Ready to jump in, Looking for advise

Welcome to the forum and thank you for your honorable service.

 

Armyguy, where do you live? The reason I ask is I may be able to recommend a insurance agent.

We have a $100,000.00 cargo and $1,000,000.00 liability. A few things your going to want to make sure of is,

#1. You want to make sure your insurance agent puts you with a on shore insurance company. In other words you want your insurance company to be located within the United States.

#2. You want to make sure your agent will send out insurance certs to Brokers, or Shippers for you right when you ask them to. Not at the end of the day, not at the end of the week, right away. Brokers and Shippers will not want to wait for them. They'll just give the load to the next owner operator that can produce a cert right now.

As far as load boards, there's several of them online to choose from. Here's a few, Truckersedge.net , truckstop.com, 123loadboard.com, Getloaded.com, and if you plan on hauling any vehicles there's Centraldispatch.com.


Your last question would take me days to answer. Lol. There's a ton of mistakes that can be made. The bottom line though is you want to do everything by the book. Off the top of my head, make sure you check the credit on everyone you haul a load for, before you agree to haul it. Read your contracts and confirmations thoroughly. Another real important thing is communication with Brokers, Shippers, and Receivers. Give the Broker a loaded call, daily status calls, and a empty call.

 

With Progressive just make sure they don't try to limit you to a 500 mile radious.

Am I still brokering loads? No, I gave up the Brokers license. Just didn't make any sence to keep paying for a Brokers bond, especially with the bond increase that was coming. I never really made a dime off my brokers license anyways. The only reason I got one was because my customers had more work then I could handle as a small company. Having the brokers license allowed me to keep the work within a small group of Independent Owner Operator buddies. My same customers still call me, and I handle business the same way I always have, I just book the loads for the Independents I dispatch in their name without taking a cut from the load. Works well all the way around, the Shipper gets a direct Owner Operator rate without paying a broker fee, the Independent gets a little better rate then he could get from most Brokers. And I keep the Owner Operators I dispatch loaded and rolling.

 

Thats a good system Flatbedcarrier! And good advice about 500 miles limitation with Progressive, they did that with me for the first few years I was with them, they seem to be a good solution for anybody starting out but last year we left them. I knew they were raping me for the last few years but I was being loyal and hoping that would pay off. Last year they wanted $45,000 for the year, I went with another company and got way better coverage for $27,000.

Armyguy, don't be afraid to shop around for insurance.
Where are you based out of? I have subscribed to pretty much every loadboard out there and found internet truckstop to be by far the best, (for me on the west coast anyway).
Looks like your doing things the right way. Best of luck.

 

Yeah hopefully he got a good rate. Our new guys here tend to get their insurance for in the $6k to $8k range, even lower if they don't have any tickets, and they get even a lower rate after they've been at it a year, or two.

 

I think mine starting out for one truck was $4,500 with progressive.

 

San Antonio is a good place for a 40' hot shot.
Iv found internet truckstop to work the best and DAT (Transcore) next best.
When I ran both of those boards simultaneously the loads poped up first on truckstop and a better variety. DAT would post the same load 10 times mostly by the the mega carriers but claim they had better freight and more loads which would be fine if you wanted to run your ##### off on $1 pm freight.
What limited options were there?