Lumber dealers are in a challenging situation. Big box stores want your customers. Some companies sell directly to your customers while other companies sell their products to anyone and everyone, pushing profit margins down.
You have to have what your customer wants and you have to be able to get your products to your customers exactly when they want it. At the same time, you must balance inventory levels with turns in order to stay profitable.
As lumber dealers, you also must compete with the increased growth and demand for building materials online.
The final challenge is that as lumber dealers you are also competing with larger companies that have teams of experts and a lot more money which makes them an agile competitor. When they want to make a change, it appears easy because they have the people and budgets to make it happen, fast.
Most lumber dealers like you don’t have big teams of experts or the disposable money to make the types of changes that can improve your business quickly. Instead you know that changes need to:
- Benefit to your customers
- Differentiate you from competitors
- Not Increase your costs
- Free-up your management’s time so they can focus on important issues
How Outsourcing Delivery Can Help You Meet All 4 of These Needs
First and foremost, if you are operating your own in-house delivery service, you are letting some customers down. No matter how many vehicles you have in your fleet, there are days when you could use more. Hint: If Amazon and FedEx can add more vehicles by outsourcing so can you.
The “We try hard or do our best to meet our customers’ delivery requests” mind-set is no longer good enough. In fact, it is a customer losing mind-set. The dealer who can most reliably get materials to job sites when needed has a significant advantage over you now. Builders and contractors are focused on reducing waste and inefficiency and believe me, they notice and know which dealers offer the best delivery.
Making a delivery with one- or two-days’ notice may have been acceptable in the past, but those days are gone. Today, delivering the same day and within hours of ordering is fast becoming the norm.
Can your delivery team keep pace with these growing demands and expectations?
When a dealer outsources their delivery, they reduce a lot of costs – for vehicles, maintenance, insurance, drivers, and downtime.
Outsourcing also frees up time for your employees to focus on other areas of your business.
There are several delivery services out there that as a lumber dealer you should consider. One that is raising the bar and that stands out is GoFor Delivers. They are on-demand and offer 3-hour same-day local delivery. They have the types of trucks required for different building materials, and their drivers know their way around job sites. I recommend you talk GoFor Delivers. Their experience and success in helping building materials dealers is game changing and will provide you with that competitive edge you have been looking for.
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