Im female looking to get into the trucking industry

Ok, well there were a couple of helpful links in previous posts.
Honestly, right now is not the best time to start. People with years of experience are having a tough go of it.
Good luck.

 

Get into trucking your self atleast 5 yrs then try buying trucks and hiring or loan me some money and we can do it together i only got 32 yrs exp.

 

If memory serves me right, Meadowlark is or was female owned. Might be a good place to start. I don't think she knew much about trucking either.

 

I feel like most people that get into trucking don’t know much about it/

 

It's hard to make money when you are new driving the truck yourself. I'd think it's darn near impossible when you have to hire someone else to drive it and you still know nothing of the industry.

 

Seeing you replied to me, I will post something. I have to assume that you have zero trucking experience and want to be an arm chair owner.

I am going to provide feedback, but I want to know why would you do this.

See I don't want to sound like an ***** but there is a huge problem in this industry with people who are armchair owners. They end up driving rates down through desperation just to pay the bills, there are hundreds of drivers who are screwed over by these POS owners, so don't be one.

So ...

The first thing is the failure rate is 85 to 95% for new owners, owner operators and so on.

This isn't a number pulled out of thin air but it is established. Most failures are related to finance, the most are under capitalized but many have money mismanagment issues.

Second you should have a good amount of capital. The first one you pay is not yourself, not the bills but the driver, always the driver. If your truck craps out, then you can have up with money for three months of down time, not making that crap up, a few here have had nothing but trouble with accumilated downtime measured in months, you need to pay the bills so capital is needed for that. There are rather not too bright people I know who ran their company into the ground by using credit cards, it don't work.

Third the hardest thing to do is find a good driver who is willing to work with your to get established, I can tell you right now that it isn't easy at all. I get 100 applications for every driver I hire. I have gotten more relaxed than I was but still 1 to 100 ratio sucks. You don't want to hire just any driver, you need someone who is expeirnced, who is willing to teach you what you need to look for and how to do things.

Forth - how do you think we get our work? You going to be dependent on brokers? How about leasing to a carrier? a fallacy is you have a truck and trailer, you walk into a place, hand the logisitics manager a box of candy or some truck trinket and think you will get work out of them, you won't. even networking doesn't always work, many companies with consistent freight have performance measured and many transportation companies fail to help the company maintain the metrics that the logisitic staff need to maintain.

Fifth - you don't buy a truck like a car, the same goes for a trailer. the trick is to keep the risk of breakdown low or lower it. I won't get into maintaince of the truck, there are different ways to mitigate risk through preventive maintaince. However, you look at a truck as a tool, you have the tool checked for problems, I recomment a dyno with blowby, an Oil anaysis for all fluids, a complete ECM dump printed out on paper and an independent mechanic to go through the entire truck front to back and tell him to find problems with the truck. This could be as high as $3k now but it is cheaper than sitting on the side of the road with a breakdown and a $4k tow bill.

well that's it for now, i am tired, I spent the day chasing problems for a customer and now I am going to get lunch.

 

Sounds like a good way to waste money. By the time you cover the expenses and pay the driver there's going to be very little leftover.

Trust me, I was looking into buying a hotshot truck to put on with a local expediter and having someone else drive it. Even paying minimum wage to the driver there would have been very little leftover. That's without factoring in setting money aside to replace the truck after 4 years either.

 

Ridgeline nailed it. A concise answer to your basic questions.

It appears that the current freight levels are soft, the company I reciently retired from has half of it's long term leased container chassis parked; that's over 250 units at $5 to $8 a day each just sitting as the port volume has dropped.

They can't afford to return them early and as the staggered leases come to term they will be returned.

At the same time they are spending money to have places to park the idle equipment and paying the personal to inventory these satelite locations.

Yeah when they were working they were being billed out at $25.00 a day but how far did it go once some have sat for a year?

from 1977 to 2022 I have watched thousands of drivers and owner operators and the most problematic are owners who don't drive their trucks.

Early on I heard someone say it is hard for two people to live on one truck and in my opinon is it has not become easier.

Without a confirmed steady source of freight, depending on brokered freight is not the best business model as the broker is another hand reaching into your pocket.

How to end up with a million in trucking; start with two!

 

Yall have been too soft because op said they were female.

Brutal truth, just like I'd tell a man, go away.
If you want to invest, go invest, trucking is a real buisness and youll do nothing but lose money and treat your driver like crap with your armchair owner idea