The Driver Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

The podcast has given me so much, including a community of like-minded folks that we often self-identify ourselves as Concrete Nerds. And sometimes, one of these folks becomes a friend. Today I want to tell you about my friend, Manny Tejano. He's got a company called RocketStart and he showed me a demo of his software that I could not stop thinking about. The whole idea is driver retention through positive reinforcement, recognition, and reward. He called it fantasy sports for drivers. And man, when he said that, it just clicked.

Because here's the thing. We talk a lot in this industry about mix designs, about SCMs, about batching software and AI and all that stuff. And those conversations matter. But the driver problem? That one's been sitting right in front of us for years and we keep dancing around it like it's going to fix itself.

It's not going to fix itself.

The Last Line of Defense

I've been in and around ready-mix plants long enough to know that the driver is the last line of defense on every single load. You can have the best batch plant in the world, the sharpest QC team, the most dialed-in mix design you've ever seen. And then that truck pulls up to the job site and the driver adds water because the contractor asked him to, or he's running late and he's stressed, or he just doesn't feel like anybody at the plant actually cares whether he does a good job or not. And now you've got a problem.

Billy Ripple made a point during an old podcast about driver management being one of the biggest pain points in the software space right now. And he's right. The planning and scheduling piece, the call-in process, the communication between dispatch and the driver on the road. It's still manual at a lot of plants. It's still phone calls and paper tickets and a whole lot of assumptions.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Here's what the numbers look like right now:

• Nearly 40 percent of ready-mix drivers leave every year.
• The average driver is 47 years old.
• Fewer CDL drivers than ever before.

So you've got fewer people coming in, more people leaving, and the ones who stay are getting older. And the cost to replace one driver runs somewhere between eight and twenty thousand dollars when you factor in recruiting, screening, and onboarding. That's real money. That's money that comes right off the bottom line.

And yet I still walk into plants where the driver recognition program is a Christmas ham and a handshake.

Fantasy Sports for Drivers

What Manny built is genuinely interesting because it attacks the problem from a different angle. Instead of just throwing money at it, which most producers can't sustain anyway, he's using the same psychology that keeps people glued to their phones playing games. You set the behaviors you want, like completed trips, clean trucks, perfect attendance, and you let drivers earn points and rewards for hitting those targets. You make the data transparent. You celebrate the wins publicly instead of letting them disappear into a spreadsheet nobody reads.

Manny said in mid-2025 that the workforce was 55 percent Millennials and Gen Z. He told me this week that the percentage of those generations in the workforce will increase to 74% in the next 12 months! And if you're still trying to manage and motivate those folks the same way you managed the guys who've been driving for 30 years, you're going to keep losing them. You've got to speak their language.

I'm not saying gamification is the silver bullet. I don't think there is a silver bullet. But I do think the producers who figure out how to make their drivers feel like they matter, like they're part of something, like their performance is seen and valued, those are the ones who are going to have a real competitive advantage in the next five years. Because everybody else is going to be scrambling to fill seats.

Treating Driving Like the Skilled Trade It Is

Concrete Ontario just launched the first standardized training program for ready-mix drivers up in Canada. A 160-page manual, modules on product knowledge, safety, maintenance. Five-year certification. And the whole idea behind it isn't just to train new people, it's to give the people already doing the job a reason to feel proud of what they do. To feel like it's a profession, not just a gig.

That's the piece I think we underestimate. These guys are operators. They're not just hauling freight. They're managing a perishable product with a chemistry that's changing from the minute it leaves the plant. They're making judgment calls on the job site that affect the structural integrity of whatever's being built. That's a skilled trade. And we need to start treating it like one.

What's the Plan?

The driver shortage isn't going away. The CDL pool isn't getting bigger. And the guys who've been doing this for 25 years are retiring. So at some point you've got to ask yourself, what's the plan?

If you haven't looked at what Manny's doing over at RocketStart, it's worth your time. And if you want to talk through the driver retention piece more, reach out. This is one of those conversations I think our whole industry needs to be having a lot more of.