Bek – 00:00:05: Hey everyone, my name is Bek Abdullayev, founder and CEO of Super Dispatch, the host of Auto Transport Co-Pilot Podcast. We started this podcast as a way of helping the Auto transport community to learn from each other, to grow, and to collectively face our challenges together. Today, I am super excited to bring a new guest that we’ve been trying to get on the show for a while, Rich Levene. I’m really excited about having a conversation with Rich. Rich has an incredible background. He’s in the auto transport industry. He’s in the automotive industry on the wholesale side, but he’s got a wide range of topics and experiences, and as well as a remarkable book that he has written on leadership called You Are Doing it Wrong!. So I’m super excited to introduce Rich to the podcast and to the Auto transport community. I believe many of you already know Rich from his extensive work online with his content and his own podcast and the auction that he runs and the background that he has in this industry. So without further ado, I’d love to bring Rich on to the show. Rich, how are you doing?
Rich – 00:01:10: I’m doing great, thank you.
Bek – 00:01:12: If you could please introduce yourself to our audience for those people who may not afford to view. Tell us a little bit about yourself, please.
Rich – 00:01:19: You did a great job introducing me. So 25, 26, 27 year veteran of the automotive industry, currently working at an auto auction. Most of my career has been auto auctions, but what I found out fascinating with the college undergrad and studied sociology by accident, which led me down the path of studying groups of people. And then I decided to dive in one day, try to understand the vast difference between what it is to be a manager and what it is to be a leader, because I thought they were synonymous. And then a couple of aha moments told me they weren’t. So I went on pursuit of a master’s degree in behavioral science, studying leadership and change. So that brings me to where I’m at today. I wrote the book. I wrote the book, so I guess that’s top in the top. Now I’m trying to walk the top by leading a team and putting the values that I put into place, or I spoke about in that book, and using them in living life and trying to lead others.
Bek – 00:02:11: Thank you, Rich. And I’m excited to get into some of the content from your book, and especially, ways that it can apply to what we do every day. Auto transport is an extremely difficult job and an industry. So there’s no shortage of challenges for any of us. But first of all, I’m curious what exactly happened that led you to writing this book, whether a certain series of events or certain things that happened that made you do this.
Rich – 00:02:39: I wanted to share my experience. I wanted to get out and let other people know that there’s more than one way to do stuff. And managing, a lot of what happens in organizations is everything’s about control and risk aversion and hitting numbers. And I talked about in my book, there’s four P’s, products, plans, profits, and productivity. But if you don’t put people before those four P’s, that’s the fifth P, then you’re really never going to hit those things. So in order to lead, you got to help others get what you want. So if you help people become better or whatever it is they’re doing, they in return will help you get. And that’s how I’ve discovered that you’d hit those four P’s, but it was a journey. It was, you know, it was asking a lot of questions. It was being vulnerable, having a willingness to learn and probably waking up one day and realizing that despite the fact I thought I knew a lot, really understanding that I didn’t know much. And that was probably the most humble moment. And then how do we share that? How we get out? I believe leadership’s helping other people. And I thought maybe the book would be a great way to share my version of what my life was like, and maybe I can help somebody else.
Bek – 00:03:45: Thank you, Rich. I’m curious, what was Rich like before this mindset? And what is Rich like today after developing this leadership mindset of putting people first?
Rich – 00:03:58: I was a jack wagon. I was a jerk. I was always chasing about the numbers. You know, that’s kind of why I put down the title of the book, Stop Managing and Start Leading. That’s all I was, was managing. Hey, you didn’t hit your numbers. You didn’t hit your productivity. You didn’t get this right. You didn’t get that right. I was constantly telling whether it was friends, family, or employees. And mostly I lost most of my friends because I kept telling them all the time, hey, you’re wrong, you’re doing it wrong. My way is the best way. Now let’s transition to the new way and having an understanding and self-awareness. And that’s where it really came in as I started studying the DISC profile, became a DISC coach, and started understanding who I am as a human being and how my actions affect the behaviors of other people. And that was the real aha moment. And you know what? My friendships have become stronger. My relationship with my wife is way better. My son and I used to argue all the time. And now I take a second, I pause. I think the biggest thing I learned was stop reacting and start responding. And I did it just a minute ago. And I asked you a question on the book because my brain already started going through it. Like, hey, what was that question again? I was already starting to formulate an answer before you’d finished the question. And it’s difficult to slow our brains down to pause because no one wants the awkward pause. No one wants to wait for three seconds and try to dissect that and say, okay, what is this person really asking me?
Bek – 00:05:17: I want to take a short side quest, if you don’t mind going down this tiny rabbit hole with me. You mentioned DISC assessments. And I know you are a certified coach, and expert in DISC assessments. I am familiar with DISC assessments. I do believe it’s an incredible tool, especially in working with people, managing people, growing people. For those of US who haven’t heard of DISC, would you mind giving US a brief overview of what DISC is and how you use it in your work?
Rich – 00:05:43: Yeah, absolutely. So DISC is a behavioral assessment. A lot of people want to call it a personality test. It’s not a personality test. It’s a behavioral assessment. It’s what behaviors do you employ? And then the four letters of DISC each stand for a different type of behavior. D is for dominant, I is for inspiring, S is for steady, and C is for compliant. And when people talk and you start listening to them, you can start picking up on different things on how they’re talking. Are they trying to dominate the conversation? Are they happy go lucky? They’re being very inspirational, like here I am. That’s that yellow side. Or are they just a steady, calm listener? Or are they always trying to get the facts right? And that’s kind of what I was doing. I was that C compliant. I was always trying to get the facts. My version was the right version because I knew so. And since I started studying this, I’ve really changed. I was definitely in what you want to call the adaptive state. I was very blue. So at work, I was very C, very compliant. It has to be done this way. Then going to the assessment, it’s like, wait a second, I’ve discovered I’m really naturally more red, but I also have to hold that back. And then we can dive in from the DISC side, going down this rabbit hole. Your D’s and C’s are both about things. I’s and S’s are both about people. So listen to what somebody’s telling you or the conversation. You can start to figure out where they are. And now if you have a conversation, if I talk to you in the world where you behave in the most, now the conversation becomes more relevant to you. And I believe communication is a two way street. If I’m talking and you’re not listening, there is no communication. It’s like the internet. If the internet’s not going up and then coming back down and we’re not seeing this video back and forth or hearing the audio back and forth, we’re not communicating.
Bek – 00:07:24: Thank you. So for those of us that are in the auto transport industry, think about carriers, big and small, brokers that service the industry, shippers, companies, and people like yourselves. How can we leverage this tool? What’s the easy ways of… What are some things that it can do for us organizationally in our businesses?
Rich – 00:07:42: I mean, all the way from whether you’re running a big transportation company or you’re a driver of a truck, if you’re able to understand the behaviors of those you’re interacting with, you can have a better experience. Like I said earlier, if you help others get what they want, you’re going to get what you want. Let’s say you’re working with a dealer and you need to move cars and you go there and you start talking to them and you start finding out what is this person saying? Does he want to talk about the football game over the weekend, the soccer game, the Olympics coming up? What does he want to talk about? He might be the inspiring side, but then you just start having a conversation with him and then you start going. But if you don’t meet them where they’re at, that’s when you start having conflict. So I think these behaviors can help us, but it takes a little more than a couple of conversations to understand and start it. You’ve got to practice. Leadership is a practice. Become good at anything you’ve got to practice. So, I mean, it takes some time. It takes some courage to learn. It takes that willingness to understand.
Bek – 00:08:38: I completely agree. Thanks, Rich. Tell us a little bit about your journey into, Auto transport. How did you first encounter Auto transport? When was it? And then walk us through your initial impressions, surprises and your impressions so far.
Rich – 00:08:56: So let’s go back in the way back time machine, late 1900s, 1990s. I started out selling cars for a lender and I had to move cars. So it was my first takes, like how do we get these cars moving? I had to start finding some transporters to move them. And I did really well. I was very successful. So if you follow me through my book, I was the high producer that gets promoted beyond my skill level. Lo and behold, I land as assistant general manager of a very large auto auction in the West Coast. One of the first challenges we had there was our transportation department was, we’re just going to say it was starting to stink. They were known as a pretty good auction, but we weren’t getting cars moved fast enough. And we were using a database to track this stuff. Well, I cracked the code of the database and started making the database better by asking questions that we need, that we had problems to. Well, how many cars are at this repo yard? How many cars are at this dealership? And I started rebuilding the database, creating reports. I didn’t rebuild the database. I started creating reports that gave us better data analysis. So we could say, hey, you know what? We’ve got five cars here. Let’s go send this truck over there or whatever. So I started working on that, which led to me actually end up helping out that organization. I was all over the West Coast helping all their transportation departments. Fast forward, I ended up at the corporate office, and then we acquired a software company that was transportation-based. And I helped with the integration of that project by pulling all of their information over into the auctions information so we could start looking at a holistic view of we have auctions, we have cars. How do we get them moved? How much are we going to pay? Who’s going to do it? Are they compliant? So I’ve actually spent a lot of time in the transportation realm, just not at a transportation company, if you will, more from the operations side of an auto auction.
Bek – 00:10:43: Do you remember what some of the things are that surprised you or continue to surprise you? About Auto transport?
Rich – 00:10:49: I think the biggest surprise, and I’m really starting to understand it now, is let’s go back to the DISC and just seeing everything through my lens and not understanding what the driver of that truck was going through, or maybe the owner of the transportation company. Here I was thinking, I just need my cars moved. They’re moving cars for a lot of people. And I guess it’s that need to understand. That was the biggest, I mean, call it stupid or naive on my part, but it was taking my own leadership skills. And go, wait a second. These people are human beings too. They got a lot going on. What does their world look like? And that’s used in empathy. If I were a transportation driver, what would I do? How would I do this?
Bek – 00:11:29: I love that. So I’m assuming you get to interact directly with drivers, picking up and delivering cars.
Rich – 00:11:36: I do not as much as I used to. And they’ll come in, they walk into the auction where I work right now, and I’ll walk and I’ll start talking to them. We get stuff done. But what I really like to do is, as the general manager, a lot of people want to come to me to solve a problem. And I can solve the problem. I don’t have a problem solving the problem. But if I solve the problem, what does my team learn? So I really am about putting my team out there first and not to stick them out there like the front lines to get shot at, but to put them out there for the learning experience so they can understand what it is. And then once they get it, say, all right, now you’ve got this, let’s get you to the next level. And who’s going to be the next person behind you? So we continue to build that succession. My team is, I believe the people working for me are the smartest people doing that job because they do it every single day. And me as the general manager, I’d like to use the title general helper. I’m just generally here to help you become better. So that’s how I look at it.
Bek – 00:12:29: I love that mindset that you talk about. You’re putting people first in your book a lot. And you also talk about when problem solving in your business, starting with people. So for example, fixing your processes, whatever you’re trying to do, you really start with people. And earlier you mentioned, I’d like to get a clarification from you for my own sake, as well as our audience. You mentioned a difference between a manager and a leader and how we often confuse the two. We think one is the other. Tell us a little bit about your learnings about the differences between a manager and a leader and their roles in the organization.
Rich – 00:13:02: Simply put, management is about things. Leadership is about people. And my grandmother always told me, you manage inventory, you manage things, you lead people. And when I started thinking about it and breaking it down, it was like, holy crap, I’ve been a manager my entire career. And I took that as being a leader. And it really wasn’t. A leader is about inspiring and helping people get to where they want to go. And then management is about removing the risk and following the processes and make sure things are done right. So what I like to say is management is about getting things done right or getting things done correctly. Leadership is about doing the right thing. And if you start separating it from that mindset, you can start having a conversation with people on, I tell you, you’re more in the management realm, you’re more in the leadership realm. Now, I believe both of them are there. So another way to say it is management is about numbers. Leadership is about people.
Bek – 00:13:55: I love that. And I love that quote. As well, I’m thinking, how does this look when you think about day in and day out? All of us, either work in a company or we’re leadership positions or management positions or we’re starting and building companies. How does this work in practice? Give us some practical examples of what that looks like in the day to day.
Rich – 00:14:16: So first of all, people don’t know how much you care until you show them how much you care about them. And that’s the key part. You’re going to show them you care about them. It’s bringing in the compassion. And then to make this leadership stuff sticky, if you will. And I talked about in my book, I use four values. I use trust, Hope, humility, and empathy. And we put those into work every day. And are we building trust with our employees, our customers, our peers? Are we creating Hope? Is tomorrow going to be a brighter day than today? That’s creating Hope. And are we being humble? It’s like setting your ego aside and understanding that what you have is not exactly what the world needs. That’s my definition of ego. And then being empathetic. And that’s like going and trying to understand, looking at the viewpoint, trying to understand what is it like to be Beck, who’s running this transportation company? What is it like to be the driver of a transportation company or the sales guy, the marketing person? And trying to get into their realm. And that’s what it looks like every day. Now, here’s the thing. Do I do this every day? Absolutely. But am I a human being? Do I make mistakes? You better believe it. There’s a lot of days I screw up. I’ve had to go back and apologize to my team. I go, you know, yesterday, when I told you, that you didn’t get enough cars moved. Yeah, I was a jerk. I’m sorry. What can I do going forward to help you move more cars? And that’s how we got a frame of conversations is they start changing from asking the quantitative questions to qualitative questions. How can I help you? Let’s qualify it. We know we need to move more cars. You know the goal. I know the goal. We missed it. Okay, but let’s qualify the question. How can I help you get to our goal? And now you start opening up conversations. And there’s one thing I do with every manager I have reporting to you. We try to do it weekly. We fail sometimes, but weekly we sit down. We have one-to-ones. So Bek, if you’re my employee, I’ll look at you and say, all right, Bek, what’s working well? May you tell me what’s working well in your world. And then I ask you, okay, what’s not working well? And you tell me what roadblocks you have obstacles. Then my final question is, is how can I help you? And now we’ve got a structure for a great conversation and we start building those things. So these conversations come up. So before you ever tell me, before I ever have to go to you and say, hey, you didn’t hit your goal, you’re already telling me that you’re struggling or that you’re killing it. And then I also go, okay, you’re killing it. Great, how can I help you? How can we even do better? And that changes the whole dynamic of the conversation. Now it’s about people.
Bek – 00:16:39: I love that. So do you do that in all of your meetings with your people? The three questions?
Rich – 00:16:45: In the one-to-ones.
Bek – 00:16:46: Yeah. What’s going well? What’s not going well? And how can I help you?
Rich – 00:16:51: Absolutely.
Bek – 00:16:51: Great.
Rich – 00:16:52: It’s three questions. That’s super easy. It just gives you a framework. And that’s what I believe. A lot of things is, you know, so leadership, studying behavioral science, these are all theories. And then you put a framework into it so you can understand it. That’s all it is. That’s a framework for making your meeting go better. Is it going to work every time? Probably not. Is it going to work majority of the time? Absolutely.
Bek – 00:17:11: I started thinking about, as you were describing, these potentially very effective leadership frameworks. And you’ve been in the leadership role for a long time. I’m wondering, thinking about our audience and our listeners, not every single person in the audience is probably a leader or a manager, but an individual contributor, someone that works at a company. How can someone like that introduce principles like this into their organization? What are some practical ways of introducing better leadership frameworks or mindset from bottoms up?
Rich – 00:17:43: I would say, and here’s how I started with my team. Day one, all-employee meeting, we do it every week. And I said, you know what? Leadership starts with you. You are leading yourself. You’re leading your family. You could be leading a church group. You could be a little league coach. You could be a coach of whatever. Maybe it’s your daughter’s dance team. Who knows what? You’re leading somebody somewhere because somebody’s following you and looking up to you. So you have to be completely self-aware of how your actions and your behaviors help other people or affect them or hurt or harm other people. And now any type of leader, they come in all different shapes and sizes and behaviors. One leader can’t be for everybody. And if you are for everybody, then you got a problem. So what you need to do is figure out what works well for you and then go out and try to share more of that. Find out why people follow you. The best leaders I’ve found out usually come from followers, the ones that understand,what it’s like to be, like, we’ll just say it at the bottom of the food chain, at the bottom of the org chart. I like to flip that org chart over and say, I’m at the bottom and everybody else is at the top. And that’s difficult to do. But I think that’s how you start integrating it in as you start helping people, get them to believe in themselves. Now build up some of that self-confidence and say, you know what? You are important. You are a special person. You are leading others. You just may not recognize it.
Bek – 00:19:04: Thank you. I love that. Great practical advice. You mentioned values, core values, organizational values, personal values. Tell us a little bit more about the role of values and the organization and leadership in what we do every day.
Rich – 00:19:21: So values are your guiding point, maybe the why behind what you do. So why are we doing this auto auction? Why are we helping dealers? Well, we’re here to build a community where people want it to be a part of. And how are we doing that? Well, in our example, we’re using trust, Hope, humility, and empathy. And we measure everything we do. That becomes our standard. And we use that honestly, for everything. Hey, we want to bring on a new vendor. And we’re talking to this vendor. Are they going to help US do this stuff? Are they going to help US move cars? Yeah, they are. Great. Okay. Bring them on. Well, wait a second. Let’s do a litmus test. Let’s check against the values. Are they going to help US build trust with our customers, with each other? Are we going to have trust together? Is this going to be a hopeful relationship? Are we going to be able to have a better tomorrow, by signing with these people? And then go through all of them and walk through that. And we do the same thing with employees. And it helps both ways. This is where I love value-based leadership. Because once you start having that standard to measure against and make decisions on, now it’s easy to make decisions. Are we going to go with this company? Nope. Why not? Well, because they’re not helping us create trust. They’re not very hopeful. Whatever it is. Are we going to go with company B? Absolutely. Why? Because they’re doing these things. You can apply that across the board. I’ll just be honest. We fired customers, we fired clients. We’ve hired clients. We’ve found new customers. It works for everything. It works for employees. All those things. It’s just our standard. We’re not going to change our values based on the way somebody else wants to behave or act or do business.
Bek – 00:20:53: That’s great. Can you give us examples of some of the core values that exist in your current organization?
Rich – 00:21:00: Well, so the value, here’s what’s interesting. Values are all, you can’t touch them. You can’t touch trust. You can seal it. Hope, you can’t touch Hope, but you can seal it. And it’s creating those environments. I guess I want a good example. And you guys were a part of it. You guys helped us with the rodeo sale. I shared the vision with the rodeo sale on what I wanted to do and sell more cars than we ever sold before. And the first thing from marketing was, well, what are you going to give away? I said, we’re going to give away Education. They’re like, what? You’re crazy. You can’t give away Education. I said, yeah, we can. Watch me. So we put together a panel and people loved it. They took away knowledge from there. What does that do? When we start creating knowledge, you start sharing that knowledge. That creates Hope. That starts building trust. Hey, these people know something. Hey, this other guy knows something I don’t know. And now we start building those things up. That’s just two of the values. So there’s an example. And I can’t wait for next year because next year is going to be even bigger. We’re going to give away more Education. We’re going to build more trust. We’re going to create more hope. And we’re going to have the right people up there that, you know, are humble and huffs to understand that they’re helping others and not being egotistical that they know everything. So that’s what we look for when we start hiring and building these panels. We put it into everything we do.
Bek – 00:22:14: Thinking of if you’re an up and coming organization or an organization or a leader who wants to inject positive change into their organization, what do you think are practical ways of identifying what your values are? And then most importantly, integrating them into your team, into your organization, getting to a point from, it goes from an idea to a reality of value base that your whole team operates from.
Rich – 00:22:39: You’ve got to have a vision. There’s some exercises you can do to work on what your values are. A very simple one is just go out to the internet, get on Google or whatever you use for your search engine and type in value worksheet. And you can pull one down that’ll have anywhere from 100 different values on there. And then there’s some exercise you can do is just have your team go through and say, hey, circle 20 of the values on here that speak to you. And then what you start doing is you start whittling them down. You get them down to where eventually everybody’s only got three left on their deal. And then you can do it like popcorn style or whatever and say, all right, what’s on your sheet and go through and find out what are in common. And then you’ll start discovering that people have these different values in common. You’re like, whoa, cool. Hey, you’ve got trust on your list. I’ve got trust on my list. What else? Do you have courage? Yeah, I got courage. Or maybe they didn’t think of it and they’re like, aha, it’s an opening. But once you start discovering what people have in common, they actually have a propensity to actually help each other work better together. Actually, it goes up by 56% is what research says. Once you understand that you have something in common with somebody else, your likelihood to help them increases by 56%.
Bek – 00:23:47: Wow. That’s cool. I love this topic. And for a long time, we’ve been trying to, I guess, scale our core values at Super Dispatch and also trying to figure out how do we do that as the organization grows, as you bring more people and everyone, all the new people that you hire and bring that come into the organization, everyone comes with a core set of values that they carry from their previous experiences. Right? And as they come in, they try to figure out how these teams work, how things work around here in this company. One of the things that we have found to be effective is exemplifying. One of the core values is being customer centric. For example, when you see an example of someone being customer centric at an all hands meeting, which we have every other week, we’ll try to exemplify that behavior. And I’ve learned that that shows people what it looks like to embody a core value of an organization. And also serves as an inspiration on how we work collectively, especially in the remote world. When we don’t see people every day, you don’t get to observe these subtle experiences of how people are doing things. So I’m learning, especially in the world that a lot of our learnings are happening through stories, these sort of folklore, the, oh, Rich did this thing or Steve or Jody, you know, X, Y, and Z happen. And these sorts of inspire the collective behavior of the org or organization. So, I wanted to dive into some of the other parts of your book as well. I would say I am curious about the book for sure, but I’m more interested in what you do in practice. There’s certain books that I read. I’ll only read 10 pages and that’s all I need. I don’t have to start and finish every single book that I get. Sometimes I can skim through or sometimes I go to this specific thing that I want to read and I learn. I take what I want from it and I move on to the next thing. So I’m more interested in that aspect of it. So you don’t necessarily have to recite everything that’s in the book, but more about what parts of it that you get to practice.
Rich – 00:25:46: Let’s tie this together. And it’s in my book and it’s what I do every day. So number one, you nailed it. You got to practice. Leadership is a practice. Being a medical doctor is a practice. Being a lawyer is a practice. It’s a science that you’re never going to perfect. You’re never going to be the perfect leader. But my why statement, so I discovered this when I was going through my master’s program and it’s to learn, to grow, to lead. And to create a world of dignity and leaders are always learning. So I’ve become a constant learner. I’ve turned off TV and I’ve opened up books. I’ve slowed down. I’m reading two to three books a month. I was reading four to five for a while. So I’ve slowed down. And once you start learning, then you can start growing. I’ve grown more in the last, probably since I started my leadership journey. My official start when I went back to college, that’s what I’m going to call it. So since 2018, so the last, what, six years, my growth, my mental growth. What I can do as a human being as just. It’s been miraculous to say the least. You wouldn’t recognize me. Let’s put it that way. If you met me before you, I wouldn’t be on this podcast. Because back then I just knew things. Now I know different things, better things, people things. So learning, grow and lead. So now I can become a leader because before I was never a leader. So once I started learning, started growing, now I can become a leader. So now it’s like, ah, don’t know everything. Somebody else might know something more than me and that’s not a threat to my existence. That’s a means to my survival. And then the last piece is dignity. So as I was studying and going through my master’s program, I came across Donna Hicks and she is from Harvard University. She’s got her doctorate and she defined dignity. And then I’m going to reinterpret it on how, what I mean, but regardless of where you live in the world, your gender, your race, your religion, anything, there’s one thing every human being has in common. And it’s just that we all want to be treated with respect. And she defined that as dignity. So that was my aha moment. So now here’s how I put this into practice. I will have, we’ll use a transporter. I’ll have the transporter that comes through, brought the car in too late, wants to charge me too much. Maybe they damaged the worst case scenario, the ones that just perk you and make you want to go. But at the end of the day, what does that guy want? He just wants dignity or gal if it’s a female driver, they just want dignity. I don’t know what they faced. Did their truck break down? Was there a wreck in front of them? Was the road closed? Who knows what they faced, but at the end of the day, they just want dignity. That’s what they want. So every time I start to get frustrated with somebody on their actions or behaviors, I stop myself and go, Rich, they just want dignity. They just want to be understood. And then that starts propelling me forward. Now there’s days I fall down and my team has to come out and they go, Rich, really? That wasn’t being very good, but I’m a human being and I want to reiterate that. And that’s where I guess humility comes in. I got to go back. I got to continue. It’s a vicious cycle. You got to continue learning. Then you continue growing. Then you can lead. And then you treat people with dignity. And then you go back. You fall down like I did. Then you learn. Then you grow. It’s a vicious cycle that just keeps repeating itself.
Bek – 00:28:51: Thank you for that. So I want to wrap up. By the way, I mean, what an incredible conversation. I’m having so much fun. I really enjoyed this conversation. I’ve learned a ton. I’m really hoping that there’s lots of valuable tidbits as well throughout the episode. But I’m hoping we can capture a lot of quotable also items, which is great. In conclusion, I wanted to see if you have any final thoughts around your message to the audience, overall automotive space or the auction world, the wholesale industry, or auto transporting specifically. From your experiences, what thoughts do you want to share? Do you have any sort of message to the industry overall? What are your thoughts about where we are, the challenges we’re facing, your overall advice? Obviously, we’ve covered putting people first, identifying, integrating core values, operating based off of that system, using tools like disk assessment, which we’re going to put links to those things, as well as your book on You’re Doing It Wrong! When we publish this. But if you were speaking to the Auto transport audience or the automotive industry, do you have any messages that you’d like to relay to the audience?
Rich – 00:29:58: So I never stopped learning. And I’m going back and I’m studying some more right now. And I’ve become fascinated with the current shape of the workforce, and the future of the workforce. And all I have to say is it’s only going to become more challenging and more difficult to navigate our future because there is a significant event that happened in 2012 that nobody really talks about and nobody really knows about. There’s not a headline about it that’s reshaped the way we live our lives. And it all started in January of 2007 when Steve Jobs sat on the stage and said, we’re going to change the way you look at, talking on the phone, and he introduced the iPhone. The iPhone has been the fastest adaptation of any technology since the beginning of time. It’s happening so fast that it’s changing the behaviors of the people coming up. Gen Z is just now getting into the workforce. They’re the first ones that have only been around an iPhone. And then you got the generation coming after them. Some of them are calling them the Polars. I’m not really sure why they’re calling them the Polars, but these people are only going to know one thing. We’re losing track of the human element. We’re starting to become addicted to the technology, to text messages, to social media. And we’re losing the fact that we’re tribal. Human beings are tribal by nature. And we have to have social interaction in order to survive. And there’s all kinds of stats about this right now. People are like, Rich, you’re off your rocker. Depression is going sky high right now. Suicide rates are on the rise. And all these things are going back to, research is starting to point back to a lack of social interaction, face-to-face, meeting with somebody, and just being a genuine human being. So that’s my advice. Be a human, learn how to communicate, and be empathetic.
Bek – 00:31:48: Very good. Thank you for that lesson and a reminder. What are the best ways of connecting with you from people that listen to this podcast and may want to connect with you or follow your story or learn more about your book or your content? Tell us about some of the best ways of connecting with you.
Rich – 00:32:04: You can go to my website, richardlevene.com. You can send me a text message, 712-358-1282. And I’m also very active on LinkedIn. But number one, just go out to my website, richardlevene.com. From there, you can get to my podcast. You can get to my book. You can get to me. That’s Grand Central Station right there. Perfect.
Bek – 00:32:27: Great. We’ll make sure to include the links.
Rich – 00:32:29: That’s my super dispatch. My website is my super dispatch.
Bek – 00:32:32: Yeah. Well, actually, that’s a good question. Let me just ask you this before we completely wrap. When you say that, how do you view Super Dispatch just objectively, someone from the outside? Obviously, we’ve been doing this for 10, 11 years. We have views of like who we are and what we do in the industry. But if you take off the gloves and just tell your buddy about who knows nothing about Auto transport or automotive industry, how do you describe what Super Dispatch does and what it is?
Rich – 00:33:00: You solve a problem. And the problem being that I need a transporter to move a car from point A to point B. I’m point B, I need it brought back to me. And oftentimes those are places where I haven’t been before, where I need a carrier, I’m running short on carriers. So you give me supply, you’re solving a problem. You got a supply of drivers, you’re going all over, you’ve vetted the people, you know whether or not their DOT is up to date and all the other numbers, a carrier number, motor carrier numbers are all good and valid for the US and probably even Canada and Mexico because of, I think it’s NAFTA. But anyway, so yeah, you solve a problem and problem being I need a car moved. It’s that simple. And you got technology that does it really well. And you got great people.
Bek – 00:33:40: Thank you. Very grateful. What kind of words? Yeah, very well put. I love it when ideas and concepts come out in very simple terms that are easy to digest.
Rich – 00:33:48: But you got that one guy stand that gave me grief one time though.
Bek – 00:33:52: Yeah.
Rich – 00:33:54: I love Stan. I love your team. Your team is awesome. I really appreciate them. And you came out and you helped us with our event sale. So thank you.
Bek – 00:34:01: Yeah, happy to. The team is one of the two favorite things that keeps me going every day. The two things that I love about building, growing and continuing to evolve Super Dispatch are what first is to see the positive impact that we make in customers’ day-to-day lives and in their businesses. I’ve built six other companies unsuccessfully and somewhat successfully. I’ve never quite had people practically reach out to us and express gratitude. Gratitude. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for existing. Thank you for introducing technology into the space. It makes all that so much easier. I get to go see my kids’ baseball game. I don’t have to do this manual thing anymore. It’s push a button. I don’t have to sit there for five hours and do all this stuff. And the amount of gratitude that we collectively experience on the team from seeing the positive impact we’re making and in the small industry, not all the transport industry, is extremely rewarding. I’ve never felt that in any other company or industry that I worked in before. It really gets me out of bed every day. It gets me excited about what we do. And the second thing is, I love, love doing this with this team of people. I have a hundred people who collectively really care about what we’re doing. It’s great. It’s one thing to just come in and clock in and clock out. You still get the job done and everything, but it’s another when you become this mission-driven organization that you really care about the work and the quality of the work you’re doing and then the people that you’re doing it for. And I’m extremely proud of that. I’m extremely grateful that we get to do this. And I’m grateful that I’m in this position where I get to do something that’s extremely fun and rewarding that also helps a bunch of people.
Rich – 00:35:40: No, that’s awesome. That’s good. What I like to say too is, you know, and ask a question to people, would you want to be on a bus that goes to, let’s just pick a place, let’s say Disney World, with maybe a bunch of lunatics on that bus, but you’re going to the happiest place on earth, Disney World. Or would you rather be on a bus with people that want to be there with you that you like and you cherish, and you’re really not sure where you’re going to go, but you’re going to have a lot of fun on the way. I mean, I think I’m going to take the second bus. I’m not sure where we’re going, but as long as I got a great group of people around me, let’s go, let’s have some fun. I think that’s what it sounds like you’re doing at super dispatch.
Bek – 00:36:12: Yeah, thank you. And so are you.
Rich – 00:36:14: We’re trying.
Bek – 00:36:15: Well, thanks again. Shout out to all the work that you’re doing. Appreciate you being a mentor, a coach, and a teacher to others through your book and through your work. I respect the heck out of you practicing what you preach. The organization considered me a fan. Anything I can do to be helpful in anything you’re doing automatically. And man, thanks for your time. I Hope we do this again. I’d love to check in maybe sometime down the road. And I Hope to make it to your next rodeo show.
Rich – 00:36:44: Awesome. I Hope you do make it. And I was listening to a podcast that you did live and I’m a fan of yours and what you’ve overcome and what you’ve built. And I heard your background story and that made me a fan of Super Dispatch before you even knew who I was. So kudos to you, as well. It’s a two-way street.
Bek – 00:37:01: Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, sir.
Rich – 00:37:03: You’re welcome.
Bek – 00:37:04: All right. Well, that will wrap up our podcast. I Hope you enjoyed it. We’re going to include all the links and I’m really hoping some of the quotes from Rich. I wrote down some of your quotes, Rich, I’m going to be using and sharing with my family and team. Thanks for tuning in. If you’re watching this on YouTube, make sure to like the video, make sure to comment. We respond to all the comments, even the negative ones. And then yeah, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it. Thanks for being a friend and a supporter of Super Dispatch. And I’ll see you in the next one. Supporting our mission. We Hope to continue building more momentum of bringing this community together so that we can collectively navigate the challenges that we face together as an industry. All right, y’all. We’ll see you next time. Thank you.
