Pro Tips: Guide to Running & Growing Small Fleets
Building a Successful Transportation Business
When you talk to most transportation companies with large fleets, most have had modest beginnings of less than 10 cars, or even starting with a single vehicle. Many transportation business owners have had personal experience driving as a profession themselves, with their drive and ambition pushing them to run their own fleet operation.
If you are on a similar path, looking to grow your fleet in the transportation industry, learn about the different ways you can make smart moves when developing your strategy and business plan.
Decide Business Structure
Will you own the vehicles and lease them out? Will drivers use their own vehicles? There are several pros and cons to consider when choosing your structure depending on your budget and other factors.
Contract Drivers
- Taxi drivers own their own vehicles and agree to paint their cars with the taxi company colors and logo.
- Build your fleet without the obligations and regulations that come with employed drivers. Less pressure on your budget, where leases pay off vehicles and owner/operators are responsible for their vehicles.
- Decide on how your fleet is maintained. Will you take on the costs or are drivers responsible?
- Contract drivers must operate at your standards in order to have the right to display your brand if stated in your agreement.
Employed Drivers
- Cab companies own vehicles and hire drivers to operate them.
- Great for Medical Transportation (NEMT) where certifications and special needs put higher liability on driver performance.
- Drivers are provided with vehicles maintained at your standard, with requirements to perform based on your operating procedures.
Low-Cost Booking + Dispatch System
When you’re starting your business with a small fleet, you’ll need affordable options for booking and dispatching rides to drivers, as well as convenient ways for your customers to book reservations.
Where can you find a cost-effective booking + dispatch system that has all of the features you need to run your transportation business? Small fleets use SmartMove Systems for affordable software that not only manages dispatching needs, but also offers solutions for online booking through website or mobile app, while also integrating with voice and chat support for customer reservations.
Book a Demo
Outsource Customer Support & Dispatching
As growing while saving costs without losing quality is a major goal for all business owners, this is also the case for start-up or small fleet taxi companies. Successful transportation companies all over The United States, and around the world, outsource their inbound customer support calls, chats, emails, and more to specialized contact centers with agents that are trained especially for transportation. Work with contact centers exclusively or make a hybrid team (some outsourced, some in-house). Outsourcing can eliminate the headache of managing low-level employees to answer phones, not to mention these positions are typical for high turnover.
Contact support services are available to all fleets that utilize SmartMove Systems, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
What support is included?
- Customer Calls, Chat, Email, and More
- Driver training
- Staff training
- After-hours assistance
- Holiday/Weekend Coverage
- Troubleshooting and system improvements
- Assistance with specific reporting requirements
- Everyday assistance with keeping your fleet operational and at maximum efficiency
SmartMove works ‘hand in hand’ with your fleet, from fleet setup to driver and staff training. We are available 24/7 to help you with troubleshooting and system repairs.
With multiple layers of redundancy protection to ensure our systems stay online all the time and to keep your fleet operating smoothly.
SmartVoix by SmartMove is a feature-rich phone system which has been customized to interface seamlessly with the SmartMove booking and dispatch system.
- Identifying the caller via the phone number
- Identifying previously recorded caller details including name and addresses
- Providing advanced call queuing to prioritize important callers
- Allowing you to take more accurate bookings and offering advanced functionality
- Recording all calls and linking them to the original booking. This provides an exceptional quality control measure.
- SmartVoix also enables you to effectively use ‘interactive voice response’ also known as IVR to speed up bookings.
See our SmartVoix video here for more detailed information on this feature.
Make a Goals List
- How many vehicles do you want to have in your fleet by the end of the year? In 3 years? 10 years? Review what exactly you need to do to hit those goals, and execute. Revisit your goals every year to see where you can improve or pat yourself on the back if you’ve exceeded your goals. Did something prevent you from growing at the pace you had expected? Maybe you had trouble hiring drivers or didn’t increase customer base. Going over your customer and driver experience can open your eyes to any stunted growth.
Make the SmartMove
Our team at SmartMove is committed to bringing small fleets an affordable option for booking and dispatching software, with features that allow for easy-to-use customer and driver apps and tools.
Small fleets and transportation startups have grown with SmartMove. With options that scale with you and your workload, SmartMove pricing scales up and down if your fleet size or workload changes.
