I'm facing supply issues with my business. I have access to vastly more work than I can actually do, so I need to get some outside help. The nature of the work is such that I can use help at most times of day between 0800-1700 EST and I don't really have any need for these people to do anything but call trucking companies and offer them my freight.

I'm planning to just pay a flat fee for every truck found that actually picks up a load. This is a basic outbound calling sales type activity.

I'm thinking about letting people work from home any hours they want. I'll provide the software and phone line and they use their own computer and internet.

I'm planning to either pay some kind of sliding scale where more loads covered equals more money per load, or just a flat fee per load.

Is there anything I'm not seeing here that I should be? I realize that this sounds like a 'make 1000 a week from your bedroom!' type of deal... So how do I communicate to prospects that this isn't a scam?

What's the question I should be asking that I haven't asked yet?

You could post it on UpWork or similar. There will be calling professionals on there who'll work for flat rate or a minimum wage + flat rate. Save yourself money over a salaried + commission employee.

Just pick people from places other than India that's racist with American accents/in the US.

If you want to do it locally, "commission based telemarketing secretary for freight company" might do the trick. Just need to word so they understand that they'll be offering work and not cold calling sales, makes it more attractive.

Presumably these trucking companies are being cold called versus as a follow-up to some other campaign that warms them up?

Consider Eastern Europe (basically any country that still offers it's own local currency) and prioritize people with cold calling experience who have above average English-speaking skills.

What is the volumistic throughput needed for these folks in terms of results? how many people should they be closing per week/month/quarter? Will they manage an ongoing book of business with these companies once they are closed or is that being handled by an entirely different job role?

The other thing I'll say about the job market on roles like this is that you can usually ask/encourage your first employees to tell people like them about the job. Whether it is stay at home moms or college kids these folks tend to know several other people who may be worth considering hiring because they are in a similar situation.

Someone doing this job full time should be able to do 10-30 of these a week. Someone who has a large network of carriers running regular lanes could be doing vastly more. Part of this program is going to be the commitment that the main office isn't going to be making outbound calls to cover trucks. This means that they are free to develop networks of trucking companies that like our freight and use them to cover progressively more trucks. I don't particularly care if they see this as an extremely part time gig and cover way less. I probably will have a problem with someone being terrible at the job and having a radically lower close rate than other people though.

I'm stealing this whole model from another company (although they are very large and simply hire call center employees for this role) and I'm not particularly worried about the economics of it. I can afford to pay 50 bucks per truck sourced, which means that this is potentially a pretty decent work from home gig.

I 100% agree about referrals... And I think stay at home moms are probably the perfect demographic for this. Particularly the ones with real skills whose schedules don't work with full time employment.

Two things that I think are important: First I want to hire outside the industry. Industry people are much too likely to only be there to try to steal an account, and worrying about that is going to fundamentally change the relationships we have with those people. Second I want to retain the final say on whether we say yes or no to a truck. Quality control is an area where we have meaningful advantages over other brokerages, and I think letting that go would be a huge mistake. In borderline cases I want to actually talk to the person we're thinking about doing business with.

Does all of that sound reasonable?

wrong thread

I would be interested in doing this type of work for you BoredSocial. PM me when you are looking to move forward with this.


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So time to update I guess...

I did end up getting someone to fill the role. He's a former co-worker of mine from the first brokerage I ever worked at, so he was a proven commodity which has actually been REALLY helpful.

The reason why it's been REALLY helpful is that the idea I had simply didn't work. It's not that the pay wasn't fair for the work (although I did end up bumping the per load rate to 60 bucks), it's that there wasn't enough actual work to do which means that the easiest 10% of his work was generating 85-90% of his results, and his results weren't all that great.

Thankfully I was able to see this quickly and efficiently because the person in the role was so obviously doing everything as well as could be expected, so I didn't have to worry whether it was him or the system. He's also capable of being VERY productive so bringing him on has added a lot of total capacity.

So I'm going to be starting him on the coming Monday as a some tbd job title that manages carrier sourcing for a specific account. I'll hand over 15% of the brokerage and instantly drop a meaningful amount of my overall work.

The plan is to take the time that has been freed up, hire 2-3 outside sales contractor types at 20% source more freight, and hopefully start turning this into more of a real business rather than just a one man show + my wife assisting me with keeping everything organized.