Looking to start Transportation business, any advices?

What is with people today.
No trucking experience whatsoever and want to buy a truck and go into business.
It’s a bad idea. People with years of experience that know where to find the loads have hard time making it right now.

 

Meh, you try and warn them off, but like moths to a flame...

After all, it's only trucking, how hard can it be?

 

In my time I started with shoes on shipping containers from Europe and Asia. Shoes shoes and more shoes. In the Reagen years we just came off a very bad time where interest was 19% to buy a home at 15% buy a car. If you were smart you did not spend a penny into debt. You went the opposite and all cash. Then one day everyone decided they want Reeboks and Nikes.

Thats where I came in. Container after container after container. Back and forth and back and forth. The third week Im pulling up towards Reading PA with a black cloud over me and decided I do not like shoes enough to haul them.

The truckstop sat for a minute, absorbed my complaint (essentially saying no one knows I am alive or abused me if I did something stupid with truck) they started laughing hysterically.

I don't know about you but 50+ battlehardened savvy veterans of the big road and life in generaly reduced to being on the floor out of control is just too much.

One of two times I got laughed out of a place. Sheesh.

Fast forward many years. They assign us to haul a million plus in medicines, some are cancer kits, others narcotics and so on. Boom. That's my spot in this world. I'll haul your millions in meds, and the money will take care of itself.

Big difference between medicines and shoes. All things being equal I am motivated to run medicine. In shoes I'll be condemned to a joyless existance to eventual suicide by drink. what a waste that would be.

Now if you tried to trace the American love of shoes, you will find they cannot afford them right now. But they have to buy them anyway at any price due to drug and sports related gang cultures for some of those specific shoes.

However if one million thug wanna bes want a pair tonight, there is not enough in containers to make them all happy. you might need about oh... 20 truckers to run the containers to the distributions enters and 4 days later all of them are empty. Now what?

Hopefully you have solved the logistics question of "Now what" 5 days before they were empty all over the USA.

Feast and famine. Thats why weak companies outside of war needs go out of existance. Poof.

Now if you had say... 200 tractors running 600 trailers of medicines every morning where possible (200 outbound to delivery, 200 on loaded and waiting and a rolling percentage of your last 200 are in a varity of situations which by itself protects the trailer supply from the medicine group from being disrupted. They will have their trailers. IF they require two you keep three. IF you have any other business at all such as Apples from Yakima WA to Atlanta Safeway, then you kept 4 trailers because sometimes you dont know for sure where one of those 4 are.

Medicines. We will go through a hell of alot of them by 2050.

Unless we have a proper world war three that cleans 6 of 7 billion people in 10 years from the planet. Anyone left alive longer than 10 years will be assumed to bear children and not need medicines anymore.

Or any of them fancy nike shoes.

 

Clearly you were a successful businessman. The market in Canada has changed dramatically in trucking. Profit margins are razor thin. Paying drivers crap wages, so driver turnover is very high. Fuel, insurance, and costs all going up. Loads paying less, guys cutting each other off at the knees for a few pennies a mile. Mass influx of LMIA drivers brought in from foreign countries, taken advantage of with poor pay and lots of miles.
Take trucking out of this picture. Substitute any business. Can you make money on a 1 or 2 percent profit margin?

 

lemme put it you this way, if you think construction is in a bad place, trucking is 1000 times worse; and getting worse by the day.

Construction will recover one day, transport never will.

When my 13 year career ended, I did trucking, because it is all there was out west. I’ve done well enough to survive, but there isn’t much else in this business. I had planned on running three trucks to one million KMs myself, but I figure I’m done after this one has 1.2 million kms. Then I’m gonna go local for XPO, FedEx, XTL or Canada Post and be done with it.

 

I'd try dealing drugs first