war1974:
but ‘profit’ isnt how you state it.
if i have 20 drivers earning me £20 per day or £400, i then have the office, wages, calls, admin, stationary etc etc to come off said ‘profit’.
so its far lower than people think or realise (yes its obvious agencies make money).
like i have said before get a few drivers together and go and approach clients say you will work for X they will no doubt snap your hands off, just make sure you have credit checked them, can get them to pay on time after say 60 days (so initially 60 days with no pay potentially).
I’m suggesting the overhead costs in employing more drivers is negligable compared to the “velocity of money” achieved by “piling it high, and selling it cheap”.
It’s surely the overhead that is the fixed amount, and the margin per driver that can be EITHER a fixed amount or a percentage. Since agencies will try and employ drivers on as low mark as possible, rather than cherry pick the elites for a high amount - the “percentage” system isn’t going to work very well. with pretty much static rates of pay.
City Brokers can be used here for a comparison - STOCK brokers will charge something like “1% of the consideration”. Eg. if you buy £10,000 worth of shares - you’ll pay £100 commission to get them, plus another 0.5% stamp duty. These days, many brokers will let you sell shares you’ve actually purchased via them for “no commission on a closing sale” as well.
Now compare that to COMMODITY brokers - who’ll charge a flat $25, £15, or E20 depending on which market is being traded. You pay even less for higher multiples of contracts traded.
The brokers do it this way to encourage speculators to trade larger numbers of contracts at a time, and more importantly - trade them more often - the very base of the world of “day trading”.
…If a commission percentage was charged, the broker would probably lose all their business except the very small players… Brokers want as many bums on seats as possible like any other business - but they’d really prefer 100 “frequent” traders than 200 “small investors” who might only do one trade a week -
Thus, they set their commission structure to encourage those throwing less money at them per time - but a lot more often…
It doesn’t cost hardly anything more to employ 100 drivers than it does to employ 20. Thus, you should do everything you can to encourage your books to take on those 100 drivers - if, indeed that’s your target figure. If you only need 30 for the work you have as an agency, and you take on 100 - then the 70 who keep getting let down for work are going to get ■■■■■■ off fairly quickly, and move to another agency that’ll give them all the work they want.
I believe that prospective drivers when looking for an agency to sign up with - are looking at the quality and quantity of work available to them from day one BEFORE they look at the rates.
The rates, then, only need to be “adequate” rather than “top notch” to get the new sign-ups through the door…
"I can give you 5 days from tomorrow" is a much better selling point than “We pay £1ph more than our competitors, but it’s a bit quiet this week. I’ve got a dustcart job for friday, and a couple of days on tescos express next week.”
Who ya gonna call?
It ain’t gonna be “ghostbusters” either.