A newbie with no direction.

You are welcome. Just be good and do good where possible. And remember your hours before anything. Be professional. You will be ok.

 

If you picked a company ask them to give you name & phone number of a driver that lives near you. Ask driver how many miles he's getting, how often/how long he gets home. Who is the worst customer he's been to? How long has he worked for company? Why is he working for company? Does he have any problems getting paid for the miles he ran or does he need to monitor that they are paying for his dispatched miles. What does he wish would change at company? If he left the company where would he want to work? Does he have to sit and wait hours to get his next load? How ofetn does he breakdown? What kind of breakdows has he had. Tire breakdowns are sort of random. Mechanical truck breaksdowns arn't a good sign if it's happening more than a couple of times a year. If you are running team, make sure you talk to a working team driver at the company. Team driving, as I understand it, is about always rolling, which means under dispatch, drop & hook. Is the company dispatching to keep you rolling? What are the pay & benefits. Does company require you drive their route to customer or leave that to driver to pick, while only paying "dispatched miles"? You can't make more money driving the long way, but in bad weather you may want to pick one route over the shortest route to stay on better roads or go around worst conditions.

Personally, I'd rather work at a company I know more about than a company many say is better but I don't know the details. If this is your first company, you may not stay more than 1 year anyway. After 1 year you will KNOW which factors are important for you. Before you drive you have to make a best estimate of what matters to remain happy. If it is all all safe & possible plan on staying for 1 year, staying less is not going to help getting next job. Don't make a short-term decision. If some problem is less than life-threatening, don't quit, don't get reputation for anger. Ask if things can be done to fix some problem. If they won't fix them, you know you're just going to be there until you get your year and leave. Yelling or making demands they aren't going to do just makes your job harder or puts you in the penalty box. If the company has high driver turnoever they likely don't care what you say r do, they expect to replace you when you quit ot give them trouble.Don't just resign yourself to being treated poorly and quickly changing companies. Once you start down that road you just narrowed your possibilities to bad & badder. Better to tough out hard times at 1 company than get stuck down in the "bad neighborhoods of trucking companies." If you are working don't rush until you feel you have all the information you can get and feel this company, above others, is your best option. I've been lucky enough to have friends or family working for good or better companies before I needed my first job or next job. Above everything, YOU have to keep your driving record clean, nothing worse than minor logbook errors or MINOR equipment violations. That determines your hire-ability for good companies. Good equipment, plenty of customers, good pay & benefits, hometime is how you stay in the industry for longterm. Only Superman can put up with bad companies & driving stress for years & years.

 

I must emphasize that Team is always rolling. That means no sitting for two hours dinner and breakfast all day. You must learn to cook on the move. To be a valuable team means to take orders at a moment's notice with a cheerful attitude.

For us it was literally a National Firetruck racing to rescue late single drivers who sat in NM or NV Gambling all day and throwing away the delivery appt causing the reciever to threaten the very continuance of accounts with our company. We pushed 9000 miles some weeks. Literally the MAX possible. It's something that will cause problems if one of you get short tempered. That truck cannot stop. Therefore if one of you is cranky and mad, you go close the blanket curtain in the sleeper and do not disturb either cab or sleeper until you have had time to cool off enough to be decent again. You have to learn how to make that go away.

And you cannot be cowards and plead to be excused from the ice in the rockies. You gotta go. My advice to you two is the get that bobtail (No trailer) find a 20 acre lot somewhere on snow and ice and do doughnuts and figure 8's until you both can put the tractor exactly where you wish it regardless of how much falling down ice is under your wheels. Congrats you are now ready for the rockies in ice.

Once in Oklahoma city in December we had a warm front temps increased to 98 degrees. The heavens opened up with thunder to behold and rained. We were on east side OKC. By the time we crossed center city temps were 20 and everything perfect ice with people slid into the middle crying on CB for tows. We took refuge about 4 hours until sunrise on a hill west of OKC. I have never seen such a display in a single hour such weather enough to be able to stop us. Dispatch was real nice to us that morning once they understood just how epic it was. Better safe than sorry. But we were a good 200 miles behind and needed to move at sunrise.

 

The best team in the nation is Old Dominion Freight Line. It's all drop & hook and they hire new cdl grads. There's terminals all over Dallas, Oklahoma City area. One team that used to post on here made $167,000.00 one year split.
Pull a set of doubles to California, drop & hook and head back eastbound.

Hometime is based on company policy, not where the terminal is or where your home is.
I'd still look at TWT Refrigerated Service and ask if they hire in your area. They run everywhere.

MCT Transportation has a facility in Ft. Worth and they run teams.

 

Sometimes a lower cpm is ok if you're getting more miles and the company has good accessorial pays. The company I worked for paid .36 cpm but my annual pay was $65K because lots of long run and lots of miles and good accessorial pays.
Freymiller has teams and the trucks have direct tv hookups, refrigerator, Tripac APU and other driver comfort features. Lots of west coast to east coast runs.

 

What terms? Your new to the industry, regardless if you're teammate is experienced, you don't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to dictating much.

 

Check out Jim Palmer.

 

I would second this, go with them.

 

Everyone will have a different answer as to who to go with, I know where your coming from because I know what a holes CRST are because that's where I started. I didn't finish my training with them and went to KLLM which was the best thing I could have ever done. KLLM did not play games and ran it strict, we had homework every night and if you didn't get it done you risked getting kicked out.
Best of luck

 

Ive been wondering how KLLM got along since they bought out our outfit FFE in Lancaster. I just remember them as some common grocery outfit with cabovers all over the east at one time decades ago. They must have grown up and got big enough to pay millions for FFE.