My experience at Pride Transport

I worked for Pride out of Salt Lake for 22 months. They were my first company so I went through the training process there. I left a couple of weeks ago due to moving back to where I grew up and getting the job I had wanted since starting driving. Here is my experience there.

I'll start off first by saying that 90% of my time there was running team. I personally have little experience with the solo side of the company. I talked to plenty of solo drivers and my co-driver was solo during my training and currently is solo there so I do know somewhat how it goes for them. So just keep that in mind if you have questions about miles and such because I really don't have much personal experience with that.

I learned about Pride while riding along with my good friend, who would later become my co-driver at Pride, on a trip to New Jersey with a company he hauled produce for. This was before I had a license, I just wanted to do something and get out of CA for awhile. We got stuck in Jersey for awhile and ended up talking to a trainer for Pride in Bordentown. By this point in the trip I was interested in getting my license and started thinking about where to start. Being stuck in a truck stop for multiple days due to circumstances that really don't matter, I was able to talk to a lot of drivers. We all know how it is, 95% of drivers are unhappy and that's all I heard really. We were casually talking to this Pride driver and we both knew little about him so talked to him for a bit. He was one of the few that seemed happy and that's what stuck out to me. Plus, he wasn't trying to recruit, just answered what we asked.

So I went to school and decided to go to Pride. Applying was easy, the usual quick internet application. I had applied everywhere and people were calling me 10 minutes after applying. Pride didn't call me after I applied so I took that to mean they didn't want to hire me since others had. I wasted a good month just because I assumed this and didn't call. I called a month later and within 5 minutes I had a hotel room waiting for me in SLC and was set up for orientation. I had a criminal history and brought that up and my worries of coming up there then being told to go home. When I called an hour later they had already run my background check and said I was good to go which made me feel easier about it.

Orientation was the typical three day boring thing. Paperwork, physical/drug screen and all that fun stuff. You're in orientation with guys who have experience and won't be training so half of it you don't even understand if you're new to trucking. I remember thinking to myself while they were explaining how to get your POs on the computer, "wth is a PO and why do I need one?" For those with experience, when they tell you over the phone that you will get a truck right after orientation, they aren't joking. You will not be waiting for a truck.

Training there is pretty long. The general process is you go out with a trainer with him always in the jumpseat for 7,000 miles. After that you run team with the trainer. I can't remember the miles for the team mode, but you'll essentially be with a trainer for 90 days total. If you do well, they'll let you out of it earlier, but it still won't be short. If after 7,000 miles they don't think you're ready to team, you will be staying in the solo/trainer in jumpseat mode until they decide you're ready. I've seen a couple guys end up with a trainer always awake with them for 5-6 weeks because they just weren't getting it. They're not going to rush people through that side, they may with the team part, but not on the solo part. I had a great trainer. I still talk to him often, had a three hour conversation him just last week. He was patient, honest and blunt with me, and even when we were teaming I could wake him up if I had problems without him being angry about it. That was the nice part about teaming in training. The driving wasn't an issue at that point but when problems would spring up with shipper/receivers or whatever, I could get help when I didn't quite know what to do. They used to pay by the mile during training but apparently they pay a weekly salary now. I'm can't remember what the solo part was, maybe $400/week, but I think the team portion is $700/week salary now. I could be wrong, it wasn't like that for me.

I teamed with my friend right out of training. He had 13 years experience at the time, so my training really never ended. Looking back, that helped me in my career a lot. When we started teaming, Pride did not have team runs. They had runs a solo guy couldn't do, but to call it a team load would not be correct. You would basically sit around all day to get loaded then get where you were going at least 24 hours early and have to wait to get unloaded. The only way you kept moving was to keep swapping out loads with solo guys that were going to be late or running out of hours. We stayed out 6-8 weeks at a time by our choice so we still made decent money. They had only a couple dedicated runs for teams at the time. We filled in for one team for a week and absolutely smoked the other teams running the same thing. We gained a reputation of being the fastest and were told we'd get the next dedicated run. I actually ran local for about 3 months while we waited on that but got the dedicated and I got back on the truck. At this point, they had began creating a lot of dedicated team runs in a short time so team driving became viable there. We ran a dedicated that we averaged 28,000-30,000 miles/month. Great money there. They lost that contract and we ran another dedicated that we only ran about 24,000 miles/month but we got home for usually 60 hours a week, 48 hours at home minimum. We'd generally get back Wed. night and leave out Sat. morning. The teams are really mostly getting thrown on to dedicated runs now. A lot of them are good for getting you miles and getting you home weekly. My last W-2, I made $50k running team and it was only that low due to not doing crap for the first two months when I was local. I was getting 10 hour weeks sometimes doing that. My co-driver made $60k since he stayed OTR while I went local.

As far as the office staff, most are great. I had one bad dispatcher out of 5. It wasn't even an attitude problem but she just wouldn't do her job. Simple things like sending emails to customer reps and such. What's the point in communicating problems to you if you don't do your part? Anyways the rest I had were good. A couple there I wouldn't run for. It wouldn't be a problem as far as the work itself or them screwing you or anything, I just know I wouldn't get along with a couple. I would be part of the blame for that and it's part of life, you'll never get along with every person everywhere you go. Management has an open door policy. I've talked to the owner multiple times. The biggest problem talking to him is he's a driver and will want to talk your ear off when you need to do work he's paying you to do lol. When that's your biggest problem, I guess that's a good thing. Most people will know you by name, or at least recognize your face. You can tell when someone remembers you and the majority do. If your pay is screwed up a simple 2 minute conversation will get it fixed. In 22 months, I had 2 payroll problems. One I screwed up, another they gave a PO to my co-driver instead of me, so nothing major.

I'll throw the equipment and shop together. The equipment is good. Generally, the oldest trucks you'll see are three years old. Unless you're driving local you will not see a truck with over 450,000 miles. In my time there I had a total of 6 days down due to repairs. One time it was something that needed the time, another was waiting for 3 days for Freightliner to even look at the truck then do a 20 minute fix on it. Some trailers have some age but most are in good shape. The biggest problems is guys being lazy and not doing a post trip, or even doing it and not bothering to fix it because it's "not their problem anymore". You'll find dropped trailer with flat tires, bad air leaks, mudflaps gone. It's not like that every time, but this is a driver issue, not the company. Maybe the company should do more to punish guys who do it. Maybe they do and I just don't know since I leave my stuff in good shape, I don't know. The shop is pretty good. Sometimes they can take forever to get you through for even a PM. Most of the guys are easy to deal with, especially when trying to get things fixed on the road. There is one that will act like you're trying to steal from the company to get a bad tired changed but you just tell him it's getting fixed whether he likes it or not and it gets done. All he sees in $$$. You do not have to do any work on a truck or trailer. They are more than happy if you will, but you will not be forced to. Night and weekend dispatchers will often pay you money for getting something done on your own. I've made $100 for getting a reefer someone ran empty running again which maybe takes 20 minutes between dropping and hooking to it and getting it going.

One of the nice things there is you get paid whenever you turn in a TripPak. They do payroll every weekday. Anything they have by 10:00am you are getting paid for that day. Might not get into your account that day, but you will have an email with your pay stub already that day. You don't have to worry about getting your bills in by whatever day or you're not getting paid next week. When I ran a Salt Lake to Ontario, CA team dedicated we were paid every single day since we dropped the bills at the terminal every day. Honestly, I don't even remember the payscale for solo guys and I was making .38/mile split running team. They have mileage bonuses for hitting X amount of miles every month. My last full month there I had almost $500 in mileage bonus alone. It helped make up for the lower cpm. They do force per diem on you but there is no charge to you. It sucks, but it's not like I didn't know before I started.

All in all, I enjoyed my time there. Did I get pissed off a few times? Sure. Overall it was good though. I made money, I ran miles and on my last run I got home often at the sacrifice of some miles. I was a little sad to leave, but I had to move on and am at an even better place now. If I had to go back OTR, I probably would go back there.

Sorry this was kind of long. I'm bored and like to type and I know there isn't a lot of info on here about them.

 

We always took it home and they never even asked where we were keeping it. We did keep it in a yard with an 8 foot stone wall around the entire property so it was as secure as it got. My former co-driver still works there and still takes it home so nothing has changed apparently.