Wear your scars as a badge of honor
Published on March 19, 2025
At the Best Fleets to Drive For® Education & Awards Conference in early March, CarriersEdge CEO Jane Jazrawy shared observations about the state of the industry, and how the Best Fleets build resiliency through constant improvement. Several people have asked for copies of that opening speech, so here it is.
Good morning and welcome to the 2nd annual Best Fleets to Drive For Education and Awards Conference!
Before I do anything else, I especially want to thank our sponsors: Netradyne, TruckRight, and EpicVue. You can scan their QR codes outside this theatre on the big posters, and there are representatives from all three companies here. Please, when you see them, thank them for their support and give them some of your time.
EpicVue in particular has hit a milestone with us – this is the tenth year they have sponsored this program and their belief in what we’re working to do has been invaluable. Thank you very much for supporting us in the quest to improve the driver experience for fleets big and small!
Interesting times
This has been an eventful year. The economy started to look like it was going to brighten up, but really hasn’t. The trucking industry is battling inflation, high interest rates, supply chain disruption, cybercriminals, broker fraud, employer fraud – generally, lots of fraud. Everyone has been scarred in some way, some of those are visible and some are not. Some in our industry have been hit so hard, they aren’t coming back.
But this isn’t the first time that society has been in upheaval.
“May you live in interesting times”
You may recognize this saying – it’s supposedly a Chinese curse, but I did some research and there is no evidence of a Chinese source.
This is the actual quote that researchers believe the saying came from, attributed to Joseph Chamberlain in 1898…
“I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.”
Joseph Chamberlain was an influential British politician. In 1898, he was acting as “Colonial Secretary” – which put him in charge of the British Colonies, including Canada. He had a courtside seat to the wars, economic upheaval and innovation.
The Panic of 1893 had just ended, the biggest economic depression before the 1930s. There was the Spanish-American war, along with conflicts in Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Colombia, China, and Japan. X-rays and radioactivity had both been discovered and car companies had sprung up in Europe, although they weren’t in the US yet. Literature was taking a dark turn with Dracula and War of the Worlds.
This was a pretty interesting time. Unless you’re a big history buff or it’s part of your current job, you were probably only vaguely aware of any of this. So why bring it up?
Because the interesting times haven’t stopped. They really never stop. We have new technology, we have incredible discoveries like generative AI, autonomous vehicles, the ability as a regular person, to post a message that can instantly be seen by thousands of people. These are amazing changes, but we haven’t figured out how everything fits together. It’s not a surprise that sometimes our experiments are going to leave a mark.
Organizational scars
We all have scars – some are visible, some aren’t so much. Some are inexplicable – we don’t know where they came from, some are from childhood mishaps, some from surgery and other serious injuries. Every scar you have tells a story.
You may or may not have noticed a couple of mine. This is a real dimple. This one? This is a scar that most people mistake for a dimple. On February 14, when I was 21, I was driving in the snow in my 1979 Plymouth Horizon, when I hit another car head on.
I have a lot of other scars from that accident, and they represent a long recovery. But I don’t hate them, and I don’t try to cover them up because they are the reminders of what I overcame. They’re part of my face and part of my experience.
Organizations can have scars as well – all those failures and embarrassments you can only laugh about 5 or 10 years later. The money you invested in failed technology that you have to rip out and replace, or the effort you put into a program that died on the vine. Maybe a critical employee left suddenly or, all of a sudden, you have expenses you didn’t anticipate. If you don’t have scars from experiences like this, you have either been very lucky or you haven’t really tried anything that makes a difference.
We have a ton of driver nominations when freight is good – many companies think that they only need to attract talent in the good times. What the Best Fleets have demonstrated is that you need to keep it going every year whether you win or lose. The hard times can actually play a vital role in improving how your fleet operates. When times are tough, you have to really think about where your money is spent, and what you can do with less. That’s where creativity comes in and you have the opportunity to innovate – to do more with less.
By going through the Best Fleets process – whether you make the top 20 or not, you have been making the effort to do something big, even in these interesting times. And it can be hard and you can end up with some scars. But eventually, you realize that you are better for it. The scar tissue stops being unsightly and starts being a part of your face.
So let me close this welcome with “We will have a few more scars before we come out of this.” But wear those scars as a badge of honour – because every challenge you overcome doesn’t just leave a mark; it makes you stronger, wiser, and ready for what’s ahead.
Thank you.
