
I had started my own business selling sheds and delivering for myself. Sales were relatively slow to begin with, my other business (vinyl siding) was really slow, and money was most definitely an issue.
The clutch went out in my truck, and there was absolutely no money to fix it.
We went to church the next Sunday and afterward, a friend came up to me and said he felt like he was supposed to give me something. It was $1,000 cash.
Turns out his wife did the exact same thing to my wife, giving her $1,000 cash. The money totally covered the cost of the new clutch. It was absolutely mind-boggling.
In my opinion, there are very few industries where “competitors” will actually come together to help each other, and I firmly believe that haulers are some of the best at doing just that.
Also in my opinion, it is extremely important for us as haulers to stick together and help each other (monetarily and otherwise) simply because no one else understands what we deal with as well as a fellow hauler.
I have been a hauler longer than some of you have been alive and had to learn a lot through the school of hard knocks, but what I see now on the Facebook hauler page is, in my opinion, priceless.
You can literally post about almost any problem you are having with equipment, customers, dealers, etc., and within hours (sometimes minutes), you will have multiple people offering to help diagnose or even solve your immediate issues.
That is worth so much more than any manual that may or may not address your problem.
Why should we help each other out? My answer would quite simply be “Why not”? There is so much knowledge in the shed-hauling industry that, to me, there is no reason to not share that knowledge with others.
In most cases, it’s not like giving someone a hand is going to cost you any business or cause you to lose any customers, and a lot of times it literally doesn’t cost you a thing. It is just shared knowledge about how to handle a situation or helping to diagnose a problem that you may have experienced and solved.
I shall now get on my soapbox about an organization that is specifically targeted to the shed- hauling industry. The Shed Haulers Brotherhood (SHB) is designed to be an affordable solution for breakdown “coverage” when something breaks (which we all know it will at some point), but that’s not the greatest thing about it. It is much more about helping others.
I think a lot of haulers look at it as “What does the organization do for me” when we should be looking at it as “What can I do through SHB to help others.”
I am a firm supporter of SHB, not for what I can get out of it but for what
I can contribute for/to other haulers. Had someone not helped me way back when, I possibly could have found an alternate solution, but the fact that someone did help was literally almost overwhelming at the time.
For those of you who are not Christians, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs because I will be doing a little preaching here (actually, maybe you do need to read this paragraph).
If you are a believer and you are not tithing, you are missing out on one of the easiest things you can possibly do to have more peace financially.
Personal story again. Way back when (like over 30 years ago), we were really struggling financially. Like paycheck to paycheck, and even that wasn’t enough. My wife and I had a discussion about tithing, and my opinion was that we couldn’t afford to tithe. Hers was that we couldn’t afford not to (of course she won).
From that time on, there was never a question of whether we would tithe or not, the question was simply how much. We started out doing the biblical 10 percent (I was on salary at the time) but then when I started my own business and the income was much more erratic, we started tithing on how much we needed/wanted per week to live on (so if we needed $1,000/week to pay the bills and eat, the tithe was $100/week).
It wasn’t always easy, and we did go through some really tough times, but I can also tell you that we never went hungry and somehow the bills always seemed to get paid. If you don’t belong to a church, give to a charity or a missionary somewhere, just do it.
Along those same lines, I am a firm believer that you cannot hold onto what you have been given with a closed hand. Imagine trying to give someone something and they keep their hand closed. How would you give it to them? If we hold what we have been given with an open hand, we are also able to be given more.
Over the years, we have been blessed far beyond what we deserve and have been able to help people who are going through tough times. My greatest motivation for generating as high a level of income as possible is to be able to help as many people as possible.
We may not always be able to help each other monetarily, but we all have knowledge that can be helpful to others.There are a lot of folks in the hauler community who have so much knowledge and insight to offer—most of the time, all you need to do is ask.