Fleet owners, where do you find drivers?

Lets say your guys pull 120k miles yearly, 80k before taxes is 66 cpm, taxes hit and your driver is only getting 68k (ballpark 15%)

Thats not great pay, its not horrible, but not great.

Housing 1200 (moderate house, nothing fancy)
Car/insurance 500
Savings 1000
Kid/wife (clothes etc)1000
Food 1000 (remember feeding your driver seperately from the wife and kid isnt cheap.

Leaves 966 a month for everything else. If they have ANY other debt, or want a vacation etc, it all comes out of that and savings. A single medical event can wipe out a year of that.

And at 120k miles, thats not "home weekends" thats 2500 miles a week 48 weeks yearly, every single mile paid and your shippers and receivers never waste their time, 0 breakdown, it nets you home friday night, leave sunday night, monday early.

Inflation sucks.

Im not going to work my keister off for no life while I build no equity in the buisness. Just not happening (Im an o/o, not fleet owner or company driver)

 

Deflation is not going to save you from having to pay people.

Also, deflation wont help as much as you think, itll hurt YOU, your customers and cashflow, because deflation rewards previous savings while punishing anything leveraged. And oh boy do most buisnesses have a TON of debt (securitized or not, debt is debt)

Itll barely make a dent in most day to day consumers because while it may help food and clothing, many things are just too sticky to move much (cell phone and internet subscription, insurance).

Medical will not drop in cost, if anything, it will be up as well, theyre all way over-leveraged

It will nominally drop rent costs after a while but it wont change anything if they have a mortgage. Same for vehicles if financed


Addressing the pay question again, lets say your driver is close to 1.00 per mile after benefits, employment parts of taxes etc, if theyre 30% of your costs now, thats probably relatively reasonable, but thats over 3$/mile all miles, find other places to make cuts, or raise rates. plenty of other big areas to find the cash in the 70% not 30 %...

 

Yes, it’s very hard to hire. No, expectations have not come down. Sustainable? Depends on what freight your on I suppose. In general, no probably not.

Sounds like you need rate increases before this deflation you speak of makes that not likely.

 

$100,000 is a fair wage for sure. But if you get much below that then it pays more to be local is the sad part about it all (from the employers point of view). If local pays 80 to 90 then home weekends is going to be pushing 90 to 100+. God forbid you put a team on the road. That’s gonna cost you 100k each at the minimum, upwards of 115k.

All W2

It’s crazy I agree, but like Skallagrime pointed out, cost are up for everyone and if your a true professional and bust ###, you oughta be able to not tread water but get ahead in life. Are carriers going to get squeezed? Oh yeah, big time. The company that can keep these numbers up the longest, wins.

 

40 hour a week driving jobs are extremely rare and most local jobs average 60 hours per week (or more). Realistically, with overtime a local driver in your area running your specified hourly rate would be around 60k/year.

 

Not beating you up . . . your business, your rules, nor am I a carrier.

It sounds like you are saying "competitive pay", or better stated, or the same as everyone else . . . expect to get below average or average personnel. If I were seeking a job and competitive pay was implied, that would be a huge red flag. Although I only drive part time anymore at $34 p/h, I have never had a CMV accident, last CMV ticket was 1984, always on time if the load is and the equipment doesn't fail, and happy to run 14 in a day. I consider myself better, and I expect better.

Reminds me of a post from a driver in GA indicating $16 per hour local . . . I'm not getting behind the wheel until at least double that. You just cringed, but my opinion.

Where does the money come from? Run metrics on office/support and other expenses, even maintenance costs from careless drivers. Less driver wage is the easy, minimum thought process answer. Driver only work for 1 reason . . . MONEY, if you are going to stand out, better bait, better catch.