Managing growth can be an exciting time for any motor carrier! Beyond ensuring all your ducks are in a row from a legal / DOT compliancy standpoint, there are many considerations to be had in terms of how you balance your driver base to match your business growth. Below are just a few of the tricks of the trade to yield high growth for your trucking business while minimizing risk and financial impact. At it's core, there are 3 basic building blocks of running a successful trucking operation:
1. Drivers
2. Assets
3. Customers
...everything else is just peripheral.
Thus, as you're scaling your business, it's important that the rate you go about hiring drivers matches the rate you go about purchasing or leasing assets (i.e. your trucks, trailers, etc), which, in turn, should match your overall customer demand or loadboard opportunity. In other words, don't buy a truck if you don't have a driver to sit in it. Likewise, don't overcommit to customers if you don't have a truck (& driver) to deliver on your promise. As you can see, drivers are the foundation of any trucking operation. As such, it is imperative that you have a full proof plan of securing drivers as you scale. Moreover, the following is a list of easy tactics and approaches to help streamline the process:
- Get a strong grasp of your company's P&L
- Create standard metrics & safety standards
- Build regular routes to accommodate your spot load unpredictability
- Outsource your backend to a company that handles overseas dispatch
- Adopt off-the-shelf scalable dispatching software modules
- Track driver detention through geofencing (ex. Geotab or other ELD trackers often have this)
- Create driver retention programs
- Keep recruiters on standby
Should I Build Out A Brokerage Division for My Trucking Company?
Many motor carriers expand to include a coverage in various areas of transportation to provide comprehensive logistics services. This is a great way to flex your capacity and push incoming business to others while keeping a piece of the pie. Should I Test Drive A Driver Before Committing To Hire Permanently? Should you first give them a few loads before telling them they've got the job? The short answer to this is, "No". You want to maximize your options. If someone does a good job, that is the expectation of the role and therefore they are ABSOLUTELY an asset to your company. From there, you build the assets and customer demand around THEM. It's a bottom up approach vs a top down approach.
