WTF?

I don't know or understand the O/O side of the business so hence the question. How come O/O's, or more of them don't do "brokering" on their own? Deal with shippers directly, get rid of the smug middle guy, the guy who is trying to tell the guy who is actually doing the work how it's going to be or why this works this or that way and with a crappy grin on their face tell you "if you don't take it somebody else will"? It seems if somebody with cheetos stained fingers, a phone and computer can do it why can't somebody who is running a business do it and get that money that's being skimmed off, not just by the brokers but everybody else involved, into their own pockets?

 

Cuz the customers have every clown with a phone cold callin em and tellin em every lie under the sun to get their business. There's no time to compete with that. I'd rather search for the honest broker that makes his 10-15 percent and deal with them. And believe it or not theyre out there. Tough to find. But they're there. And not ONE of em has ever tried to tell me how to run my show, or tell me if I'm not making a living for a buck eighty-two ten a mile then I gotta rethink my plan. And you can dang sho nuff believe ive never told THEM how to roll, or that if they can't make it on 10-15 percent margins they should go back to school.

This whole lowest common denominator paradigm that trucking has become is what makes me sad. 'Let's see how low this guy will move this for, and if we find someone lower after we confirm his crap load we'll just cancel'. Yeah there's a mission statement.

 

My average margin is <12% and that includes my super high margin stuff. Most produce lands around 10%. I'm simply stating that in 2016-early 2017 1.82 a mile isn't that bad. I choose to be informed about the state of the trucking business. That's a big part of why I'm here actually.

Seriously if 1.82 isn't enough for you to pay yourself a fair wage as a driver and turn a profit on the truck how much do you need? How many miles do you run a week? I've been very open about my business practices. How much do you consider to be fair?

 

Because finding shippers is hard work. And shippers don't want to deal with someone who can give them a truck a week they want to deal with someone who can handle 25%+ of their entire freight spend. The big carriers have these same kinds of people. Those people make the same money kind of money as low end to mediocre brokers.

 

White Volvo's are the equipment of choice of most foreign trucking outfits. Especially the one's in Chicago.

 

Trust me when I say the race to the bottom has been brutal on the brokerage side too. Customers have pulled that same move on me (taking a load back because someone else was cheaper) and I've responded by never hauling a load for them again.

That's the sort of thing civilized people don't do. Sort of how if you offer someone a firm rate you have to do it if they say yes. Even if they say yes really fast and it causes your heart to sink because it means that they would have done it cheaper.

I expect the same back from the carriers I use though. I don't appreciate it when the spot market rates go up at 11am and suddenly a couple of my trucks break down.

All of this brings me to why I don't work with Landstar anymore. One day I booked my last day with Landstar. An agent called me in the morning and snapped up a reasonably priced load from me. At 4PM he called me to tell me that the driver had some kind of personal emergency and needed to come off the load. Now by 4PM the prices had shifted a fair bit so I priced it higher trying to get it moved quickly.

Landstar instantly called me and tried to take the load. Never again. I covered the load for a couple hundred higher than Landstar offered the second time with one of Rollin Coal's breathren and slept like a baby.

 

I just thought that with today's technology it would be easy to do even from your truck especially once you built a customer base. Is it not worth the hassle over the 10-15 % you pay someone else to try to save that for yourself?

 

Your customer base is probably going to be in the city you operate out of. Most customers don't have reliable freight to just one place, and those that do typically don't pay the greatest rates (honestly much lower than I pay). Once you take that first run out of your city to some random place you're going to need a load back.

Trust me when I say that you can't just 'call around' and get a load in an area with a direct shipper. If you can it will be because they have an internal freight brokerage that will pay you exactly what you would have gotten from a broker.

This is the thing people don't get... The customer pays the broker not the truck. That 10-15% I'm making doesn't come from you... The customer pays me what he would pay you if he was talking to you+ my margin. My margin is pay for going out and finding you. I'm also responsible for how the load goes so I'd better pick right.

 

1.82 is mediocre at best. Just more propaganda from you. I'll give you this though your pretty good at slinging bull dung.

 

That's round trip all miles in 2016. In 2014 it would have been more like 2.50. Hopefully in 2017 it will be north of 2.00 again.

Remember that brokers don't set the market truckers do. All those other trucks are your competition. You can rage at them for being willing to take the freight for cheaper, but it's their job to try to get as big as they can and make as much money as they can. If they can find a way to be happy at a lower price point you have to find a way to be happy there too... Or you can go out of business.

It's not like I don't feel your pain. My $/load dropped from 435 to 212 from 2014 to 2016. I'm now doing almost triple the work for a 50% pay bump. It's a lot of fun let me tell you.

EDIT: A good starting place would be to stop seeing other trucking companies as brothers in arms against the evil brokers and start seeing them as what they are: competition looking to find ways to operate cheaper so they can scoop the food right off your plate. I don't have anything against truckers, but I wish my fellow brokers pretty much nothing but the worst. If they are having a terrible day there's blood in the water and there's an opportunity for me to profit.