When it comes to wellness in trucking, let’s be real: the bar is low. A free app no one uses, a one-off webinar, maybe a dusty gym membership no one knows they have, that’s what passes for “driver wellness.” Meanwhile, in maritime, the conversation is miles ahead. Seafarers face many of the same challenges as truck drivers, long stretches away from home, irregular sleep, isolation, and stressful daily work, but the way shipping companies approach health and wellness puts most trucking outfits to shame.

I sat down with Claudia Paschkewitz, Columbia Group’s director of sustainability, diversity, and inclusion, one of the world’s largest ship management companies, responsible for the welfare of over 16,000 seafarers. Columbia has built structured wellness programs that blend physical health, mental health, nutrition, and connection. Trucking could learn a lot from how maritime has tackled these same problems.

But social feeds and headlines condition us to believe if you’re not growing at warp speed, you’re failing. Cue the 10X bros telling you to grind harder, sell more, never stop scaling. But that’s not a business strategy. That’s just bullshit.

We act like growth is the only proof a business is doing well. But ask anyone who’s lived through a hypergrowth phase, it can be chaotic, messy, and even destructive.

And the media? They’re guilty too, plastering revenue numbers across headlines like it’s the only thing that matters. Spoiler: revenue is 100% a vanity metric. It doesn’t tell you how healthy, stable, or scalable a company really is. You can have skyrocketing revenue and still be bleeding cash, drowning in churn, or running your people into the ground.

But social feeds and headlines condition us to believe if you’re not growing at warp speed, you’re failing. Cue the 10X bros telling you to grind harder, sell more, never stop scaling. But that’s not a business strategy. That’s just bullshit.

In a perfect world, marketing and logistics work hand-in-hand. The hype machine drums up interest, and the supply chain quietly delivers the goods, literally.
In reality? Companies often operate in silos, and marketing regularly make moves that can take the logistics team completely by surprise. Sometimes that surprise is a PR disaster. Other times it’s a tidal wave of demand. Either way, if your operations are not informed, they won’t be ready, and then you’re in trouble.

Let’s look at two beauty industry examples: one where marketing is likely to hurt demand and one where it blew it through the roof.

In supply chain, just like in day to day life, tech is supposed to make life easier. Instead, a lot of companies are slowly drowning in all the “solutions” they have been sold.

Every year, a shiny new platform promises to revolutionize your operations or optimize scalability or maximize profits. A dashboard here, a tracking widget there, maybe a warehouse robot that looks like it rolled straight out of a sci-fi movie. And before you know it, your team has six logins, a 40-step procedure for booking a truck, and no one can agree which report has the “real” numbers.

If that sounds familiar then your tech stack isn’t helping you. It’s got you working for it.

We all know how much I hate hype when it comes to new businesses in logistics, unfortunately it can feel like there’s a shiny new “must-have” trend every week.

AI-powered TMS. Drones in warehouses. Blockchain for pallets. Digital freight marketplaces promising to “Uber-ize” trucking. Not to mention every LinkedIn guru yelling about “resilience,” “visibility,” or “hyper-automation” (whatever the F that means).

The FOMO is real, and so is the fatigue. Because when you're running a brokerage, managing a fleet, or trying to keep products moving smoothly through a supply chain, you don’t have time (or budget) to chase every trend that pops up.