Latest / The Slump Monkeys Concrete Podcast / 026 - Scott Brewer
Transcript
- Brewer - 101726: And welcome into the Slump Monkeys Concrete Podcast on our way to being the world's number one concrete podcast. And the only way you get to number one is you bring in the boss, the guy that everybody looks to, and we have a question about what in the world's going on around here, Scott Brewer of Deleuze Brothers and chairman of the NRMCA. Thank you so much for being here with us. Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me on. man, this is great. It's a treat for me. It's nice to meet you for the first time here, and under the best circumstances, we get to Talk it up on a podcast. absolutely. Great show going on, lots of people, record crowd, record attendance, so it's it's good. That's great to be. That's great here. I tell everybody, this is my favorite show. And yes, World of Concrete's got 50,000 people at it, and Con Ag's got some of the coolest stuff you ever see. But if you want to come to a show where the energy is such a good energy at this show, everybody's in a good mood, we're celebrating the drivers. And decision makers come to this show so you get to have the conversations and do the things you need to do in a wonderful environment. Absolutely. And I was telling my guys last night, so we we brought five drivers with us this week as as well. We took everybody out to dinner last night and and when I was talking to them, for me this is the most exciting show ever. Coming coming here and and being a part of this, being ha seeing the drivers, how they interact, the energy that's just around it. all the drivers, not just ours. And then tomorrow night. the the driver dinner. Tomorrow night is gonna be so fantastic. It's all it's always good. I get goosebumps, I'm getting goosebumps. I'm gonna run out too. Just just celebrating the guys when they're coming in, that the families, just the looks on their faces, the the the just happy to be here, just enjoy being a part of it. It's hard to describe that if you haven't been here and you haven't you you you f it's you feel it here. It's a different type of energy at this show. And then when you get to the driver dinner, it's it's just it's hard to even describe how incredible the whole thing is. I've tried over the years to explain it, and I and I was telling them last night, I was here at the very first one. is that right? Yeah, twenty years ago, we I I worked for a company in Springfield, Missouri. We brought a driver to the very first show, and and I'll brag on him, he actually won it the second year that we came out. let's go. Yeah, so he's on the list, you look on the list, Mr. Blair, he was he he won it the second year, but it was great. Just that excitement, the first time seeing all that, you know, standing up, clapping when all the guys come in, the families come in, I just you can't you can't explain that to someone. You they just have to experience it. I tr I tried to. I was like, imagine imagine someone coming in in like a WWE r to the wrestling ring. Like he's got that c type of energy in the music it's the hype, it's the hype, yeah. And they're going right through the middle of the crowd. There's people on both sides and it's just it's just cheering. Cheering cheering. We we had one of our guys a couple of years ago. I and I mean I know him and I've and I've talked to him, I've seen him at the plants and stuff like that. And coming in cheering and I was standing there, he just grabbed me like bear hug me. He was just so excited to be there. we're celebrating these guys, we're putting them on ESPN. That's exciting, yeah. It's exciting, yeah. How in the world you pull that off, by the way. I would love to claim responsibility for that, but that that is the brainchild of the staff at NRMCA. our our new CEO president Jim Riley as he came on. I'm not sure exactly where it originated, but he and and Paul Facito the Paul Facito's great they're great. Paul Facito's great both a lot of energy, a lot of a lot of great ideas, a lot of things going on through a lot of things that they're coming up with, but but they did it. And Paul's the one that went after it and and got him to get him to be here. So it it's just everybody was like, my God. I know this PNO's gonna be there. yeah that's exactly what I felt like. And the amount of People that are like, ESP and the Ocho, that's real? They're yeah, it's real, it's great. It's great. I first started telling people when we could start start telling people about ESP, and they're like, what? ESPN's coming. I was like, yeah, ESPN Ocho's coming. We're gonna have them. Yeah, it's great. And so I talked to Paul about it. And so what I what I thought was interesting about Paul Facito is he came in like from the outside. He's not part of like the ReadyMix business, but he's part of the media business, and so he's bringing that strength, and he's really he's gonna making RMCA stronger. Yeah, yeah. So far he's doing a great job. he just he's only a month or two in he's just jumping in and running with he took the bolt just running with if you've ever joined a company and you're only two months into a company a lot of times you're trying to feel your way out and like What I where where does my authority end and begin? He's like, no. We're going we're he dove in head first. I I'm just waiting to see. how do you top ESPN Ocho? So he's gonna He's in trouble. He's in trouble. We gotta how do you he's already set the bar so high, he's gonna jump high, nah? And he's in tr he's in trouble for the rest. So so you're coming in you're representing NRMCA here, but you're also representing Deleacey brothers. Correct. I mean probably the most well known concrete company in Oklahoma. we're the largest concrete producer in Oklahoma. Absolutely. And and I've never I've never met somebody said a a bad word about Deleace. How long have you been with them? I got to Deleacy twenty years ago. So I started over there in November of 2006. So November next month would be my twentieth anniversary. well congratulations. twenty twenty years in one spot. I mean these days it's that's pretty unusual. You don't see that anymore, twenty years in in one spot. Before that, I five years at a time was was the most I'd spent and I I landed there twenty years ago and just never left. It's been great. Well what kept you there? What what made you what was it? Just the just the company, the culture, the the people. I've really enjoyed being there. the you you get to you get to know the people that you're working with, they become your friends. so I don't know that I have many friends away from work that all of my best friends work with. So, it's it's been good. It's funny you say that. I think ninety percent of my friends also and the ones that are not are not from work, they're from childhood and they don't live they live a thousand miles away. I I I will say I've got I've got three buddies that were my close buddies, grew up in high school, we lived together in college. We still are on text we same group chat same group chat we talk all the time but one guy lives in Little Rock one guy lives in northeast Arkansas one guy lives in Pennsylvania we get together like once every year or two years or something like that and we text and stuff but I can't hang out with them. So guys at work are the ones that I spend the most time with but unfortunately spend more time with them than I have my family a lot of times so I won't say that too loud because my wife's looking at me from right over there. So we'll keep that out. We're at work on a weekend right now. So yeah, that's what it does sometimes. But speaking of like your wife being here, so so everybody knows we're live on site here at Concrete Works in Nashville. It's Saturday night. And these these are done at the Gaylord. And one of the great things about doing it the Gaylord properties is it's family friendly property. The number of folks here that have their wives and their kids running around having a good time. I mean it's one of the great things about choosing these these properties. It's it's a great property to have this up. It's it's big enough to to host the event. But yeah, some of the drivers brought their kids. You know, you see a lot of people walking around with a lot of their family, and they they got the facilities, they got the pools, they got the they got all the things for people to do. This one has an indoor water park. I don't know if you saw it over there. It's I saw the outside of it, but you know, based on the gray hair here, I don't hang out in water parks very much anymore. My kids are grown, so I don't I I don't venture in there. How many kids you got? I got two boys. Two boys? Already out of college or in college now? they're yeah, in college. Yeah. no. They're twenty two and twenty four. No, they're doing good. My my twenty two year old graduates in May. That's great. Did they go to OU or UCO is where where he's going. University of Central Oklahoma. Okay, sorry, do it for me. Yeah. Edmund, Oklahoma. Edmund, Oklahoma. It's not too far from where we live in Edmond, so it's Okay, well where'd you grow up though? I grew up in a town called Paraguld, Arkansas. Okay. Paraguld, Arkansas, sorry. So I've been I know where I've been to Little Rock, I know where Little Rock and I know where Benton is. Yeah. So draw me a map. How far from Little Road? Northeast, Jonesboro. Golly, you're yeah, you're up there. All right. Good deal. I I was wondering if you went the other way, you'd be in the Ozarks. So you went out out there. Yeah, we're over they call it Pearlie's Ridge. There's a little ridge down through there, but it's a lot of farmland. I was just about to ask where you're in the Delta, it's it's getting close. We're an hour from Memphis. Okay, good deal. Yeah, yeah. I spent time here in Tennessee, so you we're in Nashville. I love I love it coming back to Tennessee. It's a good spot. So what's the most exciting thing right now at Dolisi Brothers when you look out and the the thing that you say, you know, over the next next year, three years, five years, I'm most excited to see that we're headed in this direction. What is that what is that thing for you? yeah, I don't I'm not sure how this the this will apply into it, but the the most exciting thing that we that we started or started getting into here in the last year or so is what we call our CDT program. since we're sitting here talking about drivers this week. It's our certified driver trainer program. A couple of years ago or two, three years ago I'd gotten with my my operations managers and and in in our industry, one of the hardest things for us to deal with was keeping trucks clean. So I was like on them to talk to the, you know, it's like how do we how do we get with the drivers and talk to them about cleaning trucks? So that's keeping the trucks clean on the outside or the inside? Okay, okay, okay, okay. And give me a give me a minute to get to where I'm going because that it we got so far away from that. Okay, okay. We we we brought in drivers from all over the state and just kind of had what we call a CI team, so continuous improvement team, got them to sit down and talk about what what what can we do to to do this and what came out of that was we found out that across the state drivers were being trained so differently there was no consistency that they called parts of the truck different things and it was just it was all over the place. And what came out of those guys getting together was hey we need a training program for our drivers that's consistent from plant to plant across the state and develop the what developed out of that was we We we hired we we specified and like fifteen to twenty specific trainer drivers. They're all trained the same. They go through a six week program. my gosh. To to regimentedly this is how you train a driver, this is what you want to do, and then they check back up on them. And those are the guys that go out to all of our plants. And we've got somewhere around forty-five plants across the state of Oklahoma. my gosh. And and we run about sixty or so trucks i in the state. So those guys are the ones that sign off and train every driver in the state. So everybody that comes on and I I don't know how much you know about how much turnover there is in in drivers, but I mean they come and go is a lot. Yeah. Just having that program and we're we're in the infancy of it. It's been going on for probably about a year. But it's it's been great just just to see how the guys are are taking that on and and going through that training. when they they do the do the training with the drivers, the tension that we're seeing, the effect that we're seeing out in the field has just been phenomenal. That's great. I'm I'm excited to see how it turns out over the next four or five years. Yeah. Man, that's that's pretty interesting. I I got two comments. So one is that do I do I have it know anything about the truck driver's turnover. So no I don't run concrete plants, but my one of my best friends did and he was running one inner city Baltimore and he thought he this is great there's lots of people around that don't have jobs that need jobs and I can train them real quick. And you talk about guys who had who were making no money and he was paying them great money and they were still gone in two months. They get those first couple paychecks and they were I got money, great, I'm out. They're like, what? Like, no, this, I'm trying to try to have a career and a job, and like we want you to stick around, yeah. Before that, we would try incentives, you know, we try sign-on bonuses, we try, yeah. We've tried all kinds of things. and they're paying their pay was so high. And and he thought he kept thinking like, this is a money thing, it's money. But it just was it wasn't for them. And so I wondered is it the same in the city as like in the rural you're still having the same type of problems? I mean there's a little difference between city and rural. in in our hours. I mean in the radius industry. It's it can be tough. It can be tough dealing with when the jobs are growing and and all that. So yeah. So the second thing I wanted to get to, I so I was talking to somebody earlier who I just met for the first time he was telling me about driver improvement through like a virtual system. simulation program and I think he might have brought y'all's name up. We we're in the in the process and it was you're probably talking about Scott Thomas. Yes, Yeah and he we're working with him on getting a simulator and that's gonna be part of our part of our training program as well. It'll be set up in a trigger that we can pull around the state and and the guys will go through that that simulation training as well. Yeah it was his his stuff sounded super cool and I thought it was great that you were gonna give that a chance and see if it couldn't improve of the drivers of the company. So that was really great. Guys, thank you so much for sticking around here on this episode of the Slump Monkeys Concrete Podcast live from Concrete Works. We have the man himself, Scott Brewer, came in telling us all the great things that are happening, not just here at the NRPCA, but the future of Deleuze Brothers Concrete. Thank you so much Scott for being on the program. Absolutely, thank you for inviting me. For sure. See ya.