https://junkremovalauthority.com/. We messed up our dispatch yesterday. Lee talks about what dispatch did and what they should have done in this video. Why it’s always important to play the dispatch game conservatively with your junk removal business.
Hey guys! I hope everybody’s doing great day on Sunday. Just in here at the office. Today is going to be a last little bit of our business office out here. This will be our dispatch office or sell stuff from this property. Rent out the U-Haul from this property and then all of a truck crews were still checking here. We’ve got our main 2000 square foot office, which will probably outgrow in the next year. We only signed a one-year lease on it. Right by my house. I always talk about work life balance. I literally have about a three-minute drive once we move into that new office. It’ll be 2000 square feet, six individual offices with a reception area, kitchen and pretty good size area for our call center. Still going to use our shop back here to work on trucks. Kind of sort through items and that sort of a deal as well.
That’s not what I want to talk to you today. You see half of our fleet back in there. You see half of them. The other one’s in Greensboro and Charlotte location. Ones in the shop right here. Getting a little work done to it. Yesterday, we had a little issue go on. I want to kind of mention everybody. We’ve been doing this a long time. We’ve had multiple trucks for a long time, multiple crews for many years now ever since our second year in operation. Generally, we do dispatch great, but yesterday we had just a few problems. I just kind of found out about him yesterday evening. I had a birthday party I was at and then I was doing some work from the house. Then I came into the office about 3:30 yesterday evening. Everybody kind of explained to me what was going on. I was a little disappointed and kind of how we handle some of the situations. What happened is we only had one crew going in Greensboro. We had a going two in Charlotte. We had a four, running a in Raleigh. Two of the crews in Raleigh finished up early about 1:00 to 1:30 or something and then they headed out. They got cut out. Our Greensboro location was booked solid. Greensboro is about an hour from Raleigh. That Greensboro location with just one crew had seven jobs yesterday. We were a little short staffed in Greensboro. They look to be somewhat small. So, our dispatch thought that they would be able to get all the jobs done with just that one crew. So, they went ahead and they cut the Raleigh crew out. What happened as often happens is customers had mistaken how much stuff they had. We had a lot of these jobs that are multiple truckloads. Thousand dollars, $1,200 jobs in Greensboro. I don’t remember the exact number. Out of seven jobs, I think three of them were over a truckload. Well, some of the Raleigh job got large too. Then Charlotte was booked solid. What wound up happening is we had a couple jobs get off late. We had a couple of customers, they couldn’t reschedule. We had to do in that same day. The landfills are already closed, so our Greensboro location had to actually take stuff back to the office. Just trashed up.
They load it up, take it back to our warehouse there. We got to 1800 square foot office in Greensboro. Our warehouse space in Greensboro. So, they took it back there. They dumped the stuff off and they’re going to have to reload it. There was no stuff that could be recycled or sorted. Any of that sort of deal. That’s just additional time there. Those guys worked till about 10:30 last night. Getting all this stuff done. We got multiple truckloads of stuff in our office there. That’s got to be reloaded. I had customers. They didn’t leave the last customers job until 9:30 on a Saturday night. It wasn’t handled correctly. What did we do wrong? Always play your dispatch conservatively. Those two Raleigh crews, they had called other jobs to see about going early, but they were unable to go early.
What our dispatch should have done instead of cutting out both those Raleigh crews is they should have cut out one of the crews. One, just working around the office. Cleaning the truck up. Just run them out to a system with a current job going on. Cut that other crew running just in case they were needed. We got other job that was a lot larger because those crews cut out about 12:30. One crew could have been cut out to save on labor and the other crews should hang around until at least 3:00 because we had so much going on. We were relying so much on these jobs being small which oftentimes are not. Also, we would have been unable to take on any same-day. We’re always conservative on dispatch. It’s better to pay to have some downtime where you’re paying guys a little bit of downtime. Cutting the grass around your office, cleaning up, clean the truck up, organizing tools and buying some extra tools something like that. It’s better to have them doing those kinds of task and be paying them for it. Then to cut them out both early and all of a sudden need them later and not be available. Then like same-day bookings, that right you might pay for two hours of downtime. That might cost you 75 bucks for two hours of downtime, something like that. You miss out on that one asap job and that one same-day booking that costs you hundreds. We always roll everybody. We’re always extra conservative on dispatch. What we’re supposed to have done and we dropped the ball yesterday. What we did do correctly is we still made sure that we weren’t however long it took to make those customers happy and to get those jobs done. We didn’t turn away same-day bookings. We just had team members work until 10:30 at night on Saturday. Pretty demoralizing and something we try and avoid, but we did get the work done.
Just a couple of tips on dispatch. Always get people in early enough to make your first arrival window. Basically, the start of that arrival time, that way you’re ahead of the game right from the beginning and you’re not starting out an hour later than you probably should have. You need to always play for same-day bookings. I talk about that a lot. A lot of our business consists of 20% same-day bookings. That’s a lot of money. We’re talking $2,000,000 a year revenue. 400,000 of that $2,000,000 in revenue is same-day bookings. That is one of the things we’ve been able to do which really allowed us to scale the way we have. Then you’ve got junk removal companies that have been in business longer or the same time we have. That had not done nearly as well.
We normally run 4 or 5 crews in our Raleigh location on any given day. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about four or five. Let’s talk about if you have normally run two crews and you’ve got a day like our Charlotte location. Normally about two crews. You’ve got a day for some reason where it’s a little slower. You could get by on one crew. Just schedule one crew to come in at the beginning of the day, schedule another crew to come in about 12:30 or 1:00. That way if you’ve booked up more jobs than that other crew can go in and take those extra jobs. Your first crew can keep on working. If for some reason you don’t book up more than your second crew, it just replaces the first crew. At least for a little while there, you’ll probably have two trucks running. In case you got some asap jobs and some same-day bookings in. Always think conservatively about dispatch and you’ll be a lot better.
It will remove a lot of stress for your business and you’ll make more money. Your expenses at time. You will have some times where you’re paying people to not really do a whole lot of work, but most of the time you’ll have same-day bookings come in. That makes up all the difference. Anyway, we’ll get back to work. I will jump back in this office. We got a lot of our operations manual stuff we’re finishing up this weekend. I’m excited to be working with some of our new partners. Got one open in Denver, Colorado within the next month. Feel free to call us at +1 919-466-9322. Thanks guys!