Building Trust Through Transparency: Denis Gallagher’s Operations Leadership

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Dennis Gallagher, Senior Vice President of Operations at Student Transportation of America, STA. One of North America’s leading school transportation providers. Founded in 1997, STA has grown to employ over 23,500 people and operate more than 17,000 daily routes, all while maintaining a deep commitment to student safety, reliability, and a family-oriented culture. As a senior leader at STA, Dennis plays a key role in shaping field operations, supporting thousands of employees across the U.S. and Canada. His leadership has been marked by a focus on cultural transformation, operational excellence, and talent development, helping the company stay resilient and mission-driven in a rapidly evolving industry. With a background in finance and strategy, Dennis brings a grounded yet forward-thinking approach to leadership in one of the most critical sectors in public service. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications in a way that puts more money in your staff’s pockets and the company’s too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted net profits over $412,000 a year. Results vary for each company, and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, Senior VP of Operations at Student Transportation of America, Dennis Gallagher Jr. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, thank you for inviting me on here. This is great.

Anthony Codispoti : So, Dennis, I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile here. It looks like you briefly worked at STA for nine months, 2004 to 2005 as a financial analyst and researcher. Then you left to work at Marriott Vacation Club International for a few years in a similar role, and then came back to STA where you’ve been now for 16 years. Walk us through how the opportunity first came about at STA, why you left, and then why you came back.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So, my father started this organization that I worked for back in 1997. I’m actually fifth generation in this industry. So, my father had worked for a company called Late Law, and left late law in 1996 and then started this company in 1997. I had grown up in the industry.

It’s really been all I’ve known, and it was all that I knew for most of my childhood life. Then I went to college, got a degree in finance and marketing, and met my wife in college at Boston College, and she’s from the central Florida area. So, after we graduated, she moved back home. I moved back to New Jersey. Just looking for jobs, looking for ways just to try and enhance some of my knowledge, some of the things that I had learned in college and had an opportunity to help out with some things at the office in New Jersey. So, did that for a few months, like you had mentioned, and then had that stink opportunity to be fired by my father, but in the best way possible.

In so far as you need to find what it is that you want to do, you need to start to sort of carve your own path in life here. And so, it took that advice.

Anthony Codispoti : So, that’s fire for performance reasons, more like, oh, spread your wings a little bit, kind of a thing. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So, my wife, like I said, is from central Florida, and she asked whatever I think about moving down here, and I thought, okay, well, cost of living is lower, and the weather is wonderful, and there’s opportunity. So, I did some networking amongst the alumni for Boston College through a series of wild networking opportunities. I was able to get in touch with somebody who was finance director down at Marriott at the Time Share Resort in Orlando. So, I flew down on a Sunday after my sister got married the day before, interviewed for the job on Monday, and got offered the job on Wednesday, and two weeks later moved down to Central Florida, and started down here working for Marriott, doing accounting for golf operations at Time Share Resort.

So, did that for a little while, transferred over to the corporate office to do financial analysis and financial planning and development for new project development. And did that for a few years. Now, one of the things I had developed in my relationship with my parents through college was to call them every Sunday, just as a check-in. And I continued that practice actually to this day. And so, all the while, while I was down here and working for Marriott, I used to still talk to my folks every weekend.

And my dad, he just loved talking shop. That’s all he did. It was the thing he did best, right? And so, for many years, it was just absorbing all of this information from him, all these stories. And back in 2008, he had said that, you know, the company got a contract with Duval County in Northeast Florida.

And he started floating out the idea, you know, we could use somebody to do the books here for this location. And I thought, okay, well, if I do that, I’m going to have to move back to New Jersey, and I really don’t want to do that. But then the possibility became real that I could stay in Florida, sort of travel up to that location from Orlando to Duval every so often, and do accounting for them.

And so, I took that opportunity. I had a career coach at the time. The career coach asked me, you know, would your dad ever steer you in the wrong direction? Because I think like many people you have on your show, you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder, you know, you don’t want to lean into that nepotism.

But when they framed it that way, I thought, you know, my dad would not steer me wrong. This sounds like a great opportunity. And so then in the summer of 2009, I jumped at that opportunity. And I’ve been with STA ever since.

Anthony Codispoti : And so how has your role evolved since you’ve been back there?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I started out doing accounting for a single site in Northeast Florida, and then grew that into multi site responsibility across a region. And just kept raising my hand and asking, you know, can I do more? Can I do more? So when we do acquisitions, even though it might not have been really geographically relevant, I said, okay, I have the capacity to take on more. So just let me take on more. And they were nice enough to say, okay, you can take on more. And so I started doing that.

And like I said, grew into an area, a region responsibility for finance and accounting. And then in 2016, someone had told me, you know, I think that you know operations more than you think. And I think that you might make a halfway decent operator.

I said, I don’t know anything about operations, all I know is finance and accounting. And he said, you spend a lot of time in the offices, right? You spend a lot of time at the terminals, which I did. I spent a lot of time in the dispatch offices just trying to figure out how do how does information move around here? How do processes work?

What are the people dynamics? I said, if you can figure that out, you’ve got nine, 10 operations down. So just lean into that, you know, pray about it, figure out what it is that you want to do. And I realized this was going to be an opportunity with a much higher ceiling for me. So I made the transition into operations. And I’ve been in regional operations management since 2016.

Anthony Codispoti : So let’s take a step back. And you know, there was the intro that I gave, but kind of tell a little bit more in plain English what STA does.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Two thirds of school districts around the country use own and operate their own school bus fleets to take kids to and from school. The other third use a vendor partner like us. So we are one of the largest contractors of school bus services across North America, like you had mentioned, in 23 states and six provinces in Canada.

And so we contract with school districts to take kids to and from school safely and on time every day. I think what sets us apart, one of the things that my that my dad used to say, and he’s retired, I retired in 2018, maybe it was 19, 2019 he retired. One of the things that he used to say is that this is a family business. It’s not a family business because it’s my family who started it.

It’s a family business because it’s about the families of the 18,000, 20,000 people that work here every day. And I think that that mindset combined with a hyper focus on putting yourself in the shoes of the customer. So how do you take care of your people? How do you take care of the customers?

Not ironically, those things are related, right? Take care of your people. Your people will take care of the customer. And the customer will take care of you. And I think that attention to detail that attention to making this organization like a family culture, while also being a trusted partner for school districts is something that’s unique to us versus many other contractors. I’m not saying that no one else in the industry tries to do that too. They do. But the emphasis here is I think what sets us apart from many other companies that do the same work in this industry.

Anthony Codispoti : How do you compare sort of, I don’t know, in terms of geographical coverage or size to some of the other players in the industry? Because I’m hearing over 23,000 employees. I mean, this sounds like a pretty sizable operation.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : It is. We are the second largest, I believe, in the industry. So there’s one company that’s a competitor for us who’s about double our size, they’re larger than everybody else by a country mile. Then after that, there’s us.

There’s a handful of players around the same range. And then it shifts into a lot of mid-size regional kind of companies. And then there’s a million and a half mom and pop providers who own one busses, 10 buses, things like that. So yeah, we are on the larger end of the spectrum relative to most other companies in the industry.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you find it challenging to sort of keep that family business mindset in an operation that size? I mean, you want to take care of your employees, they take care of the customers who then in turn take care of you. Like how do you sort of instill that in an organization that’s so large and spread out across so many different locations?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you can imagine, but we place such a heavy emphasis on relationship building at the local level. And so we’re a fairly decentralized organization. We place a lot of emphasis, like I said, on relationship building.

And that has to be instilled. So the level that I’m at in terms of senior management, where I oversee a region of operations, it is dependent largely on people in the role that I’m in and my counterparts to be able to filter that message down to, you know, VPs and general managers and filter that message down to terminal managers. You have to keep an eye on it, though, you have to not just have relationships necessarily from me to my direct reports, but relationships all the way down the line. And you have to put your ego aside a little bit in my opinion in terms of, yes, there’s a direct report chain of command, but you can talk to anybody in the organization that you want to. So if a terminal manager wants to reach out to me, they should be able to.

If I want to reach out directly to a terminal manager, I should be able to without anybody’s feelings getting hurt. If I want to go check on a customer, I have to be able to do that. It’s so important to be transparent, whether it’s with your own employees or with the customers. There are some times where you’ll find people don’t want to give people information because it’s inconvenient or because it’s not the most positive news, but you have to get past that. And like I said, you have to be transparent.

You have to be able to provide good information, bad information, good feedback, bad feedback, so that we can continuously improve those relationships, which will ultimately lead to us doing a better job for you.

Anthony Codispoti : Makes sense. It strikes me that your business is almost certainly very seasonal. We’re recording this in June of 25. Schools are out of session. You guys have a lot of idle buses or are your folks employed like a teacher would be where they take the summers off or their opportunities to put them to work in other ways during the off season?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : There’s some opportunities for work during the summer. Most districts run summer school, whether it’s extended year programs or whether it’s just straight summer school programs. There are some camps that are available. Largely, a lot of our employees like this job because it provides them an opportunity to take unemployment during the summertime. So the unemployment during the summertime allows them to collect a paycheck still, but be able to spend time with their families. Most of our employees are retirees.

Most. It shifted maybe somewhat a little bit, but it’s still largely retirees. And it’s a lot of grandparents, a lot of parents that like to spend time with their families. They work during the school year, but then they like to take summers off.

So there are opportunities for people that want to work and want to collect a paycheck through the summer, but largely our employees will take the summer off. It becomes a challenge to keep them engaged during the summer, right? How do you stay in touch with them?

How do you make sure that they’re coming back? And so we have to be cognizant of that. But yeah, a lot of them, that’s kind of their plan for the summertime.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I’m curious with such a large workforce and with that sort of unusual break time there in the summer, you know, where you’re going to have, you know, some turnover that you’re not aware of until sort of the moment arrives. What kind of programs have you guys put in place to recruit folks on the front and then to sort of maintain that retention, whether it’s throughout the year or during the sort of unusual summer months?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So I would say two different parts of that answer. There’s, we have to place a focus, a strong focus on retention throughout the year. Recruiting has become, it’s the thing everyone wants to point to.

There’s been a driver shortage in the industry since before COVID, but it’s really exacerbated by COVID. And so most times when we talk to people, whether it’s from outside the industry, whether it’s at the school district level, they always ask you, how are you recruiting? How are you recruiting? And recruiting is important, don’t get me wrong. I don’t find necessarily that we have a recruiting problem, that there are plenty of applicants that come that come in and we’ve done a pretty good job as an industry at stepping up wages to be more market competitive. Wages previously usually lagged versus other employers, but it’s gotten better more recently, especially post COVID.

So the wages are there. I think you can sell it as an opportunity to drive your kids to work. There are different ways that you can sell the opportunity to potential applicants. Like I said, there are some appealing parts of it. It does give you a lot of flexibility in your schedule. So there are recruiting programs that we do, whether it’s through Indeed, whether it’s on radio or billboards, those sort of traditional recruiting methods. What I find is the more important part of the conversation is that retention, because honestly, it doesn’t really matter how well you recruit. If you’re recruiting and you’re getting in one, two, three, four people a month or 10 people a month, if you are losing them out the back door, it doesn’t matter. And so the emphasis has to be on retention. Now, there’s a couple of things that we need to do in terms of making sure that we’re setting ourselves up for retention.

One is making sure that we’re recognizing our employees for the job that they do year round. The other is you have to make sure you give them proper training, set them up for success on the bus. And that’s with respect to accidents and safety. But it’s also with respect to student management. You can’t shortchange the training on the front end and then expect that that’s going to pay off for you in the back. So it is a significant investment in time to get school bus drivers trained weeks.

But you have to do that. And if you shortchange it, those people, the first time that they have an incident on the bus with students, the first time that they have an accident, even if it’s a mirror clip or something like that, they’re going to say, this is too much for me. But you have to instill in them the training and the confidence to be able to do the job so that when these things happen, they feel prepared to do the job and to stay.

It’s not the easiest job in the world, but it’s a significantly rewarding one. So I think that is really the importance throughout the years in terms of retaining people. Throughout the summer, we do some social gatherings, whether it’s a picnic or a beach gathering or an ice cream social, something like that, to try and physically keep your eyes on people throughout the summer. But then we also keep in touch with them through text messages.

Anthony Codispoti : And we try and ask them before the school year ends, is your intent to return or not? But even beyond that, you have to still keep on them throughout the summer until you get to that kickoff meeting before school starts when you’re introducing rounds back to them and everything. Just as a little sidebar, I’m kind of curious what the training for dealing with, I think you called it student management, dealing with tough kids is like, because I rode a school bus and it was mostly a pretty good experience.

But there were some kids who got rowdy, who were out of line. And I remember, her name was Sue, and I can still see her face. She was fantastic. She had a firm hand, but she wasn’t overboard. And so I think she just kind of had the right mix of the personality. But how do you instill that training, folks?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Honestly, if you get to the point where you’re at, where Sue was at, you’ve done a good job. You can’t be afraid of the students, right? You don’t want them to necessarily be afraid of you. But you have to let them know that there are rules on the bus. And as long as you operate within the confines of the rules, everything’s going to be great. You also have to introduce accountability to them in terms of here are the rules that we’re setting.

And if you go beyond these, there is a process with which we can refer hand in a referral note to the schools and the schools will discipline you, we’re not allowed to discipline the students, but we can write them up hand handed into the schools so that the schools can discipline them. So again, it’s that perfect combination of being patient for one, but that because they are kids, right? If you think about it this way, traditional school bus type C anymore, 72, 77 passengers, you know, that can range between if you’re if they’re smaller kids, you might be able to get a full 72, 77 kids on vehicle. And the older kids, you might be able to get 45, 50 kids on the vehicle, just because you know, those three seaters, you might sit two to those and two seaters, you could sit one. So traditional classroom would have what 20 kids in it, 30 kids in it inside the school, right? You go on the school bus, you’re talking about two to three classrooms worth of that you’re turning your back to and trying to navigate the road in front of you while not getting in an accident. So you have to I just

Anthony Codispoti : picture like I’ve been a part of it, but I’m just sort of picturing like there’s three ring circus and you’re juggling all these different things.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, 100%. And so they have to be able to have the confidence to speak with the kids and tell them that these are the rules of the bus. But also, like I said, introduce accountability measures that you can have fun as long as it’s right within here, right? Just stay within here and then everything’s going to be fine.

Anthony Codispoti : These are your guardrails. Kind of going back to more of like a, you know, because I know you’ve got a strong background in finance, you’ve kind of been a part of a really impressive like 400% expansion in the STA operations, while simultaneously keeping, you know, margins where they need to be. I’m curious to hear what were the most important pieces of the puzzle that had to come together to allow for such substantial growth?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So this was back when I first started in operations back in 2016. They had tasked me with growing the region. So at that time, I had two locations. One of them was the large location in Northeast Florida.

And the other one was a small operation in Charleston, South Carolina. And so my first year in 2017, I won a contract of similar size to the large one. So effectively doubled the size of the region. Following year, one another one, again, in Florida, same size. So tripling the size of the region. Following year, another one in 2019 in North Carolina, similar size.

And in 2020, another one similar size. As far as how do you make this happen? Well, part of it is you have to be very intentional about the contracts that you’re going to bid. There’s a couple of different ways that you can grow one of them through acquisitions, one of them is by bids. And then one of them is by trying to convert in-house operations to the contracted model.

All of these particular ones were about bids. So in some ways, it’s not like you can go proactively out to the market and try and sell a widget and increase sales. It’s a bit reactive in terms of the contract comes out to bid and then you bid on it.

But the process to prepare for it doesn’t have to be reactive. If we know these opportunities are coming available, how do we position ourselves in our current operations so that we can use our current operations as referrals, both from the school districts, but also just so you can see this is how we operate. You can speak to our employees, you can speak to our customers.

And you have to be, again, very cognizant of that because that speaks for itself larger than anything. One of the contracts that I had won in North Carolina was one that had come out, I think, a year or two before they actually imported the contract. And it came out just as a request for information, which is a precursor to any sort of public bid. And so we knew at that time, okay, this is not an opportunity for us to bid, but this is something that long term we might be able to take advantage of if we build a relationship. So we built a relationship with people at the school district level, answer a whole bunch of questions. Again, transparency, how do you go to them in transparency and position yourselves as subject matter experts so that when they put this contract out to bid, they already know you, they already know you can, they can trust you, they know that you’re going to give them good information.

So as this contract came out two years later, we find ourselves responding to the bid, we find ourselves in a negotiation, and then we find ourselves with a contract award. So some of it is reactive, but it doesn’t mean the entire process has to be. There are definitely ways in even a reactive environment that you can be proactive about your customer engagement, but also about your own current performance. So you’re sending yourselves up in a reactive environment to be able to respond accordingly.

Anthony Codispoti : So most of the growth that you just talked about there came about because of bids that you won, significant bids. You mentioned that another way to grow is through acquisitions. How big of a part has that played in the overall operations growth?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : A pretty significant part, and especially post-Covid, generally in the industry there’s been some consolidating of some of the mom-and-pops or the regional players into some of the larger organizations in the industry. So acquisitions is more prevalent than bids. The bids is a, it’s part of doing business in this industry. It’s just shifting share from one company to another. So it’s this natural competition between you and the other organizations. It’s an okay way to grow, but I don’t think it’s anybody’s favorite in particular because it’s a zero sum game.

As you win, someone else loses. The conversion side, and I’ll get to the acquisitions in a moment, the conversion side would be the best opportunity for the entire industry because it really just grows the size of the pie versus it might be two thirds now.

Anthony Codispoti : When you’re converting somebody from using their own internal operations to a contractor like theirs.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, and we all believe in the contracted model. We believe that the school board should keep their dollars inside the classrooms and focus on teaching kids. Let us get them there.

You worry about teaching them when we get them there. So we all believe in the contracted model, and if we could increase the size of the pie, it would be better for the entire industry, obviously. The acquisition side has been, I think, the largest source of growth for most of the larger organizations in this industry. We try to take the approach again of finding who are going to be the companies that fit with us culturally, who has similar values to us. You can do 100 hardware business review case studies to learn how acquisitions fail when you don’t assimilate culture properly.

It falls apart instantly. So we do a lot of diligence on finding out who are the owners of these organizations. And if we were to succeed in acquiring them, how would it fit strategically, but also how would it fit culturally?

I think that is really important. You can’t just go out buying up every company just to hit an embedded growth application. You really need to be smart about making sure that you’re onboarding the right group of folks. And I think we’ve done that by and large.

Anthony Codispoti : Going back to how you really grew the business in your region there, by winning those bids. Was there something special about the pricing model that you brought into place that allowed for you to have so much success in the bidding?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So this is kind of interesting because I love Microsoft Excel. Probably too much.

Anthony Codispoti : Spoken like a true finance nerd. I love it.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I’m the kind of person that, you know, when I was a kid, I used to use Microsoft Excel to track hockey statistics just because I just liked tinkering. I just love tinkering with Excel. And so even before I took formalized classes with it in college and after I got out of college, I took a proficiency test and was certified as a master user of Microsoft Excel, which I quickly realized if you have that and two dimes on niggler you have 25 cents.

So I have always kind of had a hobby of just tinkering. What could I do? How can I maximize this? So when I started with STA, I’m not going to sit here and say that I revolutionized this whole thing, but I found that we were probably not optimizing on the most efficient frontier when it came to our financial modeling in two ways really. I think one is there’s probably information in here that doesn’t necessarily need to be in here because it’s not a driver for decisions, but there’s definitely other information that is not in here that should be.

So in terms of content, I think it was a little bit of a redoing. How do we redo the current model to make sure that relevant drivers are in here for decision making? The other thing that I learned was very important and I learned this from one of my bosses at Marriott, was just simply about presentation. She emphasized that presentation in Excel modeling a lot. So when you would hand off a senior boss a document, make it easy for them to read. Make it aesthetically pleasing. You have to realize, especially in the school bus business, a lot of the bus operators are not Microsoft Excel master users like I am.

How can you create this thing in such a way that it’s aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate? Because the last thing I want to do is create a strain on the people who had to make decisions about these contracts and where we’re going to bid. You don’t want to add a strain to them by figuring out, by making them figure out how it is that I use this model. Make it easy for them to use. Decrease that burden for them so that the decision making capacity grows and we can just be much more efficient in our process for making decisions and make much more educated decisions. So I think that was kind of my approach with financial modeling as I approached STA.

Anthony Codispoti : Are you guys union shop? Non-union? How does that work?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : It depends throughout the country. There are some places where we do have unions. I would say it’s probably a third unionized and two thirds not. So where we have to, we come up, we negotiate with the Teamsters and we maintain labor peace.

Anthony Codispoti : Is that a process that you personally get involved in? Can you negotiate in those contracts?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, a couple of the locations that I operate in have organized employees. Most of the times through the Teamsters, I have one contract with the ATU, the Amalgamated Transit Unit. Most of them are with the Teamsters.

And what I find is that again, I’m going to sound a bit like a broken record here, but it’s relationship building. You know, you go into negotiations and you sit across the table most times from the union president or the business agent and then usually a couple drivers stewards, right? A couple drivers that represent the rest of the collective drivers in that bargaining unit. And you just have to listen to what it is that they say because a lot of times they might have been burned by one particular instance and now they want to take this one particular instance, they feel like no one listens to them and now they want to introduce it into contract language. It might be an issue that somebody had with a manager.

It might be an issue that somebody had with the facility. And you realize, okay, we don’t need to memorialize this in contract language. All we need to do is address your problem. And you could do that so often just by again, building human relationships with people, encouraging the drivers to have the open door or the managers to have the open door with the drivers so you can resolve a lot of these things.

The same goes largely for the union process. They’re not bad people. We’re not bad people.

We’re all good people trying to achieve an outcome, right? We have a business to run. They’re trying to make the most for their employees.

They’re trying to give their employees good places to work that are safe and clean and that they can provide for their family. And if you just view it in that perspective, it becomes so much easier to negotiate and you can cut out so much or not so much, but if there’s hostility, you can cut through that by just stepping back and realizing they’re out to achieve an outcome and so are we. There’s always a middle ground. How do we get there without thinking the worst of each other? And again, once you take that perspective and build relationships, especially to, it becomes easier, a lot easier.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, one of the things I like that you just said there, Dennis, was, you know, this idea about sometimes there was one thing that they feel burned by. And right now they want to memorialize it in a contract, somehow put something in place to, you know, prevent an early occurrence. But if you’ve got the ongoing relationship with them ahead of the negotiations, chances are you’ve heard about this instance and you can address it. And it, you can prevent it from even coming to the negotiating table in the first place. Right.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : And people just have a desire to be seen and to be heard. And when you don’t, it bubbles all the way up to, now we have to memorialize this in in a contract. No. So just listen to the people, acknowledge them, and see them, and you can avoid much of that.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, we’ve talked a little bit about the training that you guys provide. I’m kind of briefly referenced safety training, but I’d like to go into a little bit more in detail because I know that that’s something that’s really important to SDA, and I want to hear how you guys kind of implement that system-wide.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I, again, trouble when I say stuff like this, but my bosses let me, you know, talk to people, whether it’s customers or whether it’s the public or whether it’s stuff like this, and they trust I’m not going to say something stupid. Because what I do is I say that our organization is large enough now that there are many people, many processes, and I can’t sit here and guarantee that every process that we have is good, that we do all of these good things. But I know that we do one thing really well, and it’s the thing that you have to do well in this industry, otherwise you could be disqualified from doing it, and it’s the thing that we happen to be the best at, and that thing is safety. We are just better at safety than everybody else in a field confident in saying it.

I’m not saying other people don’t find it important. I’m just saying that we have the metrics back up that we do safety better than anybody else. Now, safety has to be at the forefront of everything it is that you do.

Everything has to start with, has to end with, and has to point back to safety. So that begins with the interview process of the drivers. There’s a series of questions to make sure that we’re initially weeding out people who don’t seem like a good fit, and that goes to the significant amount of training that we have to do before people even get on a bus. And then it goes to monthly safety training that’s required. There’s our safety meeting that we have before the year starts. There’s refinement training whenever there’s an accident, it doesn’t matter if it’s your fault or somebody else’s fault. So there’s just this significant investment in safety training, even if it means we have to get a route covered because we have to keep a driver off the road in order to test them because they just had an accident.

So there are sacrifices. And again, as long as you’re upfront with your customer to say, hey, this person got an accident on this route yesterday afternoon, we have to pull them off for today, do some additional refinement training to make sure that they’re not going to do this again. So in the meanwhile, we need to cover that route otherwise customers, I’ve never heard a customer necessarily complain about that. But everything, like I said, has to point back to safety. And this goes to regular daily operations and route running, but it also goes to things that have nothing to do with safety. Why is it important that you pay your people correctly?

Because if you don’t pay your people correctly, they’re going to walk into the payroll person’s office and they’re going to ask why they’re not being paid correctly. And if they don’t like the answer that they get, they’re going to go out on the bus, all flustered, all hot. And what happens, inevitably, we’ve seen it a hundred times if you’ve seen it once, is that people get distracted while they’re on the road and it leads to accidents. So everything we do, whether it’s in the shop, maintaining vehicles, whether it’s the dispatch, how we talk to people, whether it’s getting people’s pay correct, everything has to point back to safety, everybody has to be invested in it. If you don’t have everyone pointing back to safety, everybody investing in it, people are going to know that you’re not serious about it, and then it’s going to show and your accidents will start to creep up and then your retention goes down and it just no balls from there. So it has to just be a commitment from every single function in the business back to safety.

Anthony Codispoti : I like the fact that you guys will take somebody who’s just had an accident, take them off the road, provide them training right away while everything’s still fresh to address whatever the issue was.

And I also appreciate the confidence in saying, hey, we do safety better than anyone. I’m curious, I’m kind of putting you on the spot here. I don’t know if you’ve got this at your fingertips, but any stats that kind of back that up?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : There’s two key metrics in the industry where we track safety. One of them is accident frequency ratio, and the other is lost time injury frequency ratio. Now those numbers, because of all the different acquisitions that all the different companies have, they’re all tracked separately by DOT numbers. So we keep those internally.

Those are not numbers that are published publicly, but those figures that we record internally, we’re able to look across the spectrum and say, yeah, we do this better than anybody else because of how we track or how we stack rank in these couple different metrics.

Anthony Codispoti : I like that. You guys doing anything with alternative fuels in STA?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, we’ve been doing things with alternative fuels for quite a while. I mean, when I started back in 2009, shortly thereafter, I want to say it was in either in 2009 or 2010.

So it’s 16 years ago. My first introduction to alternative fuels was somebody in Jacksonville had come to us and said, hey, we would like to sell you a biodiesel blend. I said, OK, well, what is it blended with? I said, chicken fat. OK, so it’s part diesel and part chicken fat.

And so we set up a few tanks on the location and we would be able to fuel, we set aside 10 buses or so. And it smells like chicken. You get really hungry and start wondering where’s the closest Chick-fil-A after your fuel. Also, I love Chick-fil-A.

I would eat it every day. And so it but it was price comparable to diesel. You know, it was maybe a little bit cheaper than diesel. The efficiency was about the same and it burned cleaner and the drivers appreciated that.

So fast forward then to probably getting the year wrong, but somewhere around 2014 or so. We end up having the largest propane fleet in the country in Omaha, Nebraska. We ran over 400 vehicles, all propane for Omaha public schools.

Fast forward then to today. And we do some some CNG stuff out in California. I don’t have a ton of experience with that myself. Now that the push is more toward electronic, electronic school buses or electronic, electric school buses. And so, and I can talk about EVs as well. What’s interesting to me is, you know, whether it’s the chicken fat, whether it’s the propane, whether it’s EVs. There’s always been this desire, whether it’s from the customers or the drivers, to find some alternative to diesel. And it’s mostly due to, I would say health reasons in terms of the drivers really appreciate the cleaner burning fuel. We’ve been around school buses enough to know that it’s not the most pleasant thing to inhale diesel fumes. And the drivers appreciated it so much when you put them on a vehicle with alternative fuel. Now some, just like their old diesel bus and little like change, that’s a thing too. But there are a lot of people that appreciate that you’re going out of your way to try and create a safer driving environment for them. And so between the interest from school districts here and there and the interest from drivers, that’s kind of never gone away for the last 16 years and it makes me think, okay, especially the last few years there’s been this, you know, push toward cleaner living generally, that I don’t think this, you know, this consideration for alternative fuels is really ever going to go away. On the electric vehicle school bus side of it, I have 10 electric vehicles that are being delivered to one of my locations in January. So that’ll be my personal first foray into it.

We do it here and there throughout the country. But this will be my first experience with it. We have the charging station set up. We’re just waiting for the vehicles to be delivered. What I’ve heard, which will be a really fun social experiment too on the EVs, is that the EVs are quiet, right? I’m sure you’ve driven an electric car or been around and they’re quiet. So there’s a theory that the kids don’t have to yell over the sound of the diesel engine.

And so if you’re not yelling to talk to your friend, you can keep your voice down. And that’s going to lead to temperatures rising a little less emotionally, right? And so is there a link between electric vehicles and student management? Not even for anything that necessarily the driver is doing, but is it going to lead to perhaps better behave kids? I don’t know, maybe.

Anthony Codispoti : I believe one something. I mean, theoretically on paper, it makes a lot of sense. As soon as you started talking about it, and I’m like, oh, it’s going to be quieter. The kids are probably going to, you know, whether it’s 1% or 20% calmer, it makes sense to me.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : There’s something there. So we’re going to test it out and see how that goes. But yeah, I mean, there are some school districts throughout the country who are hardline against it. They just want their traditional diesel school buses and that’s fine. But there’s always been a contention of the population that’s got an interest in it. And I don’t think that’s going to go away.

Anthony Codispoti : Why are some districts bent on staying with the old diesels? Is it because their rates are lower if they’re using a traditional diesel bus versus electric? Because the electric buses are going to cost you more, right?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : The electric buses are going to cost you a lot more. We’ve been assisted by some of the government grant programs in order to get those funded. I think there’s two reasons to answer your question. One of them, the state of Texas, comes to mind. Just with the prevalence of oil and I don’t think that they’re interested much in electric vehicles. And that’s okay.

That’s how they get their bread butter. That’s fine. The other, I think, is more because I think generally our industry is a laggard in tech. And I would consider EVs as sort of a tech implementation, which we kind of have to be. Because we transport kids to and from school every day. We have to make sure that the technology is right and it’s safe.

Because if it’s not, we have more on the line than almost every other employer out there. And so I think that right now it’s, the EVs have gotten a little bit more prevalent over the last five years. The implementation has stepped up somewhat.

But there’s a lot of school districts, even who I’ve been a partner with, who have been awarded grant money to be able to get them. And they sit back and they say, well, we want to see everybody else use them first. We want to see how the efficiency on them is. We want to see, can you run them on long routes?

Or do we have to charge them in the middle of the day in between routes? There’s a lot of operational questions that people have that are making them a little bit more hesitant to sign up today. So it’s not necessarily that they’re hardline against the usage of it today. They just want to see more data. They just want to see how it works. Which is fine.

Anthony Codispoti : Will you see the future of SDA going and say, I don’t know, the next three to five years, what do you think the organization looks like and changes here in the next few years?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I think the changes largely to the industry are going to be the same changes to the organization. It seems like the most impetus for change right now is through onboard technology. And again, like I said, we’re a little bit behind many other industries, especially within transportation, as far as implementation of technology.

And right now there are so many different options. I mean, I’m sure if you, if I told you about all the different tech that is available on the buses, you would think, oh my goodness, like how much it’s changed since we wrote the bus, right? It’s almost like an entirely different vehicle.

You wouldn’t believe it. And so there are so many different tech options, even within the same subset, right? So there’s all different kinds of GPS units. There’s cameras inside the bus. There’s cameras outside the bus. There’s cameras on stop arms. There’s technology that you can implement at the facilities in terms of pre and post trip inspections of vehicles.

There’s AI implementation in the cameras so you can monitor the driver’s behavior so you can try and get ahead of driver error. There’s a whole bunch of these opportunities. And I love the vendors in this industry. It seems like they’re really getting after it in terms of student safety and efficiency. So I really applaud the vendors in the industry for keeping efficiency and student safety in mind because that’s where most of the tech is going. I think where this needs to go is having more of a single solution that encapsulates all of those different things.

And I think we’re kind of on the precipice of that. But there’s, like I said, so many different tech offerings. How do you get them all implemented and all to work together? Because a lot of times they’re with different vendors and there’s not always an opportunity for those pieces of tech to work together without some other third party solution to put together. So how do you create this single painting glass, as I’ve heard people say, the single platform that pulls together all of the technology? I think too, there’s so much tech and there’s really, I don’t know if there’s a great ability right now to measure the return on tech. And so I think that whoever figures out the best way to measure the return on tech is going to have a leg up in terms of implementation and scalability of that tech. Interesting.

Anthony Codispoti : Shifting gears, Dennis, whether you choose something personal or professional here, I’d be curious to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome. What it was, what you learned going through it and how you got to the other side.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Sure. So this one’s going to go back quite a bit. When I was 10 years old, I had a pretty serious eye injury to the point where I’m still blind in one eye.

About 90%. It’s kind of a miracle that they let me drive anywhere. But so I had this injury happen at the time I was a pretty avid basketball player. And so it was in the hospital for a few days and then had to rest and not really move for a little while. And then as soon as I was cleared to be able to kind of get up and move around, my parents had me back out in the driveway, shoot hoops.

And my mom would go out and rebound for me. And I don’t know if you followed basketball in the 1980s or 90s, but there was a guy named Kurt Rampus who played for the big sons.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, he had glasses and a strap. Great.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : So we bought a pair of glasses just like the Kurt Rampus glasses. And my mom had taped over the lens for my good eye. So I’m out there practically blind at the free throw line and practicing dribbling. By the way, you can get a lot better at dribbling when you can’t actually see anything. And then go to the free throw line and start just taking shots.

And my mom would rebound for me. So like I said, I’m out here practically blind, getting back to shooting. And I’m not going to say that, you know, I was hitting buckets blindfolded. What I’m saying is that to be able to get back out there and shoot, and it kind of would move around elbow, corner, three point line. But you start to learn to shoot based on feel instead of depth perception and sight. Like I said, I’ve not very good depth perception anymore. The Muppets 3D movie is a lost cause for me.

So I don’t think I’m trying to watch that. But it was just this resilience. I don’t think I ever gave my parents enough credit for pushing me to get out there. I had a serious physical challenge, a serious physical limitation, but a lot of potential in terms of athletics. And my parents weren’t allowed, but weren’t about to let something like that be a hurdle that I wouldn’t be able to clear. I didn’t want to create an opportunity for me to mope around and not be able to do what it is that I love to do. And so that kind of pushing me, despite this pretty significant hurdle, is something that I don’t think has ever left. And I have such a low tolerance for complaining.

I get in trouble with my wife and my kids a lot about that because I have such a low tolerance for complaining. But we are just capable of so much more than we even realize, and all it takes is a little fortitude. And sometimes it takes somebody pushing you and telling you that you can do these things that you don’t even think you can do.

Anthony Codispoti : As you think back to that time, can you think how willing were you to participate in those drills with your mom, or did it take a lot of effort on her part, kind of strong-arm you into it?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : No, it didn’t take a ton of effort. I think it was a little bit, what are we doing again? I’m not allowed to see anything, but that was the only way that I was going to be able to learn how to do this. And so maybe a little bit of resistance at first, but I loved getting out there. It was my favorite sport to play, and if it was an opportunity for me to do that. By the way, when you can’t see, you also can’t see how bad you are at the time either.

Anthony Codispoti : Is that helping with your golf game too?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : No, I have friends that tell me how bad my golf game is. Don’t worry about that. But yeah, so yeah, it wasn’t a ton of resistance. I think it was something I knew I had to lean into, and I enjoyed doing it, and I was better for it. I ended up being a very, very good shooter, and I played throughout my high school career, and got a couple letters to play at different colleges, didn’t end up doing it. But I don’t think that I would have had the career that I had in athletics. And I don’t think I would have that little thing that I have always kept from that. If I didn’t have my parents to be out there not letting me give up, just because of something like that.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you think your basketball career would have been as successful as it was if you hadn’t had the vision issue?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : That’s a great question. I hadn’t ever thought about that. I don’t know the answer to that. You know, I was always pretty bad at defense, so it wouldn’t have helped me be a better defender. I don’t think that I would have been necessarily any better. I’m just glad that I wasn’t able to end up being worse. I think it kind of reached my potential. But again, if I think there was a serious challenge that easily could have prevented me from reaching my potential, and I didn’t let it stop me from reaching my potential, would I have been better? I don’t know. I think I was about as good as I could have been.

Anthony Codispoti : As a father, as somebody who manages people, have you ever thought, I don’t know if you’ve sort of connected the dots in this way, about how you can sort of take that experience and what your mom did to sort of encourage you through it, to put something similar in place for any employees or your kids to sort of give them that same, like, get up and go?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : You know, I try with my kids. They fight me on this, but I try to match, you know, a level of pushing them. But also, I lean on my wife a lot for empathy. It’s something that I don’t necessarily lead with, and so I need to have her help me. I know I’m very involved with my kids’ lives in terms of coaching, sports and whatnot, and so I think that they think I could probably go a little bit easier on them, but again, I’m just trying to get the best out of them. In terms of work, I think you always need to be pushing people.

Andy, you need to have that conversation with people up front to say, I recognize that there’s something there, and I’m going to push you if I feel like you need to get better. And again, just let them know it’s because you care. It’s not because you’re trying to be out there yelling at them. It’s because you want them to meet their potential. I’m admittedly not the best at giving people that proactive feedback to say, hey, you know, I had a boy, I had a girl, you’re doing a great job. I admittedly could be better at that, and I probably need to take that, you know, from my own life, my own experience and use that more going forward so that more people aware. I think it exists up here. I just need it to exist out of my mouth so that others can understand. Here’s where I’m coming from when we’re having these kind of conversations.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, you know, I think about, because I’ve got two kids, nine and 10 year old boys, and I think a lot about the things that I learned from them and the interactions with them and how they sort of respond to the things that I say, the coaching that I try to provide. And as I understand sort of the psychology of the responses that I’m getting and the resistance that I’m getting, how can I take those lessons and sort of apply them to sort of adult interactions, right? Because I think like deep down, like, you know, the psychology of grown-ups is we’re all little kids still inside, right? And so the same things that trigger my children and get really big reactions are probably triggering, you know, adults that I’m interacting with. And it’s harder to detect because, you know, we sort of all developed our coping mechanisms and, you know, we sort of hide our emotions. I don’t know if you ever sort of think about interactions with kids and like how you can sort of learn from that and apply it sort of in the adult world.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I do. I feel like I say that to people all the time in terms of, I’ll end up saying to someone at work, like I’m going to have to treat this relationship like I was talking to one of my children.

Again, it sort of goes back to everything that we’ve talked about. How do you listen to people? How do you see people?

Let them know that they’re heard, that they’re seen, that you understand their perspective. Because again, I think they all just want to be recognized. I think that there’s so much of that in adult interactions. But again, how do you be transparent with people?

How do you tell them I’m doing this for you because I want the best for you? I think that applies to children. It applies to parenthood. But it applies every day in so many interactions that you have with people at work.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I like that a lot. Dennis, how would you characterize your superpower?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : My superpower. So I have probably two superpowers. One of them is, a couple of my friends call me Rain Man because I have this just innate recall for events and things that people say at seemingly meaningless things that people say and do. And I just have this innate ability to recall them.

So that’s one. My other one that I really like, this is going to sound funny to say, but is doing roasts for people. I don’t know if it’s an Irish thing or a New Jersey thing or a Boston thing, but we’re only cracking on people that we like. And I’ve been invited to do roasts for my college friends, for my home friends, for family members, for my current friends. And I don’t think that they would be asking me to do this if they didn’t appreciate it or they didn’t enjoy it. But it’s this perfect combination of putting people at ease and public speaking, which by the way I love. So public speaking, putting people at ease, building relationships and friendships. People enjoy it so much. I’ve never been in an environment that I enjoyed more than giving a good roast to people and just seeing people crack up. Again, you’re not doing it to be mean-spirited. It’s doing it because we really like it.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s such an interesting choice to offer up there. Are these like, what’s the question I want to ask here? Are these like pre-planned activities or is it sort of like on the spot? Like Dennis, can you like just fry me here for the next 60 seconds? Or is this like an event where like you’re planning for weeks ahead of time?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : It’s a little bit of both. It’s mostly the pre-planned type, whether it’s a best man’s speech, which I’ve done a couple of those. But for a while it was a fantasy football requirement. We had started out by whoever finished the last place had to roast the rest of the group. And I did finish the last place and did it so well that everybody’s like, you’re just going to keep doing this. And so every year I would come back and we would have our draft and I would roast everybody with the same exact jokes, but just told different ways. And my goodness, we had so much fun doing that. So yeah, I put a lot of work into these things, but it pays off. I love it so much.

Anthony Codispoti : Now maybe we’ll have you back on and you can do one on me. Maybe we’ll get to know each other a little bit more. I could do whatever you want to.

Maybe. How about a resource that you could recommend for our listeners? A course, a book, a podcast, something that’s been helpful to you, rather than sort of just like personal development, professional development that others might find useful?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : If there’s an opportunity for anybody to do a public speaking class, I couldn’t recommend that any more highly. I had to take one in my MBA. I did my MBA at the University of Florida, Gogaters. And it was a semester long. You got one grade for it at the end of the course and I got the best grade in the whole class, which was unusual for me because I hated public speaking. I was afraid to do it, but really worked at it and became rather good at it. And I can singularly point to that part in my career where the trajectory of my career changed. Because if people know that you can be trusted to talk in front of, whether it’s thousands of people, whether it’s in front of a board meeting of eight people, whether it’s one-on-one with a superintendent, if people can trust you to speak publicly and with customers in varying capacities, the opportunities open up for you so much more broadly. And I had been started to be given this opportunity when I was even in finance and accounting, so not even in operations, but I found myself being invited to go do presentations for school district customers or prospective customers. So the opportunities just open up more than you could ever imagine if this is something that you can get proficient in.

So find a class, find a way to be measured, some accountability, record yourself doing public speaking. It is a nightmare to watch. It’s like watching yourself swing a golf club. You know, you get out there and you’re like, I look like Roy McElroy and then you watch yourself and you’re like, I think I look like Roy McElroy’s mom probably more than I look like Roy McElroy. So it’s painful to do, but it’s the only way to get better. And I promise if you can get proficient at it, opportunities will open up in your career more than any other opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti : Roy, that’s something I can really echo. You know, my kids have asked me in the past, Dad, what was your favorite class growing up? And I don’t know about favorite, but certainly the most useful is I took two different speech courses in high school, one in freshman year, one in senior year.

Mr. David Brunner is a teacher and that had such an impact on me going forward. I started that first class just a mess. I forgot part of my speech the first time I got up there.

I just, you know, I bombed it. And I was so uncomfortable. It felt so out of my skin up there and just, I just stuck at it and just, you know, committed myself to, I’m going to get better at this.

Part of it was probably just the vanity of like not wanting to, you know, be in front of a group of people and look like a complete fool. And that first class alone, even if I hadn’t taken the follow-up course years later, yeah, transformed my life exactly like you’re talking about. It opened up more opportunities, more doors for me. It made me comfortable when opportunities came about because I knew that I had proven myself in that way.

So I echo that completely for listeners. If you’re not comfortable with public speaking, if you haven’t, you know, taken a course on that before, put yourself in that position. It’s a big game changer.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : One of the things that really changed my perspective on public speaking as well is, you realize once you get out of the class environment, you’re not going to be put in front of a group of people to speak professionally unless they know that you have the answers. They know that you have the information and they want you to be the one to relay that information. And once you realize that people in the crowd don’t want to see you mess up, I think we have this fear that people are going to want to laugh when I mess up.

They want to see me do poorly. And that’s not the case at all. People want information from you and it’s your job to give it to them. And it’s not that hard once you realize I am a subject matter expert in this thing I’m being asked to talk about. Now I just need to learn how to communicate it. But if you can get over that fear part of it, people want you to succeed. They want you to communicate to them. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : Just one more question for you, Dennis. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First, I’m going to invite everyone listening today to hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app. This has been a really great conversation today with Dennis Gallagher at STA Student Transport of America. And I want you to get more great interviews, more great content, listen to more great guests like Dennis. Dennis, I want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you or STA directly. Maybe follow your story. What would that be?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I’m moderately active on LinkedIn, I think. So if people want to connect, you can send me an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. It’s probably the best way professionally at least. And the company has likewise social media pages, Student Transportation of America on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. But yeah, if people would like to get in touch with me, LinkedIn would probably be the best way to do that. Great.

Anthony Codispoti : And we’ll include a link to your profile on the show notes for everybody. So last question, Dennis. We’ve had a nice conversation here. I hope we stay in touch. You’re from now, we reconnect and you’re excited because you’re celebrating one thing. What’s that thing?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : I would say the Jets went in the Super Bowl, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in my lifetime. There’s a contract that we’re starting up in Texas that I’m particularly excited about. And this is a new bid and win for us this year. I would love a year from now to look back and say we absolutely nailed it between the start-up and we made the experience for Student Transportation safer and more reliable in that school district than it’s ever been. So I would love to have a successful year one in June 2026 looking back at the last 12 months.

Anthony Codispoti : What specifically about this particular contract are you so excited about?

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : This is a school district that had one provider for a long time and when they selected us, many people in the room looked around and said, why exactly are we changing again? And so it’s an opportunity for us to go in as a vendor there. And we have a pretty large presence in the state otherwise, but it’s an opportunity to go in and show people that just because the Student Transportation has been done for you this one way by this one vendor for such a long time, that’s not the way that it always has to be done. We already have some safety measures that we’re introducing and implementing.

And I think it’s just an opportunity again to showcase some of the things that we do here when school districts take a chance on us and select us to give their kids’ rights to school.

Anthony Codispoti : Well, best of luck with that. Dennis Gallagher of Student Transport, Transportation of America, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dennis Gallagher Jr. : Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.