At the outset of a new venture, everything moves fast.
Entrepreneurs are heads down building products, winning over customers, and executing against the vision. Company operations can be left behind — not because they’re not important, but because they seem easy to manage when the team is still small, and processes are informal. Unfortunately, as companies grow, whatever flexibility may have seemed in place becomes very brittle.
From coast to coast, growing startup businesses are learning that predictable, sustainable growth goes hand-in-hand with focus on the nuts and bolts of the business. Whether it’s managing a small fleet of delivery vans, service trucks, or a team of field technicians, having a day-to-day picture of operational resource levels is the divider between control and disaster.
Why Visibility Becomes a Growth Lever
Operational visibility is a business’s ability to see, measure, and understand what’s happening immediately across the company. For startups, that initially means tracking financial metrics — cash flow, customer acquisition cost, burn rate, etc. — but that’s just the start.
When startups expand beyond a single city or state, the number of areas where they can go blind increases exponentially. Vehicles travel longer distances, managers track and coach workers in different locations, and meeting customer expectations is harder. Without information to monitor performance, waste slips through the cracks until it affects the bottom line, customer satisfaction metrics, or employee turnover.
As a result, growth-stage companies are rethinking how they approach fleet and mobile operations. To them, vehicle tracking solutions have become part of a larger operational system designed to give them visibility of their assets, hold drivers accountable, and make better decisions as they scale.
And the behavior comes from an understanding that visibility isn’t about burying in the weeds, but instead developing systems that enable leaders to make quicker, more confident decisions as situations evolve.
The Hidden Costs of Inefficient Fleet Operations
Hidden costs around vehicles are one of the largest under-appreciated risks of a scaling business. Fuel efficiency, wear and tear, unplanned maintenance, and driver time are all sneaky variables that can slowly but surely destroy a bottom line. Only, that damage goes unchecked, and what happens in the background disappears, and eventually, that pockmarked runway becomes difficult to trace back to any single issue.
In the U.S., where fuel prices vary by region, and labor rates are increasing, it doesn’t take much in the way of inefficiencies for things to wind up costing your company dearly, and too, poor visibility can result in opportunities for safety violations and citations for non-compliance with regulations from DOT, FMCSA, and OSHA. Risks have a tendency to compound over time and are bound to pull most early-stage management teams in different directions, so overhead costs are typically higher than they need to be.
Controlling costs is important, though, and so there is sometimes no way to avoid decisions on the part of founders and operations to slow things down a bit.
Telematics as a Practical Business Tool
Telematics technology has emerged a long way over the last decade. What began as little more than dots on the map is now a treasure trove of rich data on road intelligence — about vehicle utilization, patterns of vehicle use, driver behavior, efficiency (or inefficiency of the routes drivers take), and vehicle maintenance needs. This is valuable information that startups can use to their advantage to make quick decisions as they scale their business.
Armed with this data, a founder can see whether their cars are idling for too long, if drivers are taking bad routes, and whether specific cars are going back to the shop with frequency. The quicker the founder knows and the quicker the founder can fix the issue, the less likely the founder is to have unnecessary downtime and the more likely the founder is to run this business for predictability.
The second thing they have going for them is that they don’t have to be a 100-store, national brand to build a telematics program. In fact, most startups — and plenty of midsize operations — are investing in telematics when they’re still too small to have much to lose from their early attempts. They’re investing in building a telematics program, not for what they are now, but for the operational infrastructure they want to already have in place when their business doubles in size.
Building Resilient Operations from the Start
Growth is super exhilarating, but growth is brutal. Most of the startups that ultimately find their way are the ones that invest in clarity before complexity happens. Operational visibility is quickly becoming a power play, no longer sitting in the operational or back-of-house function; it’s a core driver of success.
In building scalable systems, integrating services and leveraging data tools, early-stage startup leaders can create companies that can move more quickly while remaining attentive and in control. In a competitive landscape, it might be one of the best investments a startup can make.
