Newbe with a first company choice question

I think you will be somewhat limited living in Florida. What are your choices?

 

look at WEL Companies, they hire out of FL and are a good company to start with, nice KW's too




American Trucker

 

The most important thing you can do starting out is have a clearly defined goal. Where do you want to be in three years? DO you want to be working nights on a line haul? Do you want to home every day/ 4 times a week? Do you want to work local days? Is making a lot of money your primary goal?

If you want to be successful and happy in this industry just getting driving experience on a dry van is not enough. There are a million drivers that can haul a dry van and no matter what you've been driving you can get a OTR job within about an hour. With a clean driving record and 2 years of experience it's easy to just get a job but why limit yourself.

This is what I would do, chose a company that you can quickly move into a specialized division. Tanker, flatbed, doubles, belly dump..... That way your building driving experience and getting experience in areas that will give you an edge when your ready to move on to a better company.

I started out OTR and managed to move into pulling joints,(it was a horrible job that no one else wanted). It served me well I was able to move into a nice line haul job, home every day 70k a year.

Right now I have a stack of applications stilling on the desk and they all look the same, you need to do something that will make you stand out and now is the time to start.

Hope that helps you out.

 

I ended up at Swift for my training company, but that was after I went to Werner for a month just to realize they we (Werner and I) weren't a good fit at all.

Swift was really good to me and my trainer at the time was an actual trainer and not some dumb @#$ who only cared about getting paid or seeing his girlfriend at every company terminal he could stop at.

With all that said, I believe that if you go into whatever company you choose with the mind set that they are a "training" company and understand that they're training EVERYONE including DM's, Tech's and etc. it'll be whole lot easier to get your year in and move on to a "better" company.

This is what I did with Swift and it worked for me. After Swift, I went onto Landstar and now I'm going on to JCT.

I wish you the very best and try to remember that they're just as clueless as you are at times and that the weekend personnel are even more useless then you could ever imagine. Just be patient and use (dare I say) common sense.

 

Ok so you want to run flat bed. That's probably not going to happen right out of the gate, but that's ok.

Ideally what you want to do is find a starter company that runs both dry vans or refers and flat beds. That way you can move to a different division and not have to hop companies. If that's not an option in your area get on with a company that can offer you some other kind of specialized experience, and cut your teeth in something other then dry van. You never know when it might come in handy.

If you can't do either of those two things just try to survive your first year OTR and continually pound the pavement looking for a flat bed company that will hire you. When you find a company that will stick with them no matter how bad it is.

What you don't want to do is get any tickets and you don't want to go jumping from job to job. When an application comes in and the guy has had 3 jobs in three years, or a bunch of tickets, it goes into the round file.

What makes you want to go into flat bed and what's the market like in your area? Are there any flat bed companies in your immediate vicinity?

 

Roehl does dry van, reefer, and flats. Don't know if they hire out of your area though. YOu can start as flatbed and switching divisions is easy.