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?
Not sure what to aim for? Start with goal setting for truckers before you review the plan.
Need to draft the plan first? Read our guide to writing a trucking company business plan with AI.
Every year end is a good time to run through the whole plan again — here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of your end of year trucking business plan review.
A trucking business plan review is a scheduled check of your trucking company’s plan against your real operating numbers — cost per mile, revenue per mile, revenue per loaded mile, expenses per loaded mile, and deadhead miles. The review tells you one of four things: you reached your goals, you are moving toward them, you are moving away from them, or you have not moved at all.
What Metrics Belong in a Trucking Company 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 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.
Trucking Business Plan Review FAQ
What is a trucking business plan review?
A trucking business plan review is a scheduled check of your business plan against your actual operating numbers. It tells you whether you reached your goals, are moving toward them, are moving away from them, or have not moved at all. It is not a test — no one grades a business plan, so there is no way to fail one.
How often should you review your trucking company business plan?
Reviewing quarterly lets you change strategy while there is still time to act. After Q2 you still have half the year to change course, realign with the marketplace, or adjust to finances when an emergency repair shuts down a truck. Every year end is also a good time to run through the whole plan again from the start.
What metrics belong in a trucking company business plan?
The obvious ones are cost or expense per mile, revenue per mile, revenue per loaded mile, expenses per loaded mile, and deadhead miles. A metric does not have to be a complicated math problem — “decrease deadhead miles by 10%” is a metric. Over six months of data those calculations add up fast, which is why software tracks them for you.
Can AI write a trucking company business plan?
AI is a reasonable way to get started when you are stuck on the format and cannot break through to the goal-setting part of the document. The problem is that an AI-written plan is not specialized for your trucking company, so its goals and metrics will not reflect how you actually run.
Do you have to be home to review your business plan?
No. If your business plan is online and you use TruckingOffice PRO, you can review the first half of the year and decide what to do next without coming off the road. The reports reuse the numbers you already entered for dispatches, expenses, and invoices, so there is no extra data entry and no typos to throw the numbers off.
No one can ever truly have an accurate account of their cost per mile because that they never really know how many miles that they are going to have to drive from day to day. With that being said I understand that everyone has weekly and monthly overhead but that won’t be allocated or achieved in a day.
I understand that you can’t predict how many miles that you are going to drive, however you can track how many miles that you drove and relate them to the expenses that you had. Then you can use those numbers as a guide when planning your next freight move.