Vision

A revenue target decides nothing

Ask an NEMT owner what this year’s target is and you get a revenue number. A million. Two million. Double last year.

Now watch what that number does on a Tuesday. A broker offers forty trips a week at a rate you are unsure about. Does the revenue target tell your dispatcher whether to take them? It does not. Should you hire another driver this month? It does not say. Is the third van worth buying? Silent again.

That is the test, and it is the only one worth applying: a target is real when someone who is not you can act on it without asking you first. Revenue fails because it is an outcome. The things that produce it are what a team can actually work with.

The three numbers have to add up

Three numbers run an NEMT company: the trips per day you are building toward, the margin you will not go below, and the fleet size that gets you there. You can probably produce a number for each of them. The harder question is whether the three agree.

They are tied together by one piece of arithmetic:

Across the fleets we see, a vehicle runs about eight trips a day on a six-day week, which is where that 8 comes from. So a hundred trips a day is a thirteen-vehicle company. If you run nine, the target is not a target yet.

Now put your own fleet next to that answer. Every vehicle of difference is one you have not bought yet, and the target is not real until those vehicles have a date and a budget against them.

This is where most vision exercises quietly fail. The three numbers get set independently, in different moods, and never tie. Reconciling them is the work, and it is usually the first time an owner sees that their growth plan needs a fleet they have no intention of funding.

The margin floor then constrains both. A trips-per-day target you can only hit by taking work below your floor is volume you will pay for. Deciding which of the three bends is the actual strategic decision, and it is far easier to make in January on paper than in June with a broker on the phone.

One caution: this is target-setting, not a purchase decision. When the moment comes to actually buy the vehicle, the questions in Fleet and tools come first, starting with whether the vehicles you already run are doing as many trips a day as they could.

Make the margin floor a rule

A margin floor that lives in the owner’s head protects nothing, because the person deciding whether to accept a trip is usually not the owner, and they are deciding in the ninety seconds before the broker needs an answer.

So translate it. The floor is a margin; what dispatch needs is a rule they can apply without ever seeing your books. Start with a minimum per loaded mile, because it is the one you can derive rather than guess: it comes straight from the cost per mile in Fleet and tools. Apply it to the brokers you already run and you have a list of which ones are accepted on sight and which need a call. Add a minimum per trip by type later, when you notice short runs clearing the per-mile floor and still losing money.

Your dispatcher can now say no on their own authority and be right, which is worth more than any number on a wall, and it means the trips you refuse are refused consistently rather than according to who picked up the phone.

Revisit the rule quarterly, because fuel, wages and broker rates all move. A floor set two years ago is not a floor.

The buyer question

Once a quarter, ask one question honestly. If a buyer walked in tomorrow, could they run this company without you?

It is the sharpest diagnostic in NEMT, and the reason has nothing to do with selling. A buyer pays for written processes, a team that runs the day without you, contracts that are not friendships, and numbers someone else can pull. That is the same list that makes a company calm to own. An owner who never intends to sell wants all four for their own sake.

The question is easier to answer than it sounds, because there is a concrete version of it. If you were unreachable for two weeks, what breaks? Not slows down. Breaks. Write down the first three that come to mind. They are often billing stopping, one broker relationship going quiet, and nobody making the call on exceptions.

Those three answers are your plan. Not a five-year strategy, the next three things. Fix them and ask again next quarter, and the company moves up the ladder from Chaos toward Sellable one answer at a time.

Put the target on a clock

The failure that kills targets is moving them. A hard month lands, the number starts to feel unrealistic, it quietly slides, and after three slides nobody on the team believes any number you say.

Thirty minutes is enough for both questions: are we tracking toward the three numbers, and has anything structural actually changed? The second is the one that decides something. A lost contract is structural. A rate change is structural. A bad January is one month, and one month has never been enough to move a year.

Then run the test that tells you whether any of this landed. Ask your dispatcher, with no warning, what this year’s trips per day target is. If they cannot say it, the target is not shared.

The cadence