Q2 is done. Hopefully, you used TruckingOffice PRO and ELD’s integration to produce an accurate (and fast!) IFTA report and have dealt with that annoyance and are now ready for what’s next. Do you know what’s next? If you pulled out your trucking company business plan and reviewed it, what would you need to consider? What metrics did you build into your business plan to judge your success?
Trucking Company Metrics… in a Business Plan?
A business plan is a series of documents that lay out the ideas and strategy for a trucking company to succeed. The best business plan has methods to determine if the strategies are working – or not. Even if all it says is “decrease deadhead miles by 10%” – that’s a metric. Metrics don’t have to be complicated math problems – but some of them are.
At some point, looking at your business plan, you’re going to see if you
- reached your goals
- are moving toward the goals
- moving away from your goals
- have not moved at all.
Notice, we didn’t say “failed” at all in that list. Because you can’t fail a business plan. No one grades it. Nobody gets to look at it and say “You get an F” because that’s not what a business plan is.
A business plan is full of potential. Sometimes that potential doesn’t happen. Sometimes we exceed and go beyond what we planned. Strategy is pretty flexible. It can change. It should change when the data indicates a need to do so.
Strategies For the Win?
Strategies don’t always work.
- There are things happening in the world that we don’t control, which impact our businesses.
- Lanes change or are lost to competitors.
- Unexpected equipment maintenance may derail a plan.
The good thing about reviewing your business plan quarterly is you can change your strategies. Realign your plans with what’s going on in the marketplace. Change your business according to your finances when emergencies can shut down a truck for repairs.
A business pan is not written on stone. These days, it’s usually not even written on paper. It’s an online document that can be revised as is necessary.
The Trucking Company Business Plan that AI Wrote
Did you look at how to write a business plan – and decide to let Chat GPT write it for you?
We’re not judging. AI is here to stay and using tools to write a complicated document like a trucking company business plan isn’t stupid. It’s a great way to get started when we get stuck on the format and can’t break through to the important goal setting part of the document.
But here’s the problem with an AI-written trucking company business plan. It’s not specialized for YOUR trucking company.
Using the second quarter data to review your business plan is a great time to take a hard look at how you’re doing, and what you want to change in the future. After all, you’ve still got half the year to change course if you need to.
Q2 business plan review for the independent owner operator
How does your business plan look right now? Is there something forgotten that needs attention?
Let’s get to the brass tacks. Statistics and metrics that show how your company is doing are complicated calculations. Over six months of data is a lot of numbers and each of the obvious metrics
- Cost or Expense per mile
- Revenue per mile
- Revenue per loaded mile
- Expenses per loaded mile
- Deadhead miles
.. ,And that’s why we have computers. To track all that data and give us the numbers when we need them.
TruckingOffice PRO offers a number of reports that will show you the metrics you need to assess your trucking company. The Company Overview Report is just the start of the options of reports that TruckingOffice PRO provides a trucking company
WITHOUT ANY EXTRA DATA ENTRY.
Who wants to put numbers into a computer over and over?
Not us, that’s for sure! That’s why TruckingOffice PRO takes the numbers as you enter them for dispatches, expenses, or invoices, and uses them over and over again. Since you’re reusing the same data, you can be confident that you’re getting accurate numbers in the reports – no typos to mess everything up!
Trucker Stats™ and a Q2 trucking company business plan review don’t have to take you off the road. You don’t even have to be home to do it – if your business plan is online and you use TruckingOffice PRO, you can review the first half of this year and decide what to do next. Maybe that’s to change something in your company. Or to change an aspect of how you run your business.
Or celebrate a big success!
Let TruckingOffice tms trucking software help you build a trucking company that you want. We’re here to help you! TruckingOffice even will give you a free trial of our entire program for you to see how much easier and faster it is to run the company part of Trucking Company.
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