Trucking Businesses, Get Smart & Organized with Software!

People will often say, “It looks so disorganized.”

Often, they are watching something – a meeting, an event, an activity – from afar and trying to figure out what is going on. Often, they are simply watching my Atom hockey team. Hmm?

I actually think the word they are meaning to say is, “It appears unorganized.”

If something is disorganized, then it means that at one time it must have been organized.

Our Customer Success Manager, Angelena, is a great listener. She has spoken to hundreds of customers and she says that the number one thing she hears our customers say is they want to “GET ORGANIZED.” They sign up to a monthly subscription for our trucking software because they want to get their business organized.

It’s a natural human instinct to build an orderly environment in which to operate. We do it as a society and we do it as individuals, and we do it more so at the places we work. As humans, we seek something called “Ceterus Paribus,” which in Latin means: all things being equal or held constant, if I get organized, I will be successful.

There was a comedy TV series in the late 60’s called, “Get Smart.” Get Smart was a good spoof of the memorable James Bond movies during that decade.

The good guys were called “CONTROL,” the bad guys were called “KAOS.”
Okay…I am going to lower the “Cone of Silence” for the rest of this blog…just between you and me, okay? 😉

For most trucking companies, it’s a constant battle to stay organized. And we know that when your business life isn’t organized, you can’t keep personal life organized. In a trucking business, one is always dealing with change – the business moves with the changes in its customers’ businesses.

So, for a trucking business to grow and gain the economies of scale, it must find a way to accommodate and manage the constant change in its business. Ideally, you want to find loyal customers, work with loyal suppliers, and loyal drivers and run the same routes at a good margin.

Consistency is the signature feature of CONTROL. Doing something different every day or every week is the creator of KAOS. But still, you need to find new customers, offer new services, try new routes in order to grow the business.

One of the key things then for a trucking company is find a trucking software that can accommodate a brokerage business, having an ‘all in one’ system that can accommodate growth and changes.

Say a big customer gets a new customer and they now have some more business for you. You may not have the equipment or staff in place to handle it, but you still want to own the relationship, not let another supplier come in and edge in on your business. Ideally, you would find some more owner -operators to do the loads or failing that perhaps you decide to broker a load.

Having a trucking software system in place that could manage a brokerage of loads in the same system that you run your trucking operation will accommodate this change. Keeping all the paperwork in place would be ideal.

Sometimes, I wonder if our natural curiousity is the enemy of good business. I worry that all our “constant idea generation” diminishes our ability to execute.

One day, I came to work and I saw that someone, pretty sure it was our President, left a book by Larry Bossidy on all of the executives’ desks. It sat there prominently – I looked down at the title and read it.

The name of the book was “Execution.”

I sent him an email. “Thanks for the book. Before I open it, I wanted to know if it was a business book or a book about capital punishment?”

His response: “Both.”

Trucking software and brokerage software initially helps the ‘Unorganized,’ and if you choose the right one, it can scale and adapt to the changes in your business – helping the ‘Disorganized.’ It gives you the necessary platform to accommodate those leaps in your operations and puts you back in control over all of the natural chaos of doing business.