About this episode
Chrissy Bruno, the bookkeeper turned owner of We Care Transportation Services and its 22 vehicles in New York's Hudson Valley, bought out the taxi owner who first hired her to keep his books, inheriting a business that was 85 percent taxi and 15 percent NEMT in January 2021. She is blunt that driver classification is not the owner's choice: she owns the vans, pays the insurance and dispatches every call, so her drivers are W2. NEMT carries the better economics right now, with methadone clinic runs paid by the mile against an $8 taxi minimum fare.
Key takeaways
- An LLC is a state construct the IRS does not recognize as an entity, so the owner still pays self-employment tax. Bruno started there and converted to a corporation once profits grew.
- The corporation is why a driver accident lawsuit can only reach the roughly 10 minivans that entity owns, not her house, her personal assets or her other businesses.
- Her classification test is ownership and control: who holds title to the vehicle, who pays its insurance, and who sets the shift. Uber drivers pick their own hours, hers do not.
- She divides monthly expenses into a daily break-even number tracked in Excel. A 10 percent car insurance renewal increase sent her back to the spreadsheet to raise the target.
- Two corporations run in parallel, one medallioned for taxi and one holding the broker relationship for NEMT, with employees on both payrolls so a dispatcher can clock in and drive.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:36 Chrissy's journey into NEMT
- 4:17 How to pay drivers
- 7:57 Setting up your business structure
- 10:54 Best practices in bookkeeping
- 15:20 Chrissy's consultations
- 16:25 Driving efficiency with vehicles
- 21:09 Complexity of taxi business
- 23:17 NEMT vs Taxi
- 27:14 Efficiency with technology
