How do you tell people where your truck is today?

I've been boosting Facebook posts for almost six years and they work. I'm not going to sit here and tell you they don't. We've never had a sales problem.

But I pay for it. About $450 a week, every week, which is right around $1,800 a month. And the day I stop paying is the day the reach goes away, because none of it was ever mine.

That's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out. There's a difference between reach you rent and reach you own, and it takes a couple of seasons to feel it. What I'm working on now is spending less on boosts every year and still getting the same turnout. Not zero. Less.

Here's what each way of doing it actually costs.

Boosted posts

These are the ones that actually move people, and I still run them. A plain unboosted post reaches whoever happens to be scrolling right then, which isn't many. Put money behind it and it goes where you point it.

Two things worth knowing. It's a rental — you're buying reach for that one post, and next week you buy it again, and the invoice never stops. And you're paying to reach a lot of people who were never going to drive to you. You pick a radius and hope. The platform doesn't know who's actually bought from you before.

A schedule page on your website

Get one. It costs nothing after you build it and it answers the question for anybody who goes looking.

That's the catch, though. They have to go looking. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I wonder where that truck is parked." They check your schedule after they've already thought about you, which means it works great on the customers you already had and does nothing for the ones who forgot you exist this month.

Texting

Texting works. People read texts in about a minute, and 9am is exactly when somebody's deciding where lunch is coming from. Nothing else comes close.

But texting 400 people every morning sucks. You're standing there at 6am copy-pasting into your phone instead of prepping, and you're going to miss mornings, and the mornings you miss are the slow ones you needed it most.

There's also a legal side people find out about the hard way. You can't just start texting customers as a business — carriers make every business register first, and sending marketing texts to people who didn't clearly opt in isn't a grey area, it's a fine. Worth knowing before you build a list of numbers you can't legally use.

Email, but only to the people near the stop

I know. Email sounds like a newsletter nobody reads.

A newsletter is a monthly thing nobody asked for. That's not what this is. This is two sentences telling somebody who lives ten minutes away that you'll be close by at eleven. Different thing entirely.

Here's why I lean on it. It's the cheapest reach I've got by a mile — once the list exists, sending to it costs me almost nothing, and it doesn't cost more next month. It goes to people who already bought from me once, so they're the ones who actually turn up. And it goes out whether or not I remembered to fund anything.

That last part matters more than it sounds. When I was in Wray and emailed everybody, the folks in Akron and Brush learned to ignore me. Do that five or six times and your list stops opening anything, and a list that doesn't open is the same as no list.

None of this works without a list

That's the part that gets skipped, and it's the whole foundation.

Followers aren't a list. Neither is a boost. Both of those are reach you're renting from somebody who can change the price or the rules whenever they feel like it. An email address and a phone number are yours — nobody can raise the rate on them, and they still work the month you decide not to spend anything.

The good news is you've got something a sit-down restaurant would kill for: people standing in front of you with nothing to do for four minutes.

A QR code taped where the line forms, and whoever's at the window saying "scan that if you want to know when we're near you" — our first year doing that we picked up about 1,200 people. No ad spend, no targeting, nothing clever. They're already staring at their phones while they wait. Give them a reason.

What I'd tell you to do

Put a QR code on the truck this week. Not next month. Every service you run without one is names you're never getting back.

If you boost your posts, keep doing it. If you don't, consider it — but build something you actually own to contact your customers.

Email the people near your stop before every stop. Not the whole list.

Add texting once the list is worth it.

That's it. That's the whole strategy, and it's not complicated — the reason most trucks don't do it is that it's the same forty minutes of work before every single stop, forever, and you've already got a prep list.