Ken Lucci 0:00

if you are not able to pay yourself a nice salary, a nice payroll, and you're existing on whatever's left over, or you're paying yourself distributions, we need to talk. Well, good afternoon to the Ground Transportation Podcast audience. My name is Ken Luci from Driving Transactions. We are a financial analysis, profit improvement and business valuations company. We represent companies for sale. We also help people buy and we help people improve profit and get their financials in order. I am usually joined at this time. For the podcast by James Blaine. But James unfortunately is out training a group of, motor code strivers today, uh, in an undisclosed location. So, James, we, we miss you. so this is unfortunately for the audience going to be a solo episode, but I think you'll get something out of it if you're joining us on YouTube. Behind me is the word perseverance, and today's episode is gonna be a lot about. So words that start with the letter P, um, we're gonna talk first about proactive planning equals predictable profits. Proactive planning equals predictable profits. We're at the beginning of the year, so it's a perfect time to do business planning and you know, in general we do this with our retained clients all the time. actually we only do the planning for retained clients, but I have an outline available for you if you email me k lucci@drivingyourincome.com. I'm gonna send you the business planning outline and there's really 10 elements to it. So we're gonna talk about proactive planning equals predictable profits. Ideally, you wanna start this kind of a document in the beginning of the year, January by the end of January, as long as you've got an outline, but you wanna publish it. At the very, very latest by, let's say mid-February. The good news is this is a business planning outline that you should be able to share with your team, right? We're not gonna share any secret sauce or, Hey, this is what I make, or as an owner, this is what I take out or, but we're gonna have some goals and objectives that you really should, share with your team. Now, the good news about this business planning outline is this is good for a single car operator all the way up to. We do this with companies that are a hundred million, 10 million, et cetera. So let's talk first about the first objective of the business plan. You wanna list your major company revenue and sales objectives. Uh, that's where my mind always goes. I, I, I don't wanna make this exhaustive. You can't make this exhaustive. It's gonna be achievable. So a revenue company, revenue target, or revenue objective for 2026 may look something like, you know what? We want increase top line revenue by 10% a year over last year. So a million dollar company wants to get to a 1.1 million. A $10 million company wants to get to 11. A $20 million company wants to get to 22, right? The other thing you can do is say, you know what? I wanna maintain top line revenue, but I want to grow a segment of my business. We're working with a great operator. Good size, $12 million company. And he entered into the motor coach space with just fantastic results. Last year we helped him buy his first motor coach and do an ROI calculator pricing calculator. And he did so well with it that he, he just bought his second and third. So he said, you know what, I'm really good with the rest of the revenue, but we need to launch the motor code space. So we designed a revenue target around that and the sales objectives around that. So that's objective one. Revenue and sales, uh, objectives, that's number one. and there's 10 of these. So, you know, another objective might be, you know what? I'm gonna strengthen the relationships with my top 20 clients. I'm gonna look at what they did last year, and I'm gonna try to double down with my largest clients and maybe expose them to another kind of service that I've never talked to them about. objective number two. Your major financial objectives. Now, yes, this involves a profit and loss statement. It involves, we take our clients through a budgeting and dynamic forecast process. So what's the difference between a budget and a forecast? really what my Esteem colleague, my business partner, the Chief Financial Analyst of driving transactions. Should answer, but he would tell you that a budget is a detailed financial plan of the future that outlines your goals and expectations. And a budgets are more fixed. Budgets are also based on goal setting framework, but it's also your financial data, whereas a forecast to do it right, it's a projection based on historical data. And analytics. What does that mean? We take our clients through this all the time, retain clients. We look at your revenue per vehicle. You could do this yourself. Look at your revenue per vehicle from last year. we know the industry averages in most major cities around the country, and we set low, medium, and high targets. But let's take a look at, let's say you're a 10 car operator. Look at what each one of those vehicles generated last year. Figure out who your workhorses were and say, wait a minute. If five of my SUVs did on average 175,000, but these three did 110, let's make a goal of getting those three performing. That's the analytical piece, that's the revenue piece. And then what you do is you back that into your financial data. That's a forecast. So major financial objectives include creating a budget with a dynamic forecast. It can also be. Setting a budget around the major financial metrics of the business, revenue growth, target direct cost targets, huh? In this day and age, it's really keeping your direct cost in line, but you need to know what those were last year in order to do that. Two ways of doing that. Number one. We have a course that teaches you how to do that driving financial success. Go to go to driving transactions.com, look at the course, or work with your bookkeeper and say, look, we wanna look at all of our direct costs as a percentage of total revenue, and we need to keep those in check. And it's gonna be tough because you know everything is rising. So look at your revenue targets, look at your direct cost. Establish what your gross margins have been. And how are you gonna increase those? One way to increase margin, obviously, is to increase your pricing on some of the specific vehicle categories that you have that are not necessarily extremely price sensitive. Example. You can go up on your wedding limousines, you can go up on your mini coaches, you can go up a little bit on your motor coaches, et cetera. Whereas you may say, geez, I don't wanna go up on my airports. Okay? Because we have so much competition there. So to increase your gross margins, there's only one, two ways to do it. Increase your revenue, you increase your pricing. Or lower your costs, so, you look at that. Another budget target would be manage your g and a expenses. You're gonna have to maybe give some people some raises. So you're gonna have to figure out what are my overhead expenses that I might be able to cut? And then next is what, you know, what are my profit target? Best thing to do to establish a net profit target is look at what you did last year and shoot for that. Now, the average limousine company that's out there, the average company, and we have the profit equations for all, pretty much all companies. What I mean by profit equation is based on X amount of revenue, how much you should be spending for direct cost, paying your chare, paying your fleet expense insurance, your fleet vehicle costs, et cetera. how much you should make from margins. How much should your overhead be? What should be, and how much should my profit target be? We have those profit equations for every company size imaginable, but in general, your net profit, if you are not making between an eight to 12% net operating profit, I'm not talking about paying tax on that now. Net profit target should be somewhere between eight and 12% after you. Pay yourself as the owner, a nice healthy W2, a nice salary if you are not able to pay yourself a nice salary, a nice payroll, and you're existing on whatever's left over, or you're paying yourself distributions, we need to talk. So that's, a budget, uh, and a forecast. Your third business planning objective is what are my marketing and communication objectives for this year? What do I mean by that? Well, let's start by looking at how much you're spending on marketing and for what, and let's calculate a return on that investment. So if you're spending on Google PPC, or SEO services or social media, we need to establish how much revenue you need to bring in to break even on that expense. return on that investment. and the marketing objectives may be, what are the five things that I can do every single week in my market that cost me practically nothing but my time? You know, go to the Chamber of Commerce, going to the local GBTA, going to the local MPI, going to other business networking functions. Um, that's a good marketing objective. Let's talk about communication objectives. How about you look in your reservation system and create a list of dormant clients that didn't use you in 25, maybe go back two years, look in your reservation system, who used you in 23 that didn't use you in 24, 25, and send them some email marketing. I, I do this with clients all the time. Hey, this is Ken. We haven't talked in a little while. How are you doing? just letting you know we have some new services. Also, hit your top 20 customers, whether those are individual businesses, whether they're private individuals, maybe even affiliates. And let them know all of the things that you can do for them. don't think that they're sitting on your website figuring out wow. I didn't know these guys had a jet sprinter. I didn't know these guys had a new sprinter or new. You need to tell people that. So that's a communication Objective four is your major sales and business development initiatives or objectives. So what's the major sales objective? you know, if you have a revenue target of increasing revenue by 10%, or increasing motor coach by a quarter of a million, or getting that minivan, that mini bus or that new jet sprinter getting that producing revenue, the sales objective is how you're gonna do it, right? we talk to our clients. The first thing you want to do is look at how your vehicle production was last year. What excess capacity do you have? And that's a good place to start. On sales objectives, it may be I want to increase more charter work. I want to increase more special event work. I want to increase more group and meeting work. Well, we need, you need a sales initiative. We are big on looking back at your and harvesting your sales data. We do that for every single retained client and every single profit improvement engagement that we take on. We look at sales data like nobody else, and my business partner pulls down data from every reservation system slices and dices it. W some of our biggest clients didn't even know, wow, I didn't realize that client was doing much less work, or, wow, I didn't realize that client has never used me out of town. So sales initiative is very, I important. Why don't you start with something easy. Look at the dormant customers, and then look at doing sales outreach to your top 25 clients and look at those clients and say, Hmm, if they're a law firm, for example. Why don't you find five like law firms and make a sales initiative that you're gonna reach out to them. You're gonna try to meet them, you're gonna try to cold call them, you're gonna try to prospect. Number five, service and hospitality improvement goals. I gotta tell you, we as an, industry, we have to really take a giant step forward on how we treat our customers. Because it's not about the brand new Escalade, because the other day I saw an Uber Black car at, BWI, which is, uh, the Baltimore International Airport brand Spanking New Escalade. I thought it was my car, uh, my chauffeur car. It was an Uber black car. So it's not about the car anymore, it's about service and hospitality. So. What are your business plan objectives to improve service and improve hospitality? And these can be a myriad of things, but let's just talk about quality improvement, defect reduction, improving your on time performance. We work with every retained client that we have. We pull down their on time performance from most of the major softwares they don't have. We build a report for it and we basically look at that by customer, by driver, et cetera. But why don't you start by. Doing what my friend Douglas Schwartz does on Long Island and I love Dougie and I always talk best in class. I talk about Doug, how about going and looking at how you can get more five star reviews and solicit reviews from your best clients and ask the question, how we doing for you? How are ways you think we can improve? Why don't you secret shop your company? Why don't you call the company and see how, or have a friend do it and see if the service and hospitality, critical cues that you want handled or communicated are really being used. One example is. Have the person call in and and make a mock reservation. Are they using the client's name? Are they greeting the client? Mm-hmm. Are they asking the client if they've ever used them, used you before? Are they thanking the client for calling today, et cetera, but figure out you service him. And hospitality improvements that you want to make. It may be introducing a new service. It may be increasing the amount of service that you do in a specific area. Uh, I myself, like the on-time performance metrics. Okay. Number six, objective operational objectives. What kind of system and process improvements do you want to make? You know, I wrote down here because I always think of my co-host, James Blaine. I mean, I think of him constantly safety. Okay. How do you triple down on safety? How do you harvest the data from telematics or harvest the data, data from your camera systems? How do you triple down on safety and build a case that you are a safer company than your competitors? And how do you demonstrate that to clients in your insurance company? That's an operational objective. It might be as simple as, look, I wanna make sure that every one of my phone calls are answered within two minutes. I want to improve my dispatch tracking. But you have to answer the question. But the sixth objective of a business plan is operational objectives, the seventh objective. objective involves people and organizational objectives. Okay, so let's talk about that. It could be key hires. I wanna add, a new dispatcher this year. I want to add a sales person this year. I want to develop, I wanna have my dispatcher, I want to improve his comm, his or her communication skills. So it could be hiring. It could be employee development, it could be employee engagement and retention methods. Like I wanna create a bonus structure for my people. It could be performance management improvements, it could be cultural, it could be, I wanna double down on service and hospitality. So I'm gonna teach the Ritz Carlton Gold Standards course. frankly, I'm gonna, I wanna improve my chauffeur, performance. So I'm gonna institute pacs. Okay. I can't, I can't think of a better investment than investing in the people who are on the front line of your company. So that's the seventh objective of business planning. So those are the major objectives, but it means nothing unless you create a quarterly focus and quarterly milestones of what are our targets. So if I said for example. One of my objectives is I want to implement a CRM. I want to learn Zoho. I'm a huge fan of Zoho, by the way. We have a consultant. We can refer to you, but I'm a huge fan of Zoho. I want to institute a client communication, marketing, and communication program, and I wanna learn Zoho. Okay? When are you gonna do that? Quarter one. another thing with quarter one, I wanna work with, uh, driving transactions and I wanna make sure that my budget, or I'm gonna work with my bookkeeper. I wanna make sure my budget and forecast is done by mid-quarter one, no offense, but if you haven't done your budget and forecast in your first quarter, You were way behind the curve because usually in our industry, the first quarter is kind of quiet. Okay? So. Don't do your budget forecast in the middle of busy season. Do it when you've got equipment hanging around and you really wanna work with your people. 'cause you get some time for, again, proactive planning equals predictable profits quarter two. What are your priorities? So out of the objectives that you just identified, what do you want to have accomplished by quarter one, quarter two, quarter three? And then finally, what are your priorities by the end of quarter four So the eighth objective is to put timing targets in place, and we like to do everything either monthly or quarterly. You can do 12 targets and, you know, one per month, or again, the most important. All of your revenue, sales, and financial targets should be established by quarter one or behind the the eight ball. So number nine, uh, element of a business planning outlined. And again, email me k luci@drivingyourincome.com. Three words, no hyphens, k Lucci, LU, cci, at driving your income.com. And I'm gonna send you this outline for you to work on with some suggestions for each one. Okay, so number nine is what is the success look like at the end of the year? What does success look like at the end of the year if you've done a really good job executing your plan? So I always yield back to the financials first. What's my total revenue gonna be? What is my cost of goods gonna be? What's my gross profit gonna be? What's my overhead and what's my NOI and what's my standard EBITDA financials? You know, financial target may be I'm gonna reduce my debt. I mean, and I gotta tell you, I'm a little worried about some of the EIDL loans hanging out there and people still paying interest only. I mean, at the end of the day, that's a sort of damocles over your head. It might be another success criteria. Maybe. You know what? I'm starting the year with only 75,000 in the bank. I want to generate a profit of eight to 12%, and I wanna have cash reserves at the end of the year. I wanna have cash. I want 200 K in the bank. for every million dollars. Yeah, you're doing in business, if you are not generating 82, 120,000 in cash after you are paying yourself, not your distributions, but every week you're paying yourself payroll, W2, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't have 80 or 120 in cash for every million you do, you gotta talk to us because you have profit problems. Okay, so what does success look like at the end of the year? And then let's talk about. Non-negotiable outcomes. So let's face some realities. Even though quarter one is slow, you know, any plan is gonna get sidetracked. Some of the elements are gonna get sidetracked because other stuff's gonna come up, other opportunities, other fires, et cetera. So what are the non-negotiable outcomes? Okay, I'll give you, uh, uh, for us, for example, you know, we only have a certain number of retained slots, right? Because, you know, it's, it's me, Cole, and a couple of researchers and, and I'm getting old and Cole's busy and. So we have, only a certain number of retained spots. I want those absolutely filled. I want 'em filled by at the latest February 15th. I want our Zoho CRM project done. I want every single prospect out there and all of my nifty communication stuff. I want that in Zoho. I want that all done by the end of quarter too. Right? I have objectives and outcomes as far as the surveys that we do with chauffeur driven. I want to have our retained slots filled. We have. valuation slots to fill, and those are my non-negotiable outcomes. Do I want to do another course? Yeah, but you know what, if I don't get to it, but I get to my top two or three non-negotiables, I'm good. Okay. I'm not a perfectionist anymore. what are the metrics we're gonna use to evaluate success? Guys and gals, if you're not using your, your, year end profit and loss statement from 2025 and you're not doing a budget for 2026, and those are not your base metrics. That's not a business plan. that's what you need. And again, if you need help with that, feel free to reach out. We've got a course that talks about that. We have a module on budgeting and, but it also tell you, the course will also put your financials where they need to be. Best investment out there. Sold 275 of those courses. I think I gave money back to, and by the way, it comes with a money back guarantee. I gave money back to one operator that was a one car operator. I'm like, dude, this is too big for you. so. I let him keep the course, but I gave him his money back. Okay, so that's the business planning aspect. Those are the 10 things. So let's recap what those, what those are. Number one, we're gonna start with a number one objective or 2026 business plan is what are your revenue and sales objectives? Number two, what are your major financial objectives? So you need your p and l for that. You need to know what are your major objectives? How much revenue am I gonna bring in? How much net profit am I gonna bring in? What are my monthly seasonality gonna look like? What are your major financial objectives? And again, budget being more of a fixed thing, definitely looking at what your cost structure is and what your trends are, but your forecast should be dynamic. Every single month you should be looking at your forecast, and if you achieve, achieve it or exceed it, good for you, but you may have to make adjustments In the forecast, we work with people and by the middle of the year, if we see that vehicle, certain vehicles are not moving. you gotta say to yourself, either I'm gonna get a move or I'm gonna sell 'em. This is an asset utilization business. So that's number two is major financial objectives. number three, objective is marketing and customer communication. Number four is major sales initiatives. Number five is service and hospitality improvements. Number six is operational objectives, goals, systems, processes. Number seven, am I gonna make people and organizational goals and objectives? Maybe I wanna. Give my people more money. Maybe I want to figure out who I'm gonna give bonuses to. Uh, number eight, again, what are my quarterly focused targets? Out of all of those things I mentioned before, number nine, how am I gonna measure success? Is it going to be based on revenue production per vehicle? Is it gonna be increasing revenue per trip, per vehicle, et cetera, that you can really only measure your success with two sets of data. one is your p and l The second is your balance sheet. That more deals with cash and debt. And then you, you, your entire revenue suite, your entire KPIs from your re reservation system. So you have to figure out what, how you're gonna measure what you're gonna track, and then give yourself a break. Just give yourself the non-negotiables. If you have those seven, out of those seven objectives, you might have two. Many objectives in the middle there, just give yourself a half a dozen that are non-negotiable, okay? And you say to your team, you, you keep the non-negotiables to yourself, right? But you tell your team, here's what we're gonna do. Here's who's gonna be the assignment on this? Here's how we're gonna track this. This is what we're gonna do every single month, and we're gonna stick on this and we're gonna stay focused. And then again, you know, the metrics. What are you gonna use and track every single month? Our retained clients meet with us once a month. We say it's a 60 minute meeting, but They always go 90 minutes. And what we do is we look at their entire financial package that includes how are they doing profit and loss wise, how are they doing against the budget? Compared to last year budget versus actual. Do we have to adjust the forecast? What does the forecast now look like after we, because we've gone another month, we look at all of the revenue KPIs to come outta the reservation system. You know, can you do it yourself? Yeah. I mean, we only have so, so many retained spots. But I would encourage you to get our course, 'cause our course talks all about that. Our course also allows, gives you, uh, a number of hours for to work with us on, to answer questions for you. But again, the business planning piece is something that if you email me, I'll send you an outline. So something else that's near and dear to my heart. Besides. Proactive planning equaling predictable profits is something that I learned way back in the day. Um, a SWOT analysis SWOT SWOT is your strengths, you weaknesses, your opportunities, and your threats. It's another business planning tool and. don't care if it's just, you just get in a room and say, what are we good at? What do we do well? What do our customers say we do? Well? What is our unique selling proposition? What is really, what are we great at? What are we weak on? What do we have to improve? I worked with an operator the other day who says, you know, Ken, you do, you seem to have the gift of gab, but I'm really an introvert. So I worked with this person on a 30 second pitch, uh, 30-second introductory pitch when he meets new people to say what he does well, I'm in a little more business. No, you're not. you are a passenger transportation logistics expert. You're in the chauffeur private transportation industry for sure. and we worked on the 32nd pitch for when he meets new people. And then we worked on what I call an elevator pitch. So when you trapped, God forbid somebody's trapped in an elevator with me for three to five minutes. Um, wow. God, that poor person. what's your three minute cocktail party pitch that tells. People what you do, but it also answers the question. Hmm. What's in it for the person I'm talking to? So it may be you meet somebody at your local HOA, you meet somebody at the Chamber of Commerce and you say, you know what? How, you know, how many vacations do you take a year? Oh, I always, always take the family to Disney World. Well, we do a great job with airport transfers. We put everybody in an SUV, we take care of luggage, et cetera. So all I'm saying there is. Be honest with yourself about what your weaknesses are. You may have weakness as far as personnel or staffing, so you know what? We're really good first and second shift, but a third shift is really, really weak. We can't give out prices, et cetera. Okay? Well figure out what your top three alternatives are to deal with that weakness. The O in SWAT is opportunities. Do you have competitors that have any weaknesses that I hate to say that you could benefit from? Do you have target markets that you want to grow? I mean, do you have, private schools in your area that you, you know what? We get a great opportunity. So and so went out of business or. new private school opened up, et cetera, et cetera. What are the opportunities in the space? You know what? We don't do any national work, but I have an opportunity to grow an affiliate network. Let's start there. Let's start with the top 20 cities, the busiest airports, and then what are the threats? What are the threats to my business? And it may be, you know, they may dovetail from your weaknesses. Your weakness might be, I don't have enough cash. Okay. Well. How about you creating a relationship with a local bank? Because it is a threat. It is a threat if you run outta cash or you have an unforeseen expense and you don't have the dollars, that's a threat. So weaknesses and threats kind of sometimes go together, but is a new competitor, potentially ex their business? is our target market shrinking or shifting? So what are the threats? Now, some people would say that our airport services threatened by Uber and Lyft. I, I gotta, I gotta push back on. Our airport service being, our market share automatically shrinking. I think this industry delivers a fantastic product. When people get in and out of our vehicles, they're not worrying about the background or the driver. They're not worrying about the safety of the vehicle or it's insured. They can't really, some of the TNC stuff that's out there. You can't really say that. So we deliver a great product and a service. I think we do a terrible job at proactively marketing our products and services. Most of my customers, we try to shift them from reactive to proactive, certainly on the financial basis. But one of the threats is you're not expanding your marketing and sales, you're not expanding your own reach. In your market because there may be somebody that's going to it it do that and affect you. Could there be, an industry or economic trends that could weaken us or hurt us? You know, all I can tell you is you can control what you can control. And the way you mitigate against threats from somebody who was in the security industry for a long time is you either fortify yourself physically or you get in better shape. And, and as far as your business threats are concerned, one of the best thing you do is make sure you get enough cash. Make sure that you are in optimum financial condition so that if anything does happen from an economic trends perspective or any chaos. Um, that you are prepared for it. Prepare yourself as best as you can. And I always focus on a SWOT analysis as if you look at it as a seesaw and your strengths, and this is not, I mean, they wouldn't teach this in business school, but if you look at your strengths and opportunities on one end of the seesaw and then your weaknesses and threats on the other, you want your strengths and your opportunities to be. The heaviest side and your weaknesses and threats, you want to have a plan to mitigate those. So, so you want the scales to be balanced on strengths, much more strengths and opportunities than weaknesses and threats. So proactive planning. It means you have to sit and you have to really think about where you are today versus where you want to be. And the second thing is, and the reason why I brought up the SWOT analysis is you gotta be honest with yourself If you are the biggest weakness in your company, because you won't let go of certain things as the owner. and I see this all the time, or you won't embrace new things, you gotta be honest with yourself. Now, in any case. in either scenario here for business planning or SWOT analysis, you have the opportunity to reach out to us and you get a 30 minute introduction. Uh, introductory zoom that costs you nothing. And we can talk about either subject, kind of tough to do both in, in 30 minutes. But I would challenge you, you can go online and you can find your own business planning outline. or you can email us and I'll send it to you and you certainly can go online and get an, a SWOT analysis template, but you wanna make sure that it's close enough to our industry where you are addressing. the specifics, it, it shouldn't be general. So now is the time to do that. It is the first, month in a new year, so to be effective, all of your planning should really be d done and finished. And. Set to paper by the middle of February, at the very least, the end of February. It's not that it's not gonna be, you know, changing and moving it's dynamic, but you should at least have your major goals and objectives of your business plan outlined. and again, if you are at all uneasy about what your profits should be and what your financial objectives should be. Feel free to reach out to us. Visit driving transactions.com and book 30 minutes. It doesn't cost you anything for an introductory, session or just shoot me an email and we can answer some questions. my partner in crime, James Blaine, he is the guy to talk to about improving your service and improving your hospitality elements, and he's as accessible as I am, if not more. I miss him terribly. so again, my name is Ken Lucci. This has been the Ground Transportation Podcast. We will be back next week. hopefully James Blaine will be, back, uh, with me as a co-host. So, Do me a favor, make sure that you subscribe, Go to Ground Transportation, podcast.com and, um, you get more further information. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube. as well as subscribe on Spotify or Apple or however you, wherever you're listening to me, because we have a ton of listeners, but we're light on subscribers. Everybody's listening, but they're not hitting the subscribe button. so anyway, I've enjoyed, this, podcast with you and go up there and remember, proactive planning equals predictable profits. Thanks and have a great day.

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Thank you for listening to the ground transportation podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PAX training and to contact James, go to PAX training.com. And for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, Go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the ground transportation podcast.