Best way to transition from one truck to a fleet?

What I love the most is when you drive up to the yard at 8 AM and a truck that was supposed to be somewhere unloading at 8 AM is still sitting there cleaned out !!!

 

30 years ago, the claim was it took ten trucks to make what one oo could do driving his own truck. I thought that was a stretch, until I owned a few. We did well enough having a couple more trucks, but mainly because we had good drivers before I even bought the truck for them. Everytime I thought about getting bigger and adding another truck, I would just watch a fuel isle for a few minutes and get over it. I would not like having a truck sitting with the thought that I needed to find a driver for it at all..
I don't have a clue how many trucks they figure on today to equal out money wise, but it may very well still be 10 or even more.

 

I say go for it. If you fail, there is a poster on here who dabbles in fleet acquisitions and will give you a good price for the whole company.

 

I am surprised he is not in this thread yet, probably busy taking over the Nemf operation

 

Pappy used to spend a hour going over my week in the NE with 30 drops. I get all the information written down including directions as he remembered it etc. I will improve on them where necessary.

Two things he asked.

Call him when finished a stop. DO NOT call him for nothing else. He does not want to hear it.

Payroll was always a lesson. Truck made 2400, I get 25% of that. Why did I get stupid and buy 2.20 fuel for 600 gallons in 5 days? Why couldn't I have bought that 1.89 fuel out of the way somewhere?

Sometimes I bought a tire I had to get replace because it's my own fault I cut it on a curb or something.

Payrolls were not bad, he had 8 trucks to deal with each week.

One week the truck made 3000.00 revenue on one fill of fuel. Always fuel. (No payments... free and clear) His joy at the prospect of feeding his family well that weekend was something to remember. And not to mention I had 25% of that without buying a tire.

Those days are gone forever. I learned so much from him. And at times kind of screwed up so much when you consider the constant fuel bills that came in at whatever prices. That I think ate him alive more than anything in those days. Fuel fuel fuel.

If we had a APU in those days... it would have ruled. And paid for itself so fast... but there again the mindset in the old way. "TOO FANCY!" same with satellite. TOO FANCY. CALL ME from any old phone *&^% it.

There are days I think about Pappy and what he has done for us when we were new to the business. Kind of a treasure lost to time.

 

Meanwhile, the Monster’s trying to eat You alive!!!

 

Now you be a nice little monster and don’t eat all my cash flow !!

 

How should I transition to a fleet?

Carefully ... we have too much capacity, going down slowly.

Should I save enough to be able to start with 3 trucks?

Start with one, put a driver in it and go from there. Three trucks can turn into a nightmare very fast.

Money?

Three months of reserve to operate and at least $15k for repairs.

I’m thinking that starting with only one truck will barely be enough to sustain me as the dispatcher and to save money to add another truck, unless I have another source of income.

One truck will make you 5 to 6% if you are lucky, bank that, every penny for a couple years.

Your hardest issue to overcome is finding drivers. So many crap drivers out there, they won’t give a crap about your truck just the money.

 

I work for a 6 truck fleet owned by a quarry man. I think the trucks are all paid. It takes a full time mechanic, running outlaw and selling the product on the trailer to keep it paying everyone. The owner is definitely not greedy. Money poured into these million plus mile trucks daily. Constant headaches for the poor guy. I try not to be one of em.

Ill bring back 2 checks pretty often. One for $3k of stone and another for $800 freight. Theres no way it could survive on just the freight charge imo. And not on ELD or w2 either.