ASK ME ANYTHING

Yeah honestly that sounds like more of the same. Nothing wrong with it mind you, but nothing incredible about it either. Be careful of the phrase 'passive income'. In my experience it isn't.

 

Are you Kifdding me?

You work for a brokerage that Plays fun n games when it comes to paying freight charges if their is a claim?

"Whatta ya think billing,Should we pay this carrier,He had a claim last month"
"Naa.....Let see what the customer does"


I Wouldn't entrust doing business with you Ever.

You CANNOT,I Repeat CANNOT Hold Freight Charges in Lieu of a claim- Its ILLEGAL, They are two Separate Entities.

Im sure im not the only one here that would like to know whom your brokerage is you work for

 

Gotta be xpo right?

Alright I’ll stop. I remember what it was like to work for lousy people.

OP thank you for your honesty.

 

Nothing quite like being asked to have a conversation that unpleasant for probably <40 bucks to the OP. What was the something technical about his trailer? No offense but that shouldn't be happening basically ever if you're communicating equipment requirements clearly.

Like let's imagine it's a load of any paper good. You need to tell the truck that their trailer needs to leave no doubt about whether it can stay dry. There can't be any obvious structural issues with the trailer or it's going to get rejected... And in that spot I'd be pissed at the truck because I told them what they needed and they screwed ME over.

Similarly if a load requires 15 straps and vboards you need to ask very concisely how many straps they have before you tell them how many you need. Why? Because a lot of carriers will have 13 or something and try to wing it and get loaded anyway. If your customer is a stickler you now have drama.

So much about this business is about communication. My goal at work is to have zero problems with anyone. It's not easy, but it's doable if you disclose everything. Strangely consciously avoiding problem carriers doesn't actually reduce how much freight you cover... Because the time you would have spent dealing with problems will get spent on covering freight.

The basic structure of the freight brokerage business is that we get paid what we get paid on a load not because of how much work it is when things go right... but because of what happens when things go wrong. Why does a broker deserve 15% in a lot of situations? Because the #### is going to hit the fan X% of the time and when it does he's going to end up doing a ton of work and losing a decent chunk of money. One claim for 25-50k can destroy literally 1-3 months of work for a successful broker who has an office, insurance costs, employees, and pretty serious software costs (we get to buy everything so you don't have to. I always laugh when people ask whether they should buy DAT or IT as a broker. Both you dumb #### that's just table stakes). After legal fees, the time spent (sometimes literally hundreds of hours), and the money you actually just straight up lose it's pretty ugly.

So what does that mean if you want to make a nice living as a broker? Have no problems! Even if you make slightly less money per load because you're paying trucks 25-50 bucks more than the market rate to make sure they don't fall out on you you'll make vastly more money in the long run if you're not cutting corners trying to get loads covered. If a load wasn't meant to be just sigh and keep looking basically. That 'maybe I shouldn't do this' feeling is to be respected at all times.

EDIT: And in this market if salespeople are ####ting on you for the rates you can politely tell them that them ####ing up the last bid cycle with the customer isn't your fault. Go get vast quantities of market rate trucks. If they don't like it they can fire you. Probably for the best anyway. Go work as a dispatcher for trucking companies for a year waiting out your noncompete... and then get a job without a noncompete doing the sales role too. The only thing that matters in this business when the freight market is down is owning the customers. The only thing that matters in an up freight market like this one is trucks.

SECOND EDIT: Honestly OP I really dislike the business model of shops like yours. What they've done is made it so that your companies salespeople can't build a business on their own because they have no idea how to operate... And the operations people like you have no way to go out on their own because they can't sell. It's a nifty way to cap employee comp at 75k (and this is for people who would make 150k+ elsewhere), block people from leaving to start their own thing, and make sure that 70%+ of the profits end up going back to the company. It's really exploitative and it works super well. It's also lousy for customers because of the salespeople over promising and under delivering. You want to know a salesperson who doesn't overpromise? Me. Why? Because I have to go out and deliver what I promised. Your typical generic salesperson is going to do a lot of harm in logistics telling people what they want to hear all day long. Also when your operations people never interact with the customer they can't really get a feel for what the customer actually cares about. A dirty little secret in this business is that cutting corners on the customers requirements is a GOOD THING that you should be pushing the limits of whenever possible. There is a ton of profit in charging a customer for what they asked for and giving them something equivalent that accomplishes their goals perfectly but costs less. But to do that you have to actually talk to the customer and ask them questions about what will work. You aren't just negotiating with the customer about how much what they are buying should cost, but also what they should be buying. You can't really do that effectively if you don't know anything about hiring trucks.

Oh and it makes it much easier to dick over trucks. Why? Because the person making a greed based decision about how to treat the truck isn't the person who is going to have to tell the truck! It's pretty easy to say "yeah we're not going to pay that because I need to hit my numbers this week" when you aren't even the one who has to call up and give the bad news. This piece of work literally wasn't willing to tell the customer that they needed to pay up for not rejecting the trailer immediately... But he's fine telling you to go tell the truck that you're about to bend him over.

The good news morally is that the dude was definitely stretching on the 400. His trailer really wasn't what was ordered, and honestly if the requirements were on the rate con I wouldn't pay him either. 'Stuck over the weekend' is ########. He was doing a 34 hour reset as soon as he picked the load up. He lost the time from Sunday afternoon to first thing Monday AM. You owe him a 150 dollar TONU because the customer didn't check the trailer quickly enough basically. His clock isn't your problem or responsibility honestly.

But all of the above is why you have to have a framework for what fair looks like. You can't just decide on a case by case basis depending on where you are emotionally with that person. I don't care if the dispatcher starts crying when I give them the bad news. We are going to do everything by the book thanks.

 

You don't know that. Many people never do a reset and choose to run a recap instead.

 

I also don't know that he's going to get 'stuck' over the weekend. The whole thing is probably ########. In this market you can get good paying loads 7 days a week pretty easily. I'm really not very sensitive to any argument for additional compensation beyond the strict damages done.

If I have a team delivering into a grocery store DC that takes 1.5 days to unload them that's going to be quite a bit for layover and detention. But I don't want them to tell me that I owe them another 2 days because they won't be able to run another load until Monday. That's simply not the case, particularly not for a truck that can deadhead infinite miles and keep rolling afterward to wherever the load goes.

Weekends aren't even a particularly bad time to book freight right now. Customers who tried and failed to ship Friday and are now willing to ship on the weekend aren't price sensitive. They just aren't. You can ring them up pretty hard. So please don't tell me that your truck is down for 48 hours. If the truck is down for 48 hours that's on the lazy dispatcher that doesn't want to do any work on the weekend not me. Take it up with him/her.

EDIT: And no I have no sympathy for dispatchers having to reshuffle their plans. My plans have typically been reshuffled 2-3 times that day already and my response is pretty much 'welcome to the big leagues rookie... go earn your pay'. Sorry not sorry. This is trucking and it's pretty normal for the best laid plans to have to get changed. Handling those changes is literally the job description. If you don't want to deal with it go do something else.

 

All true but, you should switch to decafe.

 

Yes decaf will help

 

Are you taking trucks off the street or are you dealing with a trucking company that has the equipment you need for the loads you arrange to ship?

A few minutes communicating what you need exactly at the shipper will eliminate time wasted if that trailer indeed is not up to standard for loading.

I recall Kraft in particular as a shipper. That trailer had to be clean. Not even the usual pound of coffee and sweeping it would cut it. It went to at truck wash out before going to Kraft dry. They would climb in there and sniff it and feel it. A little picky picky, but I got used to it. MM Mars Waco is another shipper that did that.

Im not here to give you a hard time, but you would think when people tell the prospective trucker and his dispatcher what is exactly required by a shipper you would save everyone time all around by having the correct truck from the beginning.

I hope you are working with large companys with trucks to standard. Otherwise trying to do work brokering freight to truckers off the street and being somewhat maybe short on the required equipment is not exactly what I would call a good situation.

I don't know too much about your side of the problem but there has been a handful of times I have been told in very simple words by shipper: "No I am not loading you"

Without fail that leads to a destroyed day with hours spent on the phone with now a angry profane dispatcher stressing everyone out. Which is why those refusals by shippers stick in my memory most of the time.