One team member kept the fleet filled from existing customers and did it well. But the new business was run by the owner alone. He was the subject-matter expert, the relationship, the closer. This gave the company a hard ceiling: it could only grow as fast as one person had hours in the week to win work. A business that scales through one person doesn't scale.

They’d seen the cap and tried to fix it — recruited a business development manager who arrived with the usual promise, a “black book” of contacts. Three months in, no new business. So I asked the questions the numbers couldn’t: what does your pipeline look like? What conversations are you having, with whom, at what stage? There were no real answers. In logistics, the sale is short — people need to give you a try, and then you win them by impressing and over-delivering — so “no pipeline” isn’t a long-sales-cycle excuse. It’s an activity-and-quality problem. The hire wasn’t growing the business; they were costing it.

The same blind spot showed up everywhere once you looked. Capacity left the depot half-used on trips the business was already paying to run. A team member who needed babysitting was pulling colleagues off their own work, and the previous month had produced a run of complaints and missed sales. These weren't separate problems; they were one problem: an owner with no systems or habits for monitoring performance and having the conversations that go with it.

We tackled it on three fronts, all the same discipline applied in different places.

On new business, we put short-term goals and regular reviews in place that tested not just whether activity was happening, but whether it was the right activity, the conversations, the contacts, the stages, so effort could be judged on quality, not just motion.

On the fleet, we calculated the utilisation percentage and started tracking how well they filled the space they were already moving: back-loads on return trips, co-loading shared space, and front-loads on collections. Nobody pretended 100% was the target — it isn’t achievable, and chasing it is a distraction. Moving the needle little by little was the win because space on a trip you’re already running converts almost straight to profit.

On the wrong hire, I sat down with the team member and asked them to explain their role to me — why it mattered, why service and sales were central to the business growing and to looking after customers. There was initial enthusiasm. It faded the moment they were asked to report on what they were doing and take responsibility for it. They resigned two weeks later. For the business, and for someone who wasn’t committed to its purpose, that was the right outcome.

The fleet didn’t change. The cost base didn’t change. What changed was how much of the capacity they were already paying for actually got sold.

By filling space that was already on the move — backloads on the return leg, shared loads, collections made on the way — the business lifted its weekly turnover by around two-thirds within eight weeks.

And because not a penny of extra cost went into earning it, almost all of that increase fell straight to the bottom line: an operation that had been barely covering its costs was now turning a real weekly profit, with the recovered capacity going into serving more customers.

Alongside it, the business development role now focused on real goals and was evaluated on the quality of its activity.

The team member who wasn’t committed had moved on — leaving the rest free to do their jobs without distraction.

"Space on a trip you're already running converts almost straight to profit."

Growth here was never an effort problem — the team worked hard.

It was a right-people problem. Small businesses too often hire a body to do a job, rather than the right body who understands the business and can actually contribute.

That mistake costs an SME far more than it costs a large company — there’s no size or slack to let people learn through too many errors, and in logistics, reputation and reliability are the whole game.

Underneath the hiring problem lies a bigger one: most owners have never developed the skills, systems, and processes to monitor performance and hold performance conversations.

That conversation is a two-sided coin — it nips problems in the bud and addresses people who aren’t delivering, while recognising and motivating those who are.

Done consistently, it’s what turns a team that’s good at tasks into a team that grows a business.