Fuel for Thought
Good Is Not Good Enough
One of the best ways to help insure your success is to always give your best. It really doesn’t matter what the task is, if you accept the responsibility of the task, give it all you have to offer. No one ever asks for someone to do a job halfway. Whether you like the job or not, if you accept it, it is up to you to give 110% of your ability to get the job done.
One of the best ways to insure your failure is to get the job done without any effort or inclination to go above and beyond. Lackadaisical work shows to everyone involved. Especially your customer. If you have work performed by a supposed trained professional, you expect to get expert results. The job to be done is irrelevant, any job that you are paid to do, or you pay someone else to do, comes with a certain degree of expectation that the job will be done properly, timely and for a certain agreed price.
Expediters, for the most part, perform in a time sensitive manner. Once you accept the load, there is a given time frame for picking up the load and a required delivery date and time. Obviously, different loads will vary on time constraints and outside factors, such as weather and traffic, can have an effect on your schedule. Once you are loaded and underway to your destination, this is no time to test your equipment. If your equipment is not ready to handle to load from start to finish, do not take the load, take your truck to the shop and get the necessary repairs done to ensure to the best of your ability that the equipment is sound and safe for travel. Sometimes it just takes one undelivered load to lose a customer. If the customer just wanted it there whenever you wanted, they would not pay the premium price for premium expedited service.
Understanding the limits of your truck is necessary and there are ways to know these limits without risking your customer’s freight. If you want to know how far you can travel once the fuel gauge is on EMPTY, test that when you are unladen, if you plan to drive until you run out of fuel. A better way might be to fill up, note your mileage, drive a few hundred miles, fill up, note your mileage and subtract the two mileage numbers then divide by the number of gallons. A little math beats walking down the shoulder of the road looking for a station and carrying a few gallons of fuel back to your vehicle, while your loaded truck sits on the side of the road with the customer’s freight onboard.
A leaking roof over your customer’s freight is only an issue if it rains? Not necessarily. Storms can pop up along your route, it may not be raining where you are loading, but it just might rain along your way or at your destination. Do you really want to risk it?
Your customer expects great service, if you cannot provide it, let someone else do it. Besides, if you cannot deliver your customer’s freight on time and in the condition you received it, they may not be your customer much longer.
Do everything you can to make each load a success. Bring the proper equipment, in good working order, and always give 110%. There is a lot of competition out there, what do you do to stand out above the rest?
Lagniappe : A little extra (110%)
See you down the road,
Greg
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
- Red Adair