A few days ago, on LinkedIn, I reposted an article that we published on our website. I added a thought to the post that got me thinking a little deeper about our Swap Body system:  

“When medium duty trucks were $50k nobody cared. Guess what? These trucks are going to be $100k. So we need to keep them rolling and not sitting at a dock.”

Let me explain why I believe that so strongly.

I've been selling demountable truck bodies since before I started this company in 1989. As a matter of fact, I was selling them while I was still in college. Back then, the problem I saw was in wholesale window distribution. Virtually every millwork distributor here on the East Coast had two trucks for every driver. One truck went out and made deliveries while the other sat back at the warehouse and got loaded. The industry ran on a two-step process: The window manufacturer sold windows to the wholesaler, the wholesaler added value and delivered to the lumberyard, and the lumberyard delivered to the builder. Those wholesalers always knew a day or two in advance what was shipping. They had plenty of time to preload, they just couldn't, because the body was bolted to the truck.

So, we showed up and said, hey, you want to have half the trucks? They said sure. It was a complete no-brainer.

The two-steppers are mostly gone now, but the problem hasn't gone anywhere. Today the building products distributor is selling straight to the job site, and the question is the same: how do you leverage a $100,000 truck to its maximum? You keep it moving. With a swap body truck, one box is on the truck making its morning deliveries while the warehouse team is loading another for the afternoon, or the next day. The truck just keeps rolling, maximizing its value.

Here's how I think about it. At our plant, we bought a laser for $600,000. We bought an extrusion cutting machine for $300,000. Those machines should be running all the time, because if they’re not working, they’re a waste of money. A truck is no different. It's a tool.  

So ask yourself: Why did you buy a truck? To make money. Are you making money when the truck is sitting at your loading dock? The answer is simple: No.

If you run a fleet, look at your cost per delivery hour. Your truck has a cost, and it only works so many hours. The more time that truck spends delivering, the lower your cost per hour. It is that simple.

Thirty-seven years later, the math has only gotten better. The trucks got expensive. Keeping them rolling is how you win.