Never Stand Still

It's there civil war cannon logo and there fancy Maroon non basemodel Internationals.

 

CANNON EXPRESS OPERATIONS

For a few years prior to trucking, I owned a small carpet cleaning business.

That was my van in July of 2014 out in Lakewood, Ohio on Mathews Ave cleaning an apartment for the owner of the apartment building.

That was my machine I had a nice 2001 Hydramast Boxxer 421 great machine if I was still cleaning that's the machine I would stick with. The machine did a hell of a job, I cleaned up a lot of nasty messes with that machine, residential, commercial and industrial that machine and I had been through a lot.

That was the back of my van I had a 100 gallon fresh water tank and just a hair under 300ft of hose. The 2 tool boxes were just that, the first one was a spotting kit and the second one was actually a tool box full of tools which it's actually the tool box I use today at my house.

Anyhow, what does this have to do with anything?

When we talk about the operations of Cannon Express we have to talk about where they actually got there freight from and see once you have enough trucks and man power your to big to just haul freight from freight brokers.

By the 1986 The Cannons had out grown hauling brokered freight and needed to run on there own.

I can a-test when I had my carpet cleaning business it's not the carpet cleaning it's self that's the hard part necessarily it's keeping work coming in.

When I had my carpet cleaning company I worked for janitorial companies they would hire me to do work for them and then I also worked for brokers like Cleanway and all that was okay, but it was never as good as direct freight, however I was a one man band and as a person who ran a small business for a time, it's a sales game really. The what you do after a while comes second.

Back to Cannon Express.
The buying trucks, and trailers all that's easy. The finding a shop and setting up a base of operations basically getting your tools and box to put all the tools in that's all easy it is. Spending money is not hard at all it's extremely easy.

However once you get all the tools together you need to put them to work and get them to work for you.

For me I always had a really hard time soliciting for business until I found something that worked for me, and made me comfortable and what I did was I went to the day old bread store and bought cakes and stuff like that and I would go out door to door and pass out cakes and chocolate bars with my business card taped on to them. Now granted that's still a big numbers game, but you keep hitting the people every quarter or whatever and eventually they bite.

I got a golf course out of it. I dropped off a cake at a golf course a couple weeks later the golf pro called me and wanted me to put them on my work list.
They ended up being a customer of mine until I left the business.

Actually Consolidated Freightways was a great example of this no other company understood sales and marketing better then CF. Sales and marketing was at the top of what they did. When they were launching the Con-Way's the first thing they did was set up a sales force and hit the street running. CCX's headquarters the farm house in Ann Arbor, MI had some operations offices in the upstairs bedrooms, but the basement was a sales office people cold calling all day long.

With trucking companies you really don't get to hear much about there sales and marketing efforts, however Cannon Express they did have a fairly impressive sales and marketing department for a little while at least Cannon had to have had something decent in the sales department or they would have never grown to the size they were.

Anyhow the way Cannon's sales operation worked was Cannon had a 3 tier system. They had telemarketers telemarketing industries that would use there services, and they also had satellite sales people at satellite offices around the country in there preferred operating area and then Cannon also had customer coordinators.

So the way it worked was the telemarketers cold called potential new customers and clients and set up appointments and leads for the sales people at the satellite offices around the country. Which by the way isn't hard to do it's easy you call up go-leads or who ever tell them you want a list of warehousing and manufacturing companies and also companies that employee 50-1000+ people who are in the warehousing and manufacturing or retail support business which would also fall under manufacturing and warehousing. Anyhow you get a list of those companies and you call them and ask to talk to the traffic manager. Basically you keep calling them every quarter until one of them bites.

So anyhow the sales people would then go to the places once the leads came in and talk to the traffic manager get them signed up to ship with Cannon Express. The sales people would gather information on what the customer was shipping, what transit times they were expecting and payment history. Also the sales person would gather frequency how many loads was the customer shipping. Was it one load a week or 30 loads a day? All that's important.

When the sales department for a big company like Prime Inc or Werner or whoever sits down to do a quote for a customer and were not talking some place that ships out one load a day were talking like a customer like Kraft Foods who there Lewis Rich plant might ship 100 loads a day say Kraft wants Prime to quote them, for maybe will say 15 loads a day and Prime Inc will quote based on production. Depending where the loads are originating from and where there going to.

So the sales person would get the customer signed up. Then the sales person would pass the information along to the customer coordinator who was essentially the load planner. The customer coordinator entered all the information from a particular customer into the system and started on a price quote. Once all that was agreed to the customer coordinator would then look for available drivers in the area. They would start planning loads for drivers to haul. Then the loads would be passed a long to dispatch who would tell dispatch to assign load 1420 to driver 42 who's in that area here's what the driver needs to know.

Then dispatch would actually then send the info to the actual driver and the driver would go and pick up the load.

Cannon Express was a whole sale transport provider I.E. they hauled dry van freight. Dry Van freight is the trucking industries version of whole sale transport.

The rail roads are whole sale transport providers really, but dry van freight is the trucking industries version of whole sale transport. To do dry van you have to have the capacity and means of production. I was just talking about this last Sunday on the telephone with @KillingTime and he said basically to run a dry van company you have to have the money to buy assets and then have the money and means to have those assets sit around and be under utilized.

I.E. every day whoever it is Acme Warehousing says you must haul 30 loads out of there, but the problem is on the receiving end this driver can't make it on time this customer can receive the load this driver is 2 minutes early to Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart is to busy doing nothing and can't unload the driver till next Tuesday so now all those drivers and trailers are tied up with shipments that can't be delivered so now dispatch has to tell the driver to drop the trailer at some mud lot that's packed 3 trailers deep all the trailers are loaded with freight that some irresponsible receiver can't take. So all those trailers sitting there, that's all waste. But you still need to haul 30 loads out of Acme warehousing everyday so you have to have enough trailers and tractors available to fight the waste and figure the cycle time so you really need like 3 trailers for every one power unit you have which is why you need to have a lot of rolling stock to do dry van. Tanker or LTL or flatbed is different, but dry van that load of dog food can sit in Werner's mud lot for a week it's no problem the receiver is getting free warehousing space out of Werner and Werner should be grateful for the opportunity. A dry van company you might need 30 trailers for every 10 tractors you have, because of all the inefficiency.

The railroads used to get that too, back in world war 2 customers wouldn't unload box cars because they wanted to save warehouse space for other stuff, but the rail roads started cracking down on that stuff. They started fining receivers who wouldn't unload cars. However that was War time now a days anyone with some money to waive around pretty much can do what ever they please.

Anyhow Cannon Express was a dry van company and pretty much hauled consumer grade dry van freight. They were a small whole sale transport provider and hauled consumer goods, canned food, automotive supplies, loads of stuff to discount merchandisers, you know consumer goods basically. Consumer grade dry van freight. That's what they hauled.

 

Where do you find these conference calls?

 

I like these trucking companies especially the dry van people there drop lots some of them are filled to the brim 3 trailers deep can't even move or manuver on the lot it's how it goes. Clearly a miss utilization. What I wonder is how many loads get lost in the shuffle and don't ever make it for what ever reason.