Aaron Ralph Thomas: It seems that when it comes to employees it’s pretty obvious when you walk into any establishment or if you’re dealing with anyone over the phone, you can really sense when people are happy. You mentioned time off. What are some of the other things that Service Freight does specifically for its employees to make sure that its employees are happy?
Rob Ten Brinke: Right at the very beginning in the hiring process, the law in Canada states that you have to give an employee two weeks vacation and that’s it. That’s all you ever have to give them. We start off a new employee with three and we give them four weeks after five years and we give them sick days and special occasion days.
There’s always circumstances where an employee has a kid that’s sick too much or a parent that needs a lot of attention and they go over that time, we forgive stuff like that quickly or they work it back for us. We’re open with them in terms of helping their lives be successful.
Little things, like we have a kitchen that we provide coffee, tea, bread, jam, cheese, you can go make a salad. We just buy that stuff. You’re hungry, go grab something. We don’t time people’s breaks. It’s all an honor system.
Aaron Ralph Thomas: We were talking about customer service and we were talking about client service and how your team is just happy and the things that Service Freight puts into place to make sure that your employees are happy employees. What are some of the things that you do that are specific to focusing on the client to make sure that communication happens? You were saying that you over-communicate. What are some examples of that?
Rob Ten Brinke: When we get an order in, for instance, we communicate with them. We don’t just do the order. We make sure we tell them we’ve received their order and then once we’ve assigned their order to a carrier, we tell them that. Then once their order starts to move, we tell them that. If something happens – any challenge or problem at that point, we let them know that happens. We let them know when things have delivered.
It’s just an ongoing communication. If there’s a seal that broke on a truck … Mostly a customer will never find out about that. We’ll make sure they know. As a matter of fact, all our employees that work in operations all have the latest iPhones with texting of course and email, and this doesn’t just happen during business hours. This also happens after hours. It’s just a constant communication
Aaron Ralph Thomas: With that in mind and then thinking about the fact of how you’re communicating with the clients, making sure that they know exactly everything that’s happening like you said, a seal being broken, and I know the significance of that, having worked in warehouses and knowing that means that the integrity of the product is compromised.
Rob Ten Brinke: Correct.
Aaron Ralph Thomas: It’s something that some providers don’t want the client to know about things like that.
Rob Ten Brinke: Correct. Yeah, we’re very, very transparent.
Aaron Ralph Thomas: Yeah, and that’s good. I can definitely see how that’s important and not just trying to hide it and say, “Well, you know, if no one complains about anything then I guess we don’t have to worry about it.”
Rob Ten Brinke: No that’s not the deal. No, absolutely not. What else do we do for a client? We book all their appointments. We have a full-time person here strictly to book and monitor appointments. That’s a really, really big deal. We clarify border issues. If there’s some problems with FDA, CFIA, permits, bonds, paperwork, we clarify and get to the root of these problems. When you’re dealing with a trucking company, you can be assured a dispatcher will call someone in your company and say, “There’s a problem at the border. Figure it out.”
Then you have to stop your day and your job and try to understand these issues that you are not trained in. We wouldn’t even think of doing that. We figure it out and then if we need the client involvement, we’ll get that. Then it goes on beyond that. We’ll do customized reporting, customized invoicing, all kinds of that sort of stuff, but the real thing that happens is relationships develop and customers and clients really become friends. You have this group of clients and you have this group of operations people here that actually enjoy talking to each other.
You can go into the operations room and you can hear people calling in or our people calling clients and it’s like, “Hey, Gene, how are you? How’s your son doing? He started back to school?” It gets that personal. I just want to add in one more thing, is that I don’t think a week passes here where I don’t get told one of our customers or clients ask us if we’re hiring because they want to work here because it always sounds fun and happy. I think that is the mileage right there. I think that goes a long, long way. That positive, positive projection.
Aaron Ralph Thomas: Awesome. That’s fantastic to know that. Rob, how did you get started withService Freight?
