Most carriers spend a lot of time talking about culture. Tracy Rushing says culture is just another word for truth: what's actually happening at the carrier, in the fleet, and on the road. When recruiting is selling one version of the company and operations is delivering another, drivers figure that out fast. R.E. Garrison Trucking learned something else: when those two things match, drivers stop leaving and start referring, and the waiting list of applicants builds itself.
Tracy is the executive director of safety and recruiting at R.E. Garrison, a fleet that has built a waiting list most carriers would not believe is real. On this episode of Don't Get Played, she sits down with Carlo Solórzano to talk about how R.E. Garrison got there, what their Crown Driver Program actually asks of drivers, and what the carriers stuck with high turnover are almost always getting wrong.
What she says most carriers miss is what happens after the recruiting conversation: whether operations can confirm what recruiting promised, or whether drivers arrive to find a different version of the job than the one they accepted. Drivers are tolerant of a lot, but not of that particular gap.
Tracy Rushing has spent 30 years in transportation, starting in a scale house and building one of the most driver-centric cultures in trucking. She traces the shift in R.E. Garrison’s approach back to 2023, when a candidate asked what they were actually offering that another carrier couldn't match. The answer was not a better sign-on bonus or a shinier fleet. It was the way R.E. Garrison creates the opportunity for success and then transfers ownership of that success to the driver.
"When the drivers started talking about that, there was a clear shift in us seeking candidates and candidates seeking us," she says.
The referral program took off, and the waiting list followed.
Tracy is clear that neither happened because of a recruiting tactic. They happened because what R.E. Garrison promises in the first conversation is what drivers actually find when they show up. She calls that being a destination employer, not in the recruiting pitch sense, but in the operational one. The terminal is a place drivers want to be, not just somewhere they pass through.
The mechanism behind the culture is the Crown Driver Program, which R.E. Garrison introduces to every candidate in the very first conversation. Tracy calls the program's metrics "kept promises indicators" because that framing matters. Each one is a promise the driver makes, not a standard the carrier imposes.
The kept promises cover the full driving job: credentials stay current, preventable accidents are prevented, hours-of-service regulations are followed, and equipment is treated like something the driver owns. R.E. Garrison makes balancing promises on the other side. If R.E. Garrison misses a service and the equipment can't perform, they own that too. Drivers know they can hold R.E. Garrison to the same standard R.E. Garrison holds them.
The safety data reflects what that kind of mutual accountability produces over time. Tracy does not present it as a fleet achievement. She talks about it as drivers operating safely around her family on the roadway, and says there is no adequate way to thank them for it. There are 227 Crown Drivers now, and any one of them will step into a recruiting conversation when a candidate needs to hear the ownership model from someone who lives it.
When carriers ask Tracy what they are getting wrong in a high-turnover cycle, she listens for their truth before answering.
"We talk about culture a lot, but truly it's just the truth. Like what's the truth at that house, at that carrier? And then if their recruiting department or their sales team is tasked with telling that truth, is the operation of that fleet confirming that as truth?" she says. R.E. Garrison goes out of its way not to sell one thing in the recruiting process but to deliver something altogether different on the job.
The damage is rarely intentional. But most carriers do not do the work of saying out loud what the safety lane is actually like, what happens when a driver is detained at a shipper, what a breakdown on the roadway really looks like. Recruiting sells the ideal. Operations delivers the reality.
If your fleet is stuck in the turnover cycle, the question Tracy would ask is simple: what's the truth at your carrier, and is your recruiting confirming it? The goal is no gap between the pitch and the pavement. The carriers that close that gap aren't just reducing turnover. They're building a trucking culture that drivers actually want to stay for.