6 Reasons You Should Not Remain a Single Truck Operator

You’re a single truck operator. You’re proud of your independence. No one’s your boss and you don’t have any employees to make life difficult. And you’re cheating yourself and your family. Here’s six reasons why.

1. There is Little Work/Life Balance

No employees means there’s no one else to do the work. You get a job and you have to get to it, even if it cuts into family time. If you do turn down work or try to delay it, you can’t really enjoy, say, your kid’s Little League game because you’re thinking about the work you passed on or might lose when the customer calls another plumber.

You may be independent, but it comes at the expense of your work/life balance. You are the only plumber on call, so you are always on call. The work/life balance is tipped heavily towards work.

2. Cash Flow is Uneven

With company size comes a leveling of cash flow. It can still be uneven, but it rarely dries up. When it does, the company can bridge the gap with a bank line of credit.

As a single truck operator, you are either doing work, chasing work, or waiting, hoping for work. The dry periods can be really dry. Since few banks will extend a line of credit to a single truck operator, the only choice to bridge a shortfall is using credit cards.

3. Paperwork is Always Waiting

Single truck operators don’t just do the plumbing, they do the paperwork too. After a full day in the field, the single truck operator is greeted by the need to complete the day’s paperwork, not to mention staying on top of all of the government forms and filings.

Some plumbers enlist their wives to help, typically without pay. She may help, but it’s no fun for her either, especially if she’s holding down a full-time job, home schools, etc. By contrast, larger companies have an office manager and bookkeeper to handle the paperwork.

4. Injury/Illness

If a single truck operator gets hurt in an auto accident or job-related injury and can’t work for a time, the company can’t make money. The customers must be referred to a competitor. Household income is not totally reliant on the plumber’s wife. If she doesn’t work outside the home, she’ll have to start.

Most plumbers do not think a serious injury will happen to them. It doesn’t have to be that serious. Tear an Achilles and it’s six weeks when you cannot even drive and additional weeks before you can perform actual work.

Given what an injury could do to his family’s income and well-being, the single truck operator should ask himself if he is being independent or selfish.

5. Age

As plumbers age, the work may not get harder, but the plumber’s joints make it seem that way. Age is inevitable. If the plumber runs a company with employees, he can supervise instead of strain.

6. Exit Value

When age finally makes it impossible to keep working, the single truck operator better have sufficient savings and investments to live on, because he doesn’t have a business to sell. You cannot sell a job and that’s all a single truck operator owns. Sure, it might be able to get a little for his customer list, but this is probably no more than the very low five figures.

By contrast, the plumbers who build true businesses that can operate without them have choices. Many have grabbed the brass ring from private equity, selling their businesses for seven or eight figures with some selling before they turn 50 years old. That can be the future for the single truck operator who chooses to grow.

Want to grow your plumbing business? Start by joining the Service Roundtable, plumbing’s largest and most affordable business alliance. Learn more at ServiceRoundtable.com. For inspiration, pick up a copy of Matt Michel’s book, “Contractor Stories” at Amazon.