Does anyone have experience in scaling a truck fleet business?
August 19, 2021
by a searcher from University of South Florida in Phoenix, AZ, USA
I purchased my first truck in January of this year. I will be picking up a 2nd truck next week.
I would like to be at 5 trucks by the end of the year. I would like to connect and learn from someone who has gone from 1 to 15,20 trucks within 24. months.
from University of Canberra in Perth WA 6000, Australia
Firstly, I coached and consulted with a waste management company here in Australia for a few years. They had and grew a fleet of garbage trucks. and were based in regional Western Australia. They service the non-city (country) towns and farming community in a region that is probably spans the areas of Texas to California. Significant fleet means significant costs -esp around maintenance and servicing, supply of spare parts (even if all fleet is one brand, which it isnt). Other big issue is staffing as if your company does regular delivery rounds you need a stable workforce which can be a problem at times. It took a while for my client to 'get' that they needed a labour pool so that the owner wanst hopping into the truck to fulifl client needs (vs. getting him to travel the country side doing Business Development).
Second experience which I think is a much smarter model is I am invested in a logistics mangement company that doesnt own any hard assets. The sector is called "Last Mile Delivery" and focusses on solving the logistics issues of getting the product to the consumer. Think Uber for products. We have a fleet across the country of drivers who own their vehicles and have to service them etc. It's a flexible fleet - we can do heavy delivery, light delivery, cold storage delivery, food and bev, you name it because we have the full range of drivers and vehicles available to us. During COVID we've seen incredible growth as we are seen as the 'overflow' service delivery option for suoermarkets that dont have the capacity to deliver the volumes they are getting. Clearly it's a different model that means you need to have the tech smarts and platform to deliver on ethe epectations of suppliers as well as end recipients. The beauty is that we have been able to scale from early days in Sydney with 50 drivers to being across the country with 1000s of delivery drivers. We are now expanding to other countries - Staff has gone from 7 - around 25. So overheads are lower, we dont have maintenance and running costs, etc.
Dont know if any of the above is of help but thought I'd share my experiences as ^
from University of Colorado at Boulder in Los Angeles, CA, USA