Mike Bush
[00:00:00] Jolie Downs: Welcome to the Career Wanderlust podcast, your compass for new career horizons. Today, we are talking with Mike Bush. Mike has a diverse and extensive background in marketing, communications, and public relations, working with both leading companies and agencies. Mike is currently the chief growth officer with CDL 1000.
[00:00:23] Now, in the beginning of his career, Mike worked his way up through the PR agency ranks until he was managing director of Fusion Public Relations. Now, from there, he made the move in house and he worked in the transportation and logistics industry as head of communications with Next Trucking and Cargomatic.
[00:00:43] From there, he went on to manage his own communications firm, Nomad Communications, before taking on this chief growth officer role with CDL 1000. Mike has successfully navigated his clients and his companies through a wide variety of challenges while consistently generating Millions in revenue and strong, positive publicity.
[00:01:06] I'm really excited to learn more. Mike, thank you for joining us on the Career Wanderlust podcast.
[00:01:12] Mike Bush: Tilly, thank you so much for having me. That was the best intro I've ever had from anything. I might, I might have to ask you to, to come around with me and introduce me in meetings. That was pretty awesome.
[00:01:19] Jolie Downs: I would love to. I'm happy to. Sure. Now, could, could you share with us maybe what has been some of your favorite career advice and, and why? Thanks. Thanks.
[00:01:28] Mike Bush: Yeah, I mean, so if I look back at when I got started and one of the pieces of advice, actually, Julie, something you told me almost 20 years ago, which is pretty awesome.
[00:01:37] Um, so one of the, one of the early things that I learned, and this is actually from Julie and, , was to keep a spreadsheet of the accounts that I work on. Break down a list of everything that you work on when you're in an agency setting it, whether you're in a really great agency where they say, look, you've only got three or four clients or a turn and burn shop where you're carrying six, seven, eight clients, you're going to have a diverse range of experience.
[00:01:58] And over time, you're going to forget that. So the ability to pull out a spreadsheet and say, you know, an insurance base, I've carried seven customers. Holy cow. I know that industry or in logistics, I've carried eight companies or whatever it might be. Having that as a frame of reference is so valuable.
[00:02:13] Whether you're interviewing for a new job, whether you're trying to land business, when you can say, Oh, I've worked with these three companies in your space and here are the results. It's so much more powerful than just kind of explaining. Yeah, I've been in insurance or whatever it might be. Um, so that one is really big to me.
[00:02:27] The other two. And I think, you know, when it comes to like getting started, I'm really passionate about this. If you're a rookie level PR person, or in your first or second job, find reporters at trade publications that you think are really smart. Because trade publications are a great place for reporters to grow their career, gain their knowledge best, and eventually end up at a large publication, a top tier publication.
[00:02:47] Right. If you look at the Wall Street Journal advertising section, they've all come from the same publication. Get to know them at that publication. So that when they get promoted, you're kind of going with them and whether they go in promotion size and stay in journalism, or whether they go in house for somebody, in which case to become a referral or a source of business, or even somebody, this is really critical.
[00:03:08] If you're pitching a trade show and are pitching, you know, a speaking opportunity, being able to say, Hey, I know so and so over at Google, we worked together in the past and bringing them into a panel idea makes that panel so much sexier than what you might be presenting. So build relationships early, find the people that you think are really talented.
[00:03:24] Get to know them and keep them in your network. Don't, even if you switch to an in house setting and go back to agency, make sure you retain those relationships because they can be critical to your career. And then sort of the third thing, , that I think is really, really important is don't be afraid to build your own brand.
[00:03:39] If I look back at my career in 20 years, I've built followings of a million people. Over and over again for all the companies I've worked with or for all the companies I've represented. And if I look at my Twitter, I've got like 4, 000 followers
[00:03:54] to do again. I'd claim a little bit more credit in sort of a tasteful way, whether that's just being out there saying, I'm so delighted to see my client, ABC company featured by, you know, so and so at the wall street journal or whatever, but building my own credibility is something I wish in hindsight I would have taken the time to do because I really, I didn't.
[00:04:11] And now that I'm, you know. 20 years into my career. I'm way too old to try to establish myself as somebody who knows what they're doing on TikTok.
[00:04:18] Jolie Downs: No, you're not. No, you're not. I disagree with that. You absolutely can establish yourself now, but really good advice. And it actually gave me a little chills when you said that, you know, because we do, most people forget to do that, but yes, in the PR industry, those specialists who do this for everyone else.
[00:04:34] So many, so many of them are not doing that for themselves and, and you know, how
[00:04:42] Mike Bush: it's it's an eating your own dog food type of thing, you know, it's really tough to say, but it's something we all kind of forget about because we're, we're in the, we're in the grind, right? Like, like a PR person that says, man, I'm so excited.
[00:04:52] And the great PR people say, okay, the story ran today. Now I go to work, right? Like we work up to, okay, we want this feature story once it runs. Okay, great. It's how do you provide value on top of that? Are you doing stuff? Are you giving your client the materials to share that out in ways that one lead the leads, but two, maybe keep that reporter or that editor's attention.
[00:05:12] If you think about it from the perspective, and this is a little jaded, but if you think about it, reporters do look at page views. They do look at, if I write about company X, what was the traffic I generated from it? Well, if company X promotes the heck out of that story. And that traffic goes up that reporter or that editor might be more inclined to revisit you in a couple of months.
[00:05:31] So, you know, understanding that that component from the sales perspective from your client perspective is really important. Take a couple extra steps and make sure you're sharing the stuff that you created for your client. You know, it's very easy to build your own brand. To kind of claim credit and say, I'm so excited to see this game live or thrilled to see paradigm staffing, do something so very cool and then promote that.
[00:05:52] Even if it's just sharing it on your own, you're going to build your own followers at the same time you're helping your customer.
[00:05:56] Jolie Downs: Exactly. Really, really good advice. And I like that you, you're given permission to, you know, it's like, even if some people might be thinking about it, maybe they're not sure.
[00:06:04] Give them, you're giving them permission. Go do it. Sometimes that's all we need. And I just want to say the spreadsheet that really is key, especially as you move on through your career, because those just start building and it is so great to go back and be able to find those things in the past and pull them up.
[00:06:20] I still do it to this day with clients.
[00:06:23] Mike Bush: I'm pretty sure you still have access to mine, Jolie. It's, it's really funny, but. If you go into your shared Google file, you might actually find a document called experience. That's me. Go down deep. I'm
[00:06:34] Jolie Downs: an optical. That's really funny. That's so great. Well, thank you for that.
[00:06:38] I appreciate it. Now. I love, okay. I love a good story. Could you share a story with us that was an impactful lesson or just something that you learned in the course of your career that, might benefit other people to hear about it. You know, what happened and what did you learn?
[00:06:52] Mike Bush: Yeah, so I think when you work in crisis comms and lots of people are willing to say, Oh, I've done crisis communications, right?
[00:07:00] Everybody thinks everything is a crisis. I understand that In one role that I was operating and I was the head of head of PR for a company that provides loyalty programs for financial institutions And I woke up to one of those things that you actually don't believe Can happen until it actually happens we had a one of our employees drove a pickup truck Built into a bomb into Times Square and tried to blow up Times Square.
[00:07:25] I don't know if you remember this, Julie Oh my god, that was
[00:07:28] Jolie Downs: one of your
[00:07:28] Mike Bush: employees. I yes. Yeah, indeed indeed So being able so the lesson here is gonna be a couple fold But the first thing to consider is okay, you find this out I woke up to a text message and I think 6 in the morning from our attorney that said call me now Uh, FBI in our office and you're thinking, okay, did someone steal his phone?
[00:07:48] What just happened? Um, so, so that was kind of like that moment of terror of, okay, what just happened, what's going on, uh, to kind of learn that, , the first lesson I learned, so I think, you know, we've, everybody's gone through a crisis communication plan or every. planning event, or class, or whatever, to say what is really a crisis comms thing.
[00:08:05] What, what are the steps you should take? Get your war room together. Take the time to craft your message. By the way, when you get that text message at 6am, there's no war room planning. There is, your phone is about to blow up with, with 500 or a thousand employee calls, as well as media calls. Because as soon as...
[00:08:20] As soon as the, the, this person's name leaked out, of course, the media did what, what we all do, you go to Google, you go to LinkedIn, and then when you looked at this, this individual's LinkedIn, you saw he was reporting to the CFO of companies like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Now to be clear, he was an entry level employee who was writing a report that was being shipped to somebody, that being shipped to somebody, being shipped to somebody, being shipped to somebody who was then passing it on to somebody within one of the large banks who was then passing it up the chain three or four steps.
[00:08:48] It's not a direct line of report here, but we've all embellished LinkedIn, right? Like, come on. We all know that not everything on LinkedIn is a hundred percent true. So, you know, being able to kind of go through that step one. I think the most important lesson I learned from this is that when you're facing a crisis, the very first discussion you have to have isn't about planning.
[00:09:08] The very first discussion you have to have is getting all of your employees aligned. Because as this happened, and as we learned about it, the very first thing we did, we said, we sent an internal note that said, look, you're going to get calls from reporters. We know this. We knew reporters were calling the switchboard and just punching in whatever extension, and they were asking questions.
[00:09:28] So the first thing was, here's Mike's name, here's his phone number, here's his email address. He's the only one allowed to talk. By the way, you're going to see some craziness today. And we saw, not only the Dialing for Dollars reporters calling in, there was a smoking hut in the building. This is, you know, 15 years ago or whatever, so smoking wasn't so terrible.
[00:09:46] Um, we saw the same runner run by the smoking hut every 15 minutes. We thought, what the hell's going on there? It was a reporter. Trying to get commentary. We ran a shuttle to and from the train. We saw people try, we saw reporters trying to sneak onto the shuttle to get commentary. The fight for who was going to get some sort of exclusive scoop was unbelievable.
[00:10:09] And without that very first we can.
[00:10:18] As you probably know, or saw, the FBI is here, so there are certain things we can't tell you. We can give you as much information as we can, but in terms of communicating with the press... Do not handle it. Do not talk to anybody. If it's somebody you don't know, don't share it. I mean, it's kind of like that terrible office of the terrible, terrible episode of the office where, where the printer started exploding.
[00:10:37] The very first thing Joe should have done was tell everybody, just be quiet. Right? Like Andy never leaks it. Kelly never leaks it to the press if Joe steps in and says, guys, you're my, you're my constituency first. And I think that was, that's an important lesson that I learned, especially as you go through kind of any crisis issue.
[00:10:54] Jolie Downs: Oh, it seems like something so simple, but, but yes, not something that, , Most people wouldn't remember a thing to do. I mean, as soon as you said that, I was like, yeah, well, that makes sense, but, yeah, I believe that's a step that, that is often left out because people are often talking when they shouldn't be, but so simple to say only one person shares and done.
[00:11:13] So that's really great, great advice. Thank you. I can't even imagine how crazy that must have been throughout the whole thing. I... It was a rough couple days. Yeah, that was pretty intense. You know, Mike, you successfully made the move from agency into in house, which is something that I get, I talk to a lot of people who are looking to do that.
[00:11:33] Is there any advice that you'd give someone who has... maybe struggle a little bit and trying to make that shift.
[00:11:39] Mike Bush: Yeah. I think the most important thing, and you can set yourself up for success in the agency setting as you start to transition over, as you start to think about transitioning over. And the way to do it is again, you know, when you get that, that article and PR, right, you get that hit.
[00:11:55] You're like, yeah, this is great. I got to talk to your story. Stop thinking that that's the victory point. And start thinking that that's where the job begins. What do you do with a front page Wall Street Journal article to make it more meaningful to your customer? And if that's, you know, look, we sent over a suggested LinkedIn post for you that that touts the corporate side.
[00:12:16] We're thrilled to pieces to be on here. If it's a story about three things that are happening in the housing market, and your customer, your client is in the housing market. Ask one of their people for a fourth thing so that they share the story on their own LinkedIn with their own commentary, right? Now you're expanding the story.
[00:12:32] And for each of those pieces include three or four or five extra tweets. Now you're talking 10, 12, 15 tweets and three or four different ways to share the story based on your audience. As soon as you start to do that, and as soon as you start to put metrics behind it, The in house opportunity is way easier because you can say, I not only secured this story, this feature piece for my client that was really great, but we made it meaningful by doing these five things and then tracking who engaged with it, who liked it, go to Twitter two days after your stories run, insert the URL of the story and find out how many people shared it out.
[00:13:07] Send your customer a list of those people. Hey, I don't know all these folks, but 10 of them are industry folks. Five of them look like they could be client and five of them look like they're related to the reporter. Who cares? Because all of that is actionable on the sales side and when you start to think that way, that's when you're going to be perfectly positioned to go in house.
[00:13:25] Mm, really good
[00:13:26] Jolie Downs: advice because that's all the information that you need to be sharing in the interview in order to be the one chosen. And if you don't have that backup, you're not going to make the impression that you need to. So really good advice. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about CDL 1000, you know, what do you guys do well, what do you look for in your talent?
[00:13:46] Give us a little spiel.
[00:13:47] Mike Bush: So we're kind of a weird company, Jolie. I think most people over the past few years have heard about the supply chain. There was probably an article in every paper in America at one point about the fact that there were 108 steamships, giant vessels with 20, 000 containers off the port of LA long beach.
[00:14:01] We all read this supply chain became sexy, which is really cool.
[00:14:08] But there are a couple of things people still don't know. And I think the first one is that when you see a truck on the side on the road, so an 18 wheeler pulling a metal container or pulling a trailer, 90 percent of trucks on the road are part of a small fleet. So six trucks or less. So if you're a company like Walmart or Amazon or Rite Aid, and you're looking to move goods and lots of goods, you only have a couple of options.
[00:14:28] Option one is you can build your own fleet. Okay, this is highly expensive because you have to go buy trucks, you have to go buy fuel, you have to pay drivers, you have to pay their benefits, workers comp in the trucking space is horrific. Also, 50 percent of the miles those trucks drive are empty miles.
[00:14:42] There's laws in place that say Walmart can't move goods for other companies. So the Walmart truck driver moves stuff from a distribution center to the storefront, and then he drives back empty. So literally 50 percent of the miles that you're paying for are completely useless. That's a bad approach.
[00:14:56] Option number two. Is you can sign agreements with 4, 000 or 5, 000 trucking companies, your procurement team, they're going to hate you. They're going to be getting invoices in PDFs, faxes, spreadsheets. There's going to be no similar technology. There are 2, 500 different operating systems in the trucking space available.
[00:15:14] So no way can you, can you do this if you want to know where your stuff is and you want to have a team that just doesn't walk out on you. So our approach was to say, what if we take the top trucking companies in America, we put them under one umbrella, they bring whatever technology they're bringing. We build an orchestration layer between those trucking companies.
[00:15:32] and large shippers. So we work predominantly with the top 100 importers and exporters in America and we connect them with a fleet of 26, 000 trucking companies that have all been vetted, proven quality, uh, have no issues with drug and alcohol clearinghouse, have the right insurance. High instance of being on time, even basic stuff like that.
[00:15:50] So we identify the best trucking companies. We then approach big shippers and say, we want to control your first mile. Can we handle port work, which is the hardest set of stuff in the industry, because if you can control the port work, everything else falls into place, right? So from, from the port, we can then do over the road trucking, which is the guys that drive across the country.
[00:16:09] We can leverage trains for that. We can take care of all, all everything else. But that first set of movements. From the moment goods are created in China or Vietnam or wherever it might be and shipped, they go through 14 different sets of hands before they're delivered to a distribution center. So we sit in that intersection trying to take all the friction out of that in order to build a company that's supply chain focused.
[00:16:32] Jolie Downs: So smart. You're just absolutely brilliant. I actually, I know it's this huge company, but I didn't know all the ins and outs of how this was working. So really interesting. Thank you. So before you go, well actually, are you hiring? Should anyone, if anyone's interested in working for CDL 1000, um, what's the type of talent that you guys look for?
[00:16:53] Mike Bush: Yeah, so our needs right now are on the sales side. Uh, so somebody that's got freight relationships. The, the freight space is very relationship based, so we're looking for salespeople that are 10 to 12 years into their career and have a book of business that they know. , if you're younger in your career, junior in your career, that's not to say you're excluded.
[00:17:09] We are looking for account management support. We're looking for, , we do have a couple of opening marketing and sales roles, , on the junior level. And then we're looking for, for folks that have operations jobs, folks that have been in supply chain, know what it means when we say, Hey, we've got a vessel with 500.
[00:17:22] We've got 500 cans on the next vessel. You know, where, where can we find 500 chassis? Somebody that knows those terms and says, okay, I gotcha is really important for us. Um, so that's kind of where we're at. And then again, we are a technology company, like it's, it's an orchestration layer that sits between truckers and carriers.
[00:17:37] So if you're a programmer who knows what they're doing, , we'd love to hear from you as well. Perfect.
[00:17:43] Jolie Downs: Perfect. Okay. And now before you go, I love to ask people if there is anything that you have either read, watched, or listened to that had a positive impact on you that Other people could benefit from well from as well.
[00:17:54] Could you share
[00:17:55] Mike Bush: something like that? Yeah. So I feel like I'm in PR and marketing, so I have to say Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. Right. But if you're looking to go vertical or if you're looking to explore supply chain and I run a shameless plug here, I actually, I started a podcast a couple of years ago called careers on the move with the idea of.
[00:18:12] Spotlighting opportunities in supply chain, right? Like a college kid doesn't say, let me go work for a trucking company. But if you give me a college kid, that's got a statistics background. And I say, look, you're going to use your skills to curb emissions. 30 percent in the planet, their eyes light up. If you give me an engineering kid, that's, and I say, look, you're going to build an iron man suit that protects dock workers at the port.
[00:18:33] Their eyes light up. So the idea behind the podcast was to say, let me. Spotlight interesting people in the space and show what they're doing. So we had like the chief supply chain officer of Starbucks came on and he talked about the fact that he's been to 50 different countries to taste coffee. Because of supply chain rule.
[00:18:48] Yes. That's awesome. Yes. So, the book I would recommend, if you, if you're considering supply chain, which is the industry that I have just been in for too long and know too well, uh, Chris Mims, who's a personal, , technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal wrote a book called Arriving Today. And he traced the micro USB charger we all have on our Android phone from creation in Vietnam.
[00:19:10] to delivery at somebody's house in Minnesota. And he highlights all of the complexities and all of the weirdness and all of the oddities that have to happen for each of us to get a simple charger into our hands. Never mind the phone or all of that stuff. This is just the ability to charge it. It's a wonderful read that highlights all of the friction and all of the challenges throughout the industry.
[00:19:31] And all the things that tech people can come here and really, really solve. It's an amazing opportunity in the supply chain right now. That's
[00:19:38] Jolie Downs: super interesting. Yes. Thank you for that suggestion. Fantastic. Well, Mike, I really appreciate you coming and joining me on the Career Wanderlust podcast. Thank you for joining us.
[00:19:48] Mike Bush: Actually, my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invite.