Using what you learned from Legos® and TinkerToys®

Nearly all of us as children remember looking at a pile of Legos® or TinkerToys® just after we’d poured them from their storage containers onto the floor. At first, all they were was one big mess. But somewhere in our imagination was the image of what we intended on building from this mass of little plastic blocks or sticks and wheels. Of course there were those play days where the image in our minds and the final results didn’t resemble one another and other days we far exceeded our own expectations. But what was the common denominator regardless of the result? The process required one block being connected to another or one stick being connected to one wheel at a time. It was the only way we could assemble the image we had in our heads. Many times it required some trial and error; other times, some experimentation. However, any way you tried to do it, it only worked if you assembled the plan one step at a time. It wasn’t possible to skip any steps. and if it was assembled incorrectly, you had to disassemble it the same way, one block or stick and wheel at a time.

Now fast forward to today when your Legos® and TinkerToys® have become a combination of trucks, trailers, drivers, customers, loads and lanes. The game is the same; just the blocks and sticks have changed. As an owner of a trucking company it’s up to you to connect the right truck to the right trailer to the best driver for the customer’s load. And do it in a manner where everything flows from one load to the next in a profitable manner. It’s all about connecting your blocks and sticks in a way that makes it roll smoothly. At times, it will require your intervention to disassemble a plan where a different trucker or truck will work better than what’s currently running a particular lane. Or maybe taking two or three freight lanes, disassembling them and then taking parts and pieces from each to make more efficient lanes for both the shipper, your trucker and your bottom-line.

Trucking isn’t as complicated as many would believe, especially when you break it down to blocks, sticks and wheels that you played with as a child. Problem-solving is problem-solving, regardless of the venue. It’s a matter of breaking down your operation to its individual components, not unlike pouring the Legos® or TinkerToys® out of their storage containers onto the floor. What we did next was organize them according to size and color to get a good idea of what we had. Once we had them separated and categorized, it was much easier to see the big picture of what we needed to do next to take the image in our head and make it reality. Same can be said of running a trucking company.