Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
Standing Out is a show created to help individuals and companies improve their sales & marketing outcomes, as well as their leadership development. Each episode we have an expert who has a unique perspective on sales, marketing and/or leadership providing insights from his or her experiences. And we throw in a few laughs from time to time. Be sure to hit Subscribe wherever you listen to our podcasts.
Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
The Compensation Conversation with Beth Carroll
As technology transforms the industry, Beth discusses how companies must rethink their compensation structures to accommodate productivity shifts driven by automation. Understanding how to adapt to these changes can be the difference between getting it right or falling behind. The conversation also dives into the establishment of the HR Best Practices Group, aimed at providing companies with a forum to share insights and strategies for navigating compensation effectively.
Thank you to our sponsor, Salesdash CRM – A CRM for Freight Logistics. Salesdash CRM is built for freight broker & agent sales teams. Manage your shipper prospecting and follow-ups. Organize your carriers and the lanes they run. Learn more at www.betaconsultinggroup.com/standing-out
Standing Out is a sales, marketing & leadership podcast powered by BETA Consulting Group, created to highlight best practices from industry leaders with incredible experience and insights! The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire individuals & companies to improve their sales, marketing & leadership development outcomes.
Folks, it never gets old seeing my stepdad hop into the show on a live show. That was a lot of fun. One day I was recording at my parents' house and love seeing that Always makes me laugh. Welcome back to Standing Out, so glad that you're with us today. I'm Trey Griggs, your host, and the founder and CEO of Beta Consulting Group, and excited to have you with us today for another episode with a great guest we're going to bring on here in just a little bit. Hey, do me a favor, check us out at betaconsultinggroupcom. We are helping companies with their go-to-market strategy, telling their stories to drive revenue, to bring attention to themselves and bring the right buyers to their pipeline. So check us out at betaconsultinggroupcom. Click on the little button that says schedule a call with yours truly and let's chat, let's talk about your business, about your brand, about your sales and how we can help you out.
Speaker 1:Before we get started today, I want to say thank you to our friends over at Wreaths Across America. We love being a part of the Trucking Tuesday lineup with Wreaths Across America Radio. We're going to see them at Matt's here in Louisville in just a little bit. And folks listen if you're not a part or connected in any way with the Wreaths Across America family. Make sure you do that. Check them out at wreathsacrossamericaorg and you can partner with us by sponsoring a wreath by simply clicking on wreathsacrossamericaorg.
Speaker 1:Forward slash standing out. No-transcript Radio. Thank you for tuning in. We appreciate you being here today to hear this episode. Finally, I want to give a thanks to my good friend, josh Lyles, over at sales-crm. Listen, my friends, if you are a freight broker and you're struggling with your CRM because most of them, let's be honest, are not built with freight brokerage sales in mind this one is Sales is built by freight brokers, exclusively for freight brokers. So be sure to visit sales-crmcom or you can check it out on our website, betaconsultinggroupcom. Forward slash standing dash out. You can even request a demo right there. And either way, when you reach out to Josh, when you talk to him, tell him you heard about it right here on Standing Up.
Speaker 1:All right, it's time to bring on our guest today on the show. I've known her for several years. She's doing amazing work in the industry. She wrote a book that changed the game and she's back for more. Please welcome to the show the founder of Prosperio, my good friend Beth Terrell. What's up, my friend. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing, trey? It's so good to see you again. As we talked about before, it's been too long. I feel like we only get to see each other at TIA. It's just unfortunate how it works, but it is great to see you, great to have you on the show today. How's everything going for you?
Speaker 2:Everything's going great. Trey, it's great to see you again.
Speaker 1:Good, excellent. You know this is cool because we got I don't want to say reconnected, I mean, I don't really think we lost touch, but we kind of got reconnected this time around through your daughter, katie, who is now working with you, and your son works with you as well. This is becoming a family affair over at Prosperio.
Speaker 2:It is, it's exciting.
Speaker 1:What is it like working with family? Is it easy? Is it fun? Is it challenging? Some people struggle. What's that like?
Speaker 2:So far it's actually been really easy. So John's been working with me for five years now. So he started right before the whole COVID stock market crash and everything. So he's been with me since March of 2020. Many of you maybe have met him at the shows because he comes with me to the TIA shows.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he's been there since 22 when they started back up again in San Diego. So he's been at all of them since then. So he does a lot of the analytics, behind the scenes stuff and he's actually starting to run some of the smaller projects. So he's helping smaller brokers actually develop their compensation plans, which is great because then it frees me up to do some of the bigger projects. And you know, we always say, as the owner and founder, you should be working on your business, not in your business. So it gives me a chance to kind of step back and think more strategically about where do we want to go with this?
Speaker 2:And then Katie's, a recent addition. So she's been out of college now for two years and spent a little bit of time working in the world at large and she started I think it was like in October, november. She started QCing some documents for me and was just doing such a phenomenal job. John and I, both at the same time, said I think we need to hire her full time, and so we did. And it turns out she's got the marketing gene which neither one of us had, which is fantastic, because now I have branding by me right so now I like we're redoing our all of our brands.
Speaker 2:I'm going to have new swag for the tia conference. She's ordering me some little um polo shirts with prosperio on them and and new banners and everything. So it's very exciting. I'm very excited for all that, and she's helping a lot with our surveys and stuff too, which is one of the things that I want to talk with you about today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all starting to come together, which is really exciting, and I'm happy for you because this isn't something you expected. You didn't plan on your kids working with you, it just kind of happened?
Speaker 2:No, not at all.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:And I don't think either one of them in high school. If you'd asked them, they probably would have both said hell, no.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know many teenagers that would say yes to that. There may be a few out there that are excited about being a part of the family business, but probably not a whole lot at that time in their life would say, yeah, sign me up, let's do it great to work together someday. I would love that. But they're theater kids. I don't know. If I joined the theater maybe I can work with them, but other than that, I don't know. I don't know if I get them or not.
Speaker 2:Well, the practical realities of life may come to have, you know, an influence on their, their future career choices. Hopefully they're phenomenal, theater, kids.
Speaker 1:but Well, I mean, either way, you know it's fun just to be able to still do stuff with them. I still get to be in some shows with them, which is a lot of fun, but we'll see where life takes them and who knows, maybe someday they'll come back as well, which should be good, so we'll see. All right, well, listen, everybody knows that you wrote a game changing book for the freight brokerage industry, taming the Compensation Monster, specifically for freight brokers to help with their compensation models. Because, let's be honest, it's not easy to get that right, and when you get it wrong, it's bad. It can be very bad, it's really really bad. So that's the primary thing that you do you consult companies on that. What else are you doing right now? Prosperia what else is going on?
Speaker 2:Right? Well, we've been running a compensation survey since 2012. So we have this big annual survey that we do in partnership with the TIA. They help market it and we have somewhat of a little bit of a revenue share with them on it. So, but it's time, it's March, and so it is now time for us to start collecting the data, because the survey is called Measure Up and we collect the data for the preceding calendar year, so we have to wait a couple months until 2024 closed out, and so now we can start collecting the data, and this survey provides brokers with really critical information that they need to be making sure that they're paying market competitive rates.
Speaker 2:So the way it works is we gather data from usually we have between 50 and 100 companies that give us their data at the incumbent level, and so we usually have somewhere around 12,000 incumbents in the file, and we can typically report on about 45 or so jobs with four different experience levels for each one of those jobs, and what it tells people is it tells them the median salary level, so they know what is typical not the high or the low, but the middle of the pack and then we have total compensation as well, and we do 25th, 50th and 75th percentile. So again they get an idea of what the middle of the pack is, and then the top quartile and the bottom quartile, so they can really have an understanding where 50% of the people that are in this role are paid between this number and this number yeah, there may be an extreme outlier out there somewhere, but that's not the bulk of the population. So it really helps them make much better decisions in terms of the amount of money that they should be offering to new candidates to come in and what is realistic for their people to be expecting. Right, if they say they're jumping ship to go someplace and make $600,000, maybe they are, maybe they aren't but you can go and look at the data and you can say, eh, for what you're producing? I don't think so.
Speaker 2:So that's the big thing that we have going on, and we really want to make sure that anybody who wants to be a part of this gets in touch with us to give us their data. So if you give your data, you get the hard copy of the survey for free, and Then you also get access to our online tool for three months. So both of those things together, it's about a $1,500 value that you get for just providing us with your data. So Before we get off onto another topic because I know you want to jump onto another thing If you want to participate in the MeasureUp survey, email us at measureup it's all one word at prosperiogroupcom. Or if you can't remember that, just try to remember me and reach out to me and we'll get you the template so that you can be a part of that.
Speaker 1:I'm not wanting to move on, beth. I think this is great. I want to talk about this a little bit more. So this is really fabulous for freight brokers, who I mean.
Speaker 1:Let's be honest, if you don't have access to this type of data, or if you don't have great relationships in the industry, you're really shooting blind in terms of what you're paying or what you think is right or the market value or what you think a job is worth. But by simply submitting their data, they can get access to the report and really get a gauge of am I above market value? Am I below market value? Am I right on point as I plan for my 2025 hires? Where should they most likely be? I think that's really valuable to do and it doesn't cost them anything but their data and they get the hard copy report. Then, of course, they can utilize the other tools. What is the benefit between having just the like the online access versus just the report? Cause it sounds like there might be some other things in the online tool that they could use throughout the year that maybe the hard copy wouldn't provide. I'm guessing here.
Speaker 2:I'm asking yeah, no, you're exactly right. So, for one thing, when we produce the hard copy report, there has to be a cutoff date, right, and we try to get the report out. I would love to say I could get it out in May, but usually what happens is there's a lot of people that are lagging in terms of giving us their data, and so I'll get a big one you know name, any you know big broker that you can think of and they're probably in here and they'll say I need two more weeks. Well, I'm going to hold it for them for two more weeks. At some point, though, I have to cut it off, and so when we cut it off, that becomes the hard copy report In the online tool. We actually can add in companies after that cutoff point. So the online tool ends up. Maybe we cut it off at 50 to produce the hard copy report, and then we get 10 more companies that gave us data in the online tool. They're going to show up there.
Speaker 2:The other thing you can do with the online tool is you can filter it by region, so you can look at East region, central region, west. You can even go down a little bit more specific than that If it's an area where there's a high concentration of freight brokers, don't try to filter on the West Coast or the East Coast, because you're not going to get. There's not enough brokers in New England that have given me data yet that we can get that specific, or like Rocky Mountains. But in the central region you can Like you can do South Central, west Central, east Central, you can do that in there, particularly for jobs like carrier sales. So if you want to get a lot more specific in terms of your geography, you can do that in the online tool and you can't do that in the hard copy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's obviously different to hire a freight broker in Kansas City than it is to hire one in, like Los Angeles or, you know, connecticut, for example. I think those markets would be drastically different. So you're able to provide more geographic, granular information on the online, on the online tool, than on the hard copy yep absolutely okay. Well, that's cool and it gets updated it.
Speaker 2:I mean we'll take submissions and put them into the online tool in october if people give it to us.
Speaker 1:Does it show trends from past years as well? On the online, it does it's not graphical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an idea we probably should do, but we have data going back to 2019 in that, so you can look at, you can filter on, you know, carrier sales, which is the job that we have the most data for. So filter on carrier sales, filter on your region, and then you'll see 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 now and then 24 when we get it in there. So you can see how the pay has changed over the years and it's a really fascinating story when you start to look at it from that perspective.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So there's definitely some advantages to having the online tool. And again, for anybody who wants to submit their data, they just simply need to email measureupatprosperiogroupcom. What format? What do they send? Do you have a template? We have a template?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Katie will. When you send that email in, katie will send you the template and help you if there's questions about how to fill it out or whatever. But it's an Excel file where you give us I don't want social security numbers and I don't want employee names, I just want, like, employee ID, and then you fill out, you know their, their information in terms of hire date, their title, the title of the person they report to, and then you give their current salary, or that would be their 2024 salary and their 2024 total incentive compensation. So we split it out between salary and incentive comp and if somebody has a draw, then typically what I recommend, if it's truly a draw, you put a zero in the salary bucket and put all of their earnings in their incentive bucket.
Speaker 1:Does it also account for equity positions or options or anything like that?
Speaker 2:It does not. It does not. There's not a lot of freight brokers. There's more that are starting to ask me about LTIPS and equity and stuff like that. But historically that's not been a big focus for these guys because a lot of them are privately owned right, the owner is, the founder, is the main one running the company. But I am starting to hear more about those kinds of questions. And how do you develop phantom stock plans? It's not my area of expertise. I can do a reasonable job with a cash LTIP, but if it's truly phantom stock, I have other partners that I would recommend somebody to go talk to about that kind of stuff Got it Well.
Speaker 1:That's great to know. I'm excited for this report to come out. I think it's going to be really helpful for brokers to just at least benchmark where their data is, where their salaries are and how they compare to the market at large. And I think that geographical data sounds really valuable because, again, if I'm in South Carolina and I'm trying to hire somebody, I don't want to know necessarily what somebody in North Dakota paid for that position. That's probably going to be a different situation, so I think that's great. Beth, you're also doing something with HR best practices. You're starting a group. Tell me a little bit about some of the details around this and how you got into that.
Speaker 2:Well, it was actually one of the measure up participants that had been providing data, and if I said their name, you'd know them one of the big brokers that are out there.
Speaker 2:The head of HR reached out to me and said Beth, is there any way that we could get the data more regularly? Like waiting a whole year? Right, so we're going to be collecting data now for 2024 and it probably won't come out until May or June. She said can we do something that gets us a little bit more frequent in terms of the reporting? And she asked for a narrower cut of companies because in the broad measure up, it's anybody right. It's a broker with two people, it's a broker with a thousand people, it's the whole spectrum. What she was really looking for is can we get this narrowed down to big brokers?
Speaker 2:And so last year was probably around March, probably around this time I had the idea of starting up what I'm calling an HR best practices group and that is focused on brokers.
Speaker 2:Typically they have to be at least a hundred employees to participate in this, and ideally the hundred like at least a hundred employees in the rev gen roles, so like customer sales and carrier sales and all the support and leadership that goes along with that, and we collect the data on a quarterly basis.
Speaker 2:So, but it's just for that smaller group of people, it's not the entire organization, it doesn't include accounting and IT and HR and all that stuff. So it's just the customer, sales carrier, sales rev gen rolls and we collect it on a quarterly basis. We report it back to them on a quarterly basis in the same kind of format that we do measure up, but then we also provide them with tableau graphs that actually shows all of their little dots of people, like where they're paid, lined up next to a whisker plot. It doesn't show individual dots for the other companies because that would be violating confidentiality, but it shows a whisker plot that shows you sort of the range of what the other companies have, so they can see exactly where their people are lining up relative to the market.
Speaker 1:Very cool, and how many companies do you have in that group?
Speaker 2:so far, we have 15 in the cohort right now and if I rattle off the names you would probably know at least 10 of them, maybe more. But if anybody's interested, if they want to participate in that, just shoot me an email. It's bethcarol at prosperiogroupcom and I'd be happy to share on an individual basis the names of the cohort that are in it. I'm not comfortable doing that in this format, but it's 15 large brokers' names that people would know that are providing data. We also do quarterly meetings. We just had one yesterday and we've got another one coming up on Thursday. I do two every quarter so somebody can hit one of the two calls where we kind of go over like anything interesting that I saw in the data trends concerns. They have additional data requests that they're asking for. So this group is really interested in getting some productivity data in here, because that's a really critical factor. It's like knowing how much somebody is paid is only part of the story. You need to also know how much they're producing to go along with that pay. So we're starting to explore ways that they can comfortably provide that data, maybe even at the individual level as part of the submission, and then I would be confidentially of course like scrubbing it, reporting it back in a way that doesn't reveal anything about who actually provided that data, but it still enables them to get some understanding of the trends in relation to compensation as a percentage of productivity. So that's going to be a really interesting thing. That's going to kick off for 2025 for the HR Best Practices Group to try to get that piece of this going.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I provide for this group is that if they ask for a pulse survey, some of you maybe got, you know, pinged with a pulse survey from me in this past year. The ideas for that are coming from this group. They're saying hey, I'd like to do a pulse survey on the carrier sales role. I'd like to do a pulse survey on support roles. I'd like to do a pulse survey on offshore roles, you know. So anything that they think of. I work with them to put together the pulse survey and then we send it out, gather the data and then send it back out for that one. Anybody, if you do get hit with a pulse survey, answer it, because if you answer you get the data right. So you don't have to be a part of the group to answer the survey, but if you're part of the group, you get to ask for a survey very nice, okay, and there's a cost associated with that, of course there is.
Speaker 2:It's a yep. It's five thousand dollars a year for the membership, and do you?
Speaker 1:think you'll have different level groups. I mean I could see like somebody with, like you know, 50 to 100 could be a cohort. I could see maybe like over 500. I mean, do you just that?
Speaker 2:would be yes. So this is. This is modeled a little bit off of the tca um best. Don't know what they call it, but they have the TCA cohorts where they have the. It's like they share their statistics.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I've spoken at a number of those events, they bring me in to be the guest speaker there, and so I was like well, you know, I could probably do something similar in terms of compensation.
Speaker 2:So it was the request from the head of HR and then my experience with TCA and I put those things together and I'm like, okay, let's see what I can do. So if I had enough people, I could do sub-cohorts right. Or we could do cohorts where it's a broker that's somehow connected to an asset provider, because that creates a really different flavor for freight brokerage. If they're connected to a warehouse or a trucking company, they have different things that they're thinking about than somebody who's just a standalone freight broker.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's very true. I think that's really valuable and I think those different levels could be helpful because, again, I mean, if you're a smaller company, I mean it's hard to really connect with a 500 person brokerage.
Speaker 2:So I think that yeah, the thing that would be hard for the smaller companies is to provide the data on a quarterly basis. Right, right.
Speaker 1:Right. Sometimes the technology is not quite there to make that happen.
Speaker 2:They're stretched a little bit.
Speaker 1:Power. That's right. All right, We've got to talk about this as well. I mean, it's you know it's March already. I can't believe. We're here in March, and next month we have TIA Capital Ideas Conference, which is the one that you always attend. Are you going to be having a booth this year and what are some things you're going to be doing at the event?
Speaker 2:So, of course, having a booth and John will be there to help me with the booth, and we will have I am doing my pre-conference session on April 9th, so I've done that every year since 2010,.
Speaker 1:Maybe I mean my first maybe 11.
Speaker 2:My first TIA conference was in 2009 and I've been at every single one and pretty early on I started doing this six hour pre-conference session where we go through different brokerage organization structures. So we talk about cradle to grave and what that really means, because there's actually two different definitions of cradle to grave. So we talk about cradle to grave, we talk about pod models, we talk about the Chicago split model and some other various table models, desk model type things. So we go through the different ways that brokerage organize themselves and then the different compensation structures that go along with that. So there sort of is an alignment of compensation to org structure and if somebody is thinking about changing their org structure, they can't do that without changing their compensation plan.
Speaker 2:So they have to know how to shift and if you're doing that, then you're talking about doing a redesign. So you better have some basic understanding of how to do comp. So I go through comp 101 stuff that talks about target, total comp, pay mix, leverage elements and weights and then some of the real common mechanics that I typically use for freight brokers, which these days it's really boiled down to some type of a progressive commission for customer sales. I still do some sort of a matrix for carrier sales, typically kind of a goal-based incentive for account management type roles and then various other structures that you can use for support and leadership. But I go through those. So if you attend the class you get a long way to being able to design your own compensation plan. At least you know enough not to make some of the big mistakes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a class they can sign up for when they register for TIA.
Speaker 2:It's an add, it's an ad on, I believe, at the beginning. It's on Wednesday. Yep, it's on Wednesday, before the show officially gets started. So if you're a golfer, you would have to make the choice between golfing and me. Sorry, um, but maybe you could send somebody else from your company. You can go golf and send some somebody else. But yeah, it's on the, it's on the day before the whole show gets started.
Speaker 1:Okay, very good, that's great to know, and I have to ask this question because I think this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I'm sure freight brokers are as well. How has compensation changed, or how do you anticipate that it will continue to change and evolve, with technology coming in and automating a lot of jobs or creating more efficiencies? How do you factor in the technology component for compensation?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's creating a real awareness of the need to have goals and expectations, productivity expectations. I think we're rapidly moving away from the time when you can just set a flat commission rate and be done with it and walk away from it, because if you do that and then implement an AI solution that overnight quadruples productivity, you've just quadrupled pay and your employees have not had to do anything different to get that pay. So I think companies are really starting to think about and I help guide them to think about how can we put productivity expectations in so that, as when those automation things come in, we can increase what it is we're expecting to people people to be doing. And if you have the concept of a threshold, a target and an excellence in your plan, threshold would be the point at which pay would start. That can get raised up right. So that's like your seat cost kind of idea.
Speaker 2:Those of you who know, who've heard me talk before, know I don't like a true seat cost where it's literally connected to salary. But there can be something that is a threshold, where you have to produce this much before you start to earn and then you get a rate to a higher level and then a rate above that. This is going to give companies the ability to adapt. If all you're doing is paying, I don't care what the rate is. If you're paying 5%, 3%, 8%, whatever flat rate it goes exactly on the line. And if they double their production, they're going to double their pay and you have no way to recoup your expense on those tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you get that wrong, that can be a big problem. That can be a big, big problem, a lot of people Trey interesting love.
Speaker 2:2022 is one of my best years and it's because they're, I mean, remember it was a good year for everybody. But I think why a lot of people were coming to me because they realized how broken their plans were. Because people were making so much money without doing incrementally additional effort. The load volume wasn't increasing the rates were increasing and it was driving pay without any additional work right, yeah, that was.
Speaker 1:That was, uh, I feel like a turning point in many ways, because that's also when, I think, automation became even more powerful in a lot of these brokerages. You see companies that are implementing automation now for quoting and for booking loads and all those kind of things, which changes the nature of the job for a lot of these positions in freight brokerage, which is really fascinating. I have this feeling, beth, that 10 years from now, freight brokerages are pretty much going to be technology shops with some exception management. That's what it feels like it's moving towards. I don't know, it's 10 years, 15 years, I think we get like airlines, you know, like whenever you book a flight on an airline, you never talk to a human being. The only time you talk to a human is when something goes wrong, and then you call Southwest and talk to somebody and they fix the problem. Like that's what it feels like we're headed towards with technology. I don't know if that's true or not.
Speaker 2:I don't know, when I hit a million miles on United, I had my 1K number as one of my favorites. Like right under my kids, right was my United 1K number to call because I called them a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I've only called Southwest a couple of times. I could probably count on one hand over the last three years how many times I've called them when I needed something. But that's kind of what it feels like it's headed to. We'll see if that becomes true or not, I don't know. We'll kind of move in that direction. I do like the idea of accelerators and comp plans, though I know that the best comp plans that I ever had had the accelerator in there, that kind of like excellence, as you called it and that was really good, because when I hit quota, especially if I hit it early in the month, it gave me even another reason to go Sometimes we get double bonus in there.
Speaker 1:So I think it just, you know, for somebody who's really motivated man, like it just gives them one more reason to go go after it even harder when they when they're having a good month and get some things close. So I'm a big fan of accelerators and kind of excellence tiers that you have there.
Speaker 2:You have to give people, you have to tell people what good looks like.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. More is not a goal right. What do you want them to do? Be specific, what are your goals as an organization? And, by the way, I also work with leaders to help them be really clear about what their goals are right. So define where you want to get to. What does it look like for 2025 and 2026? And how are you going to do it Right? And do you have enough people? And does it all work Like the pull it all together and can you tie it in a bow.
Speaker 1:I remember getting the comp plan every year and evaluating it to find out what do they really want me to sell Like? What are they giving the greatest commissions on? What do they want me to sell? What you know? All those things are really important to think through in terms of how you want to grow as an organization and making it really clear for your sales team on what you want to do, you incentivize them the right way and a lot of stuff takes care of itself.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:That's for sure. Okay, beth, listen, we've got to pause and have a little fun on the show. We always like to do this from time to time. Okay, so we're going to be given some prompts from our producer up on the uh, the screen here. It's going to list a category like food and a letter like b, and then we have to try to come up with the same word, that uh, that, that is, that is in that category. All right, and here's how we're gonna do it. You're gonna think of the word I'm actually gonna write down my word and then you're gonna say what you had. I'm gonna see if, if, I got it correct. Okay, we have five of these. Our goal is to get three. That's that's okay. That's our goal. We get more than that. We're rock stars. We less than that. We're definitely not on the same wavelength. All right, here we go. First one up out of the gate is a state that starts with A. All right, I've got one that I'm writing down. You tell me, which one did you think of?
Speaker 2:Alabama.
Speaker 1:Alaska.
Speaker 2:Alaska.
Speaker 1:That's on me, beth, that's on me. That was bad, all right, let's do another one. All right, let's try again. Okay, things to eat that start with the letter T Ooh, okay, all right. So see, this is sometimes. Only certain words come in. I'm hoping that we can.
Speaker 2:Oh man, okay, I don't know, Trey, because it popped right in my head right away.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, this is all I've got, and so I'm going to put it on here. I don't think there's any chance. We're off to a bad start here, beth.
Speaker 2:Okay, there are a lot of things to begin with tea, but turkey oh, that would have been so good.
Speaker 1:I put tortilla. Tortilla, that's the only thing that came to mind.
Speaker 2:All right, all right now. That would have been hugely specific for me to come up with tortillas I know.
Speaker 1:That's why I'm saying sometimes it's a problem, because you only get one thing that hops into your brain and you know the pressure's on it happens. Okay, all right, here we go. Next one. Let's see if we can get the last three. Okay, a fruit. Okay, it starts with p. All right, I like this one, I think. I think we're gonna get this one, all right not as many choices here fruit that starts with p. What do you got?
Speaker 2:peach oh no, what did you put down pineapple? I could have said persimmon. At least I didn't do that it's just pear pear there's, there's seven.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're terrible this path. All right, let's see. Let's see if we can get one. All right, an animal that starts with a g. All right, I've got mine written down. What do you got? Giraffe man, we stink we were over five we're over four right now.
Speaker 2:We're gonna go're going to go for an 0 for a total donut.
Speaker 1:Let's see if we can miss them all here. A flower, flower, like I know flowers. A flower that starts with a D, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:What in the world? This is horrible. I can't even think of like hardly any flowers.
Speaker 2:Can't even think of one.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, okay, yes, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, I don't know if this is a flower or not.
Speaker 2:And if you're saying that, then I know what I'm going to say.
Speaker 1:All right, go for it. What do you got?
Speaker 2:Dandelion.
Speaker 1:That's what I got. Dandelion, let's go. It's not. I think it's a weed. I think you're right, I was like dandelions and weed okay. So what would have been another one daffodil?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, I wouldn't have gotten that, no, no, yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah, I had my mind, what is a doldrum?
Speaker 1:doldrum is when you're bored. Oh daisy, that's a good one.
Speaker 2:Doldrums are like when it's you're it, you're bored and you're in the daldrums. You're in a funk.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's not a flower, then, all right, well, good, Well, beth, clearly we're not on the same wavelength here One out of five. Sorry, I blew that one, but that was fun. I'll be a good time with that. We also like to have a's random question of the day is what is your biggest pet peeve? Okay, all right, what's happening? Sorry, what's your biggest pet peeve, do you?
Speaker 2:have a pet peeve. I don't know that I really have pet peeves I got one um you do you tell me yours while I think of mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got one it seems like since my kids went back to school, and my wife too. So my wife used to be a homemaker and homeschooled our kids. We were all home all day right. It seems like since they all went back to school because now my wife's the principal and my kids are there a lot of house chores have fallen to me without anybody even saying it, it's just become expected. I'd rather just be like hey, can you do the dishes or can you get this done, or whatever, but it's it feels like they think I don't work at home, like I'm just sitting around doing nothing, and so they they leave stuff for me, like the dishes get piled up, and so little pet peeve to me is when people see dishes piled up and they don't do something about it. So that's my current pet peeve, okay, I think mine would have to be something grammatical.
Speaker 2:That's my current pet peeve. I think mine would have to be something grammatical, because I grew up with my mom was a librarian, my dad was a mathematician and they both were real sticklers on grammar. Like I tell stories about like I'd be coming home from school crying about. You know, somebody was mean to me in school or whatever. In the middle of the story, as I'm crying, I said him and I or you know, no, no, no, no, no, it's him and me. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm crying right now.
Speaker 1:It's not a joke, dude I know.
Speaker 2:No, it didn't matter. It didn't matter Like I could be telling them you know 911, and if I misuse grammar they're going to correct me in my life, but it. So, but it does bug me when people misuse myself when they use the word myself like myself, and John are very concerned about this issue. Like that's one that just kind of makes my skin crawl.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Cause it should be John and I.
Speaker 2:John and I are very concerned.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah, my mom was really big about that, as well as about putting yourself second. Did you get the one about good versus well? Growing up, they ever talked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yep, good versus well. Grown up they ever talked yeah, yeah, yep, yep. I had a friend. I had a friend who taught me a way to remember that and then he said he said the way to remember it is he's a good basketball player that played well yes like you know, yeah so one is an adjective, one is an adverb.
Speaker 1:You don't play good you play well, yeah, so I remember that one as well. That's interesting. Yeah, I could see how that could be a problem. I I'm a former sports editor of the newspaper in both high school and college, and so when I'm reading through things I have that editor's eye and it bothers me too. I just can't. I can't post things without the like. It bothers me if I misspell something or if I miss a punctuation on a post. I know some people like ah, it makes you human, I know, but like when you're a former editor, oh, it's killer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's hard, that's rough, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:All right, beth. Well, hey, listen, it is so good having you on the show. I'm so glad you came by to talk about what you're doing. I'm sad I'm going to miss you at TIA, but a bunch of other people are going to get to see you and hang out with you, so that's great. And again, if they simply need to email measureup at prosperiogroupcom and then Katie will help them with submitting their data and they can have access to benchmarking their compensation data, which is great and then also if they're interested in that HR best practices group, they just simply need to email you at bethcarroll at prosperiogroupcom. Final words, my friend, what else do you want to tell everybody?
Speaker 2:Oh, just hang in there, keep trucking and I hope to see everybody at the show.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, 2025 is a better year than some of the past years that we've had. Well, beth, I look forward to seeing you again out on the road. And again, thanks for being on the show today and we'll see you real soon.
Speaker 2:All right, Take care Trey All right, everybody.
Speaker 1:Make sure you come back every Tuesday for another episode of Standing Out with great guests like Beth Carroll. Also want to say thank you once again to our sponsor, josh Liles, over at sales-crm. If you're a freight broker, check them out, let them know. You heard about it right here on Standing Out. And again thanks to our friends over at Reads Across America for allowing us to be a part of their Trucking Tuesday lineup. And remember my friends. Until next time, stop standing. Still start standing out. We'll see you soon.
