SPEAKER_01 1:27

Where we're currently at as far as rates, yes, I told you on the last segment the 14% rate increase seemed to be what I've been seeing. If you're best in class, if you're doing all the right safety stuff, if you're doing all the right things as far as training, if you're doing everything right, your fleets updated, you've got all your stickers, you got all your permits, you got all your camera system. We're seeing definitely some better rates. I'd say more on the 5% range on the increase side, 5 to 10% range for those guys, for the fleets that are doing it all. Even flat renewals.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

You're listening to the Ground Transportation Podcast with Ken Lucci of Driving Transactions and James Blaine of PAX Training. Learn how you can build a thriving transportation business with real profits, repeat clients, and enterprise value. And now for your host, Kenan James.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Ground Translation Podcast. I don't have my partner in crime, my co-host, one of my favorite people, Ken Lucci, with me today, but I am really excited because I have a reoccurring guest. I have Joe Manniato who has come back. I'm super excited to have him back on the podcast. And he's brought a friend, ladies and gentlemen. We have Tyler Lamer. So I want to tee you up, Joe, because I think one of the things that has happened, and we'll call it a shakeup for now because I want you to be able to tell the story. Is there's been a little bit of a shakeup or a change in your business, and you've come back on, talk about it. We'll talk a little bit more about where the insurance industry is at right now. But share with us what has changed in your business that prompted you to call and come back on.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

We have joined with a company called Signers National. They're a national insurance agency conglomerate, and it is pretty exciting and new for us, and something we didn't know if we would ever do, honestly. It's a family-owned business, but we consider it's a partnership. We're really we're excited for the opportunity moving forward.

SPEAKER_04 3:25

Before we jump to Tyler, what I want to do is I want to get a little bit of a story. It's almost a shame that we don't have Ken today, but I'm sure at some point Ken will walk us through kind of the financial side of it. I want to know a little bit about the human story because I can tell you a lot of times we become our businesses. I get people all the time that, you know, they're, oh yeah, that's that's Bruce's deal, that's James's deal, that's you know, whatever that might be. We become almost like part of our identity. I feel like a little bit of yourself gets woven into the business. So kind of walk us through what does this look like for you guys? Where did you guys start? How do you get to where you're at now? What leads you down this road?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Okay, so for us, well, we started. I mean, I started with it at my family's agency. My dad and mom opened it in 1981, specializing in a niche, which was passenger transportation. They started with taxi cabs and then went into limousines. They did everything. Still in Florida, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We started in Florida, but my dad immediately went national with all his programs. I mean, we're based out of Tampa, Florida, but we wrote passenger transportation even in Alaska. I visited accounts in Anchorage, Alaska. We were in New Orleans, we were in California. I write several accounts still in California. Professional insurance center as a brokerage, as an agency, we've been everywhere. Right now, currently, we're licensed in about 31 states, I believe, still doing business. That that is basically from my last session with you guys, what I lived and breathed my whole childhood with my family, like visiting the operators my whole life. And then when I joined my father while I was in college, he sat me down about the family business, and it was something very passionate for him and my mother, and I became passionate working with them. And it grew. Our business grew, but we've also had ups and downs. We struggle the same way that the transportation operators struggle through things like COVID, carriers leaving and exiting the marketplace. Anything that affects their business is affecting our business because we're an extension and we provide the most important service, I believe, that an operator needs to have, and that's the insurance, which includes things like safety and training and things like that as well, which has become my passion. I'm in my 40s now, and it's all I've ever done. So how we get there is basically you start to think like my my family, my mother specifically lost her husband who was the principal agent, and he never got to retire. So my mother was thinking, you know, how can I retire? Can somebody do what I'm doing? A lot of it became about finding the right partnership, maybe to explain.

SPEAKER_04 5:57

How old were you? And I obviously I know that's really tough, so I don't want to like bring you back to a bad time, but like, where were you guys at? And I mean, obviously, the loss of a parent is one of the hardest things anybody's gonna deal with. I know that, you know, as I watch my parents get older, I dread it. But having your dad super involved running the family business with your mom, can you kind of walk us through what that went? I mean, because a lot of people, when something like that happens, they would just, you know, there's a lot of people that just instantly are like, oh, we're gonna sell the business, we're gonna get out. And that's not what you guys did at all.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

No, so my mom was approached by several people that wanted to buy her immediately. I mean, we had a carrier that called us up and said a broker came to them the week after my father passed away. Holy crap. And asked them for our entire book of business. And the president of that carrier called me and my mother down there to talk to us about that instance, and they said they were gonna protect our business because we built a reputation and an agency as if we were still moving. He wanted to know what we were gonna do. And my mom was a fighter as long as I've ever known her. She's one of the toughest women I've ever met and known and had the pleasure of learning from as well. And she said, We're not, we're we're gonna make this thing work, we're gonna keep it going, we're gonna do everything we can to fill those shoes with your father's, but you're gonna have to step up, you know, into those shoes.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

Is this after you left college? How old are you?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, yeah, no, I was I was already 30. When my father passed away in 2016, I was 29, 30 years old, right in there, and I had already, you know, had the time I started PAX. Yeah, yeah. I already had Bruce at some point.

SPEAKER_04 7:28

So yeah, I mean, like 2016, I'm just trying to think because you and I are similar to age, right? That's when I had met Bruce and we had talked about starting PAX around the time my first show. So we're talking about 10 years ago now.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Yep. And yeah, by that time, my father had already appeared at NLA and SCD. We were 45 year members of Transportation Alliance TTA. So we've been established. So it's interesting because it's a small, as you know, it's a tight-knit industry when you go to those shows. So everybody knew, like when my father was passed away, which also made it a little more complicated.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

So we were approached. Well that's gonna make it tougher for you as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Yeah, and and so we were approached by a lot of people trying to either buy our agency or try to take our book, and it was something my mom came and talked to me personally about, and something she didn't want to do, and something I didn't want to do. And so we met with people though, like we opened up and just nothing sounded like you know, a lot of times when you get bought out or when you get merged or partnered or any of those things, you're worried, you're scared. What's gonna happen to other the people we built that have become family? All of our employees here, every single one, barring one of our producers, has been here more than 15 years. So it's very important to us to keep that family together. It was very important to us to try to find somebody that believed in us and what we built and what we're doing and what our style is, that kind of thing, if we were ever to do something. So we didn't entertain much. We met with people here and there, nothing ever seemed to jive with us, and then ultimately last year in 2025, we were approached by signers. They approached us and we gave them a conversation and we liked what we heard. It was always about what the things I mentioned, trying to see how it could expand us and help us and get us to a different level, you know, level us up at the same time leveling them up. It's a true partnership, right? Like you you go in and both sides benefit. So that was something that I was, you know, me and my mom were very nervous about throughout the whole process, and anybody we ever talked to.

SPEAKER_04 10:32

And that's I think that's kind of a different place, right? Because, you know, especially in our industry, you know, it's it's really funny because I got in this industry and I felt like the young guy, and I was like, oh man, I gotta get older, I gotta catch up to and now I'm like literally I'm knocking on 40's door, right? And I don't want to admit it, but next year is next year's a big 4-0 for me. But half the people listen to this podcast are like, oh my god, what a child, right? Like the funny part for me is like I got this industry, I felt like the kid, I'm 10 years in, everybody got 10 years older, we didn't get a ton of no more young people in, so I still feel like I'm kind of the kid over here. I think it brings up a really important point, and that's that a lot of people in this industry you see people even that sell a business that still stick around and hang around the industry, but they might not be materially involved with the business. I think one of the things that you've hit on and that you've kind of nailed here is you are at a point where your goal isn't, you know, hey, I want to ride off in the sunset on my horse. It's, you know, I am looking for ways to grow and level up and partner and do things with my business. And I really wish we had Ken for this, and at some point we'll have him chime in on his thoughts. But I think that's very different to what we see from a lot of other businesses where people are selling and getting out, whereas you are looking to partner with someone to build and go up. Talk to us a little bit. What did that look like to you? What does that look like to you?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Moving forward. So yeah, what that looks like to me is I have a niche that I specialize in, my agency specializes in, and that niche is something that whatever partner we were, they definitely need to embrace that that's what we're about and not try to change everything we do. And that was something that was important to us. It's about making us feel comfortable that everything we do and the way we do things could still work, right? Like, because that was something that was fearful. I had no plans of leaving this business behind or leaving the transportation industry. I wanted to make sure I could stay involved with my associations, the Florida Limousine Association, the TTA, the NLA, and safety, and all the things that are passionate to me, like safety training and all of those things. I think moving forward, what this looks like is it expands the reach we have, especially with the national footprint that Signers has, as well as expands our opportunity to have the backing we need to maybe have some new programs come to the table, new things within our industry, new safety programs, new things I wouldn't have been able to do without the support, without the new coworkers we have, the new partnership we have, all the new people and access to markets and things across the insurance, the scope of the insurance industry, cross-selling and different things like that that they bring to the table that we didn't previously have access to, as well as things we bring to the table, I think, that they're going to have access to. It's a true partnership, as I said earlier. You know, like I'm gonna have some things I can bring to them that's gonna help them grow, and then we're gonna bring stuff to me that I didn't have before that's gonna help us grow and us grow together, right? Because we're we're all one team.

SPEAKER_04 13:38

Um and we'll talk a little more about it later. I don't want to transition to it right now, but I think this time right now for our industry is tough. And I think knowing that you'll have access to new programs, knowing there'll be new things out there, and knowing there's things you can do. I mean, I gotta tell you, I find it interesting because I think of insurance brokers, and I can probably count on one hand the insurance brokers I know that are truly present in the industry, that show up, that join committees, that join associations, that do the work, that are involved, right? And I'm talking brokers, right? Not not even carriers. I probably wouldn't run out of fingers if I then tried to count the carriers on the other hand. And so I think that's something that comes up a lot. And I think it's really important that we keep that type of talent and those type of people there. I mean it's funny. I was talking to Derek Barr from FMCSA recently, and one of the things we're talking about with him was they had an issue at FMCSA where they had a bunch of people leave and they lost a bunch of this knowledge, this institutional knowledge. And so I think it's really important and it's really good that in this case, you know, even though you went through a sale with your company, you didn't leave the industry. Right. This isn't, hey, you know, I I got rid of my company, I sold it. It's I I found a way to partner my business to be able to have a better offering, to be able to keep the knowledge base there. And so I think that's really important because of how specialized our industry is. You know, you've got the limo segment, you've got the bus segment, you've got the NEMT segment, you've got taxi. Each of these kind of have their own unique needs. So I think it's really great to know that you're working to figure out how you expand it. I'd love to kind of know, and Tyler, maybe this is where you would jump in. Tell us a little bit about Signers National and how is that gonna dovetail? How do you guys mesh? What's kind of the background there? Because I'm gonna tell you, Signers National for me is not a new name, so to speak, but I don't know near as much about Signers National as I do about some of the other companies out there.

SPEAKER_02 15:43

Yeah. Thanks, James. So Signers National, just to give a quick overview, we're a we're a top 50 national retail broker. The business was founded 18 years ago by Josh Lambert, our CEO. He is still the CEO today, which I love, right? We are all about, you know, family entrepreneurial drive, and that kind of embodies what Josh is doing, which is great because someone I think like Joe and his mom can really relate to that, right? People who have been in the weeds, people who have, you know, made this business their baby. That's what Josh is about. And so we started basically as a retail broker that focused in literally just not for profits and religious institutions. And for those that don't know, what's a retail broker?

SPEAKER_04 16:23

What is help me understand that term?

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, so a retail broker, essentially, we're helping companies like a limo company or a transportation company get insurance coverage, right? That that's essentially what we're doing. So you guys started with nonprofits. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 16:37

Well, how does that kind of transition and what does it look like in terms of your portfolio? Because I gotta tell you, I don't know any in the transportation industry that would consider themselves a nonprofit. I'm sure there's nonprofits with cars. Yeah. But the nonprofit world is a very different world to ours, right? They've got very different concerns, very different needs. How does that kind of transition into make your way over to our industry?

SPEAKER_02 16:59

So it's and what it was is it was about specialty for us. And what I mean by that is like, okay, look, you know, we became an expert and the go-to person for people who wanted to be and you know, get insured in the not-for-profit space. So we sat back and said, hey, like, where else can we go and where else can we win in specialty? So what we did is we built layers on to signers national and we acquired more specialists, right? So we started a business that Joe is now a part of cars. That's like the next area of specialty where we wanted to focus. We also have a commercial real estate division. We also have a division that does assisted nursing and assisted living facilities for seniors. And then additionally, we also have a specialty wholesale broker that does similar things, right? So what we wanted to do is we wanted to start doing what we did really well on the what I would call the not-for-profit side, and then start replicating that in other areas of insurance where we thought, hey, there are some people out there that have really tough challenges or really hard times getting insured. Why don't we go find people who are focusing on that every day and taking really good care of their customers and grow our business out that way as well? So, what I would say, James, is we're not looking to be a generalist and go, you know, buy this and buy that. We're really looking to find people who have built a really niche expertise in what they do and bring them onto our platform where we have really good technology, really good shared services, really good market access. So Joe can keep doing what he does, which is being on all these boards, being the go-to person for you know anything transportation related. In his life, he doesn't have to go and deal with you know running payroll anymore or dealing with HR and she's right. Like we're gonna take all of that stuff off his plate so Joe can keep doing what he loves to do, right? And so that's what we're trying to build out, and that's why this was the perfect partnership. Like this business drops right into our cars business, and it gives us like a lot more expertise than we did the day before, right?

SPEAKER_04 18:51

Tell us about cars, right? When you say cars, are you guys doing personal auto, home auto, anything with wheels? What is cars? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_02 18:59

Yeah, so cars, we call that our this is our commercial auto platform, and we are doing ground transportation, trucking, taxis, livery, any so basically all four hire. That's exactly what James. Yeah, and so we've invested in that business, and we really like this commercial auto market. We recently hired a guy who Joe now works with Gordon Kurtz. He's the president of that division, he's based out of Indiana, and we at the Signers platform are gonna invest heavily on this side of our business. And that was a big sales pitch that we did to Joe, is like some people might be struggling with this market, it might be a really tough market to write business in, but we're like we're gonna double down and invest in it, right? Like you might want to call it like a contrarian back, so to speak, but like we love that, right?

SPEAKER_04 19:43

We want people to You're not shorting the market, though, right? Like we assume it's gonna end well, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Like it ends well, but we want to be investing in in tough classes of business where we think we can win over time through expertise.

SPEAKER_04 19:55

So talk to me a little bit about that because I have to tell you, in the insurance space, a lot of what I've heard is that this is a really tough place to be right now. We've talked at length on the podcast. I don't want to send us down crazy rabbit holes, but we've talked about everything from fraud cases to the cost of parts to tariffs, the reinsurance market, tort reform. It really almost feels like right now we've got this perfect storm. I got 70 idiots. Can you fix them? Where there's all these different pieces that are swirling around us. What do you guys see that is that light at the end of the tunnel? Hopefully there's something you could share there that's gonna be helpful to operators of things, but knowing that all of that is going on, what still has you guys pushing that direction?

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Yeah, well, I think for us, it's more I'll kind of go back to what we're doing as a broader business, and it's you know, we want to find people who know that space really, really, really well. Like Joe has built these carrier relationships over his 20 and 30 year career, right? So if there's a market out there that is tough and people are pulling out of it, if there's only a few left, those people are gonna want to go to who they trust and who they like to do business with. And those carriers are gonna go to Joe, right? They're not gonna go to like the generalist agency that is writing, you know, home auto, commercial, all these things together. Like they're gonna say, hey, Joe, like we have a client, it's a tough one for us to write. Can you help us? And like Joe's relationship with carriers in the boards he's a part of, in the safety that he's focused on. Like Joe's gonna be able to find a home for that business, right? And that's something that's really important to us is we want to go invest where people are like just solely focused on what it is that they're really, really good at, right?

SPEAKER_04 21:35

It almost sounds like a hospital, right? Like, Tyler, tell me if this is the right way to think about it. I mean, I almost think of like you have a hospital system where you've got kind of the centralized departments that can help, but then you've got all your different specialties. Is that the right way to think about what you guys are doing? Like you've got this one big building and you've got all your specialties, but you're able to leverage and work with each other. Is that the right way to think about it?

SPEAKER_02 21:56

That's exactly right. So think about signers as literally just the signers national brand. We're a holding company for all these specialty brands underneath us, right? And what Signers does at the top is we have an executive team and then we have our shared service team. And the shared service team's job is to just help make Joe's life easier, right? Like that's that's what we're doing. We built a smile at Joe's face. Yeah, we built I mean, who doesn't want their life to be easier? Yeah, so we built out a really good function where instead of Joe having to worry about his financials or payroll or his markets, like we have a group, not only just a person, we have like a staff of people in each one of these areas that can help Joe with all of that for the purpose of Joe just being able to focus on really doing what he loves to do, which is to go out and create relationships, talk to carriers, talk to customers, be on the boards of these different entities. Like, that's what we want him focused on. And our promise to him is to allow him to do that, right? Like, you know, this was Joe and Debbie's baby, right? And we really appreciate that. And we tried to get that across, right? Like, we want to be a very, very good landlord of what Joe and Debbie have built, and we're not gonna do that by not doing what we said we were gonna do. So we want to be able to let them leverage our technology, let them leverage our relationships, but on the other side of the coin, like they have expertise that we didn't have, right? So, like I hate saying this, but it's like a true one plus one equals three scenario where we're bringing something to the table, and like it's not us just buying his business and they're going away, or it's not Joe just doing one thing. Like, we really think we can both help each other, and I think in that scenario, it's it's really easy to win together.

SPEAKER_04 23:26

I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I would love to talk about is kind of where you guys and the two things I'd love to talk about, kind of where they intersect. So I know Joe, one of the things I absolutely love about you is you're gonna cut the monster, you're gonna say it like it is, right? There's a lot of people that will feed you a turd sandwich and they will dress that thing up and they will try to make it look so appetizing, right? Yeah, Joe's the kind of guy to be like, no, that's turd. It's gonna be a turd. I'm sorry, you're gonna deal with it. And I I uh the world needs people like that. I'm like that, right? A lot of people think about me and they're like, oh yeah, you're kind of a pessimist, your glass half empty. I'm like, no, no, it's at that halfway mark. Nobody ever sees that as an optimist. I like to think of myself as a realist, like it's at halfway. I know the last time that you came on Joe, we talked about a pretty big expectation, a 14% increase across the board, if I remember right. I think that kind of lined up with everything we're seeing. Let me ask you do you still think that's where we're heading? And then the other thing I ask you is knowing that you guys have joined forces, knowing that you now have access to this larger, broader group. Does that kind of change what you see in the future as what you're able to do or what you kind of see there?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yeah. So I'll kind of piggyback off what you said of being a glass half empty, glass half full kind of guy.

SPEAKER_04 24:46

Notice how he didn't go for the turd sandwich. He was straight for the glass.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

I think one of the things this does, to your point, is that this makes a glass half full scenario, I think, feel a little bit better, like more opportunity, more hope, more like, oh, okay, now if there's a market that comes around or a market coming into the segment that we ensure it, of course that'll help soften things. But now we know we have a much broader scope, right? Because we're a lot larger and we can have access to information and markets and things at a much quicker pace. But as for current, where we're currently at as far as rates, yes, I told you on the last segment the 14% rate increase seemed to be what I've been seeing. I still see that similar. I mean, obviously, all the carriers are going to have rate increases that are driven from their reinsurance negotiations every year, typically around the January time period. So a lot of my averages came from some of those increases that I knew. And we're still in that, we're still in that kind of that period, right?

SPEAKER_04 25:43

Yeah, we're about halfway through, you know. I think we're probably looking at that, you know, halfway through the year compared to last year.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

And one thing I'll touch on is that we are seeing if you're investing in class, this is why I've told you before, James, like we do other stuff together. If you're best in class, if you're doing all the right safety stuff, if you're doing all the right things as far as training, if you're doing everything right, you want to be that in our industry. You want to make sure you're doing everything you can do for your business that's gonna make you appetizing for the carriers. Because the more carriers that say, I want to look at this guy, like your fleet's updated, you've got all your stickers, you got all your permits, you got all your camera system. Camera is very important. I stress it on every podcast I've been on. Make sure you have everything in line. We're seeing definitely some better rates. I'd say more on the 5% range on the increase side, 5 to 10% range for those guys, for the fleets that are doing it all, rather than even flat renewals. I've seen a couple of flat renewals, not seeing as many decreases. Yeah, not seeing as many decreases as we did 10 years ago. But have you seen any decreases though? I had a flat.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

So you're saying there's a chance.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah, I had a fleet, I had a fleet that had a decrease. Yes, I did. And that with the way that works in our decrease.

SPEAKER_04 26:54

While maintaining the same fleet size, right? This is not like we got rid of half the fleet, so the insurance went down. This is this is we kept the business as it is, and there's a decrease.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Yeah, but the what that's why you want to have a broker that has access to all the companies because when you see those decreases as a transportation business owner, right? Any kind of business owner, it sometimes comes from that agent, your insurance agent, shopping you to all the markets, and markets now, one other market might take interest in your business and say, listen, this guy's gonna be profitable for us, and now you have a couple markets and it could lead to a decrease, right? So a new market entering the fray might have to come under the other market's price if they want that account, if they want your business. So that's where you see decreases is when you're operating effectively, you've got good loss ratios, you've got good safety, got good driver training, year over year, right? You've got to prove that. And then the more markets you have at your fingertips, the more you could send that operator to, and then effectively hopefully get you a price decrease or as close to renewal as possible, right? And the average black car operator, I think, even the NLA report said that on the increase side, 15% does what? It's gonna make your operator start shopping aggressively, probably, right? You get something 15% or more.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

I think if you're under that I think any business owner, right, you tell me there's a 15% increase on anything. If it's a substantial part of my business or it's a larger number, 15% is gonna make anybody at least question and look.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

And here's another thing fleet makeup, right? I did some more research on that after our last conversation within my own book and within my own, you know, everything I have. And you're looking at like a sedan and SUV rate is probably gonna increase a lot less, maybe more than 8% from what I found in my own research, than your sprinters, your vans, and your small buses that are gonna go up to like the now we're seeing on the small buses almost a 20 to 25% rate increase, especially on the charger side. And then you start tacking in loss history, like if you're not performing well and you're not doing the safety, you're looking at 25 to 50 percent, maybe even a non-renewal. If you're just you know putting any driver in that seat that doesn't have the right experience, you don't have the cameras to help with the claim side of things, you're not having driver training. So you are in control of how much increase you're gonna get, I think. Now there are things that whether you call them acts of God or accidents, right? You're gonna have accidents. They happen.

SPEAKER_04 29:17

But you it's like this is where I want to step in, right? Because I I have this argument with people all the time. The biggest problem in my world, in my business, directly correlates to that. And that's that you know, it is really hard to put a number on something that didn't happen, right? A lot of what I do and our company, what PAX does, is preventing things. And it's so hard to say, well, how much did you save last year? Oh, well, we didn't have the accident, so you know, we we saved this much. Well, it's very, very difficult to say, well, we would have had a catastrophic accident with a fatality and we would have lost the business. That's a big if. So I deal with that side of it all the time. But the other piece of that that I deal with is I in my business have found this cycle. Okay. And what this cycle looks like is it literally looks like the gym in January, right? We see this thing where uh there's an accident, there's an incident, there's an increase in insurance, there's something, they're like, oh man, we gotta fix it. We need better training, we need this, we need that. And so what do they do? They call up PACs, they put a training program in, they start using telematics, they start doing all these things. And they're doing that in January, they're in the gym. They start getting in shape and they're like, Man, I look good. I don't need to go to the gym, I look good. Same mentality, right? Well, we're spending all this money and we're not having accidents. They don't equate it to we're not having accidents because we're investing in technology safety training, we're having them do the weeklies impacts, we're using the modules impacts, right? That's not typically what happens. What happens is they look at that balance sheet and they start looking at, okay, where's all this money going? Where's my profit line? Oh, well, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this line item? I can't believe I'm spending this much on this or that much on this. And the thing that I find the most interesting is we live in the proactive space, and what's the first thing that goes? Well, we're doing all this training and we haven't had any accidents. Let's get rid of that. That goes out the window, that cost comes down. Just like if you stop going to the gym, it's not immediate. There's kind of a gradual drop-off. And the other thing we see is we see a lot of people that buy in with good intentions but don't actually implement it. And so I think what you're talking about, Joe, is huge because I am a firm, firm believer that a lot of what we're dealing with is our ability to be able to self-regulate and to handle it and to do it. Ken has said this at least a thousand times. The most profitable companies are the ones that have a safety, a training, that type of budget built in. One of the things I found interesting though is when we did our recent we did a whole report. I don't want to go too deep into that, that's a whole other episode that people can go watch. But one of the things that we found is that people are moving away from sedans, they're moving more towards SUVs, they're moving more towards your mini coaches, your transit-style vehicles, right? Your shuttle style seating, and more towards motor coach. Let me ask you, what is that going to do to the insurance market, right? You're more than welcome to tie in how this new partnership is going to allow you to deal with it. But how do you see that affecting the market? And what do you think that's going to do to rates overall?

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Well, the markets themselves, the carriers themselves, the ones that we represent as brokers and self to the operators, they're moving away, especially from sessions I heard at the UMA and NLA, and I mean we've touched on it in the past, they're trying to move away from the high limit risks, especially charters. Charters are having it a little bit tougher. Like if you have a buses on some mixed fleets, you might have it easier than like a straight charter bus company on finding carriers that are going to ensure your risk, because a lot of those carriers have exited the marketplace. And recently we had another one that's not willing to do five mil limits anymore that has always historically done them on charter risks, and they're now max is two mil limits, and some just exited the space completely.

SPEAKER_04 33:29

So, how does that work though with the mandatory federal minimum, right? If they're only going to do a two million dollar limit on a vehicle that's required by law to do a five million dollar limit, like what do I just gotta buy two and a half policies? Like, that doesn't make sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

It's like anything else. If they're offering two million, that carrier, let's say a carrier decides they don't want to write the five, you have to excess it. It's gonna cost you more money in theory, right? To excess a policy than if the one carrier can write the entire, you know, to limits, right? To the entire five mil. If you're trying to excess a three exit two, now you're paying an excess premium, and excess premiums have come up quite a bit.

SPEAKER_04 34:02

I think So let's rewind for a minute because I want to make sure that we're giving people kind of the scope here. Because if someone hasn't dealt with excess before, right? You know, obviously it has a little tongue in cheek with the two and a half. Explain how excess works and kind of what this process is. Because I want to make sure people understand what this means.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Well, here's the difference between an excess and an umbrella, right, is gonna be your excess is a commercial one line, it goes over the top of one product. Whereas an umbrella can go over many products, right? So where if you have an excess, if in our industry we don't allow an umbrella to act as an excess over a commercial auto policy. So if we have a first dollar policy that's up to 2 million, and it's with a carrier ABC. And so you need 5 million, but carrier ABC doesn't offer that. So you need to go get three more million somewhere, right? So you shop with a broker like myself, we'll shop you to 11 different excess markets, and they're gonna all put a price on it and see look at the risk individually, just like the carrier that's underlying. They have to do the same underwriting, and they're gonna all come back with numbers, and now you have to tack that number on top of it. Now there's different kinds of excess, right? So let's say you just need a 5 million policy because you have a DOT requirement that says you need 5 million because you're carrying 24 passengers in a bus and you're crossing state lines, you know, whatever your need is for that limit, you need to make sure that that excess carrier can do your filings if you need the filings. You can't just go to a carrier that's gonna do it and not be able to give you the proof that you need for the state or the federal, whichever filings you need done. So in our world, it is a need, but to your point, if more and more carriers stop doing that, you're gonna raise the cost per unit to the operator. So that's what's happening. Essentially, yes, what you're asking me is if more and more people are moving towards these larger units, wouldn't that be more and more people are gonna be paying more for insurance? I can grasp what you're getting at, right? So, yes, the answer is yes. As of now, our markets are hard, especially in the excess area. So excess pricing has gone up over the last five, ten years. Tort, we need tort reform across the country. We're seeing these lawyers, these PI lawyers, and the claims. Every time you see something in an accident, and this circles all the way back to safety and driver behavior. And you're in the home of that, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Florida.

SPEAKER_04 36:19

I'm sure if a billboard falls, it is a Morgan and Morgan billboard, right? Like if a tree falls in the wood, does it make a sound? If a billboard falls in Florida, it says Morgan and Morgan.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Yeah. So the carriers, they tell me point blank, I have gone outside of Florida. I remember in 2017, I was sitting in Atlanta in a carrier's office saying, please come into Florida. We need more carriers in Florida. And he looked at me and said, You guys got Morgan and Morgan in every bush. Now Georgia's just as bad, honestly.

SPEAKER_04 36:47

But Georgia, Georgia did some tort reform, though, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Recently, they did, but it's not gone in. They're more recent than Florida's. Florida's was in 2023, HB 837. House Bill 837 was great for us. I think it helped a lot of the homeowners market soften. Some of the other things are softening, but our line is still pretty hard. From the carriers themselves, we've gotten feedback that because of the tort reform, they're able to make more money on some of their accounts that are already written because it's changed the statute of limitations on claims, it changed some of the 150 to the med pay payouts, it changed how lawyers are able to use doctors. We would like to see more. Texas has put it on hold, so I know a carrier specifically waiting for that tort reform to go through in Texas before they enter the marketplace. There are carriers that will wait until tort reform comes into play so that they are not as I mean, it's a safer play for them, right?

SPEAKER_04 37:39

And I think I think one of the things that, and this kind of goes back to that storm I talked about, and the reason I wanted to talk about it on this call is I think it really ties into what you were looking at for your clients and your capacity and what you're able to do. The more tools I have access to in my box, the more things I can work on. And I think that was something really important that you talked about. But you know, we have this storm, and there's so many different angles that we have to worry about with it. I guess my thing would be are we still at a point where, you know, do we think there is light at the end of the tunnel, or are you still at a point where you think we're still kind of in the tunnel and we haven't gone far enough down it to see the light at the end of it?

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Here's what I'm gonna tell you on that. I see a light where here's why I see a light, and I think we're still in the tunnel. Don't let don't get me around. Yeah, no, and I want to tell you why I'm an optimist on this, is because I am seeing the operators, and I've gotten a chance to see it from 20 years ago till now, and the operators are taking more care in their business than they ever have before. I agree. I watched a fleet of about a hundred to two hundred vehicles fluctuating, right? Over the last I've insured them for eight or nine years, and it's or no, I'm sorry, since the 1990s, so a lot longer. But me myself since my father died, right? So eight or nine years ago. So one of the things I like to do is analyze a lot of loss runs. I do it for companies, I do it for carriers, I do it for myself, I do it for data purposes, and one of the things I like to do is see how driver behavior has cameras changed differently than just regular cameras, right? Cameras are great because they give the lawyers ammunition on the carrier side to fight the PIs. It's reactive, it's a video of what happened. But the driver behavior cameras, this particular fleet I'm speaking of, has done nothing but been profusely thankful for going into their own operation after having a few bad loss years and seeing their prices skyrocket. They have taken care of their business, and three years after, four years after driver behaviors, their loss ratios are down 70, 80% from what they used to be. And they're active in their handling of drivers in a way that they've never been before. They're active in their training, they're active in their safety. And I feel like that's what we're seeing. And the light I see is that we're gonna have an industry filled with like-minded people doing that, and it's gonna save the carriers a lot of money in the long run. But we have to see that, right? It takes a while. I see another there's carriers that are talking about coming back into Florida, right? And I think tort reform is happening across the country, and I hope it gets to a national level. That's something we didn't have four or five years ago was tort reform.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

No, and I will tell you when I was in Washington, DC recently, it's ironic because the Women and Busters group is going back, so we've got two of the ladies that work with us are heading out there. I will tell you that the conversations that we were having around this stuff from this year to last year have shifted and changed. And I think I totally agree with you that we have seen a change in the market. When I got into this business 10 years ago, right, when I came on board with BACs and Bruce and I kind of teamed up and started building this thing out, Bruce had an idea within the limo space for certification, and I had this idea to bring in ongoing training. And I am one of those lifelong learning people. I've always got four or five books around me at any one time. I'm always reading, I'm always learning, I'm always developing, and I'm a firm believer that if you think you can learn something once and be good at it forever just by doing it, you're missing out. So when we introduced that back in like 2016 at that first show, people are like, What are you talking about? I took them out, I showed them how to drive, I'll put them in the car, they know what to do. Like, why would I ever spend more money on these guys? Like, I literally remember I've told this story a million times. We have a guy come to the booth, he's like, I got 70 idiots. Can you fix them? And that was the favorite part of the story. So Bruce likes him and he goes, Yeah, it's top down, so we gotta fix you first, right? That's how we knew we were gonna work. But to that point, I think we've shifted to a space where now we are seeing a lot of people that have figured out that's how you stay good at anything. It's constantly developing, constantly doing. And so we are seeing mass adoption in terms of the ongoing training. And a lot of times now, especially with PACs, if I'm talking to fleets, the oddballs are the ones that aren't doing it. We've kind of shifted to this point where we've been blessed enough to become almost like a standard in the industry of what does that ongoing training look like? You know, the recent survey we did with chauffeur driven through the podcast, it was like, how often do you train? Annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly. If we'd have done that survey 10 years ago, they'd have just drawn a line through all of it. They'd have been like, no. Now there's this acceptance. And I think one of the biggest things that I've seen happen, and I don't know if you've seen it happen as well, Joe, is I've seen the companies that aren't tightening that up are the ones that are getting out of the business. They can't do it, they can't make it sustainable. Now that said, we have some of our customers that are larger fleets that have seen absolutely absurd increases even without having that. And if people hadn't listened to our last episode, I think they can go back and they can listen to you talking about things like captives and all these other tools, which again dovetails right back into why you've expanded what you're able to do. Talk to me a little bit about what if you're trying to pitch somebody, if you're going in and you're saying, Hey, I need this, this, and this, what are their biggest levers that they can pull? And then how does that kind of dovetail, and maybe it doesn't, right? But does that connect into what you've done in your business in terms of being able to join with someone and expand that? What do those levers look like to them? What are the highest value levers? Even if you're not gonna buy PAX training, I know that one of those levers is training. I think the hardest part about that one that I always explain to people is it's like you said, you gotta do it. It's the gym. You know, if you go into the gym for January, February, March, and you're pissed that you don't look like swollen anger by the time you get out, and you're not just absolutely stacked, you're like, I'm quitting, you're not gonna get the benefit. I know there's a lot of things like that. What would you say are the big levers they need to be looking at?

SPEAKER_01 44:04

So the big the big levers, I think, uh obviously packs training. And I was kidding, but checking so the biggest levels that levers I think that they need to be looking at is obviously you said it before, top down, right? So the person at the very top needs to be making sure that they're putting, and we put this criteria in place in our safety program that we made with the FLA, right? We talked about what levers we needed within the platinum safety program that we created to make sure that the insurance carriers in the underwriting get everything they need to get your policy to have max credits, any kind of safety credits they have, camera credits. Cameras is one of those levers. I've been preaching cameras since we partnered with Cables of Florida based for higher company. We were exclusive for them as an agent for two years. And one of the things they brought into the marketplace was the cameras. They were new to the industry, but they required it. You had to have cameras if you wanted to be with them. Why? Because the claims are much easier if you have proof to handle. Like if you have video footage of the inside outside of what happened during that claim. That's basic, right? Now we have driver behavior. Now we have that's an awesome lever, especially if you're running a fleet. If you're a one-car, two-car operation, you may not need the driver behavior because you know you're the driver, your wife's the driver, your, you know, or your best friend.

SPEAKER_04 45:21

You know, I would almost argue in my mind, if you're forward thinking, I would argue it becomes more important. Oh, for the behavior part? I think one of the things that I see a lot and I see it happen, the number for me is probably one to 20 cars. And really, it's more like zero to ten. When it's just you doing it, you know, you kind of figure out what the best practice is and you kind of build a business. And then you bring someone in and you 101, and you bring another person and you want to want them. So somewhere around the fourth or fifth person, it starts to become a little bit like telephone because you have the one person that's been there for a while and they have their way of doing it, and you start to kind of drift. And I think what I've seen is the people that have called us early on at PAX and said, hey, I want to get on the platform, I want to start using it, I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna make people take it, and they've grown through it, and they've done the same thing with cameras, they've done the same thing with everything, and have already had these processes in place that they grow up through. And I think that, at least for me, it's been one of my big lessons is the guys that are like, Well, I don't have money for that, I don't have time for that, I don't have this. By the time They get around to it. I don't want to say it's too late, but it's not like you know, instead of taking care of it when it's this little problem, we get the call of like, yeah, so everybody in my company does everything totally different, and somehow they crashed two of my own cars into each other in my parking lot, and my insurance company's pissed. Again, tongue in cheek, right? Hopefully they're not crashing cars into each other in the parking lot. But it really becomes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

Basically, one of the things is you're gonna have a lot of operators that are already doing everything that they can. And like I mentioned before, you have accidents happen, things happen. So it's up to the broker to know if there is anything missing, if there is any levers missing, right? You got the driver training, you got the cameras, you got the behavior, you got everything you've done at all. Your drug testing, your hiring practices are perfect, like everything an underwriter wants to see, like, oh yeah, I background check them, I do the MVRs, I do all the things. Like, but if you're not, you know, right, those are the ones that you can advise. Like if let's say you get an operator that comes and says, Hey, Joe, you know, my price is this, that, and the other, and they're not doing a lot of those things, then you have an opportunity to make that operator better, make the industry better, make the carrier who might write them have a better loss ratio or a better overall margin, and help that operator get to a point if they let's say they have bad losses, you want to help try to stay with them and year after year help. This is what you can do, this is what you need to, and you rehab them almost, right? And then now they're an operator that's up there doing all the right things, or maybe there were two missing things they weren't doing that you can let them know, hey, you need to do this. Oh, absolutely. And so I think there's always something you can do for the worst, you know, and I don't want to call them the worst. Let's I I in my industry they call them the property.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

The ones that can benefit from the most, right? The ones that have the most opportunity. We'll leave it.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

And then and then we let we let our clients know, right? Like, let's use, I'll say, like, Lancer has a seven-year age requirement, progressive has a 10-year, I'm talking about the vehicle age for certain coverages. And if you want more opportunity or more access to these carriers, update your fleet if they have vehicles that are too old. That's something we're seeing on the motor coach side that's becoming problematic. A lot of these older buses, you can't even get access to the few carriers that are out there. And you're limited to somebody that's gonna ride a 20-year-old bus or a 25-year-old bus. So keep your fleet updated if you can, if you have the means to do it. I was talking to an operator the other day, he'll downgrade the amount of units in his fleet so he can have new units and be able to operate what he can rather than having 20 old units with a group of drivers, because now you're gonna pay more for insurance, you might have less safety standards than you would in a newer vehicle. You gotta do all the things, and it's our job as agents, as brokers, to let the operators know. My specialty, my niche is the transportation industry. I wouldn't be able to tell a trucker what he needs to do to get a better rate. I'll leave that to Gordon and the rest of that team. I can go to an operator and walk around and see what can be improved or what's already top of the class. I think all of that goes into making the industry better, making the operator better, making the operation more appetizing for the carriers, and as well as making them stick around a lot longer. I hate to see when operators have to be forced out of this injury industry because of the insurance rates climbing. And I've seen that more often than I like like to admit. I've dealt with enough going out of business type of phone calls than I'd like to admit. And it's it's just it's not fun for any party. And we want to see our industry thrive, all of us. Like, you know, you, me, Tyler, we all want to see the the the trend the the industry survive because we can all form partnerships. Because I'm not just a partner with them, I'm a partner with my clients. Like, look at the FLA. We're 90% five car or less operators. Oh, absolutely. Not everybody out there is gonna have 20, 40, 30, 50, 80, 100 vehicles. It's nice if you can do that and build that, right? But you can have a great operator that has 10 units or eight units, and that's all he's ever run, and he's doing awesome, and he's got a name, and they're known nationwide as a great operator doing the right thing, safety, training, insurance, everybody knows him. But you don't have to be big to be that, you know, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04 50:46

I agree with you, and I think this for me is a really good place to leave it. And I think obviously you've been on before, I'm sure you'll be on again. I think one of the big things for me is a lot of this is about doing the right things. And I wanted to be able to have you guys on and talk about this. But I think it's important that our operators know that on the broker side, they have people like you, they have teams like the team over at Signers National, you have people that are working to try and solve it from both ends. And I think a lot of times it can feel tough because as an operator, you're thinking, oh man, I just bought this guy a new yacht. That's not necessarily the case, right? I'm kidding. The big thing for me though is that operators understand that this is something where you guys are looking at what you bring to the market. You guys are looking at how you can provide them the tools, and you guys are trying to build your businesses to be able to provide more things for them to be able to do more. And I think that really means a lot. I am really excited to see where you guys take it. I can't wait to have you guys on again. I think one of the big things for me that was the takeaway from this one is I think uh regardless of what business it is, I I think you brought up a really great lesson, Joe, in that you have to really be looking at how do you make things better to be able to do things within the industry you love and offer the types of tools that are going to be able to do that. Tyler, uh Joe, I can't thank you guys enough for being on. All our listeners, thank you so much. If you haven't already, please like, subscribe, drop us some comments, and we will see you again on the next episode of the Ground Transportation Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 52:19

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 packettraining.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.