3yrs experience in day cab not good enough for landstar

Yep, lots of good info. Things you really need to be familiar with, to succeed, whether as a company driver, a leased O/O, or even an Independent Motor Carrier. The better you are familiar with the regs, the less you will be surprised and the smoother the sailing. Not knowing, or being familiar, with this stuff can and probably will cost you time and money.

Just like a game of high stakes poker, you can't win if you don't know the rules.

Getting back to percentages. Never judge a company strictly by the percentages paid. Find out the rates, those percentages are based on, first. Do the math, then decide. I have often made more on a lower percentage lease, than friends that got a higher percentage. The trick was, my carrier got much higher rates for their freight, than my friend's carriers got for their's.

 

Dan, Autocar has pretty much summed alot of this up a few things to add, I'm not a big fan of theses bigbox training companies but it may be something to look into before buying a truck to get some road experience and time out on the big road to see if you like it.
2. Run your house hold expenses, see what it costs you to just live every month.
3. figure what your expenses are going to be for running your own truck; fuel, repairs,tires,mait., taxes, plates ins.
put all these numbers together and you can fugure your costs per mile to run.
Landstar has a great XL spread sheet for doing this, but i dont think you can get access to this with out being on the LS network.
But If your a Member of OOIDA they have a cost per mile spread sheet on there web site, its not to bad and gives you a close idea of what you need to run.
with all that said, the spread sheets and cost annalysis is only as good as the paper its written on! There are always the OH NUTS! expenses that pop up.
What ever you have in your saving you need to almost double that for this, engines,trans wreck or towing those bills get expesive quick! and can put you out of buissnes fast.
You also have to remember what ever you make all year long, figure Dec to feb are pretty much dead months for everyone across the board so you needd to save for that as well.
This winter I ran through a debri field after a wreck,a scrap iron truck over turned in front of me, didnt have enough time to stop or get out of the way. I cut down 6 tires had to replace 4 drives and repair 2 trailer tires. Tires cost me almost 3 grand puls road service, plus the down time and getting a tire guy out in the snow, im sure cost me more. By the time i was done with this senario it cost me almost 4 grand, which basicly added up to i did the load for free!
So think about this and PLAN AND RESEARCH AND READ!