Starting a trucking company

What Triple Six last posted was very well put! Excellent advice!
That was about as honest and straight forward as you could get.

 

My advise would be to buy 1 or 2 get them running and then buy more as cash is available. Don't over extend yourself or it will lose all its joy and you will hate it. We run 8 truck and never go more then 200 miles from our shop so we are able to save a lot on doing our own repairs. If you can do your own you can make a lot more then sitting in a seat. Everyone has a different way of looking at it but we buy older trucks all peterbilt and kenworth in the 600,000-800,000 range and plan to work on them some but can afford this because we are not paying shop rate of 110 per hour. 3-$30000 trucks will do a lot more work then one $90000 truck will even if you run 2 and have one for a spare. This has worked well for our company as we should be debt free with 8 trucks this year. Then maybe we can start updating to a little newer equipment. Also don't try a live like a king. I work on adverage 65-70 hrs a week and only took home 51000 last year. I could have pull more out but I'm driven to get my company debt free so I'm willing to live a modest lifestyle. Hope this helps ​

 

I don't think I'd wish a trucking company on my worse enemy. Every owner I have ever worked for, while successful, is stressed to the max and just plain tired.Sure you can make ok money but, good luck finding time to spend it. The 2 smaller outfits I've worked for won't let their kids touch a truck, they plan to sell everything when they retire, that says it all.

 

Get some experience in sales before you get into any kind of business.

 

They are tags that you attach to your mirror and when you enter the termial they can track how times you enter each port. They are to verify that your truck in newer the 1994 to meet their emissions standards and by 2016 all truck are to be 2007 or newer. All this is info for the seattle ports. They are the ones we run in and out of.

 

I'm not sure where all they are required but I know Long Beach ports are already 07 or newer but there are some lawsuits over it. Are you thinking about getting Ito containers?