Wellness in Logistics with Mark Manera

I always love the chance to get to share stories of founders in the supply chain world , and sometimes they're at that $100 million stage and they've just crossed a massive milestone , and other times it's they're in day 42 and they just won their first customer and made their first dollar .

And that's what I love about this show in particular is we don't give all the attention to the big guys . This is entirely about supporting logistics founders and entrepreneurs sharing their stories and then supporting them through community , and keeping it that simple is working .

And we keep hearing from folks last year and just ongoing that we like hearing the David versus Goliath stories and we like hearing the rags to riches ones too .

We want to cover that entire spectrum , and so today I'm really glad to get to share the story of somebody who's not in either one of those buckets Dr Mark Monara , with supply chain fitness , one of the leading health and fitness firms in supply chain . Mark , good morning and how are you today ?

And he just like from day one had the mentality I'm the best in the world , I'm the biggest there is , and so , and then also my wife and I have a joke , and it's with my family that I'm like five , nine , but I always joke I'm six , four and I'm like I got a six , four mentality .

So I'll tell you , you know , I'm not the a hundred million guy yet , but internally I'm a big guy . The world just hasn't seen it right and we're pushing towards that .

Before you decided to start supply chain fitness . What was your journey like ? Cause you had a job , a regular life , before deciding to take the leap into starting your own thing . So what was your background like , just in the professional world ?

So , born and raised in St Louis , I went to physical therapy school and the small private school in St Louis and it's called Maryville University and it's kind of an interesting physical therapy program because , unlike most physical therapy programs out there where you got to go to undergrad then you got to apply to grad school , this program was direct out of high

school , six and a half years and you were , you know , you just had to hit a certain GPA and you stayed in the program all six and a half years and so I was going through school . No one in my family was in trucking or logistics .

I had never met a truck driver in my life outside of you know the walk and buy them at the gas station type of situation .

And I was on my first clinical rotation and I honestly it's funny because I look back at it and I'm sure you can relate and I'm sure people listening this can relate as you know , early 20 year old men sometimes act like cavemen and don't make very intelligent decisions or don't think through situations and my wife and I fiance at the time were like trying to

figure out a way to go on a clinical rotation where we were stayed in St Louis because we wanted to stay together . We were like wedding planning and getting ready because our wedding was the next summer and my undeveloped brain that was not very intelligent .

I had someone else in my class tell me oh , this clinical is really cool , and it was like two hours away , an hour and a half away , and I was just like , oh sweet , I'm just going to write that one down .

And I got picked that one and it was in the small town south of St Louis and I had to stay at actually my wife's aunt's house for the whole 10 weeks and it was a lesson learned in relationships , along with it was kind of one of those funny places that I wasn't even supposed to be at that clinic on that clinical because I should have picked a different

one to go on . But I ended up going there and was working at that clinic and a bunch of truck drivers walked in the door and I got to know a couple of them really , really well while rehabbing them and honestly , that was the first time I saw firsthand what 20 , 30 years behind the wheel can do to someone's health .

And it was just one of those kind of light bulb moments of talking to some of those drivers and just getting to know them on a personal level and hearing their stories . And there was one driver in particular who had just had a total knee replacement .

38 years out on the road as an over the road truck driver , he hobbled into the clinic with crutches on because he had just had a total knee replacement and he was still loopy on the pain medicine because it was day one after the surgery . I just worked with him for months , so maybe it wasn't a light bulb moment , but it was months .

I was working with him and during that rehab process the total knee replacement sucks to have .

Like it is not fun to go through , it's very painful and as a PT that knee is kind of bent but pretty straight , so you have to push in to get it all the way straight and also get the full range of motion back and it's just painful and so what you do is you small talk and you ask them questions and you talk to them .

I'm just a curious person in general so I really enjoy talking to people and getting to know them and just hearing his stories out on the road , probably some big fish stories of some of the craziness that he kind of put some steroids on . Just you know , tell me .

And just hearing about his family he had five kids and the sacrifices he was making , you know as being an over the road driver , and how he was doing this for his family and for his kids and his wife , and his schedule being out for months at a time and then being home for a couple of weeks and months at a time , and I was just like really intrigued

about the lifestyle . I thought his story was super interesting and you know also he was diabetic . He was like 350 pounds but he had to lose about 80 pounds just to have the knee surgery , because they won't do those surgeries if you are obese or very overweight .

And so just kind of his stories , plus a couple of the other people that I was working with in the clinic , threw me down this rabbit hole of the trucking industry and you know I was going researching , hours and hours of researching and I mean like , after all of that time and what I saw when I researched it , specifically from the health and fitness side of

things , it completely changed the course of my career and I was seeing stats of like seven out of every 10 truck drivers are obese . Trucking has the highest rates of diabetes among any other occupation in the United States , same with obesity , highest rates of obesity compared to any other occupation .

Two times higher rates of hypertension compared to the average US worker . Two times higher rates of depression compared to the average worker . And then I saw this stat of the average truck driver has a life expectancy 16 years less than the average population 16 years .

I mean I cannot even imagine having like almost two decades of my life taken from me just because of my career choice , not only like a random career choice , but a career choice that like I'm seeing firsthand and this was like super early on in the pandemic as well . So nurses and truck drivers were like our heroes .

They were all over the news and I'm just like learning more and more about how like 73% of all goods in the United States is touched by a truck and it's like these people are so vital to our whole economy , our whole country , but then they make so much sacrifices throughout their 30 , 40 year career for their lifestyle , their family and everything , cause I

heard that in the clinic . And then I'm seeing these stats by the time they retire maybe they have high blood pressure , diabetes , obesity . That doesn't just stay in trucking once they retire , it comes with them .

And then they get 16 years chopped off the back end and I was , just like you know , honestly pissed off and still am a little bit that that even exists and just thought to myself like how can we just ignore this ? And I decided I couldn't and I started supply chain fitness and that's what we've been doing for the past three years .

Some of the smartest people I know have been conversations of members that I've gotten on the phone with and talked to , and I think they also just in general just kind of get treated as secondhand citizens for a lot of people on the highway and also they at the truck stops are in public .

You know someone sees the truck driver and they kind of walk the other way or they walk around them . Because it's just this weird feeling and I just I've experienced it firsthand and also experienced it from just talking to so many drivers that I just met .

I think they need to be treated more like humans and more like friends , versus just cogs in the wheel that are moving everything around for us .

I've been guilty of that same bias towards others in my life and I recall I had a boss one time that I really really didn't like and we were always at odds and I thought he was really arrogant and in reality I was that 20 year old , you know , with an underdeveloped brain , who was also very arrogant , and so what I was doing was I was really disliking

somebody that was showing a lot of the characteristics that I didn't like about myself , and I didn't understand that at the time . But I remember he had a heart attack and died at age 42 . I'm 43 right now and he was somebody that I also looked up to .

He was my first boss and I remember going to his funeral out of some mix of obligation and I had said some things to him once that I shouldn't have said and I felt really guilty about it , and so I went to his funeral and heard him described as all of these other things that I had never even contemplated .

His neighbors got up and talked about what he did in the neighborhood and how he helped everybody . His daughters got up and talked about what he was like as a dad .

Other people in the community talked about his role in their lives None of them had anything to do with his occupation and I realized I had reduced this person down to a single facet and then put all of the emphasis on that one thing , which I at the time didn't really like , and so I dehumanized him down to the worst possible and least generous interpretation

of who he was . The funeral changed me . I walked away from it humbled , embarrassed , and felt like I needed to make it somehow better or different , or not do that again . It was one of the milestone moments in my own life of beginning to see people as more than their jobs truck drivers .

That's a long story , a long-winded story , but the way that people view truck drivers is very similar . They are dads , then they're moms , and they're sons and their daughters and their veterans , or some of them have advanced degrees and they're all of those things .

You're right , we do depend on them for way more than they get credit for , and when there's a crisis , yeah , they're quote heroes , and then , when the crisis has gone , they're back to being in the background and being kind of avoided .

So I'm curious , now that you've gone through this relationship , forming experience that you've had in all this education and learning around the trucking industry , obviously matching up with your own interests and health was there a moment where you put all those pieces together and realized I think I may have found my purpose , I think I may have found the path that

I'm supposed to go down , where I can take all of these things together and that's how you came up with supply chain fitness . Or was it something different ?

You know , with what I'm trying to do , there's balancing act of like the health and fitness side of things , but also the lifestyle of a driver and working in the supply chain , and so I have always leaned more towards how can I fit what I know on the health and fitness side into the lifestyle of a truck driver , versus trying to fit the truck driver into

what I know should be happening on the health and fitness side of things . That's why , like the last three years , I've spent hundreds of hours talking to drivers Some of my good friends . Earlier this year , and this was one of those moments where everything really clicked was I got one of our members . Two of our members actually got married to each other .

They drove team for years and their friendship turned into a relationship and then they got engaged . And actually it's a scary moment because two weeks before their wedding , the guy in the relationship his name is George actually had a heart attack out on the road .

He had to pull his truck over and he was going 70 on the highway or whatever in California and he had to have an emergency surgery because he had 95% blockage in one of his arteries .

He's in his early 40s , right , and thank goodness that he got to the hospital , you know , in time and he had the surgery and everything went well and he was able to recover and go to his wedding and it went awesome .

But my wife , amanda and I were invited to their wedding and I walked in and we were two of 30 people at this person's wedding and that is like crazy to think about . The relationship I've built with some of these drivers just in the last couple of years has built up to it . I could be one of their top 30 people in their life .

That's like really cool and kind of . The other thing I wanted to mention is like some of the best ideas I've had for my company has been just calling up drivers , telling them the situation of what I'm trying to figure out , hanging up , letting them do some deep thinking , because a lot of the times .

These are some of the most deep thinking people I know , because that's all they have time to do , and I have had some very , very well thought out thoughts about how I could solve this problem or how I could build a program around the lifestyle of a driver . Come directly from a driver who I have just asked like how would you do this ?

This is the context I'm coming from now you show me your perspective and it's been amazingly helpful .

We can't do this show without sponsors , and I'm especially proud to have Rapido as a sponsor , because I got to know Danny and Roberto and share their story on the podcast last year and then got a chance to go to Guadalajara and meet their team .

Help bring their story to a wider audience , which is part of being a sponsor on this show is helping spread awareness about others who are doing great things for people and talent in the industry , and so Rapido is a terrific near shore logistics staffing company that helps freight companies find freight talent , and logistics is in their DNA . I have seen it .

I know the training programs that their teams go through when they onboard , I know how they do their hiring and they're recruiting , and I can totally vouch for them . They've got a highly educated workforce and if you need talent in the freight world , they should 100% be your first call .

So check out gorapidocom to learn more and , of course , you can always reach out to me and I can put you in touch with their team as well if you need . So big shout out to them . Back to you , mark .

So one of the questions that I am always curious about , at the really deep levels of what makes us who we are , is you have a passion for fitness and a passion for health , and physical therapy is also a very restorative profession . You're there to help restore people's physical health , and so I'm curious where did that come from ? Pre career choice ?

Have you always cared about people in that way and had a love of fitness ? Yeah , so I grew up .

with that lens of hey , I think I want to be in the medical field , healthcare , something in that world , and I knew I didn't want to just spend all day staring at people's eyes and asking which one's better .

but I was . I grew up playing baseball and love sports , love baseball . I went to a big high school and realized , being in St Louis , I idolized Albert Poole Holes growing up .

I wanted to play for the St Louis Cardinals and be Albert Poole Holes and I realized about freshman year of high school I was not going to be Albert Poole Holes and I also realized part of the baseball training was I actually enjoyed the gym aspect , the lifting and working out aspect , more than the on the field aspect .

And you know , at that time I remember being , you know , one of the littler guys and maybe a little bit had self-esteem issues of , just like you know , looking at myself , not as confidently as I would like to say . I look at myself now and standing up , you know a lot taller now .

And I remember very much you know that freshman year of I was the only kid in the whole baseball team all three levels , freshman junior high varsity that needed their friend to hold their legs while doing pull-ups because I couldn't do pull-ups on my own .

I vividly remember that and I was at like some family event I don't remember what it was , but a family friend that I always looked up to . They were our neighbors and their sons were probably 10 years older than us .

He got super big into CrossFit and he was telling me about CrossFit and showing me some of his workouts and all this other stuff and I was like man , that looks cool and so I stopped playing baseball and went all into CrossFit and lifting and exercising and fitness and fell in love with it and that's what I did for the rest of high school and then into

college as well , and kind of going into deciding to be in physical therapy I was like how can I mesh the medical side of things with fitness ? And I thought physical therapy was the perfect fit and so that's kind of how I fell into it . But really my love for caring people actually came when I was in sophomore in college where I was doing CrossFit .

But a buddy of mine at the gym connected me with his friend who was a physical therapist that had graduated from the same program I was going through , who was starting this new gym in the same town that I was living in and it was like this barbell strength gym .

It was like a boutique , like one-on-one coaching gym , and I went there and interned for him and then that turned into a coaching job and I just fell in love with coaching and helping people there and I didn't know I wasn't as educated as I thought I was educated on fitness , but I was like two or three steps ahead of everyone .

I was coaching , which was awesome , and I was like just loving helping people and showing them , like , okay , here's how I would do it . And that's where I fell in love with coaching and helping people and also kind of expand my horizon on what a physical therapist could do with their career .

Because typically and it still is throughout my whole school the mentality of a lot of physical therapists is you graduate and you go work for a clinic .

It's not being innovative and opening your own business or doing an online business or anything like that and so that was the first time that I saw a physical therapist who was working in the health and fitness realm , but doing something different than just working in a clinic or working in a hospital .

And so we typically I talk about supply chain fitness as we are a trucking specific corporate health , corporate wellness program and so we partner with trucking companies and we really take the day to day load of what they would have to throw on their HR person or their safety person as the fourth , fifth , sixth thing on their plate that they're trying to juggle .

Well , we'll handle everything on the program wise and we still need the help of the company from the marketing and really getting it involved in the culture , but 99% of it is handled on our end and it's all done through an app based platform on all of the employees phones and then they get a personalized exercise , nutrition and accountability program and coaching

experience and the big sell here is the number one a lot of these trucking companies don't have the capacity internally to handle a program like this and also they really need to partner with someone who has the expertise in health and fitness and you've probably stayed up long enough to see some of the infocommersals at like one o'clock in the morning on TV of

some of just like the non evidence based crazy loopy health and fitness stuff out there and I think going down the rabbit hole of Googling stuff and just piecing things together if you don't really have someone who understands , okay , what is the meat and potatoes drivers or other employees really need to focus on , especially in these industries that are time sensitive

, and you really need to focus on the things that are pushing the needle versus the things that maybe feel good or don't push the needle as much , or there's not any evidence around pushing the needle as much for that small timeframe that these drivers or even people who work in the warehouse or at the dock or in the office , who work long hours .

They don't have all day to do these crazy health and fitness regiments . They just need you know I got 20 minutes , I got 30 minutes . What can I do ? That's going to have the biggest impact and that's what we really focus on .

In reality , in the last six months , eight months , I have worked with a sleep coach . I started to finally get sleep under control and then that led to starting to want to eat better because I could feel , when I wasn't , if I was putting bad stuff into my body .

I began to feel it for the first time differently and then that started to create some small interest in exercising .

And I'm proud to say last week I can't jog or run because of an ankle injury , but I can walk , and so I walked five miles for the first time probably in 20 years last week and I was so proud of myself because I'm not somebody who naturally gets excited about fitness . For me it's work . It feels like a uphill battle .

I don't have that motivation that I wake up every day and say , oh , I just can't wait to hit the gym . Others do . I was not born with that thing that people talk about this runner's high . I have no idea what that is .

I've never experienced that in my life , and so I empathize with those who , like most truck drivers , they don't have that built in rhythm of fitness . It's not easy to do , and after a long day of work , the last thing I want to do is go exercise . You said you've been a cross fitter . You've been into fitness your whole life .

Do you ever struggle with that yourself ? And just like I , don't want to work out .

Actually , I was telling you this before the podcast that this morning I ended up going for a small walk and doing some resistance band exercises on the back porch instead of going to the gym like I was supposed to , and that's okay . It's all about ebbs and flows and the game of health is not like our culture builds it up to be .

Our culture builds it up where it's like you need to make this 180 flip in your whole lifestyle . You need to go hard for 30 to 60 to 90 day challenges and then you will get the body of your dreams and you will have everything done for you . And I take the complete opposite approach .

That , to me , the game of health is how can we set it up into your lifestyle where it's sustainable and you can consistently do it for the rest of your life ?

Because if you're not doing it for the rest of your life , yeah , you might hit some high points , but you're going to go right back down to the low points , when you fall off because what you were doing is just not fun , not enjoyable and not realistic for an actual your lifestyle and the life that you want to live as well .

And I think from the physical activity and exercise standpoint , I've been really , really taking some time to step back and like thinking about that a lot , because it's all about just physical activity , moving more . It's not you need to go to the gym , it's not you need to go run . It's what activities do you enjoy doing ?

That could be gardening , that could be doing yard work , that could be going on a walk right , or that could be going to the gym or doing something you know doing body weight exercises or yoga or something like that . And I think it's more so the fact that you find something that you enjoy doing that you can fit into your day to day routine .

And on day one that might not mean you're going on a five mile walk every single day . I think that's unrealistic to set yourself up to hit that standard . But maybe you're going for a 20 minute walk three times a week . I had a driver right now that I was just talking to who we're working on a 10 minute walk two times a week .

So for some people they would look at that and they're like , does that even do anything ? But to me , that starts building up small wins and it builds up momentum .

And I think for someone super early on in the health journey , it's all about momentum . And it's building up those wins because , just like you showed earlier of , hey , you were motivated to improve your sleep . Well , okay , you made some improvements to your sleep and now all of a sudden you're like , oh okay , let me check out some of this diet stuff .

This seems interesting . And then all of a sudden , like you've got this momentum . And now you're like , oh okay , I'm not peeking my head over the exercise hill , like let me try this out . And I think a lot of people fail because on January 1st they're like I'm done with it .

I just , you know , I spent the holidays and New Year's drinking and eating cookies and not caring about anything . I'm changing everything . Tomorrow I'm getting a gym membership and , by darn it , I'm going to do everything possible . Right ? And it's like dude , you haven't done it for the last 40 years .

Do you really think it's sustainable to just flip your whole lifestyle upside down ? And , you know , are you going to do that to your family as well , because that doesn't only impact you , it impacts your family as well .

So there's a lot of things that need to be adapted , and what I always tell the people , and specifically the drivers , is when we're starting , the question I ask them is say , three years from today , can you realistically see yourself continuing to do some of these changes or continually doing these habits that we're focusing on ?

If the answer is no , then we're probably starting too aggressive and we need to back it up . But if the answer is yes , then awesome , we're on the right path .

And once those habits become a part of their day-to-day routine , weekly routine , then we just start stacking other habits on top of it , and it's really focused on let's build this lifestyle , versus let's hold on to them for dear life for six weeks and see where we're at after and lose 10 pounds on the scale just to gain it right back .

Set a goal of I'm going to walk 45 minutes three times a week and then measure that over time . The outcome that you're looking for will find you . But instead we always focus on the outcome and then when we don't make progress towards that as fast as we want , we quit because we're demoralized or we're not seeing the progress .

And there are so many of those late night infomercials that are promising get rich quick scheme or get fit quick schemes , and they all have the same thing in common really attractive , tell you that the results are going to come quickly and all you got to do is 49.95 plus shipping and handling , and you're good .

It has nothing to do , or not only to do , with health . That focusing on those small inputs that will lead to the outcome that you want is a far more sustainable practice . And that's where physical therapy as a discipline is maybe different than a lot of others .

Because you mentioned , you're trying to get the gentleman with the knee replacement to just stretch out his knee a little bit more . You're not going in at that , pushing it 100% and trying to get them there quickly . It's no , we've got to gently ease our way into that in a way that is comfortable .

And , yeah , maybe it's sometimes uncomfortable , but it can't be painful , because if it's painful , that people will stop it . And I didn't think we were going to get a whole bunch of life lessons out of this today , mark , but that's where we've gone .

It's something I also I struggle with as a founder , I think , especially when you're scrolling through Twitter and LinkedIn and you have , you know , you follow these business influencers and you're like man , I just I want to be there . I know I can get there . Or like everyone's posting their highlight reel instead of the actual , like real , day to day struggles .

And I think sometimes I struggle on the business side of things to focus on the inputs versus the outputs and everyone has that different balancing act and different categories of their life that they struggle with or what their rockstar at .

Every single founder is going to encounter something that is new to them but that is old to somebody else .

Being around other people that have been there and done that and can offer that perspective is incredibly valuable , and so I'd love to be able to connect you with some other founders that are in similar spaces or even later in their journey , and some that are earlier and can learn from you , and that's the joy that I get to have in building this network of

founders just by telling stories . So thank you for sharing your story today , mark . We are all rooting for you and we can't wait to see what you do next . Yeah , thank you so much for having me on and yeah thank you .

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics , and a special thank you to our sponsors and the team behind the scenes who make it all possible . Be sure to like , follow or subscribe to the podcast to get the latest updates . To learn more about the show and connect with the growing community of entrepreneurs , visit logisticsfounderscom .

And , of course , thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories .