Cost per kilometre comes before rate per kilometre
A quoted rate is only good or bad against your own cost, so the first deliverable is an all-in cost per kilometre built from the fleet's actual books. Fixed costs (truck payments, insurance, plates, the office) get spread over the kilometres a unit realistically runs, not the kilometres you hope for. Variable costs (fuel, driver pay, maintenance, tolls) get measured per kilometre from settlement and fuel-card data.
Then the number gets honest: costs are divided over loaded kilometres, because the empty leg back from a cheap load is part of that load's price. Out of this comes a floor rate by lane, the discipline to decline freight below it, and an operating ratio tracked monthly, so the whole fleet's direction is visible in one number. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a lane that runs one empty kilometre for every four loaded needs a rate a quarter higher than its cost per total kilometre, which is why two carriers can quote the same freight and only one of them is wrong.
| Cost line | Behaviour | The lever |
|---|---|---|
| Truck payments, insurance, plates | Fixed per unit | Utilization: kilometres spread the cost |
| Fuel | Variable per kilometre | Routing, idle time, price discipline |
| Driver pay | Variable, mostly | Pay structure aligned with loaded kilometres |
| Maintenance | Variable, rises with fleet age | Replacement cycle and reserve pricing |
| Dispatch and office | Fixed, grows in steps | Add overhead after trucks, not before |
The next truck is arithmetic, not ambition
Growth in trucking is bought one expensive unit at a time, so the marginal-truck question deserves a real model: what revenue the unit can win at today's rates, at what utilization, with which driver, and what the payment, insurance and maintenance stack does to contribution. We build that model from your existing per-truck results rather than industry folklore, and we run the downside case, softer rates and a slow first quarter, before the deposit leaves the account. Used against new is part of the same model: lower payments against higher maintenance and downtime, priced with reserve rates from your own fleet rather than with optimism.
Sometimes the answer is not yet: no driver identified, a maintenance backlog on the current fleet, or one customer already carrying too much of revenue, a concentration risk another truck would deepen. A CFO who will say not yet is the one worth paying.
Financing from someone who sat on the lender's side
Walla Assaf came to public practice from banking and corporate finance, which changes how a financing file gets built. Equipment loans and leases are negotiated with covenants and buyouts understood in advance; an operating line is sized from the receivable cycle instead of a round number; and where the company factors its receivables, we price the facility's true annual cost against a margined line and chart the graduation off it.
Lenders also want statements they can rely on, and Compilation Engagements prepared by a CPA firm carry weight a spreadsheet does not. The financing itself, from applications to term-sheet comparisons, runs through Business Financing Advisory inside the same mandate, so the person modelling the truck also defends the file.
A monthly rhythm that answers three questions
The Fractional CFO engagement settles into a rhythm built around three questions: is each truck earning, is cash covering the payment stack, and can we grow. The monthly pack tracks revenue per truck, loaded-kilometre share, cost per kilometre, fuel per kilometre and days sales outstanding, drawn from books kept current rather than rebuilt each quarter. Every quarter we stress the plan against a rate drop, a fuel spike and the loss of the largest customer, so the response exists before the event does.
Cash gets its own instrument, because trucking's timing runs against you by design: fuel is weekly, drivers are biweekly, truck payments are monthly, and shippers pay in thirty to sixty days. A rolling 13-week cash forecast makes that gap visible before it becomes a factoring decision made under pressure, and it is the first thing a lender asks to see when the fleet wants to grow.
We run this for fleets based in Mississauga and across the GTA, sized to the company rather than to a template, and scope is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call. There is no fixed fleet minimum: the work pays for itself once truck, lane and financing decisions carry real dollars.
