Drivers? What do you want?

If I thought you was talking about driving by the hour I would've told you to go get a job at UPS!

This is why you pay drivers percentage. It gives them the incentive to look for that better paying load, layover instead of taking that cheap ### load to nowhere and to work smarter not harder.

 

I also want to wish you good luck on your endeavor. Word of caution, do NOT ever be more than a boss to anyone that works/drives for you. Be friendly but not a friend, never mix business and personal. Learned the hard way that friends/employees can't be one in the same.

Sincerely hope that you find drivers you can trust. Have had more than one that thought they could steal from us. We've gone the extra mile, so to speak, to help folks in whatever way we could only to be lied to, stolen from and back stabbed. I know there has to be honorable, hardworking, reliable drivers out there, they just seem to be few and far between. Anymore I feel like a fly strip for freaks!

 

Free cookies, thats all I want.

 

I can tell ya what I don't want....a co-driver...ugh!!!

 

Ahhhhh okay. For some reason I didn't grasp that you'd be leasing to them. I was wondering if you were going to come off the road and manage the loads.

Silly me.

 

I will not work for a percentage. Here is my reasoning:

I am a company driver. Period. I am not the one taking the risk- the owner of the truck is. We all know some loads pay more than others. For the fleet owner, it all evens out in the end. But I am not taking that risk. I want a flat rate for all loads, all dispatched miles. It's up to the owner to determine what rate s/he can pay me and still make a profit on my truck.

I understand the incentive aspect of percentage pay, but isn't keeping your job an incentive to take good paying loads and keep deadhead to a minimum too? Let's face it, if Swift were consistently not making a profit on my truck, I wouldn't still be employed by them. I'm sure this would be even more true for a small time operator with only a handful of trucks.

Disclaimer: my opinion is colored by a bad experience with a small local tanker company out of Erie, PA that paid percentage and did everything they could to cheat drivers out of fair pay. They made the pay system so confusing that no driver without a masters degree in mathematics could ever figure it out, and so it was impossible to tell if they were being honest or not. I say they paid percentage, but it was also based on miles driven and what product we were hauling. They had a long formula which included miles and product and a bunch of random numbers I think they just pulled out of a hat, and they paid a percentage of that. So I am a little down on percentage.

 

If you pay by the mile, you might as well find someone to drive you truck. You basically just started an adult daycare!

You will have to control where they go or you will be broke in no time flat. If you don't control their freight, they will be joy riding in your truck at your expense.

 

yes i think the % rate would be the way to go---but as for finding somebody who actually knows anything mechanical about the truck--good luck
now if you can find a good ol farmboy you might be ok--but a lot of the newer drivers really dont have a clue about the mech side---didnt have to know that at last job at taco bell
the people who grew up around trucks and equipment are getting fewer and fewer every day