THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE - DFO gets a truck and hops on Schneider's IC Choice Program

Well, HERE WE GO!

After 10 months as a company driver with Schneider I am transitioning over to the O/O side of things on Schneider's Independent Contractor Choice program. If any new drivers stumble upon this thread, and you want to read about my experience as a company driver for Schneider, click here for a link to the old thread.

Call me an owner-operator, lease-operator, dumb-###, whatever else you want to call me, succeed or crash-and-burn I will be logging down my experience in this thread. I have no desire to continue with rolling-leases (i.e. never own the truck, always turn it back in at the end of the lease and get another), so my main goal is going to be getting this truck paid off and in my name as soon as possible.

So a little background about me - I'll try not to ramble too much here, but I figure it's important to know... ehh whats the right wording for it, I guess "where I stand". I'm 23, and live in Chapel Hill, NC. I have no kids, no debt, nothing/no one to tie me down or hold me back. Honestly that is the way I want it at the moment and why I am doing things as I do them. I am extremely independent and extremely stubborn and while I can't say it always works out the best for me, it has gotten me to where I am now which I am pretty content with.

Career wise I have jumped around a bit from computers to the mechanical side of things, to driving trucks now, but I've always tried to work at jobs that will provide me with experiences that I can apply to other fields. I may have kinda dead-ended things at trucking here, but honestly I am loving this job and know that it is not something I want to do for a year and then switch it up.

In terms of owning my own business, well, I have never owned my own business before - this will all be very new to me and I know that I will have a lot to learn. I am good at saving money and and preparing for the unexpected. I don't make impulse decisions and try to research and look over plans and outcomes before I take a plunge.

I did a lot of talking to IC drivers that were on Choice. For those that don't know, drivers running on the Choice board dispatch themselves via a web-based load board rather than having a dispatcher find loads for them. Go where you want, home when you want, make it work or lose it all, it's up to you as the driver. Rather than base the majority of my decisions off what a recruiter told me, what I read on the internet, or what someone told me their friend's mom's stepdad's 2nd cousin told them, I figured that just talking to these drivers would be the most reliable source. I know that everyone is busy with their day and many times the last thing they want to happen is to have someone approach them and hound them with questions. I made sure to never corner any of these drivers, but would just simply ask them, "hey, did you finance your truck through Schneider, and are you liking the choice program?" About 90% of the drivers I talked to did get their truck from Schneider, and 100% of them said they were happy with Choice. I did get into a little more in-depth conversation with a few drivers while sitting at our OC's (terminals) and they all had basically the same thing to say - "its pretty good".

I also talked to 2 drivers who were running on the mileage program. Neither of them were very happy with it. One told me he wished he had just stayed a company driver, the other told me "less miles, same money" (in reference to being a company driver). The mileage program is similar to what many other companies run - the driver is responsible for the truck, a dispatcher is responsible for the loads - the company you make your truck payments to controls your miles - for me, this was NOT an option.

So, with that in mind, about 2 months ago I put in an application to get on Choice. I just did it all online and kind of forgot about it for a while and didn't hear back. I started pursuing it a little more aggressively and ended up sitting down with my DBL in person and telling her that I was interested in getting on Choice. She wasn't really happy to hear this because it meant her losing a driver (one that never gave her problems or cussed her out), but to her credit she was supportive and helpful. This finally got the ball rolling, and what do you know, that application that was sitting in a pile up in Green Bay magically got moved to the top and we started making some progress.

After talking with the IC recruiter in Green Bay, we basically ended the conversation with "you're accepted, keep driving and in the meantime start looking for a truck". I told them I was looking at both the option of bringing in an outside truck (buying from a dealer, etc.) as well as getting a truck from Schneider. The recruiter was very helpful with giving me the information needed if I wanted to bring in an outside truck and did not push me to get a truck through Schneider in any way. I was very surprised by this, it was nice to see.

In the end I decided that I was going to get a truck through Schneider. I have near zero credit history, and getting financing from the outside would have been all but impossible. If I did manage to pull it off I would have had to purchase a much older truck, without any kind of warranty and that I would truly be "on my own" with. Although I would have preferred to have gotten one from a dealer or gotten financing from the bank, etc., in my opinion I would be putting myself in a much riskier position should I run into any major issues. While I have been doing a lot of saving, I simply do not have enough to cover the cost of a new engine or other extreme mechanical failure. I know some will say "then you shouldn't be getting your own truck", and I understand that. But I have to start somewhere and I feel that Schneider will give me the ability to safely start out.

The downside is that for the first year I am still making lease payments on the truck, so not everything goes towards paying it off. After the lease term is over I can either turn the truck back in to Schneider, or they will finance the balloon payment at the end if I want to keep it for myself.

At first they decided to set me up with a truck out of Charlotte. This would have been convenient, but unfortunately the trucks they had I was not interested in. One was a almost new Cascadia with 38k miles and the other a slightly older one with 120k. Both had the DD15, 10spd, and battery-powered EPU.

Since I plan to complete the purchase of my truck, I wanted to find a truck that had at least some of what I was really looking for. While Schneider did not offer me a Peterbilt 379 with a good old N14 Cummins and 18 speed, they did have a 2011 Cascadia with a Cummins ISX, a 13 speed, and a diesel TriPac APU, with around 200k still remaining on the engine and transmission warranty, and more on the rears. "Put my name on that one" I told them. Although the Cummins is known to have some EGR issues, it is under warranty and for the mechanic in me, I am more familiar with Cummins than other engines and it will be much easier to work on than a Detroit or a CAT.

Keeping my location in mind and knowing the heavy loads I pull through the mountains usually headed either north or west or a combination of the two, the 13 speed will be very nice, and the Cummins will pull great and there is no arguing that Cummins has hands-down the best engine brake retarding power around. The diesel APU will let me stay comfortable for as long as need be without needing to idle the tractors engine to keep the batteries charged. Although it is not the entire truck that I wanted it is very similar to what I would have chosen otherwise.

Since this truck was a few years older, it was also significantly cheaper. The base price is $80,000 vs 110k and 130k for the other trucks in Charlotte. I was only eligible for a 52-week lease period. At the end of the lease the residual value is $52,000. If all goes as planned I should be able to knock out a very large chunk of this within my first year and be well on to owning the truck completely.

After choosing my truck there have been a few phone calls, emails, and paperwork sent back and fourth but all in all it has been very easy so far. I am picking up my rental car (covered by Schneider) tonight and will bring it back home and load up my stuff and head for Green Bay tomorrow. I'll probably stop about half way and finish the drive on Sunday, I'm not interested in trying to pull off the 1000 mile drive in one go.

Although it wasn't mentioned, I am assuming the cost of gas for the car will be on me. No problem, I'm actually surprised they covered the cost of the rental car, can't complain! The hotel is covered by Schneider if I want to share a room with another driver. I asked to have my own room and I will cover the cost myself, nothing against other drivers but after doing the company driver orientation while sharing a room, well, I prefer just to have a bit of space to myself. I can sleep like a baby with a reefer or straight pipes next to me at a truck stop, but a TV and light flickering on all night will keep me WIDE awake.

So, that's where I am at this point. I will wait until I have the actual in-my-hands papers about all the insurance costs, payments, etc. before I talk about those, but I will be happy to share them. From what I am told the closing for the trucks is on Monday, a short day of paperwork is on Tuesday, another meeting on Wednesday afternoon and on Thursday we learn the system for dispatching ourselves. It looks like there is a fair bit of downtime, the days won't be as full as they were during company driver training. The motel has breakfast, Schneider will pay for lunch on Monday and after that we're on our own. They say I should be able to bring my truck over from the shop to the motel by Wednesday and put all of my stuff inside it then.

I have some pictures of the truck but want to get some myself as the truck hadn't been cleaned up when the old ones were taken.

Really looking forward to getting started!