Advice for new hotshot owner

Flatbedcarrier,

I was told you may be able to assist with insurance for hot shots. Just getting started out of Tucson AZ. Have rig, trailer, Crazy Progressive quote 18k yr and wanting to find other sources for potentially cheaper quotes. I'm 36, clean everything. Non CDL but will be going to Southwest Driving School here in Tucson on the 22nd. Any advice or contacts for the insurance? Thank you

 

Pretty much every commercial insurance company out there is high now. I’ve heard Berkshire Hathaway is offering lower rates but you’ll have to hunt down an agent. A new Independent Owner Operator using our services just saved a few grand going with them.

 

@flatbedcarrier

Thanks my man, I'll look into that. I just got a second quote from the same agent but we removed the unlimited Miles and did 500 miles at 90% of the time but she said there no way to know how often I travel outside of that 500 mile range but it dropped down to 13k. Do you think that's bait, if I have a claim will they look into my loads to see if my lane average exceeds that 500 Miles so they can drop me? If not i think I'll go that route. Thanks again.

 

Yeah I’d be worried about dropping the unlimited mileage radious. What’s your log book going to show? I’m thinking they could deny your claim easy if something happened while ooutside the 500 miles.

 

The first years insurance is going to be high, there’s no escaping it. That’s because any new company is considered a high risk. The key to making big payments like, insurance, equipment, and fuel is to hit the ground running. If you’re busy and profitable right out of the gate you don’t have to worry about those payments. The money will be there.

Everyday I see Owner Operators with less than a years experience, on forums, and Facebook pages crying about cheap rates and the lack of loads out there. That’s because they thought a load board would be all that they needed. They had no clue that most flatbed freight slows down for months at a time. From now until about mid February, hundreds if not thousands of Owner Operators nationwide that are solely relying on load boards for work will go under. That happens every single year.

If you get into this business you need to be willing to run pretty much all over, hauling just about anything you can get on your trailer. We run in and out of AZ regularly but only if the inbound rate pays enough to subsidize the outbound rate, or to dead head out to somewhere that we can get a good rate. Luckily we have a client base that understands if they ship something into AZ on us, they’ll have to pay a premium.

I’m not telling you all this to scare you, I’m telling you this to warn you that you better have a game plan that’s going to work, or you probably won’t make it. Have a game plan, and run that game plan by a multiple seasoned veterans in this business before implementing it. I’ve been around trucking for over 40 years but even I still bounce ideas off other experienced people to make sure I’m not overlooking anything.

 

I went through their 53 page introduction and i found a lot of help but the information is so scattered and hard to find. I recently had a thread asking about all sorts of things but users picked and chose what to answer, again leading to the scattered knowledge and they focused about the sleeper question for a page which i gained information but it became more chatty than informative. Ah well, the search continues to for me. I will read through this thread and see if I can gain any more knowledge.

 

Yup