"A 'Q' for the Owner/Operators out there.....Any help is helpful......"

I would be very cautious about jumping into debt right now with the current state of the economy and the looming fiscal cliff. We could very easily see another recession, the last one in 2008 weeded out alot of owner ops and companies big or small. But with all of that aside, my personal opinion would be to lease onto a company first, learn the ins and outs of owning a truck, hard lessons learned this way are more forgiving than when you have your own authority. The vast majority will lease to a carrier first, some get their own authority from the get go, I believe they are more prone to fail.

 

Love the media - "Fiscal Cliff" - US business is resilient and on so many levels we are nowhere near the same condition as we were back in 2008. Great example is inventory levels. In 2008 we had weeks worth of inventory in stores and warehouses. Now we have days. Why is that important in trucking? Because when the economy slows those weeks turn to months and orders stop for a long enough period that it snow balls. But now, 2-days inventory turns to 5-days and that relates to a bad week in trucking vs shutting doors.

So with that example in mind, look around our economy and see how things have changed and it is easy to see that if Congress doesn't figure out a way to kick the can down the road again the impact is going to be minimal.

In terms of starting a trucking business. If you are a business person (not a truck driver that is buying a job) this is a great time to get into this. Used truck prices are down, capacity is tight, and more and more carriers are looking to have relationships with independents and small carriers vs. increasing company drivers and leasing on O/O's.

And as far as the rest of it, use the search button and you will find many threads on the financials. Then start studying the industry and figure out what added value you can bring to your customers.

 

Have a decent amount of start up capital and operating cash on hand (not credit cards). $20-30k might seem like overkill- until you blow a trans or engine, then it goes away fast! Look into joining OOIDA for help getting your business plan started. As a member you also derive many benefits on the cheap, like drug consortium, and a lot of other stuff.

 

I have seen many mixed reviews for satellite systems on trucks. The main choice though is the Vuqube by far but there are tons of mixed reviews. Some say they never find the satellite signals others say they have no problem.

I am going to guess that getting a good signal all depends on where you are in the country and the surrounding area of where you are parked.