Decisions Only the Owner Should Make — Driven for Success Episode 39

Most trucking company owners are trying to get out of decisions. And that’s exactly why they lose control of their business.

You’ve been told, delegate more. Empower your team. Stop being the bottleneck. I’ve even told you some of those things. And that’s all true to a point.

But here’s what nobody tells you. If you delegate the wrong decisions, you don’t get freedom. You get drift.

Welcome to Driven for Success, the podcast where we help trucking company owners and executives run their business with better processes, less chaos, and lower driver turnover. I’m your host, Mike Ritzema, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple: Help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill that mission.

And today, we’re talking about something that almost every growing company gets wrong: What decisions should never leave the owner?

Three episodes ago, we talked about this in some other more abstract way of rules and guardrails and examples. And that’s great, and it’s going to help you get out of the day-to-day. But now we need to talk about the other side of this, because not all decisions are created equal.

There are some decisions that should never leave you as an owner. Here’s an easy way to think about it. If the decision changes the direction of the company or redefines the company, it stays with the owner. Period.

Everything else can be taught. Everything else can be systemized. But direction, that is 100% on you as the owner.

I mean, you think about all these things that can change a trucking company. And change not just, oh, do we do this thing or that thing? Or should we charge detention on this load, which is the example we’ve talked about?

But things like, who do we serve? Yeah, who’s our customer? How do we make money? What are we doing to earn a living here? What are we offering to the marketplace? What things will we do and absolutely will not do? What hill are we willing to die on to save our company? Like, we’re not going to do this thing.

For us, like choosing our mission. In my company, that’s mine. I get advice from people that work here, absolutely, but I’m the one who makes the decision. And those kinds of things just can’t be sent out to committee.

You can delegate execution of most any task. You cannot delegate direction.

Because when you start delegating direction, first of all, you’re going to have many directions because everybody’s going to do it a little differently. Everybody’s going to interpret that direction that you had told them about differently, and that’s just going to be chaos. As I said earlier in the podcast, we want to help you reduce chaos, and this will just multiply it.

You’ll have things like, for example, your sales people and your dispatch are going to be on two different sets of things. Sales is going to make their own direction, which might be get a sale from that customer no matter what, even though it’s a bad lane for operations, or it’s a bad price, or it’s whatever. They’re like, look, our mission is to get sales. That’s what we’re going to do.

Operations could also be the same way and say, you know, I only want loads from here to there on this kind of trailer that load on Tuesdays, or something like that. Well, we have to load seven days a week if we’re going to run all the time, or at least five days a week if we’ve got that kind of operation, so it’s not going to work.

Other things that come out of this: your margin starts to leak away. There’s no clear direction, and these different directions are going to cause friction. And friction is where margin goes to die, because you’re having people basically work against other departments or work against other people, and that is just money down the drain.

And you’re always going to keep solving the same problems. If you don’t have the direction set by the owner, you’re going to have these problems over and over again.

And this whole podcast series that we’ve been doing for like three months now is trying to avoid all of these things. We don’t want misalignment between sales and dispatch. We don’t want inconsistent decisions, either within a department or one department versus another. All those things are just poison.

We certainly don’t want margin leaks. We don’t want the margin going out the door because ops is working around sales and sales is working around ops. Or, I’m using those two departments, it could be anybody.

It could be the safety department, you know, decides that we’re absolutely only going to hire drivers that are 100% perfect all of the time because our goal is to have the best safety score possible. I support having a high safety score. Do not misinterpret that.

However, we also have to haul loads. We also have to make some money. And I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t hire or you should hire unsafe drivers. I’m saying a driver that got a speeding ticket 20 years ago is probably still okay if their record’s clean since then.

But if my goal is no accidents, basically the best way to have no accidents as a safety guy is to have no drivers. So again, it depends on the direction. And you, as the owner of the company, have to be the clarity of clarities on this.

If five people can answer it five different ways, you don’t have a team problem. You have a direction problem.

Now, why does this happen? Why am I bringing this up? Why do owners choose not to be the North Star on this, the direction for this? And it’s a lot of reasons.

Owners are busy. Man, you guys, 20 trucks, 30 trucks, 40 trucks, shoot, five trucks. You have a lot of things going on. Your whole life’s tied up in the equipment. It’s crazy amounts of money if you have 20 trucks out there. Millions of dollars of equipment, real easy.

You’re trying to empower your team. You’re like, well, you told me to let my people make decisions. Well, I did. I didn’t say they get to make all the decisions. You know, there are still important ones for you.

Or, you know, I’ve been listening and I’ve been trying to follow what you’re saying here, and I’ve read this in other places too about how I shouldn’t be the bottleneck. I shouldn’t be what’s slowing things up.

Well, that’s true. You don’t want to be the bottleneck. However, you still have to give them clarity on where we’re going, where the direction is. What are the absolutes here? What are the things we absolutely will not do for people? Who’s our customer?

If our customer is food service, for example, and we get the opportunity to haul something that just doesn’t go with it, something where we have to sweep out the truck every time or something. I don’t know what. It’s not going to work.

And so we’ve got to really know who we are. That’s what we keep coming back to. And the owner has to have that be clear to everyone: who we are and who we are not.

I can give you a better example from our own company here. We are a payroll service for trucking companies. We don’t do anything to try and get payroll for bakeries. We don’t try and do driver safety for trucking. We have one thing that we really work on doing well, and that’s what we provide to the marketplace.

And again, that comes from me. I don’t let my people get to make variances on that. They don’t get to go, hey, let’s go market to restaurants. No, no, no, no, no. Hey, let’s do this service for trucking companies, driver qualification files or something, which are an important thing, we’re not going to do it. And my people know that, so they don’t even come to me with it.

So yeah, you don’t want to be the bottleneck, but if you don’t define it clearly, you’re going to be the bottleneck anyway because you’re going to be sorting all of these things out.

Most owners don’t lose control all at once, but they give it away one decision at a time. That’s the painful part. It’s not like yesterday I was in control of our direction, all the great, and today I have none of it. It just erodes away.

Now let’s go back to what you should delegate. I’ve been talking about what not to delegate. Let’s talk about some things that should be delegated.

Repetitive decisions, absolutely. You define a set of parameters. You give them a boundary on each side. Away they go.

Operational decisions, same thing. You know, are we going to take this load or that load? They’re both within our direction. Okay, we’re good.

Financial thresholds. I can pay up to this much, or I can take a load for this much per mile or this much total, things like that.

And most customer issues, again, within limits. This customer had a special need. What should I do about it? This customer asked us to do something extra. This customer asked for something else. We had a service issue with this one. All those things can mostly be delegated away, except the extreme ones. And the extreme ones are rare.

But the things that you should keep are strategy things. Anything strategic. Strategic is the things that are going to point where we’re going. That’s another nice word for direction, and it’s how we’re going to execute it. That comes from you.

And the standards. This is what we stand for. These are what we will accept and what we will not accept. You can call them standards. You can call them boundaries. You can even use mindsets like we use. There are other leadership ways to run a company, and they’ll talk about mindsets. You can absolutely use those, and that should come from the owner.

Trade-offs. What are we willing to trade? There are going to be times that there’s some conflict or it’s not always clear, and you should tell them this is more important than that.

And the great example of that is when I was talking about the safety person who said absolutely no points ever in your whole entire lifetime, or not even something that looks like a point. Plus, we make you take an exhaustive test or something that basically disqualifies everybody.

Yeah, that sounds great, but we also have to move loads. So the trade-off is set there by the owner. It’s not set by the safety person. It’s not set by sales. It’s not set by dispatch, because sales and dispatch are going to be like anybody who can fog a mirror, let’s go. Typically, not always, but often.

And safety seems like, no, no, no, I’m not letting anybody go, because if there’s an accident, it’s on me and my goal is to reduce accidents and have zero claims. So zero loads equals zero claims.

You, as the owner, come in and you set this boundary. You set this trade-off and say, this is what we will accept, this is what we will not. It’s kind of standards and trade-offs.

It’s also anytime you’ve got to set precedent with a decision. Anytime you’re like, okay, this is the way we’re going to do this thing now, you’re really giving your employees something that they can repeat. But you have to do the first one. You have to tell them the first time. Otherwise, they’re going to go off the reservation on you and they’re going to make their own decision in a way that you may not like.

So you give them the framework. That’s what you’re building. The precedent-setting decision is really the framework. Then they can take it from there and repeat it as needed.

So here’s another way to think about it. When you’re trying to decide if you should delegate a task or not, or you should delegate a decision, ask: would an answer to this question change our direction? If it’s yes, you keep it. If it’s no, okay, you can delegate it.

Or, am I okay with 10 different answers to this question? If it’s yes, again, you keep it. If there’s one answer, that’s a repeatable thing. You can give that to other people to do.

And then finally, does this set precedent? Again, if it’s yes, it’s yours. And if it’s no, then you can delegate it out.

A great way to think about it is this: if a decision creates a new rule in your company, you should be the one making it.

If you get this right, your team moves faster, your decisions get better, and your business stays consistent. Almost boring, which is the goal. Boring means processes are running well.

If you get it wrong, if you don’t choose freedom, you get chaos with other people making it. It’s not even your own chaos. It’s all the chaos.

Here’s what I want you to do. Take the last 10 decisions that your people have brought to you and ask yourself: does this change our direction? Am I okay with 10 different answers? And does this set precedent?

If any of those answers are yes, that is your decision and you make it. And if they’re not, then you tell them how to do it.

Your job isn’t to make every decision. Your job is to protect the decisions that matter.