Between a Rock and a Hard Place...

Informal agreement or did they all sign organizational/ownership docs?

How/why did C go bankrupt? What did he put into this?

 

If you have successfully flipped a few houses, and made decent money on them, then I strongly suspect you COULD make money in the trucking industry, if you got some experience in the industry, and found a couple others who also had experience, AND your skills complemented one another.

That's part of the problem though. Without experience in the industry, it's hard to really understand how much your partners know, so it really boils down to how much the primary business owner knows.

I suspect that there were a whole lot of unreasonable expectations set by ALL of you, because your driver didn't know the back end of the industry, and your other partner and yourself knew little about the back end either. And the back end of the industry is what makes the money. Efficient load assignments. Contracts. Accounts payable. Expense control. Finding the right fuel providers. Insurance.

Your driver can drive the wheels off that truck and do an awesome job, but the company can still lose money.

That's not meant to be insulting. I hope you don't take it that way. You just moved too fast.

It sounds like you have done some driving and delivering yourself on days off, or nights, or some such, and that's good. You also, hopefully, learned a fair bit about the back end too, even if you didn't learn it fast enough to stay out of debt.

You might even have enough experience now to give box truck deliveries another go in a couple years once the current business is under the bridge and the debt you incurred is paid down.

Another potential option for you to consider. Lease the truck out to a driver, and charge them a flat rate to cover the truck loan, plus YOUR expected expenses. Make sure the truck is governed to a reasonable speed, and make #### sure to pull a MVR and criminal record, and lease only to drivers with verified experience. Require that the driver send you monthly recaps of the maintenance they perform on the truck, so you know they are not driving it into the ground.

In fact, take a moderate deposit and call it a lease to own. You no longer have anything to do with the truck. Once they pay off your loan, they own it. If they drop the lease, they lose their deposit, and pay a penalty if the truck is damaged in a way not explainable through normal wear and tear.

That is somewhat similar to one of the moneymaking strategies for house flipping via leases, so there's some overlap!

 

Whao there, this is very reviling about your lack of reality.

Dissolving the llc is easy, each partner will have to eat the debt though bankruptcy of the llc, this means you will each take a financial hit.

Reorganization and restructuring of debts may be the best thing going forward - chapter 11. What this will do is allow you to keep your credit intact while having the debts paid down. By no means is it cheap and it will take a little work, may take an injection of cash from each of you,

The other thing with that is seeing one partner is the driver, he will have to eat his profits (as all of you will) to pay the debts down, he can earn money but not a profit and this is where the a partnership llc sucks, there will be no profit if you want to pay the debt down.

Once the debt is paid down, meaning the $33k cc debt, i would tell the other two that either they can buy you out for the value of the assets or that you will move to shift the guarantor responsibility to the partner who didn't file bankruptcy and do so if you have to through the court.

I would also forget the "lucrative" thing for a while, this is where you will have to run it like a company, know your operating cost to the penny (including dead head and maintaince costs) and do runs based on your needs, not looking for golden eggs. The drivers pay should be reasonable for the work, depending on the region, it could be as low as $25k gross to as high as $40k, if you have any benefits for the driver/partner, then considering them cut, the same goes for hotel rooms and such. Everyone has to deal with it.

Oh and if your driver/partner bails, immeadiatly dissolve the company, sell the truck to pay the credit card debt an so consult a lawyer to recover the rest or go through chapter 7 for the llc.