S1 E39 Trucking Owners You’re Delegating the Wrong Decisions (And It’s Costing You Control)

Most trucking owners think they need to delegate more.

They don’t.

They need to stop giving away the wrong decisions.

In this episode, we break down why some decisions should never leave the owner—and what happens when they do.

Because when direction gets delegated, your business doesn’t get easier to run.

It gets inconsistent.

We cover how to identify the decisions that define your company—and how to keep control without becoming the bottleneck.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Most trucking company owners are trying to get out of decisions. And that's exactly why they lose control of their business. You've been told delegate more. Empower your team. Stop being the bottleneck. I've even told you some of those things. And that's all true to a point. But here's what nobody tells you. If you delegate the wrong decisions, you don't get freedom, you get drift. Welcome to Driven for Success, the podcast where we help trucking company owners and executives run their business with better processes, less chaos, and lower driver turnover. I'm your host, Mike Ritzima, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple. Help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill that mission. And today we're talking about something that almost every growing company gets wrong. What decision should never leave the owner? Uh three episodes ago, we talked about this in some other more abstract way of rules and guardrails and examples. And that's great, and it's going to help you get out of the day-to-day. But now we need to talk about the other side of this. Because not all decisions are created equal. There are some decisions that should never leave you as an owner. Here's an easy way to think about it. If the decision changes the direction of the company or redefines the company, it stays with the owner. Period. Everything else can be taught. Everything else can be systemized. But direction that is 100% on you as the owner. I mean, you think about all these things that can change a trekking company. And change not just, oh, do we do this thing or that thing? Or do we should we charge detention on this load, which is the example we've talked about? But things like who do we serve? Yeah, who's our customer? How do we make money? What do we what are we doing to earn a living here? What are we what are we offering to the marketplace? What things we will do and absolutely will not do? What hill are we willing to die on to save our company? Like we're not gonna do this thing. You know, for us, like choosing our mission. That's that's in my company, that's mine. I get advice from people that work here, absolutely, but I'm the one who makes the decision. And those kinds of things just can't be sent out to committee. You can delegate execution of most any task. You cannot delegate direction. Because when you start delegating direction, first of all, you're gonna have many directions because everybody's gonna do it a little differently. Everybody's gonna interpret that direction that you had told them about differently, and that's just gonna be chaos. As I said in earlier in the podcast, we want to help you reduce chaos, and this will just multiply it. You'll have things like, for example, your sales people in your dispatch are gonna be on two different sets of things. Sales is gonna make their own direction, which might be get a sale from that customer no matter what, even though it's a bad lane for operations, or it's a bad price, or it's whatever. They're like, look, our mission is to get sales. That's what we're gonna do. Operations could also be the same way, and say, you know, I only want loads from here to there on this kind of trailer that load on Tuesdays, or something like that. Well, we got to load seven days a week if we're gonna run all the time, or at least five days a week if we've got that kind of operation, so it's not gonna work. Other things that come out of this, your margin starts to leak away. There's no clear direction, and this these different directions are gonna cause friction, and friction is where margin goes to die because you're having people fix basically work against other departments or work against other people, and that is just money down the drain. And you're always gonna keep solving the same problems. If you don't have the direction set by the owner, you're gonna have these problems over and over again. And this whole podcast series that we've been doing for like three months now is trying to avoid all of these things. We don't want misalignment between sales and dispatch. We don't want inconsistent decisions either within a department or one department versus another. All those things are just poison. We certainly don't want margin leaks. We don't want the margin going out the door because ops is working around sales and sales working around ops, or I'm using those two departments, it could be anybody. It could be the safety department, you know, decides that we're absolutely only only going to hire drivers that are 100% perfect all of the time because our goal is to have the best safety score possible. I support having a high safety score. Do not misinterpret that. However, we also have to haul loads, we also have to make some money. And so, and I'm not at all saying you shouldn't hire or you should hire unsafe drivers. I'm saying a driver that got a speeding ticket 20 years ago, probably still okay if their record's clean uh since then. Uh, but if our if my goal is no accidents, basically the best way to have no accidents as a safety guy is to have no drivers. So again, it depends on the direction. And you, as the owner of the company, have to have to be the clarity of clarities on this. You know, if five people can answer it five different ways, you don't have a team problem. You have a direction problem. Now, why does this happen? Why am I bringing this up? Why do owners choose not to be the be the you know the North Star on this, the direction for this? And it's a lot of reasons. You know, owners are busy. Man, you guys, 20 20 trucks, 30 trucks, 40 trucks, shoot five trucks. You got a lot of things going on. Your whole life's tied up in the equipment, like a help, you know, it's crazy amounts of money if you got 20 trucks out there, millions of dollars of equipment, real easy. You know, you're trying to empower your team. You're like, well, you told me to let my people make decisions. Well, I did. I didn't say make they get to make all the decisions. You know, you gotta either still important ones for you, or you uh uh you know, I've been listening and I've been trying to follow what you're saying here, and I've read this in other places too about how I shouldn't be the bottleneck. I shouldn't be what's slowing things up. Well, that's true. You don't want to be the bottleneck, however, you still have to give them clarity on where we're going, where the direction is. What are the what are the absolutes here? What are the things we absolutely will not do for people? What are the things who who's our customer? You know, if our customer is food service, for example, and we get the opportunity to haul, you know, something that just doesn't go with it. Um, you know, something where we gotta sweep out the truck every time or something. I don't know what, you know, it's not gonna work. And so we've got to really know who we are, is what the direction is, you know. That's what we keep coming back to. And the owner has to have that be clear to everyone who we are and who we are not. I can give you a better example from our own company here. We are a payroll service for trucking companies. Uh, we don't we don't do anything to try and get payroll for bakeries, we don't try and do driver, you know, driver safety for trucking. Like we have one thing that we really work on doing well, and that's what we provide to the to the uh marketplace. And again, that it comes from me. My I don't let my people get to make variances on that. They don't get to go, hey, let's go market to restaurants. No, no, no, no, no. Hey, let's do this service for trucking companies, driver qualification files or something, which are an important thing, we're not gonna do it. And my people know that, so they don't even come to me with it. So, yeah, you know, you don't want to be the bottleneck, but if you don't define it clearly, you know, you're gonna have you're gonna be the bottleneck anyway because you're gonna be sorting all of these things out. Uh, most owners don't lose control all at once, but they give it away one decision at a time. That's the painful part. It's not like yesterday I was in con control of our direction, all the great, and today I have none of it. It just erodes away. Now let's go back to what you should delegate. I've been talking about what not to delay delegate. Let's talk about some things that should be delegated. Repetitive decisions, absolutely. You define set of parameters, you give them a boundary on each side, away they go. Operational decisions, same thing. You know, are we gonna take this load or that load? They're both within our direction. Okay, we're good. Financial thresholds, I can pay up to this much, or I can take a load for this much per mile or this much total, things like that. And most customer issues, again, within limits. This customer had a special need, what should I do about it? This customer asked us to do something extra. This customer asked for something else. Uh, we had a service issue with this one. All those things can mostly be delegated away, except the extreme ones. And the extreme ones are rare. But the things that you should keep are you should keep strategy things. Anything strategic. Strategic is the things that are gonna point where we're going. That's another nice word for direction, and it's how we're gonna execute it. That comes from you and the standards. This is, you know, this is what we stand for. These are the these are the what we will accept and what we will not accept. You can call them standards, you can call them boundaries. If you you can even use mindsets like we use, if you're if you're used to things, there's other uh leadership ways to run a company, and they'll talk about mindsets. You can absolutely use those, and that should come from the owner. Uh, trade-offs. What are we willing to trade? What are we willing to, you know, there's gonna be times that there's some conflict or it's not always clear, and you should tell them this is more important than that. We're willing to trade off this thing for that thing. Uh, and that's you know, the great example of that is when I was talking about the safety person who said absolutely no points ever in your whole entire lifetime, or not even something that looks like a point. Plus, we make you take an exhaustive test or something that basically disqualifies everybody. Yeah, that sounds great, but we also have to move loads. So the trade-off is set there by the owner, it's not set by the safety person, it's not set by sales, it's not set by dispatch because sales and dispatch are going to be like anybody who can fog a mirror, let's go. You know, typically, not always, but often. And safety seems like, no, no, no, I'm not letting anybody go because if there's an accident, it's on me and my goal is to reduce accidents and have zero claims. So zero loads equals zero claims. You, as the owner, come in and you set this boundary, you set this trade-off and say, This is what we will accept, this is what we will not. It's kind of standards and trade-offs. It's also in anytime you've got to set precedent with a decision, anytime you're like, okay, this is the way we're gonna do this thing now, you're really giving your employees something that they can repeat, but you have to do the first one, you have to tell them the first time, otherwise, they're gonna go off the reservation on you and they're gonna make their own decision in a way that you may not like. So you give them the framework, but let them, you know, you that's what you're building. The precedent setting decision is really the framework. So then they can take it from there and repeat it as needed. So here's another way to think about it. When you're trying to decide if you should delegate a task or not, or you should delegate a decision, delegate anything. Ask does this change our does this or choose not to change, would uh would a and would an answer to this question change our direction? And if it's yes, you keep it. If it's no, okay, you can delegate it. Or am I okay with 10 different answers to this question? You know, if it's yes, again, you keep it. If there's one answer, that's a repeatable thing. You can give that to other people to do. And then finally, does this set precedent? Again, if it's yes, it's yours. And if it's no, then you can delegate it out. A great way to think about it is this if a decision creates a new rule in your company, you should be the one making it. If you get this right, your team moves faster, your decisions get better and your business stays consistent. Almost boring, which is the goal. Boring means processes are running well. If you get it wrong, if you don't choose freedom, you get chaos with other people making it. It's not even your own chaos. It's all the chaos about here's what I want you to do. Take the last ten decisions that you've had your people have brought to you and ask yourself, did it change does this change our direction? Am I okay with ten different answers? And does this set precedent? If any of those answers are yes, that is your decision and you make it. And if they're not, then you told them how to do it. Your job isn't to make every decision, your job is to protect the decisions that matter.