3 lane quote

There are two reasons why a customer would be having trouble covering loads...

1) They are doing something fundamentally wrong. Examples include all sorts of wrongheaded policies that make it extremely difficult to coordinate with them and get the loads covered.

2) Not being willing to pay what it costs.

It's usually a combination of the two. Often it's that they have some unreasonable restriction on their loads (shipping hours are 12:30-14:30 and they only load flatbeds that can scale 49k pounds and they don't tell anyone about the loads until the end of the day before it ships) and are unwilling to pay for the kind of cost increase that kind of restriction would entail.

Or they are just cheap ######## who are horrible to work for because their goal is to figure out how to squeeze every last penny of margin out of their supply chain. Those people suck and none of us should be willing to work with them.

 

I work with some "needy" customers. They pay for being needy tho. If they don't pay: doesn't matter to me if it's easy nothing special work. Just isn't worth it.




Always makes me wonder when I see brokers trying to move cheap freight: not enough to peel off a decent margin to begin with.
Example: Garick Farms is based in Ohio, they have mulch and soil plants around the country. They are easy to get set up with, take anybody (anybody) on as a carrier or broker. They have their own load board for a variety of equipment and there own load board with bidding system.
I spoke with them a while back bc they have a location near me.
They always (year round) have loads to a particular location 190 miles away; they pay $350 or so as their "high" number. Brokers post it for $325. And it doesn't move for days/weeks.

That's a #### margin: on cheap freight.
Not worth hauling from a carrier perspective; and not worth it as a broker either. $25? Not worth it if you open their board and text 1 person that immediately covers it- you'd have to move 20 loads a day to make any money worth your time. I don't want to move volume at dismal margin: I look for things that are profitable.

 

Yup. There's a reason why the first thing that goes through my mind after a one call close (a customer that wants to get setup the first time I call them) is "that was way too easy... the other shoe is about to drop." I'm right nearly every time unless the customer moves one of my core commodities.

EDIT: For the record the other shoe is usually their credit. You'd all be shocked at the % of businesses out there that have pretty crappy credit. Everybody #####es about how hard it is to get a business loan out there... but then they don't pay their bills on time.

I actually don't think that it makes any sense to take ANY default risk in transportation. The margins are too low for that ####. I don't operate a cleaning company that charges 75 dollars for time they bought for 10 bucks. I run a freight brokerage operation that pays trucking companies somewhere between 88 and 92 cents of every dollar I bring in. You guys run trucking companies that have to pay drivers, truck payments, fuel, and maintenance. One customer decides not to pay you or I 100k and we aren't even profitable that YEAR anymore. Seriously we could just go get a job as company drivers or (in my case) being transportation manager of some random company. I have a customer that has a half a million dollar credit line. If they decide to just not pay me I'll be out of business.

So yeah. Have good credit, be willing to send a bank wire for the line haul+ a reasonable deposit (which I'll be keeping if you cancel the load or cause a bunch of problems that cost money), or #### off.