Testimony

Title : Shawn Jameson talks about his experience at SGT 2000
By : Shawn Jameson
Published date : November 2009
Published by : The Rear View Mirror
                       
Image description The SGT Group is an international carrier for North America. Established in 1988 and with its headquarters in St-Germain de Grantham, Quebec as well as terminals in Montreal QC, St-Nicholas QC, Brampton ON, Calgary AB, Laredo TX and Houston TX, SGT services Canada, the USA and Mexico with its distinctive green trucks.

Shawn Jameson is Director of Safety at the Brampton, Ontario terminal. He’s been in the transportation industry for 26 years, when he started unloading trailers of Kraft cheese by hand as a summer job for Network Transport at age 14.

“When I was 16 I delivered fishing worms from Brampton to Parry Sound, Sudbury and North Bay every day. At 18 I worked a midnight shift in a warehouse and in the daytime I delivered cement blocks on a straight truck to get some experience [driving]. At 20, I bought my first truck and started to haul gravel in the summer and freight in the winter.

“That’s how I met my current boss, Doug Bell, at SGT. I went to see if he had any work for the winter. At that time the SGT presence in Ontario was small. When I met Doug his office consisted of a fax machine on top of a water heater. Now we have 125 US drivers and a seven-acre state-of-the-art facility that I am very proud of.

“So my career at SGT was born in December 1990 as the first local Ontario broker. I decided to sell my truck and become a company driver, and eventually turned into the Warehouse Manager.”

About 1998 Shawn was asked to help Bob Bell, Doug’s father, recruit long distance drivers. The men soon learned that the best place to find drivers, he’s proud to say, was through schools like KRTS Transportation Specialists Inc.

“In the old days we would take a truck and trailer and road test the new recruits at their facility in Caledonia. As we grew the driver pool at SGT in Ontario we realized we needed to start to do ongoing training and comply with all the different regulations that govern the trucking industry. So that’s how I then became the Safety and Recruiting Manager.”

Shawn has spent 11 years as a recruiter for SGT, learning the business “from the ground up,” as he notes.

“The President of SGT, Denis Coderre, is still a real hands-on trucker and he values people who want to learn. And,” he jokes, “he is a patient man, with all the recruiting stunts Doug and I tried to do along the way.” Recruiters, Shawn recognizes, need to understand each new recruit for who they are and what skills they have.

“I watched Bob Bell take a skilled driver that could not read or write and help him become a qualified US driver. That driver stays with SGT because of the extra help he was given.”

In that way, two of the things Shawn most enjoys in his position are to hire a driver from a school, and to watch the drivers’ careers grow.

“I have seen people who were down and out come back with SGT help and become home owners and proud owner/operators. In this industry we all have turnover, but we always have former drivers stopping by and saying hi. Or they ask for some advice on a new job they might try. That’s a very rewarding feeling.”

Shawn has studied many different courses on recruiting and safety and does recruit for both owner/operators and company drivers for SGT. He has a staff of three recruiters/mentors and many over the road trainers. SGT employs “mostly new drivers; they need to have a FAST Card and clean driving record, and must have attended a topnotch driver training school like KRTS. I would say over the years in Ontario 90 per cent of all our drivers came from such schools. I’m proud to say we have many of them with their million-miles of safe driving under their belts.”

If asked to offer one piece of advice to a potential driver, Shawn says that they should carefully research the school they attend.

“In Ontario there is only a handful I would recommend. Look at what type of relationship the school has with the carriers, like the one KRTS and SGT have.”

A self-described jack-of-all-trades and master of many, Shawn doesn’t feel that his recruiter hat comes off when his human resources one goes on. He takes care of it all, and enjoys the daily challenges that a multi-tasking position like his implies.

The SGT position on retention dictates that they have an open-door policy: “We want our drivers happy. If they feel respected they are happy. The drivers have a tough job and without them the company wouldn’t be here.”

Unfortunately, Shawn believes, that the public sees truckers as “second-class citizens.” “Over the years I have had stock brokers, pilots, and a retired military sergeant come to work for us. Drivers are men and woman from all parts of the country and the world who have an extremely stressful job. I will always be proud to say I am one of them.

We have drivers from age 21 to my toughest driver, ‘Granny’ Carol Pickell. She will be 68 in November and has been with SGT for eight years. Carol started her trucking carrier at 60 - a great driver and even greater lady!”

Under his recruiting hat, Shawn says he’s a builder who loves to see the growth of his company and how successful they continue to become. He’s followed the apprenticeship program as a recruiting initiative “from the start and yes, it’s great for the industry. We’re just starting to get more involved in it now.”

“We come up with new ideas every day/week/month on how to keep our drivers happy and loyal.”

As well, with the work that organizations like the OTA and publications such as The Rear View Mirror do in “getting the true facts out to the public,” he feels the industry is getting safer and more driver-friendly.

To work alongside that promotion, Shawn’s goals are to work very hard and try to enhance the staff skill set so that SGT can become an even safer and more efficient company. And although that could place extreme stress levels onto his shoulders, Shawn recognizes that sometimes his former stress was brought on by himself.

“Denis, our president, said to me once, ‘Shawn, work hard every day and do your best and go home and feel good about what you have done. Tomorrow is another day and we will tackle it when it comes.’ Great advice for anyone!

Bob Bell was well-known in the recruiting circles and he gave me lots of great advice. He told me, ‘Treat everyone you meet with the same respect you deserve and life will be good’.

” Advice like that keeps an employee’s inspiration levels high. In the next few years Shawn would like to continue with SGT, “but I hope I will travel more to all our terminals and teach Recruiting and Safety to others. I have to feel that I am making a difference in the company and this is one way I can do it. I would love to go somewhere and start what we have done here at SGT in Ontario in another province or state. Over the last year and a half I have been helping our Houston Terminal with recruiting and safety. We were down to 13 drivers there and now we’re back to over 30. This is very rewarding for me.”

To that end, Shawn likes to promote the team aspect of SGT. “The more you learn about SGT and the people who work here, the more you just want to be part of this family. To me, SGT stands for SOME GREAT THINGS.”