With 2021 just weeks away, business owners of all sorts are planning for growth in the new year. Owner-operators and trucking business owners should use these last days of 2020 to visualize where they want to be in 365 more from now.
With this post, let's go over some strategies owner-operators and trucking business owners can use to determine goals for the new year, develop concrete steps for meeting them, and create metrics for gauging results.
Prioritize Your Needs with a SWOT Analysis
One method business owners can employ when deciding on goals for the new year is a SWOT analysis. This is a planning technique that examines four components of your business: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths are, as the name suggests, what your trucking operation does well. Are customers eager to recommend your business? Your word-of-mouth reputation is impressive. Do you deliver cargo on time, every time, without a scratch? You're a pro in the quality department. By looking at your companies strengths, you can determine what sets your business apart from the competition—and maybe you'll polish up your elevator pitch while you're at it.
Weaknesses can be a bit more disheartening to review. But to make substantial progress in any field—trucking included—you need to confront your weaknesses head-on. Some great advice for getting started: Don't reject your weaknesses, embrace them. Brett Steenbarger, with Forbes, writes that "instead of viewing weaknesses as problems to be minimized and worked around, we can view our vulnerabilities as a function of unfulfilled strengths." If, for example, you find negotiating with shippers to be a grueling process, maybe you've stumbled across a chance to become an expert rate negotiator.
Opportunities are those external factors that could give you and your business an advantage in the new year. Are fuel costs going down? Is a new warehouse being built in your area? Is a driver shortage on the horizon? All of these elements and more could be great for business. If external conditions are good, it might be the right time to take some strategic risks. And speaking of risks...
Threats are another kind of external force to consider, but unlike opportunities, they aren't necessarily a source of encouragement (although, they certainly can be). Threats can range from increased or improved competition to rising maintenance/fuel costs to supply chain slowdowns. As a business owner, you can't always anticipate the exact threats you'll face in a given year, so it's best to develop a comprehensive plan for periods of financial stress (like this one).
After completing a SWOT analysis, you should be able to divide your operation's needs into the following categories:
What strengths should we advertise?
What weaknesses need to be improved?
What opportunities can we seize?
What threats must we account for?
Simply order these based on what you feel is most important to accomplish by this time next year, and you have a set of working goals for the next twelve months. Now to discuss how you can achieve them.
Set SMART Objectives
Once you know what outcomes you want from the new year, you should develop a plan for reaching them as well as a set of metrics to evaluate your progress.
SMART objectives are—and before we continue, I want to reassure you that this will be the final acronym of the day—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.
Specific goals are both focused and unambiguous. Instead of "move more freight for clients" or "move 100 loads" try "move loads for 100 new clients this year." You can often find out if a goal is specific enough by making sure it's progress can be tracked from start to finish. While you can definitely keep track of how much freight you've moved in a given year compared to the previous one, if you don't have an endpoint to aim for, no amount of progress can be considered a certified success.
Measurable goals are often specific as well, so making sure you're using the right metrics is a natural second step to take when creating objectives. You should adapt to your customers with fluid metrics. These are metrics that help you see the full picture; don't rely on a single statistic—like your percentage of on-time deliveries—but, instead, use multiple metrics, in combination, to get an idea of your customers' experiences on the whole.
Attainable goals don't mesh with unrealistic expectations. Building a successful business takes loads of time. While moving 1000 truckloads in six months would be fantastic, if you're a one-truck operation, it's okay to set the bar lower to start.
Relevant goals should relate to the SWOT analysis you performed earlier. If your goals don't align with your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats, you need to reevaluate your plan of action.
Time-based goals should be achieved within a predetermined amount of time. This time limit can be adjusted but never discarded. In the case of this post, there's a built-in time frame: One year.
By prioritizing your needs with SWOT and setting SMART goals, imagine how much better off your trucking business could be in that time.
Are you interested in an alternative to the standard trucking business model? If so, take a look at how Relaymile is reimagining trucking to provide drivers with a healthier, more consistent standard of work.
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