Trucking businesses are difficult but rewarding things to run. You can find it fulfilling to sort out your own journeys and pick and choose the jobs you get to do, rather than being told what you have to do and potentially having to drive roads you don’t want to go down.
However, it does have its difficulties, too. You need to make sure that your business works well and is meeting your targets, and make sure that as the sole driver and owner, you are meeting your client’s needs all of the time. As you might know, this can be exhausting, and when you get exhausted, you begin to make mistakes.
That situation is far from ideal, so it is important that you use tech to make your business easier for you to run,but if you’re not quite sure where to start, here are some tips to get you started.They’ll cover ways to help you fulfill your customers’ needs across all areas, even if it is only just you who is running the business and delivering the goods.
#1 Make sure you always have access to more work
If your income streams start to dry up, you might,very understandably, begin to panic. No work means no money, no money means not paying bills, unpaid paying bills means you get into a lot of trouble, and you might even go bankrupt.
So, you are going to need to make sure that you at least have access to work to help you cover these dry patches or even just help you feel a little better about longer hauls that you might be wanting a full load on.
When it comes to finding shipping work, you might need to look at directories to make sure that you find work that can help you keep your business going and help you stay on top of things. This can help you find unusual jobs, too, that might just help you get experience in areas that you might want to focus on a lot more, such as pet transport.
#2 Make sure that you are communicating effectively with your customers
In a nutshell, this means ensuring that they have accurate ETAs and know roughly where you are. This is important for tracking services and can help them know when their packages will arrive. Don’t undervalue how important this is, and make sure you are as close to the promised delivery time to ensure customer satisfaction.
Even though most people are happy to have their things delivered earlier than they anticipated, if you are helping someone move house and you are going to be there hours before they are, you might even see yourself getting a customer complaint because you have come in too early and ruined plans. Alternatively, if you are running very late, your customer should be aware as soon as possible, and not just have you turning up at their door three hours late just shrugging your shoulders as to why you didn’t at least communicate how late you were going to be. They don’t deserve that.
#3 Make sure you have a good online presence
Finally, making sure that you have a good online presence is key to the continual smooth running of your business. Here are some things that you can do to improve it.
- Build a great website,
- Invest in SEO,
- Invest in a business social media page on multiple platforms, and
- Start a blog.
Building an online presence can be expensive but well worth it, as it will help you attract more of the right customers and keep them too.
