24. Celebrate Success and Learn from Failures

Our final values episode! Andrea and Griff talk about the opportunity that comes from failure and how we celebrate success. 

https://hahnrmg.com/about/values

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to Loaded, the Hawn Ready Mix Podcast with Andrea Meyer, Griffin Hahn, and producer Lex. Hey everyone.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

How's it going?

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Great. Really good. How about you?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Doing good. Looking forward to this weekend. We're doing with Lucas, my youngest, we're doing the potty training immersion weekend.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

When you like porky pig it, you know, with no pants and and uh put them on the toilet every hour. It's gonna be awful.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

That sounds really fun. Really fun. We are enjoying our last weekends of summer before school starts and all the sports and activities start. So we're just taking it very easy. I actually have friends who are moving from Colorado to Washington, D.C. with the Air Force. So they're traveling through town this weekend and staying with us. So fun. They apparently watched a documentary about the River Bandits Stadium and are really excited to go to a game.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Great. I didn't I had like have the heart to tell them that I I may have been to a couple River Bandits games, but not it has won awards like for like best minor league stadium a couple times or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

They're excited about it, so that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Cool. Cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

What announcements do you have this week?

SPEAKER_00 1:23

I have a few, one really big one. DJ over in Geneseo took third place at the inaugural Illinois Ready Mix Concrete Association truck rodeo, and he got first place in one of the events, which is a huge deal that he got third place.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

It's crazy. I don't want to be offensive to any of our other truck rodeo road rodeo participants, but I had almost given up hope on us ever placing in a truck rodeo.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Well, and it's what's even more wild is this is the first one in Illinois, right? So you got to think that everybody sent the best of the best.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

This was their first try, and they sent whoever they thought could win it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah. And yeah, so it's really impressive. Really impressive. So congrats. Some other things. We have some upcoming work starting. I wanted to give everybody a heads up on Stewart Road in Muscatine. Next week they're going to start moving dirt. So we're probably about a month out before we start putting concrete out down on that job. That's a big job. So we're excited about that. And then getting started in East Moline with Valley on that paving job uh next week as well. So two nice size jobs we'll be starting up and and yeah, it's exciting.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

That is all good news. Yeah. More good news coming up soon. The chippers are on their way here, I think. By the time this podcast comes out, they should be here. And I think that's a nice reset for everyone to get their drums cleaned out, but we really need to do a better job of maintaining that going forward. I've seen a few uh pictures and videos of trucks that are just trashed on the inside, and I think we can do better than what I'm seeing right now.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Another truck uh specific topic is I had to do some cleanup and maintenance in our um Fluidio software that the mechanics use to track issues in trucks. So I deleted a bunch of old stuff that was out there. So if you have a lingering truck issue, it would be a good idea to report that again. Um we just had a lot of redundant issues coming through, and the mechanics were confused about what was done and what was not done. So we cleared that out. We're sort of starting fresh. So if you have something out there that hasn't been addressed, try again. And then we have had some interesting calls from customers lately, some good and some not so good. So they will sometimes call in and tell us, like, oh, this driver did such a great job for us, and they just want to let us know. And we always love to hear that and try to share that with everyone. We've also had a couple recently where someone's calling in to complain about a driver, and we always keep an open mind about that, you know, because there's two sides of every story. So I've had a chance to talk to a couple drivers, and in a couple of these situations, it was a job site gone wrong before we ever got there. Yeah. And I just wanted to remind everyone it's never a bad idea to let dispatch know or let Sheldon know when you pull up to something that looks rough. You know, if they're not ready, if they don't have the people they need to do the job, if they're, you know, spraying water right away, you know, just the things that you know are a telltale sign that this is gonna be sketchy. Yeah. Let somebody know so we can check on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

I can think of a couple of jobs that I come to mind of extreme examples of that. I went to look at a homeowner, um, called me out and said their driver, the driver messed all this up and in this job, they poured a driveway without forms. So they just dumped it on the ground and tried to smooth it out. And it's like there's nothing that we could have done to make this right. This is not the driver problem. Uh and then of course, there's the the infamous uh uh golden corral situation. Yes. Yeah. Which uh where they were trying to use a squeegee to finish concrete. So a broom from the kitchen.

unknown 5:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

So if you if you come upon something that you know is is a disaster, let us know so we can can help you out out there.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

All right, should we get started?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

I have a couple other small announcements.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

One, that we've had some reports of some people driving around with their strobes on. Um so make sure you're you're not doing that. That's uh against the rules. That's one. The other thing I wanted to celebrate.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

The law.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

The law. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

You can get pulled over. Yes. And then they'll do a whole GOT inspection or or worse.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So Right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Off-road only for strobes.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yes. I wanted to celebrate something, which is a little bit of a foreshadowing. Okay. Uh occasionally I look at our rejected load data, and we talked about this in an early episode of this podcast. And our kind of company target is 0.4%. We want to be under 0.4%. And we have not been able to hit that target. And year to date right now, we're at 0.408. So we're literally right on the line there. So we're doing a really good job on rejected loads. And and just if we keep focusing and keep up the effort, we're definitely going to get there at the end of the year. We had one kind of out of our hands situation that re led to a large number of loads early this spring. So if you take that out of it, we're we're we're well in inside our goal. So yeah, we'll just keep that up.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Great. Yes, that is very nice foreshadowing to our topic of the day, which is celebrating success and learning from failures.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Our last value episode.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

I'm I'm celebrating that myself.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

We will have some more flexibility with the podcast after that, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:00

So as I was thinking about this, the word failure was hard for me. I think that's a pretty strong word. And I think of it more as mistakes, right? It's it's hardly, it's it's pretty rare that we actually completely fail. But there are times where we make mistakes. And I think we're have really focused on learning from mistakes, rehashing tough situations, and getting better from it.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

I like that you made a segue from the word failure to mistake, because the quote that I have for today.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Of course. I would never set you up for this.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

You definitely did not know this was coming. This is from Henry Ford, who started Ford Company.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Are we in the right century then at least?

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah, I think this was like nine. No, we're not. No. No. We're we're almost within a century. But Henry Ford said the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing, which is exactly what you're saying, but from somebody more important. So you don't agree? Lex is offended by that. Henry Ford. Yeah. So yeah, I I agree that you know the most valuable experiences in life a lot of times are failures. And no one gets it right 100% of the time. So we have to learn from those. You know, you hear the thing, uh, the best uh baseball players in the world, you know, hit the ball 30% of the time.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

A baseball reference from you too.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

That hurt me actually. But anyway, yeah, so failures are a lot of times our biggest opportunity because it gives us a chance to improve, gives us a chance to start again more intelligently, gives us a chance to um to do things different and better.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah, my favorite failures come from when we try something and we don't know if it's going to work or not. And I love to love to try something new. I hate to keep doing say things the same way over and over again. So even when you try something new and it doesn't work out, I still always feel like it's worth it.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Do you have any examples of that?

SPEAKER_01 9:09

I have so many examples of that.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Well, let's talk about some real world examples of of when we've failed and what we've learned from it.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah. Uh we have failed many times with technology and different software programs, processes. You know, you don't know if it works until you try it. And we try it, and sometimes they're great and sometimes they're not.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

We've talked about it before with the probes and different, just different programs that didn't quite turn out how we thought they would, but it was still worth it to go through the process.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

I was thinking about some of my bigger, like personal mistakes, missteps that I've taken in uh in business. One of them that was definitely the most costly for the company was when we were quoting the I-74 bridge project, and it was trying to make things, I had good intentions, I was trying to make things easy for the contractor and for us, and quoted a flat rate for liquid nitrogen. And that was a huge learning experience for me, uh a chance to get better from a mistake, because we had a contractor that took advantage of that and asked for basically colder concrete using more liquid nitrogen at that same kind of flat rate, because I had said we're gonna average it out no matter how much nitrogen we use, you get this same rate. So from that experience, when we've had to quote things that are of a variable nature, we have avoided flat rates in the future to kind of protect us from that situation happening again. And you know, it helps that we can tell that story and say this is why we do it this way, because we can't predict how much of something you might need. And um, so that's that was a valuable experience for me and and changed a little bit how we quote things. Um, so that was one. And then I had another one. We had a job with a really good customer where we had some service issues on the job. And our or the foreman on the job definitely overplayed how bad the service issues were to his boss who called for a meeting to talk about it. But there were service issues. And so I went in with a really defensive posture to that meeting. I had a printout of exactly how many minutes, you know, looked at GPS fixes, you know, how long they had gaps in their service, and and handed that over, and he promptly crumpled it up and threw it away and said, that's this isn't it.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Your facts don't change how I feel about this experience.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Correct. So I learned a lot from that, that like that strategy was a total like it it really damaged our relationship for a while. Um, because that didn't work. That was not what they needed to hear from us. That is not how uh we should have responded in that situation. We needed to say, listen, we didn't meet your expectations, and we're gonna talk about how we can do better and what we should do differently, and kind of come with a curious and and open mind instead of a defensive, you know, I'm not saying we shouldn't ever stand up for ourselves, and there, but there probably was more tactful ways that could have done that than what I did. So yeah, the lessons can be the most or failures can be the most valuable lessons by far.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Those are those are good examples. I thought of a couple other, you know, more basic level examples where I feel like we're still learning. Yeah. Uh, you know, rejected loads due to water valves is something that we have gone around and around and around with. Yeah. And I don't know that our current solution is perfect. I mean, I know that it's not perfect, but I do think we learned that the valves that we had before were left on. Yes. And then we switched.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

In the winter, yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

So even the most simple basic mistakes or failures like that, we spend quite a bit of time talking through them each day. Yeah. And saying, what if we try this? You make a little adjustment. And it it's hard, you know, it's hard to switch water valves on a hundred different trucks in a bunch of different locations. But we try it and we see if we get better results from it.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

And then I like that when we have a major failure, we huddle up and do it kind of a post-mortem and say, what went wrong? How do we change our process to stop this from happening again? That's how we get better. So I think that's important. And we do many of those. I would, you know, or every day we have the three o'clock operations meeting. Some of you might not know that. Our management team gets together and we look ahead at um the next few days and make sure we have materials and mixed designs right and everything. The way we start that meeting, well, first of all, we start with what went right, and we make sure to celebrate and recognize, you know, when things went well. But then we go through, okay, do we have a rejected load? What was the cause of it? Have, you know, do we have any customer complaints or customer appreciation, you know, both ways. So we really do some celebration and and and pass that on when it's for our frontline folks. But we also do those postmortems and we say, well, what can we learn from what didn't go right today? And that happens every day. So it's not always a huge, long discussion, but there's little bits, little incremental improvements that can be made from learning those lessons every day.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Yeah, I think we've really improved in another area as far as reviewing mistakes. We for a while were, I think, too hard on ourselves. We we beat ourselves up or beat each other up sometimes and in blaming things or, you know, trying to really nail down who was responsible for what part of the failure. And I think we've really improved in that where everybody is on the same page and we're really just trying to work together to avoid the same kind of mistake again.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Give us credit, celebrate for that.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Nice. Well, let's talk about celebration. We've talked a lot about failure.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

So let's talk about celebrate. So why? Why do we celebrate? What's the purpose of that?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

I think it's easy to forget to celebrate because when things are going right, that's how we expect them to go. And it I think Steve Ott through our leadership training kind of brought it to the forefront for us in saying if if if we're not celebrating, we're missing an opportunity to to feel good, to make other people feel good, to build on that success. And as we've been paying more attention to it, I've really seen it play out well.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah. Well, I think it's about reminding people that their work matters. Yeah. And and doing a a good job or going above the expectations is what we would like to see happen. So we need to make sure those people are recognized and and feel appreciated when they do that. Or when we try, you know, it it's often people and that should be our focus. But sometimes it's we should be appreciative and celebrate when if a software you know platform works out, we should be like, this is great, and and the those people that have worked on that should be celebrated for it. But it can be any part of the business that is going well. We should it's easy to get bogged down by what doesn't go well because that is our focus.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Yeah, it definitely pulls all of your attention to it, you know, whether it's truck getting stuck or we ran over some tools or something goes wrong, but you can focus all of your attention on that, but you don't think about the rest of the day where hundreds of trucks were out there in really tough spots and did a great job.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yeah. Well, we want to reinforce the positive behaviors and actions, right? Yeah. Cool. Well, and so a little bit about how we celebrate, that's people have probably noticed in pailosity. We've had a big push towards journaling this year.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

And some of us more than others.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Yeah. I mean, I'll admit I'm I'm not doing great in the same thing. Both of you have guilty looks on your face, right? So the journaling though is so important though when we hear about somebody that's done something right or that has gone above and beyond, that we gotta celebrate it. And that's a great way to do it to make sure that not only you can make it so everybody can see it and or just share it with whoever the target of that appreciation is. But that's been, you know, we've been using journaling for corrective behavior and for celebration. I would say 90% of the journaling has been, you know, positive.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah, I I really like that. I I like using it myself, but what I really like is I can see what other managers say to drivers or other employees, and then I can comment on it. I really like having that opportunity to chime in and say, Yeah wow, I didn't I may have never known that this happened, and they're journaling it, and I get to also show my appreciation. What are your favorite ways to celebrate?

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Favorite ways to celebrate. Well, I think my you know, obviously journaling is I'm I haven't been the best at that.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

But so that's not your favorite.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

I really you know, we've talked about before, I really like face-to-face um communication. So my favorite way is to tell someone that I know did a good job, like, hey, nice work out there.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yeah, and then even better when you recap that face-to-face conversation in a journal.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

That's where I can that's where I can improve. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

I think we also like to celebrate with uh food and drinks, right? That's uh always good. I hear conflicting thoughts about that, though. It's like a joke on the concrete mixer uh Facebook groups or whatever that the company tries to smooth things over with the pizza party. But I think I think it's generally well received around here. So maybe we're maybe we're due for a celebration.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

I can only speak for myself, but I like food. I don't know if that's profound or not.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

But let us know. I guess that's a that's a that's a follow-up to this podcast, is for people to let us know how they would like to celebrate.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Do you have any closing thoughts for this is the last of our values series, as we said. Do you have any closing thoughts as we kind of wrap all of this up together in a in a bow? We've had what is it, 12 episodes on values now.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

12 episodes is quite a bit. My I admittedly burnt out on writing the values when we were doing it, and I uh applaud you for sticking through it and getting something that we feel good about. I think that's that's my closing thought on it is I do really feel like when we are our best, we are doing all of these things. And I think we're every day getting better at doing that.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Yeah, I agree. I really like having these values so visible everywhere because they can kind of be a compass for us to say I'm okay, I'm in a I'm in a quandary. I don't know how to make a decision that's put in front of me, and we can look to these values to help help guide us and and make sure we're doing things the way that we want to you know act as a team. And um and and I think if we uh we follow these values, we're going to find success. We're going to work well as a team, we're going to be um good to our customers, we're going to create continue to make quality products, be good stewards um of the company and and good for our communities. So that's all really important. That's why we're here. And this all kind of identifies the why and the how of how we're gonna engage with each other, with our partners outside our company and and with the communities we serve. So yeah, just keep the value. I mean, we're gonna transition off the values, but always just keep them in mind and take a second if you pass the sign to to look at them and just kind of digest that a little bit every single time. Because I think it can be powerful.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Do we have a loaded question?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

I think we had some sent in to us and you put out the call. There's one decent one from Sheldon that I put out. That was actually from Kelsey.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Okay. Loaded question today is from Kelsey through Sheldon, which is which is great. If you have a loaded question, you can send it in through Sheldon or uh send us a message. This question is to Griffin. What is your view of the direction and future view of the company?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

I'm really happy with the direction we're going uh as a company. I think that we're more in lockstep organizationally than we have been in my whole time here. And I think that you're seeing the fruits of that on the relationships that we have with our customers, the relationships we have with our team members. I think we're in a really strong position. Certainly everybody's aware that the economic situation is very weak right now, and that makes things a lot more challenging. And obviously, our ability to invest. In new equipment or or grow and those things are somewhat contingent on the amount of work we do. And there's just not a lot of work out there. So there's no question that it's a challenge right now, but I think we're we're poised to do really well. Like we're in the position that as soon as the things that are kind of outside of our control kind of turn back in the right direction, we'll be off off the block like a sprinter and and and really doing well. So I'm really bullish about where we're going as a company and our long-term prospects. And I think that economic situation will turn around, you know, within within a year here, that it's gonna be a lot stronger, just anecdotal anecdotally from things we hear. So yeah, I I couldn't be prouder of of what we've all built together. And I I'm excited for the future, really. Um and and so we're gonna do it together and and we'll work hard. It's gonna be a lot of work, it always is. Everything worth doing is is takes a lot of work. But we have the right people here to be a massive success. And you know, we want to grow the company, so that'll that'll bring new challenges and new opportunities. And I'm excited for all that.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Good. Thanks for the loaded question.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah, thanks, Kelsey.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

All right, thanks for listening to Loaded the Han Ready Mix podcast. Share this episode with your friends. Tune in next week. Something exciting, not more values, something totally different. So we'll talk to you next week.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Thanks, everybody.