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CFF-TV Ep. 4 | Hot Topics: Should I Stay OR Should I Grow Now?

Welcome to CFF-TV and This Week’s Hot Topic!

Should I stay? Or should I grow now? Is today’s hot topic. We get this every single day from our customers. They ask us for our expert opinion on, should they stay where they are or should they be growing their fleet of vehicles and growing their business? You are probably asking yourself this question all the time.

In 26 years in business, this has probably been the question that I have struggled with the most. Are we good yet? Or actually do we need to get bigger? And there are so many reasons that we begin to feed our brain as to the answer to this straightforward questions. So on the hot topic today, we’re going to explore what we say to ourselves and how we could say something different and what our final opinion is on. Should I stay where I am or should I grow now?

Why We Justify Not Growing At All

These are the things that we say to ourselves to justify why we don’t grow, right? What if we expand and a recession hits, right? Can we even afford to expand? What if my husband or my wife will fight me about expanding? And it will cause me problems at home? Will I have to take a pay cut? Well, I have to take one step back financially to be able to take two steps forward. And what does that do to my husband and wife? When I go home and say, Hey, baby, we’re not going to make as much this year as we did last year. Why honey? Why is that? Well, because we’re putting it back into the company. Well, baby, you’ve been putting it back into the company for years. Like I’m kind of sick and tired of you putting all our money back in the company.

When did we start taking some of that money out of the company? Well, we’ve got to grow, baby. We’ve got to grow. That is a real problem. That impacts so many of us as owners of business. Another question we say is what if regulation and the white house changes, right? What if my employees aren’t, um, good enough, skilled enough, ready to grow? What are my hiring processes? What if I can find good trustworthy, worthy the employees? And in the end, most of us just say, let’s just stay where we are…

Should We Grow Now? – How?

You only answer that question when you develop your end game, what are you doing? What you’re doing for, are you doing it to enjoy the lifestyle, cruising the roads, seeing the country, are you doing it to actually make more money? Are you doing it to build something, to sell it down the road?

Are you doing it to pay down the debt service on the equipment to in essence, have a built-in retirement account called equity in my equipment, um, or are you doing it to help others, right? You just like the ability that your business helps to fuel jobs for people taking it. The time to create the end game is how you begin to visualize the answer to the question of, should I stay or should I grow now? Let’s just address a couple of those topics. First, first and foremost, a recession going back a hundred years. My opinion here, not formal data, right? I’m not an economist, but I think about every seven years, there’s an economic downturn and that downturn lasts about 12 months. So if every seven years we’re having an economic downturn and the downturn last for 12 months, there’s a six year window in between there in which we should have prosperity, we should have growth.

Historically The Best Time To Reinvest In Your Company – Grow!

So without question, you can go back and look at every recession and then the six year rebound after the recession. And we as an economy have moved to an entirely new level. If you literally ask yourself what were real estate prices in 2007, the recession of 2008 and 2009 and real estate prices today, there are more than double it’s gone. Crazy. The economy is more valuable today than it was prior to the recession. Now you also have to say to yourself, well, hold on a minute, Matt, if we had the great recession in 2008 and 2009, and you just told me seven years, that should have put me in 2016 mean what happened? We didn’t have a national recession in 2016, but in transportation, we did have a recession in 2016. And so we believe we’re actually on the upside coming out of that. There is an argument that if you add another seven years to that from 16, add seven takes you to 20, 23 could be a downturn in 2023 possible, very possible maybe, or maybe something’s changed altogether.

The Government Wants Businesses To “Put Their Money To Work”

Why did COVID not have the massive downturn effect that everyone thought it would basically in March of 2020? And it’s because our government stimulus the heck out of the economy in the great recession of Oh eight or Oh nine, our government puts $600 billion worth of stimulus into the economy in the COVID recession of 2020. Our government puts 6 trillion in dollars. So far worth of stimulus into the economy. I think there’s a potential argument that because no one in the white house cares about balancing a budget or even paying down the debt that we will always from now on stimulus our way out of a deep and ugly recession. I think people are really thinking like that now.

And that throws out some of the historical data, some of the thought process of, Oh, it has to happen every seven years. It’s always been like that. Yeah. Except that our government doesn’t care about the deficit and the government doesn’t care about balancing the budget anymore. They simply care about putting more money to work each and every time avoid recession at all costs. We know what happens. Inflation has to go up. What can you do when interest rates are virtually zero, the cost of funds is virtually zero

Total Available Market (T.A.M)

How much more money can you print? Nobody knows the answer to that. And certainly a lot of people are going to say the whole thing’s got to come crashing down, but I’m not so sure that’s totally true. If they just keep printing money, the recession could be deferred for a very long time, but that is not the reason why you make the decision of, should I stay or should I grow? The only reason you should ask yourself is how big of the TAM am I in the total available market? TAM, and transportation is so massive. It’s one of the benefits of the industry that we’ve chosen to make our careers in. It’s huge. And how much of that Tam, what slice of that pie do you need to reach your end goal? And most of us will realize that what we need of the total available market is so small. So minuscule that everything else is actually surely irrelevant.

Total Available Market (T.A.M)

Why is it that one trucking company can have one truck in their fleet? And another trucking company can have 15,000 units in their fleet. What is the difference there? And that’s that the owner of the 15,000 truck fleet had total confidence that they could go into the marketplace, extract enough market, share out of them to meet their end game and their goals. And they would do anything to get it, regardless of who was in the white house or when the recession was coming or what might pop up in regulation that nobody thought of, we believe now is a fantastic time to grow. We believe the economy is going to be on a tear for the next two to three years. We believe that government is going to provide stimulus for infrastructure and bridges and schools to be rebuilt. And that’s going to cause tremendous demand for the products that are on trucking companies trailers. So we think the answer is it’s time to grow, but you have to believe in your business. You have to have total confidence in yourself as the leader, you have to have a great group of people that work with you. You have to have great client relationships and you have to say to yourself, the marketplace is so big and I need such a little sliver of it that it doesn’t matter what factors happen.

That’s our hot topic. Should I grow? Should I stay or should I grow now? We’ll see you down the road.


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The experts at CFF answer the most commonly asked questions about financing, including refinancing, which is better loan or lease, and how credit is measured for a company.

About Commercial Fleet Financing, Inc.:

At Commercial Fleet Financing (CFF), our pros have given smart advice to fleet owners and owner-operators in the transportation, moving, towing or construction industries for more than two decades. With CFF, finding the right financing solutions is a phone call away and most borrowers secure commercial vehicle financing with ease. To talk directly with one of our finance pros and get started with credit approval in as little as two hours, CFF’s phone number is (469) 281-2962.

2022-03-24T14:25:39-05:00
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