Why does Hot Shotting exist?

As I stated above with regards to mining, I used to work for a company who repaired mining shovels in the oilsands. The loss of production as a result of a shovel being down is mind blowing. If they can hot shot a component out and have it there 4 hours faster than on a tractor trailer, that's 4 more hours of production that day.

 

Thats where I call it, mining/oilfield...everything previously stated plus, hot shot prefferably have clean records and are willing to take a ding and drive 80+ to get that hot load there!!

Term stolen by the expedite folk

 

We get plenty of time on the freight we haul. We get offered and move some expedited but not very much of it. Personally I'd rather build a load out of LTL freight.

I started moving LTL freight back in the early 1980's with a 1967 freightliner cabover, and a 40' flatbed. I'd stack as much as 18 drops on my trailer, and on a deck/drom that I had on the back of the tractor, I'd even put freight in my sleeper and side boxes. A few times I even tied some sailboat masts under my trailer. If I could've, I'd of tied freight to the roof of the tractor. Why? Because it paid really well, sometimes one piece of LTL pays as much as a full truck load. My average load back then paid more than a lot of Owner Operators today make in two to three weeks of running. We still do well moving LTL today but it's nothing like it use to be. The thing is, there is, and always will be a demand for LTL shipments.

A lot of guys are afraid to deal with LTL freight because of the risk involved in moving it. If you don't know what you're doing, don't have a lot of connections for this type of freight there's always that chance that you could get stuck with a quarter, or a third of a load that doesn't pay enough.

If you get down to it, most full loads are ltl's, they're just going a distribution process. It leaves a shipper in bulk and when it gets to the warehouse/distribution center the loads are broken up and loaded on several trucks and sent to stores/end users all over.

The reason we have LTL shipments is there's a lot of small businesses out there that don't produce full loads, look at construction companies, auctions. And just think of the general public buying and selling all different types of stuff. They all néed their stuff but they don't want to buy, or move a full truckload of it.

Here's a few pictures of hotshots with LTL loads on them. I probably have a few thousand pictures of loaded trucks/trailers.

 

I've actually thought about going hotshot when I move up to canada, especially since I'm looking at Alberta...

 

I used to hire some hotshot drivers on occasion in my business. We rented some specialty equipment out of Houston and it was about $4,000 a day in rent. I would pay a hot shot to pick it up close to 5PM in Houston and haul it to my job site and be there at 7am the next day. The rental company didn't charge us rent for the day if we picked it up that late in the day. If we picked it up in the morning we were charged rent for that day.

We are a small company and needed all our people to be able to work at the jobsite. If I sent someone to drive all night to get the equipment they would be sleeping the next day and not working.

Most the loads were 5-10,000 lbs.

 

To some extent Hot Shotting exists because people are doing it. When someone has a service and the customer base erodes (as in the decline of business in the oil patch) they either go out of business or adapt. Hot Shotters have adapted.

These days it's more of an LTL business than an expedited, although expedited loads are where I make the most money. I tend to get the loads that are either being picked up or dropped off somewhere far out of the normal shipping lanes.

A flatbed hauler probably doesn't want to take a 3 hour side trip to pick up 6000 lbs with another 3 hour side trip to drop off to make an extra $600. That load I can do and if I'm careful I can be out and back the same day.

I'm the same as any independent operator, just a smaller truck with smaller loads, shorter trips, but hopefully the same profits.

 

99% of what I do is LTL in my van. I can pick up 3 250lb copy machines in Phx and deliver them to Gardena, CA for the same rate those megas get for 45,000lbs of recycled cardboard going to Wilmington.

 

Theres more to it, but you're getting the general idea.

 

Yep


The mega carriers with their 10, 15, 20 thousand trucks make their money, on pennies, a penny, some times even a fraction of a penny per mile going after what they see as a sure thing, FTL.

We make our money by being creative, and gambling.