How Key Oil Cultivates Engaged Drivers While Making Safety a Top Priority Part 1

In this episode, Lindsey talks with David Murphy and Dylan West from Key Oil, alongside Brent Lauber from the Kelly Anderson Group.

They discuss their diverse backgrounds and the impactful safety transformation at Key Oil since 2013. They highlighted the company’s commitment to hiring the best candidates and enhancing driver training, which includes a partnership with a local community college and the innovative use of Lytx cameras for data analysis and improvement strategies. The conversation also covered the services offered by Kelly Anderson Group in recruiting and training drivers, alongside the use of a learning management system to enhance retention rates. Additionally, they shared insights into the development of a custom driver simulator and the inclusion of the Smith System training to promote safe driving practices. The meeting concluded with actionable items which included re-certifying Smith System training and ongoing improvements to driver training programs, along with plans for safety meetings that recognize and reward top-performing drivers.

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Transcript

Before we hit the road on today's discussion, I want to express our sincere gratitude to our sponsors. Without their support, this podcast wouldn't be possible. A big shout out to our sponsors that are advocate DHL, Louisville Paving, KKW Fusion, now Gordon food service, Midwest carriers, usher transport, and cook trust trucking. Without your support, we wouldn't be where we're at today. So buckle up. Let's get ready for an insightful journey into all things next gen trucking, your road to the future. Hey, everybody, welcome to NGT Talks. I'm very excited to have some esteemed guests on my show today. First of all, I want to introduce you to David Murphy with Key Oil and Dylan west with key oil safety professionals, and then Brent Lauber with the Kelly Anderson group. And we're going to start this off how we always do. 

And just ask, how did you get into trucking? Right. Next generation and trucking association, we're trying to attract young people to the trucking industry. So I wanna know from you how you got into trucking. David, let's start with you. 

Well, I'd have to say indirectly I got into trucking when I was in the Marine Corps because I was a logistics officer, and we hauled 35, 40 shiploads of marines and cargo to Norway, to Germany, to Panama. And my job was to get it loaded safely, and then when we offloaded in the country, is to get it reloaded and come back home. So indirectly, I got some experience there for about 18 years. And then just because my brother was already involved, he said I'd be a good fit in the solid waste business. And that ended up being safety manager for different companies and areas for 23 years. And after a reorganization in that business, I came on to be starting my 12th year with key oil. 

And each, ironically, each location in solid waste, and particularly with key oil, were kind of like bottom feeders in safety. 

Oh. 

When I started in Orlando with BFI, were one 330th out of 333 locations as far as safety. And there was really. There wasn't really a lot of difference, location to location that I was with, including Nashville, and basically faced the same type of situation with key oil. When I started, they were under two safety warning letters from Dot FMCSA, and we just started with the basics. 

That is awesome. So you went from the marines to safety and how you got into your trucking. 

And really it wasn't about teaching marines or employees about safety regulations, it was teaching them how to go home safely. 

Yeah, absolutely. 

And teaching them the benefit of why we did things and it really, I mean, particularly nowadays, it pays huge dividends to be able to not just tell somebody what to do, but explain to them what we want accomplished and have them give you that result. 

I love it. That's exactly right. Dylan, what's your story? How did you get into trucking? 

So, years ago, I was running a mobile mechanic business, and friend of mine had a tow company, and things just happened. He one day came to me, said, hey, I need a part time driver. And a couple months after that, I was driving for his company and also dispatching for it. Moved on to another company from there, where I've hauled everything from repossessing cars because people couldn't make their payments to hauling 100,000 pound pieces of equipment down the road, kind of just happened into it. I mean, it's something that's been in my family forever. You know, my parents and uncles and stuff like that have drove trucks forever, so just kind of fell into it as a natural fit for me. 

Absolutely. And how long have you been with key oil in San Bill? 

Well, I came to key oil originally as a driver hauling fuel. I did that for a few years, and I've been here just over six years now. I've been in their safety department for almost three years, and that was another one of those. Honestly, I never would have thought I'd be in this position and had an opportunity to talk with David and, you know, figure, well, I could probably do that. I like helping people and seeing them succeed and do better, and he gave me a shot, and now here we are. 

That's awesome. I love that story. It's so good, and you guys have done so much, and I can't wait to get into it. Brent, tell us your story. 

Well, I'll try to keep mine short, but you know how I get sucking. I actually came into transportation in a very different path. I started off in the golf industry as a golf professional, didn't have any idea what transportation, other than just seeing trucks going down the road, of course. And of course, I was one of those people that honked and didn't like truck drivers for that matter, at that time. But I had the opportunity to get into transportation. As I start off as selling freight was worked for Landstar transportation. I wanted to work then I worked for work for TMC transportation, a flatbed company kind of recruiting stuff. And then I. Kelly Anderson group family. Todd Cornette is my vice president, and he actually contacted me. 

We were friends in high school, and now that I'm in the business, I wish I would have looked in this in transportation years ago because I love it. It's absolutely a great business. And like we all say, without trucking we have nothing. 

That's right. So you wish you would have done more golf for fun, right. And then trucking for your. 

And now I seem like I get to play golf for fun and have a lot more fun doing it when. 

It's not your job. 

Great people like you and David Dillon, I always say this. I wish I had 100 customers like David Dillon because they are the epitome of safety. They really are. They do a great job. You know, congratulations to both of those guys. They just won the safety company year and the Kentucky Trucking association and dealing with safety manager of the year. Not sure what the title was exactly, but anyway, congratulations, guys. We appreciate you. 


Thanks. 

And that is a great segue. So one of the things that I like to preach is that we, you know, we're trying to get young people to come and consider careers in trucking and help get them trained, but we have to have companies that are great to work for that young people are going to want to come and work for, and that upholds safety as the number one priority is everybody get home safely. So with that being said, David and Dylan, I want to hear about key oil and your vision to turn around your safety scores so that safety is number one. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Well, to begin where I started with back in 2013, I just wanted to follow law and were a company that didn't do it well. And so if I said to employees, and I did, we want to follow the law, we want to follow regulations and we want to follow company policy. And in order to do that, it's very simple. We're just going to explain to you why we need these things done and those that don't want to do it. No problems. We'll work on your replacements. And immediately I lost 40% of the drivers. 

Wow. 

Over time, we wanted to establish our own driving school and then Sky CTC locally in Simpson county did that. And we immediately attached ourselves to them donating equipment and our time to build a relationship. And I had seen it prior with driving schools in Florida that I had worked with where drivers would come to us after they figured out what over the road meant. And the same thing with the Sky CTC school. They do a very good job of getting people prepared. And I think in our driver training evolution post the orientation period, we bring that driver to the next level in competence as well as in our line of work, which is totally different than most trucking jobs. And we've had, for the most part, success. And even sometimes when we don't, we use that information to learn from it. 

So you really. I mean, you pulled off the band aid pretty harshly in that you lost 40% of your driving workforce. And management probably looked at that and did not think that was a good thing. But where you are today, how many years later and what you have developed, what was the process of changing your focus from just getting by and doing the bare minimum to you coming in, wanting to completely change the culture and have a culture of safety? What was the process in getting that done? Obviously, you lost some people and you brought in Dylan. What was that like? And Dylan, maybe you want to chime in. What all did you do? Make this a priority. 

The one thing that I needed to get through initially was, we don't need to hire an industry experienced fuel driver. We want to pick the best people, train them on our policies and procedures. And that right there was probably the key, because even people, and Dylan can speak to this, even people who have come straight out of school, because they were the most highly recommended of the school superintendent, once we got them trained, they. They became some of the best drivers in the workforce. And then going to you, Lindsey, and hearing two, three years ago, your presentation to KTA, it just turned on a switch to recognize that, hey, we're not seeing 40, 50, 60 year old people in the interview process. We're seeing 20 and 30 year old people. 

And that whole aspect of how do you train somebody that's not a baby boomer or whatever that next generation was? And what do they expect? It turned into everything that Dylan and I are doing now. And that is with the simulator, with. With inexperienced, licensed drivers. And I'll even take it back a step further. Dylan's in the ELDT register and trains non CDL employees to get their commercial license. 

So, you know, when I came in, one of the things I set out to make sure that I do is, you knowing I learned so much when I took this position, going from a driver to a safety manager. And I wanted to make sure that anybody that I work with, anybody that comes in and does orientation with me or is already a driver here, realizes the part they play in that. And, you know, as a driver, it's like, well, I'm just one driver in a truck. I don't really matter. So I go out of my way to explain to them why everything they do matters. And that's. That's worked great. You know, David did a good job of that before I got in here. Also just changing that from, you know, where he first came in, it was kind of adversarial. 

Hey, you're going to do what I say because that's kind of what had to happen because there was a bunch of, I guess you could call them cowboys. They were just doing whatever they wanted to. Now we have guys that understand, hey, you know, we're on the same team, you know, our guys. It's great. They'll come into my office or David's office and just chat with us. They'll come in and, you know, if they see us do something wrong because we're not human, you know, we're human. We don't do everything perfect. 

They'll, that'd be me. 

They'll come in and gladly call us out on just like, you know, we're gonna say if they do something wrong. And that's part of it, you knowing that again, we're all on the same team. We all have the same goal at the end of the day. But like I said, the biggest thing for me, I came in and basically reimagined how we're using all the Linux cameras. I am big on data. I love any data point I can get. I'm going to take it and use that information to try and help make drivers better. And we'll talk more about the simulator here a little bit, I'm sure because that's a great idea too, that I have and help make them better. And that's how, you know, we have our single digit CSA scores. 

You know, how we've won our insurance captives President circle award a couple of times now. You know, we're no longer that company that's getting those warning letters. 

Well, and that's something that's interesting because you all, you are an eld provider. So you train, you can train somebody to get their CDL. You're partnering with your community college, getting people with no experience but coming to work for you. How did you work that out with your insurance to be able to, because you're in a captive. So how did you work that out to be able to ensure these are drivers who are inexperienced? 

Great question. 

That is a good question. And as long as they had a clean driving record within the parameters of the insurance company and were over 22, 23 years old, the insurance company accepted it. We have hired, I'm going to say we have hired a couple drivers who were 20 years old and we knew they had to stay in state and so with the new authority given to us by FMCSA, they didn't push back on it. 

Wow, that's awesome. That's really cool. 

I mean, that is awesome. But your insurance would not have approved that years ago when you had single digit scores. So really, in order to build what you've built and what you have today, you had to build a robust training program. One of the things that you guys have done was brought in the Kelly Anderson group, which our video series. Brent, tell us a little bit about. Kelley Anderson Group and what you guys do. 

Yeah, well, we are kind of. Our little saying is that we find, recruit, train, and retain your drivers. So with that being said, when I say find, we actually have an advertising department that will advertise for companies based on their needs. We can either piggyback off what they're doing, or we can do it ourselves. We have a whole team of people that do that now. Stay on top of the ads and make them refresh and keep them at the top of the list, basically. We also, of course, as far as the finding part of it, the recruiting part, we're a little different than most people. We don't act as part of your, we actually act as part of your recruiting staff. So we don't share drivers. We don't have a group of drivers. 

We will actually go out and act as part of your recruiting staff and find drivers for you guys, for your companies. And then we have our retention department, which we retained through our statistics, we've been able to increase turnover rates by 38% to 40%, which is huge in this market, as you know, by simply talking to drivers on a regular basis to make sure they're happy, make sure things are going the way they were told they were gonna go. And it just opens the door for them to be able to talk to our people and not have to worry about things coming from the company, retribution of the company. So that's been a great thing. And then our relearning, as David was talking about, we have our full gambit. We have a full LMS system that has over 400 safety modules in a library. 

You can actually add to that. We just developed a new, well, thanks to David and Dylan recognition program that we've been doing that. David, they did a great job implementing that with their team, and they've seen a lot of success. They can talk about that, too, again, if they want to, but we also have all the ELDT modules as well. We don't do the behind the bull training, but we do the theory training. So again, we have all those as well. That's kind of an overview of what we do, of course. 

So, David and Dylan, how do you use a Kelly Ederson group for your needs? 

So we use their learning management platform, and we use that to send out training to all of our drivers once per quarter, usually two to three of the modules per quarter, based off of, again, that data that we have that shows, you know, the potential low hanging fruit we have and try to get drivers trained up and efficient at those items. We also use it with our bonus program analytics to where if a driver has a triggered event for, let's say, for example, speeding, they will get assigned a module within Kelly Anderson group system for speeding. And where our system, you know, we have a deduction on it that will actually cut their deduction in half, which is a win, because then we have documented training for that issue. 

The driver has, but the driver doesn't take as big of a hit for making a possibly a simple one time mistake. 

And it's all tracked on a scorecard. So it shows us not only who are the drivers in most need of help and for what, and who are the drivers exceeding expectations, then it's all broken down by location. So we can see by within ten locations whose core drivers are averaging the best scores. And so we can say Bowling Green has the highest scores and e town has the lowest scores, and it will be indicative of what we need to concentrate on at each location. 

Hey, David, I have a question for you. Along those lines. Do you guys, do you see, we've heard wave heard stories from some of our other customers about competition among drivers and doing the scores, and you guys track that at all, or do they seem to have that same type of competition in your company? 

So for the past few quarters, a bit of a challenge I've issued, not necessarily specifically to the drivers, but to the managers, is who can get this done first, who can do the platform and complete these modules first? And this past quarter, we had a group of 40 drivers completed within, like six days of the quarter, something like that. The quarter before that, we had one group that just knocked out the park and did it within one day. So we do we kind of make a little bit of a competition here and there. We're starting to use some other stuff, and there'll be some competitions using some other things we're working on. 

Also, me personally, I love putting locations against each other a little bit as a friendly competition so you can see who the better guy is, which then just drives all of them to try and outdo one another. And I can think of one other scenario where were using our first version of our driving simulator. We have to test reaction times. We were doing it, a safety meetings, and it was just a way to get participation in it. So we put drivers down on this computer system and say, okay, whoever gets the best reaction time gets a marathon gift card. Which is funny, because the guy who got the fastest reaction time was one of our eldest drivers who had a double knee replacement. 

So, hey, there you go. 

Well, that's a good segue, I have to say, because we love driver simulation training, and I. We were at Skills USA this year. We had a varage driver simulator there, and we had students constantly coming. And a lot of these were diesel tech students or construction or welding students. They were coming every day, heavy equipment operating students, and we had a competition. We had several students every day that would get 100% on the. The driver route that we had. I did it, and I got a 59%. So these students, these young people are really good at this, and I think it's with that, you know, those video games that they play, but they have good spatial body movement reactions. And so, Dylan, you created a driver simulator. 

What was your vision behind this, and how have you developed it into using it for your employees? 

Then I started looking, and we found some software out there that was still fairly expensive. It was a couple thousand dollars, but it seemed like it would suit the needs. So that was our kind of. Our first version. Quickly realized that it wasn't very immersive, it wasn't adaptable. It just kind of had. Here's your scenarios. This is all you get. Good luck. And then David was asking me, how can we make this better? 

The idea behind it is, you know, we want to put drivers on this system to just kind of see what their reactions are in certain scenarios, how they adapt to different situations, and, you know, okay, do you have too close to a following distance, or you're not paying attention to the fact that street sign said, you know, stop sign ahead, so you blew through a stop sign, things like that. We have a score sheet that we can use to identify those issues and give them a score at the end of it and combine that with some, again, ongoing training, and you can put them through that system again later on and see if their score improves. We. 

The system is still fairly new, so I'm still coming up with new ideas for it and stuff, and it's going to continue to improve, but I. You know, right now the idea is anybody who comes in during orientation, we put them through it just to see kind of where their baseline is. 

Yeah. 

And go from there. And that would also help our behind the wheel instructors to know kind of where to focus with these drivers while they're out training them, period. That they're doing that. 

Yeah, absolutely. So transforming your safety at key oil, you have the simulator, you've done the Kelly Anderson videos. You train Smith systems training. Right. Tell me a little bit about that. 

Smith system is the best example of a very smart man trademarking common sense. And if you're, if you untrained as an untrained driver coming just in high school, if you looked at it from the standpoint, how do I get the best view of the road? How can I maintain that? And what should I be looking for? That's the Smith system, and I've been using it since 1997, and Dylan's been trained and certified for it for the last two years, and he's going for recertification in another month or so. 

And it is the most rewarding thing that takes a very long time because once drivers recognize that these are, these, let me just say these truths are self evident, they will come to you and ask for reference material because they're going to teach it to their kids, their nieces and their nephews. And I've experienced that. And it is a mark. It's a mark at the level of culture that you've developed. And so I always keep extra pamphlets and keychains and every once in a while, driver will say, believe it or not, I got a grandson who's going to start driving. And they'll ask. And so, like I said, it's just a very common sense approach of obtaining information while you drive and making decisions as how to keep your space so that you're nothing where other people's accidents occur. 

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a lesson that we could all learn. 

Yeah. 

Anything else that you guys have done that you want to share on how you transformed your safety? I mean, winner of the 2024 safety director of the year and the company, as a company, you won safest company in Kentucky. So any other things that you've done to make this your culture now at key oil? 

I think the fact that Dylan brought it up earlier that the drivers expect us to be looking at them and for them as well as they will let us know that they will be looking for us, too. So if we're in a company vehicle and somebody doesn't completely stop at a stop sign. Somebody's going to knock on a door and say, hey, I saw you. But that's no different than the way were. We would address them and they appreciate that camaraderie, they appreciate the involvement, and we reward them at their safety meetings based on the level of success they've had and either by personally cooking a meal for them or catering a meal for them. And they would get anything from smoked bologna in a hot dog to filet Mignon. And so, hey, I love that smoked bologna. 

That's the low side. That's the low end. 

Yeah. 

And so they do appreciate that we've had a couple safety meetings where there's been some free play at gaming centers and as well as rookie of the year, driver of the year, those kinds of awards. 

Yeah. So really recognizing your employees and your drivers for what they're doing and really making it a culture of, you know, shining your drivers as great employees.