Interested in buying a truck and hiring a driver

Imminent Divorce

Wasn't that the name of a show truck?

 

@archerMAN If you want a return on an investment in trucking, talk to a stock broker.

 

I guess all I have to add is ditto! Everything everyone said is the truth. You will lose your arse this way.

 

You'll find the hardest part is finding a competent driver. Few and far between. You don't want the stress, it's not as simple as it seems.

 

Right. If you want to do something right, do it yourself. A lot of drivers don't want to stick with a company. Due to the OTR CDL mill churning out drivers and firing them/forcing them to quit at an alarming rate, the work ethic in this field has suffered. Guys get hired and stay 3 months, 6 months until they find a company that pays 1CPM more and they jump ship. Kind of funny since these companies want you to have perfect work history to join their subprime bottom feeder company.

Dude, if you want to run a business and retain quality employees, you're going to have to pay above industry wages, give excellent benefits, and require this dude to pass drug tests on demand. Give him all your respect and treat him like a professional, and like a person. The company that is most successful, treats their people right.

But no, I don't think you are going to succeed with your idea of hiring one driver to drive one truck. You will barely break even, if not go in the red because of unexpected expenses.

Like I said, if that were possible, anyone who could take out a loan against the equity in their house, would finance an old beater of a Peterbilt and hire some crackhead to live out of the truck for ridiculously low wages. This is not a passive income type of situation, it's not like renting property out. There is no easy way to do it. It's a clever balancing act of managing your expenses and knowing the industry. You will work your butt off to get to the top, and I'm not even an owner operator but I know this. Just being real with you man. If you can get like, 5 trucks and have like 10 dudes running the truck 24/7 , you can probably start to do well. But that's running an actual business. There's no realistic way of doing this as a side business, and when you consider the monetary figures involved in being an o/o--you're probably talking tens of thousands of dollars in a month of cash flowing in, and expenditures; doing this to clear a mere $1200 a month isn't even worth the effort.

 

@double yellow will have far better input on passive income, as I know he has several rentals. But, no idea on whether he'll be willing to share any info on it.

 

See what I bolded. What do you mean?
Drivers should pay or they should not?

 

I can understand you wanting to do this but there other ways to make extra money..

Are you doing this because you love trucking and trying to get into it while keeping your job?
Theres got to a reason... Its tough out here.. Gotta know what your doing.

 

It depends on the situation.

Here is an example of how it seems to happen.

As an owner i hire a guy who has a clean record, I don't test drive him but rather I put him into a new truck with say 80k on the clock. So a month goes by and he comes to me telling me the clutch needs to be fixed, so I put it into the shop, they replace the clutch. About three months goes by and I get a call from the guy that the trans is acting up so I tell him to go to a dealer and have them look at it. The dealer calls me and tells me that the oil plug (which is magnetic) is caked full of metal shavings. It is obvious to the dealer that the trans was abused, and he tells me that the trans needs to be replaced.

So what can I do?

In this situation I would try to mitigate any further problem by first try to work with the driver to see what he is doing or not doing.

BUT let's say I get to test drive the guy, he grinds the crap out of every gear. Is it my fault that he can't drive a truck?

NOPE so I am kind of pissed off at this so I offer to get him help but then he refuses, now what?

I can't have him continue to damage the truck, and if he refuses help, he has to assume some of the responsibility for damage he knew he was doing - right?

Another case I can use my policies as a foundation for the example. I record every little thing that is done to a truck, I have two types of scheduling for maintenance, one is routine and the other is preemptive. No matter what, problems arise, things break and it isn't because the truck isn't taken care of.

That said say I hire a guy who isn't working out (which I've had maybe 5 so far) and he decides to trash the truck. He cer'chunks the gears, hit curbs, take out signs and so on. He can't claim that the truck is defective, nor can he claim I am mean making him to do things he doesn't think is right. Basically he's a common driver that we deal with all the time.

Now this is where he will pay for the damage because he is purposefully damaging property that he is in charge of. Most owners will cut their loses and go on but I don't. This is a situation where the driver doesn't have protections at all. It gets into a criminal behavior.

Hope that clarifies it.