A trucking company is basically a person who owns a truck and gets paid to move other people's stuff. All they sell is a trip. Pick up here, deliver there, send an invoice, done.
They're the most heavily pitched businesses in America, every lead gen /SMMA/marketing agency is trying to sell them meetings. And every AI agency is trying to sell them “workflows that save time” or “workflows that bring leads”. But that shouldn’t stop you.
If you can come in from a different angle than most people (which is what we’ll do) you can differentiate yourself very fast from the crowd, because even with all the pitches they get weekly, they still can't find the right provider at the exact moment they need one. Why that keeps happening will make sense in a minute. First, you gotta understand the meat & potatoes of this market.
This is the golden nugget I’d like to share, a trucking company is a stacked buyer. What does that mean? Well it means that one trucking company needs many things and buys many things, they buy insurance, they buy fuel, they hire drivers, so the arbitrage here is that you can connect the same trucking company to many different businesses, each selling it something different, even though they only sell moving stuff from one place to another.
Because in order for them to work, they need insurance to stay on the road, they needs drivers to move the trucks, fuel so the truck can move, they need repair shops if a truck breaks out of nowhere, ten different needs.
So my recommendation is: always think in bleeds, not needs. A company can be bleeding in ten different spots, and anyone who can stop one of those bleeds can pay you for access to that company.
First we have run it through the checklist, and three questions you should ask before touching any market, and these are:
1. Do they invoice for work?
Meaning: does this business do a job and then send a bill? Yes, a trucking company invoices per load, and a load is just one trip: for example they pick up in somewhere like Dallas, drop off in another place like Atlanta, then they send the bill.
2. Is their next dollar blocked by something they genuinely have to buy?
That is a nuclear question, and you’ll end up killing 60% of the markets because of it (which saves you time, headaches and also money)
Meaning: to earn the money they want, are they forced to spend money first?
Well, apparently (based off my research): they cannot legally move anything until they have commercial truck insurance that gets filed with the government, and this costs money. Gotta buy it before making a single dollar.
But again that's only the first payment. Once they're legally allowed on the road, the next problem is: "we still need work, and obviously, customers." So where do the customers come from?. Middlemen.
These middlemen (this industry calls them brokers) have the relationships with companies like Walmart, factories, big warehouses, anyone who has stuff that needs to move. The middleman takes the job from Walmart, hands it to a trucking company, and the truck moves it. That's how a trucking company eats for the most part.
But the issue is: they don’t pay them for at least 30 to 60 days. Because Walmart/factories/big warehouses don’t pay each truck the moment a delivery is done, they have to a) check the delivery, b) finish the boring bureaucracy paperwork, c) the invoice has enter their old weird payment system, then at the end all the bills get paid together on a set schedule.