Armchair lawyers of TTR...

I'm a 40 year beaten up veteran of this culture GpD, and I'm here to tell you with all due respect...that you've entered a den of wolves, a ship of fools, and many other things now that you've entered the world of trucking (or should I call it "logistics" nowadays?)

I wish you the best, and I'm sure with determination and steadfastness that you'll plow through whatever you are up against as I have learned to do in this game, but keep in mind that it doesn't require a whole lotta education, sense or resources to enter this business, and it is saturated to the point of what you are seeing in these broker/carrier agreements terms. Both sides have experienced problems with each other, resulting in lawyers having to structure these agreements in their own languages.

I would rather paint my house with a Q Tip than deal with brokered freight personally. I don't do much of it at all anymore, I only use the service to get myself to a point to get my expenses covered (because that's about all you get from brokered loads these days anyways for various reasons,) to grab my own customer's piece.

I'm an equipment transporter/buyer/seller/repairer. I am set up more like a towing company in that the customer calls us for a quote to transport their equipment, truck, etc. and I give them the price...which is the way it should be anyway being in a service business such as this. That is when I usually have my personal dispatcher (yup, I got me one of them too,) do the search, contact, setup, and booking of a brokered load so that all I have to do is do what I do best...which is everything else BUT all that. I don't have the time nor brain matter to #####-foot around in a conversation for $50 to $100.00 and get the run-a-round on the phone. All I want is to get where I'm headed to and get things going, not play "negotiator" or "let's make a deal" for fifty or a hundred bux.

Most of what I deal with either doesn't run and I have to make it run, or get creative to load it on the deck, or there's specialized work involved which is what I do. Either way, I charge fees accordingly to the situation. Gone are the days to me, of calling a broker and saying I need another $250.00 for 2 hours of mechanic services to get something loaded or unloaded. It doesn't register in their brains anymore.

Once you get through the learning curve of this first year and decide to do your own thing, you'll do well if you're aggressive and determined to succeed in this. If it doesn't change in a year, I'd probably set my sights on something else that would make better sense to invest time and effort into. (No sense sticking to something that has a "dead end" sign on the side of it, right?...)

This, is my true heart-felt assessment of what you were posting GpD...and again I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

Coming from a guy who's had 4 decades to sit back and watch the game....

 

Great post @oldW900. Thanks for sharing.

 

That should be your two primary goals; #1: Remove the word "loadboard" from your vocabulary ASAP, and #2: Figure out how to piss that neighbor off more to the point that he should man up and come face to face with you.

Just because you come into the neighborhood with a truck and park with minimal noise/impact, should not be an issue. As long as you're trying your best to be quiet and respectful...

Those are the kinds of neighbors that cause all kinds of trouble for everyone else, but yet do whatever they want to and it's OK...I got a couple myself, but much to their dismay there is NO ZONING in this town, so they can kiss my shiny burgundy and white ^$$....

 

Yeah, it's always a weird deal with bad neighbors. We've been in this place 6 years on the 20th of September now.

The day I moved in, I was bulldozing the side yard to make a solid parking spot for my iron. The last residents were elderly folks, always quiet and doing yardwork, gardening, etc. Now here we come, with all kinds of iron and a new deal altogether from the elderly folks for 50 years.

The across the road neighbor waddles over here and starts questioning me as to what I was doing as I was on the machine. I informed her I was graveling the area here to make a good spot to park my trucks and equipment. (They're all used to a garden there, now all of a sudden it's a gravel area. Sorry...can't help it, it's my property and the taxes are enough to make me feel that I can do what I want to it. )

She comes across as a nice woman, and of course I extend my offer that if she ever needed anything, PLEASE let me know and I'll be right there. I've lived out away from civilization my entire life until moving here, so I'm not really good at having people within plain sight anyways.

A week later, I'm down over the embankment behind my house, burning the papers and cardboard boxes from the move in a contained/controlled environment. I get informed by a local guy I know that he "saved my butt" from trouble with the fire chief the other day. I was like, "and just WHO was it that complained"? Not wanting to be too direct, he implied that it was that woman I just wrote about. I remember someone waddling past the house that very day as I was burning, but people walk and jog past here all day long so I didn't think much of it.

Come to find out, it was her looking at me burning my papers and she turned me in. Mark my words, we're not borrowing cups of sugar from each other since then, and that was 6 years ago now. Idiots. AND, they have weekend and even weeknight parties with screaming and music and chickens running around all the time, but that's OK...yet they came over here a couple times to complain about someone burning rubber in front of the house that we had no idea who it was even...(they were quite fortunate that I wasn't here upon that meeting.)

It's the very reason that I totally prefer living out in the woods just a bit, out of sight out of mind.

Now all of a sudden here I come into the neighborhood, albeit with nice looking equipment (so I think anyways,) and respectful to the surroundings I idle in, and idle out in the earlier or later hours. This isn't a residential/gated community-oriented town by any means, it's all farms and construction guys, and me. Local gravel pits with dump trucks slamming their bodies when empty over the bumps and wailing engine brakes all day long around here. To me, it's "white noise". Hell, the train tracks are less than a 100 yards away and it's an active line. I love the sounds of things like these around me, it feels like "life".

I guess the moral to the story is, no matter what, life's a struggle...it's all what you make of it that really matters.

 

This business? How bout any business..