Sounds good. Yes, downtime is extremely costly - still have to pay employees, potential for upset customers, headaches galore! Lots of lost money and lots of lost mental capacity.
It sounds like you have some room to increase capacity and with the fall/winter coming up, you don't need the extra truck - so best to wait and/or be extremely picky with your next deal on a truck. Maybe you'll find a good deal in the offseason but you have time to be picky.
A good way to look at it, is a vehicle/equipment that doesn't have downtime.. is a fairly fixed expense. And we all love that predictability. Something always needing attention has a variable expense. Not only that but it's extremely stressful.
Sounds like saving up might be the best but again, just an opinion. We still buy used stuff once in a while but have moved to purchasing new with maintenance plans. We had to raise prices slightly to cover it but it was less than we expected. The lack of worry, downtime, etc... is well worth it to us and the price increase didn't impact the closing rate. If you go this route, don't forget to factor in insurance cost. Especially with financing, you'll sometimes be required to carry higher insurance coverage. You just want to make sure your profits are healthy and stay healthy. Too many people eat into profits to buy new stuff and that's just a bad idea.
Thank you for your thoughts on the situation. There are definitely a lot of factors to consider. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on increasing the capacity of the truck that we have already!
Do you have steady business coming in? How much more, per hour, per job.. however you price.. would you need to increase your pricing to cover the cost of a new truck and subsequent insurance, to make it work? Or maybe get one that is just 2-3 years old after the biggest depreciation hit has taken place. How much would you need to raise your prices to meet that and would that increase be accepted by the customer base? Likely, so.
