What to buy?

not its not common usually youll be sitting at a t/s somewhere burning through money to eat or keep yoursrpelf comfortable( 2 gallons an hour to idle). the failure rate for new o/ops is like 75-80% and they all want to make money. how many businesses have you owned or ran? being an o/op is more about being a good business man than being a truck driver. this is not easy ven with a few yrs exp in this business. if it was there would be no such thing as a co driver. sorry to say but it sounds like you are trying to buy yourself a job b/ whats out there doesnt sound good to you.

 

I don't think that is the case at all. As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that the opposite is true. Buy a new truck with cash, scratch and dent it up while learning, watch the value drop faster than my pants in front of a naked hottie, not perform proper regular maintenance (not intentionally, but because you just don't know how to yet), get bent over a workbench by a shop because you have no idea that what they tell you the truck needs is a lie (they will smell you comin and do everything they can to relieve you of that wallet-bulge)....



Don't do it. If you want to risk wasting money, go buy a used pre-07 truck to learn the business with. If you make a profit in the first year, then *CONSIDER* a new truck. All those costs are going to eat you alive, man. Unless you want to be in the business of losing money, don't buy yourself a new truck without several years under your belt.

 

Then go to Stevens, Central, or any other company that replaces it's fleet frequently, grit your teeth and drive their 3 year old trucks for a few months, then get a new truck issued to you.

Heck, you could go to JBS and get a new truck.

 

Why is it so important that your first truck be brand new? Do you have some sort of germ phobia or something?

 

To be an O/O is to create and run a business. The people who make money as an O/O tend to be the people who would be able to make money being in business for themselves no matter what type of business it was. The people who go broke as O/O tend to be the people who would go broke no matter what type of business they were trying to create and run.

And most successful business owners will tell you that the way you become successful is to create a product people want, find a price point the people will put up with and the find a way to make a profit by selling at that price point. Everything else involved with the business comes after and is dictated by those basic goals. The people who fail are the ones who try to put the other aspects of the business first and figure out the product/price point/profit stuff later.

I'll give you two quick outside examples that illustrate this. I used to know a guy who had a very successful chain of computer repair stores. He started by repairing computers out of his garage and built a customer base that made him a decent living. He noticed that lots of his client had bought machines from Bestbuy and come to him after being dissatisfied with the quality of service they got when they tried to get the Bestbuy techs to fix it. So he found a pretty good deal on a little store that was right across the street from a Bestbuy and he ended up doing great with it. A couple years later he had multiple locations and a couple dozen employees. That's the right way to do it.


I know another couple who decided they wanted to go into business for themselves. They discovered that a local developer was going to build a some new storefronts at the edge of a shopping center he owned. They had some meetings and signed a leasen for one of the spaces once it was built. Then they sat down and started looking for some kind of business that they could run in the store space. They signed a lease for a storefront that didn't exist yet without having any earthly idea what kind of business they were going to put in the space. They figured ah, the store isn't built yet, everything will work itself out later. I did my best to talk them out of it but they wouldn't listen.

They ended up spending a fortune on some funky commercial exercise bikes and opened a gym. At my urging, they also put in some tanning booths. They were bankrupt within a year and a half. The tanning booths were the only thing that ever made money. And in the interim the company that built the funky exercise bikes had come out with a new model that did everything the old model did and more and cost 1/4 as much. So when it came time to liquidate the assets, they ended up taking a huge loss on their equipment investment.

Of those two examples, which approach do you think most closely matches the way you're setting out to become an O/O? Are you the guy that creates a money making business with no overhead and then finds a store to put it in or are you the couple who buys a store and then tries to figure out how to make money with it?

 

So many questions you ask about the industry could and would be answered if you would just drive for a company.