Business Plan/ Mentor Needed

The dedicated stuff is already being taken care of. Why should someone fire whoever they are using now and hire you to take over their dedicated route? Why are you intent to limiting yourself to ON/QC only?

 

I got started by driving my own truck under someone else's authority. The deal was not very good so I went for broke. I figured out what I wanted to do and found that work and called and asked if I set myself up will they work with me. All of them said yes. It has been working out well since then.

 

I also use the load link to find new work. I now have a book full of sources of work but have it honed in to a few specific customers.

 

Routine stuff through load link. You will get to know who has what shipments and will eventually rely less and less on the load board. I found a few direct customers through load link also. It is expensive, but is a necessary tool for the Canadian market.

 

I understand what you are up against. It is difficult in the beginning because you are the new kid on the block. You will have a ton of carrier packets to fill out for all the new brokers you will be hauling for. It feels daunting at first. The good news is, once you get into a groove (took me about 18 months) it comes as second nature. Those packets only need filled out once. Once you prove you are a good, reliable carrier, they will start calling you.

In the mean time, it will be up to you to keep that driver happy with enough work or enough pay because he will be sitting in truck stops waiting for loads. He may get tired of sitting in truck stops too much while you are lining up work and he may quit over that. This is where it really helps, in the beginning at least, if you are the driver and also the load planner/dispatcher. With such a short radius, you are up against the companies that have large accounts both in Toronto and Montreal and have drivers doing drop and hooks as fast as they can turn them. They pay decent too. The problem is, you can't legally go from Toronto to Montreal and back in the same day. You will run over your 13 hours of driving. Most drivers don't want to drive just from Toronto to Montreal or vice-versa and call it a day. It is a tough market to do that, for sure. To add even more insult to injury, lots of stuff is heavy and requires a tri-axle trailer for the weight. If you only have tri-axles, that will cut down on your availability to haul into the US because you can't carry as much weight. All of that is why I say that lane is not an easy lane to service.