So the show Landman has crossed my desk recently and I can’t help but see myself in the dust and diesel of Ole Billy Bob… A guy walking into rooms full of suspicion, trying to do a hard job in a harder world. The difference? My oil is freight. My wells are trade shows. And the land I cover isn’t Texas—it’s the cracked pavement of cities like Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis, Indy, Columbus, and Louisville.
I run the freight operations for the largest geographical region in my company. That means I’m the one on the hook for making sure millions of dollars in show freight moves in and out of convention centers on time, without getting lost, broken, or caught in union gridlock. I navigate labor politics in places where the handshake doesn’t matter if your last name isn’t known. And I do it at an age when people still ask, “How long have you been doing this?” as if experience can only be measured in decades, not disasters avoided.
The truth? This isn’t glamorous work. It’s long nights, unpredictable freight schedules, and 4 a.m. warehouse calls. It’s solving problems most people don’t even know exist—like making sure a client’s booth doesn’t get buried behind crates or helping a trucker make a 2-inch turn through a 10-foot dock door while half a dozen departments argue over who’s responsible. It’s not sexy, but it matters.
I’ve heard it all.
“You’re young.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Are you Mack’s son?”
And then five minutes later they’re asking me to fix something their department couldn’t handle.
There’s a strange kind of resistance in this industry when you come in young but competent. They like your energy, but they doubt your judgment. They want your hustle, but not your opinion. What they don’t realize is that age doesn’t teach you how to survive when four departments collapse onto the freight desk at once, or when a 40-foot trailer disappears in a union yard. Experience does—and I’ve earned that the hard way. Not to mention if it’s true your frontal lobe does not develop prior to age 25, but is molded by life experience. My brains decision making mechanism is strictly grounded in trade show logic. Which is as blue collar as it gets…
Like Bill the Landman, I didn’t get here by accident. I earned every mile of this territory. I’ve walked docks in the middle of the night, stood between feuding departments, and taken the heat for problems I didn’t cause. And I still show up early and stay late—because even if the industry hasn’t caught up to me yet, I’m already ahead of it.
This isn’t a complaint. I love my job. It’s my life. I love the grind. But don’t mistake youth for weakness. We’re the ones who will change the way this work gets done—and still carry the load while we’re doing it. Stay tuned.
