If you sell ready mix concrete, I want you to know something: what you do is hard.
It's hard to sell it. It's hard to ship it. It's hard to negotiate it.
I had a customer ask me the other day, "Is there any other industry that's even close to this?" And I thought about it for a minute. The best I could come up with was the airline business.
Think about it. Airlines have these massive pieces of equipment. They're trying to move them around the country on tight schedules. And every single person on board thinks they're the most important passenger on that plane. They all need to get where they're going. Right now.
Sound familiar?
That's what you deal with every day. Except your equipment weighs 80,000 pounds, your product starts going bad the minute it leaves the plant, and your customers expect you to hit a 15-minute window on a jobsite that might not even be ready when you show up.
And here's the thing about airlines. Those planes aren't always on time either, are they? But people still fly. They still pay. Because they understand that moving people across the country in a metal tube at 500 miles per hour is complicated.
Your customers don't always see it that way. They think concrete is concrete. They think a truck is a truck. They don't see the batching, the logistics, the coordination between dispatch and drivers and the plant. They just see a price on a ticket and wonder why you're not cheaper.
That's what makes this job so tough. You're selling something that looks simple but isn't. You're managing a million moving pieces behind the scenes while the customer only sees the one truck that showed up.
So if you're having a rough day out there, cut yourself some slack. This isn't easy. Nobody said it was supposed to be.
But you already knew that.