the event. So they can do that if they'd like. And we're really excited about that. You know, that's going to be just continued value adds.
Trey Griggs [00:24:45]:
We're also working on a project to potentially help truckers find loads to get to Indiana because, you know, sometimes it's hard to get your truck there, especially if you don't have a load going that direction. It may not be a lane that you run all the time. So we're, we're continually trying to figure out how to make it better and better for carriers and provide more value. A lot of our sessions this time around are all carrier based, so we're really excited about it. Broker carriersummit.com, they'll find out all the information there.
Jeremy Reymer [00:25:11]:
I love that. As you know, a passion project of mine is around driver health and wellness. And in late 2024 I founded Project 61 which is, you know, the relevance of the number 61 being the average life expectancy of a CDL driver. And I know that you're an advocate for self care and leading your people, leading your family towards a healthy lifestyle. Which brings me to the industry health segment of the show. And this is the latest feature segment you know, sponsored by Project 61, where I asked my guest a question tied to, you guessed it, health. The question is what one behavioral change would have the biggest impact on driver's health? What do you think?
Trey Griggs [00:25:53]:
I think it's without a doubt planning. Most bad decisions we make in life, whether it's our health or our finances or whatever it is, it's almost always due to the fact that we're making decisions in the moment. We're not planning for them from a health perspective. And I don't know if you know this or not, but one of my podcasts that I do is called Iron Mind. It's on Tuesday mornings at 6am Central. Michael Lombard is on there. Nick Klingensmith is on there. We're talking about how to build healthy habits.
Trey Griggs [00:26:21]:
We're talking about, you know, what it takes, what you can do. And I think the biggest thing is this, is that if you plan your meals in advance, if you plan your workouts in advance, you're much more likely to follow through on them. If you don't plan them, then you're just winging it. And that's when you maybe buy something that doesn't make you feel good. You knew it was a bad decision to buy that and eat that. But, you know, you're in the moment. You just, you just made it, you know. So I think when people don't plan that, that's when it gets really, really hard to maintain your health, especially in an environment like being a truck driver, because you don't have all of the amenities at your fingertips like you might at home.
Trey Griggs [00:26:56]:
You know, you don't know exactly what that truck stop is going to have. You don't know exactly, you know, what type of facilities they're going to have. We're going to park. Can you walk around? Is it safe to walk around or do a workout? Can you get a healthy meal? You don't know. You know, a lot of times you're, you're figuring out along the way, unless it's a lane that you run all the time and maybe you have it down. But for most truckers out there, they're not always on the same lanes. They're going to new locations and stopping at a new truck stop. And so by having a plan and saying, okay, this week I'm going to eat these meals and doing some work around, you know, most truck stops do have a microwave.
Trey Griggs [00:27:26]:
So if you have frozen meals or meals that you can reheat up, most trucks, especially, you know, the ones that have cabs, they usually have Refrigerator in there. You could potentially cook all your meals in advance. Put them in, you know, small Tupperwares, put them in there. And then every day just pull it out and go into the truck stop, heat it up. And now you've got the meal that you've planned to eat. You're not buying the junk that often is right in front of you. That's so tempting, especially when you're hungry. I mean, I travel on the road.
Trey Griggs [00:27:49]:
We have an rv. We'd like to travel across the country. It's so easy to go into a truck stop and just grab a soda and, you know, something that's heavy on carbs and no protein. And it just starts this really bad cycle, you know, and so by, by being intentional and having a plan. Hey, this week I'm going to walk 10 miles. I'm going to walk 10 miles. Okay, what day is am I going to do that? Let's plan out the days. I got to walk two miles at this place.
Trey Griggs [00:28:09]:
Then when you get to that place, you've already told yourself, I'm walking two miles. You know, you've already got the plan, so you're more likely to make it happen. Do. Do things. Do things come up? Of course they come up, but when you have a plan, you're more likely to follow through on it. So I think the best thing that drivers can do from a health perspective is plan.
Jeremy Reymer [00:28:25]:
Excellent response. And Trey, thank you so much for joining me. I'm grateful for your friendship and I look forward to seeing you at the Broker Carrier Summit in Indy this April.
Trey Griggs [00:28:33]:
Let's go. Thanks for having me on the show, man. It was great to talk to you.
Jeremy Reymer [00:28:36]:
And thank you for Taking the Hire Road with me. Once again, special thanks to the sponsors of the show. We really appreciate you. If you're interested in being a sponsor or joining me for an interview, please email jeremy@takingthehireroad.com. Until next time, thank you for Taking the Hire Road.