I agree, USHIP sucks.

If it's that painful, why do you keep coming back to it?

 

What's going on in the O/O market today? Let's look at the various players.

Shippers: Tend to contract with the lowest cost provider that can get done what they need done. Not changed in eons. Shippers have the yellow pages, websites, and word of mouth to find who to contract with directly. Or, they have a broker or logistics company handle it for them.

Brokers: Compete against transportation companies and other brokers to lower costs to shippers. Brokers then get truckers / trucking companies to bid the lowest to move load. Brokers seek lost price from shipper, lowest reimbursement to trucker - and keep the spread.

3PL: Depending on operation, generally attempt to fulfill roles of almost any of the above, and seek to keep the spread as profit.

Large shipping companies: Tend to market direct to shippers and compete to outmarket and underprice smaller companies, attempting to remove the markups of brokers and 3pl's.

O/O: Compete against each other, large trucking companies, smaller trucking companies. The most successful manage to capture some market niches which they work very hard at keeping to themselves.

Whose operations are to the detriment of the O/O? Everyone. They lose in access to the markets, they lose in economies of scale, they lose in marketing muscle and scope, they lose in competing with each other for small market segments. And everyone from load boards to brokers to shippers business practices are geared toward reducing the trucker's share of the pie.

And truckers are wondering why rates suck? The law of supply and demand dictates that the oversupply of truckers and drivers is going to lower rates for anyone who hasn't captured a small market segment.

That's why all the experienced truckers come here and their first advice is to drive for someone else and make connections with shippers to cut out the middle man, in order to find financial success.

I'm going guess at this point, people are going to start pointing to load boards, brokers, etc, saying "isn't this what they do?" Well, they all exploit the need for truckers to find work, to grab a slice of the pie for themselves. Just as brokers do. And the "free" ones lack the marketing muscle to attract both truckers and shippers to them in large numbers.

What's the answer? I haven't gotten the definitive answer, but if I look at it from the standpoint of a large shipper like Walmart and a large trucking firm like Swift, what I see is that Swift goes everywhere, anytime, and it's truly one point of contact to fulfill the need.

So, how do you get 10,000 O/O have the ability to compete? Put them all in the same place. Give them a single point of contact. Let that contact automate the logistics of a diverse array of independents moving independently. And guess what? The marketplace advantages of the big guys... are vastly diminished. Without the need for a broker's cut, the rates presented to the shipper can be competitive, but the trucker gets the maximum possible rate.

So, what I'm talking about is an idea. The idea is this: A technology (network) based system that provides ALL the advantages of any large carrier - redundancy of capacity, flexibility in terms of capacity, tools like tracking and available performance metrics for individual truckers. Imagine THAT marketing muscle for the individual O/O.

What's it look like to the trucker? You join, after proving you meet the standards of the consortium by signing up, obtaining the communication system, and then choosing what you want to compete in. If you break down, the system will find you the nearest available other members who are empty to sub your load for you (not for free, but you agree when you sign up not to gouge too bad) so you keep your good on time and reliability metrics.

The system will (if you choose to participate) offer you the next available at your destination or nearest, if you're closest, if not, then it goes open to the next "taker". The system quotes reasonable rates, if the shipper accepts, and you're there, it's assigned, and if you accept, it automates your entire paperwork process and you proceed as if dispatched.

If someone wants to take a risk trying to get lower rates, they can make it open market listing, and it works somewhat like a load board, and see if anyone takes it.

There are some caveats to this. One, is that it requires a large contingent of participating owner operators to function - to have that ubiquitous market ability. Three is that joining will take some financial commitment - mostly purchase of some computing and possibly cellular or sat communication to automate things. To automate the shipper's load tracking in semi real-time and transmit paperwork and automated bidding and dispatch functions.

It will cost some. Can't do these things for free, obviously.

Questions that need to be addressed is, among other things, how to fund startup and operations.

Of course, it's just an idea. Refinement and perhaps even adjusting the concept needs to be done. But what's NOT in question, is that something needs to be done, so that the entire independent owner operator market doesn't shrink away to insignificance.

 

Nothing I said is inconsistent with that.

Why are you back here again? You said it's too painful. Or too "something". I guess you didn't specify other than it was "bad" enough. Still, why do you keep coming back, doing your best to misread? The word "tend" you seem to have ignored, in an attempt to make an argument about me, personally.

So, again, WHY ARE YOU HERE?

 

Anyway, since you're so fascinated with this subject (what trucker would not be?), why not tell us what YOUR idea is for making O/O's more able to compete and opening up more of the shipping market to them?