Case Studies
PMG Holdings' 17-truck delivery fleet was leaking about $129K a year in idle wages and a standby driver. Four rented trailers and a re-sequenced dock lifted on-time deliveries from 90% to 97%.
PMG's industrial business ran its own 17-truck delivery fleet, about 70 deliveries a day. On paper it worked. In practice one or two loads were missed every single day, so a backup driver sat permanently on call.
Two high-volume drivers did ten deliveries between them. Fifteen more did four apiece. The drivers were long-tenured, treated like family, and every miss came with a familiar excuse.
We went in the way an operating partner does. Not to hear the story, but to measure it. GPS, daily logs, a stopwatch on the dock.
The waste hid inside "labour" and "we need a spare driver." At a loaded driver cost of $37.80 an hour, two costs stood out and added up to a six-figure annual leak.
On top of that, about $144K a year of billable capacity. Roughly 1,400 driver-hours the fleet could have sold at $140 an hour and spent waiting instead.
Two to three trucks a day sat 2+ hours because the forklift and dock crews weren't staging loads ahead, and often there weren't enough trailers on site to pre-load one.
GPS and daily logs showed a handful of drivers taking longer routes and pulling off, because they were paid by the hour and knew a full day was a full day, loaded or not.
With no data, tenure won every argument. The same excuses had run for years because nobody could prove otherwise.
So a loaded trailer is always staged and ready. Against roughly $129K of annual waste, it was the easiest capital decision in the building.
Stage loads before the driver arrives, and put every route and hour on GPS with findings written into formal performance reviews. Behaviour on the record, and a clear read on who to keep heading into slow season.
GPS, staged-load scheduling and performance dashboards now do this monitoring continuously. It is the system we install across the freight platform.
The real danger here isn't the analysis. It's what the analysis can break. These drivers and owners had trusted each other for decades, and those bonds don't rebuild on a spreadsheet. Hold people accountable carelessly and you win the argument but lose the culture. The craft is getting done what the business needs while keeping the relationships intact, pressure and trust at the same time. Most people treat this as a numbers problem. It isn't. That balance is the art of execution, and it's where value creation lives or dies.
The operating-partner playbook in one move: measure the waste the owner can't see, deploy small capital against it, and turn the on-time rate into margin. It's exactly what we do on every book we buy in the freight platform.