Almost everyone has heard by now that the best way to make enough money to live their dream life is by starting a business. Whether you start it from home or rent out some space to do it, there are things that you have to do from the start to make sure you’re setting your business on a firm foundation. If you’ve chosen the trucking industry and would like to open your own trucking business from scratch, here’s a brief guide on some of the steps that you should take.
Get Your Commercial Driver’s License
The first thing that you need to do is to get some experience as a commercial driver. To do this, you can enroll for lessons at a driving school and get a commercial driver’s license upon successful completion of the course. Alternatively, you could get a job as a company driver for a trucking business that offers its own training program or that’s willing to sponsor you to attend a commercial driving school. This way, you can get some hands-on experience and learn things such as that large trucks accounted for 10% of the vehicle miles traveled in the year 2020, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The experience will prove handy when you start your own business.
Come up with a Business Plan
Next, as with any other business, you need to write a business plan. This is going to guide you on details that are important for showing you what needs to be done, mainly concerning business finances. This is something that you can do from the comfort of your home by searching for a business plan online and using it as a guide.
Include all the details of your cash flow, including costs you expect to put in and money that you expect to get. For the best outcome, you could hire a business advisor to help you better understand the process and do it more efficiently. With a solid business plan, you may be in a position to apply for a business loan if you need one.
Learn About Compliance and Insurance
It’s important to know what the law stipulates so that you can run your business in full compliance. This way, you’ll build a solid reputation for yourself and also avoid expenses such as fines that you could be given for not running your business as per legal expectations. Remember to find out the best insurance coverage to get so that you can secure your business and safeguard the well-being of anyone you hire. This is important to do when you consider the fact that from 2016 to 2017, fatalities involving large trucks increased by 9%. This added up to 4,761 lives lost in the year 2017.
Set Up Your Funding
Finally, you need to get into the details of your business finances. You’ll need to invest a lot of money at the beginning for truck purchases, licensing requirements, registration, and hiring a team. Hiring people can be costly and time-consuming, so you have to find a way to make it efficient. Keep in mind that 63% of job openings are positions that have been created newly. That said, you may need to keep hiring to fill positions as you start your business and start to take off. Such expenses may fall solely on you at the start. That means you must be sure you’ll be able to cover these costs for a minimum of the first six months that you’re in operation.
These tips cover a few of the details that you need to think about when starting your trucking business. Remember that you’ll need to do a good amount of research and work quite hard at the beginning in order to succeed. Once the first year passes, you may find it easier to keep running operations, and you can then think about growing your business.