Business coaching for transport and logistics operators in Adelaide

Worth being straight about what this site is before you read any further. I don't provide coaching. I read what you send me, look for a fit among the independent Adelaide coaching businesses in the network, and make an introduction where there's one worth making. Every page in the industries section is put together on that basis, around the work a business actually does rather than around who happens to be on the books.

The operator this page has in mind owns the trucks, knows every driver by name, still holds a licence, and does the invoicing somewhere between 7pm and 9pm. That business has almost nothing in common with a national provider, because a national provider has people whose entire job is costing a lane. Here, the person who would do that costing is also the person covering a run on Thursday, which is precisely the problem.

If the business is smaller than that, a single truck or an owner-driver, the small business coaching page is the better starting point, and it covers the same ground for an owner-operator of any kind.

Ask an owner what a truck costs to run and you'll usually get a fuel figure and a pause. That isn't carelessness. It's what happens when the cost base is spread across a fuel card, a tyre account, a workshop invoice, a registration notice, an insurance renewal, a finance direct debit and a payroll run, none of which arrive in the same week or in a shape that adds up to anything on its own.

Cost per kilometre is the whole of that, over 12 months, divided by the kilometres actually run. Not the kilometres quoted, and not the kilometres the customer pays for. The gap between those 3 figures is where the empty running lives, and putting a real denominator in usually moves the number more than anything on the cost side does.

Cost per hour is the same cost base divided by hours the truck is committed rather than distance covered. It exists because a large amount of South Australian work is local: tippers, cranes, waste, yard shuttles, metropolitan distribution. That work spends its day loading, waiting, queuing at a gate and standing, so a per-kilometre figure flatters it badly. An operator running both kinds of work needs both figures, and the useful moment usually arrives when they discover the 2 disagree about which customer is worth having.

Neither number is difficult. Both are tedious, both need last year's statements rather than a memory, and both tend to sit on the list until somebody outside the business asks about them every fortnight. That is a fair description of what a coach is actually for here.

Fuel, tyres, maintenance, insurance, registration and finance are close to the entire profit and loss of a small fleet, and the structural problem is that none of them respond to a bad month. Fuel moves on a market. Tyres and servicing are consumed by kilometres already run. Insurance and registration are annual. Finance is contracted. The only line an operator can genuinely change in a hurry is their own wage, which is why so many small fleets absorb a rate squeeze personally without ever calling it that.

At the other end, the rate is usually set by a customer with a procurement process, an annual pricing round and other operators on speed dial. That combination, fixed costs and a taken price, is genuinely hard, and it's worth saying plainly that no coach can change either side of it. What coaching does is change what you bring to the conversation: a costed floor, a view on which lanes sit under it, a decision about which work you'd let go, and a plan for replacing the revenue if you do. Preparation is not leverage, but it's a great deal better than arriving without it.

It also changes what happens between those rounds. Fuel surcharge mechanisms, waiting time, after-hours work and pallet handling are frequently absorbed simply because nobody costed them and nobody raised them at the time. Those are the recoveries a coach will usually push at first, because they need no negotiation of the base rate at all.

Every operator says the same thing about drivers, and most of them are describing the same 3 controllable moments. The first is the advertisement, which usually describes the licence class required and says nothing about the work, the truck, the runs or the yard. The second is the response time, where a good applicant takes the first offer they get and a slow reply loses them. The third is the first fortnight, where an induction that consists of a set of keys and a run sheet produces the resignation 6 weeks later.

Underneath it sits the pattern the business can least afford. A driver leaves, the owner covers the run, the search stops because there's no time to run one, and the business settles back into depending on the owner being available. Every subsequent problem on this page gets harder from inside a truck cab. Breaking that loop is generally where a transport engagement spends its first few months, and the work is unglamorous: 1 run, 1 replacement, 1 set of written instructions, then the next.

What a coach doesn't touch is pay rates, entitlements or the process for ending someone's employment. Those carry legal consequences and belong to a lawyer or a specialist workplace relations adviser.

Road transport in South Australia carries a lot of businesses started in the 1980s and 1990s by someone who is now approaching the end of their driving years. Where the owner still drives, still prices, still holds the customer relationships and still decides what gets serviced when, the business is a well-paid job rather than a saleable asset, and the difference only becomes visible when somebody tries to buy it.

The coaching work is the readiness, not the transaction. It means writing down how the yard runs, getting maintenance and compliance records into a state that survives inspection by a stranger, building a second person who can price a job and handle a customer, and reducing the list of decisions that only 1 person in the building can make. It takes years, which is the argument for starting while you'd rather not.

The valuation, the structure of any sale and the documents are for your accountant and a lawyer. The succession and exit planning page sets out where that boundary sits in more detail.