This is our early Christmas Gift to home Building Centers across Canada. Because one Saskatchewan ownership group just discovered they were better off delivering lumber by taxi than using one of their own trucks.
A few months ago, a new ownership group took over several Home Hardware locations in Saskatchewan. Like many new building center owners, they inherited more than inventory and staff — they inherited a fleet of trucks with almost no usable data.
They didn’t know which trucks were performing well.
They didn’t know which ones were costing them the most.
They didn’t know what anything truly cost to operate.
They were flying blind when it came to fleet decisions.
This is something we see regularly. At least once a quarter, a building center group tells us a similar story. New owners step in, trucks are already there, and decisions continue to be made based on habit or gut feel rather than facts.
In this case, the initial call was straightforward. The new owners needed a Ford F-550 flatbed. We were able to source it, sell it to them, and deliver it without issue. Everything went smoothly.
But as the relationship continued, we started asking deeper questions about how they planned to manage their fleet and what information had been passed down from the previous owners.
The answer was simple: very little.
So we walked them through an exercise we’ve refined over years of working with building centers. We asked them to create a basic Excel spreadsheet and list every truck in their fleet. Each month, they tracked starting and ending kilometers, along with expenses like insurance, fuel, financing, labor, maintenance, and repairs.
From there, we ran the numbers through a cost-per-kilometer calculation.
For companies delivering lumber, cost per kilometer is one of the most valuable KPIs you can track. It cuts through opinions and gives you a clear picture of what’s really happening.
In this case, one result jumped off the page immediately.
They had an older, larger flatbed delivery truck that was costing $3.17 per kilometer to operate.
Even worse, they had newer trucks with similar capabilities that could do the exact same job for far less.
Our recommendation was simple and honest. At $3.17 per kilometer, it didn’t make sense to run that truck even once. You could literally deliver lumber by taxi for less money.
So we told them to take the plates off it, park it on the corner of the lot, and get rid of it.
And this outcome isn’t unusual. Every time building center owners start tracking real fleet data, there is almost always at least one truck that doesn’t make sense anymore. Sometimes it needs to be retired. Sometimes replaced. Sometimes repurposed or used only as a backup.
The value comes from knowing — not guessing.
That’s why we decided to take this basic calculator and turn it into a more comprehensive fleet cost spreadsheet, and give it away for free. It’s yours to download, use, and modify.
Because when building center owners understand what their trucks truly cost to operate, they can manage their delivery operations with confidence, reduce waste, and make smarter replacement decisions.
Merry Christmas to all the building center owners across Canada from my family to yours!