There was a time when hiring in this industry felt like fishing in a very small pond. If you didn’t already know how deadhead or relief changes a price, if you couldn’t figure out HOS compliance just by looking, if the words “pickup” and “set down” didn’t come naturally to you, you were simply not qualified to work for us. We built departments on institutional knowledge, and we guarded that knowledge as if it were family recipes. The work got done, but it was held together by the tribal memory that lived in a handful of people’s heads—and that meant hiring was less about talent and more about finding someone who already “spoke our language”.

Then the software changed.

Not the cosmetic kind of change that gives you new icons and the same old headaches. I’m talking about tools that take the lore of the motorcoach business and quietly make it teachable, scalable, and repeatable. Tools that ask better questions, put more control in the hands of consumers, that do the math the same way every time, that make tribal knowledge public knowledge, that calculate fees, taxes, surcharges, and availability right inside the quote—so it’s less about what the person using it knows and more about simply following the steps.

When that happens, you don’t just speed up quoting and increase margins. You change who you can hire.

Now, suddenly, the best candidate for your sales team isn’t the one who’s memorized every back road, who has 20 years of “this is how we do it”, or who has memorized the “busy” dates in your market; it’s the person who can listen well, communicate clearly, and follow a process. The right dispatcher isn’t necessarily the former driver who can feel a schedule with their eyes closed; it’s the detail‑minded problem solver who can read what the system is telling them and make good decisions faster. The aperture widens. You start hiring for aptitude and attitude, not for an unofficial degree in “how we have done it for the last 20 years.”

This is what modern booking and operations software does when it’s done right and what TBN has targeted from day 1. It reduces the onboarding burden by moving the burden from the brain to the system. It takes the thousand little assumptions a veteran makes and turns them into prompts, guardrails, validations, and workflows. It’s the difference between throwing a new dispatcher into the deep and hoping they swim while having to shadow them for 6 months, to handing them an established process where the data they need is always right in front of them, and where alarms go off before any mistake makes it out the door.

If you’ve felt the pain of ramping up new people in our industry, you already know what’s at stake. The labor market is tight. Customer expectations are high. Turnover happens. And every hour you spend teaching someone the unspoken rules is an hour you aren’t selling, dispatching, or delivering. Institutional knowledge is valuable—but when it becomes a prerequisite for employment, it turns into a bottleneck. The business slows down to the speed of its training program, and the training program slows down to the speed of whoever can find time to explain why a one‑day, two‑bus trip with 4 hours of driving but 12 hours of waiting deserves a very different price than they may expect.

Great software shortens that runway. It doesn’t insult the experts; it honors them by codifying what they know. The senior salesperson’s pricing instincts become a set of rules that live in the engine. The dispatcher’s sixth sense about Hours of Service becomes eligibility logic that sets the standard when assigning drivers. The operations team’s insistence on signed documents turns into a booking contract that assembles itself, pushes out, and gets a digital signature as part of the process, not the exception. The point isn’t to erase judgment. It’s turning your best people, on their best days, into business as usual.

That’s where the freedom shows up. When the system does the heavy lifting, you can recruit from adjacent industries—hospitality, events, call centers, logistics—and see people become productive in days instead of months. When the quoting widget asks the right follow‑ups automatically, you don’t need a decade of booking experience to avoid underpricing a prom shuttle that hits on your busiest weekend of the year. When operations have real‑time visibility into drivers, equipment, and conflicts, a new coordinator can trust the screen more than needing to build a “gut feeling”. When your platform keeps a breadcrumb trail, leaders can coach with receipts instead of hunches, which is a far better way to grow people.

I’ve watched the opposite play out, too. Legacy systems that require a whisper network to operate and where support is quicker from “other users” than it is from the company itself. Spreadsheets that multiply like rabbits and disagree with each other completely, devoid of real-time insights, but are snapshots into a moment now past. A new hire who is shadowed for a week that turns into months because they don’t even speak the language, let alone grasp the nuance that is sales and dispatch in the motorcoach industry. That environment forces you to hire unicorns—and unicorns are expensive, scarce, and, eventually, tired.

Here’s the quiet revolution tucked inside modern booking software: it lets you bet on teachability. You can hire the person with the right behaviors and give them the tools to perform the role like a pro. You can build teams that are resilient because knowledge is distributed, not hoarded. You can scale without needing to clone your most tenured employee—and your most tenured employee can finally take a vacation without the office catching fire.

At TBN, that’s why we obsess over the boring‑sounding parts of the platform—contextual prompts, eligibility checks, standardized pricing, embedded terms, integrated payments, and real-time ops views. They aren’t features for the brochure; they’re scaffolding for your people. S TBN was designed to take the “you just have to know” moments and make them “the system already knew.” When the software carries the weight, your hiring pool increases, your ramp time shrinks, and your risk of expensive errors goes down.

And if you’re wondering whether this means experience no longer matters, let me say this as clearly as I can: experience matters more than ever. But now your veterans get to be coaches instead of crutches. They refine the rules instead of re‑explaining them. They spend their best energy on exceptions, strategy, and relationships—places where human judgment shines—and the system takes care of the rest.

The future of our industry won’t be won by the companies with the most institutional memory. It will be won by the companies that bottle that memory, pour it into their workflows, and free themselves to hire the best humans for the job, regardless of how many charters they’ve priced or nights they’ve dispatched. That’s how you build a team that learns faster than it churns. That’s how you turn common sense into common practice. That’s how you grow.

If you’re ready to stop hiring for secrets and start hiring for strengths, we should talk about what modern booking and operations software can do inside your shop. The pond is bigger than it used to be. Let’s cast farther, together.

— Christian Riddell

Ready to see it in action? Let’s connect about the TBN platform and walk through how operators are onboarding new team members in days, not months.

#TBNDrives #TheFutureIsHere