10 Crucial Steps to Launch a Successful Dump Truck Business: From LLC to Mindset Mastery

Key Points:

• The essential steps to start your business involve forming an LLC, creating a business plan, and getting a CDL.
• Importance of a unique business name and protecting personal assets through legal entities.
• The necessity of a detailed business plan, including an executive summary and market analysis.
• Marketing strategies include creating a strong brand, logo, and website presence.
• Discusses the significance of securing proper certifications and insurance for liability protection.

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Hey, what's up? Today we're going to Talk about the 10 important things you're going to need to start your business. 10 most important things. The first one is the LLC. The second is the business plan. Third one is your marketing. Fourth one is if you're gonna drive your truck, you're gonna need your CDL. So CDL. The fifth one is getting the truck. The sixth one is getting insurance for the truck. The seventh is registration, so registering your truck. The eighth one is getting certifications. We're gonna talk about those as well. The next one is getting your DOT number. And then the tenth one, what I think is the most important one out of all of them because you don't have this, you can't do none of this though is the mentality, man, you gotta have the right mentality to survive in this business. Not to lie. It can be tough at times and if you're not focused, you know, have that quitter mentality. I guess you're not gonna survive.

All right, so in the LLC, the first thing you need to do is to think of a unique name. What I did was I kept the name away from my personal name that didn't want to call it Malcolm Trucking or Malcolm Transportation. My family has this old email that we used to have and it stands for GHM, which is Greg. My dad's name is Greg, my mom's name is Helen and my and my brother's name is Malcolm Marcus. We couldn't put 2M so it's just 1M for both of us. But GHM, that was the name I used, Transportation, that's the unique name I came up with. And once I got that name I went to ecorpse.gov and I plugged it in to see if anybody had taken it. Nobody took it. So I filed it on ecorpse.gov. We got to pay a hundred dollars. They gonna ask for three different options. And you can switch up the LLC if you want it altogether, or if you want it just spelled out, but they're gonna give you options to do. But those can be your three different tops and see if you can, you know, pick the best one. You can put the best one at the number one spot cause that's the one they're gonna give you. That's how you go and file yours. It's gonna cost you $100. It's easy. You don't have to pay nobody to do it.

Also, once you get the LLC back, that's when you go and file your EIN number. So you're gonna go on IRS.gov and you're going to file your EIN number. That's like your Social Security number for your business. That's for when you file your taxes. That's the number you're gonna give. Anytime you're filing for a credit report for your business or you're trying to get funding, you're gonna give them your EIN number, not your Social Security number.

So yeah, those are the two things that you're gonna have to do dealing with the LLC and the EIN. So the reason why you want the LLC, it protects you from lawsuits, if you have somebody, you know, bankruptcies, just anything, anybody trying to come for you due to business, it protects your assets. So if I have a home and I'm just running a business and I don't have an LLC, the business is not, you know, registered on anything. And say, if somebody says, "oh yeah, you, a rock fell off your truck or something that hit my car and it’s $100,000." Those people can come for your house, they can come for your assets. So it just protects your personal assets from being taken when anything ever happens.

Also, you have multiple owners for your business. The LLC U, it’s like a pass-through entity. It helps you during tax time; it’s one of the best ones. Now the one thing that people don't tell you is down the road, you can outgrow an LLC. Once you start making an excess amount of money, your tax agent, whoever you use for taxes, they will have to switch you to an S-Corp because the tax advantages are different from an LLC when you start making a certain amount of money. So that's just a little bit down the road. We'll talk about that later. But LLC is very important, man. I would not start any business without filing a legal entity.

All right, so now going into the next thing, the business plan, the business plan is the second most important thing too, it creates a roadmap for your business. It sets out, you know, what you need to do, what you're looking at, what you're facing. It's like studying for a test. You know, you're gonna kind of set a plan before you go into study. Nobody's just gonna be like, "all right, let me just do this." No, you're gonna set a plan. If you were buying a home, you're gonna have a plan before you do something. It's always best to have a plan before you do something. So the business plan is the same thing. You want to know what you're about to get into.

So the first thing you're gonna do in the business plan is executive summary. Executive summary is just pretty much a scope of what you're doing, where you're located, what you know. A lot of this stuff is going to be pretty much your guess. You’re gonna be kind of just like, "yeah, I’m gonna be in this area." You may not even be there at the point, but it’s still just putting. It’s putting a picture of what your business is going to look like. I think that’s one of the greatest things because once you put stuff on paper, that's when it really becomes reality.

Also going to talk about the product. The product in dump trucking is you getting a vehicle. You're the product. You're providing a service. That's your product, the customers. You want to know who's your customer base? Who am I going to be delivering and hauling for? You want to know the customers, then that's how you get business. The future of the company. That's how you, you know, look down the road one, two, three, four years later. You want to know where you want to be.

Anybody who starts a business, they always have a plan of where they want to be. So why not put it in the paper? Why not kind of, you know, predict where you want to be five years down the road? So it’s projections. That’s what we call them: financial projections.

Company description, just describing what it is you do, what's your name, where you guys are located, how are you going to get business? And just pretty much telling people what you do. Mission statement. The mission statement is more mentality. It is more your moral values and what you stand behind and what you're gonna do, what you're gonna accomplish. And you know, it tells pretty much the integrity of the business.

Legal structure. Another important part, I advise you to talk to a lawyer while doing this. You know, it may cost you a little money, but talk to a lawyer to know what you're going up against in dump trucking because it can get a little testy, especially when you have materials, you have to hire drivers. And drivers may do. They may be tired one day and they may not tarp the material and rocks may fly off and those rocks hit somebody's car. You know, you start to get emails saying, "hey, I was driving on I-85 today and they. A rock fell off a car and it hit my window." And I will, the first time I got it, I was a little scared. Like, "oh man, they're gonna sue me." But talking to a lawyer, you understand that that happens all the time.

Like not talking to a lawyer, just a legal entity about the business. Market research, you want to know what you, you know, what's the landscape of the industry? How many people are in the industry? How much money is in the industry? Is it room to grow? Is there room to scale? If I see, I see a business that says, "oh, this is going to be a $1.2 billion industry in the next five years, and right now it's at 28 million." I was like, "that's a lot of room to scale." So knowing the market research and just pretty much knowing also what else is out there, who else is out there? How are people getting business? Who's the top dog? Who's the top dog in the industry?

You kind of always want to know that because it may be someone you can aspire to be or you know, you make. Can connect with them and take some keys or tricks or anything from them, but that’s doing your market research. And those are pretty much the same competitive advantages. It’s going to be hard to kind of tell what your competitive advantages are when you're just starting. That’s the tricky thing about business plans. They ask you questions you like, "I don't know." But it’s still good to kind of just put something down maybe what you're thinking because you never know what that can transform into.

So pricing structure. In dump trucking, we have a pricing structure sometimes where, you know, they already tell us what they pay us. But especially if you do work for landscaping, people want dirt for their backyards to cover sinkholes. They may ask you, "hey, how much do you charge to get three, four loads of dirt from this location?" You want to have a pricing structure in place. You want to know what it is.

Now, starting off, you may not know what that is, but it’s. That's why I'm here to give you the information to tell you how to set your pricing structure. So to sum that up for the business plan, five most important things you need. Business plan is your executive summary, the product, your customer base, your market analysis, your financial projections, and your competitors. I know that. Six, I guess I can't count, but six things that I’ll give you: your competitors. You want to know who you compete with. You want to know what the industry is like. You want to know what you're doing; you want to tell people what you're doing. And I would just, you know, want to know your pricing structure as well.

But those are the main things I would use for the business plan. It’s a lot of the stuff they're gonna ask you to create. But I'm gonna give y'all a little, a little tip. I'm gonna give y'all a little cheat sheet. And don't tell nobody told you this. You can use this website called ChatGPT. You can put in what you want. You can kind of tell them what you, you know, the landscape of your business. You can put in the info and it will write you to create your business plan. So using AI really helped save a lot of time because back when I did my business plan, I had to sit there and do a paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. But now with AI, so many things you can do with AI and it helps you and it's so much faster now, saves so much time.

So I would go on ChatGPT plug in my business, what I'm doing, where I'm located, what I'm hauling, what state I'm in, what my business or mission statement is, and it will formulate all that stuff for you.

All right, so next we're gonna talk about marketing. Marketing is very important. Marketing is pretty much building a brand for your business. The first thing you want to do in marketing is to create a logo. I wouldn't create it myself unless you're talented; only if you're really good at this stuff. But to some people, you can actually go on Fiverr and you can hire somebody on Fiverr to create your logo for a little like five to $10. And thinking of a logo, you need to think of the colors. I like to think of them as like warm but soft colors that kind of stand out but not nothing too crazy.

So you see my logo here. It's been times I've put this on my truck and people have called me or called my brother or called some my family and said, "hey, I've seen GHM Transportation just because of the logo stands out." So you don't want to just go with anything that's, you know, just boring. You want to kind of jazz it up a little bit. But logo is one of the most important things.

Next is your website. And the first thing you need with your website is to go and purchase a domain name. You can go and GoDaddy and purchase a domain name. What the domain name is: so my business is GHM Transportation. I went and purchased GHMtransportation.com. That will give you, you know, you will have that as your domain name. Nobody else can steal it. And that's one step to your branding. So go and purchase a domain name and also get email addresses that are attached to that domain name.

It just looks very professional when you send an email that says.com with your business on instead of having [email protected]. So go and get that domain and get some emails attached to that domain name. [email protected]. I wish it was shorter though, I'm not gonna lie. But at least go get that email with that domain name and create your website. You can have somebody again create your website off Fiverr for little 5 to $10 just depending on what you want and tell them, "make it look good. Have it, you know, around your color scheme of your logo. And that's creating branding." When people see that color, people see your logo, they should know who you are. They should know, "oh, I've seen that before" if they're in the industry. But yes, please create a nice website.

Also, put nice picture, put professional pictures on there. I made a mistake of putting pictures I took with my iPhone. It didn't look too good. So I went back and I got some professional pictures for the website. It really transformed. It really looks better when you have professional photography pictures on there. So, you know, don't do those shortcuts. It's stuff I'm giving y'all so you won't make the same mistakes I did.

Social media. Social media is very big. A lot of people, you know, kind of skip over this with marketing. But make sure you separate your personal page from your business page. No, you've probably seen people have a business and they have a personal page and, you know, they'd be selling the product. They also got their kids on the page, but then they have a family, but then they have the business. Like, "okay, am I coming here ordering? What am I ordering? What am I doing? What business?"

Separate your social media pages, your IG, Facebook. If you feel the free, you know, need to use that. I like LinkedIn for my industry, dump trucking industry. LinkedIn has a lot of construction companies, CEOs, and presidents that are on LinkedIn. So you can really connect with them and send them an infographic which I was going to talk to you about.

Next, infographic is something like a snapshot of what you do. So when sending emails or messages on LinkedIn you can send them an infographic and they can automatically see what you do in the infographic. And it's like a. People like pictures, people like to see illustrations. You know, they might not always read the word. You might send a long email and say, "man, what is it that you do?" But if that infographic is in there, they can see what you do, but always make it to the color scheme of your business on the logo that you chose.

Business cars. Business cards are very important now. They have business cards where you can get them digitally, where you can scan a QR code. We get to tap the back of somebody's phone. I'm gonna be honest, I'm old school. I don't really like the new digital business cards because I taped it to my phone and you know, I talked to the person. I save it my contacts, but then I forget what their name is so I can't find it in my phone.

So I like tangible business cards because I can always, I keep up with them and I can always remember, "oh, I met so-and-so at this event" or "I met so-and-so at this event." It’s gonna have your logo and it’s gonna be branded digital business card. I forget what they do, you know, I had to go back to my phone. "What was that guy's name I met?" Remember what his name was?

So you can do digital business cards; I know it's the new era. But I still like just to go to Staples or anybody who makes business cards and go, you know, put your logo, put your email address where they can contact you, put your phone number, how you, know, you kind of jazzy. You want them to remember you. That’s the thing about a business card. So whatever you feel is going to stand out, that’s what you should put on your business card. But that's a part of marketing. That's a part of getting your business out there, getting your logo out there.

Some of the marketing, make sure you're just putting a lot of attention, putting attention to detail into your marketing. Don't skip over that. As I see when people create business, that's the one thing they skip over. Put attention detailing to your marketing because you're branding your brand. You're building a brand for yourself. So put attention, you know, have to put some money for it, too. So don't skip out on marketing.

Marketing is very important. If no one knows who you are or what you do, do you really have a business?

All right, so next we're gonna talk about CDL school. So if you're planning on driving your truck or if you're not planning on driving your truck, I think it's still beneficial to get your CDLs. The reason I say this is because I had a situation one time where I was driving and it was a guy that didn't have his CDLs but I knew him. He was a guy in tech and he, you know, ran his business by hiring drivers.

Well, one day he told his driver he should have got an X amount of loads said they should have got nine loads. But I was on that same job and that wasn’t a nine-load type day. It was more like a six or seven type load day. So just being able to drive and being able to communicate to your drivers what happens or what they expect. You can't do that unless you've been out there. You know, I can't tell a driver, "man, you should be doing this" and I've never done it. So not saying it can't be done but I think getting your CDL is very important.

There's also things about getting your CDL of Just imagine if you have a driver and you don't have your CDLs and you need to go and take the truck for maintenance on Saturday. Well who is gonna take the truck to maintenance? It may be 20, 30 minutes away. You got to get your driver out of his bed, which means you're going to pay that man. You're not just getting them out of this bed for free. He has to take the truck to maintenance. You may need to go pick him up, take him back home. Then when it’s ready you pick him up, take him there.

But if you had your CDL, you can just take it boom and solve the problem. So today we're gonna talk about CDL's school and how to get your CDLs. So for a dump truck, all you need is a class B license. A class B license is all you need. You can go and get your class A, that’s on you. You can go ahead and get it that you know, you can drive the dump trailers, which are the longer trailers. But class B is all you need for a dump truck.

The school that I recommended that I went to was Cat Law. When I went to their course, it was like $1,500, which was well worth it. I think now they moved to maybe like 18, 19, which still is well worth it. You go to school in the classroom for like a week and then you. No, it's actually like four days. You go to classroom for like a week, four days. And then the next week you’re in the truck. You learn how to drive a manual. So you can, you know, have manual on your license and you train for four days in the truck and you take your test on Friday.

You got to lock in that week because there’s a lot of things you’re gonna learn in a week's time to get your CDL. You’re gonna pretty much learn some mechanics. You're gonna learn the parts on the truck because you gotta pass this thing called pre-trip. And pre-trip is checking out all the major things before you get into the truck and drive to make sure the truck is safe and ready for you or whoever is about to get in and do a day's work. So pre-trip is one of the biggest things you fail. If you fail pre-trip, you can't even get into the truck and drive. Pre-trip is the first thing they test you on.

So you really got to lock in somebody. For me, I was okay. I was a little mechanically inclined, but I just had to learn. I can tell you all the parts now. But yeah, you really have to learn. You have to learn how to brake test. The brake test is a little rough too. But dealing with air brakes, they want to know that you can really maneuver air brakes because they are different from just regular car brakes.

Cat Law is the school I went to. A couple others I know is ATL Driving School. I think that one is in East Point. And you also have Roadmaster. I think Roadmaster has a couple of other locations. But if you're looking for one that gets you in and out, Cat Law, you can get it in two weeks. But you gotta lock in; like you really gotta, you gotta lock in. So to sum up, I think CDL is very important when you get into this business. It just, it saves you a lot of time, saves you a lot of money.

And just say, you don’t have a driver. From time to time you get in your own truck and drive until you find the driver. But if you don’t have your CDL, that driver leaves and you don’t have anybody ready for him to take his place. Now your truck is sitting, not making money. So CDL is very important.

All right, so next we'll talk about insurance. I don't really have to talk about the importance of insurance on a dump truck, but I will. Insurance on the dump truck, we carry like a million dollars liability. And that's because we are in a 64,000 pound machine. So, you know, if anything happens, we get into accidents, a lot of times it's not good. So we have to carry a lot of insurance on our dump truck. Especially the materials. If we waste a certain amount of materials on the street, sometimes those materials may mess up the roads, they may impede accidents, they may drop on people's cars, just anything.

And you know, we have to be able to pay for that type of stuff. So just to save you really, I know a million dollars sound like a lot, but you know, insurance policies, they, you pay a premium and you know, you pay monthly or you can pay every three months just depending on how your plan set up. What I went through insurance was Progressive. Progressive was one of the policies that I got when I first started. And I'm still with Progressive. My first year policy, if I'm not mistaken, it was like 11,000. Yeah, it was like 11,000 for one truck. And that was like maybe 900 a month.

It was something in that range. But I wouldn’t have paid it for the year. So I think I dropped like 11,000 just on insurance. Insurance is very important. You can't do nothing without it. A lot of companies are going to ask for your insurance policy. They want to be a holder on your insurance policy. That's when you're talking to different companies, they're gonna say, "hey, can you call your insurance make us a holder of policy?" That's how you get in bed with them. That's how you, you know, get once you sign your halls agreement, that's how they know they're gonna keep up with that stuff too because they know that if something happens out in the yard, they want to know that you have insurance because if not, they’re gonna be liable.

So insurance is very important. Registration, of course, is very important in your county, whoever you have insurance with. Now, there are some little tricks to insurance.

So you know, some people have an address outside of Atlanta because Atlanta insurance companies feel that if you are inside of Atlanta, inside the perimeter, you're possibly gonna be at a high risk of getting in an accident. So they look at that and they say you're in the okay, your insurance policy gonna be a little bit higher outside of Atlanta. You know, they think you're just doing work outside of there. So it’s not much traffic, it’s not many cars on the road. But that's just a little trick you hear from me.

But yeah, insurance is very important. To sum up, you can't do anything without it. You can't even move your truck off the lot until you put insurance on it. So it's best to. When you're buying a truck, which we’ll talk about in the next video, we’ll talk about getting your truck. But it's best to go ahead and find a truck and then start shopping insurance policies because you want to know what you're gonna pay. You want to know what type of insurance you need. And it can be expensive, but there are ways around it that can lower the cost.

All right, so next we're gonna talk about certifications and getting your DOT number, which I think you can do simultaneously. Since you're doing all the paperwork, you might as well do it simultaneously. So DOT number, since you're gonna. If you plan to run your dump truck just in the state of Georgia, all you need is the DOT number. People are gonna try to tell you, "oh, you need authority, you need an MC number." You don't need that, don't listen to that. All you need is a DOT number. If you're gonna run in the state of Georgia and get a DOT number, what you would do, and I'll give a more in-depth video about DOT numbers, how to do it. But just to give you a snippet of how to do it, you go on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

So you're gonna go, whatever that acronym is, FMCSA. And you’re going to fill out all the information. Now there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to say they can do it for you. And I think you can just do it yourself. You can save yourself, what they're gonna cost? $300 to $500 they gonna charge you? It’s for free. You just fill out like information about your company, what you need, what you want. And again, I'll do another video that goes in-depth how to do it.

But it's very simple. Everything I pretty much did myself because I wanted to learn. And one thing I learned was it’s not that hard. We just think it's hard. We think it's a lot of paperwork. Whoever does it for you, you don’t have to provide documents anyway, so you might as well just provide those documents, do it yourself.

Another certification you're gonna need, I think is important, is the DBE certification. Disadvantaged Business Enterprise. Again, DBE certification. What this DBE certification does is it makes you stand out in the dump truck industry. I’m not saying this will get you business, but it will make you stand out. It'll put you in like a different realm of getting business. There are a lot of companies who need DBE participation. And you can call them, "hey, do you need any of these DB participation? I can provide it for you." I’ve gotten jobs that way.

Just some calling cold call, and they say, "yeah, we need X amount of how many trucks do you have?" And that's how I was able to get work. But DB certification is very important. One of the certifying agents is MARTA. That's who I went through. There are a lot of other programs that you can go through. But MARTA was what I went through there. There are a lot of people that are gonna come out and say, "yeah, I can do it for $700, 800, 1000." But you actually can do it by yourself.

If you need help, I'm here to help you. I can walk you through the process. It's a long process, but I have a rule that I'm just gonna turn in what I have and they're gonna tell me what I need more. So it’s gonna feel like a lot. You're gonna look at all the documents you need; just start one by one, just knocking them off.

What you don't have, they're gonna come back and tell you. And you’re gonna say, "okay, well now I've only got out of 30 documents, I only need five more." Out of five, I only need one more. Like it’s just knocking it down. It’s gonna feel like a lot, but DOT number and DB certification are the two most.

One more thing to add: the DB certification. Once you get it with MARTA, you get other certifications up that you get small business, so MBE minority business. You get SBE and you get a couple. I can't remember the names off right now, the top, but you get, like five certifications in one. That just gets you to be able to market to federal contracts. It may be state contracts, it may be county contracts. It just...the government space is really a way to, you know, tap in to get work.