S1 E41 How to Stop Answering the Same Questions Over and Over | Trucking Systems & Scaling

Most trucking companies don’t have a people problem.

They have a repetition problem.

The owner keeps answering the same questions over and over again… and every unanswered process slowly turns the owner into the bottleneck.

In this episode of Driven for Success, Mike Ritzema breaks down why growing trucking companies get stuck in operational chaos — not because employees are bad, but because answers never become systems.

This episode covers:

•  Why repeated questions are a warning sign 
•  How undocumented answers create inconsistency 
•  Why owners accidentally train team dependency 
•  The hidden cost of interruptions and context switching 
•  Simple ways to turn everyday answers into systems 
•  Why systems create freedom, not bureaucracy 

If you feel like every decision still runs through you… this episode is for you.

Because the goal isn’t to work harder.

The goal is to build a business that can operate consistently without depending on the owner for every little thing.

#trucking #truckingbusiness #smallbusiness #leadership #operations #processimprovement #podcast #businesssystems

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Many trucking company problems are not people problems. They're repetition problems. The owner answers the same question over and over and over again. And every time that happens, your business gets harder to scale. Welcome to the Driven for Success Podcast. This is the podcast where trucking company owners want to build a better business, make better decisions, and have better driver retention without losing control. I'm Mike Ritsimo, your host and owner of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple to help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways we fulfill that mission. And in today's episode, I want to talk to you about one of the biggest hidden bottlenecks inside growing trucking companies. It's not bad employees. And it's not lack of effort. Just the fact that answers never become systems. Here's what usually happens. Somebody in the office asks a question. How do we handle this deduction? What do we do if the driver turns in paperwork late? How are we setting this customer up? At what point do we charge detention? And the owner answers it. And everybody just moves on. Problem solved. Except it isn't solved. Because next week or even the next hour, somebody asks the exact same question again. Maybe it's a different employee. Maybe it's the same one. But now the owner answers it again. If you answer a question twice, you don't have an answer, you have a bottleneck. Or should we buy more trucks? Those kinds of things. And they just get deep into their thought and their strategy idea, and then someone comes in with a question that could have been an answer by somebody else. So the owner kind of becomes Google or AI or however you search for answers now. You're kind of the company wiki. And that just doesn't work. You know, and it happens all the time. The owners don't even notice a lot of the time, except for when they try and do deep work or they try to leave the office for a day. You know, at five trucks, you can survive on the owner's memory, no problem. It's how everything works. At 15 trucks, it really starts to become a problem. It gets to be annoying. At 40 trucks, it's pure chaos. Because now everybody's filling in gaps differently. One dispatcher says yes to a question, another dispatcher says no to that same question. Payroll handles it one way, safety handles it another way. And the owner spends half their day cleaning up inconsistency. When the answer only lives in your head, your business can't scale past you. You know, some of the ways this comes up too, like we talked about accounting giving one answer and safety giving another. It's just so hard because everybody has the right intention, but all that does is create confusion for your employees, not only your safety and accounting people in that example, but your drivers. And because drivers are people and people look for ways to get to the answer that they want to get, they're gonna go to the person who gives them the answer they want. They're gonna know maybe accounting says no, but safety says yes, or safety says no, but dispatch says yes. And you're gonna be pitting departments against each other, and none of it's working for you as the owner. And that you just can't have that. You've got to have consistent answers. And the same question that went to payroll and safety and dispatch should have one answer, and it should be your answer, and everybody should know it. You know, the real shift is this every answer becomes documentation every single time. Not eventually, not I'll get to it, not when things slow down immediately. Because we all know it will never slow down. You know in your soul it has never slowed down since you've been there. If somebody asks you a question enough that matters enough for you to answer, it matters enough to document, that could be an SO, you can do it by an SOP, you can make a Loom video, you could make a CRM note, you can make a checklist, you can make a process guide. It really doesn't matter what format you use. What matters is that all the answers stop depending on your memory. Because your business changes the moment knowledge stops living inside you. You know, the I race for perfection here is not the goal. But just something simple. Again, a Loom video, which is just, you know, if you're if you're not familiar with Loom, it's a way to kind of show your screen on a computer and have your face in the corner. There's other free software that does it as well. You know, or just a checklist or a place in the CRM where we put that. Or, you know, just here's a procedure, here's what we're gonna do, a process guide. All those things work. And the goal is just to be consistent about it. And so the consistency really is we all get to the same answer. So if the driver calls dispatch or safety or accounting, they're gonna get the same answer as if they had called you. The goal is not perfection. We want to get we want to move toward perfection, but the goal is not to get there. Hey, I know this sounds like a lot of work, and that's one of the biggest reasons that most owners don't want to embrace this. And it feels slower in the moment, and it is slower in the moment. Let's not kid ourselves. The difference between answering a question, which would take 30 seconds, and documenting it takes 10 minutes. You're like, man, that's nine and a half minutes I just gave away, and I'm already busy. So they skip the documentation. But they don't realize they're creating future interruptions, and now they're gonna have to answer that question a hundred more times. So, really, that 10 minutes it cost you today, you'll get that back after, you know, how many people? 20 people use your document to answer the question. So when you get into scale and you get into, you know, big numbers of how many times people ask that question, you're gonna save hundreds of hours by just documenting it the one time. The sad truth is owners love to save 10 minutes today and accidentally lose 100 hours later. That's exactly what we're talking about here. You you want to spend your time being strategic so you can do things again, like making that truck purchase or deciding whether I should bring on another employee or things like that. You want to be strategic. Well, be strategic about this. This is something where you invest a little bit of time now and you'll get the payoff later, and you'll get it as long as it goes on. And you know, there's because there's the the cost of these interruptions, you know, is just it's tremendous. You copy come in in the morning and go, I'm gonna get A, B, and C and D done today. It's gonna be a great day. And you get hijacked 10 minutes, you barely got your coffee, and 10 minutes in, you're getting questions. It can't work. You'll never get A, B, and C done. You'll look at A for a minute during lunch, and that's gonna be about it. And that's if you take lunch out of the building. So if you want to get the things done you need to get done, you've got to give your people an easier way to get the answers without coming to you all the time. Uh, and I'll remember it is not a system either. You know, counting on your people to remember answers, even you to remember answers. It's not a system. It doesn't scale, it never works. You've got to document this somewhere. And it's not documented, this isn't the Ten Commandments that are eternal. This is what it is right now, and we may tweak it later. It's a living document, and that's okay. As long as people are going to look at it when they have the question, they'll get the newest current most current answer. So once answers become systems, everything changes. Training gets so much easier. It's ridiculous. Like all the answers are there. Delegation gets easier. New hires ramp up faster. Managers make more consistent decisions. Everyone makes more consistent decisions. And the owner stops being required for every tiny operational detail. That's the real win. It's not having processes for the sake of having processes. It's freedom. Freedom from having to answer all of those questions. And a great way to think about it is this systems are just future decisions you already made. So it's not just you're telling one person how to do this thing. You're telling everybody whenever this thing comes up, this is how you're going to do it. So you only have to answer it once. And that's the win. That's the freedom. That's the whole goal. So, you know, it doesn't just reduce your time. It reduces stress for your people too. Because they can just, there are probably times they want to ask you the question but don't dare. And so they're just saying, well, that's what the owner's going to want us to do. And sometimes they're right. They're probably right more than they're wrong. But it's the stress for them to wonder, did I do it right? Did I not? It could also be costing you money because they don't want to ask you. And even though they ask you stuff all the time, there's all the other times they want to ask you and don't. And so you're you're losing on both sides of that. And the decision fatigue, you don't want people having to make decisions that they don't need to make. You know, if you make it for them, they don't have to worry about it. And you made it once, and it's there until you change it. So here's a rule I would use to try and do this. If you answer it twice, document it. That's it. Let's not overcomplicate this. You don't need some giant corporate process department. You don't need AI to write you out a four-page memo or anything like that. You just need the discipline to stop letting answers disappear. Because every doc undocumented answer creates future confusion. And confusion is expensive. Documentation is cheap. Clarity is gold. Everything runs better with clarity. You know, confusion causes people to not act in the way that you'd want them to act, which causes mistakes. Even, I'll give you an example from my life years ago. I used to, I worked for a pizza chain. And people would just put on, they'd like put on extra stuff on the pizzas because they were trying to be nice. But that wasn't what the standard was. And if we didn't enforce that, the next time somebody did it right to spec, they'd feel like they got gypped. And I know it's kind of a weird example, but you know, it's the idea of confusion. The customer didn't know what to expect, and that was the mistake. And, you know, there's a lot of relief in the consistency of it all. There's a lot of relief of knowing exactly how every everything gets done in your company, how we pay every driver, what our rule is for detention for every customer, things like that. The consistency takes so much emotional burden off of your employees to have to wonder these things. And it also takes them, if the customer questions them, they won't, which they won't question as much because it's consistent. But if they do, you go, look, this is the SOP, like this is the way we've always done it. And that clarity and that consistency, that's that's the magic of this. You know, think about how many recurring questions happen every single week. How to onboard a driver, what happens after an accident? How are advances approved? What to do when paperwork is missing from the driver packet? Most companies answer these differently every single time. Or they'll give you it depends like they're an attorney. It's not because people are bad, but it's because the company never decided on a system. They never set those guidelines up. A lot of people's problems are actually process problems. Good employees that are trapped in unclear systems will not appear as good employees. They'll appear as confused employees, they'll appear tentative, they will appear incorrect, wrong, bad, whatever adjective you like. You know, there's a there's a difference between accountability and clarity, which is important. Clarity is what we're establishing here. You still have to hold them accountable to follow the procedures that you're setting up, the processes that you're setting up. And you still have to you're still gonna have to manage them, but now you're just checking to make sure they did it instead of telling them what to do. So much easier and so much simpler. But let's be clear making these rules doesn't just, it's not, you know, it doesn't solve the problem forever and ever unless your employees use them. And that's where you come in as the owner, as the manager, is to make sure that they do them. But that's a lot easier job because they do it or they don't, right? And if they don't do it, they can't say I didn't know because they you laid out the process for them. Episode 37, what, four episodes ago, was about helping your team make better decisions. This is the operational side of that conversation because people make better decisions when the company gives them context, and systems are how you deliver that context at scale. So here's the challenge this week pick one question, one question that you answer repeatedly and turn it into a system. Not perfect, but just documented. Because every documented answer gives you a little more freedom. And every undocumented answer keeps the business dependent on you. So let us know how that goes. You know, reach out to us on socials. If you like this podcast and find it helpful, give it a five star review and share it with your friends. You know, we let we do this for you. So until then, thanks a lot. We'll see you next week.