How to cover a day without wasting cars
The hours that pay are not spread evenly, and covering everything the same way is the most expensive way to work.
Demand for transport is not flat: it has narrow peaks and long empty plains. An operator that puts the same number of cars on every hour pays for the empty stretches in order to be ready for the peaks, and in the peaks the same number is not enough.
Look at the week, not the day
The peaks repeat: early morning to the stations and airports, evening to the restaurants, Friday and Saturday night, the days of a trade show. Before reorganising anything, take four weeks of calls and count how many came in by hour and by day. It is an afternoon’s work and it is worth more than any impression.
The three things to count
- The jobs done, which is the only number most operators have
- The requests drivers refused, which tell you whether the problem is price
- The requests you could not answer at all, which are the ones that cost you the customer
The third is the most important and almost always the least recorded. A lost call leaves no trace anywhere: if you do not write it down, next year you will take the same decisions on the same incomplete figures.
How to ask for cover from people who are independent
An affiliated driver is not an employee and you cannot put them on a shift. What you can do is make it worth being there: say in advance where and when cars are short, and show how many jobs went through in that window. A driver who knows that on Tuesday at seven there are six jobs in one area goes there on their own.
The gap almost nobody looks at
The empty run back. A long job out of town takes a car out for twice the time you see on the booking. If long jobs are a serious part of the work, they have to be counted as two, otherwise the cover looks sufficient on paper and never is in practice.