Why Most Trucking Companies Stall at 20–80 Trucks (And How to Fix It) — Driven for Success Episode 34

If you run a trucking company with somewhere between, say, twenty and eighty trucks, and your team is constantly coming to you with questions, and you feel like if you step away, even for a day, even for a dentist appointment, things slow down, you don’t have a people problem. You have a system problem.

For example, you’re in a meeting, and your phone goes off, and someone has a question about driver pay or deduction or detention or a shop repair, and you just make the decision and give it out because it’s faster. You know, that feels better in the moment, but it’s really not a good long-term plan because you can only make so many decisions.

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, and our mission is simple: to help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill our mission.

And today, I want to talk to you about something that shows up in almost every trucking company once you get to a certain size. You become the bottleneck.

This absolutely happens to almost everybody once they grow. It’s a product of your growth because at 4 or 5 trucks, you could be the decision on everything. You were. There was no one to ask about the decision. It was just you. So every decision was made by you, and that helped the company grow.

But now we’re at a point where it’s going to stagnate. I want you to maybe feel convicted by this, but don’t be depressed about this. This is a growth stage. This is us pressure-testing your business, and we’re going to fix this, and it can keep growing if you can just get past this hurdle.

A lot of companies don’t even get this far. So I want you to feel good about how far you’ve gotten and just know that this might be the next step for you.

Here’s the tricky part. This usually doesn’t happen when you’re doing something wrong. It happens because you’re good. You make good decisions. You come up with the solutions very quickly, and you care about getting the right answer for both your employees and your customers, your vendors, everyone.

So what happens? Well, your team learns that the way things get done is, “I’ll just go ask Bill, and he’ll give me the answer.” Bill being the owner, of course. And over time, that becomes your system. It’s not a documented process. It’s not a clear rule. It’s just go ask Bill. That’s our system.

So when, for example, payroll has a weird thing that they want to ask about, “Oh, how do you want us to deduct all of this advance this week?” or, “Do we pay detention pay on this load?” or, “Do we bill the customer for detention on this load?” or, “Do we bill them for, you know, extra service fee for team service?” things like that, someone asks, “What did we do last time?”

You become that single source of knowledge, and that is not a recipe for success.

They’re not doing anything wrong, your employees, when they’re asking you. They’re doing exactly what you’ve trained them to do by being the answer all the time. They never have to find their own answer because they found you.

So now every decision runs through you, and it feels like you can’t step away, not even for a dentist appointment. You can’t scale because everything runs through you, and you’re answering the same questions, or different versions of the same question, over and over again.

But here’s the shift. You’re not the bottleneck because you’re too involved. You’re the bottleneck because decisions only live in your head. And if they only live in your head, your team has no other choice but to come back to you every time a decision has to be made.

Your team isn’t just dependent. They’ve been trained that way. You’ve trained them to be dependent on you.

And again, your history was that you made good decisions, and you’ve helped the company grow. But when you were sitting there with 5 trucks right when you first started, you weren’t thinking, “Hey, when I get to 30 trucks, I’m going to make every single decision.” You were thinking, “I’m going to sit in the office and strategize, and I’m going to have people who make those decisions, especially the easy decisions, for me the way I want them made.”

That’s what we all want, but that doesn’t seem like it’s happening right now for a lot of companies.

So here’s a simple rule you can start using immediately. I call it the answer-then-system rule. Every time someone asks you a question, one of 2 things should happen after you answer it. Either, number one, it gets documented, or, number 2, it turns into a decision rule. If neither happens, don’t worry, you’re going to get asked that question again, and you’ll have another chance to do it.

Let’s say someone on your team asks you, “Hey, how do we handle this type of driver pay situation?” You know, “How do we pay detention for this load?” You answer it, great, but then you stop, and that’s the mistake.

Instead, you say, “Next time this happens, here’s how we’re going to handle it.” Now it becomes a rule. It becomes a process. It becomes something your team can use without you. And over time, those small moments start to stack up and make your life a lot easier.

Another example would be, how do we handle this billing correction? We billed for detention, and we weren’t supposed to, or we didn’t bill, and we were supposed to.

You know, if every one of these things could be turned into a rule instead of a one-time answer, how much better would your life be without 50 percent of the interruptions you get, or 80 percent of the interruptions you get? How much more could you do when you could spend all your mental energy working on the future, deciding, you know, should we buy more trucks, and when should we buy them? Should we look at a new lane? Should we look at trying to really work on this lane, or should we really work on our driver recruiting and work recruiting better drivers, better-fit drivers for you?

All those things, that deep thinking time, keeps getting interrupted because you keep getting knock, knock, knock, we have a question. How do we handle this thing?

It’s the same way you handled it ten other times, is what you might think in your head, but you can’t say that, so you give them the answer because it gets them out the door quicker so you can get back to your thing. But all those little knocks on the door add up, and it’s no good, and you can fix it.

And just by making these rules, answering every question once, and then you won’t have to answer it again if you document it and if you can make a process out of it, make a rule out of it.

Okay, I painted the great picture here. Here’s why most owners don’t want to do this. Because in the moment, it’s going to feel a lot slower. It’s going to feel like a slog. Every time I answer a question, I’ve got to now sit and develop a process, or I have to make a rule, and it seems like everything is going to take 5 times longer, and I’m already busy. I’m already maxed out. I can’t even, you know, take an hour for lunch.

But here’s the reality. You’re already paying the price. You’re just paying it over and over and over again. Every repeated question, every interruption, every decision that comes back to you that could be easily made by somebody else. Really, any decision you can make like that, that’s a rule. But that’s the cost of not building the system, is that you keep having to answer those.

So to kind of sum that up, you’re not too busy to build systems. You’re too busy because you don’t have systems. So if you spend the time to build the systems, even if you just do a couple of them, you’ll see that you’ll pick up some more time, and then you can build your momentum from there.

And none of this is about working harder. You work hard already. You’ve got 20 trucks. You’ve got 30 trucks, 40 trucks running. You’re working plenty hard. It’s about stopping the repetition. That’s what we’re trying to stop here. We’re trying to stop your employees from asking you the same question over again.

By the way, it’s also good for your employees. They’re going to appreciate it too. They want to do good work for you. And if they didn’t, you wouldn’t hire them.

So this helps them also be much faster on their own side because they’re not even having to get up and walk the ten steps to your office and knock on the door and interrupt you and feel bad about interrupting you and then go back to their desk and implement the solution. Now they just have it right there.

Everything’s going to get faster, and everyone’s going to know what to expect. When we’re talking about detention pay and things like that, you make that answer, you give it to everybody, even the drivers are going to know what to expect, and that’s one of the biggest wins you’re going to have out of this.

So here’s what I want you to do next week. Nothing complicated. For the next 5 business days, every time someone asks you a question, don’t just answer it. Write down the rule. That’s it.

And when I say the rule, a sentence or 2. We’re not talking about writing, you know, War and Peace or some crazy old novel like that. We’re talking about, when you pay detention, this is the rule.

And if you want, make the person asking the question write down the rule and have them save it in a document for you. That’s it. You don’t need perfect systems. You don’t need software to do this. You just need to start capturing decisions so that you don’t have to make those decisions again.

You know, keep a notebook on your desk or open a note on your phone or start a simple Word document, a Google Doc, whatever. It doesn’t matter. And you can, like I said, you can even make your employee who asked the question go populate a Google Doc, and then you’ll sort it out later.

This is not a big project. Do not turn this into a whole massive undertaking.

Think of it this way. You’re not trying to become perfectly healthy if you were completely out of shape before. We’re just trying to get a little bit better, a little bit at a time. It’s eating the elephant one bite at a time. That’s all we’re trying to do here.

We’re asking you to take one bite for 5 days, keep a note of all the questions you get asked, and develop rules for those. I think what you’re going to find by the end of the 5 days is you’re not going to have nearly as many questions, by the way. You’ll start seeing the effect of it.

The goal here, as a reminder, is not to work less. The goal is to build a business that doesn’t need you for every single decision, so you can be gone on a vacation, and the business runs mostly just fine. You might get a daily update. The way you do that is one decision at a time.

If you fix this, your business will change. If you don’t fix this, you’re going to be stuck here as long as you own the business. I don’t want that for you. You don’t want that for you.

So if you found this to be helpful, we’d ask you to like it, share it, give us some feedback wherever you find it. Comment, again, subscribe. That would be great. That helps more trucking families like you be able to get the same kind of advice.

Thanks for listening. Keep on trucking.

Hey, if I saw any of you, the people I saw at MATS, at our booth, I want to say hi. Appreciate you coming out. It’s always great to meet everybody, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at the next event.