Travis Klassen 0:00
Travis,

welcome to the value Creators Podcast, the exclusive Insider PodCast for the Klassen group. This is where we talk about how we create value, how we work lead and grow together and real stories from across the Klassen tree. I'm your host, Travis Klassen, whether you're in a machine at a desk or on the move, we're glad to have you on the Klassen crew. In our last episode, we introduced the idea of value creation, why it matters, and how it shows up at Klassen. But strategy alone doesn't build great companies. What really shapes a business is how people behave day in and day out. It's about how we treat each other, how we build trust, how we take ownership, grow through feedback, and show up for the team when it counts. This four part series is about the principles that guide those behaviors, the ones that hold us together when things are moving fast, and the ones that help us build something that lasts. Today, I'm sitting down with our CEO, John Mark Ferguson, as we take a deeper look into what we call the Klassen code. So jumping back into the conversation on values. Our previous episode, we talked about valuing people, respecting and valuing every human. And on this one, we're going to direct our attention to the second value. I'll just read it so we can, we can talk about it. Value number two is we are honest. Don't cheat. It's like I can't read anymore.

Speaker 1 1:31
Your voice still sounds so good. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, there's a DJ voice.

Travis Klassen 1:37
Oh, yeah. We're down in a van down by the river.

Speaker 1 1:39
There we are. Just for the record, we are down in a van down by the

Travis Klassen 1:44
river. It is awesome, isn't that where all great things happen. Podcasts. Anyways, this is we've gone off track already. Value number two is we are honest. Don't lie, cheat or steal. We value open dialog truthful feedback and candid conversations. We share ideas openly and let the best ideas win. We give and receive feedback with the goal of making ourselves and each other better. So my first question, John Mark, that's a bold start to it. Bold language is, don't lie, cheat or steal. Why did you go that direction?

John-Mark 2:24
You This is, again, we're talking about the foundation of the company. If you, if you lose this, this is how you get Enron, right, where you like, whole empires crumble because the foundation is fundamentally flawed, and people start bending the truth, and it becomes worse and worse, and then you just keep fibbing or faking the numbers, and eventually it comes back to haunt you and destroy and your whole, the whole thing falls and just just, if you're thinking about the best way to live, Generally, where I say always, if you're just honest, it just helps with mental bandwidth, for example, and just it is the best way to exist. You should be honest and straightforward, right? And so again, we don't lie, we don't chill, steal or cheat. It's pretty clear, right? And everybody knows when they're not doing this right. And

Travis Klassen 3:21
sure my kids knew this when they were three and four years old. Humans

John-Mark 3:25
have a built in sort of conscience that guides them. And you know when your ears are burning,

Travis Klassen 3:32
yeah. So the bold stuff, I mean, people are gonna say, Well, of course, we don't lie, cheat or steal. What are ways that this shows up, that maybe it's a little bit more, a little bit less obvious, uh, lying, cheating and stealing.

John-Mark 3:52
I think there's like again, I think when you're when you're treating customers, right? We don't underfill loads. Let's just start with that, right? You could say, hey, look, we've you could choose to put 80% or 90% of what you should put in a load, right? That's easy, right? You could make more money doing that, but that is not what we want here at Klassen ever. And if we find someone doing this, we will. We do not want to keep this person.

Travis Klassen 4:17
That's not a behavior we tolerate, exactly. And now I think we've taken some fairly significant contracts in the world based on that same principle. Other people shortchanged customers, misled them, and we showed up and delivered our load next to theirs, and we were 30%

John-Mark 4:38
bigger. Again, this if, if you wanted to work with someone in in the landscape of business, everyone gets to choose who they do business with. Are you going to work with a guy that's always honest? Are you going to guy that's only honest some of the time? Right? Obviously, you always want to work with a guy who's who's honest, who's like those guys always do what they say they're going to do, right? And the way to. Measures are always accurate. That's that's a company want to be just easier. And there's probably not that many people up traveling in this direction, so on the honest highway here.

Travis Klassen 5:10
So I think the proclivity for people with in business or where money's involved is to maximize it, and often there's a shortcut there. Dennis has been making, uh, uncle, Dennis, uh, your father in law, my uncle, has been making a quite a few appearances in our podcast so far, just in the stories we tell. But I remember, I mean, to a fault we would not under fill loads. We would be over, right, and overweight, but, you know, to the point where people would literally come to our yard and say, can that guy load me? Because that's the way he thought, yeah, I still

John-Mark 5:42
think, to this day, he gets called being like, hey, things are different now that you're not loading and delivering. We're like, No, those are the accurate loads. They just weren't a dentist load, right? And good for him. I think he had. He loved delighting customers, and he did a really good job of that. But, yeah, I just think there's this whole side too. Like, owning problems. Like, if there's an issue, you're like, No, no. That was me. Like, and, or if someone broke something, just the person's like, that was me. I did that so much more freeing than being like, I don't know who that was. Yeah, again, just that. That's the culture we want. This ownership we want. We just always want to be honest about the things we're doing. Sure, yeah.

Travis Klassen 6:25
I mean, and your first thought this is that moving out of weights and measures and into other things is covering up when you make a mistake. I mean, I know, last year I oversee people and safety in the company, but the other day, or last year, I backed a pickup, around a dumpster, around a loader, in the dark, in the rain, totally smashed the back quarter panel. First thought, tell no one, and you're like, Whoa. That's a weird human thought is like, I don't want to get in trouble, and yet, like, I'm in a in a pretty significant role in the company, all I have to do is explain what happened. You know, kind of get a little bit of the embarrassing. People laugh about it, like, Hey, don't get don't give Travis a pickup. He's gonna smash it. Of course, I'm not, but we all make mistakes, and all of

John-Mark 7:11
us do, yeah, I think it's so. I think that's a great example where the human humans were all flawed and broken, and we have these, we do weird things like that. The brain is like, hey, how am I going to protect myself? Maybe the ego inside of us if we want to get psychological here, but sure, right? Want to protect ourselves. I could have made mistake and or make mistake, I'll be blamed or made fun of. But, like, the reality is nobody, no, everyone's like, Oh yeah, that that would happen to anybody, right? And it's so reasonable, it's and it's so much better. Imagine you hit it and you didn't tell anybody, and there's like, and then suddenly someone's like, Oh, I saw Jim Jimmy down the road. He came in and smashed it, yeah? Like, just stories circle it just, what a waste of time and energy, right? Just to own the problem, yeah, and move on. It's so much better, so much more freeing. And that's culture we want to be part of. People own stuff, well

Travis Klassen 7:58
as leaders in the company. I mean, I am so grateful every time someone comes and tells me what they did. Yeah, it is so much easier to be like, Oh, let me actually help you through this situation. Instead of, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write you up or whatever. I mean, sure, there's processes. I mean, I had to write an instant investigation for myself on that one and be like, you know, this is what happened. I wasn't paying attention and it was raining. I should have been out there, but I think it's so important for our people to realize, if you come forward first with the problem, the team around you is going to support you through it, not discipline you or hurt you

John-Mark 8:31
totally. There's this example where someone sent an email to an old email address of a company that bought some other company, let's say, and they came and were like, Hey, this is so bad. And, and I remember, like, don't worry about it. We've got your back. And he's like, whoa, that's cool. You've actually got my back. You're not gonna, like, not mad. I can find, like, no, like, No. You didn't mean to do that, and it's okay. And yes, there was some fallout, and yes, we had to deal with some challenges, but it was like, again, if he was like, I didn't send it and just got hit in a corner, it would have got way worse, way faster, and we were able to get ahead of it. And again, I think that the culture we want is we have each other's back even when someone makes a mistake. And I would argue we should actually do a better job when someone makes mistake and actually, like, extend our hand further right, and put our arm around the person say, No, we've got, we've got, you don't worry about it, right? And that's what we want to be a

Travis Klassen 9:27
part of. That's right? And I think we were walking down by the river here before the podcast, and you know, you're thinking about all of the ways that people make mistakes and all of the opportunity there is to learn from them, right? So you make a mistake, we want to come behind you, and that's an opportunity to learn and grow, definitely not to rub your face in it. It's to say, hey, what responsibility did maybe management have in this? And then we have to look at ourselves too, and say, You know what? I don't know if we fully trained that person, you.

John-Mark 10:00
Yeah, I would say, in Japanese culture, they say 100% management fault. Anything in the business is management fault. And I believe that to be true. And I've argued with a lot of people about it, generally, it's a training problem. Most, most people, 99.9% of people are well intentioned, yeah, and want to do a great job. And again, if going back to the people side, if we send someone to pick up a load of bark at a facility, and they've never been there and they didn't know anything, and they're calling trying to feel it out in the middle of dark, in the pouring rain, of course, they're probably going to hit something Sure, if they didn't see that pylon

Travis Klassen 10:40
there, that's right. And they've never, they've never been there, never walked through it. Even if

John-Mark 10:44
someone's talking it through on the phone, it's still not gonna be the same as being shown how to do it right. And so there's lots of room and ways we can improve here at Klassen, and we'll keep getting better.

Travis Klassen 10:55
Absolutely. I mean, we just did a series of safety meetings, you know, we had a bunch of infractions that we needed to address as a team. So, you know, over the last three days, I've met with almost 60 drivers, and consistently, you know, what you realize is, of course, we're talking about this problem, and in each in each meeting, we didn't sit, we just stood in circles outside. The yard. Has been very nice weather up here in what are we in? July or June, and each time, 30 people, 20 people, circled around, and we kind of looked at the problem in the middle, so shoulder to shoulder, we're not blaming anybody, and then you're also realizing we're talking about problems. But we said this earlier as well. 98% of the time we deliver without any problems. We don't talk about that. Oh yeah, right. We talked about the issues,

John-Mark 11:41
and that's a that's such a good point. Generally, this the company, yeah, we deliver 98% of all the loads without a hiccup, but we never talk about those. No, good job. Everybody. Such a good job. Everyone's doing that. We don't talk about, right? We don't even say anything to anybody. Generally,

Travis Klassen 11:56
no, yeah, so, I mean, that's, that is very important. Yeah. Important. I'm curious about the rest of like, don't lie, which is also, don't cover something up, right? Just tell the truth all the time. I asked a few people about this value recently, in terms of, you know, don't cheat or steal. And they asked the question like, What about you know, in compliance issues, if you're running overweight, or, you know, there's, there's all kinds of nuance in the business where, you know, you've loaded too much material came out of the bin. And now, and now, what you know, I think I have a, I've communicated a fairly, a fair bit about this in terms of, you know, one offs are? We understand one offs. You know, there's going to be a mistake, but if you find something systemic is likely not intentional, but we may just not even know as a team what to do. So, so how would you, how would you talk about these, these issues that seem could be seen as problematic?

John-Mark 12:57
First of all, one, we want to hear about it. Hey, if there's, if there's an overweight issue, for example, somewhere in the company, and we're doing it consistently, we'd like to hear about it, and we want to, we actually want to improve and action and and figure out how we can do it better. There's always ways to make it better. And I actually think it's just, it's it this will get into our next value. But like we just, we want to, we want to own these things and work at them like we'll hear about thumb sucking in the next one. But so I would call that thumb sucking, if we know about something and we're not doing anything about

Travis Klassen 13:41
it, that's it for this episode of the value Creators Podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, make sure to check out previous episodes. Each one offers a unique look at how we create value together, one conversation at a time. On behalf of the support team. I'm Travis Klassen. Thanks for listening. We'll talk soon. You