Best place to find flatbed loads?

Oh yes,.. and www.google.com

Thats where we all started. Good luck with your ventures.

Hurst

 

Are you asking which load board to use or for guys to give up their contacts to you?

 

Man that book looks old, even the pages have turned yellow.

You could have made a smart ### comment about finding all your loads on the ground or something to that effect.

Me, personally, being a company driver at the moment I keep a notebook of everyone that I move stuff for. May come in handy later, maybe not but I am compiling a pretty big list because of it.

 

I keep a list of phone numbers and names for every broker, shipper and receiver I've worked with since I leased on with the carrier I am with now. Besides a few Chicagoland shipers,.. everything they do is loadboard loads,.. so its not like I am stealing any clients when I move on from here. I look at it as building a database for prospecting loads and survival.

It helped me this weekend. Carrier booked a brokered load out of Amarillo down to Roma, Tx. I really wanted to get out of Tex but the load actually paid good enough to dead head if I had to so I took it. Roma is a cruddy little border town SE of Laredo. And we all know how lovely Laredo rates are. They make Miami look good.

Carrier scores a respectable paying load out of Laredo. Tarp load of fencing. 2 drops. 1 in Cortez Co and the other in Peyton Co. Cortez is over near the Utah boarder,.. Peyton is just south of Denver. One look at the weather and I canceled the load. Dispatcher is freaking out. WTF she tells me!?! Sorry,.. but I dont do mountains when blizzards are rolling through. No amount of money is worth the risk to me.

So she's struggling to find something. I call on a few brokers who owe me. Only one has a load coming out. Seadoo's going up to St Paul for $1900. I said I need a favor,.. not looking to do one. I hung up. Who rides SeaDoo's in St Paul in January? Dispatch found a load going to Jersey for $3000. I told her to wait a min and called a shipper in Hebbronville that I knew might have something. Sure enough, they were looking for a hotshot truck to take a single pallet (2k lbs) up to Trinity. Asked where I was and if I could do it. I played Coy and said not sure,. I'm near Laredo and your a bit of a hike from here. I'm waiting on a call from another company to see if they will meet my rate quote. She said I'll pay you $1500 if you can drive straight through and deliver it tonight. With dead head,.. it was only 430 miles. Um,.. yeah, I'll be right there. Called my dispatcher so she could do the confirmation/insurance and viola,.. here I am in Trinity, Tex.

So moral is,.. phone calls,.. phone calls,. and more phone calls. Eventually you will find something. I delivered Friday night,.. been sitting here at a mom n pop truck stop kicking back for the weekend. Weather is beautiful. I'm actually considering throwing my AC in the window,.. but steady breeze is nice,. so arguing with myself as to which I like better right now. LOL

The fun begins again tomorrow morning. Trinity is kinda in the middle between Austin, Houston and Dallas. Middle of no where,.. but not the end of the world. I just cant seem to get out of Texas. LOL

Hurst

 

Out of curiosity what are you pulling that 30k gross trailer with?

I have a 2016 diesel dually but am scared to pull more than around 20k with it (trailer and load). My truck has a flatbed with tools and such and weighs 10k empty. Going over 30k gross combined weight in a pickup freaks me out. That is why I bought my Pete. The dually has plenty of power but the stopping is what worries me.

 

I used to drive a 5500 dodge grossing 43k at times. Got pulled over once because the DOT officer thought I would be overweight.... Fooled him, I was 20-80 pounds under on each axle.... LOL It was a 44' PJ trailer with 24k limit tandems on the trailer. 43k was the max I could go with that setup and I could easily pull 20k in cargo. But, you are correct about the stopping of that kind of weight. I was actually about a foot longer bumper to bumper than a Cascadia pulling a 53' trailer.