Turning Repeated Answers Into Systems — Driven for Success Episode 41

Many trucking company problems are not people problems.

They’re repetition problems.

The owner answers the same question over and over and over again. And every time that happens, your business gets harder to scale.

Welcome to the Driven for Success podcast.

This is the podcast for trucking company owners who want to build a better business, make better decisions, and have better driver retention without losing control.

I’m Mike Ritzema, your host and owner of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple: to help trucking families.

This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill that mission.

In today’s episode, I want to talk to you about one of the biggest hidden bottlenecks inside growing trucking companies.

It’s not bad employees, and it’s not a lack of effort.

It’s just the fact that answers never become systems.

Here’s what usually happens.

Somebody in the office asks a question.

“How do we handle this deduction?”

“What do we do if the driver turns in paperwork late?”

“How are we setting this customer up?”

“At what point do we charge detention?”

And the owner answers it, and everybody just moves on.

Problem solved.

Except it isn’t solved.

Because next week — or even the next hour — somebody asks the exact same question again.

Maybe it’s a different employee.

Maybe it’s the same one.

But now the owner answers it again.

If you answer a question twice, you don’t have an answer.

You have a bottleneck.

It’s one of those things that’s kind of death by a thousand interruptions.

The owner is trying to do strategic work, and they want to think about how best to service a customer, or what lane should we pursue, or should we buy more trucks — those kinds of things.

And they just get deep into their thought and their strategy idea, and then someone comes in with a question that could have been answered by somebody else.

The owner kind of becomes Google or AI or however you search for answers now.

You’re kind of the company wiki.

And that just doesn’t work.

It happens all the time.

The owners don’t even notice a lot of the time except for when they try and do deep work, or they try to leave the office.

At five trucks, you can survive on the owner’s memory.

No problem.

It’s how everything works.

At 15 trucks, it really starts to become a problem.

It gets to be annoying.

At 40 trucks, it’s pure chaos.

Because now everybody’s filling in gaps differently.

One dispatcher says yes to a question.

Another dispatcher says no to that same question.

Payroll handles it one way.

Safety handles it another way.

And the owner spends half their day cleaning up inconsistency.

When the answer only lives in your head, your business can’t scale past you.

Some of the ways this comes up too — like we talked about accounting giving one answer and safety giving another — it’s just so hard because everybody has the right intention.

But all that does is create confusion for your employees.

Not only your safety and accounting people in that example, but your drivers.

And because drivers are people, and people look for ways to get to the answer they want to get, they’re going to go to the person who gives them the answer they want.

They’re going to know maybe accounting says no, but safety says yes.

Or safety says no, but dispatch says yes.

And you’re going to be pitting departments against each other.

And none of it is working for you as the owner.

You just can’t have that.

You’ve got to have consistent answers.

And the same question that went to payroll and safety and dispatch should have one answer.

And it should be your answer.

And everybody should know it.

The real shift is this:

Every answer becomes documentation.

Every single answer.

Not eventually.

Not “I’ll get to it.”

Not “when things slow down.”

Immediately.

Because we all know it will never slow down.

You know in your soul it has never slowed down since you’ve been in business.

If somebody asks you a question enough, it matters enough for you to answer.

It matters enough to document.

That could be an SOP.

You could make a Loom video.

You could make a CRM note.

You could make a checklist.

You could make a process guide.

It really doesn’t matter what format you use.

What matters is that all the answers stop depending on your memory.

Because your business changes the moment knowledge stops living inside you.

The race for perfection here is not the goal.

Just something simple.

Again, a Loom video — which, if you’re not familiar with Loom, is a way to kind of show your screen on a computer and have your face in the corner.

There’s other free software that does it as well.

Or just a checklist.

Or a place in the CRM where we put that.

Or just a procedure.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.”

A process guide.

All those things work.

And the goal is just to be consistent about it.

The consistency really is that we all get to the same answer.

So if the driver calls dispatch or safety or accounting, they’re going to get the same answer as if they had called you.

The goal is not perfection.

We want to move toward perfection, but the goal is not to get there.

I know this sounds like a lot of work, and that’s one of the biggest reasons most owners don’t want to embrace this.

And it feels slower in the moment.

And it is slower in the moment.

Let’s not kid ourselves.

The difference between answering a question — which would take 30 seconds — and documenting it takes 10 minutes.

You’re like, “Man, that’s nine and a half minutes I just gave away, and I’m already busy.”

So they skip the documentation.

But they don’t realize they’re creating future interruptions.

And now they’re going to have to answer that question a hundred more times.

So really, that 10 minutes it cost you today, you’ll get that back after maybe 20 people use your document to answer the question.

So when you get into scale and you get into big numbers of how many times people ask that question, you’re going to save hundreds of hours by just documenting it the one time.

The sad truth is owners love to save 10 minutes today and accidentally lose 100 hours later.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.

You want to spend your time being strategic so you can do things like making that truck purchase or deciding whether you should bring on another employee.

You want to be strategic.

Well, be strategic about this.

This is something where you invest a little bit of time now, and you’ll get the payoff later.

And you’ll get it as long as the business goes on.

Because the cost of these interruptions is tremendous.

You probably come in in the morning and go, “I’m going to get A, B, C, and D done today. It’s going to be a great day.”

And you get hijacked 10 minutes in.

You barely got your coffee, and 10 minutes in, you’re getting questions.

It can’t work.

You’ll never get A, B, and C done.

You’ll look at A for a minute during lunch, and that’s going to be about it — and that’s if you take lunch out of the building.

So if you want to get the things done you need to get done, you’ve got to give your people an easier way to get the answers without coming to you all the time.

And “I’ll remember it” is not a system either.

Counting on your people to remember answers — even you remembering answers — is not a system.

It doesn’t scale.

It never works.

You’ve got to document this somewhere.

And this isn’t the Ten Commandments that are eternal.

This is what it is right now, and we may tweak it later.

It’s a living document, and that’s okay.

As long as people are going to look at it when they have the question, they’ll get the newest, most current answer.

Once answers become systems, everything changes.

Training gets so much easier, it’s ridiculous.

All the answers are there.

Delegation gets easier.

New hires ramp up faster.

Managers make more consistent decisions.

Everyone makes more consistent decisions.

And the owner stops being required for every tiny operational detail.

That’s the real win.

It’s not having processes for the sake of having processes.

It’s freedom.

Freedom from having to answer all of those questions.

A great way to think about it is this:

Systems are just future decisions you already made.

So it’s not just that you’re telling one person how to do this thing.

You’re telling everybody, “Whenever this thing comes up, this is how you’re going to do it.”

So you only have to answer it once.

And that’s the win.

That’s the freedom.

That’s the whole goal.

It doesn’t just reduce your time.

It reduces stress for your people too.

Because there are probably times they want to ask you the question but don’t dare.

So they’re just saying, “Well, that’s what the owner is going to want us to do.”

And sometimes they’re right.

They’re probably right more than they’re wrong.

But it’s stressful for them to wonder, “Did I do it right? Did I not?”

It could also be costing you money because they don’t want to ask you.

And even though they ask you stuff all the time, there are all the other times they want to ask you and don’t.

So you’re losing on both sides of that.

And the decision fatigue — you don’t want people having to make decisions that they don’t need to make.

If you make it for them, they don’t have to worry about it.

And you made it once, and it’s there until you change it.

So here’s a rule I would use to try and do this:

If you answer it twice, document it.

That’s it.

Let’s not overcomplicate this.

You don’t need some giant corporate process department.

You don’t need AI to write you a four-page memo or anything like that.

You just need the discipline to stop letting answers disappear.

Because every undocumented answer creates future confusion.

And confusion is expensive.

Documentation is cheap.

Clarity is gold.

Everything runs better with clarity.

Confusion causes people to not act in the way that you’d want them to act, which causes mistakes.

I’ll give you an example from my life years ago.

I used to work for a pizza chain, and people would put extra stuff on pizzas because they were trying to be nice, but that wasn’t what the standard was.

And if we didn’t enforce that, the next time somebody did it right to spec, they’d feel like they got cheated.

And I know it’s kind of a weird example, but it’s the idea of confusion.

The customer didn’t know what to expect, and that was the mistake.

There’s a lot of relief in the consistency of it all.

There’s a lot of relief in knowing exactly how everything gets done in your company.

How we pay every driver.

What our rule is for detention for every customer.

Things like that.

The consistency takes so much emotional burden off your employees because they don’t have to wonder.

And if a customer questions them — which they won’t as much because it’s consistent — they can say:

“Look, this is the SOP. This is the way we’ve always done it.”

And that clarity and that consistency — that’s the magic of this.

Think about how many recurring questions happen every single week.

How to onboard a driver.

What happens after an accident.

How advances are approved.

What to do when paperwork is missing from the driver packet.

Most companies answer these differently every single time.

Or they’ll give you “it depends” like they’re an attorney.

It’s not because people are bad.

It’s because the company never decided on a system.

They never set those guidelines up.

A lot of people problems are actually process problems.

Good employees trapped in unclear systems will not appear as good employees.

They’ll appear confused.

They’ll appear tentative.

They’ll appear incorrect.

Wrong.

Bad.

Whatever adjective you like.

There’s a difference between accountability and clarity, which is important.

Clarity is what we’re establishing here.

You still have to hold people accountable to follow the procedures and processes you’re setting up.

And you’re still going to have to manage them.

But now you’re just checking to make sure they did it instead of telling them what to do.

So much easier.

So much simpler.

But let’s be clear.

Making these rules doesn’t solve the problem forever unless your employees use them.

And that’s where you come in as the owner or manager.

You have to make sure they actually use them.

But that’s a much easier job because they either do it or they don’t.

And if they don’t do it, they can’t say, “I didn’t know,” because you laid out the process for them.

Episode 37 — four episodes ago — was about helping your team make better decisions.

This is the operational side of that conversation.

Because people make better decisions when the company gives them context.

And systems are how you deliver that context at scale.

So here’s the challenge this week:

Pick one question.

One question that you answer repeatedly.

And turn it into a system.

Not perfect.

Just documented.

Because every documented answer gives you a little more freedom.

And every undocumented answer keeps the business dependent on you.

So let us know how that goes.

Reach out to us on social media.

If you like this podcast and find it helpful, give it a five-star review and share it with your friends.

We do this for you.

So until then, thanks a lot.

We’ll see you next week.