Most profitable tanker companies 4 owner operators

I live in Tn, but I pull for Miller out of Pittsburgh. If you are thinking of running out of Nitro for Miller, you should realize that they have a ton of short haul dedicated runs out of there. Not that that is necessarily bad, but it does not pay as well as doing system work. I run out of Pittsburgh to avoid the short haul dedicated stuff.

 

I was leased to Miller for just over 2 years out of the Lansing IL terminal. Total nightmare. I only turned down one load. Darn lucky if I could average $1.10 a mile INCLUDING FSC. And my truck was paid off (brought it with me). Most of the guys that did lease purchase went south. Multiple weeks of negative checks. Granted, a lot of that could be because of the terminal I was based out of, but it was more due to the incompetence of the dispatcher and manager. More than twice I did a load originating from the Chicago area and ended up being told that I did it for "backhaul rates". Some stuff paid ok, but more times than not, not so much. I took roughly a $33,000 cut from the company I started out at. Not to mention the vast majority of trailers were old spring ride junk. The only time they got greased was if either we did it ourselves, or had to write it up for "brake adjustment", otherwise, only once a year.

This is not just my opinion, it is factual. I left out opinions until now. In my opinion, keep walkin until you find anything else.

Good luck in your search,

Scott

 

I am leased to Miller now. I am not a Miller cheerleader. You can come over here and make good money, or you can come over here and just do ok. Last year I did $204,000. It came to $1.98 a mile on a cost of $1.23 operating cost, leaving $0.75 to the house. That was with a $2,040 a month tractor note. This is not an advertisement for Miller. But, $1.10 with fuel included.........you will have to tell that to someone who doesn't work over here. Even if you ran everything dedicated and had 50% deadhead you couldn't get that low. I guarantee you that Miller is not for everyone. I have plans on making a move out of here myself to US Bulk and go pull end dumps. But, I will tell the truth about Miller. The good, bad, and ugly. And those numbers are just not possible. I would have to see the accounting. I can think of nothing over here that is that bad and I run in and out of East Lansing all the time.

 

Do you know anyone that pulls out of nitro?? Like how many miles they average a week and what's the pay per mile average to be?

 

Pittsburgh used to be a satellite terminal. We were dispatched out of Nitro. So, I used to work for Danny( the Nitro terminal manager) and with Clay and Scottie (dispatchers). If you just want to run dedicated only and be home every other day you would be looking at an average of the low $1.60's. If you wanted to do some TX and GA and TN loads and be gone for 7-10 days you could bump that up into the high $1.70's to low $1.80's. If you wanted to run long haul and stay out a couple to few weeks at a time you could bump that into the $1.90's. As for miles, it just depends on how you want to run. It is rare that they get very slow out of Nitro. It can happen when Lucite goes down for maintenance, but, that's a couple weeks a year. If you have questions about Nitro, call the Miller Nitro terminal and talk to Danny Bollard. He is the terminal manager. He is a pretty straight shooter. He just tells it like it is, not what you want to hear. You can reach Danny at (304) 755-8216.

 

You probably remember the guy who cooked all the time and worked on the truck all the time. White T600. In the past 1 year, 6 have quit. Another is trying to secure outside financing to pay of his truck and leave.

As far as $1.10 goes, I did the Mt Home load regularly. 550 miles out, 550 miles back. Linehaul was around $1850(ish) Fuel varied, dedicated percentage of 67%. After buying fuel, I was seeing right around $1100 take home. Thats a buck a mile. Just saying, I'm sure that most people are really only interested in the bottom line. Now to be fair, I heard the line haul has gone up a little, but I don't know for certain what it is now. Yes, there are some that paid more, but MILS came in and grabbed almost (95%) all of the fuel additive loads. MILS is owned by Lee's sister. Every load that was brokered through MILS ended up sucking so bad, it really wasn't worth getting out of bed for. Anything out of Cargill was bad. They dropped the fuel surcharge to about a third what others paid and shifted it to the line haul. Yes those are some, not so hot loads, but they did do the occasional run to Cali. One paid great, one less than great. According to my former manager, Miller doesn't dispatch the same day you unload. So you sit and waste half of a day. You get used to the quall comm. Some days, i miss it. Most I don't.

Again, to be fair, I have to generate right around $500/day after fuel in order to be profitable. Out of that $500, I had to pay taxes, set aside for repairs (yes, Miller offers escrow accounts, but they keep the interest on all the escrow accounts except the mandatory $3000, so I'd rather save it and get the interest) and my paycheck. Unless I did those Mt. Home loads, I rarely saw $400/day. Again, I was out of the Lansing terminal and the manager was very dishonest. I know some of the other terminals did better, some did worse.

Isn't Clay now the regional manager? Or was it Danny? I know one of them got a promotion.

Scott

 

I'm leased to miller as well, you could not hit 1.10 a mile with 50% deadhead. The only way to hit a negative check with a paid for truck is to not run for weeks, or have borrowed money to repair the truck. My numbers for 2014 are 1.78 a mile to the truck, with lots of deadhead .

 

Danny got promoted to Nitro terminal manager. Wilson( the old manager for Nitro) got promoted to District manager. I don't know when you left, but the worst Cargill load that I have pulled paid the truck $2.30 a mile. And yes Mills did take a lot of the petroleum additive loads over. Almost all of them. But, we have a bunch of other stuff out of there now. I stay away from dedicated. Most of it pays $2.80-$3.00 which sucks when you cut it in half and run back mt. But that's still a long way from $1.10. The lowest guy I know of runs out of Memphis and he throws the truck in the wind from anywhere in the country to go home come Friday. And he still ended up at $1.38 for the year. I know a guy that had truck problems so bad that he was down for 4 months. He does a mix of dedicated and straight loads and he was in the $1.60's. Now he didn't take squat home last year, but that's because his truck just absolutely hammered him. Its just not that tough to get up around $170,000 gross over here without killing yourself, and if you want to push you can add another $30,000+ to that. But you have to push. Gary is the terminal manager out of East Lansing. I don't trust him al all. But I do get along with Don ok. There are quite a few guys doing fine out of East Lansing. But you do have to watch what your doing.

 

One thing you half to remember, is that Lansing was considered a 'turn around terminal'. They saved quite a bit of the decent loads for the guys coming up from the south to go back home. Most (not all) of the loads we saw paid the system rate of 63% up to MN, WI, KS, MI and had nothing to grab going back. Double whammy.

Scott

 

Whats going on buddy. Guess you must have gotten it parked for the night. I see you also figured out how to put some fancy wheels on your profile pic.