Imagine a $100 million company losing $20 million a year, cycling through four CEOs in two years, and plagued by a toxic, hierarchical culture. This was the reality Mitch Luciano stepped into at Trailer Bridge in 2014. Conventional wisdom suggests a hard-nosed approach, but Mitch had a different strategy—one based on the LEAP framework: cultivating Love, generating Energy, inspiring Audacity, and providing Proof. He focused on making the people happy first, trusting that everything else, from customer relationships to financial success, would follow. In this exclusive interview, Mitch shares the inspiring story of how building genuine trust, starting with a simple ice machine, transformed Trailer Bridge into a perennial “Best Place to Work”—proving that love in business isn’t just a “nice to have,” it’s the ultimate competitive advantage.
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The Radical Leap: How A CEO Turned Trailer Bridge From A Toxic, Losing Company Into A “Best Place To Work” With Mitch Luciano
Introduction Of The Radical Leap Framework And Trailer Bridge
Welcome to season 3, episode 3 of the show. We’re starting season 3 with a special series of episodes of conversations that I’ve had with some really extraordinary, extreme leaders. These are people who put The Radical Leap framework into practice every day, and by that, I mean they cultivate Love, they generate Energy, they inspire Audacity, and they provide Proof in the way they lead their various organizations.
My first book, The Radical Leap, came out just over twenty years ago, which is a pretty significant milestone, and we’re celebrating that milestone through this series of special interviews and also through the offering of a free copy of the audiobook of The Radical Leap, which is yours for the taking at RadicalLeap.org. I’m confident you’ll enjoy these great conversations, so let’s get started.
Mitch is the CEO of Trailer Bridge, which is a shipping logistics company in Jacksonville, Florida. I am wearing their hat right now, I’m sporting the logo. He is an extraordinary leader, he’s a great human being, and has a really inspiring story to tell about the turnaround that he stepped into at Trailer Bridge years ago. So, Mitch, thanks so much for being here with me.
Steve, it’s good to be with you again, and I’m looking forward to having this conversation.
Thank you. Let’s start with just give us the high level of Trailer Bridge. Here’s the journey I’d like us to take over the next hour or so. High level of what Trailer Bridge is, what the company is, and then the story about your entrée into that company and then what happened going forward. Just one other thing before we start. In full transparency, we’re having some issues on the back end of this with our producer. Something happened, he’s not here.
I’m piloting this thing, and I have, technically speaking, no idea what I’m doing. One of the things that would happen right now is you would see a URL, and the URL would be RadicalLeap.org. The reason that’s important is, in celebration of this 20th-year anniversary of The Radical Leap, we’re giving away a free download of the audiobook of The Radical Leap. I would encourage you to go and download it, and I can live in your ear while you listen to the book. Mitch, sorry about that. Tell us about Trailer Bridge.
Trailer Bridge’s History And CEO Turnover
Trailer Bridge started as a company servicing Puerto Rico from the United States back in 1991, 1992 technically first sailing was 1992 and evolved over the years. It grew from a small 1-barge-a-week to 2-barges-a-week. New ownership took over back in 2011. It was coming out of bankruptcy, that’s why the new ownership took it over. I actually joined in 2012 after having a career of starting different logistics companies. I joined to take a break. That was my goal. “I’m just going to take a break. I’m just going to be part of a logistics company.”
You mean to take a break from leading a company? You mean to be part of the team instead of being the guy?
Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. That was my goal. There were challenges in my personal life that I wanted to focus on. That was the goal at the time in 2012. Exactly two years later, November of 2014, the board, the shareholders came to me because we had four ceos in two years.
I believe they call that turnover.
CEO’s Radical Shift To A People-First Focus
It was a lot. I built a relationship with them, and they asked me to take over. I was like, “Let’s do this. I’ve been here long enough. Incredible people were here.” I knew that. Unfortunately, the people that had led before didn’t really get to know them. I had the fortune, I think, because of the role I was in, I got to know the people a little bit closer than a typical new CEO might. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t, but they like to stay in an office and hide. We weren’t doing very well. A $100 million company losing $20-plus million a year.
I took it over just knowing that I believed the shareholders were going to support the growth, and we fortunately just started plugging away. I would tell you those first three years, and I share this story a lot, is it was about the people. I said, “I don’t care about the customers. I don’t care about the shareholders,” if my shareholders are reading right now, they’d probably be pissed. “They will be happy. I can’t care about that right now. I’ve got to care about the people, and once the people are happy, it all comes together.”
You’ve got to care about the people, and once the people are happy, everything comes together. Share on XOkay, now let me just press pause there for a second because you would think that by now, that focus on people would not be a radical thought. Given the history of Trailer Bridge at that time, that was a pretty radical approach, wasn’t it? In other words, it wasn’t a people-focused place before that.
No, it was a definite hierarchy. I sat in plenty of board meetings where I heard some C-suite people taking credit for work that others did, and it just drove me crazy. There was definitely a hierarchy, and you better understand it, and if you had an idea and if it was a good idea, they were going to take ownership of it. If it was a bad idea, they were going to tell you it’s your bad idea. It was just one of those toxic places. I felt it when I was at a VP level. It took time.
You had said something early on, and I’m going to come back to this. You had said something early on about it just confirms what people already believe or something new they’ve learned through the book. I read the book. I have the original copy that you showed. I would have brought it if I had known that we were going to be comparing original copies. I read it in 2006 as a gift from Jeff Vaughn, a good friend and the Chief Commercial Officer here at Trailer Bridge. It confirmed what we had done in previous companies but also gave me new ideas about how it really has to be done every day.
I’ll come back to 2014 and 2015 when I was telling them, “This is something we have to do every single day.” after four ceos, people are going to look for something. They’re going to want to find the nick in the armor somewhere. You can’t go stopping through the office. You better have a smile. When you say hello, you better stop and say hello and how are they doing? It was really, really important. It took three years. It was until the end of 2017, beginning of 2018 where we really started seeing the results change.
The stream that you stepped into. You came in as part of the executive team. They’d been through four ceos in two years. Again, I just want to reiterate that because that’s I’m just trying to imagine that from an employee or an associate’s perspective. They got to know you a little bit because you were in that other role. When the board came to you and said, “Okay, your turn, you’re the next CEO,” I would imagine that there was a bit of an attitude that I pictured as collective eye-rolling.
Actually, how it worked was they offered me the role of president. There was still an interim CEO that had a contract through March of 2015. He was let go. I reported to the board and he reported to the board. Once he was let go, they asked me to be the CEO. I told them no. They said, “What do you mean?” I was like, “You guys don’t want a CEO right now. These people, they don’t want to see a CEO, they’re just going to think it’s the next man in, next man out, next person in, person out, woman in, woman out.” I was like, “Just let me be the president.”
It was December of 2015, they said, “We want you to have a seat on the board.” I was like, “Perfect, I’ll be number seven. I’ll be a deciding factor in these things.” They said, “You have to be the CEO.” I actually walked out of the board meeting telling them I had to think about it. At the time, my CFO and I were walking down Park Avenue in New York City, and he looked over at me and he goes, “I just have one piece of advice for you.”
I said, “What’s that?” He goes, “If you don’t take it, they’re going to bring in somebody else, and you’ll have to report to somebody else.” I was like, “I didn’t think about that.” I immediately called the chairman of the board and I said, “I accept the role of CEO.” That’s how that played out because I knew, again, that title itself, exclusive of me, just the title alone, just had an eyes rolling moment. I knew it would.
You mentioned this a couple of minutes ago. You had to immediately establish a different relationship with the team. This was how many people at that time? How big was Trailer Bridge?
One hundred and ten.
All pretty much under the same roof, or mostly under the same roof?
Mostly on the same roof.
How did you establish a begin to set a new precedent as to what the relationship is between the CEO and the rest of the team?
Well, the end result needed to be trust. There had to be trust. One of the challenges with previous leadership was the lack of following up on what you’re going to do, “Do what you say you’re going to do,” DWYSYWD. That was the beginning of it. If I said I was going to do something, I had to do it. If we said we were going to do something as leadership, we had to do it. No questions asked. If we couldn’t do it for some reason, we had to explain why. Not, “We just couldn’t do it.” That was a typical answer previously.
We had to establish trust. With trust is getting to know my family, getting to know my kids my kids would come by having little company events like a beach event or something where the families would get together, getting to know them and truly listening, like genuinely listening. Not looking through them, but hearing what they’re saying. What may be small and minute to me may be really important to somebody else. I don’t know that I would have this much energy into this, but it’s not my life.
I better give it the energy they want. It was tough at first. It was a lot of energy being burned, but it was worth it because not only have I built bonds, I’ve built friendships with people that, employees I text on the weekend or I don’t know how many of them this morning text me this morning, said, “Good luck this morning, we’re thinking of you, love you, love you, man.” It’s right there as the greatest example. It just means the world to me.
There’s so much in there to unpack, as we like to say nowadays but what do you say to the conventional wisdom, which I think is still prevailing wisdom in a lot of companies, that says a CEO should not do that? That you need to keep a very clear delineation between work and home? That friendships get in the way of effective leadership? What do you say to that from your experience?
I’ve had a few posts on linkedin over the years talking about love and referencing your book at times, and I’ve had plenty of people comment that there’s no such thing as love in business. I’ve had the comment, because I refer to, “We’re family.” You cannot call it a family. The reason I believe it’s that way is they’re afraid to hurt the feelings of somebody when they have to make a difficult decision. I believe that CEO is more protecting themselves than the company.
I just think that, you’re going to have to make tough decisions sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love them. There are times we don’t like our family, but I still love them. I think we all anyone that’s listening to this can relate. I think it’s a protectionism for that individual, and that’s what they’re going to have to let go of. Let it go.
The challenge that you had was to establish trust, and you said you burned a lot of energy in those early days. What do you mean by that?
It was making sure you’re early, making sure you’re staying late I think my schedule now is a little bit different than it used to be. I’m a CEO. I still have a job to do while at the same time, I have to give the energy to the people because in the beginning, I said, “It’s about the people.” They’re the ones that are doing the job, getting in the weeds and getting it done every day for our company, our customers, our vendors. It’s talking to them.
When they come into the office and they say “Do you have five minutes?” You know it’s going to be twenty, and you’re okay with that. You get away from your computer you don’t look at it, you turn towards them that takes a lot of energy. I know that empathy is a word I’ve seen used in some of your books. I’m more of a compassion because I think the only reason I say that is being empathetic is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. I was very empathetic in the beginning, and it took a lot. It was draining because I really put myself in the shoes of, “This is horrible. We’ve got to pay the power bill, we’re going to have to do this, and we have to do this.”
I started switching to compassion. I’m still empathetic at times, but I’m like, “I’ve got compassion for them, and I understand what they’re going through because I may have gone through it myself at one point in my life, but I can’t fix everything.” sometimes people have to fix their own challenges, whether personal or professional. It just took energy. Nothing successful doesn’t take a lot of energy. I’ve never met anyone who succeeded in anything and said, “That was a piece of cake.”
Sometimes people have to fix their own challenges, whether personal or professional. It just takes energy. Nothing successful comes without a lot of energy. Share on XNo, it drains you because then you go home. You have a sit-down dinner with your family, and your kids, they’re just seeing you for the first time really because you left early. Now you’ve got to give them the energy. I struggled with that at first, but then I got it back over time. It took a little while, but I had to learn how to balance the two of them.
It makes sense given the goal was to establish trust because trust is something that’s built over time. It’s not built in an instant. It’s doing what you say you will do over and over again. It takes time to establish a track record of doing what you say you will do. What’s so challenging about that is it could take years sometimes to build that trust and that expenditure of energy to make that happen, like you described, and it could be destroyed in an instant.
It could be something really small too. It doesn’t have to be something big that destroys it.
It’s built with really small things. If you think back to those days where you were first establishing that trust as the new CEO and challenging yourself to do what you say you will do, do you remember any specifics of things that you said and then consciously followed through on simply because you said them?
Establishing Trust With Small Acts Like Ordering An Ice Machine
There’s several. The very first one, I’ll never forget the very first one. It started by changing the town hall. We have a monthly town hall. The town halls used to be, you know get a piece of paper, the CEO stood there and just talked. Had four topics I want to talk about no questions, nothing. We changed the town hall to allowing them to provide suggestions. We had 8 or 10 slides about the company. What’s going on, are we making any changes, what’s the performance like? One of the suggestions was, very first one, “Can we get an ice machine?” We didn’t have an ice machine. I know it sounds dumb, but we didn’t have one. I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.”
You’re in Florida. You got to have an ice machine.
Right. It’s hot. They want the famous crunchy ice you get from like Sonic and Chick-fil-A stuff. That was their goal. When I said yes, I made a bad assumption that someone would just make that happen instead of asking somebody to make it happen. A couple days go by, and I start asking, “Has anyone ordered the ice machine?” They’re like, “No.” I’m like, “Okay.” I went online, I ordered the ice machine, and it got delivered. I ordered absolutely the wrong ice machine. I did not get the proper ice.
We fixed that since. We’ve got the proper ice now. I think really a lot of that trust got established in the town halls because sometimes the suggestions were things that came across for some as ridiculous. They said, “We shouldn’t put this in the town hall.” I was like, “We’re putting every single suggestion that comes across in the town hall.”
Were you hearing that from the leadership team in particular?
A couple of the people that knew what was on the board, the town hall slides. They’re like, “This is crazy, we don’t need to add this one. We already know the answer.” I go, “No, but it’s important enough for someone to write it down, and so I need to address it.” I would address it. I think that helped build trust. If the answer was no, I’d give a reason, if the answer was yes, I’d make sure we follow up. That helped build trust. It’s actually a point where we get to the town hall slide, and the whole company, I can hear it over the video, I can hear it at corporate, they’re like, “Here we go. What’s coming up next?”
We all enjoy it now, and I think it’s built trust amongst us that they’re comfortable enough to say what they want to say, as long as it’s not rude to others. That’s a big point. It can’t be rude to others. I’m not going to address that stuff. We got some crazy ones, but we all get a kick out of it, and that helped build trust. I think when we say we’re going to have a meeting, we have a meeting.
I’ve had the experience of senior leadership would always cancel a meeting last minute, “I’ve got more important things to do.” Well, you just said that your stuff is more important than hanging out with us or doing something with us, and you got to follow through on that. We have a Building Bridges, which is a mentoring program, and just a discussion really program. I’ve had to tell my people, I said, “Guys, I know this is last minute, I am so, so sorry, but we’re going to have this, just not going to be at 11.00 today. Let’s see if we can reschedule this.”
There are times it happens, but at the same time it’s little things like that that really go a long way. Trust is more than just saying hello to somebody, it’s caring about them, caring about their family. We had a lady, and she knows. She knows exactly who she is, that she was doing a bang-up job for us on something.
Trust is more than just saying hello to somebody; it’s caring about them and caring about their family. Share on XShe told me one day that her granddaughter loves to read books. Instead of getting her a gift, I got her granddaughter a gift. I got her a Kindle so she can read books electronically. She’s an amazing person and she was just so thankful. That meant more to her than me giving her a gift card somewhere. It’s those things. That means I was listening and paying attention.
If you dive into what made that possible, it might sound like I’m stating the obvious, but this is not obvious to some people. In order for you to buy that Kindle for her granddaughter, you had to know that her granddaughter loved to read.
It’s because she told me.
She told you because you cared to know. If you lived in your office and only were as some so-called leaders that I’ve met over the years do, they lurk in their cave until something goes wrong and then they emerge like a dragon, spewing fire to burn the people that screwed up and then retreat back into their cave. If you’re that person, again, sounds obvious, you’re never going to know because you don’t care. Unless somebody tells you.
No one’s going to tell you because they don’t want to be burned. They’re not going to say anything to you.
Exactly. I’m harping on this a little bit, this doing what you say you will do thing, because for one thing, I’m right in the midst of writing a book about that very thing right now. It’s really top of mind for me. It’s really about track record. I’ll get up on my soapbox here just for a second. My mentors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner the authors of The Leadership Challenge, have done all kinds of work on credibility, they have a book called Credibility.
What I learned from Jim when I first met him back in the ‘90s when I joined the Tom Peters Company he was the president is this great analogy that credibility derives from the Latin word “credo,” which means “I believe.” The word “credit,” as in financial credit, comes from that same root. In order to get a loan from a bank, I have to establish a credit record. That’s what a credit report is. Do I have history of paying when I said I will pay? That’s essentially what a credit report is. A bank will make a determination. “Yeah, pretty good, we’ll give you that money.”
If I don’t, then I’m either going to pay a higher interest rate or I’m not going to get the loan. From the very beginning, you were establishing a credit record of sorts, a credibility report, by doing what you say you will do. Ice machine. “If I’ve got to go and order the wrong one myself, I’m going to do that because I said I would, and there it is. It’s right there on my credit report,” as it were, within the eyes of people. You established that track record. Tell me if I’m wrong, but this is what I’m hearing.
You established that track record with a lot of small things and big things over time. In those moments where you say, “Guys, I’m sorry, I can’t make the meeting that I said I was going to be at,” what do they do? They look at your report. They look at your credit report. “No, this guy’s got a history of doing what he says he will do, so of course, no problem, nobody’s perfect, we’ll cut you some slack.” If it happens over and over again, ding on your credit report, your credibility report, then pretty soon you don’t have that grace anymore.
Defining Love And Respect In The Business Context
You’ve got to work in a lot of the small ways and big ways right from the beginning. If you would, could you put that work in the context of love? I know you’ve been very forthright about how love is an intentional thing for you in the way that Trailer Bridge operates. How does all this relate to the love thing?
If you’re asking for people to trust you and you’re asking them to build your credit for you, love comes in so many different ways. I think that’s where people struggle sometimes with this conversation, and you’ve talked about it plenty of times and you and I talked about it and I’ve talked about it internally. It’s not the huggy-kissy. It’s the holding the door open for someone. It’s when you when you come out of the this is going to sound stupid but when you come out of the bathroom and the person is sitting right outside the bathroom at their desk and it’s the first thing you saw them all day and you say “Good morning.”
They say “Good morning” back, and you say “How are you?” You keep eye contact the entire time. That’s love. That’s respect. That’s building trust. I think it’s making sure, for me, going to the port to see the people I lost my badge there for a month or two so I couldn’t go all the time but that was love. It’s when the union strikes you and you ask all your workers to come work the port and work the barge and you’ve got more volunteers than you need. I’m like, “They just gave me love back. They just loved each other. They just loved the whole company.”
You know it’s happening. I think probably one of the most important times is any leader has to make a tough decision sometimes. Whether it’s not necessarily by individuals, but about a process or about a disagreeing with something that’s happening or not agreeing with, whatever you want to call it. At the end of it, people come up to you, they give you a hug and they say, “We trust you, we love you, we know you have our best interests at heart.” Then you know you’ve accomplished something. You know you’ve done your job.
Ultimately, it helps build the foundation for a business that now, and I hear it all the time, “We love working with Trailer Bridge. Holy cow, we love your social media posts, we love the people we work with, we love everything.” They’re not just using “We like,” “We love.” I’m like, “I don’t even know these people, and they love us.”
Are you talking about people who do business with you?
Yeah, vendors, customers. They love us or they love the person they work with and it just, as you say, just goes on and on. It just doesn’t stop right here in the families of our family, they’re happier because the person at work is happier. It just keeps going. I love this place, you know that. I love my people. It takes time, but love builds the rest. To love someone is not difficult. It’s harder to be a jackass than to be nice.
I tell them all the time. “Why? It takes so much work to not be nice than just be nice.” I’ll never forget after one of our leaderships that we had, she’s no longer with us but she had been with us twenty-plus years. One of the things she got out of leadership, I asked her, I said, “Why don’t you just say hello to the cashier at the grocery store? You will change her day.”
She did. She goes, “Mitch, the next time I got the same cashier, I said hello again, we started having a conversation, then the next time I went in again, and now we’re like friends just because I said hello.” Hello is a form of love to a person who’s sitting in the same spot for eight hours doing the exact same thing. How many people are going through there just being rude? I go, “That’s perfect.” It just carries on.
What I’m hearing you say is it’s very simple. We’re not talking about an entirely different approach to people, it’s a basic, kind, caring approach to people. Isn’t it also true that it isn’t always that easy? It’s also very messy. You use the analogy of your it’s not even so much an analogy, but just the example of the family before. Anybody that’s raised kids, I raised teenagers for 25 straight years, so I have some experience with, “I don’t like you today, but I do love you.”
We’ve all had that experience every in every aspect of our lives, and it’s also true at work. One of the ways it shows up is you can have genuine love for two related things and that seems to come in conflict with each other. For example, as the CEO, you better love the company. You have a fiduciary responsibility to that company being successful. If I’m a CEO and I love the company and I genuinely love the people in that company, there are times where those smack up against each other.
Where the things that I need to do, the decisions that I need to make on behalf of the company, can look like I don’t love the people that work here. I’m assuming in the beginning it might have seemed like vice versa to your shareholders. “I’m doing these things because I love the people that work here,” they’re going like, “Why are we spending money on that?” It goes both ways. Sometimes, my love for the customers is going to smack up against my love for the employees and vice versa. I don’t want people to get the impression that this is, “All I got to do is smile and be nice and everything will take care of itself.” That’s a big deal, but then there’s the other stuff that every leader has to deal with, CEO or not.
I 100% agree with you. If the love for my role of the shareholders and the company has to make decisions or love for a customer that is in conflict with the love that some may perceive, if you explain it and you communicate it, I really believe that they will understand it. As long as you’ve built that trust over time. Believe me, you’re right. I don’t know how many times board members or I was in a board meeting they’d be like, “What are you doing?” I go, “You got to give me three years.”
That was our deal. At the end of three years, we started making money, and they were like, “Well, I don’t know why this works, but okay, let’s go for it.” It as long as you explain it, even with the board, when they said “Why are you doing all this?” I said, “Because I need to do this to get to here to get the company to here.” It does start with the love for the company, but this is what I need to do. If you communicate, people will it’s when you don’t communicate, that’s when people fill the gaps with doubts and all these other possible things.
If you communicate, people will respond. It’s when you don’t communicate that people fill the gaps with doubts and other assumptions. Share on XI think you can manage through it, but you have to communicate why. Maybe not to everybody, but the ones that may be feeling the impact. I think they’ll respect you for that. We do. If someone tells me no and they say “Just because.” how many times my children, I say no and they go, “Why?” I go “because,” they go “That’s not an answer. Why?” If you explain it, it doesn’t change from four years old to 70, 80 years old. It’s the same thing.
It’s putting it all on the table, it’s being transparent, it’s explaining to people the reasons behind the decisions that are made, even though it might feel like it hurts. I just want to pull out the focus just for a second because what we weren’t very clear on in this discussion so far is the impact of this approach because what you did mention is that back in the day it was a $100 million company losing $20 million a year and a toxic environment.Let me just ask you. How many times now in your tenure, have you guys been made it onto some a Best Place to Work list?
The Proof Of Culture: Best Place To Work And Resilience
Every year. Except for, in fairness, 2019. I knew we wouldn’t because we were going through changes. In general, people don’t like change. They like consistency. We were going through changes as an organization. Ironically, it was one of the highest-scoring years we ever had in the Best Place to Work, but we didn’t make the list. I don’t know did they just keep us off because we’ve won it for the last several years? We got it again this year. We’ve been on that, and that’s a local one, Jacksonville Business Journal.
We’ve been on Inc. Magazine’s Best Place to Work. This is stuff voted by surveys done by the employees, to the point where at one point, I had our former controller walk in my office and he goes, “Are you going to stand over my shoulder as I fill out this survey?” I go, “Why would I do that?” He goes, “At my last company, the CEO did that to every single employee.” I’m like, “No, I’m going to stay in my office. You do it at home. I don’t care where you do it.” The results come back as a positive experience for the employee.
That is a significant thing from a place with losing money year after year, burning through four ceos in two years, being a toxic place to being Best Place to Work year after year. That’s no small thing. I wanted to make sure that people understood that. Financially, the company’s done incredibly well too, and growth-wise and all that.
Yes. The last couple of years have been difficult for the transportation logistics industry. We’re in the largest freight recession we’ve ever seen probably in 40, 50 years. We are not going anywhere. We’re still here. I’ve delivered that message to the company several times. “We’re strong, we may not be doing as well as we would like, but others are doing worse.”
We just have to stay focused at the goals in front of us. We will get out of this. If you take the ten years, we’ve done really well for the shareholders. We’ve done well for ourselves, for our own personal pocketbooks and the shareholders’ pocketbooks. Last couple years, again, haven’t been great, but we’ll be we’ll kick it in another gear in 2025 and 2026, we’ll see how this takes off again.
For those who think that who put this love thing in the category of, “It’s a nice to have maybe, but really it’s California touchy-feely hooha crap, the soft fluffy stuff,” you and your team, not just Mitch, but the whole Trailer Bridge family, is demonstrating that love has direct and indirect impact on everything from customer relationships as you’ve described before, turnover, Best Place to Work, financial success.
Given what the industry is going through right now, resilience. It’s that foundation. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that foundation of a company where people truly love each other and love the business and love your customers, when you hit those the forces that you can’t control from the outside like a freight recession, for example, you have the resilience to navigate through it and emerge stronger on the other side.
The example I’ll give you is we actually during this freight recession, from a shipment count, grew. The revenues have come down per shipment, so the revenues are pretty flat, but we grew. It’s like, when everyone else is like declining, we’re in growth mode. I’m like, “This is awesome.” this is just a perfect example of how this culture says, “I don’t care what’s happening outside, we’re going to keep happening inside, and we’re just going to keep pushing forward.” when people love where they work, the person on the other end of the phone or email, whatever it is, they feel it too.
We’ve been getting some comments here. We’ve got a few people from Trailer Bridge who are tuned in. There’s one that I’m going to quote for obvious reasons. Reasons will become obvious after I quote it’s from Justin. He says, “Love generates energy, love inspires audacity, and love requires proof.” That’s the LEAP framework, “And it’s this framework through which we can accomplish anything that we set out to do in my experience.”
Obviously, that comes from The Radical Leap. As the author of those words, when I read them and I hear them from people, I can’t even describe what that feels like. The most rewarding thing for me is to see people like the Trailer Bridge family put these things into practice. It’s one thing to write a book about it, it’s another thing to actually do it.
Maybe this is a little self-indulgent, I don’t know, forgive me if it is but could you talk a little bit about your relationship with The Radical Leap? Which, by the way, once again, people could go to RadicalLeap.org and download the audiobook for free. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with the book and what, if any, influence it had on your thinking?
Mitch Luciano’s Confirmation Of Core Beliefs By The Radical Leap
The framework in which the book was written and the which it’s read connected with me in ways I’m not a big believer of the “six principles of a leader” stuff like that. I’m like, “There’s only six? All right, great, I didn’t know that, I’ll get these six down, I’m good to go.” The frameworks were written and in which I put myself inside the story of you and Edge. I put myself there. I’m like, “I’m feeling this. I’m feeling sitting at the diner or doing those different things.” I’m like, “This is pretty cool.”
I’ve done that in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just figured I was just being kind. I was like, “Wait a second. I’m actually loving these people,” which then creates energy. I did this and on the other side of this wall right here is a guy I hired in 2002. The energy in our office was so high. We were young and dumb, so audacious was easy to do because we didn’t know anything different and wrong. Our proof was in, for us at the time, it was in the P&L. That’s what the proof was or the results of getting new customers every day.
I was like, “I’ve been doing this.” the way it connected in the actions I had taken through my career to that point resonated with me because I went, “This works.” It’s worked for others. It worked for you to write the book, you had to feel this somewhere. I knew it had to work for you.” if I just kept carrying that out, it just ironically kept working. Not specifically in every 4 steps or maybe it’s 2 of the 4 or 3 of the 4 or 1 of the 4, it just kept working.
You have to connect with some people just want the proof. All right, let’s get to them. Some people just want the energy. Great. Let’s get to that. You know, others want, some don’t even want, “Don’t talk to me about the love part. I’ll take the other three all day long.” it resonated with me in leading people that everyone wants something within them. It’s your job to find out what that something is.
Everyone wants something within them. It’s your job to find out what that something is. Share on XIt may be they just need the energy, they just need the excitement around the job and that’s what they want to feel and they will get love out of that or they will get something out of that or some people just love, listen, I’ve got plenty of people in this family that love being audacious all the time. You’re like, “Calm down with the audaciousness. I love it, but like,” and that’s what they need for themselves. It’s a way to help people, I think from a leader it helped me help people grow. It helped me lead them and coach them, mentor them to become better than they thought they could be.
What I’m hearing in that. First of all, just by way of context for people that have that are unfamiliar with the book, it’s written as a novel, it’s written as a story. When you talk about you saw yourself in the story, that’s the delivery mechanism of the LEAP framework. What I’m also hearing is it’s not like you had this successful career before coming to Trailer Bridge and until you read this book, you were an a**hole.
It’s not like you read this book and suddenly there was this grand epiphany that said, “I’ve been doing it all wrong.” What I’m hearing is what you read was “I’ve been doing a lot of things really right and maybe not as intentionally as I could have.” Really all this did, again, like we said early on in this conversation, was really a confirmation of what was already there. Is that a fair assessment?
I think so. I think if I go back twenty-plus years, people would say that about me. It was a confirmation, but also allowed me to how do I get better because as a leader, you have to continuously get better. I think one of the things that Trailer Bridge gave me was a was the opportunity to lead a very diverse group which I had never done previously. It allowed me to extend those beliefs into different cultures, different societies, and different areas of the country. That was probably the biggest honor I could have had and I still have to this day. Have and do have.
I don’t want to just let this go because in my experience, the people who have really put The Radical Leap into practice in significant ways, and people like yourself and other guests we’ll have here in the future, all fit into that category. I’m trying to think is if there’s any one of them that experienced some a big conversion from being a jackass as you said earlier to being a love person? No, I think every single one of them, it was really in the confirmation category. Which is really lovely because what that says to me is that, maybe I’m totally wrong, maybe I’m completely naive about this, but that’s really more the norm.
I would say it’s more norm. I think you have to have a good heart, a good soul, you have to have some level of care for others. You have to be somewhat unselfish. We all have to be selfish at times, we have to take care of ourselves, but you have to be somewhat unselfish. I think those are the individuals that connect more.
I’m not saying others don’t, and so they’re right on the brink of it. They’re already experiencing it but they can’t define it. They’ve been told, “Why do you care so much about that employee?” They’re like, “Am I not supposed to care about employees?” This reaffirms “Yeah, I am. That’s the right thing to do.” If someone wants to tell me not to care about employee, that’s on them, not on me. I think it just reaffirms what the actions people are taking.
I think the stereotype of a business person is that they are selfish and that and that it’s a zero-sum game and that then my success is somehow predicated on your failure. That the way that I get ahead is by stepping on other people’s heads, that is. That’s a stereotype. I don’t think it applies to most business people. I will say, though, that there are people who think they’re supposed to be that way. When they hear a conversation like what we’re having.
Sometimes we’re taught it overtly and sometimes we’re taught it subtly. We are taught that. Maybe I’ve been taught that and I come into the workforce as a young person just out of college and I thought, “Okay, now’s my chance to make my mark and burn my way to the top,” whatever, just because they think they’re supposed to and then they hear a conversation like what we’re having or they read The Radical LEAP or another book that has a similar a of a philosophy to it and they go like, “I’ve been doing it wrong. I’d rather do it that way.” I think there’s a lot of people in that category also.
Integrating The Radical Leap Into Leadership Development
As part of our leadership development program inside Trailer Bridge, very first book everybody reads is The Radical Leap. We do it we used to do it 4 times, but we only do it 3 different sessions which is 2 days each session. The first four hours is just to sit back and “I don’t know about this. I don’t know about this stuff, I’m not entirely sure this is right.”
We start getting into it, and then they read the book and they always come back in the second session and they’re like, “Now I understand.” There it I see it live. That happens all the time. I see it. They understand where I think it helps them understand where I’m coming from or the leadership team is coming from to like, “Now we get why you do this. It’s not for no other reason than actually you genuinely care.” That’s the idea.
You got to have the raw material to work with. To that end, clearly you have the raw material, Mitch. Don’t take it from me, take it from another comment here, Rich. I’m not wearing my glasses, that’s why my eyesight is getting worse. It has nothing to do with age. Here’s what Rich says, “I’ve known Mitch since we both were rookies in CH Robinson in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s the real deal and Trailer Bridge is very lucky to have him at the helm.” here’s a guy who goes way back and can attest to the raw material.
Yeah, thank you, Rich. Rich is a great human, great dad, great husband. He and I’ve known each other for many years and it’s one of those friendships. He and I caught up and it’s one of those things that we may not talk for a year or two but then all of a sudden, you get on the phone with each other and it’s like, “How’s the wife doing? How’s the kids doing?” His kids are in college now. It’s great.
You notice other people’s kids are always frozen in time to the last place where you saw them, so it’s always a shock. I’m just curious as we come into the last little bit of time here together, I’m just going back to the town hall idea, which again is not a new idea anymore. What you illustrated for us is that simply bringing people together and calling it a town hall does not make it an effective thing. The CEO who gets up and read reads a script and sends everyone away and never hears anything from them.
You guys have this tradition now of hearing ideas. There is a misconception, I think, about love that i similar to what we were talking about earlier, it means that I have to make people happy all the time. I have to say yes all the time. You implied that people come up with ideas at these town halls that you’re not going to do. Do you have any examples of things that you’ve said no to?
We’ve had crazy things from supplying personal hygiene items to starting a credit union internally inside of Trailer Bridge, which I certainly if you look at, which I looked up by the way, I looked up as like, how hard is it to start a bank? It’s impossible to start a bank unless you have a lot of cash. To be regulated with the FCC, it’s very difficult or whoever regulates banks.
Anyway, so it so we’ve had some of those Beer Pong Fridays. I had to nix that one. The whole OSHA applies, so we really can’t have a beer pong Friday in a building that where OSHA could shut us down. We’ve had a lot and sometimes I’ve been like, “Come on guys, you know I can’t do this. I’m going to read it and I’ll say no.” A we’ve had some very personal ones or ones where people are like, “Ooh.” I read it and I addressed it.
I don’t like to know who it’s from. Sometimes people supply who it is, my goal is not to know who it is. I don’t want to know who wrote it. I just want to address it. Somebody just wrote on there, “Can we have sweatpant Fridays?” I went, “No.” I said, “For those in Florida, we already have shorts on Friday, but sweatpants Friday, it’s just a little too comfy.” For the whole Trailer Bridge family that’s reading, they would love it if I would buy Trailer Bridge snuggies.
They put over yourself like a blanket and you wear like a one-piece.” I’m like, “It’s not happening guys. It’s just not it’s not happening.” they’ve asked for that one more than a handful of times. As you’re laughing, there’s humor within us too. There’s humor within the company because it’s just part of one of the eight slides and people look forward to it now. The final slide’s always like my final thought and I think people look forward to that. What am I going to talk about? What’s going on the company in the last 30 days? I need to address good and different, whatever, to hopefully inspire some. I can’t inspire all, that’s impossible.
Inspiring Audacity With Unique Employee Benefits Like Pet Bereavement
What you’re doing to put it in the LEAP framework is you’re inspiring audacity with that. Audacity is a bold and blatant disregard for normal constraints. Inspire means to have other people be audacious, not just being audacious. When I feel comfortable expressing an idea that that is might sound crazy but at the very at the very worst, we’re going to have a good laugh about it, but I know you’re going to consider it, I’m going to come up with more ideas.
When you have a culture that people are just really happy to generate ideas because they know they’re not going to get ridiculed for giving a stupid idea or speaking up, “I tell you to speak up and then you speak up and then I yell at you for speaking up,” which is a you know a pretty classic a dynamic. Instead to be able to just, “How about sweatpants? How about beer pong Friday? How about a bank?” There’s another idea that comes up that hits and changes everything.
Pet bereavement, just a day. That was one of the ideas and we’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” These are like our children and if we lose them, let’s give them a day or two to just settle themselves back in and it so that was an idea we implemented. There’s lots of ideas we implement.
Hold on a second. Pet bereavement, day or two?
I can’t remember if it’s 1 day or 2 days off the top of my head, but yeah. If they lose their animal and we’re not talking about the goldfish you just put down the toilet, we’re talking about something that really had some sentiment, you give them some time. Now, the irony of that is most people come into work because they want to be around their family again, they don’t want to be sitting at home grieving.
They can take it if they want it?
Yeah.
What a what a phenomenal idea. What a lovely way to support people in something that only pet owners would understand. Somebody who just doesn’t like animals is like, “Really? Are you kidding?” for those of us that have pets, it’s like we we know what it’s like to lose an animal.
People want gym memberships and we did what’s called Class Pass, so they can go to yoga, they can go get a manicure, they can go to the gym, they can go to cycling, they can do all these things and I’m like, “That’s just a great idea. It makes them healthier, they’re going to work harder. This is perfect.” we take a lot of the ideas and implement them.
No matter where you are in life or what company you’re working for, there’s an opportunity to make a difference for others. Share on XYou wear your sweatpants there. It all works out. That’s fantastic. As we bring this in for a landing, Mitch, what last profound words do you have for folks who are tuning in? First of all, let me just say thank you guys for who have been commenting. Really appreciate your guys being here. What some last thoughts for our conversation?
Obviously, I think those that from the TB family on here, they know this about me. For those that haven’t had the chance to read the book or really see what this can do, take the time, go to go to the website, get the free audio or go buy it if you can go buy it and read the book. Steve, you got other books that follow it. I would encourage you to keep reading all the other books.
I think no matter where you are in life or what company you’re working at, there’s an opportunity to make a difference on others and I think this book shows you how you can do that. That was one of the other things I took from is how it gives you some of the tools, maybe not directly but maybe indirectly how you have the ability to go make change in the world.
Ultimately, I think as humans on this earth or souls on this earth, it’s our responsibility to change the world every single day. I think, Steve, you’ve touched on that in the past, but it’s not change the whole world, it’s change the world you’re in or the person next to you and this book shows you how to do that. Your other books follow up on that and not just about yourself, but about your team, about your outside customers and vendors. It just continues to expand who you believe who you are as a person. I would take the time to do it.
Thank you, Mitch. I appreciate that. Mitch, thanks for joining me. What a great conversation. You’re going to help a lot of people with this perspective.
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About Mitch Luciano
Mitch Luciano is a dynamic, results-driven business leader led by his entrepreneurial spirit and passion for people. With more than two decades of experience transforming organizations and driving success, he currently serves as CEO of Trailer Bridge, a global transportation and logistics provider headquartered in Northeast Florida.
Since joining Trailer Bridge in 2012, Luciano has reshaped the company’s strategic direction, spearheading an innovative and aggressive growth strategy that expanded its footprint and service offerings. His leadership philosophy, centered on service to others, continues to shape the company’s culture today.
He brings a wealth of experience from his previous roles as President, COO, and Owner of both Magellan Logistics and 4E Logistics, as well as at industry leaders C.H. Robinson and NYK Logistics.
