Facing Freight Budget Challenges Set on the Small Business Owner
The shipping world is difficult and confusing. Add to that the other challenges of running a business and it can be enough to make you want to scrap your vision and sell life insurance instead.
But before tormenting family members with your policy pitch, consider what some of the obstacles are to a manageable freight budget and what their solutions would look like.
The challenges usually aren’t rare enigmas requiring outside number crunchers to crack the code, but instead are the standard old culprits of time, internal expertise or budget restraints against hiring a qualified freight person. Large corporations typically bid their freight on a yearly basis to keep costs low. This takes on average months to complete – a scope which smaller companies just can’t afford. Additional time and money is then spent on measuring and controlling those costs.
After all that, it’s common for shippers to still not receive fair market pricing and if you’re a small company dealing with carriers direct, it’s an even tighter squeeze on your freight budget. There’s so much variability in pricing from customer to customer, that one company might be paying 35 percent more than their direct competitor.
No, it is not time to curl up in a ball and rock back and forth in a dark corner. It is time to stand firm time and ask these simple questions:
- How do we bid our freight?
- Are we getting the best possible rates?
- What carriers are the most cost effective?
- How are we negotiating with carriers?
- What’s the bottom line?
It’s hard to imagine, but a lot of times shippers don’t have ready answers for these. Thus, laying the foundation for the freight budget headache.
Simply put, are challenges related to weak spots related research, strategy or implementation? Often, there’s a bit of all of the above. The fact that there’s no shortage of carriers pressing for your business isn’t any help, especially if your staff doesn’t include someone with the expertise to align the right carrier with the service. Aggravating the problem, businesses might use too many carriers and end up diminishing buying power.
Keeping a trim budget entails having logistics providers who get the carrier rates shippers can’t secure on their own. That’s the balance of cost and solution. It saves valuable financial resources from being spent on a full time freight specialist and it lets you take advantage of not only lower carrier rates than you’d pay going carrier direct, but also gaining the edge from logistical analysis on all shipping issues. A good 3PL can be the difference between pressure relief and stress related illness.
Action Transport, Inc. affords businesses that kind of reprieve. We understand you don’t want your freight budget keeping you up at night. You have plenty of other business concerns that can do that. Helping our customers reach their goals in the most affordable way is what we’ve been doing for thirty-five years. We take a look at your shipping methods, the capital you’re shipping, the locations and the customers you’re shipping to and we match you with the best carriers at the lowest rates.
In a time when transporting goods is getting increasingly complex, don’t get overwhelmed. Contact Action Transport, Inc., receive a free freight quote, and save yourself from the bad jokes you’d have to put up with if you sold life insurance.