“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
It’s a common saying from Peter Drucker that you’ve probably encountered: how can you improve, grow, adapt, react if you don’t know the realities of your business? If you work with a savvy financial professional, you’ll know when it’s time to purchase new vehicles or hire more employees or secure extra financing.
I’ve been with The LMC Group since 2017, and I’m currently working as a sales and marketing specialist in the livery industry. My entire career has been spent in sales and service in hospitality and travel, with most of my time spent in hotel management. In many ways my transition has been seamless, but it wasn’t long before I realized something was missing from the livery industry, something that was an essential component of the sales, staffing, pricing, and marketing decisions I made every day while managing hotels.
What was this essential component? A benchmarking report showing us the average key numbers and performance indicators within our market.
Imagine my surprise when I transitioned to livery and found that no one knew what their competitors were doing or what their market potential was, aside from anecdotal data gathered in peer groups or unverified responses to surveys here and there.
How do you set your prices? How do you adjust them up and down based on current market conditions? How do you know when to schedule extra help and when you can get by with a lighter payroll? How do you know that you had 80% of your vehicles in service last week but your competition in the market had 99%? Or 50%? How do you know if you are sinking or swimming?
The bottom line is that most owners of ground transportation companies don't know the answers to these questions, and that means that they are leaving money on the table. Not only are they missing opportunities to grow, they are also nowhere near maximizing their full revenue.
Unlike a restaurant that can turn today’s “fresh seafood platter” into tomorrow’s “fisherman’s chowder” to recoup the costs of their investment, a livery company has no chance of recapturing the day’s lost revenues once the sun goes down. Why would the limousine industry not make this a cornerstone of their business model? It’s pretty simple: this information is not currently available in our industry.
The LMC Group has decided to introduce this critical tool—the LMC Leaderboard—to the industry. Currently participation is by invite only for the initial roll out of the program. We will be identifying a handful of owners and executives who are dialed into their day-to-day operations and hyper-focused on making sure they are gaining the right market share for that moment in time.
From this group, we will be looking for 10 people to be on the Founders Board. This group of Leaderboard trailblazers will help us drive the direction of this project in a way that will be most beneficial and useful to the industry. Once the LMC Leaderboard is introduced to owners in the livery industry, we will welcome all feedback and suggestions. The subscribers to this revenue tool will be able to attend an annual meeting to discuss best practices and will be privy to ground-breaking international trends that we can adopt ahead of competitors. The Founders Board will vote in and out all future developments.
If you would like to request an invitation, please email me at nicole@lmc.group or Jessica Boulerice at jessica@lmc.group and we will be happy to answer any questions and discuss this opportunity. We have both used this tool extensively in other industries and are excited to bring it to livery.
Invitations will go out to our current list of invitees in May - I guarantee you won’t be able to miss them!