my broker is on the sylectus load board and he offers me the same thing I see on sylectus load board so that is a lie
I wish i had a better clue how boards and brokers worked . Essentially im gathering they are middle men with some more standup and others shady .
Breaking it down to the simplest explanation, and with the understanding that it's significantly more nuanced than this and varies from broker to broker (and there's somewhere between 17k and 100k brokerages in the US, depending on the source) - we function as a sales department for the carrier, and as a traffic department for our paying customer. What that looks like varies wildly just as traffic departments and carriers can vary wildly. For one customer, I set up and arrange project shipping and allow them to be hands off on that side of thing. For another, I run their one off traffic. For a third, I handle all their non-LTL traffic. For still another, my situation is to provide blind shipping options. For yet another, I get called when there's something "weird" that needs handling. For others, I bid against other brokers and get what I get. For some, I do some combination of the above. I post the majority of this to boards. The boards are a simple enough solution to allow us to reach the widest pool of available carriers in a given area. When I have more regular freight, I tend to develop relationships with carriers who have proved reliable in a given area and give them first choice. It all just kind of depends.
Rather than a set lane or semi-regular lane, it's something where I have a single transactional load. IE: I have one Minneapolis to say, Washington, DC that comes up irregularly, versus if it were a run I was doing on a repetitive basis.
