Editorial

How to grow your business and have more time

by Anselm Waterfield, CEO, TransLogix

Success in the transport business is hard fought and hard won. With plenty of blood sweat and tears it's usually a story of total commitment and support from the whole family to build the business.

But it's more than just hard work. The foundations of a profitable transport business are also built upon understanding customer needs and understanding how to get the best out of your vehicles.

Where does the time go?

The problem is that as a business grows it seems to take more and more precious hours just to keep on top of things. More of the boss's time and more of the family's time. Control, decisions and information rests with a small group of key individuals. The business depends upon them.

The more successful the business becomes, the less time these individuals have. With less time to meet the needs of customers and less time to manage and control costs, managing growth becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. This Catch 22 means that the source of the business success is also the potential source of its failure.

Imagine what can be done with more time. Strike a better balance between work and leisure. Spend more time with the family or a well earned holiday perhaps? With more time you can manage to consistently meet the needs of your customers and also improve the management of the cost centres in your business.

Remove dependency

Successful businesses with sustained growth have systems and processes that enable the business to grow without being dependent upon the owner. These businesses have simplified complex and time consuming operations allowing others to manage and control much of the day to day transport operations.

A good example is the number of times that information is handled from receiving a pick up request. First we write the pick up docket then enter the details in a diary. Then we complete the con-note and enter it in the manifest. Then we fax the manifest to a remote depot where it is entered on the daysheet. Then we manually price the charge copy, enter it into the accounts system and generate an invoice. And that's all before we have to answer invoice queries and recover the debt. When you consider that all these steps have to be checked to make sure that there are no errors, it's a wonder that anyone has time to go home!

Simplify Processes

We can easily solve these problems with a computer system. Computers are really good at sharing data across all functions and with different people. They are also good at remembering important information about how to charge customers. They are consistent in the way they process information and can easily handle increased volumes of work. Best of all they work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for no pay!

Doubling in size

Blanchard Haulage in Grafton, NSW acquired a General Freight business which effectively doubled their size. Suddenly they had thousands of extra consignment notes to process, hundreds of new client details and needs to accommodate and a larger fleet to manage.

As Rob Blanchard explains, "the Translogix Sapphire system handled the expansion effortlessly without even the need for an upgrade. We simply transferred the new client data over to Sapphire together with fleet and driver details and we had integrated the new business from day one."

"Sapphire helped us to measure and mange our business much better. It has enabled us to grow in size and complexity and still to improve our overall productivity."

Finally when the time comes to sell the business and reap the rewards of all your hard work then having a system provides the purchaser with more confidence on how the business works and how it will continue to work in the future.

Anselm Waterfield is the managing director of Translogix. Since 1992 TransLogix has installed more systems for more transport companies than any other transport management software company.

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