Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread

My experience lately has been the same when heading home. I park my truck at my mechanics yard and usually have a list of things for him to fix. He always finds more. God looks down at me and says how much money does he have and that will be his bill.

 

Looks just as good as mine. Get rid of the box behind it and it would look better.

 

Careful. Once he goes flat he'll never go back lol

 

i am so spoiled with all the cheap truck wash and polish shops in CA my truck will get pretty dirty on this PA run

 

Polish and CA brought up a memory. I got my truck polished at Little Sisters in Barstows??? Not sure if that's the town. They took my credit card and wrote down the info on it. Said the machine was broken.

Weeks later there was a charge on my credit card for an Xbox and games at target in CA. Different town but close to Barstow then it clicked. I called up fraud department at Target and spoke to a woman. She immediately credited the amount back to my new card plus sent me a $100 gift card. Come to find out this person used the info on my card at the cash register without the card in hand. Cashier was in on it also. She was fired. He also got the extended warranty with HIS NAME on it. Target did nothing but fire the cashier but was not going after the kid. Not worth it. She gave me his name.

So, on a hunch I call Little Sisters and ask for this person. Sorry, it's his day off. BINGO. I talk to the owner of the truck stop and he doesn't care. Girl gets fired and he gets an Xbox and games and nothing happens to him.

 

All the major truck leasing outfits offer this. Just not to anyone coming in off the street. There's a small carrier we've hauled some overflow for a while back that does this with Penske for about that much money. They had 17 trucks if my memory is right. $2,100/mo each, and they just need to keep a driver in the seat and fuel in the tank. Penske is under a service level commitment that varies with the rate. In this carrier's case, it was something like 4 hour back in service for major breakdown (replacement truck if required), along with a pricing menu for other types of in the shop or call out jobs.

In their case it made sense, since they use company drivers AND have a solid book of business to keep them utilized. My contact says that before, when they owned the trucks, that keeping up with that was a full time job for him. All the while costing at least as much as the full service lease does, sometimes much more depending on what was going on in a particular month. Also a factor is the well known tendency of company drivers to not take as much care with company equipment and adding to costs, versus an o/o driving their own equipment and funding their own.

Given how SNI and the like also tend to have that solid book of business available to their owner operators, I'm really not surprised to see one with a deal like this. I'm guessing via an SNI master agreement with Volvo or another outfit that leases them. Also possible with his 18 yrs in business, that this guy got that on his own merit.

 

I worked for a guy pulling a van that the same lease on his trucks. ~8 trucks iirc. It was through Calmont, the bonus was we could service the tuvk at any of their outfits. We ran Western Canada. I was thinking about doing that whrn I take the plunge but if its not generally available to a single truck O/O maybe I'll still do the old truck deal.

I'd say you did really well DY. Considering I've heard numerous times most businesses aren't even profitable in the first year...