75,000 euros in the account—and yet even the first job can already be expensive: This is how you get started in FrachtImperium!

FrachtImperium does not put us behind the wheel ourselves. We are effectively in dispatch and decide what the driver and vehicle do next. At the beginning, things are still manageable: one driver, one vehicle and 75,000 euros in the company account. Thousands of possible transports are already waiting in the freight exchange, but not every load is suitable for your own fleet. Body type, vehicle type and available loading spaces determine which jobs can be planned sensibly. Later, different trucks, trailers, refrigerated vehicles, tankers or special transports are added, but at the beginning the priority is simply to work as sensibly as possible with the vehicle you have.

And that is precisely why the highest payment alone says very little. A job can pay excellently on paper and still turn out to be a bad tour if the vehicle first has to travel a long way empty to the starting location or cannot find a suitable follow-up load at the destination. When dispatching, FrachtImperium calculates not only the actual loaded distance, but also empty runs, driving time, loading and unloading, mandatory breaks, diesel and tolls. Vehicle wear and tear also has to be taken into account. “5,000 euros in payment” therefore does not automatically indicate how much of it is actually worthwhile for the company.

This is where the vehicle’s location becomes important. After all, the first job also determines where the driver and vehicle will be afterward. If you send the only vehicle somewhere, the next tour depends on that exact location. A load that pays slightly less can therefore be strategically more worthwhile if several useful follow-up jobs are waiting at the destination. Conversely, a high individual payment can quickly lose its appeal if a long empty run is then necessary. This chain of job, destination and next tour is later at the heart of dispatch—and it already begins with the first vehicle.

The driver is also not simply a name next to the truck. Qualifications now genuinely affect deployment planning. A small transporter requires the corresponding driving licence, a rigid truck requires at least Class C, and articulated trucks or trucks with trailers require Class CE. Dangerous goods also bring the appropriate ADR qualification into play. When expanding your fleet, you therefore not only have to consider which vehicle to buy, but also whether the existing staff can actually operate that vehicle.

You should therefore not confuse the starting capital with “75,000 euros to spend.” As the company grows, further costs and decisions arise: additional vehicles need drivers, vehicles wear out, repairs become necessary, and the company premises can be expanded with an office, parking spaces, a break room, workshop, warehouse or its own fuel station. At the same time, there is now a credit line initially amounting to 150,000 euros and a fixed overdraft facility of 250,000 euros. This can accelerate growth—but an additional truck does not automatically generate profit simply because the bank makes the purchase possible.

We already looked at this exact question in our second FrachtImperium article: When is the next truck worthwhile? In reality, the decision starts even earlier. Before vehicle number two becomes interesting at all, vehicle number one must be used as sensibly as possible. If the only vehicle is frequently travelling empty, positioned poorly or always dispatched solely according to the highest individual price, a second vehicle initially mainly makes the same problem bigger.

There is also a mechanic that becomes even more important as the company grows: partial loads. FrachtImperium does not work exclusively with complete loads, but also with individual loading spaces. Compatible loads can therefore be combined. The simple question “Which job pays the most?” later becomes more like “How can I use the vehicle and available cargo space as efficiently as possible?” Intermediate loads and intermediate unloading can also be planned into tours, meaning that a good tour does not necessarily consist of just a single journey from A to B.

That is why a genuine ten-hour balance sheet would certainly be interesting—but only if we actually played for that long. We could then record specifically which jobs were chosen, how much diesel, tolls and empty runs cost, when the first investment was made and how the starting capital actually developed. Without this data, any figure would be made up.

What can already be said is considerably more interesting than a fictional balance sheet: The real challenge of the first few hours is not to make as much money as possible from the 75,000 euros as quickly as possible. It is to understand why a high job price still does not make a good tour. Anyone who considers location, follow-up load, empty run, driver and vehicle together is already playing FrachtImperium in the way it will later demand with a larger fleet anyway.

And perhaps that is exactly why the first vehicle is more important than the second. With one vehicle, bad decisions are still manageable. With ten vehicles, the same mistakes become ten tours that are poorly dispatched at the same time.

How would you start with the 75,000 euros: first make money with one vehicle for as long as possible—or take out a loan and expand the fleet as quickly as possible?