S1 E42 Why Your Trucking Business Feels Chaotic (Even With Good People)

Most trucking companies do not feel chaotic because they hired bad people.

They feel chaotic because everybody is filling in the blanks differently.

One manager says yes.
 Another says no.
 Drivers get different answers depending on who they ask.
 And eventually everything starts flowing back to the owner.

In this episode, Mike Ritzema breaks down why chaos in growing trucking companies is usually not a people problem at all.

It is a clarity problem.

You’ll learn:

•  Why good employees still create inconsistent results 
•  How unclear expectations turn owners into bottlenecks 
•  Why repeated questions are a systems warning sign 
•  The hidden cost of making employees “guess” 
•  How clarity creates momentum and consistency 

If your business feels harder to run than it should…
 this episode will probably feel very familiar.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Most business chaos is not caused by bad employees. It's caused by different people filling in the blanks differently. One manager says yes, another says no. One dispatcher handles it one way, but someone else handles it completely differently. And eventually the only the owner starts thinking, why does everything feel harder than it should? Welcome to the Driven for Success Podcast. It's the podcast for trucking company owners who want to build better businesses, make better decisions, and keep drivers without losing control. I'm your host, Mike Ritzima, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple to help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill that mission. And today I want to talk to you about something that has almost every growing trucking company, it hits them right in the field. But most people just diagnose it incorrectly. It's chaos. Because most owners think chaos means they have bad people. Most of the time they only have a clarity problem. I hear this from owners all the time. Why does everything depend on me? Why can't people just make decisions? Why does this problem keep happening over and over again? And most of the time, they actually hired good people. People that care. People that are trying to do their best. People that want to do the right thing. But something is operating off of assumptions instead of standards. You know, one great example would be one dispatcher promising something to a driver that another dispatcher would never promise them. Hey, if you do this load, I'll do this thing for you. And you as the owner would never promise that. Or you'd always promise it, and the other dispatcher does not. You know, or you'll hear customers, worse yet, customers hearing in inconsistent information. Yeah, what's your policy on detention? Well, it's this. Or, well, it's that. Well, those answers should always be the same. Or, you know, driver is the same thing. What's your policy on paying me detention, right? It's this or it's that, and the answer should be universal from all of your dispatchers or all of your payroll people. The owner ends up becoming the referee, and we just can't have that. The owner has better things to do. You have better things to do than referee this discussion. But here's what's really happening. When the business lacks clarity, every employee starts filling in the blanks themselves. And not everyone is making decisions based on what you would want them to do. They're basing it on their own interpretation of what they think you would want them to do. So it's not the company standard. And the result of that is what's happening is everyone is filling in the blanks differently. Sales is doing one thing, operations is doing a whole different thing. Payroll is handling it differently. Safety has their own agenda for how they think it should be handled. And now the business feels inconsistent. Because it is. You know, when this happens, you slowly start having confusion. Confusion among all of everybody who touches your company, your drivers, your office people, your customers, your vendors. There's confusion everywhere. You have repeated mistakes because nobody really knows what the right answer is. They're taking a guess based on the assumptions that they have. And that generally doesn't go well. All these things create friction in your business. They just make everything harder. And if nothing else out of this podcast, we're trying to reduce friction from your business. Because it should just run. It should be boring. When we talk about boring, we mean smooth and frictionless. And that's the goal. And all these things just add friction to what you're doing. And that makes the employees frustrated. Because the employee that you hired wants to do a good job and they think they know what a good job means, but they're using their own interpretation because you weren't as clear with them as you should have been. All of these things lead to an exhausted owner. An owner who's just pulling out whatever hair they have left and throwing their hands up and going, I don't know why this is so hard. You know, yeah, just breathe that in for a minute, too. It it'll wear you out. Most owners don't immediately blame clarity, they blame execution. They think, well, nobody takes ownership of this stuff and nobody communicates and nobody thinks ahead. Kind of like in the subtext of it is when I was an employee, I did all of those things. But if you have five good employees that keep making different decisions, that's usually not a people problem. That's a systems problem. Chaos is usually a lack of clarity wearing a people costume. Chaos, I'm gonna say it again. Chaos is usually a lack of clarity wearing a people costume. That's exactly how it manifests. The bigger the company gets, the more expensive this chaos becomes. You know, small companies manage chaos reasonably well. Everything runs through the owner's brain. They've got five trucks, six trucks, eight trucks. And the owner's the only person in the office. So they're the dispatcher and the biller and all these things. So there's really just one mind making all the decisions. And even when they hire the next person, that next person is really just executing the things that the owner's telling him to do. Because there's a pretty finite number of questions that get to the new person. But as the company grows, you know, you get 20 trucks, 30 trucks, 40 trucks, and it just doesn't work. There's too many other people involved, and the original tribal knowledge that you gave to that first person, now they shared with the next people, and it gets diluted a little bit. Uh, if you don't think that would work that way, come up with a sentence, whisper it in somebody's ear, and have them whisper it to somebody else. Do that with like eight people and see what your the original sentence comes back to you as. That's what's happening here. That is exactly where the chaos lives. Is just the little bits, gradual bits at a time, how the message changes. And your message needs to be crystal clear about what you want your people to do. The result of this stuff is that the owner becomes the human glue. You're kind of the single source of truth for everything. And yeah, that's not awesome. And it's exhausting. So let's do better than that. The most dangerous part of all of this is this kind of chaos compounds. Because once employees stop feeling confident, they stop making decisions. And now everything comes back to you as the owner, every single exception, every approval, every situation that is not exactly perfectly normal. And the owner slowly becomes the bottleneck without even realizing unclear businesses create hesitant teams every time. People stop acting because they're afraid to get it wrong. Uh, things will they'll say things like, That's how I thought we were doing it, or I didn't know what you wanted, or I was waiting to ask you, or even things like, I didn't want to bother you with this, so I made a decision based on what I thought you wanted. Ugh. If you're not if your thoughts aren't clear, this is what you're gonna get. If and they're clear in your head, just so we're clear on this. See, trying to be clear. They're clear in your head, but the instructions that the other person that the employee receives do not have that same level of clarity. And so that's that's really the where things often fall off the rails. You thought you were being clear when you told them, but they missed some piece of context or they missed something, and it doesn't seem nearly as clear to them. So let's talk about we've talked about unclear things and chaos, and that's no fun. Let's talk about what clarity is. Clarity is not micromanaging, clarity is removing ambiguity. You know, good companies will define what matters, how decisions get made, and what good results look like, and what the priorities are. Because if you don't define these things, the employees will create their own vision of it. And then when they do that, it becomes their vision of what's supposed to happen and not yours. People cannot execute consistently inside confusion. They just can't because they don't know the result normally, what they're supposed to do. And most employees are not trying to create problems, they're just trying to survive all this uncertainty. I mean, my goodness, you can still give them instructions and give them freedom. You know, you can say you have a range of these things in which in which you can operate, and most things are gonna fall within that range. Uh if you can take a load coming back from this place, it pays between here and there and gets the driver back this quickly or whatever, things like that. You give them some freedom to make decisions, but you give them boundaries on each side of the decision, and you say it's gotta be more than this or less than this, and it's gotta be this, and then you go find the thing that meets that qualification. But that's that's clarity as opposed to control. Control is book this load with this person for this much money. That's control, that's micromanaging. Clarity is as long as you can get me $3,000 to get home from wherever, we're good. Or as long as you can get me $3,000 to get home and the truck will be home by this date. You know, whatever, whatever the whatever the instructions are, as long as you're clear, you know, that gives the employee a lot less stress because now they know exactly what success looks like. Success looks like me getting this driver home by this date and getting at least $3,000 for that load, given the trailer I have out there and whatever. So you that's clarity. And it's much easier for the employee to know what a successful accomplishment of that will look like. We need to talk about a shift to fix this, and here it is every repeated question should become a documented answer. We've talked about that before. Every recurring issue should create a standard. Every frustration is usually pointing at missing clarity somewhere. That's the new part of it. But that's how businesses mature. Not by hiring superheroes, by reducing interpretation. You want there to be one way for someone to pick up what you're putting down, so to say. So if you answer the same question twice, you probably need a new system. And this is where businesses start to calm down. It's not overnight, but steadily. You know, you start building SOPs, standard operating procedures. Uh, you start building decision standards. This is how we make decisions. You start building internal knowledge bases, and with AI, this is not nearly the hard thing it used to be. Because it used to be written pieces of paper randomly all over the office. You can build things that will just become your decision-making process and build it right in any of the paid AIs, and probably some of the free ones too. It's a whole nother talk for another day, but you can Google it or you can ask your own AI about it. But it can absolutely be done. You know, and having all this documentation, it reduces the chaos. So instead of chaos being in you know, in a people costume, it's gone. It's just the people again. The people that you hired to do good work, the people that you felt were capable of doing good work, and they probably are capable of doing good work. You just have to give them the guardrails or the boundaries to know how where their good work is. Okay, we've got some emotions to talk about here, too. We just do. What why is this so hard? Well, what makes this hard is owners take the chaos personally. They think things like, why can't my team just think like I do? But your team can't read your mind, and they can't execute standards that only exist in your head. Your business does not become consistent when you hire better people, it becomes consistent when everyone operates from the same clarity. That's the real shift. Is instead of you thinking they know things that they should know, you make sure they know that you're absolutely clear that they know the things they should know. Because the expectations living in your head, as clear as they are in your head, and I promise you they're probably pretty clear. They've got to be that clear in everybody else's head. There's a whole thing about communication where it's the thought in your head becomes the words out of your mouth or however you communicate it, and then whatever noise is in the air, and then their eyes or their ears, how they receive it, and then their brain how they process it. And so from your brain to their brain is really the whole voyage. And it's gotta be clear in their brain, it's gotta be that clear. And so making assumptions of what they might know or what they might believe just are clouds instead of clarity. We can't have that. So, you know, and also the idea of, you know, some people owners will think common sense isn't common anymore. Well, maybe it never was, but again, that's on you as a communicator. You need to be just crystal clear with them about exactly what you expect. And don't assume that people know things unless they've told you they know it, unless they've demonstrated that they know it. You don't want to make that assumption because they might have been, they might have worked for another trucking company that did it a whole different way, and they had a whole other manager that did things differently, and they have to unlearn that it takes a long time. You might have yourself taught them some bad habits because you weren't clear with them. And I know it sounds like I'm convicting you on this, and I'm not trying to. We've all had days where we haven't been clear. I have found in my own company that when things don't go like they're supposed to go, almost every time my instructions weren't clear because they're trying to do good work, and it just they just didn't understand what the objective was or where their where their boundaries were. And so I always have to look at it as what did I not communicate correctly? What SOP is unclear, what any of those things, because it's often one of those. And I hate it every single time, but my employees are trying to do good work, and so I have to make sure that I can I'm up to the challenge as a leader to be able to communicate to them exactly what the expectations are through things like SOPs and policies, and also when it's appropriate to ask questions and things like that. All those things are boundaries, and the more clear we can be on those boundaries, the better the employee will perform. And when I say better, I mean the way that they'll make the decisions you want them to make and the way that you want them to make the decisions. Most chaotic businesses are not chaotic because people don't care. They're chaotic because the business keeps forcing employees to guess. And guessing creates inconsistency. And then inconsistency creates friction. And friction creates that exhaustion we talked about, especially for the owner, because that's where all the friction has to stop. That's where it all has to be addressed. Confusion creates chaos, clarity creates momentum. And companies that scale the best are usually not the loudest, they're the clearest. So, what you want to do this week is look at one instance where somebody did something in a way you didn't want them to do, and really look at it and talk to them about it. Was I clear about my instructions? And if they say yes, just ask him. Okay, I instructed you to do this and you did that. Tell me what happened. Tell me where the disconnect was. And you'll probably get something like, oh, I thought you meant this. Okay, there's your lack of clarity. Take that, iron that out with that person, get it worked out, document it so everybody's clear about it. And with a little bit of good fortune, you'll never have to deal with that again. I hope you have a great week. We'll see you next week. If this has been helpful to you, please share it and review it. The more people that review it, the more trucking companies like you that get to see this and hopefully be a little bit better off. We'll talk again soon.