Growing Your Trucking Company

Dare to Dream

All companies start with a dream. Maybe it’s to be your own boss, or to provide a better life for your family – or maybe you want to build something that will survive you.

No matter why you started your trucking company, if you are successful you will come to a cross-roads where you’ll need to decide whether you want to grow, or whether you want maintain your current company size. This blog post is for those who want to keep on growing.

Two Roads to Travel

Most, if not all companies start with a single person, usually the owner, who drives the business. That owner is involved in all decision-making – whether it’s deciding where to purchase diesel or who to extend credit too – there is not an aspect of the business they are not intimately involved with.  This works great,  to a point… Eventually if you are growing you get to a spot where the principal is working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep things going, and does this because they feel nobody could do the job as well as they can. This ends up being an inflection point for a small business, a point in time where the owner either learns to let go and trust the people around them – or they become the constraint that holds the business back. During my career, I’ve seen this more times than I can remember, and it always goes in one of two ways.

1. Successful entrepreneur builds a team and gets the tools necessary to scale the business up, or
2. Successful entrepreneur can’t let go, isn’t able to build a team, and doesn’t trust the tools available to them

It Comes Down to Trust

Sounds easy right? You just have to build a team and get the tools to manage them. How hard could that be? Here’s the catch, it’s really hard to let go and trust others with what you have put your blood, sweat and tears into. You are going to need all the help you can get, and if you are a trucking company owner you are going to need some good trucking software because you are going to be managing your business now instead of running it – and that means you need a single portal that will allow you to determine how well you are doing. Trucking software can do great things, like tell you what your cost per mile is on different hauls, track and complete your payroll, calculate mileage for your IFTA reporting, give you profit and loss reports. It will take the guess work out of quoting on new hauls because you will know your costs. So, the first step everyone should take when they decide they want to scale up their trucking company is to go get some Trucking and Logistics Software as it will give you the tools you need to go from 1 to 1000 trucks. Then, hire some people you can trust so you can take a weekend off every once and a while.