“How do you thrive, when others are struggling to survive?”

“Embrace change – be transparent to your staff – treat each customer as if they are your only one – and use Axon Real Time Trucking Software.”

Tell us a little bit about your company.
Jeremy: “We’re a family-owned and operated business. Our family’s been in the transportation industry since 1954 when my grandpa actually bought his first truck.

“Out of high school, my dad owned and operated a truck stop at the corner of Highway 18 and 69 because he was determined not to drive truck. Then they put Interstate 35 in, which killed his business, so he bought a 1969 Kenworth from my grandpa – this was in ’71/72.

“We still have that truck today. The guy that drove that truck for my grandpa when he bought it new still drives for us today. Our driver turnover is extremely low.

“My dad founded this company in 1977, and we serve the same companies today that he founded our company to serve. That’s primarily truck equipment which means bodies, cranes, completed trucks, a lot of drive-on, drive-off type stuff. Primarily step deck trailers.”

What led you to start looking for new trucking software for your company?
Jeremy: “Because of what we do. We’ll bring truck equipment into our yards, and we have to basically crossdock every piece and also track revenue for every piece and for every leg.

We had built an Excel program that did this before, but it was a huge amount of double entering and a lot of room for error. There were no safety checks at all or anything that would prevent equipment from being double ordered.

“What we do is hard to do. And to make money at it and to track what kind of money you’re making is a completely other deal.

“We looked at other software systems, but Axon was the first program that we ran across that gave us the flexibility along with the safety features – it kind of protects us from ourselves.

“We track our revenue by the day, and because of all the reporting I can get from Axon, it saves me a lot of leg work. We tracked our business by the day before we used Axon, but Axon made it significantly easier to do and more accurate.

“If we’re losing money on a certain project, I want to know about it right away so I can fix it as opposed to a month later like most companies I’ve seen.

“Most operations run either from quarter to quarter or month to month. We’re operating day to day, and we know what our business units are doing revenue-wise on a daily basis.

“I can break it down per truck. I can break it down per fleet. I can see how my company trucks are doing versus my owner operators. It gives me a true, unbiased picture.”

Change is difficult, how did your company handle the move to Axon?
Jeremy: “Really, change isn’t difficult for us because we’re changing daily. I think that’s why we survive when other companies are suffocating.

“Everybody here welcomed the change with open arms because it actually saved us a lot of steps – single data entry instead of multiple data entry.

“We basically do a P & L sheet on every load. Now the guys don’t have to provide that to me manually; it’s at my disposal. If we didn’t have this software, we would clearly need to have more people for the type of reporting I like to have.”

Are there other features that you really like about Axon?
Gail: “One of my favourite options is the cross docking because we do that so much. You can cross dock and allocate revenue for each leg of the order. That’s great. That’s helped us a lot.

“The other thing that helps us track orders that we haven’t invoiced out is the pending receivables. We run that at the end of each month, and we make sure we’ve got everything billed out for that month.

“The billing is so much easier because you don’t have to re-enter everything into different programs like we were doing. I love that program. I can’t even say enough. I just absolutely love it.”

Jeremy: “Our customers are requiring more data than ever for billing, and with Axon we can give them as much information as they’re looking for. I know that’s their complaint with other carriers who tell them their systems won’t allow them to put this on their invoice or that on their invoice.

“They’re not going to get that from us. They can’t come up with obstacles for us that we couldn’t overcome with Axon. I can get a customer’s proof of delivery with the click of a button. I mean it used to be find it, get it out of the file, print it, then fax it or scan it, email it. Now it’s just whoop, whoop, and it’s gone.”

Gail: “And you email it straight from Axon so you don’t even have to scan it in or anything. You can just email it right from there.”

How does your accountant like the software?
Gail: “She loves it. She does. At first she was a little skeptical because she’s always used the same program, but once she got into the training, she would never go back to the old way, that’s for sure.”

What do you do that helped you to not only weather the slowdown, but actually grow?
Jeremy: “Being transparent to our employees so they understand the amount of revenue that we need to deliver on a daily basis to support the overhead that we presently have. We can either opt to deliver more freight or have less overhead.

“We all agreed that having less overhead meant people losing their jobs so we were gonna deliver more freight and we set goals. When we started setting our goals in ’06 and ’07 we were shooting for $110,000 – 115,000 a week and the last week of December 2010 we actually hit our goal of $200,000 of freight delivered in a week.

“Because of Axon, we’ve had extremely accurate reporting of our numbers and been able to stay more transparent. We also know exactly where our costs are at on a per-mile basis, obviously with the help of Axon, so sharing that information with my dispatchers tells them, look, we can take a load and we know it’s close on margin but we also know if we’ve made or lost money at it.

“If we made good money on a previous load, we can afford to take a little bit of a loss and still average out a pretty decent week. We wouldn’t be able to operate that way if I didn’t stay transparent, and I couldn’t stay transparent if it wasn’t for Axon.”

If there was one thing that you could change about Axon to help your company run more easily, what would that be?
Jeremy: “To be honest, other than owning your company, I can’t imagine having more control than what we have. We don’t have any complaints. We get what we want as if we do own it, I mean really.... You guys listen to us like we are your only customer, you know?

“That’s something that we pride ourselves on as well. We’ve got hundreds of customers, and we treat every single one of them like they’re our only one, and I see that’s what you guys do. It’s great.”

What are the three biggest challenges that you are faced with on a day-to-day basis?
Jeremy: “Staying on top of Receivables is big.

“The weather costs us more money than anything does, and that’s totally out of our control. Last week, we had half the fleet literally stopped – $35,000 worth of freight that didn’t get delivered because of a snow storm.

“Also, compliance with the CSA 2010 has been a huge challenge that we’re overcoming and we’re winning. We just went through a huge federal DOT audit and came out of it without so much as even a fine or a violation. Axon played a big part in that. With the fuel downloads and integration, everything is available to us at our fingertips, so we can audit logs correctly.”

Is there anything else you’d like to leave us with?
Jeremy: “No, other than it’s really a pleasure to do business with you guys. You guys are just above ground on everything you do.”


 

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