How do I own my own truck and make it?

Start a lemonade stand. Learn how to run a successful business. Low investment capital, easy to service customers. When you make enough from your lemonade stand to buy a truck; you'll have a good enough understanding of how to run a business and be successful. You'll know what is worth doing yourself, and what's worth paying someone else to do.

Sounds weird, but realistically a good business person can run a more successful business than a guy that can work on his own truck but doesn't know how to run a successful business. Takes a person that can wear all hats to be very successful in this industry, or any other small business.

 

In your other thread you said you cant make more money as O/O and should just stay company driver. You even said System will take you to back. So just go back to System and stop worrying about O/O

 

I love electrical. Its good and usually clean work. Its a lot easier on the body too compared to brakes and suspension work.

 

Keep your overhead low and your bank account high so you've got the cash to handle problems and hiccups as they arise. This isn't the kind of thing you can do skating by on a thin wallet living paycheck to paycheck...you need to have $20,000 in the bank at all times. I wouldn't buy an 80-90k truck let alone a brand new one as a guy just starting out. Buy something you can pay cash for and fix up. Look around on truck paper and whatnot, there are lots of decent rigs for sale from late 90's and early 2000's for $15-25k that would be a decent place to start. Banks generally wont lend money on anything more than 10 years old, so once that easy money goes away the resale value on stuff in the 12-15 year old range tends to come way down.

I would say if you already have a decent company gig paying $60-80k a year it would be a pretty tough decision these days with the crappy rates to leave the safe confines and minimal risk of a W-2 paycheck and trucks that aren't your financial responsibility to fuel and fix. The chances of doing significantly better than that out on your own aren't too high especially at first.

 

AMEN !!!! CAN I GET A WITNESS ?!?!!!

 

You only have 24 hours in a day. You have to decide how much time you want to: eat, sleep, recreate, drive, book loads, do paperwork, work on the truck, etc. If you do it all yourself, you probably won't accomplish as much as you think.

Lots of folks think their maintenance costs less than it really does because they don't pay themselves for their time.

Some of these folks do the same thing with driving/waiting time -- they think if fuel costs 30cpm, maintenance (parts) costs 15cpm, and fixed costs run 25cpm, that their "breakeven" is at 70cpm. Its not; if maintenance would cost 20cpm paying someone else to do it, your maintenance costs 20cpm even doing the work yourself. And if it would cost you 45cpm to pay a driver 40cpm, then it costs your business 45cpm for driver wages.

In that example, your breakeven wouldn't be 70cpm, it would be $1.35!

You might say "yeah, but I can survive at $1.30!" And this is the sad truth -- you can survive for a very, very long time running below your breakeven. In doing so, you're cheating yourself out of a competitive wage. And your $30,000 in start-up capital is getting smaller instead of growing like an actual investment.

But many keep at it -- this is your competition -- which is why the economics of this business are so terrible if you don't carve out a niche.

 

I'm saving this post so I can direct others to it in the future. Explains it very well. For some reason when I try to explain the same thing to people it just comes out as cursing and telling them how dumb they are for running so cheap lol

 

A few years ago the good people here at TTR did a graphic called the true cost of operating a truck. Although I bookmarked it I can't seem to locate it. The number stuck in my head. Paying a driver $35K a year, your breakeven was $1.54/mile. Maybe the forum staff can dig it up and post here.