Ken Lucci: 0:26

Good afternoon and welcome to another exciting episode of the ground transportation podcast. I'm here with my partner in crime on the podcast, James Blaine

James Blain: 0:38

Hey everybody.

Ken Lucci: 0:38

from, PAX training. And, um, we're going to be talking about something that should be top of mind with every single operator. And if it's not, you are putting your business in peril. And that is it dovetails into the biggest discussion going on in the industry right now, which is the insurance crisis. And it really is how documentation and training can actually save your business during a lawsuit. So when I look at companies financials, I ask the question when I see zeros under training and education, what are you doing for training? Oh, well, we, you know, we have this, we have that, but it's really no outside training whatsoever. So people look at trading sometimes negatively as an expense, and it's not, and it's an investment, but it's more than that. And we'll, talk about how, A, it can save you money on your insurance premiums, but B, the event of a lawsuit, It can absolutely save you and the lack of training implements and provable training implements can actually hurt you. So give us an idea, James, of what you go through and why do you tell people that they need to do PACS training?

James Blain: 1:59

Well, and, and let me step back for a second. Let me kind of set the stage, right? so we've been, we've been doing PAX now for almost 10 years. when we first started doing training, it was run a better business, right? It was grow your business. It was make money. you know, have a better business. That's going to make you more revenue. That's going to have more people coming back. But coming out of COVID, that shifted, right? For the first time in a very long time, we shifted our messaging. We shifted our marketing because what we started seeing is these explosive nuclear verdicts, right? People are going to court. And we are seeing just millions of dollars awarded. So what's happened with that is kind of interesting because they are looking for. Any door they can find to get in, right?

Ken Lucci: 2:46

Who's they? Who's

James Blain: 2:47

they, right? The other attorneys, right? The ambulance chasers of ship. Now they're not ambulance chasers. They're ground transportation operator chasers, right? They're waiting for that accident because they know that in our world, especially God forbid, if you got a bus. Now you've got all of the people on the bus. You've got the other people on the side of the accident, right? So these guys have figured out they go in and go for policy limits. And tell people, it's just like what happens when you leave your car parked outside. Most of the stuff stolen from a car parked outside. Isn't the guy coming through, breaking your windows, trying to break into the car, making a lot of noise. They're going from house to house. They're checking each door on the car. And the second there's a door unlocked, they're taking everything inside. Anything they can find inside that vehicle and when they're going to court, they're doing the same thing. You know, I've heard stories of, you know, we had a guy who had LASIK. He's supposed to wear glasses. He had LASIK. He was driving without his glasses. All of a sudden, that whole court case revolves around, why didn't you have your glasses on? Why didn't you update your license? In the training world, it's, okay, so you did training with them. How many days? Show us the documentation. When's the last time?

Ken Lucci: 3:59

is it true that they look for even the smallest weakness to break open the barn door.

James Blain: 4:05

Oh, yeah. like I said, think of that car example, right? They're trying to find the open door. And as soon as they find the open door, they're in, right? They're going to go for it. So when we did a mock trial as part of the Bus Industry Safety Council, right? You know, the situation there was we're going to say that. You know, there was a fire and we lost all our training records, right? We don't have telematics, right? We're kind of a cheaper company. And you had a guy that was jaywalking, and he gets hit by the bus. And in a room full of owners, operators, and safety managers, Not a single group of people that were pretend jurors gave this guy less than a million dollars, right? And this, this is against our own industry. This is industry people awarding it. So that's how good it is. And what they're doing, the way these attorneys are twisting it, is they are going in and they're saying things like, hey, you have a training program, and as part of your training program, you get him out there on the road. And if he makes three mistakes, You're going to take this action, right? And, or, or, let's, let's make it even better. You have a one strike policy. If you ever find out this guy uses his phone or pulls it out while driving, you're going to fire him But we found in his, you know, when we did our discovery, we found in his file that you actually gave him a stern talking to for having his phone out and you didn't fire him. So you're negligent. You don't even, you get to write your own policies. You don't even follow your own policies, right? That's the world we live in right now.

Ken Lucci: 5:33

so distill it down, distill it down. And when you walk through the door of a prospective client, who's an operator, what are the most common weaknesses you see in operators training programs before you really get into the meat and potatoes of what you do?

James Blain: 5:50

So, there's probably three big things I see the vast majority of the time. The first is the easiest. And that's, it hasn't been touched. It hasn't been updated, right? I've seen trainings where they've still got, you know, town car, or they've still got like 1995 or they, they've got something where I'm like, man, that we're talking 20, 30 years. You haven't touched this thing. That's real obvious.

Ken Lucci: 6:12

and the manual doesn't even have their up to date fleet. They may have, they may have minis and sprinters, et cetera, but their safety all revolves around the town car.

James Blain: 6:22

and I've seen it the other way around too, right? I've seen companies that start on the black car side. They've moved into buses. Their fleet is predominantly buses now, but their training manuals, right? Their chauffeur manual, their driver manual right? Whatever They've got is still revolving around where they started and not where they are. The second one is ironic because it's the extreme version of that. And I see it most in your one to 10 car operator, right? Usually when you get to about 10 or more, you have someone that's a trainer. You have someone's a safety manager. You have someone to put together the

Ken Lucci: 6:55

You'd like to think.

James Blain: 6:56

You'd like to think right, and I've seen this with bigger companies, but it's the manual is in the owner's head. That is, if I had to say ironically, right, that's not where I started, but the most common grave, like I can't believe it's happening that I see on probably a weekly basis is the training. Is all on the owner's head. That owner knows he, well, Oh, what's your training? Well, you know, John, the owner takes them out. He shows them everything he goes through. He does. I said, great. What checklist is he using? Oh, John's been doing this since he started the company. He doesn't need a checklist. Okay, well, how's he documenting it? Oh, well, you know, we put in the file that they spent time with John. Completely, you know, back to our example of court, completely indefensible. You go into the courtroom, John's gonna go on the stand, and it's all gonna be just what John says. And the attorney's gonna go, great, show me. And John's gonna go, well, the only way I can show you is to push through the training, and he's toast.

Ken Lucci: 7:52

what's the number third? What's the three?

James Blain: 7:54

The third is one and done. They do training when they hire somebody and, and along with that is one of my favorites, they hire someone experienced and they skip all their training because he's been doing it for 10 years. He probably got great training somewhere along the line. So we're just going to fast track him and we're going to put him in a vehicle. And it is amazing. You see that from all the way up to the largest vehicles in a fleet, right? I got motor coach companies that are guilty of that. I got chauffeured companies that are guilty of that. Taxi, any, anywhere across the board we work with, that is one of the cardinal sins of, Oh, well he's done it. He's got experience. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I can fast track him and get him in a car.

Ken Lucci: 8:37

So how do you get somebody to go from one and done to ongoing training? what's that look like?

James Blain: 8:43

Well, so a couple things, right? And, and I'll, I'll start with the mindset. And I, I did a talk in California, right? I was lucky enough to be on a panel with, Kim from Lancer, right? We have Susan from California Highway Patrol. Great panel. And when we got done, I, I sat down next to a good friend of mine, uh, Steve O'Shea from Lancer. And Steve said, man, you kind of danced around it, but I think the way you sum that up is you have to treat your training Like it's on trial. Everything you do in your training, every part of your training, you got to be ready to put it in front of a jury and I wish, right? I wish I would have had that going on that stage. I wish I would have had that in the panel because I've never heard anyone sum it up that simple. You've got to do the mindset of all of your training. If you have a bad accident, if you have a fatality, if something goes wrong, if that driver has any kind of accident at all and you're going into court, you're going Training is going to be put on trial because they know that for a lot of companies, that's a weak point and they're going to be able to show your negligent and they're going to use that to win

Ken Lucci: 9:48

So what you, what I'm hearing you say is it's got to be a culture of safety.

James Blain: 9:54

a

Ken Lucci: 9:54

ongoing of safety. So let's talk about what are you supposed to do? And this is kind of a little bit touchy when, when you have somebody that is doing something wrong, you know, I'm, I am not an operator. At this point, and when I was an operator, telematics was in its infancy. So, what do you do now? What's the role of telematics? And what is the role of corrective action when you do see something wrong?

James Blain: 10:24

So a couple of things, right? If we wanted to talk about this in the frame of sports, Right? Training is your practice. Training is where you're working on getting all of the form right. You're making sure everything's there, so that when game day happens, everything goes the way it's supposed to. Telematics is videotaping the game. It is not proactive, it's reactive. And I hear it all the time, right? Well, my telematics will tell me about driver behavior, and they'll do this, and they'll do that. Look, if you're watching football, and they video the guy getting tackled instead of getting the touchdown, and they lose the game, they still lost the game, right? Same thing here.

Ken Lucci: 11:01

Right. If game after game you're watching the same interceptions happening, you're not changing it, Guess what? That, that, game day videotape means nothing.

James Blain: 11:09

Absolutely. So that's, that's the role that your telematics play, right? Your, your telematics are showing you where you need to come back and do training.

Ken Lucci: 11:19

does stop here for a second? What do you say to an operator who says to you? I'm too small for telematics, and I'm too small to buy packs

James Blain: 11:27

so first off, I'm going to tell you, if you don't buy packs. Document, whatever you're doing, you're not too small to put together a checklist. You're not too small to document it. And the other thing is, even the telematics companies are set up just like we are. We get it. We work with guys all the way down to a one car operator. What you've got to understand and what I always have a big issue with new operators is, man, I got to control where the money's going. This is preventative. Right? Putting a couple hundred dollars into something like Pax, pulling a couple hundred dollars into something like Telematics, putting money there now is going to save you from having an accident and getting dropped by your insurance carrier, having to worry about an explosive verdict, having to deal with that. The question isn't can you afford not to? It's do you have enough money so that when they blow past your policy limit, you don't lose your company because you didn't make that a priority up front.

Ken Lucci: 12:23

so there's a lot of talk The definition of defensive driving talk to me about that term Defensive driving.

James Blain: 12:32

So, I will tell you right now, defensive driving is something that we use because it's a recognized term, but we focus a lot more on proactive driving, right? Because here's the thing, you think of defensive driving, it really gives this idea of I'm fighting everybody else. The problem is In our world, we are passenger ground transportation. I don't need three seconds in front of me. I need five, right? Because even if I can stop while avoiding the accident, guess what? If I'm jerking around everybody on the bus, if I've got the CEO, right? If I've got Elon, if I've got whoever in the back and I do an abrupt lane change and I missed the accident. He's not going to go, wow, great job missing the accident. He's going to go, why'd you, why'd you jerk me around? I'm trying to have a meeting or, or the whole bus back there is going to get jerked around. So in our world, you've got to take that a step further and think of it as proactive driving. It's one of the things that we've really focused on because the idea of defensive driving is one of those terms that's been used so much. It's been pushed around so much over and over and over. That we almost start to kind of lose the meaning in it. Right? It's one of those terms that's kind of gotten overused.

Ken Lucci: 13:50

so Give me an idea from the, from a perspective of the biggest impact that somebody can make. What do you feel is the most important thing an operator can do to promote safety and actually prevent accidents?

James Blain: 14:06

So let's go back to our analogy of a game. Right? I play football, crayon up actually, I'm playing all kinds of sports right? Throughout my life.

Ken Lucci: 14:14

Yeah, I'm not buying that. I've seen your frame. You're not big enough to play anything.

James Blain: 14:18

I said I played, I didn't say I was good.

Ken Lucci: 14:20

Okay. What was it? Nursery school. Yeah, I get it. Okay. First grade. I'm sorry. I digress.

James Blain: 14:26

So here's the thing, though. It doesn't matter, right, when I was playing in high school, when I was playing in middle school, right, even, even now, right, I'm, I'm playing hockey again as an adult to try to get back in shape. The biggest mistake you can make is going out there without a plan, right? If you really want to win, You don't hit the ice. You don't hit the gridiron. You don't hit whatever sport you're in. You don't hit the field until you have a plan and everyone's in sync, right? And it's the same thing no matter what you're doing. Even if you're playing, right? You're a tennis player, one on one. If you go out there, even though it's just you and the other guy and your plan is, I'm gonna win, you don't have a plan. You're probably not gonna win. The same thing happens in business. You have to have a plan. You have to have a list you're going to follow. And here's the thing. When you're small, that, you know, my first hire, yeah, I'm probably not going to have the best checklist. I'm just going to bring him in. I'm going to try and teach him everything I know. But even on that first hire, if that operator, that owner sits down and says, hey, I need to make a list of everything that makes it, that makes me, me. Right? Why is what I do different than anyone else? If you don't put a list out like that, guess what? If you hire a quiet guy and he doesn't ask any questions, you're going to miss half of it. If you get lucky and you get a guy that just absolutely loves questions like I do, he's going to tease it out of you. But if you don't have a plan, that next guy is not going to have the same training. And the worst part is a lot of times, by the time the owners figured it out, by the time that business owners figured it out, he's got 10 to 20 guys that are all doing their own thing. And he's only coming back to it because he's either getting complaints, accidents, incidents, or what happens in a lot of cases, the insurance company showed up and they're like, Hey, you don't have a plan. You've had a couple accidents. You're going to have more. And then you've got to worry about getting dropped.

Ken Lucci: 16:21

100%. And, you know, I'm going to go back to your plan. far as game day, you know, the best laid plans are only, they're only as good as the practice of the execution. It has to be ingrained and it has to become muscle memory. And, uh, I'm a, I'm a little, I'm worried. I mean, I had, um, people say, well, why do you get, why do you care about insurance? Okay. Yeah. So, M& A is absolutely at its craziest, we've all said that, but M& A is going to get even worse in 2025 because the insurance market is going to become harder. So, I've talked to, uh, the presidents of two of the biggest agency and one carrier, and I said, well, what's 25 going to look like in comparison to 24? And they said, worse. I said, how is that possible? How can it get worse? So, so, What I what? And tell me if you're you see the same concern. I think inconsistent training is worse than no training at all. Because right in that lawsuit scenario. Well, when was the last time you did this?

James Blain: 17:27

and let me, let me take that a step further, right? one, you got to have a checklist, right? But the only thing worse than not having a checklist is having a checklist and not following it. Because what's going to happen if there's a big accident is the attorney's going to go into court and he's going to say, hey, You know, we, we had you send everything over. We've seen your, your materials for training. You know, we're going to put your driver on the stand. They're going to say, Hey, tell us about your training. How long was your training? Well, I've been doing this 20 years. So they got me through it in three days. Really? Okay. Well then they're going to put the training manager on stage or they're going to put the trainer on, or I'm sorry, on the bench and they're going to say, Hey, now that I have you on the stand. Tell me, why'd you put this guy through in two days? If you have a checklist, well, he knew what he was doing. Okay. So I've got the checklist here. What was not important, right? What are you just assuming that he knows? And you run into these scenarios where it goes beyond just the training. It's, you know, you have a policy, like I said earlier, uh, if I catch you on a cell phone, I let you go. Well. We looked in your telematics, we pulled the history in your telematics and this guy got caught on a cell phone twice. Why wasn't he fired? He's my best driver. Sorry,

Ken Lucci: 18:40

Yeah. No, listen, you're right. And, uh, at the recent C. D. N. L. A. Conference in D. C. I was at the insurance summit and Matt Dawes, the, the, you know, foremost attorney in this industry that specializes in transportation, he made a comment. He said that, telematics can cut both ways and your training can cut both ways. And it was interesting to me. I never thought about it. If you have telematics and you don't manage by it, that will be used against you in court. And if you have a training manual and it has dust on it, right? Or it says last revision, you know, 2005, or it's actually somebody else's. and when they depose the, your drivers, they say, I've never seen that. It can cut completely against you and it can cost you the trial. So what do you see as the emerging risks or issues? in the industry right now. And how can an operator prepare for them?

James Blain: 19:39

So, I will tell you, I think probably one of the biggest issues that I see that's happening is going to be a side effect of consolidation, right? Your world and my world. Not meeting up the way they're supposed to, because I cannot tell you how many companies are going through M& A, they're buying companies, and then they still kind of let them run semi autonomously. They don't have a single point of contact for training. They don't have everything roll up. They don't have a single training manual, right? Take some of these companies now. Say you've got an operation in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Texas, and Miami, right? If there is an accident in each of those four, and it goes to court, if each of those locations has different policies, different training, different everything, Now you're in trouble because you might think, Hey, we bought them out. Everything's great. And we run everything amazing here in Los Angeles. And I live here in Los Angeles and I don't visit those other locations that often. Just to find out that when that accident happens in Vegas, Texas, or Miami. Right now, all of a sudden, you don't know what's going on over there. It goes into court and it's, Oh yeah. the manual was updated back in 1995, and when we did the buyout now, the revenue, everything changed, right? The way all the money flows changed, but we didn't do anything there. it's one of those things that I see happening across the board. Now that said, I'll share with you. I'm seeing my customers get bought left and right, and it's always interesting to me because, and again, I don't want this to be a plug, but. It is a big difference when you've got companies that are both on packs that get purchased because I've seen it happen to where one of my customers buys another one of my customers, they both customize the platform on our end. That's really easy because now we can integrate that together. They can review it all, and now they've got the mechanism to push it across the board. Where companies get in trouble is they're trying to save a buck, right? Or they're trying not to make an investment in training because the view is, I've got a bunch of experienced guys, and they have an old paper manual, and every location's got a different manual. Or they're taking that one manual and they're sending it to everybody guys, if you don't have a way to document how long they're looking at it, test them on how they're doing with it, and actually make sure that you've got all that laid out and you've got a single place for records, handing out a manual and having them sign a piece of paper, we all know they're not reading

Ken Lucci: 22:07

And actually, and it can work against you as we've talked about. You know, the other part of the M. And a scenario that really worries me in this regard is, is you have somebody comes in and the first thing they do is slash expenses and they look at the training as expenses, right? because they've never needed it in there. The buyer has never done it in his operation. This is fluff, right? So I see that as a huge problem. The other emerging risk want you to comment on is the herd mentality in this industry bothers the crap out of me, you know, on every subject. Um, You know, I'm going to go out and I'm going to buy companies because so and so is buying companies. Okay, well, first of all, you're not in the financial position to buy companies. So you have to have a strategic reason to do it. But in this case, the herd mentality that bothers me the most because it adds debt is I'm going to go out and I'm going to buy a 45 passenger minibus, where heretofore my biggest minibus has been. 25 or I've been using sprinters and sedans and SUVs and I'm going to go up to minis. Okay. Or I've been using SUVs. Now I'm going to go out and buy sprinters. So what you've done there is you've taken a piece of equipment that you usually put two or three people in. Now you're putting 30 of them. Well, what did you just do to your risk?

James Blain: 23:29

Well, and let me take that a step further, right? One of the things I hear all the time that just. It practically brings me to tears because I know what will happen is, well, you know, I can run sprinters. They don't need a CDL, so I don't really have to worry about anything. No. Guess what? You meet passenger count, you meet weight. On almost all sprinters, you're going to meet passenger count and weight, right? Or one or the other. Now that's a commercial vehicle. Guess what? You've got to have med cards. You've got to have a driver qualification file. Right? You get all of those things that come in. And one of the things that I see there in our world that's a concern is hours of service applies. I don't care if you're using 150 or my right. And that's the I can't tell you how many times. Well, we don't worry about hours of service because we have 150 or mile radius. Okay, great. You still have to have the driver to understand that. You still have to have the dispatch to understand that. Because here's the thing. If that sprinter gets in an accident and the guy was over on his hours of service because they're going to go check because remember those attorneys when you get to that point where they're litigating against you, They don't care about collateral damage. They want your policy limit. If they get more than that. Great. If they put you out of business, Hey, great, but they can go find your policy limit and they're going to go to every single possible Avenue. And if they find out, Hey, this driver had been, you know, he was out driving an SUV for a ton of hours before he got behind the wheel of the Sprinter. He was over, right? He was done. He was out of his on duty limit and he was out driving a sprinter and he got in an accident. Guess what? They're going to say you're negligent. They're going to say your dispatcher was negligent and God help you if that guy gets on the stand and they say so. So what do you know about hours of service? Well, I know that it doesn't apply because I'm in a sprinter. I don't have a commercial driver's license. What are they going to do? They're going to bring a compliance expert on right after him and they're going to say so. Can you explain to us what makes a Sprinter special? And he's going to go, yeah, it's a commercial vehicle that doesn't require a commercial driver's license. So you have these regulations that kick in, right? And so in our world, that's really easy. we've got a module, right? That's free. That's included for every PACS member that'll teach them hours of service. But what I think the biggest risk for our industry going forward is sometimes we want to believe the easier. Answer is true because it sounds like it could be right. You know, they don't need a commercial driver's license. So it's not a commercial vehicle. That sounds right. I'm going to believe that over, Hey, it's a commercial vehicle and I got to do all the other things because it's easier. And the fact of the matter is ignorance is not a defense. If you go in there and you say, I didn't know. They're going to nail you for it. And if you go in there and you say, I knew, and I didn't do it, they're going to nail you for it. And either way you're going to lose that. In my opinion, the industries move to those vehicles without having a true set focus on understanding. What we have to do as an industry to be compliant all the way up into the larger vehicles, in my opinion, is the most dangerous thing that we face right now. And especially from an insurance side, if your insurance carrier finds out that you're not doing it, you might never get to the point where you have an accident because they might just come in and drop you.

Ken Lucci: 26:48

Oh, uh, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a real If you said to me in 22 and 23, How often does insurance come up? I would have said to you, eh, not really that much. I mean, I do occasionally have people selling because They had a catastrophic accident. It's just not in the many more to do it or whatever, whatever. But now it is literally the number one, first, second or third reason why people want to sell their businesses. And the sad part is I think that first and foremost, safety cells, okay. a large corporation and, or you have, we, we actually just help somebody. Um, get a, a really decent account was a law firm. they wanted some, some, a standby vehicle, you know, when they were driving people two or three hours to, to another jurisdiction in their state. So we helped them do a P and L. And when it came down to it, I said, listen, you really have to emphasize the fact that, yeah, you may be a little bit more expensive than the next guy. But here's my safety record. Here are my last runs. This is what I have for insurance coverage. I mean, if you're dealing with one of your chief litigators, do you want to put him in an uber and they have the bare minimum insurance and frankly, no safety program. You know, not too many people don't realize this. You tell me if I'm right or wrong. But I heard that the T N. C. S. The uber and Lyft cannot mandate that the 10 99s or their subcontract drivers go through any safety programs because that's a control issue.

James Blain: 28:23

So it's not a control issue, it's an employment issue, and I'm going to be really careful how I tread, right, because there's, there's only so much I can say here, but I can tell you that I know for a fact that at least one major TNC has looked at offering training. And I can tell you that the problem with offering training directly to the driver and making it a requirement for that is that they are now employees.

Ken Lucci: 28:50

Requirement is that operative word. Correct.

James Blain: 28:53

exactly. Now that said, it's interesting because there are programs out there where if they, you know, if they get bad enough ratings, if they're going to kicked off, they will recommend, right? They'll say, Hey, you got to go take some stuff. You got to learn some stuff. But at that point, it goes back to my game analogy, right? You don't want to watch the tape and say, Hey, we've been losing right this whole season. So now we're going to go watch the tape. So we're going to change our practice, right? You want to practice ahead of time. So you are on a winning streak. You're always adapting and doing it. That's not necessarily how most of them operate. And almost all of the TNCs. The only time they ever recommend anything is they say, Hey, when are you going to get kicked off the platform?

Ken Lucci: 29:30

Right.

James Blain: 29:31

it gets interesting because in our world. You know, and, and in the, in the world of that in general, depending on your state, depending on how things are laid out, there is the opportunity to say, Hey, you have to have a certification and you have to maintain that certification. If you don't maintain that certification, we're not going to send business to you. And the companies that I have that are 1099s, because the way that PAX is set up, in addition to all of those courses we have, we have our chauffeur certification, and part of that is they gotta get, they gotta take the whole certification course again every year, and they gotta keep up with their ongoing training, that's part of the certification, that's how I've seen a lot of them work it, but the vast majority of our industry at this point, we've moved to the point where we have either Employees or we're sending work to affiliates, so we have a massive advantage and that we can go to that employee and we can say, Hey, this is part of your job. You're going to do the initial training when we hire you, and you're going to do the ongoing training because back to that example of being in court. If you have someone that works for you for five years and they say, Hey, when's the last time you had training? Right. When's the last time that you took any kind of training? And the guy goes, well, when I was hired, the next thing is that that attorney's going to turn around and go, well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how would you like to have a doctor that after he got out of school said, I know everything I ever need to know about medicine. I'm never going to study again.

Ken Lucci: 30:58

No continuing education. Yep.

James Blain: 31:01

no one in the medical industry would just laugh, right?

Ken Lucci: 31:04

has the spike in litigation impacted what you do and what operators need to do differently?

James Blain: 31:12

So I will tell you in my world, we have always pushed that you have to do initial training in our world. It's weekly, right? Because we know drivers sit doesn't matter what they're driving, right? They're waiting at the airport. They're waiting for someone that's behind. There's always time to get a phone or a tablet out when they're parked and they can safely do so and go through quick training. So we've always done that weekly. And we've always recommended that once a year, you go back through and any new courses that are available, anything major, it's changed, you go through it. What's changed for us is really the motivation. Because like when we started this conversation, I said, when we first started, it was, Hey, you're going to reduce accidents. You're going to run a better business. You're going to have more loyal customers because we focus just as much on customer service as we do safety. What's changed is now. You can't really afford not to, when people talk to me about it, it's, can you afford not to, if the insurance company comes in and does a safety audit tomorrow, and they look at your training, are they going to be confident that you're not going to be the one on the news with the accident? Because if they're not, they might not be your insurance company for very long.

Ken Lucci: 32:23

Well, and we talked about it before in that this come, people have said to me routinely that there's going to be more insurance audits, more detailed insurance audits than there are dot audits. Now, as of today, when we're on this, let's not put a date on it, but there was a, there was a 56 passenger motor coach that turned over and there's a fatality, you know, at the end of the day, putting your head in the sand on stuff like this, in my mind, you're negligent. the, the attorney, when you look up and down, even Matt Dawes said at the insurance summit, he can't go back and forth, back and forth from New York to Florida and not see at least a hundred, personal injury attorney, uh, billboards, right? So at the end of the day, you could do what you want. You can, excoriate the attorneys all you want. But the reality is that you're putting your livelihood at risk if you don't have a bonafide safety program. And it's not, it's, it's not really in my mind, we are not in a time and a place in our industry where it can be amateur hour, where one operator is going to share a checklist that he created on its own. It's, it's got to be professional. It's got to be a professional. level course because the other piece of this puzzle is the lawyers will say, well, where did you get this? Okay, well, you know, so and so gave it to me at a show for Driven conference. Really is so and so certified is so and so we have, we've had that discussion in reference to what I do. You know, we are certified to do valuations. Um, so. tell me about PAX what you've gone through as far as how have you evolved the platform to take into account the changes in this industry?

James Blain: 34:11

So when we first started PAX about 10 years ago. It was one certification. It was one certification Chauffeur certification. That was it in this industry. That's all we had. And as we went through, right, for us, it's, there's, there's a couple of huge things, right? For us, we don't want to dictate down. That is one of the biggest things that has made us truly unique is I love this industry. Bruce, my partner loves this industry. We ground transportations where we live. And so we have always made it a point to try and be involved in the industry. Understand where the industry is going and adapt, right? And so, for example, I sit on the committee for the Bus Industry Safety Council. We're the official training program of the National Museum Association, right? We've got an affinity program and we work with the Transportation Alliance, right? We're deeply involved with all of these different organizations, right? You can't go to ABA, NLA, TTA, UMA, right? I can just spit out letters all day of all these organizations that we're constantly involved with. And one of the things that we've done is, you know, when you look at kind of the old days of training, it was, here's a DVD, right? Here's a VHS, here's that. What going online has allowed us to do is we're getting feedback a lot quicker.

Ken Lucci: 35:28

mhm,

James Blain: 35:29

because we operate as a membership organization, when we make new training available, that gets pushed out to everybody.

Ken Lucci: 35:34

it's truly a proactive learning management system,

James Blain: 35:38

It is. And we're working within the industry. To set up and do things with partners. So for example, Lancer has a wealth of material that they make available to their insureds. That is great material. Well, we've worked with Lancer to get that integrated into the platform so that if you're a Lancer insured, All you have to do is reach out to us so we can verify with Lancer and we have all of the Lancer training that they've put together specific for their insureds that we can turn on. We can put there in the platform for you and we're working with lots of partners throughout the industry to be that single source where we can say, hey, If you need training, not only do we have what's available as part of your membership, we now have all these other partners that we're working with that you have a single source of training that you can put everyone through instead of having to chase all that around. You know, I had someone that was looking at packs that had a page. And on that page he had tons of YouTube videos. Well, that's great in terms of a resource, but if he has an accident and they go into court and they say, Hey, show me your training program. And he goes, I have this website and I have all these links with YouTube. They're going to say, great. How do you know if they watched it? How do you test them on it?

Ken Lucci: 36:50

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you remember back in the day Tommy Maz's chauffeur training.

James Blain: 36:55

Absolutely.

Ken Lucci: 36:56

I think there was probably three paragraphs, maybe two, God rest his soul, but there's probably two or three paragraphs on safety.

James Blain: 37:02

well, and the interesting thing is, you know, it really is. It's kind of a long evolution of that because Bruce, my business partner, and Tom Mazza were actually good friends. Bruce was in one of his first charter groups. And at one point, right, the story goes that Bruce comes up to Tommy and he says, Hey. You know, I want to take this online and Tommy looks at him and goes, you're trying to take the food out of my mouth, right? And they kind of laugh it off, right? But it was, you know, I've got my thing. I'm kind of running it. Well, when Tommy passes away, Bruce has got to figure something out for his company.

Ken Lucci: 37:37

If Bruce didn't step into the breach, I think they'd still be redoing that DVD, that Tommy Maz's DVD.

James Blain: 37:45

look, it kills me that I never got to meet Tommy because I've never in my entire career met someone. Who didn't, when you brought up Tommy sit you down and tell you the absolute most amazing stories about him, but it disappoints me when I see people that are like, Hey, you know, all the Tom Mazza videos are on YouTube and you can have your chauffeurs watch that. And that's a great way to do training one. You're taking something that was someone's product that they sold, that they made their livelihood off of. And now you're basically having it out on YouTube, out to the whole world. Right.

Ken Lucci: 38:19

I love that stuff, but it's also 1990s material and the industry has evolved since then, you know, which leads us to a discussion about people not wanting to change what they've always done. Well, we've always done it that way. And that to me that mentality is the anathema to progress. And, and now, in my estimation, this issue, this crisis, insurance crisis, and I always try to validate the crap out of everything that comes into my head. And I said to one of the largest agents in the country, I said, you know, well, are we almost over with this? He said, absolutely not. 25 is going to be worse.

James Blain: 38:58

no. and you've hit on something really important, right? And I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about this. We have a mentality in our industry of drivers and chauffeurs, right? Whatever you call them in your company, whatever type of ground transportation business you're running, right? Doesn't matter if it's motor coaches, doesn't matter if it's taxis, doesn't matter if it's black car, doesn't matter if it's any empty. There is this mentality of. The, they come and go, but the metal stays. So I'm going to put all of my money into the metal and I'm going to try and put as little money as humanly possible into them. Look, the most expensive version of PAX training is 9 a month per person that you have on it. So if you think about that, you're, if you're a bus company, right? You're sending someone out and over a half a million dollars worth of metal. Over a half a million dollars, right? You don't have to be a mathematician to know that for a, even at 9 a month, right? If you go in there and you say, Hey, that's a half a million dollars. Okay. Well, let's go in there and let's see. I could probably train that guy. What? I don't know for a couple thousand years at that amount. Right. So. What you've got to figure is there's this mentality of not investing in the person that decides whether or not that vehicle comes back.

Ken Lucci: 40:17

I'm just gonna put a number on it. I'm gonna put a number on it for you. That motor coach should be generating about 25 20 to 25, 000 a month in revenue.

James Blain: 40:27

20 to 25, 000 a month.

Ken Lucci: 40:31

a good solid good solid motor coach is doing 240 to 300, 000 a year. We just looked at the company this morning and his average is 3 25. So you're talking about Point zero zero zero three six. That's not even three cents. That is, I think, call it would have to be here, but I think it's literally, I know, I think it's a third of a cent, right? But, but more importantly, how many lives are put in that, motor coach on a monthly basis? And there's a reason why when there's a plane crash, they don't say, well, there were 300 people on there. There were 300 souls on there, right? So when you putting somebody in a vehicle in your charge, I think there's operators that don't take it as seriously as they should. when they want to sit and blame the insurance company, I'll never forget the fact that I, there was a guy that I finally sold his company in Pennsylvania, but I met him at a PRLA meeting and he was excoriating. It was just crucifying this executive from Philadelphia insurance, just crucifying on the price of his insurance per vehicles and sedans. And this guy's a small operator under a million. And, and after the fact, I said to the guy, I said, no, you know, I just met you, but I don't want to offend you. You don't understand the insurance industry because only a small piece of what you are charged has to do with your specific loss runs. And the reason why you want your loss runs at perfection is not necessarily only because you don't want your insurance to go up, but you don't want to be canceled, right? it's a measure of your safety, but they don't understand that it's an ecosystem. Much of it is out of their control, but this is not out of their control. This safety aspect of things, safety sells, okay? I will tell you it's a great, greatest value proposition. The other thing, what do you do for people that say, well, well, my drivers are really safe? Well, how do you, what do you say to them when they just come up with that? What's your evidence of that?

James Blain: 42:33

Patrick Mahomes is really good. We're going to have him stop practicing and the Chiefs will just keep winning.

Ken Lucci: 42:37

Hey, I always tell them.

James Blain: 42:38

I'd say word for word, right? Because I don't care how good you are. There's no one out there that is the top of their game that doesn't practice,

Ken Lucci: 42:47

uh, I always tell the story about Derek Jeter taking batting practice three hours before I, when I dropped him off at spring training, I'm like, Mr. Jeter, why are you coming in three hours before? And I used to follow him into the tunnel and he said, I'll show you. And I would go down there and I watched him do batting practice. I'm like, why are you doing that? He said, because once you're on top, it takes a lot of time to stay there.

James Blain: 43:08

Well, and I had a similar story, right? My mentor in small business before I came to this industry was my father in law, right? He works in the ag industry. Maybe one day we'll have him on. He's got some incredible stories, but he started his business in his basement, right? And he was stuck in the basement for years. And then one day. You know, now he's got years and years. We're talking 20 years down the line. He's got a multimillion dollar business that he can be really proud of. And he, he came to me one day and he goes. People will come to you when you actually get a successful business and they'll say, my God, you're an overnight success. You're the American dream, but they'll never see that time you spent in the basement. They'll never see all those people that told you you were a loser that told you to give up, that told you it didn't make sense. It told you it wouldn't go anywhere, right? He said they'll never see all of those years that you toiled in the dirt To actually build that business and what

Ken Lucci: 44:03

and get the experience.

James Blain: 44:05

And get the experience and he said the other thing is his big thing was always Understanding where things are going right? We gave the example a minute ago If you're you're at point right zero zero zero not even Like, not even close to 1 percent if you've got a bus and you're spending 9 a month on a driver. Think about this. if you're getting 1, 000 revenue, that's it. You're just doing 1, 000 revenue. You just bought one vehicle, you're on your own, you're a solo driver, and you're paying 9 a month. That's not even 1%,

Ken Lucci: 44:36

Not even, right, yeah, nine tenths of a percent if it's a thousand bucks. The average SUV, what do you, what do you, you know, the average SUV should be doing roughly ten thousand, uh, actually no, more like four, twelve to fourteen thousand, but let's say ten thousand. Again, it's, it's ninety cents, it's peanuts money. It's peanuts money.

James Blain: 44:55

But it's mentality, right? I, um, I don't know if I've ever shown this on the podcast, but I keep a double mint gum on my desk. And the reason I keep this on my desk is the original owner of Wrigley's when they had the great recession, right? We're going way back in history. What right? Great. Sorry. Even further back. Absolutely correct. So you have the Great Depression, and he's trying to figure out what to slash, he's trying to figure out how to get through. And they get to the marketing budget, and he goes I want you to increase it and everybody in the room looks at him and they go, you're nuts. You're stupid. That's not what you do. And he says, no, I am a luxury item. Does this sound familiar? Everyone? I am a luxury item. I have to get people to understand that if they're down to their last nickel. They need to get that feeling of everything's going to be okay. They need to understand that they get that last holdout. They get that last piece of what things are like when it's going great. I want them to come and buy my gum and that to be it. And if I don't double down on my marketing and I don't put that message out there and I cut my marketing, we'll be out of business. Well, guess what? There's a reason I can go buy another pack just like this. There's a reason this pack's on my desk. Because you have to understand where to cut. In our world, training is just as important. I can't tell you how many times I get owners that call me and say, You know, I, I, We, we're going to reduce the budget on training because we're not using it. I said, okay, so why are you cutting it? The answer is not to cut it. The answer is to use it. The answer is to get better. The answer is to grow. If you're not being smart about where you're investing, not just the money, but investing the time. You're going to get that big accident. But the other thing is, you know, we've talked so much about insurance. One of the biggest things that we do is we balance the safety and the customer service, because if insurance costs are going up, if it's getting harder to run your business, not only can you not afford an accident, you can't afford to lose a single passenger.

Ken Lucci: 47:03

No.

James Blain: 47:03

You can't afford to have a single mistake. And the only way that you are going to keep winning is if you practice harder than you've ever practiced before, right? Things don't get easier as you win more, they get harder. You don't just suddenly at your highest point, like you said, with Jarek Jeter, you've got some on top of their game and they're practicing harder than they have in their entire life. Because once you get there, you got to work to stay there.

Ken Lucci: 47:28

I said that this morning to a customer who's extremely profitable and, uh, real happy to have calls with customers like that. And, and he's like, I'm really happy that we've started working with you. I'm like, well, you're very profitable. And he said, I understand that, but I feel like you're going to keep me there. And I said, I agree with that because success is fleeting. requires micromanagement. True success is fleeing. And if you think you're at the pinnacle and at the top of the mountain, it's very easy to get knocked off of it. And again, I think that yes, the insurance crisis has necessitated this true focus. but it has to become muscle memory in your company. It has to be it has to become a safety culture. And. I've seen it firsthand where catastrophic accident has caused insurance to go through the roof and or they cannot afford to fix the vehicle they cannot afford to pay next year's insurance and if you're a marginally profitable company it's going to put you right out of business. Um, so, I don't think we're over emphasizing it. I know people love it when we do feel good topics above, you know, other stuff, but I think this is a necessity and I see 2025 as it's going to be a tougher year to operate. Cost drivers are going to go continue to go up and it's insurance. Renewals are now extremely unpredictable. But what you can control is Your safety and what you can't control is the product you put out there While before we wrap up or as we're wrapping up, when an incident happens what steps should the company take?

James Blain: 49:16

So I'm going to echo Mike, who was, it was right. So, so Mike Maricoli was on and he talked to us a lot about insurance and I'm going to echo him here because I think we have this view in our industry that the insurance companies are not our friends, right? They're out to get you. And look, I can tell you. They want you to be successful. If you go out of business, they don't get your premium, right? It is not in their best interest for you to go out of business. So you've got to keep in mind that yes, it can be scary to have to reach out to them. But when something goes wrong, you have to immediately do it right. We all kind of have, and it comes to us from being kids, right? You're in the kitchen, you break the dish. Do you really want to go tell mom there's Broken glass all over the kitchen. God. No, that sucks. But you know, it's kind of that same mentality of when something goes wrong, you have to immediately get the insurance company involved. You have to immediately start taking steps and start taking actions, right? So what does that look like? You're going to reach out to that insurance company and you're going to let them know exactly what happened. You're going to get, you know, that statement from the driver. You're going to find out exactly what happened from the driver. And most importantly, You're not going to beat up your driver. I'm going to repeat that again, because this is most importantly, you're not going to beat up that driver. You're not going to give that driver a hard time. You're not going to make him miserable. Even if it's, Hey, this guy was on his phone. It's a hundred percent his fault. He's going to lose his job. Guess what? Losing your job over it is bad enough. You don't need to make it. to where he now is miserable about it and hates himself about it and doesn't want to help you. You've got to keep in mind that when an accident happens, the people that are on your side of the bench, right? Your home team

Ken Lucci: 51:02

stay there.

James Blain: 51:03

absolutely right. That's your driver. That's your chauffeur, right? Whatever you call them in your company, they got to stay on that bench. You've got your insurance company. They're on your bench, even though sometimes you might feel like they're on the team's bench and you're playing against them. Guess what? You are on the same side of that bench. All of those people on your company are there. So you've got to take action quickly. You've got to make sure you're gathering it. I can tell you in our world, one of the very first things that happens is you're going into the PAX training platform and you're pulling up all of their training records and you're printing it. Why? Because you know you're going to need it. Right? You're going and you're pulling all the telematics. Why? Because you know you're going to need it, right? You're going through and you're piecing everything together, and you're working with that insurance company. I can't emphasize that enough. And like Mike Marcoli said on our podcast, right? If it's a little fender bender and you think you can handle it yourself, you want to have Right. And you should make sure that if you don't have this, get with your company's attorney or one of the industry attorneys, make sure you have a form for this. If you're going to pay them out of pocket, if you're going to get them to release it, you better have them sign something that says, this is it. We're done. Because the last thing you want to do is write him a check, give him money, and then have them come right back with an attorney and take even more. If you're paying them out, you want it to be done. And along those same lines, guess what? You're still reporting it to the insurance company. You're still letting them know. And here's the other thing. And this goes for telematics. This goes for accidents. This goes for everything. In business, we don't tend to do debriefs, right? This is something ABA one year had Guy Snodgrass, who's a former top gun instructor, right? Incredible pilot. And one of the things he talks about is no matter whether the mission went well, whether the mission failed, what happened, they debrief, right? You sit down with your team, right? You sit down with your squadron, you sit down with whoever's involved and you say, Hey, what went right? What went wrong? How do we do better? Success. Failure. Otherwise, what happens there? If you have an accident, if you have a service failure, if you have an incident, right, if you have a complaint, if you have a bad review, that is an opportunity for a debrief and the debrief might be, Hey, you know, this person was clearly having a bad day. We can't find anything we did wrong, right? They just having a bad day. And how do we address it? Or it might be, Hey, we dropped the ball here. Because we didn't put this in here and as a result of that, we didn't have noted that we needed to change the pickup location. And we were at the wrong place to pick them up. And as a result, when we got to the right place, we were late, you know, whatever that looks like, you know, Hey, we need to redo our policy. We need to go back through our training. You have got to do a debrief. you know, I came back from that ABA marketplace, I bought this man's book and I said to myself, my God, I've been in small business for as long as I can remember, and I don't know that I've ever truly done a debrief. So that's biggest thing there is understanding that you've got to assemble your team, you've got to react quickly, and then you've got to figure out how do you get better.

Ken Lucci: 54:20

And it's it's the sad part is Yes, we're reeling from an accident. But you also have a teaching moment. You always you also have a time that you can reflect on. Okay, what did go wrong? And what do we what do we make? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? I think the worst thing you can do is not take it seriously or blame the insurance company. I think you have to do everything in your power today that you can to create a culture of safety. make the investment in real safety training. And as I keep saying, safety cells put it at the forefront of your value proposition. And I think that the strong survive the people who take their business seriously will do extremely well. And even if there is an accident, if you've got all your ducks in a row, it's not going to be a career ender or something that's going to close the business.

James Blain: 55:18

but you have to know yourself, right? So there's a piece of psychology that we talk about internally here, right? And I'll pull the curtain back, right? This is no secret. I'm happy to tell you guys, but this is something we talk about internally. When someone calls us and they say, Hey, I just had an accident and I made a change, it is one of the very few times that we try as hard as we can to get them signed up and up and running quickly. Not for us, but for them. And here's why on what we found in almost 10 years of doing this is if you have an accident and you say, Oh, you know what? I had an accident. I need to make a change. I've got to do something. Then it becomes you have 48 hours to make the change. If you do not make the change within 48 hours. Your chance of doing that every day that goes by drops by 50%. if by the end of that week, you have not made a change in your company, I can tell you I am almost guaranteed the next time I talk to you to hear, you know, we made a mistake. We had a problem. It doesn't happen to us. It's the first time it's happened in a long time. We're not going to be due for a while. I think we're fine. We're going to move on. Right. Why? Because we're firefighters as I don't care what type of business owner you're in. You are a firefighter. You are putting out whatever fire is going on in the business that day. And guess what? After that 48 hours, there's a new big blazing fire that you as a business owner have to go tackle. And so we've developed this innate ability. To jump from fire to fire and just learn to move on, right? People love to post online the levels of stress we deal with every day would probably kill a normal person part of being a business

Ken Lucci: 57:00

It is part of being a business owner. And this is one thing that you can be proactive about. There's a lot of things that we cannot foresee, but we certainly can foresee because if they're all around us, that people have car accidents, what are you good? And how can you prevent it? There's no question. Well, listen, I, I really appreciate the fact that we could do the guest thing and then we can also do just the conversations. I think this was, pretty important. And I think that my, my own, when I look at companies, I, my own advice I give to operators is if you take for granted that your drivers are doing things right, you do so at your own peril. Managed by the telematic system, managed by a safety program, um, and try to avoid as many of the surprises as you possibly can.

James Blain: 57:52

hundred percent

Ken Lucci: 57:53

All right, so this is another exciting episode. I apologize for ending it a little bit earlier, but James Blaine, where can they find PAX Training again, please?

James Blain: 58:03

paxtraining. com and we are, you need advice. You need help, whatever you need. We are happy to be there for you.

Ken Lucci: 58:10

Sounds great. All right, we'll catch you same time next week.

James Blain: 58:13

Thanks for listening to everybody. Bye bye.

58:16

Thank you for listening to the ground transportation podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PAX training and to contact James, go to PAX training.com. And for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, Go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the ground transportation podcast.