What does CDL Helpers do? What do we stand for?
CDL Helpers was created to tackle high turnover in the trucking industry, and to find a way to simplify and improve how drivers are managed.
We take on the discovery, or information gathering, part of management, and allow management teams to focus more of their time and energy on rapidly addressing issues within their organization so the continuous pursuit of improvement that leads to business success never slows in your company.
Our mission is to better engage your drivers. By helping you better address the things that are driving them away, we reduce your turnover. By helping them feel more connected to their work and your company, your productivity and driver engagement improve.
Companies that have engaged workers outperform their competition. Companies that have CDL Helpers, have more engaged drivers.
What is the story behind CDL Helpers?
CDL Helpers' story starts back in early 2010 when Tucker Robeson was an independent recruiter for carriers as small as 50 trucks, and as large as Interstate Distributor Company and US Xpress. He wanted to create a resource for drivers that would help them avoid some of the biggest pitfalls during recruitment, so he called Gareth Miller and had him put together a simple website that acted as a library for the information. They ended up calling the website "CDL Helpers".
Fast forward to January 2011. Tucker had noticed a worrying trend among the companies he recruited for: Many of the drivers he hired were telling him that they chose to leave their company less than a month after being hired for identical reasons. He decided to call up the HR departments of a few of these carriers and ask why these common painpoints that were costing the carriers hundreds of thousands of dollars had not been addressed. The HR departments were unaware of these problems; all the HR departments knew is that they were hemorrhaging large amounts of money from turnover. Worse, many of them had spent money on high-priced consultants that came in with guns blazing but could not fix the turnover problem in the long-term.
That's when Tucker came upon the core tenant of CDL Helpers: If you create a safe, confidential environment for drivers to speak with you candidly, they are more than happy to talk honestly about exactly what's going wrong at their company. Organizational Silence, broken chains of communication, and unscrupulous carriers that gave everyone else a bad name had created an environment where drivers felt uncomfortable talking directly with their companies. A precedent had been set where drivers had become conditioned to believe that the only way to fix the problems at your company was to find a new one.
CDL Helpers the driver services firm launched in April of 2011. Instead of offering traditional "matrices and theories" consulting, they offered a hands-on service that has real people de-escalating conflicts with drivers, and gathering data about long-term trends at carriers. Since then they've been growing steadily and have been adding full-time workers to their roster as of December 2011.