GLS Carriers Presents Team Talk | Episode 3: Pre-Trip, Post-Trip, and Housekeeping

​In this episode, the guys talk about some of their favorite pre-trip and post-trip items. Answer the Question of the Day for your chance to win some cash. The question is: How many miles did GLSC put down on the road in 2022? Leave your guess in the comments or email us at Safety@glscarriers.com.

Welcome to GLS Carriers presents team talk I'm Ken Cox and I should have worn a coat today. On my left, we have Francis Hamm, on our right we have Kenny Koontz, and behind the scenes we have Danny. And we are drivers for drivers.

So, this episode, we are going to go over a few things. I wanted to start with answering the question from last week. Jay, thanks for answering that and getting back to us. The question was "When did GLS carriers become GLS carriers? When was it established?" That was April, of 2015. Jay again thanks for reaching out and answering that.

We also have some driver anniversaries. We have Robbie Criswell. He's been here three years. We have Pete, I'm gonna butcher your last name, Petrowski. He's been here six years. He's been running for us for quite a while and we thank you guys for your dedication, your safe driving and helping us succeed and move along.

Driver's mile per gallon? We're looking at that? Yeah we did, for the month of January, Robbie Criswell 6.864 was our top guy, and Joel Johnson at 6.6. Congrats to you guys on saving yourself money for sure. Yeah, that's huge with today's fuel prices and stuff that's awesome. [PHONE RINGS] I think that's just how you know we're working. Hey, you know, Francis is busy. I mean he gets phone calls. He just came back from a trip working with... who did you work with?

We actually went out to the world Ag Expo. Dan and  Brad and Rick joined us as well. We all went out there and went through the Expo and visited with a lot of potential customers while we were out there. It was a real good event.
You found the Potato Truck too didn't you? We did and and I tell you, this was pretty cool, so we've seen the Idaho Potato Truck out there and it's like all of us were like, "hey! Look at there, you know, the potato truck." So we all went running over to the potato truck and we take out our camera and we start taking pictures and stuff and this young gal comes over and she starts talking to us. We were saying we're from Idaho and we're pretty proud of you coming from Idaho. So she says, "Can I take your pictures?" So we all jumped in front of the truck and she took my phone and took pictures of us. We started talking to her and she's actually the driver of the Potato Truck. She's been driving it for a number of years now and she drives all around the United States and she promotes Idaho potatoes. I thought it was a really cool deal. And she was a pleasure to talk with. It was a bunch of fun. 

We wanted to get into some pre-trip/post-trip stuff, and some housekeeping stuff. We'll let Francis start us off. Yeah absolutely, so we're getting to that time of the year that we talk on a couple of our other conversations. We talked about business and what we're seeing with some of our dedicated customers and that's continuing to thrive. We're seeing more and more business there and that's awesome. And the only reason we're seeing that is truly because of the performance that we're getting from our team and everything that they're doing out there in taking care of our customers. So first of all let me thank everybody for that. I really appreciate it, thank you. So the next thing is the expenses that we have. It's that time of the year. Insurance costs, you know we're looking at Insurance definitely. We need to really look at our safety and I need everybody's help. Everybody's part of this, pre-trip and post-trip. Making sure that we're doing everything that we need to do for compliance.

Part of our pre-trip and post-trip is looking at your cab book. You want to make sure that you've got updated registration, updated insurance, updated IFTA, and your updated annual. You want to make sure that those are not expired. And in that book you need your ELD cab card. And that's to give to the DOT officer if they're not familiar with ELD. The only other thing that you should have in there is your current trip envelope with your current BOLs. Anything else in there needs to be taken out, it needs to be filed, it needs to be sent back to us, it needs to be thrown away. If when you were doing your pre-trips make sure that you're checking those out. And if you have something that's expired let me know right away and I will get that stuff to you. 

So one of the things we're looking at with the pre-trip and post-trip, it's not only the compliance thing and the safety piece that goes behind it, which is really important, but it's also our preventative maintenance. You know and the thing that cost us just a ton of money. Every time we go in and have a repair done out on the road, it's money. Somebody who has a tire, or whatever, that could be twice, three times the cost on the road from compared to what we could do it for here local or within network. So anytime we see something that needs to be addressed, greasing goes a long way in keeping from having to replace a part. Especially a part you can't find today. Hard to get also the fifth wheel keeping that fifth wheel greased weekly is going to increase the mileage on your tires dramatically. So make sure that you are greasing that fifth wheel at least once a week. If they want to know a schedule I think the handbook actually has a schedule in there on how many miles. I think it's two full greasings in between oil changes or something? Well right now it shows every 25,000 miles you do a short service. Every 50,000 miles you're doing a full service. So greasing in between that it's not going to hurt. It'll keep your parts running longer, it'll look newer and especially when you trade it in for that schedule B there'll be less charges. 

And then tires, you know when we see that tires are starting to wear, get those pictures in ahead of time. We can make sure that we get some tires available and in-house bought and brought in so that when you do come in we can get those things put on your trailer. I think we can save some money there too. That's really what it's all about. Trying to cut some of these costs down. When we were talking about the fuel just a second ago, that is so huge. When you look at the price of fuel today and you're pulling that kind of MPGs you know that goes a long way on reducing cost. So you know great job there. Anything that we can get from you guys to help us out on our cost is great. I agree.

With the D.O.T. book and the inspections you know what it boils down to too is the amount of time you spend at the D.O.T. facility or scale house when you're fumbling through stuff trying to find stuff.

Everyone knows that the roads in the United States aren't that great. There's potholes everywhere.  So keeping stuff greased is going to help keep stuff from breaking. And part of that is is fuel management with the weather the way it is. We are almost in March but we still have weather coming at us. This week we've got storms all around us. What can they be doing to help keep them rolling down the road fuel wise, and other things that they could be doing?   

So you guys need to pre-plan your trips. If you get loaded and you got extra time but you know you're going through Wyoming let's get through Wyoming while it's good. Wyoming can change in an hour. If the roads are open let's get through there and if we gotta wait on the other end today, better to do it on this side of Elk Mountain than it is somewhere else.

It's good to watch your National weather and what you're going into. There may be a better route to go that'll keep you from getting stuck somewhere. Just call us if you're not sure and we'll help you plan that out. Having a plan A and plan B. I want to throw something else out there too. We primarily run, I mean we run to the east side of the United States too, but a lot of traffic we push on the western side of the United States, and there's so many places that it could be 50 it could be 80 it could be 100 miles between the towns that we're actually running in. When we're running in inclement weather really pay attention to what's going on. The last thing that we would want is to have somebody get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. So when we're looking at those forecasts pay attention to where you're at, what road conditions are, and what you're coming into, because I think we all know 20 miles can be a huge huge difference. Absolutely. So just really watch that. I don't want anybody to get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere possibly no cell phone signal and get into trouble. So just paying attention to that, especially this time of the year.

I found when I was driving, especially because I went to Alaska for a few years and back, going through the Yukon and Alberta and whatnot, we always had extra provisions. I had extra socks. I had extra food. I had extra water. Extra clothing. I had extra bedding. So some of that stuff, as you're going down the road, just kind of keep that in mind. If you don't have those things with you that could be the difference between a very comfortable night waiting for someone to get there or a very uncomfortable night waiting for somebody to get there.

We had a gentleman break down last night and I want to give a shout out to him. Jake, Kudos! I appreciate what you did there. He had Uber bring him a part. This is his truck, he's able to work on it and whatnot. Obviously the trucks that we were running right now all have warranties and we'll get a wrecker out there and get you towed as quick as possible. But he had his part brought out to him by Uber, he was able to take care of that, and then zoom, he was down the road, delivered this morning and wasn't late. So thanks Jake for doing that we appreciate what you're doing out there. That's way cool. I think that's awesome. What else you have for us?

Oh please don't be working on our trucks. Like I said they're under warranty. Let's make the phone call and we'll get you taken care of. A lot of this goes back to the pre-trips too. If we catch a lot of this stuff we can get it fixed before we have an issue. You guys drive the trucks all the time if something ain't feeling right then it's probably not right let's check it really good and we can catch a lot of this stuff. You bet. 


SMS scores, you know SMS scores is something that affects the the owner operator, the driver, and the company. We all share in that. When we're looking at insurance and stuff and trying to control costs we really got to look at our safety record, where we're at. I know we review that consistently.  We try to get that message back out to everybody on where we're at. It could be just a really minor thing that can throw us in the wrong direction. We all share in it. We did speak a little bit about that last week.

When you're down doing your conferences, meeting with new customers and stuff, how does that SMS score affect what you're doing out there? A lot of our dedicated customers are looking at a preferred carrier hauling their product. And when they are when they're looking at a preferred carrier they're looking at your safety ratings and how you perform as a team. And how you perform will determine if you can haul their freight at all and possibly how much freight you can get hauled. They may put you on a primary, which means we got a selection of a lot of the lanes, or secondary where we may be a backup. So that does play a huge factor and I think everybody looks at that. I think so.

Today's day and age, especially with these nuclear verdicts and whatnot safety scores and safety is huge. Clean DOT inspections, not speeding, not getting parking tickets, things like that, will keep us above water and it'll keep our scores really low. That allows us to, like Francis was saying, work with more customers. It keeps them out of the scale houses too. Once your scores drop below a certain threshold they want to inspect you more. That's just the nature of the business. Get more green lights on your pass there and off you go.

I do have another trivia question. This time if you get it right, the first person who gets it right and gets it back to me, we'll put a couple dollars in your pocket. The question is "In 2022 how many miles did GLS carriers put down on the road?" oh! oh! I can't answer? I mean you can but it's wrong [Laughter].

I think that's about where we're going to end today unless you have something else you'd like to add.

We asked everybody to fill out a document that we put out there kind of a trip document on how things went on the trip. We have been getting those back and I want to say thank you for filling those out and getting them back to us. We're learning a lot from those and we're starting to compile some data that's making better sense of the locations we're delivering to. So thanks a lot, we really appreciate you doing that for us. It'll help us out in the long run.

We did speak about scorecards. Did any of those come back? Last week we did we talk about the scorecards. Again, Jay Rice, thank you for responding to that. He would like to see his and how what he's doing on the road has affected his scorecard and how that works with GLS Carriers.

​So as we end this episode we want to thank you for making the right choices and being safe. You are our eyes and our ears. If you see something say something. We succeed when you completed your trip safely and you're home with your loved ones. Thank you for all you do and we will see you next week. Thanks [Music]