Insights on Starting a Business in the Trucking Industry

To get more details on starting a business in the trucking industry, check out this premium episode taken from my interview with Josh Utke.

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the premium episode of my interview with Josh Utke, owner of Sun Key Equipment Finance in Phoenix, Arizona. And feel free to check out the link to Josh's company in the show notes. And without further ado, here's my the rest of my interview rather with Josh Hutkey. So tell us again, uh as much as you're willing or unwilling is totally fine with me, but can you dig into a little bit of like, alright, so you decide this is the I want to do a business, all right, cool. Alright, this is what I want to do, great. Can you get into more like logistics starting it, if you're willing to share any like startup costs related to it, and then kind of the business model of how like how do you guys plan to make money and grow?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Yeah, absolutely. And and that's that's actually a a really good question, and um I'm glad you asked that because I think, and I don't know, I you know, I'm I'm still like every other startup, uh, you know, trying to make this successful. I'm still very much in the startup stage. Sure. But I think the piece of advice I do have is that you have to build your company like it's gonna be a big company. You can't build your company to be a small company. So even if it turned out to be a small company, you have to go through all the same processes that you would building a big, you know, corporation. Um and that includes, you know, having a mission statement, having a value proposition, uh, thinking about what your objectives are gonna be, what the barrier to entry is gonna look like, what your competition is, getting into kind of some of the more, you know, kind of nerdy things like all right, here's here's our process from start to finish and building actually workflows. This is a a really funny one. We I do have an employee, but at the time I was a one-man, one-man show, you have to build an organization chart. And people think about that and they go, well, it's just you. And so I'll kind of hop into that a little later, too. But you you have to build an organization chart because you have to make sure that you're completing all the all the positions, you're filling all the positions and needs of a company. Accounting, marketing, sales, uh, you know, development, human resources. Uh, and again, it's all funny because it's like you're only one person. Uh, but the goal is to outline all those positions and then choose to fill them if you if you want to build it. Sure. Or at the very minimum, like I said, make sure that you're completing all those tasks because every single one of those tasks is important for a successful business. Right. No, that makes sense. Um, and so you you you had mentioned uh kind of some startup costs. That was something that was uh that was attractive to me uh because I knew that, you know, hey, for the time being, I could I could do something out of my home office. Uh and and a lot of the a lot of my costs were kind of more software related. Uh getting a website built. Um I I gave myself a personal loan um that uh you know that I would I would consider you know as a startup cost. So even though it's it's my own money, I I keep it very separate from my personal finances. So you have to start you know your own business bank account, create an LLC or a you know, whatever, figure out the type of structure you want your company to be, whether it's a corporation or an S-corp or a partnership, and and learn about the tax liabilities for each of those and decide which one's best for you at that time. Again, the most important part is who is your customer going to be?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

So identify who your customer is, identify the competition, and what is your value in that space? And if you can't come up with some good answers, what value you have, you know, maybe keep trying, don't give up yet. Or maybe you need to figure out a different space to be in, and then go attack that space. There's what I would say a blueprint to getting started. And it is just what I mentioned earlier, you you have to build your company like a like a big company. And even if it stays small, you have to have that foundation uh to grow because otherwise you're you're gonna be, I think, in for a struggle. And start starting up is a struggle enough, you want to be able to limit those as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Right. Yeah. No, currently I work uh I sell construction software, and um so many smaller companies, like kudos to them, because I'm a pretty risk-averse person. And uh, you know, there'll be uh like a master electrician, and he'll he'll start his own uh electrical company, electrical contracting company. But then he ends up getting in the field and he's doing everything himself and he's he doesn't have time to focus maybe more on the business aspect of things. So that's I think that's really good commentary because you almost see these businesses be successful and grow because they're a tradesman or something like that. They know the business, they know the industry, but they don't always have the wherewithal for some of the ancillary items that are very important.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

I'm no different. Um, I got into this because I had success in sales in the transportation uh industry. And so kind of the same thing, you know, a little bit of a tradesman there. I'm hey up, I'm good at sales, I can do this. But if you just focus on sales, uh it gets overwhelming very quickly. So uh, you know, if you're not looking at your accounting, your business expenses, and um, you should as a business owner be able to know uh you know your your profit and loss statement pretty well. You know, what are my quarterly expenses? What's my quarterly budget look like? Um and and after the end of each month, uh you you need to be organized enough to know if you were profitable or if you lost money. So what happens a lot of times with, and this is businesses of all sizes, uh, they they think about man, we're doing a lot of business, we're getting a lot of revenue in. Uh, but they don't realize that sometimes, as the more revenue you get in, your cost of goods sold go up, your operation costs go up. So you have all these costs that are going up kind of with the revenue as well. And you you have to be aware of that because just because you're you're making a lot of sales doesn't mean you're profitable.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Yeah, you could be a ten million dollar business that makes no money pretty easily.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

So exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

So no, that's cool. Everyone, thanks for listening, and don't forget to check us out at CareerYak.com. We will see you next time.