It's a Team's Life
Sale on Rate per Mile
In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.
If you dig in deep, analyze, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.
The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.
The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.
The last 10% isn't worth it.
We're not going to remember how cheap you were. We're going to remember that you let us down.
This blog on the last 10% started my thinking about big box stores and other businesses we deal with who have the philosophy of cutting prices no matter the consequences. As business owners, we are constantly looking for ways to cut our costs without going so far as to hurt our core operation.
One example is our MPG and if we lean too far in the direction of saving fuel we could lose out on a great load opportunity if only we could have delivered a few minutes earlier. There are times when running the speed limit can increase our income
Another example is devaluing our time. We have to choose what tasks we do ourselves or what we hire others to perform for us. I enjoy keeping all of the records for the truck, but I do not enjoy doing taxes so our business has an accountant. Bob enjoys working on the truck and he is good at it, over the years though he has figured out what he enjoys working on and the rest we hire done.
The great irony of all of this value is that we want to purchase at the lowest price possible and then many have the saying "Just say NO to Cheap Freight" when our customers are also looking for the best value at the cheapest price.
Our time is valuable and if we stretch ourselves too thin we are down around that last 10% and the quality of our work suffers.
Bob & Linda Caffee
TeamCaffee
Saint Louis MO
Expediters since January 2005
Expediting isn't just trucking, it's a lifestyle;
Expediting isn't just a lifestyle, it's an adventure;
Expediting isn't just an adventure, it's a job;
Expediting isn't just a job, it's a business.