S1 E43 The First System Every Trucking Owner Should Build (When Everything Feels Overwhelming)

Most trucking company owners don't have a time problem.

They have a decision problem.

When every question, exception, approval, and problem comes back to the owner, the business starts to feel chaotic—even when you have good people on the team.

In this episode of Driven for Success, Mike Ritzema explains why most owners make the mistake of trying to systemize everything at once, and why the better approach is much simpler.

Instead of documenting your entire company, start with the one decision that drains you the most.

The one your team keeps bringing back to you.

The one that makes you sigh every time your phone rings.

You'll learn:

•  Why overwhelm is usually caused by repeated decisions, not workload 
•  How owners accidentally become bottlenecks 
•  The simplest framework for creating a useful system 
•  Why clarity matters more than software, dashboards, or additional hires 
•  The first practical step you can take Monday morning 

If your trucking company feels like it depends on you for every answer, this episode will help you start breaking that cycle.

#TruckingBusiness #TruckingCompanyOwner #FleetManagement #Leadership #BusinessSystems #DrivenForSuccessPodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Most trucking companies do not have a people problem, they have a decision problem. The owner is still making too many calls, too many approvals, too many exceptions, and eventually the owner wakes up exhausted before the day even starts. Welcome to the Driven for Success Podcast. This is the podcast for trucking company owners and executives that want to build a better business, make better decisions, and keep their drivers without losing control. I'm Mike Ritzimo, 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 that we fulfill that mission. And today I want to talk to you about the first system you should actually build. If you're overwhelmed, this one should help you the most. Because most owners are try to systemize everything. And that's exactly why they never finish. When owners start hearing about systems and SOBs, they usually think too big. They think, well, we need a process for dispatch, or we need a process for hiring, or we need a process for onboarding. And while those are true, thinking that way gets you overwhelmed before you even start. Because now it feels like rebuilding the whole company. But that's not what fixes the problem. The real issue is much smaller than that. It's one decision, it's one conversation, one interruption that keeps happening over and over again. And it can be any number of things. It could be an exception request, it could be a customer issue that keeps escalating to you. It could be a question about driver pay. It could be a question about maintenance. There's all these things, and they keep coming to you. It happens all day long, and it just wears you out. Most owners think overwhelm comes from workload. Yeah, I don't think that's true. I think overwhelm comes from repeated decision making. You answer the same question 15 different ways to 15 different people because nothing ever got clarified. And eventually your team stops making decisions entirely because they know that you're going to step in anyway. Overwhelm is usually undocumented decisions stacking on top of each other. You know, there's a big difference between work and decision fatigue. Work is all the things that you thought you were going to do when you walked in that morning. Decision fatigue is all the things that got in the way because people kept interrupting you and you needed to keep making decisions. So not only do you have to think about their decisions, but now you feel behind in your work that you had intended on getting done. And you feel like your whole day went to the urgent instead of the important. And then that's a killer. It leads to owners feeling just mentally exhausted. You're just beat by the end of the day. And it just adds up. And then you look at the end of your day and you go, You look, you had all these things you wanted to do when you got there. And you look at the end of the day and you got none of them done. And that just wears you out. It's really why being available to your people can be a detriment instead of a benefit. Because being available means they're gonna come over all the time and they're gonna come knock on your door, or send you a text, or send you an email, or send you a Teams message, or whatever way you instant message in the office. And you have to respond all the time. This happens to me. This happened to me this week. I wanted to go eat lunch. I brought my lunch back to my office to sit there and have a bite. Before I could even take the first bite, I got an instant message and a phone call and a text. And it just wears you out. So let's do something about it. Here's the first system you should build. Not payroll, we're gonna build a whole payroll system, not dispatch or safety, or hiring. The first system should be around the decision that drains you the most. Whatever makes you sigh when the phone rings, whatever conversation you're tired of having, whatever decision just sucks the life out of you. This should be the first thing you document. Don't systemize everything. Systemize the thing that exhausts you. You know, that's it's that thing that just keeps coming back. You're like, man, I gotta deal with this again. It's the thing that your team that slows your team up, and you're you know that you have to get them an answer because the team can't move forward until they get the answer from you. You know, that's that's the system that you need to build. That's the thing you need to do. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing like we were talking about driver pay or hiring. Hiring system is actually a series of microsystems. But that first microsystem that you want to build is the one that's sucking the life out of you. The one that if you could not have to make that decision again, your thinking would be more clear because you your decision fatigue would drop by so much. Maybe it's how detention gets approved. Maybe it's how driver advances work. What's our policy there? Or it's when somebody can go home? How do we correct a payroll error? How do we correct that we forgot to pay a driver detention? It could be something like that. It could be how customer complaints even get escalated to you. Like what happens first and what do you get with it? Most companies already have systems, but they're just trapped in the owner's head. And because they live in your head, nobody can move without you. If the business only works when you answer the question, you do not have a system. You have a team that is completely dependent on you for every even remotely critical decision. They are almost bots who can only do things when everything is exactly perfect. If it's not exactly perfect, if there was a little longer wait for getting loaded, if there was an issue with a driver, things that should be solvable at a lower level than the owner, they still come to you. That's how owners become bottlenecks. No one ever wants to be, but you did it that way because when you had five trucks, you could make all those decisions, but now you have 25 trucks or 35 trucks, and you're trying to grow because rates are finally becoming decent again. So you can't have all these decisions come to you because the whole company stops. And it goes through the whole, and when I say the whole company, I mean it's not just your dispatcher, for example. Be your accounting people, it can be your safety people, it can be your driver hiring, recruiting HR people. Yeah, clarity wins here. So you really want to have that system not be in your head. You want it to be in everybody's heads, and that happens through documenting it. Here's why this matters. Every undocumented decision creates hesitation. One employee handles it one way and another handles it differently. Now, customers and drivers and all the other people get inconsistent answers to the same, basically the same questions. The drivers are getting frustrated. Uh, the trust with the driver and the trucking company begins to erode. And when that happens, you're losing drivers. And we're gonna do podcast episodes on driver recruiting and retention, and those are coming up soon. But this is where it starts. Employees lose confidence in their own ability to make decisions because they don't want to be wrong. And you start feeling like nobody can think for themselves. But usually they're scared to make the wrong call on when a decision has to be made because the rules keep changing. People don't freeze because they're stupid, they freeze because the target moves. And often it's a lack of clarity. We've talked about that a lot, but I'm gonna keep talking about that. And my business coach keeps talking to me about it. Clarity wins every time. A lack of clarity is where the target moves. Uh, there's the fear of getting in trouble. What if I make the wrong decision? I can annoy the boss a little bit and ask him a question, or I can annoy the boss a lot by making the wrong decision. I think I'll take that little bit of annoyance instead of the lot. And it's why teams start doing that. It's because that's the path of least resistance. That's the path that keeps them out of trouble. And it's the path that frustrates the everything out of the owner. It's what exhausts the owner. And it's a cycle, and you it just keeps spinning. And you want to answer the question as the owner because you want to keep things moving, but at the same time, you're really just making them ask you again and again and again instead of finding the answer themselves or knowing the answer from other resources that you've given them. So let's talk about building a system. It does not need to be complicated. Do not overthink this. As a chronic overthinker, I implore you not to overthink this. Just open a Google Doc. Open OneNote if you're your Microsoft people. Open whatever you use, you know, to communicate. And then answer four things what is the situation? What decision do we make? Who can make it, and when does it come to the owner? That's really all you have to do. And if you do that, just do that, you'll remove a lot of friction from your day. Because now your team has guidance instead of guessing. There's some things to think about or that are going to a little more details on this, but the guiding principles are simple beats perfect. Do not wait until you have the perfect policy that covers every possible contingency. You'll work towards that. But simple is always the way to start. Uh, the first version is enough of a start. You're gonna defeat most of the problems in your first version. Now you'll refine it later, and you can, and you should improve it later as you as you have to refine exactly what things mean, uh, provide additional clarity. Maybe there's new circumstances that you didn't account for in the first policy. But you can always do that later, and you should do it later. The point here is consistency. You want consistent decisions made every single time. Whenever whatever situation comes up, whenever a driver is at this customer for this long, that's when we start charging detention. But if they're there less than that time, then we don't. And then it's consistent and it's always the same, and it's no surprises, and it's boring. And boring, I know, is not considered to be a good adjective, but for me, boring for this kind of stuff is fantastic because it never has to get to the owner. Most owners are trying to buy their way out of the overwhelm. They'll try new software, they'll try new hires, new dashboards, new consultants. I see all these things. But the real fix is usually clarity. Because unclear businesses create exhausted owners, and clear businesses create momentum. Your business does not scale on hard work, it scales on clarity. How does this happen? How did you become unclear? Yeah, when you were five trucks, everything was clear because you did everything. But with all the growth, that brings new people that interpret things differently, it brings new customers, it brings new situations, and all these growth things, which are great, increase, increase complexity. They make your business much more complex, which is why all these decisions keep coming to you. And adding people without clarity just makes it worse. It's just more people asking you questions. And that doesn't help you. Clarity reduces the friction. Being clear here allows your people to do their job because they're very clear about what result they're supposed to get, about what they're supposed to do in a situation. And that's where the friction goes away. Not only for you, but for your employees. You know, I'm talking about this really as an owner-to-owner conversation, but you're really doing your employees a favor as well when you're clear. Because now they know exactly what success looks like. And if you give them that, that's the way you're going to find out if you have the people. If they know exactly what they're supposed to do, they're probably going to do it. So if you feel overwhelmed right now, don't try and fix the entire company this week. You'll just feel more overwhelmed. Just identify one decision that drains you the most. The one your team keeps bringing back to you and document it. Because every time you remove one repeated decision from your plate, you create a little more capacity to actually lead. The first system is not about efficiency, it's about getting your brain back. And as you as you start to get your brain back, you will see that snowball and you'll be able to write more policies because you'll have extra time. And then those more policies get you even more of your brain back. And then you can spend the time on the things that you should be doing, like making equipment purchase decisions or making strategic decisions, or just enjoying a day off. Because when you started the company and you had four or five trucks, you envisioned having 45 trucks and be able to take time off and having people to do things. You have the people with the systems, you'll be able to let them do things and you can enjoy yourself. We hope this podcast episode was helpful. If you like it, please like it and rate it well and share it. It helps more trucking companies like you get some advice that they might not be able to find somewhere else. And thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon.