Breathe of Fresh Air

On January 23rd of this year, I made what some would think was a tough decision and decided to let my Operations Manager go.

I had an Business analyst come in and evaluate our company. What he had found was over the last 14 months, our company had been down almost 8% profit margin from the previous 2 years. He found that we had a severe loss in revenue per mile, almost a $.32 drop. Our service calls had increased dramatically and when we dug into it, we were continuously sending drivers out without the correct equipment. We spent $1.5 million on new equipment last year, buying triaxle trucks as well as triaxle chassis so that we could handle the over weight loads for our customers, but still was sending out loads with incorrect equipment. That in turn created several service calls and 2 rolled over trucks.

The profit loss was a little part, but the biggest part was the loss of customer service. We pride ourselves on the customer side of things, and when I started digging in to sent emails and started noticing that we had a lot of just deleted emails with no response back to our customers, I knew I had to act.

I decided to bring my wife in full time to help get this mess straightened out. I asked her to take a leave of absence from her Senior Business Analyst job at an asset management company and to help us fix what had been happening over the last 14 months. Without hesitation, she started January 24th. Yes, it has been a huge learning curve for her, but she has been doing a fantastic job.

Unfortunately, the first Monday on the job, we had extreme weather. Then 2 days later, more snow. this has been one of the worst winters in recent memory. From high snow accumulation, to ice storms and finally 2 solid weeks of temperatures hanging around zero. then for fun, lets bring in the most freight this area has ever seen.

No matter how many times I told her she was doing a great job, she felt like a failure. Containers being left at the rail, empties sitting because there just was not enough man hours available during the nicer days. We had a few newer customers that did not seem to understand about big trucks and slick roads just do not mix, but most of our partners completely understand. No matter how the emails and phone calls always ended well, Debbie still takes the containers that are sitting there as a personal failure.

Debbie does not look at the 4 weeks she has run the office as a success and as setting 4 weeks of revenue records, she is like me and looks at the couple things that did not get done and feels like a failure. We had one of our best partners send Debbie a huge "thank you" that arrived yesterday. She is completely baffled.

The one thing I tell her to remember is communication. If you communicate with our partners so that they can communicate with their customers, everything will work out just fine.

Thank you to the OEC Traffic Team to help Debbie to start believing in her abilities again!