mercer transportation

Its January. That means its slow. Now that being said there is still darn good money to be had in January, but it takes more effort to make it, and you will sit more. I don't mean sitting for multiple days, i mean instead of unloading and reloading every day you might unload this afternoon and reload tomorrow morning. I also don't mean more effort as in more miles or more physical labor, i mean more effort put in to get the good loads. Keeping yourself in the right markets, talking to agents to let them know when you will be in their area, etc. Be willing to dh a little more. etc etc.

If you are kit mashing decent money right now yiu need to evaluate what you can do differently. Maybe you are relying to much on your coordinator and the flawed 'system'? Maybe you haven't put in enough effort to figure out the good areas/fine tune lanes to run in January? Or maybe it's something else, but if you got reasonable expectations and put in the effort required, you should be making good money right now.

Dont get me wrong, I'm not saying it's easy but there is a lot we can do to make January not the terribly bad month it is for most.

 

I'm making money, all I said was they don't have allot of freight like most carriers

 

We

The fact I get paid after every load.. Other than that that's about it

 

Who are most carriers? are you talking total load numbers? Are we talking loads per truck ratio? Are we talking good paying load numbers?

General blanket statements don't provide enough info for an intelligent response.

My brain went on strife and i got myself stuck out in Houston a couple weeks ago and spent half a day talking shop with a guy leased to buddy moore while we both patched and rerolled tarps. he kept having agents/dispatch calling him offering freight. On the surface that looks like they got a lot more freight than us, but the quality of the loads were pure garbage. We kept laughing about the garbage both of us kept getting called on. Multi stop paying 1.50 a mile. That's junk even for texas. Having access to a ton of freight isn't any good if its all garbage.

 

We don't even have Texas freight.. Not like we should

 

What other flatbed carriers have more freight? Is this "more freight" quality stuff (low weight, no tarp, 1 pick/1 drop, $2+ a mile, etc) or stuff agents know will be a hard sell to us operators? The freight we see on the board is a fraction of what the agents deal with on a daily basis. A lot of work goes into cold calling, calling established customers, vetting load information, receiving calls for rate quotes, bidding, etc, that in my opinion shakes out most of the garbage for us.

Every year this "no freight" conversation takes places at every trucking company.

 

We have plenty of Texas freight if you want to run cheap. Same as any other carrier. No carrier has a large quantity of good paying flatbed freight in Texas.

 

Reading my load notes.. I See where a driver turned this OD load back for being sick and is being charged for the Permits. Almost $200 in permits

 

Well of course he has to pay for them. He ordered them.

 

just interesting that they put that in my notes.