[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to the supply chain careers podcast. The only podcast for job seekers, professionals, and students who are focused on career enhancing conversations and insights across all aspects of the supply chain discipline. This podcast is made possible by SCM talent group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
[00:00:28] Mike Ogle: Visit SCM Talent Group at scmtalent.com. In this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast, we have two guests from the National Motor Freight Traffic Association, or NMFTA. Joining us are Debbie Sparks, the Executive Director, and Joe Orr, The chief operating officer. Listen, as they talk about their path into supply chain and the NMFTA plus how NMFTA provides a variety of services to the industry and their members. They talk about the incredible importance of information flow in the industry and the need to talk so much more about cybersecurity. Debbie and Joe also talk about generational differences and the changing nature of members and the board roles. They closed the episode by providing some of the best advice they’ve received and some of their own that they like to share, particularly about networking, embracing the lessons in failure, how to dive deep into learning your industry, plus how to focus your understanding on the true nature of industry challenges.
[00:01:31] Mike Ogle: I’m your podcast co-host, Mike Ogle.
[00:01:34] Chris Gaffney: And I’m your podcast co-host, Chris Gaffney.
[00:01:37] Mike Ogle: Debbie and Joe. We’re happy to have you both with us today on the supply chain careers podcast. Welcome.
[00:01:43] Debbie Sparks: Thank you.
[00:01:45] Mike Ogle: What were some of the greatest influences that led each of you into supply chain and then to the NMFTA?
[00:01:55] Debbie Sparks: I got to tell you, for me, I’ve been working at the American Trucking Association and just, it was the next step in a career trying to figure it out and was in trucking. Hurricane Katrina hit and I’d been learning the business of trucking. And that was my first introduction into the people of trucking.
[00:02:19] Debbie Sparks: And that is probably why I now write children’s storybooks about trucking. It just touched me. And I remember being up. We were up for 48 hours fielding calls from carriers. Saying, we’ve got trucks, we’ve got bottled water, we’ve got emergency supplies, where do we go, what do we do? And no one asked them to do it.
[00:02:42] Debbie Sparks: No one asked them to do it. I had one of our members, when I went to visit him in his town in Maine, as I was driving to his office, I drove by the local high school, and the taxi cab driver told me who had donated, two years ago, the big electronic scoreboard, And it was the member I was going to visit.
[00:03:02] Debbie Sparks: It’s the people in supply chain, the people in trucking, they lead with their hearts. They’re there. They do the right thing. They help each other. And that’s the story that never gets told. And that’s what just completely took me in and has kept me in the supply chain and trucking specifically all this time, the hearts and the kindness.
[00:03:27] Debbie Sparks: All right, Joe, top that.
[00:03:28] Joe Ohr: My story is similar. I was in education and as a summer job, I started working somewhere that was a provider within the supply chain trucking industry. And I was going geared towards an IT career and trucking was just a means to that IT career and really never had thoughts of, Oh, I’m going to stay in this industry.
[00:03:54] Joe Ohr: And, uh, after a summer doing it, I’m like, I really liked this and got offered a full time position and start working with some of the carriers and it got into, it gets into your blood and you really enjoy it and you find out it’s a very tight community and it’s a mission that you start to believe in and the good that it does.
[00:04:18] Joe Ohr: And for me, it was something that I really enjoyed the people that I worked with and I believed in what they were doing. And it’s not about people have this vision of trucking and supply chain. It’s this, it’s that, but it’s really not, it’s, it’s very positive. And it’s really people helping people. And so you’ve looked at, for me, some of the things that it was doing, it was helping, it was carrying ammunitions, making sure that they make it safely from one location to another.
[00:04:54] Joe Ohr: It was things like. responding. I remember it was a hurricane similar to Debbie’s. It was responding to a natural disaster. Most recently, I remember with Covid, a lot of trucking companies, instead of transporting one thing, it was transporting something different, medical supplies. And so the industry just always responds in a very positive way.
[00:05:23] Joe Ohr: And so to be part of that was always something that was very positive. And so it almost becomes part of who you are, becomes part of your DNA. And there were times that I thought maybe I wanted to do something different. And I always wanted, I never did because it’s now, this is something that’s really important.
[00:05:45] Joe Ohr: And I’ve been in several different aspects of supply chain. And the people that, that you work with are, are really good people. And the mission’s always the same. What can we do to make it safer? What can we do to make it friendlier? What can we do to just make it a better industry? More efficient, but it’s just the good of the people, the good of transporting the goods.
[00:06:13] Joe Ohr: And it’s not all about dollars and cents, although that’s important. It’s a lot of, it’s about the mission. And so you gravitate towards that.
[00:06:22] Debbie Sparks: The part about NMFTA and how our backgrounds led us to where we are today with NMFTA, when interviewing for the position, the hiring group was looking for change in NMFTA, so NMFTA had been doing the SCAC codes and the commodity classification.
[00:06:46] Debbie Sparks: Since 1956 and they didn’t want to be a stale association. They knew there was other areas they could grow into and they’d been dabbling in cyber security. They hadn’t really put a full blown plan together. They didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they were asking of their candidates to interview as their new president, what could we do with this?
[00:07:08] Debbie Sparks: When I got the position, the question was, how do we tie this back to standards? How do we do cybersecurity? It’s, it’s still, and this was two and a half years ago. That’s just how quickly cybersecurity is changing. It still wasn’t a comfortable word in business. We didn’t want to talk about it. It was uncomfortable and it was all negative.
[00:07:30] Debbie Sparks: And we got this opportunity, a small group. In the L. T. L. Industry wanted to digitize. So if you think about a truck, a tractor and you think about truckload, they have one customer, one destination, one set of paperwork in L. T. L. You could have up to 100 customers on that truck and you take all that paperwork and you multiply it by 100.
[00:07:54] Debbie Sparks: So they were very serious and aggressive about how can we digitize? How can we make it more efficient? And they were This is airing our dirty underwear, but they were looking potentially because they all had full time jobs and they felt maybe we could start an association and try to get this to happen.
[00:08:12] Debbie Sparks: One of our board members. Had knew of this group and went to them on our behalf and said, would you consider letting NMFTA do it? And at the time we were not considered cutting edge. We were still doing the same old work that we’ve been doing for many years. And they gave us a shot, and that’s when everything came together for us in that whole, and Joe alluded to it, that giving back, it’s now serving those, saying, okay, so you want to digitize, they knew how to do it, they just didn’t have the time to do it, and when you digitize, then you need to safeguard that electronic transmission, which then explained how do we segue into classified, into cyber security, All of a sudden we had the map of how to do it.
[00:09:03] Debbie Sparks: We didn’t have the talent. So we were heavy classification. We knew how to do that. We didn’t have technology. We didn’t have cybersecurity. So we got a wonderful opportunity to reinvent ourselves and bring in brand new staff and talent and software. And it’s just been an amazing journey. And part of that was bringing in Joe as part of that change agent to do that.
[00:09:28] Debbie Sparks: That’s the NMFTA. I think in a lot of organizations. Coming out of COVID, we all had to look at ourselves and we had a very savvy board that said, We’ve got to do more. Um, we’ve got to give back and we’ve got to look at other areas to do it. And yet it all still falls under that umbrella of standard setting.
[00:09:48] Debbie Sparks: So it’s, it’s been a really neat journey and it’s still in the roots of trucking, but it’s LTL, we’re stepping into truckload and we get to ultimately support into that larger supply chain in helping to bring those solutions and tools.
[00:10:05] Mike Ogle: I want to toss in one other quick question. You’d both mentioned disaster relief side of things.
[00:10:10] Mike Ogle: Uh, are you participants with, in the American Logistics Aid Network?
[00:10:15] Debbie Sparks: We, I think that’s the one we are in. Um, uh, Kathy Fulton is their
[00:10:19] Mike Ogle: executive director. She’s been a guest on our podcast as well.
[00:10:23] Debbie Sparks: Yes. We’ve just actually, it was through another connection that we just started working with her. We don’t have the full blown program.
[00:10:29] Debbie Sparks: We post it through social media, but we’re looking at ways we can. Ramp that up faster to support. Yeah. And then prior to that, I sit on the board with Wreaths Across America. So that’s my big heart with that. So yeah, but with everything, you gotta be careful. You don’t overstretch yourself and what we keep asking the same members to do over and over.
[00:10:51] Debbie Sparks: But yeah, we loved. Had a meeting with her about three months ago and just loved what they’re doing. And they’re that intermediary. So they get contacted, they understand trucking and transportation and they give all the right necessary information to connect it to the carrier or whoever can deliver it.
[00:11:08] Debbie Sparks: Yeah, it’s phenomenal.
[00:11:10] Mike Ogle: Hey, and Chris, I think you’ve got a little experience in transportation.
[00:11:14] Chris Gaffney: Yeah, it’s very fun to listen. I came into the industry right out of college, knew I wanted to be in logistics and went to work at Frito Lay and probably six months after I started, maybe nine months, I had my first job supervising private fleet over the road.
[00:11:33] Chris Gaffney: Truck drivers and also solving for what we couldn’t do on our fleet with LTL and contract carriers was early in the deregulated area. And I think a couple of things really resonate with me here. I was 24 years old and we were very fortunate at Frito. We had professional truck drivers. We really did a million miler, multimillion miler, safe drivers, or whatever proud.
[00:11:55] Chris Gaffney: They were the best way for someone to get introduced to the field, but I got to know them personally. They, they gave me feedback. You can imagine what that was like. But I got to build really good relationships with those folks. They were wonderful individuals and wonderful businessmen. In many cases, they had businesses outside of what they were doing and driving for us.
[00:12:14] Chris Gaffney: And so it was really a good entree into the field. And I would say I’ve had freight in my blood. Ever since that, and when I was at Coca Cola, I was on the other side of it. We were mostly working with third parties. Either we had direct relationships with asset based carriers, and or brokers, and or LTL carriers, and or 3PLs.
[00:12:34] Chris Gaffney: And we were trying to solve, you know, for a part of the supply chain. That is fundamentally critical and in most cases misunderstood and not appreciated. And so really, you know, for you, Debbie and Joe, it really gets back to me in terms of ideally the role of the association in terms of advocacy for the industry itself.
[00:12:58] Chris Gaffney: So talk a little bit more about the mission. What you do for members, both folks who are corporately involved and then folks individually who were desiring to grow in this field.
[00:13:09] Debbie Sparks: Can I read our mission statement? And then I’ll let Jim talk. I love our mission statement. So our mission, it’s simple. We promote, advance, and improve the welfare and interest of the motor carrier industry.
[00:13:21] Debbie Sparks: We do this through research, education, lobbying, and developing industry standards and best practices. Our goal is to have the most informed membership to not only grow profitably, but efficiently run operations and protect against new challenges resulting from the digital era. Love that. It’s a little long, but we got a lot of work to do.
[00:13:44] Mike Ogle: No, that’s good.
[00:13:45] Joe Ohr: Yeah. One of the things that we talked about, why an NMFTA. So, one of the things, if you think about that mission statement, it’s really, it’s our give back to the industry. And a lot of these, a lot of these things is. us picking up where others can’t because they don’t have the time or they don’t have the focus.
[00:14:07] Joe Ohr: So we’re focused on doing standards. So one of the things I’ll do is I’ll go through some of the things that we’re really focused on. Number one is the classification. And so we, the classification of freight. And so one of the things we’re looking at right now is to How do we, the classification was created based on the railroads many years ago.
[00:14:32] Joe Ohr: And so we’re looking at how do we update that? How do we make it easier? And so I joined about seven months ago and spent a lot, I’ve been in the industry now for 25 years. And one thing that I’ve learned is that change is not easy, but if you communicate and if you ask lots of questions. And if you do it with a purpose change, change, you can do, I always think about how FMCSA did the ELD change when I was part of that, and I know I worked a lot.
[00:15:07] Joe Ohr: You mentioned free to live. I worked a lot with free to lay way back when, and they’re one of the early adopters of onboard computers. And I remembered, I was like, nah, I don’t want that. And then this makes my life easier. Introducing that technology and that’s what we’re looking at with classification is simplifying and how can we simplify the classification?
[00:15:35] Joe Ohr: How can we reduce the friction between the shipper and the carrier? And that’s one of the things that we’re doing. So that’s one of our things on our mission statement is to give back and simplify that relationship between the shipper and the carrier. So one of our missions is simplifying classification.
[00:15:55] Joe Ohr: Another thing is to look at the standards and station. And so one of our goals is what’s it take to go paperless. And so we’re really working on API development and standards. And so we’ve done things like freight visibility. We’ve done things like e bill of lading. And these are things that have made significant changes, things that used to take hours, now takes minutes.
[00:16:27] Joe Ohr: Things where whole departments used to stay up till 2 in the morning, they’re leaving at 4 o’clock. Things where there used to be errors, there’s no longer errors. Things where paper will get lost, it’s now all digitalization. So making these things APIs. is making the trucking industry much more efficient.
[00:16:50] Joe Ohr: And then I think third thing is cyber security. As you go into digitalization, you have to look at cyber security. And that’s, to me, what is the biggest give back that, that we do is a cyber security, personally, professionally, cyber security, something we all have to think about. The truck has so many connection points and there’s nobody that really focuses on the supply chain from port to truck to back office to the IOT.
[00:17:27] Joe Ohr: And so that truck is an office on wheels. And some of our big give backs is we’ve got researchers. We sponsor a lot of things within the universities. Where we, we look at what are the vulnerabilities, we work with the OEMs, we work with the suppliers, and we say, hey, we, we’ve seen these vulnerabilities, here’s how to do a better.
[00:17:50] Joe Ohr: Here’s some recommendations. Here’s some suggestions. We really want to make it safer. That’s again, our give, give back. We do education. We do a cybersecurity conference. We’ve got it coming up in the end of October in Cleveland. And this is something where we have guest speakers come in and talk about, here’s the best practices in the industry.
[00:18:17] Joe Ohr: Here’s how, whether you’re a small carrier or a big carrier, whether you’re a private fleet, whether you’re LTL, over your, over the road, it’s here’s how to think about cybersecurity. Here’s some known vulnerabilities. Again, whether it’s the back office side of whether it’s the LTL side, here are, we’re getting the people together to talk about it.
[00:18:39] Joe Ohr: Cybersecurity is an area where people really don’t open up and talk about it. It’s almost like people are embarrassed. And so we’re, we’re trying to get people together to talk about cybersecurity. So we’re trying to have those conversations and we’re putting as much information out on our website. And it’s all free about, Hey, here’s some white papers.
[00:19:01] Joe Ohr: Here’s some research that we did. Here’s some sponsorships that we do. Here’s some best practices. And so those are the things that, that again, that’s why I was attracted to NMFTA. These are our give backs into the industry that we are really focused on. And so people that may not have big cyber security teams can start to think about it.
[00:19:27] Joe Ohr: Or if you do have a big cyber security team, you can say, Oh, this is a good idea. Maybe you just pick up that little nugget of information.
[00:19:36] Chris Gaffney: It’s interesting in my work. I. I’m exposed to logistics operations in Europe and in Asia, and there may be more of a mindset around collective action in those parts of the world, for one reason or another in clearly in the U.
[00:19:53] Chris Gaffney: S. This is a market economy and it’s private enterprise and that type of thing. But there clearly are places where there’s value in competitors working together. And obviously that’s part of what you do. How do you make the case to the larger players to say, yes, you could go it alone, but in these areas, benefit for you to be part of this larger effort through the association.
[00:20:17] Joe Ohr: The competitors work together in all the different areas. And that’s one of the things that’s always amazed me about the industry is you can have all the competitors in the room. And they do work together with the exception of maybe Coke and Pepsi, which I find interesting. You worked at both, you know, they, the competitors do work together.
[00:20:41] Joe Ohr: And whether it’s LTL, they do share. Cyber security is the difference. I was talking to somebody and they’re like, I don’t know why that is. It’s just still, if someone is hacked, it’s almost seen as, They’re embarrassed. Kudos. I know S, when they got compromised, they stood up and said, yep, we, we were compromised.
[00:21:06] Joe Ohr: This is how it happened. This is what we did. And I think that kind of led the way there were trailblazers in that area because so many of these trucking companies use similar software. And so when they did get hacked, everybody wanted to know, Oh, well, how did they get in? Am I using it? And I think Ward Trucking was the same way.
[00:21:29] Joe Ohr: And then we’ve seen a lot with the freight broker software that when they got compromised, people wanted to know how they got in. And so I don’t think it’s an industry thing. I think the industry does a great job of that. I think it’s a cybersecurity thing. And I think that is across all industries, but I think that there’s, those walls are starting to come down.
[00:21:52] Joe Ohr: Because it’s cybersecurity is a team sport and people are realizing that not one person knows everything about cyber, but if you get four or five, six, seven people in a room, you can really help out. And you’re probably not ever going to stop all cyber attacks. They’re just too many people trying to do it.
[00:22:17] Joe Ohr: The biggest thing is coming up with a business continuity plan to make sure that, that when you are impacted, you’re minimizing it. You’re thinking through the different scenarios and you’re preparing for it. It’s almost like planning for, it is, it’s like planning for a downtime or planning for an event.
[00:22:37] Joe Ohr: From an IT perspective, you always plan for what happens if the electricity goes out. What’s my backup plan? What happens if this piece of hardware goes down? Um, with cyber, it’s the same thing. What happens? How often do I need to do backups? What do my contracts look like? How much data can I afford to lose?
[00:22:57] Joe Ohr: All those things you have to think about. And so it’s just getting the right people in the room to think about it. It’s not really getting the people in the room to always think about, how can I go a hundred percent preventing it? But it’s, What can I do to prevent the majority of attacks and if I am attacked, what do I have to do to protect my supply chain?
[00:23:19] Debbie Sparks: I think, too, to your question, Chris, about the competitive nature. It’s interesting, like, working with our carriers. Competitive kind of goes out of the room where they start, they’re focusing and you see it, the questions that they come to us with and the solutions they want us to solve is the solution for The shipper, their end customer, we can’t get them to do X, Y, and Z.
[00:23:44] Debbie Sparks: So how can we supplement that? A good example of it, and this is one of the big challenges that Joe and his team are facing, the invention of the dimensioner. It’s all about getting the dimensions, the height, the size of that palette. That is the least worry of the shipper, getting that, that pallet, that box, that piece out the door.
[00:24:04] Debbie Sparks: And the carriers are constantly trying to figure out how do we solve these problems? So they have to collaborate with the shipper, with the 3PL. It’s all the problems coming at them. And the real beauty of it is the technology. Then dimensioners came in. And now, how do we tie that all into what we’re doing already in the work that we’re doing?
[00:24:25] Debbie Sparks: And that drives the collaboration. It’s trying to solve those problems, and technology has taken us so far with that, but that also becomes a challenge in the workforce because of the need for that talent. I only know of a handful of associations that have large IT departments. When a mission based association, that’s rare.
[00:24:47] Debbie Sparks: And that’s been our fastest area of growth because that’s how we get to solve the problems through the technology. We’ve got to collaborate with all segments or else we’re not going to have the most efficient solution to bring back to them.
[00:25:01] Mike Ogle: I’m going to do an ad on the next question that I wanted to ask, because I think the makeup of the board is something that would be good for our audience to be able to understand in general. You don’t have to name specific companies and people for instance, but to give a breadth of understanding to the board.
[00:25:22] Debbie Sparks: NMFTA that we are run as a non profit association, we have a board, we have a board of approximately 18 board members. We have at large board members, we have ex officio, which means they have served their term and they sit in a guidance role, and then we have our emeritus, those that have retired and left the industry.
[00:25:42] Debbie Sparks: Our board is primarily all of the largest, we have representation from the largest LTL carriers. Down to the small and what are called the inner line carriers, the ones that partner with the L. T. L. That kind of do the final mile. So we have representation for all segments. But what’s unique is as our association is changing.
[00:26:06] Debbie Sparks: We are right now this summer going through a complete board restructuring. Our board is primarily because of the work we fundamentally did since 1956 in the work of classifications. They’re pricing folks. And now that we have moved into digitalization and cybersecurity, they’re really realizing that we’ve got to change.
[00:26:28] Debbie Sparks: that talent within the board to expand it to include those areas. Um, we do our elections in October. So we’ve got this summer to put this new plan in place. And it’s really a true testament to them. They’ve, they’re the grassroots that started the association, have driven the change. And then the hardest thing is when we have to look at ourselves.
[00:26:50] Debbie Sparks: And then change from the inside. So we’ll probably still see the same large, medium and small size carriers on the board, but we’re going to see different roles from within the organizations. For instance, if we’ve got Old Dominion. We might have the vice president of pricing. Now we’re probably getting the C-T-O-C-I-O somebody in the tech department, so it still will carry the same carriers, but in those different leading areas within the organization
[00:27:22] Mike Ogle: during this short break, we recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
[00:27:31] Mike Ogle: Visit SCM talent [email protected]. And that leads into the kind of the original question I was going to ask about some of the different generations. So as time goes by, certainly the board changes and morphs and you restructure, but then also the individual members that you end up seeing at conferences, at meetings and education, all that side of things.
[00:27:56] Mike Ogle: So what kind of similarities and differences are you seeing in the generations as we have the change?
[00:28:03] Debbie Sparks: Joe, if you don’t mind, I’ll start and then let you kick in. It’s funny, our meeting app. The meeting app for a generation that’s been in the workforce a long time. Why do we need that? Where is my booklet?
[00:28:16] Debbie Sparks: Where do I flip to my page? Where’s the directory? The meeting app with the next generation, there’s no word. It’s on their phone there. They’ve already got the list of attendees. They know right where to go. They favorite what meeting they’re going to. So it’s that blend. We had to tell the board for the membership for some time generationally that we were going to go paperless and how we were going to get there.
[00:28:40] Debbie Sparks: The similarities. And I think it’s got to be universal. It’s communication, collaboration. We’ve gone to a full remote workforce early on. I was challenged. We had just come out of COVID when I got the job and every one of the employees want to know, do we have to come back to the office? We’re in the Washington DC marketplace, not a great recruiting area for people that have trucking experience.
[00:29:07] Debbie Sparks: Also high traffic, long commutes. We had to think long and hard, but we’ve now been able to attract some of the best talent because they’re not in DC and we’ve had to figure out how to keep the talent, how to make remote hybrid work. One of the things that Joe challenged me on it and I stood my ground and I might be wrong, but we have four events a year that we make the staff come in.
[00:29:35] Debbie Sparks: They have to fly in and we do an all hand staff meeting and a team building event and they stay the night and we do dinner together because it’s so important to have that face to face one on one. We do it 4 times a year. They get to pick. There’s 6 or 7 different meetings that they can come to. We encourage for 1 trip a year.
[00:29:54] Debbie Sparks: We’ll pay for a spouse or significant other to come because we are still in the nation’s capital. So they can visit D. C., make an event of it, let their family get to know us. But that real, that collaboration, communication, no matter what generation, what age, or demographic you’re working with, it’s fully understanding what are they here to do, who are they serving, but I will say this new generation, or even, it may not even be generational, but when we talk to all of our potential candidates about the mission, um, Why we do what we do, who we’re serving.
[00:30:34] Debbie Sparks: That’s the tipping point for us. That’s when we know they want to come and work for us. And I wouldn’t say that’s an age bracket. That’s across the board. I think people, when they’re going to invest their time, they want to invest in something where they know that they’re giving back. And that’s been a real turning point for us.
[00:30:54] Debbie Sparks: So the differences would be technology. One of our most senior employees, she was eligible to retire several years ago. She’s just giggling all the way. She’s working in smart sheets now, and she’s adapt to almost everything Joe has handed her. And she’s doing it beautifully. And it’s just, again, that communication, understanding why we have it, why it makes us more efficient.
[00:31:18] Debbie Sparks: I’ll give one other example. We launched a product called Active Track. And one of the challenges that, that I had asked Joe to help with is that because we’re a remote workplace, I don’t have the ability, none of us have the ability to see when somebody’s burning out when you’re mission driven. A lot of times it’s hard to turn it off.
[00:31:42] Debbie Sparks: So you keep going and we’re in our own home so we can walk to our kitchen and then come back and we can’t turn it off. And I don’t want to ever lose somebody that’s giving that much because we couldn’t tell that they were putting in too many hours and active track gives us that visibility. And of course, when we first launched it, the staff is all you’re trying to track everything I do to get rid of me.
[00:32:03] Debbie Sparks: And we said, yes, that’ll come out right away. If you’re not putting in the hours and time. Yes, we’re going to see that. But really what it is, for the longest time, we could see the guy down the hall, we could see her coming through the door, then we had the fobs that we knew you were coming into the building, we could track your phone calls, but when we went remote, We lost all that and ActiveTrack gave it back and that was a really nice plug for ActiveTrack, but it really has helped us.
[00:32:27] Debbie Sparks: We’re just two and a half, three months into it, but what has it has given us is the tools really to understand, to have those conversations. Hey, I see your hours have popped up by 20%. I know this is a big project and it’s interesting. Another thing that it’s given us, speaking of that generational difference, I could have the head of finance.
[00:32:50] Debbie Sparks: Who’s not a young buck, and she’s putting together the board PowerPoint presentation, and she’s going on four hours. She probably doesn’t need to be doing a PowerPoint. Give us your bullets. We can give that to somebody else, but we have that visibility to see that too much time may be invested in that.
[00:33:07] Debbie Sparks: And that’s probably not where she needs to be putting her time. In a way we get to see and do a little bit more than if we had been in the office, because we wouldn’t have known that part of it. I think I might’ve gone a little off track, but generationally, I think technology has helped all across the board, but I would say.
[00:33:24] Debbie Sparks: The similarities is definitely transparency and communication and Joe, I rambled, so feel free to make me sound bad.
[00:33:32] Joe Ohr: Yeah, and I think technology is the biggest thing. So not only in the supply chain, but at NMFTA, I always laugh. When you go to any industry event, whether it be ours or whether it be another industry event, You walk into the exhibit hall when I first started, you wouldn’t see a lot of technology and most of the people there were older.
[00:33:58] Joe Ohr: Most of the people there were a certain demographic that you would see. Now when you walk into an event, it almost looks like a tech event. The demographics vary, spread across multiple generations. And it’s like I said, it looks like a tech event. It’s just so different. Yeah. Whether it is our event, whether it’s ATA, whether it’s TCA, whether it’s manifest, doesn’t matter.
[00:34:26] Joe Ohr: The hall’s full of technology and the hall’s full of multiple generation. And it’s just, just push for technology. And so it’s exciting because that’s the people that it’s attracting also. Because it’s bringing tech into the supply chain and size, you bring tech into the supply chain, you’re bringing in a different type of clientele.
[00:34:52] Joe Ohr: You’re bringing in different types of people, um, because you’re transitioning to a different type of workforce because you’re bringing in these efficiencies. And I know even for us at NMFTA, I did a, latest I’ve been here about seven months, I did a all hands meeting. It was probably about two months ago, and we were talking about all the technology we brought in and the tech stack changes that we’ve brought in.
[00:35:20] Joe Ohr: And even though we’re a non profit, we have products. We have a development staff. And so what’s really excited the staff is we’ve brought in some fresh talent, some people, developers that are right out of school. And they brought in a whole different energy. We’re using Confluence or in the cloud. We’re transitioning into the most things into the cloud.
[00:35:51] Joe Ohr: Some things are already in the cloud. We’re using Scrum. We’re using product management, PMO. We’re using the same processes as the top 10 software companies. And we’re a nonprofit. And so we’re attracting the best talent because we’re using best practices and we’re a non profit within the transportation supply chain industry.
[00:36:15] Joe Ohr: And so I think that’s some of the big differences that you see, is that not only at NMFTA, but across the supply chain. We used to be, we being the supply chain, kind of the last ones to change. And now I think we’re changing quickly. And at NMFTA, we’re, I’d almost say we’re leaning ahead and we’re leaning forward and we’re willing to break some glass, but, and I think that’s why we’re attracting talent and that’s some of the changes that we see.
[00:36:48] Joe Ohr: And again, it is exciting to walk through the exhibit halls that at these different events and looking at all the different technology. And it’s really started, I think, probably about seven or eight years ago, but each year it’s grown by leaps and bounds, the, the technology that comes out. And so we’ve got to keep up because all that technology needs standards.
[00:37:14] Joe Ohr: And if you think about even the art of the possible, there’s going to be even more. With things that are coming, that as we look ahead, that’s going to need standardizations or even thinking about what’s the next thing that needs standardized. And I think there’s more that we have to think about.
[00:37:34] Chris Gaffney: So you all have talked a bit about how composition has evolved.
[00:37:39] Chris Gaffney: Skills have evolved. Our core audience are supply chain industry folks who are looking to Continue guide their career and hearing our podcast helps them shape their investment in their own development. That type of thing. If you look forward, what would you say, both for folks who are interested in the association path and or on your member side?
[00:38:07] Chris Gaffney: What do you think? If you look forward a few years are going to be really the key supply chain skills and capabilities that will make somebody either. successful and or the best candidate to come into either the field as an association member or into the member side.
[00:38:25] Joe Ohr: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is a few things.
[00:38:29] Joe Ohr: Number one, learn as much as you can about the industry itself. There’s several different aspects to the industry. Learning about the industry gives you credibility. When you walk into the room, if you don’t know about the industry, you immediately lose credibility. So, learn about the industry. What are the challenges that they’re going to overcome?
[00:38:53] Joe Ohr: Be able to walk a day in their shoes. When I first joined NMFTA, even though I’ve been in the industry, the first thing I wanted to do was get on site, spend time with the docs, understand their challenges. Learn as much about the industry, learn what the challenges are. Don’t try to solve the problem.
[00:39:10] Joe Ohr: Don’t try to develop solutions, try to understand the problems and then figure out what problems you’re trying to solve. And then the other thing is don’t be afraid to change, of change and learn to be, you don’t have to be the person that writes the code. You don’t have to be the IT person. But be as technically aware as possible.
[00:39:38] Joe Ohr: Understand technology is, it has a place in this industry. And really be as technically comfortable as possible. Because technology is what’s really going to change, is going to continue to be what changes this industry.
[00:39:57] Debbie Sparks: And along those lines is networking. And I remember when I was younger, everybody used to say networking, that you’re working on your resume.
[00:40:05] Debbie Sparks: You had graduated college. You didn’t even quite land in an industry yet and didn’t know what that meant. And now we live and breathe it every day. Anytime we think of an opening. Or a position we have to fill. Who do we know that’s closest to that role? And it’s picking up the phone and calling them. And it’s having that networked group.
[00:40:27] Debbie Sparks: What Joe was saying is don’t walk in and pretend you know everything. A great way to network is asking people why. What do you do? How did you learn how to do what you did? And now you’ve met somebody. And now you know what they do. So many things in our jobs every day. Both association and in the supply chain.
[00:40:45] Debbie Sparks: is on the opposite side of Joe saying, don’t try to fix it. Some of us, our job is to fix it. And when we do have to fix it, it’s that network. It’s that collaboration. It’s who you’ve learned to know and trust along the lines. You may not have talked to them for two or three years, but you can still pick up the phone and say, Hey, I know you used to do X, Y, and Z.
[00:41:04] Debbie Sparks: We’re looking at doing something similar. Can you shed any light on this? And I know for people that are introverts, that’s a really uncomfortable place to be. But even as the introvert, we’re still in the room in the back corner with the other introverts, and we’re still going to meet them and getting to know what they do, learning about what they do and getting their contact information.
[00:41:25] Debbie Sparks: And with technology, we can find anybody pretty easily, but really it’s that Who you know, because you’re going to either need them in your job, or you’re going to need them to help you find a job and to continue to serve and give back. It’s all about that collaboration and networking.
[00:41:43] Chris Gaffney: That is super advice and we’re biased because we would consider it to be durable advice that we hear from lots of the wise folks we have on the pod.
[00:41:53] Chris Gaffney: So I think it’s interesting as fields get more technical. You need to stay close to the physical side of the world. And if you’re going to get in this business, you need to want to go to the doc. You need to want to meet the driver. That’s part of the beauty of technology, taking an analog business into the digital age.
[00:42:12] Chris Gaffney: So I love that. And then the networking is just a reality in today’s world. So I think that’s fantastic. Mike, I think you’ve got one more to get us home.
[00:42:21] Mike Ogle: I do. And I think you’ve already done a good job of being able to help People understand when they’re getting started in their careers of what they need to be able to do.
[00:42:32] Mike Ogle: And I want to phrase this in a way that what some of the best advice that you’d received is you worked your way up and then things that you had learned then on your own or combined with some of the advice you’ve received before that you love to pass along to other people.
[00:42:50] Debbie Sparks: Tell one quick little story, and it’s such a Debbie story, very young in my career.
[00:42:56] Debbie Sparks: I worked the booths, I traveled all the trade shows, and I think it’s don’t assume anything and move your ego out of the way. I had a gentleman, an older gentleman that kept coming up to the booth and he was lovely and kept asking a lot of questions. He seemed very intrigued with our product. And at the end of the day, he asked me, he said, I want you to join me for dinner tonight.
[00:43:17] Debbie Sparks: I’ll meet you here at six o’clock. And I went, Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Here we go. And he walked away and I was still at the booth at six o’clock and he came over and I went, Oh, how do I get out of this? How do I get out of this? And behind him was his wife. His two adult children, their grandchildren, and he invited me to have dinner with him and his family.
[00:43:39] Debbie Sparks: And that night I learned so much about he was a entrepreneur business owner. He inherited the company from his father and his sons, two sons were running it. And they became one of the greatest assets, one of those networking tools. Whenever I didn’t understand something in the industry, I’m trying to solve it on the association side.
[00:43:58] Debbie Sparks: I always can pick up the phone and call him or his two sons and say, walk me through this. How does this work? And I think it’s, don’t pass judgment, move your ego out of the way. And there’s always a potential to be safe, but there’s always an opportunity somewhere.
[00:44:13] Mike Ogle: Yeah. That’s such an interesting example to be able to put in there for people because it fits so many aspects of the industry as well is I don’t end up assuming the worst, but be prepared for it and have an action plan, no matter which direction it might go.
[00:44:29] Joe Ohr: Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think for me, it’s, you always think, or you’re taught that, uh, failure is not an option. You’re taught that. Hey, once you’re out of school, you stop learning. You really never stop learning and you will hit failure points. So to me, the biggest thing is when you do fail, always step back and learn from it.
[00:44:58] Joe Ohr: I’m big on lessons learned, no matter how big, how small the failure, always step back and think about, okay, how could we have done this better? And always learn from whatever mistakes are made and make yourself vulnerable. I think that in the beginning of my career, I never made myself vulnerable because I was so afraid of failing because it’s, Oh, I can’t fail.
[00:45:25] Joe Ohr: I got to be perfect. And that was a mistake I made in the beginning. And then it’s, as you go in your career, you make yourself more vulnerable and you allow yourself to. make mistakes. You learn so much from those that you end up just growing and learning more and more. Be afraid to go down the path that, Oh, let’s see what’s down here.
[00:45:52] Joe Ohr: Let’s see how this works out. Because that’s really how you learn. It’s almost like wandering around sometimes. But you learn a lot from that because you never know what you may stumble upon. And be willing to step back and learn. I think the other thing to me, the biggest lesson is make sure you’re enjoying the journey.
[00:46:15] Joe Ohr: Sometimes I think people take it so serious, enjoy the journey. Well said.
[00:46:21] Chris Gaffney: Good stuff. I love it when I learn during a podcast, so it’s a great pleasure.
[00:46:27] Joe Ohr: Yeah, I appreciate it.
[00:46:29] Chris Gaffney: No worries. Now, this has been wonderful. We try to bring diverse sets of influences in and around the supply chain world. And this has been a perfect area that a lot of people may not understand.
[00:46:43] Chris Gaffney: And you all have done a great job illuminating the space as well as giving great guidance that I think is relevant, not only for people interested In your world, but broadly in, in our industry. So I thank you all for coming on and I think we’ll get great response.
[00:47:06] Mike Ogle: Thanks for listening to this episode of the supply chain careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released. As we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts, this podcast is made possible by SCM talent group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm visit SCM talent group at scmtalent.com.
