Business View Magazine Feb 2023

82 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 “We currently have seven trucks needing repairs and can’t use them until parts arrive,” says Vanzant. Safety is paramount to Gulf Relay. 98% of all drivers at the company have at least one year of experience. The other 2% are trainees, and students must undergo a rigorous six- week instruction program with a professional trainer. The company limits itself to four or five trainees at a time to keep operations running smoothly and ensure a high level of expertise. Gulf Relay also offers a Family Plan Training Course, where friends or family members of an employee can be shown the ropes, so to speak, about the trucking industry. But most of these trainees are guided by the six to seven professional trucking staff members who rotate their roles. After six weeks of training, they return to the road. While all logistic companies will talk about safety, Gulf Relay can say that the statistics speak for themselves. “The company has a crash score of 33 and an unsafe driving score of ten. Our department of transport (DOT) reportable (an accident) per million miles was 0.21 for 2022. And Gulf Relay had only four DOT reportable accidents after completing about 19 million miles in the last year. Industry-standard for covering that mileage in a year is around 15 to 17 reportable accidents,” says Vanzant. Typically, most of these statistics do not need to be made public, but Gulf relay believes that when the statistics paint such a great image, why not share them. The company prides itself on having employees that can build and maintain relationships from the shipper level all the way up the ranks. “Because of the close relationships, account managers can call clients and say they’ve seen posts on the Design Advisory Panel (DAP) board and then win over the business,” says Maddie Cook, Director of Customer Success for Assets Division, Gulf Relay, Clinton, Mississippi. “I’ve seen it multiple times, where the client may have selected a lower-cost option, but due to the relationships built by our account managers, they’ve been able to call them directly.” As the trucking industry is very male-dominated, it’s a breath of fresh air that many of the managerial roles at Gulf Relay are filled by women. Currently, 11% of the company drivers are women. Twenty-three people, to be exact. But the main consideration when recruiting female drivers is to ensure a safe and comfortable environment for them. The most significant incentive for female drivers to work for the company is for someone they trust to lead them into the role, whether that is a spouse, close relative, or friend. Maddie Cook recording performances at our in-house truck “Road-eo”, one of our initiatives to cultivate a culture centered around safety