AI transcript
0:00:06 $1,000 per month per client while starting a niche virtual assistant service might be
0:00:10 the fastest way to get to your extra income goals.
0:00:11 What’s up?
0:00:12 What’s up?
0:00:13 Nick Loper here.
0:00:14 Welcome to The Silent Hustle Show.
0:00:17 We’re part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, and if you are looking for realistic ways to
0:00:20 make extra money, you’re in the right place.
0:00:23 There’s a lot of talk about thousand true fans.
0:00:27 It’s this classic essay by Kevin Kelly that argues you don’t need millions of followers
0:00:31 to make a living online, they just need a thousand true fans.
0:00:36 These are the people who support your work year in, year out, but it can take some time
0:00:37 to build up that fan base.
0:00:43 So today, I want to contrast a thousand true fans with the idea of 10 true clients.
0:00:48 This is something I picked up from the Tropical MBA podcast years ago, 10 True Clients, or
0:00:51 maybe even starting with one true client at $1,000 a month.
0:00:55 Today’s guest did just that, did it in a really unique niche.
0:01:00 He had a bit of background in trucking, so he started a virtual dispatch service, serving
0:01:04 drivers all around the country from LearnDispatch.com.
0:01:07 Roman Shmunjak, welcome to The Silent Hustle Show.
0:01:08 Hello, Nick.
0:01:10 Thank you for having me on the podcast.
0:01:11 You bet.
0:01:12 Stick around in this one.
0:01:16 We’re learning how you might come up with your unique service idea, how to connect with
0:01:19 potential customers, how to find those first true clients, right?
0:01:24 And how you might be able to scale your operation beyond hours for dollars.
0:01:29 The free listener only bonus for this week is my big list of 101 service business ideas
0:01:32 that you might be able to apply some of Roman’s tactics to.
0:01:37 That’s at sidehustlenation.com/roman, or just follow the show notes link in the episode
0:01:40 description, and it’ll get you right over there.
0:01:44 So Roman, you came at it from a unique angle with a background in trucking, having owned
0:01:46 some semi-trucks yourself.
0:01:51 But there’s this, I made it moment, this moment of, “Yeah, look, I always dreamed of working
0:01:52 remotely.”
0:01:53 And there you are.
0:01:56 It’s a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.
0:01:58 And there’s this realization, “Hey, I’m serving clients in the US.
0:02:02 I’m living the Nomad lifestyle, working remotely.
0:02:04 Talk to me about what it took to get there.”
0:02:05 Absolutely.
0:02:10 Well, obviously, when I was getting into the trucking industry, I had no idea that it would
0:02:15 lead to a realization of my dream of remote work.
0:02:22 Around 2010, I had an opportunity to purchase some semi-trucks, and I was learning about
0:02:23 the industry.
0:02:30 It was very interesting business, especially for me, someone who is coming from a background
0:02:32 in real estate sales.
0:02:36 But I learned, as problems were coming at me.
0:02:40 But one of the most important things for trucking company, in order to make money, you have
0:02:44 to make sure that your trucks are constantly moving, because a sitting truck–
0:02:47 Yeah, if you’re not on the road, it’s similar to an airplane, right?
0:02:49 If it’s not in the air, it’s not making money.
0:02:50 Exactly.
0:02:51 It’s even worse.
0:02:53 You have to make money, because you have to pay for the equipment.
0:02:55 You have to pay for fuel.
0:02:56 You have to pay insurance.
0:02:57 You have to pay driver.
0:02:59 You are paying for all kind of permits.
0:03:03 So a sitting truck, not only not making your money, it is losing your money.
0:03:07 So it has to move all the time.
0:03:12 And that is one of the primary challenges of a trucking company owner, is to move all
0:03:13 the trucks.
0:03:17 We did an episode on trucking, and that was like, “Okay, go buy this used freight liner.”
0:03:18 She called it a freight shaker.
0:03:22 See if you can find one used for $35,000 to $45,000.
0:03:23 And then, “Oh, great.”
0:03:26 Then you book it up for $1,000 a week, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m listening.
0:03:28 That sounds like a great ROI.”
0:03:32 But it’s like that question mark in the middle of how to fill that up, and that’s maybe where
0:03:33 the dispatch part comes in.
0:03:37 I got to play matchmaker between people who need stuff shipped, and then the trucking
0:03:40 supply and the trucker is to actually do the moving.
0:03:41 That is correct.
0:03:46 With trucking companies, in most cases, either the owner will be taking care of finding freight,
0:03:53 trucking business for his company, or they will need to hire someone to do it for them.
0:04:00 And in my case, again, I have discovered, as I was trying to expand my trucking business,
0:04:06 we were advertising, looking for owner operators, other truckers with their own trucks and trailers
0:04:09 to come on board and join our company.
0:04:17 I’ve learned that a lot of them did not necessarily care about running under our license or using
0:04:18 our insurance.
0:04:23 What they did care about is having consistent freight for their truck.
0:04:25 That was their main pain point.
0:04:30 With some of them, we did start working where basically we would make a deal, “Look, you
0:04:32 can operate your trucking company in any way you want.
0:04:36 We will just help you secure the cargo.
0:04:40 We will keep your truck busy and you will pay us a percentage of your gross revenue
0:04:44 or a flat fee, depending on how we set up the agreement.”
0:04:45 Okay.
0:04:46 Interesting.
0:04:49 So it was almost by accident where it’s like, “Well, that wasn’t the initial intent.
0:04:54 The intent was to find other owner operators to kind of expand our fleet, basically.
0:04:59 But then the pain point, the entrepreneurial spidey sense starts tingling and say, “Well,
0:05:00 everybody’s complaining about this one thing.
0:05:01 How do I find enough freight?”
0:05:03 So you’re like, “Oh, shoot.
0:05:06 Maybe if I could solve that pain point, it’s another side hustle opportunity, another business
0:05:07 opportunity.”
0:05:08 Yeah, absolutely.
0:05:14 It was exactly a side hassle because I would just do it kind of in parallel with finding
0:05:15 freight for my trucks.
0:05:18 I would just look for freight for some other trucks as well.
0:05:21 And I did not think too much of it initially.
0:05:29 But as I gained more clients and kind of analyzed the whole situation, I just saw how great
0:05:33 this business model is versus trucking because with trucking, you have to purchase equipment
0:05:35 which costs a lot of money.
0:05:36 You have to hire drivers.
0:05:40 You have to find the right kind of drivers because otherwise they will destroy your trucks
0:05:42 and your business.
0:05:43 You have to go through safety audits.
0:05:49 Again, it’s a very cash-intensive business because you have to buy a lot of fuel.
0:05:52 You have to turn invoices.
0:05:59 And here all I need is really a computer, phone line, and reliable internet connection.
0:06:00 Nothing else.
0:06:02 I don’t have to buy anything.
0:06:05 I do not necessarily need to hire anyone.
0:06:10 My job is just provide this service, make sure that clients are happy, and receive the
0:06:11 money.
0:06:15 And as you already mentioned, suddenly I realize that this can be done from anywhere.
0:06:19 I can be in the US or I can be in Mexico or I can be in Europe.
0:06:23 It doesn’t matter as long as I have reliable internet connection.
0:06:25 I can do my job.
0:06:26 That’s interesting.
0:06:30 It reminds me of– I mean, trucking has been around for ages, so I don’t know if I would
0:06:35 consider it a gold rush, but it reminds me of a selling shovels into the gold rush mentality
0:06:41 rather than being the miner in this case, buying all those expensive equipment and licenses
0:06:42 and dealing with that.
0:06:46 It’s like, okay, what’s the picks and shovels or what’s the service that I could sell into
0:06:48 that industry?
0:06:51 And it came up with this patch thing.
0:06:54 To bring it a little bit broader, it might not be trucking, in your case.
0:06:58 But you might have a front row seat to whatever industry you’re involved with and saying,
0:06:59 “Well, what are the common pain points here?”
0:07:01 Like, you start to pay attention to those things.
0:07:06 What comes up over and over again, and that’s how I’ve come up with different product ideas,
0:07:10 different episode ideas, content ideas, and it can be the same thing in your case.
0:07:13 Just keep those ears to the ground and see what people are talking about.
0:07:17 So it starts out with looking for other owner operators to join the fleet, and then they
0:07:18 sign on.
0:07:22 I’m not super interested in that, but if you can help us fill our trucks with this freight
0:07:24 stuff, so what happens there?
0:07:26 How do you even go about doing that?
0:07:30 If that’s a pain point for them, what makes it easy for you, or is it easy to do?
0:07:34 Most of our clients are small trucking companies.
0:07:39 Sometimes it’s just an individual, a truck driver, who owns one truck.
0:07:42 He’s spending most of his time driving this truck.
0:07:49 He does not have the time to sit in front of the screen looking at various load options,
0:07:50 making phone calls.
0:07:55 And then once the load is booked, some paperwork has to be completed, so it’s not very convenient
0:08:02 to complete paperwork while driving an 80,000-pound machine down the highway.
0:08:06 For this type of client, it is essential that there’s somebody else who provides this back
0:08:10 office support and takes care of their business.
0:08:11 Okay.
0:08:16 And then for you, there’s freight marketplaces, there’s relationships with distributors.
0:08:22 How do you go about playing that middleman, especially if people are all over the country?
0:08:26 Knowing nothing about the trucking industry, it sounds kind of daunting to try and shoot.
0:08:27 Yeah, I can play matchmaker for you.
0:08:29 I can find you stuff to ship.
0:08:30 Absolutely.
0:08:36 Well, there are many electronic marketplaces called load boards where shippers and freight
0:08:40 brokers post freight that needs to be shipped.
0:08:42 And they basically work kind of like a search engine.
0:08:47 You can set up the origin location of your truck.
0:08:52 You can set up a destination if you want this truck to head in a particular direction, and
0:08:55 it will show you available load options.
0:09:00 Now your job, again, is to call, learn more about this option, get all the details such
0:09:05 as commodity weight and how much this shipper is willing to pay for the load.
0:09:11 And if it is matching criteria of your client, then all you have to do is book it and complete
0:09:14 all the paperwork related to the load.
0:09:15 Okay.
0:09:17 So they say, I want to stay within a 1,000 mile radius.
0:09:21 I want to be home by Fridays, kind of like that type of criteria.
0:09:22 Yeah, absolutely.
0:09:23 So I’ll give you two scenarios.
0:09:29 So you may have a trucker who will start his work week on Monday in Atlanta, and he may
0:09:32 say, look, Roman would like to leave on Monday.
0:09:33 I don’t care where I go.
0:09:35 I want to run all week.
0:09:37 I want to come back on Friday.
0:09:42 So then we’re going to set up as his original location being Atlanta, Georgia.
0:09:46 We’ll give it certain radius where he’s willing to travel to pick up the load, and we’ll look
0:09:49 at all kinds of available options.
0:09:52 Then let’s say coming Thursday, wherever he is, we’re going to be looking a lot for a
0:09:58 load that would be heading back toward Atlanta, Georgia, so he can come back home and spend
0:10:00 a weekend at home, and then restart following Monday.
0:10:01 Okay.
0:10:07 Yeah, it’s just a remote admin assistant in a very specific role, a very specific industry.
0:10:08 Absolutely.
0:10:09 It’s quite simple.
0:10:13 We’ve got a lot of our students in our online school, they concentrate a lot.
0:10:18 They say, I want to learn the load boards or the software, and I tell them that those
0:10:20 functions are very basic.
0:10:21 This is not rocket science.
0:10:23 Just about anyone can do it.
0:10:24 You set up.
0:10:28 You just basically search from where you are to where you want to go, and that’s pretty
0:10:29 much it.
0:10:31 And is it typical to charge hourly for that?
0:10:33 Is it on a performance basis?
0:10:37 Like, hey, we booked you $2,000 worth of freight, so we’re going to take a percentage of that.
0:10:39 What’s typical on the pricing side?
0:10:45 The most common is to take a percentage of the gross revenue you book for the trucking
0:10:46 company.
0:10:54 If you book, let’s say, five loads, each paying $1,000, that means you booked $5,000 worth
0:11:01 of loads for the trucking company, and you can charge percentage of this revenue.
0:11:07 The percentage currently range anything from three to eight percent, probably with five
0:11:11 to six percent being right in the middle.
0:11:18 So by booking $5,000 worth of loads for a client, you would make about $250.
0:11:21 Alternatively, you can just charge a flat fee.
0:11:28 Let’s say someone has a specialized type of equipment, and they are in a high-margin,
0:11:35 high-gross niche of trucking industry, they might be grossing $10,000 or $12,000 a week.
0:11:38 So they may not be willing to pay you the percentage.
0:11:41 So in such situation, you can agree on a flat rate.
0:11:46 We can say, okay, we will charge, let’s say, $300 a week flat fee, and we’ll book all
0:11:49 the loads you want for that one truck.
0:11:51 And that’s another model.
0:11:55 There are also some people that just charge a flat fee per load, they’ll say, I charge
0:12:00 $50 or $60 per load I book, regardless of how much it makes.
0:12:05 Gotcha, and then it just becomes a matter of booking consistently, and then growing
0:12:10 the fleet or growing the number of drivers that you’re working with.
0:12:14 Is that kind of where the marketing would start if I wanted to get in with this, just
0:12:16 connecting with owner operators?
0:12:17 Yeah, absolutely.
0:12:20 Marketing is the most important thing.
0:12:24 This is what I see a lot again with aspiring dispatchers.
0:12:28 They believe that once they learn dispatching, they are all set.
0:12:34 And dispatching is not difficult, but just learning a skill does not make you an entrepreneur.
0:12:37 Truck dispatching is just like any other business.
0:12:42 You have to market it, you have to convert your clients.
0:12:47 That will basically propel you to success, depending on your skill set and your knowledge,
0:12:50 you can implement different strategies to acquire clients.
0:12:55 And I can go in greater detail on that if you would like to hear.
0:12:59 Start with Roman in just a moment, including those specific marketing strategies and how
0:13:06 many clients it took before he took this side hustle full time, right after this.
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0:14:11 Yeah.
0:14:14 Do you have an example or two?
0:14:17 I’m imagining taking flyers down to the truck stop.
0:14:21 That’s a few exits down the highway from us, but there may be a more efficient way.
0:14:24 Don’t you see effective for connecting with those drivers?
0:14:30 It’s funny because I hear the story about flyers quite often, and no, I probably would
0:14:34 not find that to be the most efficient or effective strategy.
0:14:35 Here’s why.
0:14:40 If you go to the truck stop and leave flyers there, someone may see it.
0:14:45 The question is, does this person need your service at this particular moment?
0:14:50 If they don’t, they will pay no attention to it, just like with the social media.
0:14:53 A lot of people say, “Should I advertise on social media?”
0:14:54 Yes, you can.
0:15:00 You can basically put your ad in front of a target group, which would be, let’s say,
0:15:02 interested in the trucking industry.
0:15:07 The problem is they may not be in need of your service at this particular moment.
0:15:11 Will they remember you two months later when they need you?
0:15:13 Maybe, maybe not.
0:15:18 The most effective way, when you need something and you need it now, what are you going to
0:15:19 do?
0:15:25 Well, most of us will go to Google and just go into Google, in our case, truck dispatching
0:15:31 service or truck dispatching service in Atlanta, because you will not do such search for fun.
0:15:35 You’re doing it because you need this service and you need it at this moment.
0:15:42 Really, I know it’s online advertisement basics, but just Google ads, they do the magic.
0:15:48 As long as you have a good-looking website, which looks attractive to your potential clients,
0:15:52 you can easily drive traffic to the website, and then you will be receiving emails, phone
0:15:55 calls, and you just have to convert.
0:15:56 Got it.
0:16:01 I’ve got to imagine if somebody is Googling truck dispatching service, they’re probably
0:16:05 seeing the ad results, but they’re also seeing organic results from people who’ve been doing
0:16:06 it forever.
0:16:08 There’s probably companies overseas.
0:16:12 How is a new provider competing in that space?
0:16:14 Well, you just mentioned SEO.
0:16:21 Again, if you are trying to target some specific keyword, let’s say, truck dispatching service
0:16:26 in a particular area, some trucking companies prefer to work with people locally, so they
0:16:32 will look for someone who is close by, and the keyword difficulty may not be that high,
0:16:34 so there might be some opportunities.
0:16:39 However, with Google ads, yes, you will be competing against other people, but as you
0:16:43 know, Google will just serve up a certain number of options.
0:16:49 Here what is important is to have the right kind of website, okay, with the right kind
0:16:50 of content.
0:16:52 You have to differentiate yourself.
0:16:57 You basically have to explain to people why they should work with you.
0:17:02 If you intend to work on your own, let’s say you’re not hiring a team, you’re not a team.
0:17:06 Very often it’s good to just make a website about yourself.
0:17:13 Just tell them who you are, because a lot of truck drivers, they like to work with this
0:17:15 one individual, okay?
0:17:17 You’re kind of building a relationship there.
0:17:24 They don’t want the big, huge company where you have 20 dispatchers, and every time someone
0:17:26 picks up the phone, they don’t know who that is.
0:17:29 They want this personalized approach.
0:17:36 So if you are just a guy or just a girl and you are planning on doing it on your own,
0:17:37 tell them about it.
0:17:39 Tell them, “Look, here I am.
0:17:41 My name is Joe.”
0:17:43 And anytime you call, I will answer your call.
0:17:47 If there’s going to be a problem, I will be solving your problem.
0:17:52 So this kind of differentiates you from all the other companies that are out there.
0:17:57 And if trucker likes what they see on your website, they will make that phone call.
0:17:58 They will send you an email.
0:18:01 Yeah, I think that’s true of really any solo service provider.
0:18:07 It’s like, “Why are you versus some random person on Fiverr or wherever else?”
0:18:09 If you got somebody through your website, you did a lot of things right to even get
0:18:10 to that point.
0:18:16 And now, if you can showcase your unique value proposition, I think that makes a lot of sense.
0:18:22 What did it take for you in terms of client volume or dispatch volume before you’re like,
0:18:23 “Forget it.
0:18:24 Forget it with these trucks.
0:18:25 I’m going all in.
0:18:26 I’m selling the assets.
0:18:27 I’m selling the trucks.
0:18:28 And I’m just going to do this remote dispatch thing.”
0:18:34 In my case, I think somewhere around, once I had about five clients and they were generating
0:18:39 around $5,000 in revenue, at that point, I was like, “Okay, I know I will be making
0:18:47 less money than with a trucking company, but I will also relieve myself of a lot of stress.”
0:18:52 Also, at that time, me and my wife had an idea that we could go and travel.
0:18:56 That would be definitely enough money for us to go abroad.
0:19:02 At that point, I decided to terminate the trucking business and sell off the equipment
0:19:04 and just concentrate on dispatching.
0:19:05 All right.
0:19:06 Five clients, $5,000 a month.
0:19:11 Do you have an estimate of the hourly load trying to get a sense like, “If I want to
0:19:16 go do this, what is it going to take time-wise realistically to do a good job for those customers?”
0:19:20 A lot of this depends on the market conditions.
0:19:25 So for example, if we are working in a good market when there is a lot of freight and
0:19:30 trucks are in demand, it is extremely easy to bookload.
0:19:36 You may start at eight o’clock in the morning and by 10 a.m., everyone is booked.
0:19:38 We can say, “You are done for the day.”
0:19:42 Now, there is little caveat to that.
0:19:44 You are done for the day unless something goes wrong.
0:19:50 If something goes wrong, you may have to go back to your computer and address the situation
0:19:52 that came up.
0:19:55 In a more difficult market, the situation may be different.
0:20:00 You may book some trucks right away, but you may have a truck in some sort of a challenging
0:20:06 area where there is very little freight and you may end up sitting for hours making phone
0:20:10 calls trying to find a suitable option for your client to get them out.
0:20:14 Part of that is like, “Well, if you are parked in the middle of nowhere, part of that is
0:20:18 on you, Mr. Client or Mr. Client, you’ve got to go where the goods are if you want to get
0:20:19 some shipments.”
0:20:23 It is also partially on us because we probably booked that load to go.
0:20:25 Yeah, if they’re out there in the middle of the week.
0:20:28 It just happens that sometimes market conditions change.
0:20:34 You send a truck to one location and you know that historically it’s good, but then something
0:20:38 changes and tomorrow there is just no freight there.
0:20:42 In other instance, just like you said, sometimes you will get a call and your client will tell
0:20:45 you, “Hey, I just booked myself a load to Florida.
0:20:48 It was paying great.”
0:20:52 And you’re just saying, “Well, that’s fantastic, but there is no freight in Florida.
0:20:54 So what are we going to do tomorrow?”
0:20:55 For the return trip.
0:20:56 Okay.
0:21:01 Well, yeah, so and then we have to solve the problem they have created.
0:21:08 This is an interesting logistical puzzle and part of my brain says I like that challenge
0:21:13 and all of these moving chess pieces and trying to make sure everybody is optimally filled
0:21:14 and booked.
0:21:17 And then the other part of me is like, “Dude, that sounds like a lot of moving parts with
0:21:19 a lot of variables.”
0:21:21 It’s not that difficult as it seems.
0:21:27 Once you get the sense for the market and this is unfortunately comes only with experience.
0:21:32 As you do this more, you will know where to go and what to do as you move trucks on the
0:21:33 daily basis.
0:21:38 You have a sense if you are making the right choice or the bad choice.
0:21:44 So the whole process is very simple and it’s pretty easy to learn.
0:21:46 The rest is just gaining experience doing it.
0:21:52 And do some of it become recurring where I’m picturing like a Walmart, they have probably
0:21:56 obviously they have their own fleet and they’re not dealing with independent dispatchers and
0:21:57 stuff.
0:22:02 But like if they know every week this many units of a particular item is likely to sell.
0:22:05 So we’re going to have to restock that and it seems like it might be somewhat predictable
0:22:06 week after week.
0:22:10 Like is there any sense like that where it’s like, “Okay, a certain percentage is going
0:22:14 to be booked with these like easy low hanging fruit recurring type of jobs?”
0:22:18 We need to consider there are actually two markets, two freight markets.
0:22:23 One is considered to be contract market and another one is a spot market.
0:22:28 What we’ve been talking about previously where most independent truck dispatchers work is
0:22:30 a spot market.
0:22:33 That’s someone that needs something moved today or tomorrow.
0:22:34 Okay.
0:22:36 It is not a regular freight.
0:22:41 They just need, I don’t know, a scrapyard needs a load of recycled aluminum.
0:22:42 Okay.
0:22:43 It’s not regular.
0:22:48 They just need one tomorrow and it gets posted on the load board.
0:22:49 Then there is contract freight.
0:22:51 That’s exactly what you just mentioned.
0:22:56 It’s a store that is shipping something or a plant production plant that is shipping
0:22:59 something on a regular basis day by day.
0:23:06 Now, it’s a bit different because in most cases, in order to tap into contract market,
0:23:08 it has to be a larger trucking company.
0:23:09 Okay.
0:23:14 A shipper that has a production plant and sends out a load every day, they need to make
0:23:18 sure that that load is going out every single day.
0:23:23 If Joe, the trucker, comes in with one truck, they will never give him a contract because
0:23:27 if his truck breaks down, they will not be able to ship out what they need to ship and
0:23:30 they may have all kinds of problems.
0:23:35 Also with the contract market, it’s usually a bidding system where you have to make a
0:23:38 bid for the lowest possible rate that you’re willing to transport.
0:23:44 So there is the urban myth among truckers that that’s the holy grail is the contract
0:23:48 freight, but they don’t realize that in reality, it is not.
0:23:54 Now, there is also an exception where sometimes these two things, the spot market and contract
0:23:56 market sometimes cross.
0:24:01 For example, I had a client who lived in Charleston, South Carolina.
0:24:07 Every Monday, he would leave Charleston and we would book him a load, go into Arkansas,
0:24:10 and then he would return home for the weekend.
0:24:14 And we would see the same load on the load board going to Arkansas.
0:24:15 We would book it again.
0:24:21 And after, I believe, two or three times this broker told us, look, we have this load every
0:24:22 single Monday.
0:24:24 Do you guys want to do it?
0:24:27 That made our job much easier because they would not even post it.
0:24:32 They would just email us a week before and say, are you guys available on Monday?
0:24:35 I had to do nothing and I get a percentage of that load.
0:24:37 So it was a fantastic deal.
0:24:38 Yeah, for sure.
0:24:40 You mentioned best case scenario.
0:24:42 You’re in and out in a couple of hours.
0:24:43 Everything is easy.
0:24:47 And then you said, except when things go wrong, what are some of those scenarios when you
0:24:50 get pulled back into the fray and you got to put out some fires?
0:24:56 Well, the most common scenario is for load which you have booked to cancel.
0:25:01 You’ll get a phone call an hour later and they will tell you that this load is not going
0:25:02 to be going.
0:25:07 Or even worse, your driver drives somewhere, let’s say for 80 miles, arrives at the shipper
0:25:11 and shipper tells him, well, sorry, the product is not ready today.
0:25:14 It might be ready tomorrow or two days later.
0:25:19 And at this point, you have to start over and try to get some sort of a compensation for
0:25:21 your client for the work they already done.
0:25:25 Yeah, and if you were only going to make 250 bucks on that load and you’re trying to pay
0:25:29 him for fuel and lodging potentially, how does that work?
0:25:33 If load gets canceled, you usually can’t get some sort of a compensation from the freight
0:25:34 broker.
0:25:37 A lot depends again on the situation.
0:25:43 If this driver went somewhere in the morning, spent two hours, didn’t get loaded, you may
0:25:52 get $150 to $250 from the broker for what is called truck order not used, but we still
0:25:54 have time to rebook him on another load.
0:25:56 So it’s not all that bad of a situation.
0:26:01 However, if this is happening, let’s say, in the late afternoon, then driver may lose
0:26:02 entire day of work.
0:26:08 And that is a bad scenario because a few hundred dollars will not compensate.
0:26:12 There are, I could tell some horror stories when, let’s say, driver picks up a load and
0:26:18 supposed to deliver somewhere and we have already another load planned for them, but
0:26:23 receiver decides not to unload them for one reason or another.
0:26:28 And sometimes they may say, well, I’m sorry, there was an appointment which you missed
0:26:31 and next appointment is four days later.
0:26:39 And now your client is getting stuck with cargo in their trailer and he can’t do anything.
0:26:45 And we have to salvage this situation somehow and figure out who made the mistake, why this
0:26:46 situation happened.
0:26:48 Yeah, just moving physical products around.
0:26:53 Like landing at the airport and they’re like, we made it, but there’s no gates open, no
0:26:54 gates available.
0:26:57 So we’re going to park here for a minute while we try and figure this out.
0:26:58 That’s an interesting one.
0:27:02 More with Roman in just a moment, including how he removed himself from the day to day
0:27:08 dispatch work, scaled to 15 to 30 trucks in the new side hustle that created right after
0:27:09 this.
0:27:13 Now, did you go down the path of, hey, I’m working remote, I’m living the dream, I got
0:27:18 my five clients, did you eventually go down the path of trying to scale this up as an
0:27:22 agency and hire subcontract dispatch people?
0:27:24 What was the next stage for you?
0:27:25 Correct.
0:27:30 I don’t think that I initially had a plan of building an agency, but I just wanted to
0:27:37 make my job easier because sometimes some kids would have some sort of events or I wanted
0:27:40 to travel somewhere in an inconvenient time zone.
0:27:46 So what I did initially is I hired a virtual assistant.
0:27:53 The first one was from Philippines, spoke great English, and initially I just trained
0:27:56 him to complete paperwork.
0:28:02 I would make the phone calls as soon as paperwork came in, he would complete everything and
0:28:05 that made my work much more efficient.
0:28:11 Then I decided to also assign duties of making phone calls to the brokers, getting information
0:28:13 and so on and so on.
0:28:19 And then I realized that this person can really replace my duties and then I realized I could
0:28:25 technically scale it to something greater, take on more clients as long as there is staff
0:28:26 to manage them.
0:28:27 Yeah.
0:28:29 Is that what ended up happening?
0:28:30 That’s what ended up happening.
0:28:36 Eventually I moved team to India, I would provide them with the manuals and training
0:28:41 materials so they can learn in theory what needs to be done.
0:28:48 Then we would do some practical exercises and at some point I pretty much stepped away
0:28:52 from making the phone calls and doing the paperwork.
0:28:57 So I would still obviously work on client acquisition and I would work on problem resolution,
0:29:00 but the leg work would be done by hired help.
0:29:01 Okay, that makes sense.
0:29:07 So they’re working on the scheduling, the billing, the paperwork and you turn your attention
0:29:12 to sales and it’s not just the inbound, hey, somebody found our Google listing or somebody
0:29:18 found our ad, is there any outbound of trying to find smaller fleets because it’s like one
0:29:23 to one hand-to-hand combat grassroots gorilla marketing or it’s like, okay, this guy or
0:29:27 this trucking company has like four or five trucks, like, okay, that would be an ideal
0:29:32 client because we could stack on a chunk of revenue all at once versus clawing away one
0:29:33 client at a time.
0:29:35 I don’t know, what’s it look like on that side?
0:29:36 Two things I would mention.
0:29:41 First of all, yeah, you can absolutely target, there are databases of trucking companies
0:29:46 that are available where you can basically target this specific, let’s say trucking companies
0:29:48 that have less than five trucks.
0:29:52 Those are usually your primary clients because anyone who has more than five trucks, they
0:29:57 can hire an in-house dispatcher that’s going to be working exclusively for them and will
0:30:01 be doing whatever they need this dispatcher to do.
0:30:06 So you could get an access to the database and let’s say you could target the specific
0:30:11 area if you want to go locally or you can target what I recommend when we discuss direct
0:30:12 marketing.
0:30:17 I recommend targeting new companies, the ones that just got their license because they’re
0:30:23 new to this business, they don’t have established contacts, they don’t probably freight is their
0:30:27 main concern versus a trucking company that’s been in business for five years.
0:30:31 If they’ve been in business for five years, they already figured out their way of finding
0:30:33 loads.
0:30:36 Just registered last week, they may not.
0:30:39 So it’s a good target to go after.
0:30:46 Now in terms of taking on too many trucks at the same time, it’s a good problem to have
0:30:51 and sometimes I would get a call from someone who’d say I have 20 trucks and we would like
0:30:56 to come on board and I know that it’s probably not realistic.
0:31:03 First of all, it would require four more people to efficiently handle that many trucks.
0:31:04 It would be just a mess.
0:31:08 So usually I would recommend, I would tell them, look, that’s fine.
0:31:13 We can do 20 trucks, but we will take on only three at the beginning.
0:31:14 Let’s get going.
0:31:15 Let’s see how it’s working.
0:31:17 Let’s make sure you like what we do.
0:31:20 Let’s make sure we like how you operate.
0:31:25 And then we’re going to be adding gradually two more trucks, three more trucks.
0:31:31 This way, I can make sure that I provide qualified staff to take care of your business and we’re
0:31:35 not going to have this hectic transition when we’re just suddenly trying to figure out what
0:31:37 to do with 20 trucks tomorrow.
0:31:38 Right.
0:31:44 That’s probably the predicament of any agency business where, yeah, it absolutely can scale,
0:31:49 but it has to scale almost in lockstep with that staff because there’s going to be a certain
0:31:51 number of hours required.
0:31:52 That may be the bottleneck.
0:31:53 That’s not going to change.
0:31:59 So I was like, well, if one person can handle five trucks, the math can still grow, but
0:32:01 it’s going to have to grow in parallel there.
0:32:06 And so that makes it, well, let’s ramp this up slowly, make sure it’s a win for both parties
0:32:12 and then we’ll continue to add on new staff and serve that and go find qualified dispatchers
0:32:16 or train new dispatchers to go and do that work for you.
0:32:19 You’ve shifted a little bit to there’s a great YouTube content, AlphaX Logistics.
0:32:24 You can find tons of video content about learning the dispatch business, learning the logistics
0:32:25 business.
0:32:30 So you made this pivot to the content side, what’s, I mean, this been going on for several
0:32:31 years at least.
0:32:35 So the dispatch side is still running and now as a new side hustle is like the teaching
0:32:36 other people about it.
0:32:37 Yeah, absolutely.
0:32:46 That was again, exactly a side hustle because while I was in Europe, I was thinking about,
0:32:53 okay, well, what else can I do while traveling and again, experiencing this beautiful lifestyle
0:32:59 that I had, I thought, okay, well, I could teach other people how to do this.
0:33:04 And again, I knew absolutely nothing about online education.
0:33:09 It was back 2015, where really it wasn’t a thing.
0:33:16 Now everyone has a course, everyone is teaching about anything, there are tons of platforms.
0:33:21 Back then, as I said, it was as primitive as I was trying to figure out how do I make
0:33:26 videos and upload them to YouTube, but then make sure that nobody can see them unless
0:33:27 they pay for it.
0:33:31 So it was like really, really primitive stage.
0:33:36 The advantage was, as I mentioned, I was training already virtual assistants.
0:33:40 So I had to create the manuals in order to train them.
0:33:41 Oh, dang, that’s genius.
0:33:42 I love that.
0:33:45 That’s a great selling your sawdust example.
0:33:46 That’s fantastic.
0:33:47 Yeah.
0:33:48 Yeah.
0:33:49 So I already had a lot of core material.
0:33:56 Now it was just a matter of converting it into a format that is easy to consume.
0:34:02 Because when idea was born, and I believe in 2016, we launched LearnDispatch.com, and
0:34:08 we put out the first version of our training course, and we’ve been basically working on
0:34:10 it for the last eight years.
0:34:14 We’re always trying to add more information, more content.
0:34:19 One of the main advantages I mentioned before, Nick, that you can learn this skill.
0:34:22 It’s not really that difficult.
0:34:25 What you cannot learn is experience.
0:34:32 And that, we help our students, if they get into a situation where they don’t know what
0:34:39 to do, they can reach out to our support staff and use our experience to solve their problems.
0:34:46 So that, I think, is something that helps people confidently transition into this industry.
0:34:48 Yeah, that’s great.
0:34:50 I didn’t realize I’ve been around for eight years.
0:34:55 I’ve been doing this training for quite a long time, and I love that idea of taking
0:34:56 the training.
0:34:59 Well, we’re doing this internally anyway, but might as well make some of it public-facing
0:35:02 and try and serve a different audience who might want to get into this.
0:35:05 I think that’s a really unique way to do it.
0:35:09 We had a question come through from some listeners, like, “How come every guest has an online
0:35:10 course?”
0:35:15 There’s lots of reasons for that, but it’s just kind of a natural progression if people
0:35:17 are asking questions about how this works.
0:35:22 If you already have the material, “Oh, here’s a cool new revenue stream to go about it.”
0:35:27 What does a day in the life look like today if there is such a thing as a typical Wednesday
0:35:28 for you?
0:35:34 Well, I still have to start around eight o’clock in the morning because my team usually checks
0:35:38 in and gives me an update as to what is going on.
0:35:45 So I have an overview as to which trucks have been booked already, which ones are empty
0:35:47 and need loads.
0:35:53 So basically, I take 15 to 30 minutes to see what’s going on with the dispatching side
0:35:54 of things.
0:35:57 How many trucks are you responsible for on that side?
0:36:02 Well, usually we do between 15 and 30 trucks.
0:36:06 Obviously, I’m not personally responsible for any of them.
0:36:07 It’s the team.
0:36:12 I usually only get involved if there is a problem that requires my attention.
0:36:18 So if the team doesn’t know what to do or how to solve a particular situation, this
0:36:23 is when I have to get on the phone or another scenario is when I get calls from clients
0:36:29 complaining about the team not doing something that they’re supposed to be doing.
0:36:31 Occasionally, I have to- Those are not fun to get.
0:36:32 They’re not fun.
0:36:36 But I realized it’s just part of the process.
0:36:40 People get relaxed sometimes and they forget to do things that they’re supposed to do.
0:36:46 So sometimes you have to give them a little push so they perform as they should.
0:36:50 Then usually after I’m done with that, I go and work out.
0:36:53 That’s essential for me in the mornings.
0:36:59 That’s when I listen to podcasts and generate new ideas.
0:37:03 And once I’m done with that, I go back to my office and then work on creative stuff.
0:37:07 This is when I create new content.
0:37:10 Everything is not the only ventures that I’m involved in.
0:37:17 So there’s quite a few things I have to review, read about, and so on and so on.
0:37:18 That’s cool.
0:37:23 So running in the CEO seat of this agency, like, “Hey, look, I got to have to check in
0:37:27 with the team, do the team management, the client management, the performance training
0:37:29 and evaluation and all that stuff.”
0:37:34 And then take care of yourself and then play in this content creation game.
0:37:37 I think that sounds like a pretty fun operation.
0:37:42 Anything that has really surprised you, either in the logistics side or the content side
0:37:44 over the last 10 years in the game?
0:37:53 My main surprise was that I stumbled into my dream of being able to work remotely.
0:37:55 Again, I did not plan it.
0:37:56 It just happened.
0:37:57 It was education again.
0:38:00 I did not plan to develop this business.
0:38:03 And it just, again, I stumbled into it.
0:38:05 And that was another wonderful surprise.
0:38:07 Well, Roman, this has been awesome.
0:38:08 What’s next for you?
0:38:09 What are you excited about these days?
0:38:10 Where do you want to take it?
0:38:16 Well, right now, we are working, obviously, we continuously working on the content creation
0:38:17 for our online school.
0:38:24 For the dispatching business, we are thinking about concentrating on doing more of a consulting
0:38:30 work for other trucking companies and other potentially dispatching businesses.
0:38:38 We’re developing some tools for our students now that everything goes AI, we’re brainstorming
0:38:44 on how we can bring some helpful tools that would make easier for aspiring dispatchers
0:38:49 to market their business, to organize their business and so on and so on.
0:38:50 Yeah.
0:38:53 I almost didn’t want to bring that up where it’s like, well, how long before you can
0:38:58 plug in that trucker’s criteria and then there’s an AI software that will match them
0:39:02 with the perfect fit load based on that criteria.
0:39:06 It’s like, shoot, if it’s not already in the pipeline, it’s probably coming soon.
0:39:11 I have a video where I talk about future of dispatching in general.
0:39:16 And I do point out that at some point, we’re going to have self-driving trucks and then
0:39:21 it will be certain that the algorithms are going to be picking up the optimal use of
0:39:25 those machines to basically maximize the capacity.
0:39:31 However, until we have people involved, people will be making mistakes, people will be messing
0:39:33 up.
0:39:37 So I think for a foreseeable future, we’re safe.
0:39:40 And I could see self-driving trucks being a thing, but I don’t know if they’re going
0:39:43 to be completely humanless.
0:39:47 As the example is, we’re going up skiing in the winter and the truckers are pulled over
0:39:48 on the side of the road.
0:39:49 They’re putting chains on the track.
0:39:51 I don’t see a robot doing that just yet.
0:39:57 So that’s what happens when the weather turns south and you need some human involvement
0:39:58 for that stuff.
0:39:59 But that’s really interesting.
0:40:02 Yeah, problem resolution, again, you have to get creative.
0:40:04 That’s one thing.
0:40:06 And another thing, there is a human touch.
0:40:12 You need to realize that some of the truckers, I mean, they’re on the road for weeks and
0:40:14 you become their best friend.
0:40:18 You are the person they actually talk to consistently.
0:40:25 So really, the robot probably will not do it even though I do hear about AI France being
0:40:26 out there.
0:40:30 But I think that the human touch is still necessary at the moment.
0:40:31 That makes sense.
0:40:35 Well, you can find Roman at AlphaX Logistics on YouTube.
0:40:41 Check him out over there, learndispatch.com is the home base, learndispatch.com/sidehustle.
0:40:46 If you want to learn more, there is a special discount there for Side Hustle Nation listeners.
0:40:49 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:40:54 Well, my number one tip would be to concentrate on marketing.
0:41:00 You can be great at truck dispatching, you can be great at any other business, but unless
0:41:03 you can market your business, you are going to fail.
0:41:10 So by learning marketing and how to sell your products and services, you will open up the
0:41:15 opportunities for success for yourself.
0:41:16 So learn about it.
0:41:21 There’s tons of resources, tons of free resources, many books, many courses.
0:41:23 Don’t be lazy.
0:41:29 Learn how to market and sell your services and you definitely going to succeed in whatever
0:41:30 field you are in.
0:41:31 Yeah, absolutely.
0:41:36 Perry Marshall calls it the tactical triangle of traffic conversion and economics.
0:41:40 Conversion and how much can you sell, how many of your things can you sell, the economics,
0:41:42 well, how much can you charge for that thing.
0:41:44 But the cornerstone piece is that traffic.
0:41:47 Like, you could have the best offer in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you’re
0:41:48 not going to sell anything.
0:41:51 So concentrate on that marketing love, that number one tip.
0:41:55 The line that I wrote down was I stumbled into my dream and it may sound like an accident,
0:42:00 but it was the result of being open to the next thing.
0:42:04 It was the result of listening to the pain points of the owner operators, the drivers
0:42:05 that you’re talking to.
0:42:10 Like, hey, we could really use some help in this area and kind of being open to say, well,
0:42:11 you know what?
0:42:12 I can help solve that problem.
0:42:15 If I may not know how to do it, I can figure that out and that’s kind of being the core
0:42:20 skill of the entrepreneurs, figuring out the next thing and same idea with the content
0:42:24 business, the education business, like being open to that, listening, well, we already
0:42:25 have this material.
0:42:28 How could we repurpose that in a unique way?
0:42:29 So loved it.
0:42:30 Took a ton of notes.
0:42:32 Roman, thanks for joining me.
0:42:33 Everybody tuning in.
0:42:37 Your listener bonus for this week is my big list of 101 service business ideas.
0:42:38 Hey, maybe dispatch isn’t your thing.
0:42:41 That’s totally fine, but there’s lots of other service business ideas.
0:42:45 You might be able to apply some of Roman’s tactics to.
0:42:50 That is at sidehustlenation.com/roman or just follow the show notes link in the episode
0:42:51 description.
0:42:52 It’ll get you right over there.
0:42:54 Big thanks to Roman for sharing his insight.
0:42:57 Thanks to our sponsors for making this content free for everyone.
0:43:02 You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors
0:43:03 in one place.
0:43:04 That is it for me.
0:43:06 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:43:10 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen and I’ll catch you in the
0:43:13 next edition of The Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.
0:43:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:10 the fastest way to get to your extra income goals.
0:00:11 What’s up?
0:00:12 What’s up?
0:00:13 Nick Loper here.
0:00:14 Welcome to The Silent Hustle Show.
0:00:17 We’re part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, and if you are looking for realistic ways to
0:00:20 make extra money, you’re in the right place.
0:00:23 There’s a lot of talk about thousand true fans.
0:00:27 It’s this classic essay by Kevin Kelly that argues you don’t need millions of followers
0:00:31 to make a living online, they just need a thousand true fans.
0:00:36 These are the people who support your work year in, year out, but it can take some time
0:00:37 to build up that fan base.
0:00:43 So today, I want to contrast a thousand true fans with the idea of 10 true clients.
0:00:48 This is something I picked up from the Tropical MBA podcast years ago, 10 True Clients, or
0:00:51 maybe even starting with one true client at $1,000 a month.
0:00:55 Today’s guest did just that, did it in a really unique niche.
0:01:00 He had a bit of background in trucking, so he started a virtual dispatch service, serving
0:01:04 drivers all around the country from LearnDispatch.com.
0:01:07 Roman Shmunjak, welcome to The Silent Hustle Show.
0:01:08 Hello, Nick.
0:01:10 Thank you for having me on the podcast.
0:01:11 You bet.
0:01:12 Stick around in this one.
0:01:16 We’re learning how you might come up with your unique service idea, how to connect with
0:01:19 potential customers, how to find those first true clients, right?
0:01:24 And how you might be able to scale your operation beyond hours for dollars.
0:01:29 The free listener only bonus for this week is my big list of 101 service business ideas
0:01:32 that you might be able to apply some of Roman’s tactics to.
0:01:37 That’s at sidehustlenation.com/roman, or just follow the show notes link in the episode
0:01:40 description, and it’ll get you right over there.
0:01:44 So Roman, you came at it from a unique angle with a background in trucking, having owned
0:01:46 some semi-trucks yourself.
0:01:51 But there’s this, I made it moment, this moment of, “Yeah, look, I always dreamed of working
0:01:52 remotely.”
0:01:53 And there you are.
0:01:56 It’s a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.
0:01:58 And there’s this realization, “Hey, I’m serving clients in the US.
0:02:02 I’m living the Nomad lifestyle, working remotely.
0:02:04 Talk to me about what it took to get there.”
0:02:05 Absolutely.
0:02:10 Well, obviously, when I was getting into the trucking industry, I had no idea that it would
0:02:15 lead to a realization of my dream of remote work.
0:02:22 Around 2010, I had an opportunity to purchase some semi-trucks, and I was learning about
0:02:23 the industry.
0:02:30 It was very interesting business, especially for me, someone who is coming from a background
0:02:32 in real estate sales.
0:02:36 But I learned, as problems were coming at me.
0:02:40 But one of the most important things for trucking company, in order to make money, you have
0:02:44 to make sure that your trucks are constantly moving, because a sitting truck–
0:02:47 Yeah, if you’re not on the road, it’s similar to an airplane, right?
0:02:49 If it’s not in the air, it’s not making money.
0:02:50 Exactly.
0:02:51 It’s even worse.
0:02:53 You have to make money, because you have to pay for the equipment.
0:02:55 You have to pay for fuel.
0:02:56 You have to pay insurance.
0:02:57 You have to pay driver.
0:02:59 You are paying for all kind of permits.
0:03:03 So a sitting truck, not only not making your money, it is losing your money.
0:03:07 So it has to move all the time.
0:03:12 And that is one of the primary challenges of a trucking company owner, is to move all
0:03:13 the trucks.
0:03:17 We did an episode on trucking, and that was like, “Okay, go buy this used freight liner.”
0:03:18 She called it a freight shaker.
0:03:22 See if you can find one used for $35,000 to $45,000.
0:03:23 And then, “Oh, great.”
0:03:26 Then you book it up for $1,000 a week, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m listening.
0:03:28 That sounds like a great ROI.”
0:03:32 But it’s like that question mark in the middle of how to fill that up, and that’s maybe where
0:03:33 the dispatch part comes in.
0:03:37 I got to play matchmaker between people who need stuff shipped, and then the trucking
0:03:40 supply and the trucker is to actually do the moving.
0:03:41 That is correct.
0:03:46 With trucking companies, in most cases, either the owner will be taking care of finding freight,
0:03:53 trucking business for his company, or they will need to hire someone to do it for them.
0:04:00 And in my case, again, I have discovered, as I was trying to expand my trucking business,
0:04:06 we were advertising, looking for owner operators, other truckers with their own trucks and trailers
0:04:09 to come on board and join our company.
0:04:17 I’ve learned that a lot of them did not necessarily care about running under our license or using
0:04:18 our insurance.
0:04:23 What they did care about is having consistent freight for their truck.
0:04:25 That was their main pain point.
0:04:30 With some of them, we did start working where basically we would make a deal, “Look, you
0:04:32 can operate your trucking company in any way you want.
0:04:36 We will just help you secure the cargo.
0:04:40 We will keep your truck busy and you will pay us a percentage of your gross revenue
0:04:44 or a flat fee, depending on how we set up the agreement.”
0:04:45 Okay.
0:04:46 Interesting.
0:04:49 So it was almost by accident where it’s like, “Well, that wasn’t the initial intent.
0:04:54 The intent was to find other owner operators to kind of expand our fleet, basically.
0:04:59 But then the pain point, the entrepreneurial spidey sense starts tingling and say, “Well,
0:05:00 everybody’s complaining about this one thing.
0:05:01 How do I find enough freight?”
0:05:03 So you’re like, “Oh, shoot.
0:05:06 Maybe if I could solve that pain point, it’s another side hustle opportunity, another business
0:05:07 opportunity.”
0:05:08 Yeah, absolutely.
0:05:14 It was exactly a side hassle because I would just do it kind of in parallel with finding
0:05:15 freight for my trucks.
0:05:18 I would just look for freight for some other trucks as well.
0:05:21 And I did not think too much of it initially.
0:05:29 But as I gained more clients and kind of analyzed the whole situation, I just saw how great
0:05:33 this business model is versus trucking because with trucking, you have to purchase equipment
0:05:35 which costs a lot of money.
0:05:36 You have to hire drivers.
0:05:40 You have to find the right kind of drivers because otherwise they will destroy your trucks
0:05:42 and your business.
0:05:43 You have to go through safety audits.
0:05:49 Again, it’s a very cash-intensive business because you have to buy a lot of fuel.
0:05:52 You have to turn invoices.
0:05:59 And here all I need is really a computer, phone line, and reliable internet connection.
0:06:00 Nothing else.
0:06:02 I don’t have to buy anything.
0:06:05 I do not necessarily need to hire anyone.
0:06:10 My job is just provide this service, make sure that clients are happy, and receive the
0:06:11 money.
0:06:15 And as you already mentioned, suddenly I realize that this can be done from anywhere.
0:06:19 I can be in the US or I can be in Mexico or I can be in Europe.
0:06:23 It doesn’t matter as long as I have reliable internet connection.
0:06:25 I can do my job.
0:06:26 That’s interesting.
0:06:30 It reminds me of– I mean, trucking has been around for ages, so I don’t know if I would
0:06:35 consider it a gold rush, but it reminds me of a selling shovels into the gold rush mentality
0:06:41 rather than being the miner in this case, buying all those expensive equipment and licenses
0:06:42 and dealing with that.
0:06:46 It’s like, okay, what’s the picks and shovels or what’s the service that I could sell into
0:06:48 that industry?
0:06:51 And it came up with this patch thing.
0:06:54 To bring it a little bit broader, it might not be trucking, in your case.
0:06:58 But you might have a front row seat to whatever industry you’re involved with and saying,
0:06:59 “Well, what are the common pain points here?”
0:07:01 Like, you start to pay attention to those things.
0:07:06 What comes up over and over again, and that’s how I’ve come up with different product ideas,
0:07:10 different episode ideas, content ideas, and it can be the same thing in your case.
0:07:13 Just keep those ears to the ground and see what people are talking about.
0:07:17 So it starts out with looking for other owner operators to join the fleet, and then they
0:07:18 sign on.
0:07:22 I’m not super interested in that, but if you can help us fill our trucks with this freight
0:07:24 stuff, so what happens there?
0:07:26 How do you even go about doing that?
0:07:30 If that’s a pain point for them, what makes it easy for you, or is it easy to do?
0:07:34 Most of our clients are small trucking companies.
0:07:39 Sometimes it’s just an individual, a truck driver, who owns one truck.
0:07:42 He’s spending most of his time driving this truck.
0:07:49 He does not have the time to sit in front of the screen looking at various load options,
0:07:50 making phone calls.
0:07:55 And then once the load is booked, some paperwork has to be completed, so it’s not very convenient
0:08:02 to complete paperwork while driving an 80,000-pound machine down the highway.
0:08:06 For this type of client, it is essential that there’s somebody else who provides this back
0:08:10 office support and takes care of their business.
0:08:11 Okay.
0:08:16 And then for you, there’s freight marketplaces, there’s relationships with distributors.
0:08:22 How do you go about playing that middleman, especially if people are all over the country?
0:08:26 Knowing nothing about the trucking industry, it sounds kind of daunting to try and shoot.
0:08:27 Yeah, I can play matchmaker for you.
0:08:29 I can find you stuff to ship.
0:08:30 Absolutely.
0:08:36 Well, there are many electronic marketplaces called load boards where shippers and freight
0:08:40 brokers post freight that needs to be shipped.
0:08:42 And they basically work kind of like a search engine.
0:08:47 You can set up the origin location of your truck.
0:08:52 You can set up a destination if you want this truck to head in a particular direction, and
0:08:55 it will show you available load options.
0:09:00 Now your job, again, is to call, learn more about this option, get all the details such
0:09:05 as commodity weight and how much this shipper is willing to pay for the load.
0:09:11 And if it is matching criteria of your client, then all you have to do is book it and complete
0:09:14 all the paperwork related to the load.
0:09:15 Okay.
0:09:17 So they say, I want to stay within a 1,000 mile radius.
0:09:21 I want to be home by Fridays, kind of like that type of criteria.
0:09:22 Yeah, absolutely.
0:09:23 So I’ll give you two scenarios.
0:09:29 So you may have a trucker who will start his work week on Monday in Atlanta, and he may
0:09:32 say, look, Roman would like to leave on Monday.
0:09:33 I don’t care where I go.
0:09:35 I want to run all week.
0:09:37 I want to come back on Friday.
0:09:42 So then we’re going to set up as his original location being Atlanta, Georgia.
0:09:46 We’ll give it certain radius where he’s willing to travel to pick up the load, and we’ll look
0:09:49 at all kinds of available options.
0:09:52 Then let’s say coming Thursday, wherever he is, we’re going to be looking a lot for a
0:09:58 load that would be heading back toward Atlanta, Georgia, so he can come back home and spend
0:10:00 a weekend at home, and then restart following Monday.
0:10:01 Okay.
0:10:07 Yeah, it’s just a remote admin assistant in a very specific role, a very specific industry.
0:10:08 Absolutely.
0:10:09 It’s quite simple.
0:10:13 We’ve got a lot of our students in our online school, they concentrate a lot.
0:10:18 They say, I want to learn the load boards or the software, and I tell them that those
0:10:20 functions are very basic.
0:10:21 This is not rocket science.
0:10:23 Just about anyone can do it.
0:10:24 You set up.
0:10:28 You just basically search from where you are to where you want to go, and that’s pretty
0:10:29 much it.
0:10:31 And is it typical to charge hourly for that?
0:10:33 Is it on a performance basis?
0:10:37 Like, hey, we booked you $2,000 worth of freight, so we’re going to take a percentage of that.
0:10:39 What’s typical on the pricing side?
0:10:45 The most common is to take a percentage of the gross revenue you book for the trucking
0:10:46 company.
0:10:54 If you book, let’s say, five loads, each paying $1,000, that means you booked $5,000 worth
0:11:01 of loads for the trucking company, and you can charge percentage of this revenue.
0:11:07 The percentage currently range anything from three to eight percent, probably with five
0:11:11 to six percent being right in the middle.
0:11:18 So by booking $5,000 worth of loads for a client, you would make about $250.
0:11:21 Alternatively, you can just charge a flat fee.
0:11:28 Let’s say someone has a specialized type of equipment, and they are in a high-margin,
0:11:35 high-gross niche of trucking industry, they might be grossing $10,000 or $12,000 a week.
0:11:38 So they may not be willing to pay you the percentage.
0:11:41 So in such situation, you can agree on a flat rate.
0:11:46 We can say, okay, we will charge, let’s say, $300 a week flat fee, and we’ll book all
0:11:49 the loads you want for that one truck.
0:11:51 And that’s another model.
0:11:55 There are also some people that just charge a flat fee per load, they’ll say, I charge
0:12:00 $50 or $60 per load I book, regardless of how much it makes.
0:12:05 Gotcha, and then it just becomes a matter of booking consistently, and then growing
0:12:10 the fleet or growing the number of drivers that you’re working with.
0:12:14 Is that kind of where the marketing would start if I wanted to get in with this, just
0:12:16 connecting with owner operators?
0:12:17 Yeah, absolutely.
0:12:20 Marketing is the most important thing.
0:12:24 This is what I see a lot again with aspiring dispatchers.
0:12:28 They believe that once they learn dispatching, they are all set.
0:12:34 And dispatching is not difficult, but just learning a skill does not make you an entrepreneur.
0:12:37 Truck dispatching is just like any other business.
0:12:42 You have to market it, you have to convert your clients.
0:12:47 That will basically propel you to success, depending on your skill set and your knowledge,
0:12:50 you can implement different strategies to acquire clients.
0:12:55 And I can go in greater detail on that if you would like to hear.
0:12:59 Start with Roman in just a moment, including those specific marketing strategies and how
0:13:06 many clients it took before he took this side hustle full time, right after this.
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0:14:11 Yeah.
0:14:14 Do you have an example or two?
0:14:17 I’m imagining taking flyers down to the truck stop.
0:14:21 That’s a few exits down the highway from us, but there may be a more efficient way.
0:14:24 Don’t you see effective for connecting with those drivers?
0:14:30 It’s funny because I hear the story about flyers quite often, and no, I probably would
0:14:34 not find that to be the most efficient or effective strategy.
0:14:35 Here’s why.
0:14:40 If you go to the truck stop and leave flyers there, someone may see it.
0:14:45 The question is, does this person need your service at this particular moment?
0:14:50 If they don’t, they will pay no attention to it, just like with the social media.
0:14:53 A lot of people say, “Should I advertise on social media?”
0:14:54 Yes, you can.
0:15:00 You can basically put your ad in front of a target group, which would be, let’s say,
0:15:02 interested in the trucking industry.
0:15:07 The problem is they may not be in need of your service at this particular moment.
0:15:11 Will they remember you two months later when they need you?
0:15:13 Maybe, maybe not.
0:15:18 The most effective way, when you need something and you need it now, what are you going to
0:15:19 do?
0:15:25 Well, most of us will go to Google and just go into Google, in our case, truck dispatching
0:15:31 service or truck dispatching service in Atlanta, because you will not do such search for fun.
0:15:35 You’re doing it because you need this service and you need it at this moment.
0:15:42 Really, I know it’s online advertisement basics, but just Google ads, they do the magic.
0:15:48 As long as you have a good-looking website, which looks attractive to your potential clients,
0:15:52 you can easily drive traffic to the website, and then you will be receiving emails, phone
0:15:55 calls, and you just have to convert.
0:15:56 Got it.
0:16:01 I’ve got to imagine if somebody is Googling truck dispatching service, they’re probably
0:16:05 seeing the ad results, but they’re also seeing organic results from people who’ve been doing
0:16:06 it forever.
0:16:08 There’s probably companies overseas.
0:16:12 How is a new provider competing in that space?
0:16:14 Well, you just mentioned SEO.
0:16:21 Again, if you are trying to target some specific keyword, let’s say, truck dispatching service
0:16:26 in a particular area, some trucking companies prefer to work with people locally, so they
0:16:32 will look for someone who is close by, and the keyword difficulty may not be that high,
0:16:34 so there might be some opportunities.
0:16:39 However, with Google ads, yes, you will be competing against other people, but as you
0:16:43 know, Google will just serve up a certain number of options.
0:16:49 Here what is important is to have the right kind of website, okay, with the right kind
0:16:50 of content.
0:16:52 You have to differentiate yourself.
0:16:57 You basically have to explain to people why they should work with you.
0:17:02 If you intend to work on your own, let’s say you’re not hiring a team, you’re not a team.
0:17:06 Very often it’s good to just make a website about yourself.
0:17:13 Just tell them who you are, because a lot of truck drivers, they like to work with this
0:17:15 one individual, okay?
0:17:17 You’re kind of building a relationship there.
0:17:24 They don’t want the big, huge company where you have 20 dispatchers, and every time someone
0:17:26 picks up the phone, they don’t know who that is.
0:17:29 They want this personalized approach.
0:17:36 So if you are just a guy or just a girl and you are planning on doing it on your own,
0:17:37 tell them about it.
0:17:39 Tell them, “Look, here I am.
0:17:41 My name is Joe.”
0:17:43 And anytime you call, I will answer your call.
0:17:47 If there’s going to be a problem, I will be solving your problem.
0:17:52 So this kind of differentiates you from all the other companies that are out there.
0:17:57 And if trucker likes what they see on your website, they will make that phone call.
0:17:58 They will send you an email.
0:18:01 Yeah, I think that’s true of really any solo service provider.
0:18:07 It’s like, “Why are you versus some random person on Fiverr or wherever else?”
0:18:09 If you got somebody through your website, you did a lot of things right to even get
0:18:10 to that point.
0:18:16 And now, if you can showcase your unique value proposition, I think that makes a lot of sense.
0:18:22 What did it take for you in terms of client volume or dispatch volume before you’re like,
0:18:23 “Forget it.
0:18:24 Forget it with these trucks.
0:18:25 I’m going all in.
0:18:26 I’m selling the assets.
0:18:27 I’m selling the trucks.
0:18:28 And I’m just going to do this remote dispatch thing.”
0:18:34 In my case, I think somewhere around, once I had about five clients and they were generating
0:18:39 around $5,000 in revenue, at that point, I was like, “Okay, I know I will be making
0:18:47 less money than with a trucking company, but I will also relieve myself of a lot of stress.”
0:18:52 Also, at that time, me and my wife had an idea that we could go and travel.
0:18:56 That would be definitely enough money for us to go abroad.
0:19:02 At that point, I decided to terminate the trucking business and sell off the equipment
0:19:04 and just concentrate on dispatching.
0:19:05 All right.
0:19:06 Five clients, $5,000 a month.
0:19:11 Do you have an estimate of the hourly load trying to get a sense like, “If I want to
0:19:16 go do this, what is it going to take time-wise realistically to do a good job for those customers?”
0:19:20 A lot of this depends on the market conditions.
0:19:25 So for example, if we are working in a good market when there is a lot of freight and
0:19:30 trucks are in demand, it is extremely easy to bookload.
0:19:36 You may start at eight o’clock in the morning and by 10 a.m., everyone is booked.
0:19:38 We can say, “You are done for the day.”
0:19:42 Now, there is little caveat to that.
0:19:44 You are done for the day unless something goes wrong.
0:19:50 If something goes wrong, you may have to go back to your computer and address the situation
0:19:52 that came up.
0:19:55 In a more difficult market, the situation may be different.
0:20:00 You may book some trucks right away, but you may have a truck in some sort of a challenging
0:20:06 area where there is very little freight and you may end up sitting for hours making phone
0:20:10 calls trying to find a suitable option for your client to get them out.
0:20:14 Part of that is like, “Well, if you are parked in the middle of nowhere, part of that is
0:20:18 on you, Mr. Client or Mr. Client, you’ve got to go where the goods are if you want to get
0:20:19 some shipments.”
0:20:23 It is also partially on us because we probably booked that load to go.
0:20:25 Yeah, if they’re out there in the middle of the week.
0:20:28 It just happens that sometimes market conditions change.
0:20:34 You send a truck to one location and you know that historically it’s good, but then something
0:20:38 changes and tomorrow there is just no freight there.
0:20:42 In other instance, just like you said, sometimes you will get a call and your client will tell
0:20:45 you, “Hey, I just booked myself a load to Florida.
0:20:48 It was paying great.”
0:20:52 And you’re just saying, “Well, that’s fantastic, but there is no freight in Florida.
0:20:54 So what are we going to do tomorrow?”
0:20:55 For the return trip.
0:20:56 Okay.
0:21:01 Well, yeah, so and then we have to solve the problem they have created.
0:21:08 This is an interesting logistical puzzle and part of my brain says I like that challenge
0:21:13 and all of these moving chess pieces and trying to make sure everybody is optimally filled
0:21:14 and booked.
0:21:17 And then the other part of me is like, “Dude, that sounds like a lot of moving parts with
0:21:19 a lot of variables.”
0:21:21 It’s not that difficult as it seems.
0:21:27 Once you get the sense for the market and this is unfortunately comes only with experience.
0:21:32 As you do this more, you will know where to go and what to do as you move trucks on the
0:21:33 daily basis.
0:21:38 You have a sense if you are making the right choice or the bad choice.
0:21:44 So the whole process is very simple and it’s pretty easy to learn.
0:21:46 The rest is just gaining experience doing it.
0:21:52 And do some of it become recurring where I’m picturing like a Walmart, they have probably
0:21:56 obviously they have their own fleet and they’re not dealing with independent dispatchers and
0:21:57 stuff.
0:22:02 But like if they know every week this many units of a particular item is likely to sell.
0:22:05 So we’re going to have to restock that and it seems like it might be somewhat predictable
0:22:06 week after week.
0:22:10 Like is there any sense like that where it’s like, “Okay, a certain percentage is going
0:22:14 to be booked with these like easy low hanging fruit recurring type of jobs?”
0:22:18 We need to consider there are actually two markets, two freight markets.
0:22:23 One is considered to be contract market and another one is a spot market.
0:22:28 What we’ve been talking about previously where most independent truck dispatchers work is
0:22:30 a spot market.
0:22:33 That’s someone that needs something moved today or tomorrow.
0:22:34 Okay.
0:22:36 It is not a regular freight.
0:22:41 They just need, I don’t know, a scrapyard needs a load of recycled aluminum.
0:22:42 Okay.
0:22:43 It’s not regular.
0:22:48 They just need one tomorrow and it gets posted on the load board.
0:22:49 Then there is contract freight.
0:22:51 That’s exactly what you just mentioned.
0:22:56 It’s a store that is shipping something or a plant production plant that is shipping
0:22:59 something on a regular basis day by day.
0:23:06 Now, it’s a bit different because in most cases, in order to tap into contract market,
0:23:08 it has to be a larger trucking company.
0:23:09 Okay.
0:23:14 A shipper that has a production plant and sends out a load every day, they need to make
0:23:18 sure that that load is going out every single day.
0:23:23 If Joe, the trucker, comes in with one truck, they will never give him a contract because
0:23:27 if his truck breaks down, they will not be able to ship out what they need to ship and
0:23:30 they may have all kinds of problems.
0:23:35 Also with the contract market, it’s usually a bidding system where you have to make a
0:23:38 bid for the lowest possible rate that you’re willing to transport.
0:23:44 So there is the urban myth among truckers that that’s the holy grail is the contract
0:23:48 freight, but they don’t realize that in reality, it is not.
0:23:54 Now, there is also an exception where sometimes these two things, the spot market and contract
0:23:56 market sometimes cross.
0:24:01 For example, I had a client who lived in Charleston, South Carolina.
0:24:07 Every Monday, he would leave Charleston and we would book him a load, go into Arkansas,
0:24:10 and then he would return home for the weekend.
0:24:14 And we would see the same load on the load board going to Arkansas.
0:24:15 We would book it again.
0:24:21 And after, I believe, two or three times this broker told us, look, we have this load every
0:24:22 single Monday.
0:24:24 Do you guys want to do it?
0:24:27 That made our job much easier because they would not even post it.
0:24:32 They would just email us a week before and say, are you guys available on Monday?
0:24:35 I had to do nothing and I get a percentage of that load.
0:24:37 So it was a fantastic deal.
0:24:38 Yeah, for sure.
0:24:40 You mentioned best case scenario.
0:24:42 You’re in and out in a couple of hours.
0:24:43 Everything is easy.
0:24:47 And then you said, except when things go wrong, what are some of those scenarios when you
0:24:50 get pulled back into the fray and you got to put out some fires?
0:24:56 Well, the most common scenario is for load which you have booked to cancel.
0:25:01 You’ll get a phone call an hour later and they will tell you that this load is not going
0:25:02 to be going.
0:25:07 Or even worse, your driver drives somewhere, let’s say for 80 miles, arrives at the shipper
0:25:11 and shipper tells him, well, sorry, the product is not ready today.
0:25:14 It might be ready tomorrow or two days later.
0:25:19 And at this point, you have to start over and try to get some sort of a compensation for
0:25:21 your client for the work they already done.
0:25:25 Yeah, and if you were only going to make 250 bucks on that load and you’re trying to pay
0:25:29 him for fuel and lodging potentially, how does that work?
0:25:33 If load gets canceled, you usually can’t get some sort of a compensation from the freight
0:25:34 broker.
0:25:37 A lot depends again on the situation.
0:25:43 If this driver went somewhere in the morning, spent two hours, didn’t get loaded, you may
0:25:52 get $150 to $250 from the broker for what is called truck order not used, but we still
0:25:54 have time to rebook him on another load.
0:25:56 So it’s not all that bad of a situation.
0:26:01 However, if this is happening, let’s say, in the late afternoon, then driver may lose
0:26:02 entire day of work.
0:26:08 And that is a bad scenario because a few hundred dollars will not compensate.
0:26:12 There are, I could tell some horror stories when, let’s say, driver picks up a load and
0:26:18 supposed to deliver somewhere and we have already another load planned for them, but
0:26:23 receiver decides not to unload them for one reason or another.
0:26:28 And sometimes they may say, well, I’m sorry, there was an appointment which you missed
0:26:31 and next appointment is four days later.
0:26:39 And now your client is getting stuck with cargo in their trailer and he can’t do anything.
0:26:45 And we have to salvage this situation somehow and figure out who made the mistake, why this
0:26:46 situation happened.
0:26:48 Yeah, just moving physical products around.
0:26:53 Like landing at the airport and they’re like, we made it, but there’s no gates open, no
0:26:54 gates available.
0:26:57 So we’re going to park here for a minute while we try and figure this out.
0:26:58 That’s an interesting one.
0:27:02 More with Roman in just a moment, including how he removed himself from the day to day
0:27:08 dispatch work, scaled to 15 to 30 trucks in the new side hustle that created right after
0:27:09 this.
0:27:13 Now, did you go down the path of, hey, I’m working remote, I’m living the dream, I got
0:27:18 my five clients, did you eventually go down the path of trying to scale this up as an
0:27:22 agency and hire subcontract dispatch people?
0:27:24 What was the next stage for you?
0:27:25 Correct.
0:27:30 I don’t think that I initially had a plan of building an agency, but I just wanted to
0:27:37 make my job easier because sometimes some kids would have some sort of events or I wanted
0:27:40 to travel somewhere in an inconvenient time zone.
0:27:46 So what I did initially is I hired a virtual assistant.
0:27:53 The first one was from Philippines, spoke great English, and initially I just trained
0:27:56 him to complete paperwork.
0:28:02 I would make the phone calls as soon as paperwork came in, he would complete everything and
0:28:05 that made my work much more efficient.
0:28:11 Then I decided to also assign duties of making phone calls to the brokers, getting information
0:28:13 and so on and so on.
0:28:19 And then I realized that this person can really replace my duties and then I realized I could
0:28:25 technically scale it to something greater, take on more clients as long as there is staff
0:28:26 to manage them.
0:28:27 Yeah.
0:28:29 Is that what ended up happening?
0:28:30 That’s what ended up happening.
0:28:36 Eventually I moved team to India, I would provide them with the manuals and training
0:28:41 materials so they can learn in theory what needs to be done.
0:28:48 Then we would do some practical exercises and at some point I pretty much stepped away
0:28:52 from making the phone calls and doing the paperwork.
0:28:57 So I would still obviously work on client acquisition and I would work on problem resolution,
0:29:00 but the leg work would be done by hired help.
0:29:01 Okay, that makes sense.
0:29:07 So they’re working on the scheduling, the billing, the paperwork and you turn your attention
0:29:12 to sales and it’s not just the inbound, hey, somebody found our Google listing or somebody
0:29:18 found our ad, is there any outbound of trying to find smaller fleets because it’s like one
0:29:23 to one hand-to-hand combat grassroots gorilla marketing or it’s like, okay, this guy or
0:29:27 this trucking company has like four or five trucks, like, okay, that would be an ideal
0:29:32 client because we could stack on a chunk of revenue all at once versus clawing away one
0:29:33 client at a time.
0:29:35 I don’t know, what’s it look like on that side?
0:29:36 Two things I would mention.
0:29:41 First of all, yeah, you can absolutely target, there are databases of trucking companies
0:29:46 that are available where you can basically target this specific, let’s say trucking companies
0:29:48 that have less than five trucks.
0:29:52 Those are usually your primary clients because anyone who has more than five trucks, they
0:29:57 can hire an in-house dispatcher that’s going to be working exclusively for them and will
0:30:01 be doing whatever they need this dispatcher to do.
0:30:06 So you could get an access to the database and let’s say you could target the specific
0:30:11 area if you want to go locally or you can target what I recommend when we discuss direct
0:30:12 marketing.
0:30:17 I recommend targeting new companies, the ones that just got their license because they’re
0:30:23 new to this business, they don’t have established contacts, they don’t probably freight is their
0:30:27 main concern versus a trucking company that’s been in business for five years.
0:30:31 If they’ve been in business for five years, they already figured out their way of finding
0:30:33 loads.
0:30:36 Just registered last week, they may not.
0:30:39 So it’s a good target to go after.
0:30:46 Now in terms of taking on too many trucks at the same time, it’s a good problem to have
0:30:51 and sometimes I would get a call from someone who’d say I have 20 trucks and we would like
0:30:56 to come on board and I know that it’s probably not realistic.
0:31:03 First of all, it would require four more people to efficiently handle that many trucks.
0:31:04 It would be just a mess.
0:31:08 So usually I would recommend, I would tell them, look, that’s fine.
0:31:13 We can do 20 trucks, but we will take on only three at the beginning.
0:31:14 Let’s get going.
0:31:15 Let’s see how it’s working.
0:31:17 Let’s make sure you like what we do.
0:31:20 Let’s make sure we like how you operate.
0:31:25 And then we’re going to be adding gradually two more trucks, three more trucks.
0:31:31 This way, I can make sure that I provide qualified staff to take care of your business and we’re
0:31:35 not going to have this hectic transition when we’re just suddenly trying to figure out what
0:31:37 to do with 20 trucks tomorrow.
0:31:38 Right.
0:31:44 That’s probably the predicament of any agency business where, yeah, it absolutely can scale,
0:31:49 but it has to scale almost in lockstep with that staff because there’s going to be a certain
0:31:51 number of hours required.
0:31:52 That may be the bottleneck.
0:31:53 That’s not going to change.
0:31:59 So I was like, well, if one person can handle five trucks, the math can still grow, but
0:32:01 it’s going to have to grow in parallel there.
0:32:06 And so that makes it, well, let’s ramp this up slowly, make sure it’s a win for both parties
0:32:12 and then we’ll continue to add on new staff and serve that and go find qualified dispatchers
0:32:16 or train new dispatchers to go and do that work for you.
0:32:19 You’ve shifted a little bit to there’s a great YouTube content, AlphaX Logistics.
0:32:24 You can find tons of video content about learning the dispatch business, learning the logistics
0:32:25 business.
0:32:30 So you made this pivot to the content side, what’s, I mean, this been going on for several
0:32:31 years at least.
0:32:35 So the dispatch side is still running and now as a new side hustle is like the teaching
0:32:36 other people about it.
0:32:37 Yeah, absolutely.
0:32:46 That was again, exactly a side hustle because while I was in Europe, I was thinking about,
0:32:53 okay, well, what else can I do while traveling and again, experiencing this beautiful lifestyle
0:32:59 that I had, I thought, okay, well, I could teach other people how to do this.
0:33:04 And again, I knew absolutely nothing about online education.
0:33:09 It was back 2015, where really it wasn’t a thing.
0:33:16 Now everyone has a course, everyone is teaching about anything, there are tons of platforms.
0:33:21 Back then, as I said, it was as primitive as I was trying to figure out how do I make
0:33:26 videos and upload them to YouTube, but then make sure that nobody can see them unless
0:33:27 they pay for it.
0:33:31 So it was like really, really primitive stage.
0:33:36 The advantage was, as I mentioned, I was training already virtual assistants.
0:33:40 So I had to create the manuals in order to train them.
0:33:41 Oh, dang, that’s genius.
0:33:42 I love that.
0:33:45 That’s a great selling your sawdust example.
0:33:46 That’s fantastic.
0:33:47 Yeah.
0:33:48 Yeah.
0:33:49 So I already had a lot of core material.
0:33:56 Now it was just a matter of converting it into a format that is easy to consume.
0:34:02 Because when idea was born, and I believe in 2016, we launched LearnDispatch.com, and
0:34:08 we put out the first version of our training course, and we’ve been basically working on
0:34:10 it for the last eight years.
0:34:14 We’re always trying to add more information, more content.
0:34:19 One of the main advantages I mentioned before, Nick, that you can learn this skill.
0:34:22 It’s not really that difficult.
0:34:25 What you cannot learn is experience.
0:34:32 And that, we help our students, if they get into a situation where they don’t know what
0:34:39 to do, they can reach out to our support staff and use our experience to solve their problems.
0:34:46 So that, I think, is something that helps people confidently transition into this industry.
0:34:48 Yeah, that’s great.
0:34:50 I didn’t realize I’ve been around for eight years.
0:34:55 I’ve been doing this training for quite a long time, and I love that idea of taking
0:34:56 the training.
0:34:59 Well, we’re doing this internally anyway, but might as well make some of it public-facing
0:35:02 and try and serve a different audience who might want to get into this.
0:35:05 I think that’s a really unique way to do it.
0:35:09 We had a question come through from some listeners, like, “How come every guest has an online
0:35:10 course?”
0:35:15 There’s lots of reasons for that, but it’s just kind of a natural progression if people
0:35:17 are asking questions about how this works.
0:35:22 If you already have the material, “Oh, here’s a cool new revenue stream to go about it.”
0:35:27 What does a day in the life look like today if there is such a thing as a typical Wednesday
0:35:28 for you?
0:35:34 Well, I still have to start around eight o’clock in the morning because my team usually checks
0:35:38 in and gives me an update as to what is going on.
0:35:45 So I have an overview as to which trucks have been booked already, which ones are empty
0:35:47 and need loads.
0:35:53 So basically, I take 15 to 30 minutes to see what’s going on with the dispatching side
0:35:54 of things.
0:35:57 How many trucks are you responsible for on that side?
0:36:02 Well, usually we do between 15 and 30 trucks.
0:36:06 Obviously, I’m not personally responsible for any of them.
0:36:07 It’s the team.
0:36:12 I usually only get involved if there is a problem that requires my attention.
0:36:18 So if the team doesn’t know what to do or how to solve a particular situation, this
0:36:23 is when I have to get on the phone or another scenario is when I get calls from clients
0:36:29 complaining about the team not doing something that they’re supposed to be doing.
0:36:31 Occasionally, I have to- Those are not fun to get.
0:36:32 They’re not fun.
0:36:36 But I realized it’s just part of the process.
0:36:40 People get relaxed sometimes and they forget to do things that they’re supposed to do.
0:36:46 So sometimes you have to give them a little push so they perform as they should.
0:36:50 Then usually after I’m done with that, I go and work out.
0:36:53 That’s essential for me in the mornings.
0:36:59 That’s when I listen to podcasts and generate new ideas.
0:37:03 And once I’m done with that, I go back to my office and then work on creative stuff.
0:37:07 This is when I create new content.
0:37:10 Everything is not the only ventures that I’m involved in.
0:37:17 So there’s quite a few things I have to review, read about, and so on and so on.
0:37:18 That’s cool.
0:37:23 So running in the CEO seat of this agency, like, “Hey, look, I got to have to check in
0:37:27 with the team, do the team management, the client management, the performance training
0:37:29 and evaluation and all that stuff.”
0:37:34 And then take care of yourself and then play in this content creation game.
0:37:37 I think that sounds like a pretty fun operation.
0:37:42 Anything that has really surprised you, either in the logistics side or the content side
0:37:44 over the last 10 years in the game?
0:37:53 My main surprise was that I stumbled into my dream of being able to work remotely.
0:37:55 Again, I did not plan it.
0:37:56 It just happened.
0:37:57 It was education again.
0:38:00 I did not plan to develop this business.
0:38:03 And it just, again, I stumbled into it.
0:38:05 And that was another wonderful surprise.
0:38:07 Well, Roman, this has been awesome.
0:38:08 What’s next for you?
0:38:09 What are you excited about these days?
0:38:10 Where do you want to take it?
0:38:16 Well, right now, we are working, obviously, we continuously working on the content creation
0:38:17 for our online school.
0:38:24 For the dispatching business, we are thinking about concentrating on doing more of a consulting
0:38:30 work for other trucking companies and other potentially dispatching businesses.
0:38:38 We’re developing some tools for our students now that everything goes AI, we’re brainstorming
0:38:44 on how we can bring some helpful tools that would make easier for aspiring dispatchers
0:38:49 to market their business, to organize their business and so on and so on.
0:38:50 Yeah.
0:38:53 I almost didn’t want to bring that up where it’s like, well, how long before you can
0:38:58 plug in that trucker’s criteria and then there’s an AI software that will match them
0:39:02 with the perfect fit load based on that criteria.
0:39:06 It’s like, shoot, if it’s not already in the pipeline, it’s probably coming soon.
0:39:11 I have a video where I talk about future of dispatching in general.
0:39:16 And I do point out that at some point, we’re going to have self-driving trucks and then
0:39:21 it will be certain that the algorithms are going to be picking up the optimal use of
0:39:25 those machines to basically maximize the capacity.
0:39:31 However, until we have people involved, people will be making mistakes, people will be messing
0:39:33 up.
0:39:37 So I think for a foreseeable future, we’re safe.
0:39:40 And I could see self-driving trucks being a thing, but I don’t know if they’re going
0:39:43 to be completely humanless.
0:39:47 As the example is, we’re going up skiing in the winter and the truckers are pulled over
0:39:48 on the side of the road.
0:39:49 They’re putting chains on the track.
0:39:51 I don’t see a robot doing that just yet.
0:39:57 So that’s what happens when the weather turns south and you need some human involvement
0:39:58 for that stuff.
0:39:59 But that’s really interesting.
0:40:02 Yeah, problem resolution, again, you have to get creative.
0:40:04 That’s one thing.
0:40:06 And another thing, there is a human touch.
0:40:12 You need to realize that some of the truckers, I mean, they’re on the road for weeks and
0:40:14 you become their best friend.
0:40:18 You are the person they actually talk to consistently.
0:40:25 So really, the robot probably will not do it even though I do hear about AI France being
0:40:26 out there.
0:40:30 But I think that the human touch is still necessary at the moment.
0:40:31 That makes sense.
0:40:35 Well, you can find Roman at AlphaX Logistics on YouTube.
0:40:41 Check him out over there, learndispatch.com is the home base, learndispatch.com/sidehustle.
0:40:46 If you want to learn more, there is a special discount there for Side Hustle Nation listeners.
0:40:49 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:40:54 Well, my number one tip would be to concentrate on marketing.
0:41:00 You can be great at truck dispatching, you can be great at any other business, but unless
0:41:03 you can market your business, you are going to fail.
0:41:10 So by learning marketing and how to sell your products and services, you will open up the
0:41:15 opportunities for success for yourself.
0:41:16 So learn about it.
0:41:21 There’s tons of resources, tons of free resources, many books, many courses.
0:41:23 Don’t be lazy.
0:41:29 Learn how to market and sell your services and you definitely going to succeed in whatever
0:41:30 field you are in.
0:41:31 Yeah, absolutely.
0:41:36 Perry Marshall calls it the tactical triangle of traffic conversion and economics.
0:41:40 Conversion and how much can you sell, how many of your things can you sell, the economics,
0:41:42 well, how much can you charge for that thing.
0:41:44 But the cornerstone piece is that traffic.
0:41:47 Like, you could have the best offer in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you’re
0:41:48 not going to sell anything.
0:41:51 So concentrate on that marketing love, that number one tip.
0:41:55 The line that I wrote down was I stumbled into my dream and it may sound like an accident,
0:42:00 but it was the result of being open to the next thing.
0:42:04 It was the result of listening to the pain points of the owner operators, the drivers
0:42:05 that you’re talking to.
0:42:10 Like, hey, we could really use some help in this area and kind of being open to say, well,
0:42:11 you know what?
0:42:12 I can help solve that problem.
0:42:15 If I may not know how to do it, I can figure that out and that’s kind of being the core
0:42:20 skill of the entrepreneurs, figuring out the next thing and same idea with the content
0:42:24 business, the education business, like being open to that, listening, well, we already
0:42:25 have this material.
0:42:28 How could we repurpose that in a unique way?
0:42:29 So loved it.
0:42:30 Took a ton of notes.
0:42:32 Roman, thanks for joining me.
0:42:33 Everybody tuning in.
0:42:37 Your listener bonus for this week is my big list of 101 service business ideas.
0:42:38 Hey, maybe dispatch isn’t your thing.
0:42:41 That’s totally fine, but there’s lots of other service business ideas.
0:42:45 You might be able to apply some of Roman’s tactics to.
0:42:50 That is at sidehustlenation.com/roman or just follow the show notes link in the episode
0:42:51 description.
0:42:52 It’ll get you right over there.
0:42:54 Big thanks to Roman for sharing his insight.
0:42:57 Thanks to our sponsors for making this content free for everyone.
0:43:02 You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors
0:43:03 in one place.
0:43:04 That is it for me.
0:43:06 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:43:10 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen and I’ll catch you in the
0:43:13 next edition of The Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.
0:43:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]
One of the best ways to come up with business ideas is to start by solving your own problems.
That’s exactly how today’s guest started his dispatching business.
What started as a way to keep his trucks busy turned into a service business that serves other trucking companies.
Roman was able to turn dispatching into a scalable process and now can work from wherever he wants.
Find out how Roman created this niche-specific specialized service and scaled it with a team of virtual assistants.
Full Show Notes: How to Start a Dispatch Business
Listener Bonus: 101 Service Business Ideas
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