Relationships

Split your revenue three ways

Take last month and divide what you were paid into three piles: broker trips, facility contracts, and private pay. One month is enough to start, and the exercise takes an afternoon.

The three are not variations on the same business. They differ in who sets the price, who the rider deals with, and how long the money takes to arrive.

Read your own split against that table and one thing usually stands out. A company whose revenue is almost entirely broker trips has handed the price of its work to someone else, and it finds out what next year pays when the rate sheet arrives.

Nothing here says to walk away from brokers. They are volume, and volume fills vans. The point is to know the proportion you are running, so that moving it is a decision rather than something that happens to you.

Your biggest broker is rarely your best

Brokers get judged on volume, because volume is the number you see without looking for it. The trips arrive, the vans are full, and the contract feels like the reason the company works.

Score them properly and the ranking often changes. Five columns, one row per broker, once a quarter.

Profit per trip is the column that does the work, and you cannot fill it in without knowing what a mile costs you, which is the first thing Fleet and tools asks you to work out. Long-distance contracts are where the two rankings usually part company: good revenue per trip, poor profit per mile, and a denial rate that quietly takes some of it back.

Knowing it rarely means firing anyone. It means you can ask for a rate, cap the volume you accept, or tighten which of their trips you take, and you can do it with a number in front of you. A rate conversation without that number is one side negotiating and the other side agreeing.

Facilities are the relationships you own

A direct agreement with a dialysis center, a day program or a skilled nursing facility does three things a broker contract cannot. It pays better, because there is no middle. It cancels less, because the schedule is standing. And it belongs to you rather than to someone else’s platform.

The way in is easier than it looks, because you are already there. Pick a facility you serve several times a week on broker trips. Your drivers know the building, the staff know your vehicles, and you are solving their problem already without having the relationship.

The person to find is whoever owns transport: a discharge planner, a transport coordinator, a clinic manager. What they want is narrow and worth knowing. They want patients collected on time, and they want to stop spending their afternoon chasing rides. Bring your on-time performance from the scoreboard, because it is the only sales material that means anything to them.

One new agreement a quarter is a modest-sounding goal that compounds quickly, and every one of them moves a slice of your revenue out of the first column of that table and into the second.

Set up private pay

A private pay trip is the best one on your board. You set the price. There is no authorization to check, no claim to submit, no denial to appeal, and the money arrives on the day of service instead of forty-five days later.

It stays small in most companies for a plain reason, and it is plumbing. There is no published rate, so nobody can quote one. There is no way to take a card, so the driver is handed cash or nothing. And the dispatcher who picks up the phone has no authority to answer, so the call becomes a message for the owner, who calls back after the ride was needed.

Three things fix it, and none of them are hard:

A published rate, so a price exists before the phone rings. A way to take payment that does not involve a driver holding cash. And permission for whoever answers the phone to quote the rate, which is the same move Vision asks you to make with the margin floor: put the decision where the conversation happens.

Compliance belongs on a calendar

Driver credentials, vehicle inspections, insurance renewals, broker re-credentialing. One list, every expiration date, and a lead time against each.

The reason this sits under Relationships rather than under paperwork is what a lapse actually costs. The fine is the small part. An expired driver credential takes that driver off the road, an expired inspection parks the vehicle, and lapsed re-credentialing can stop a broker sending you trips until it is resolved. A filing problem turns into a capacity problem, and capacity problems arrive on a morning when you are already short.

Give each item its own lead time rather than one rule for everything. A medical card might need a week. Broker re-credentialing can take months and involves people who do not work for you. A single thirty-day reminder is useless for the second kind, which is the kind that costs the most.

The vehicle-side items on that list also show up in Fleet and tools, alongside the maintenance calendar. Same list, two reasons to look at it, and it only works if one named person sweeps it.

The cadence