Calling shippers

Pretty much, and as both loads were for two of my best customers, I'm not taking any chances. Last thing I need is to get a call from one of the guys going, "Yo, PPDCT, Guess who just called me about the lane I do for you?"

 

@PPDCT @boredsocial but in a way if new people try to enter the business and they don't have the tools or skill sets to get decent loads or good Rate x Mile, won't that affect the industry? They'll accept deals that won't be good for the market, and that'll hurt everyone. Won't you think?

I understand your take on not giving away your secret formula. But I'm sure, even if you give it to everyone, the way that you use that recipe has a lot to do with the results you get from it.
The other day someone said to me... If we could travel in time to 2005 and give you every detail into how to create Facebook, do you think you could be as rich and successful as Mark Zuckerberg? The conclusion we came to was: NO. Because although I could have the details, I didn't have the same skills, personality, context, network, etc.

 

He has the skills of an earthworm.

 

No. There will always be a steady supply of weak new fish competitors. They can't get any decent customers to work with them or any good carriers to haul their freight. They make a lot of promises and then one day they aren't around anymore. What hurts everyone is the undeserving getting just good enough to claw out a living through deception. That goes for trucking companies AND brokerages. There will always be predatory customers looking for people to front for them. There will always be trucking companies that are more in the crime business than the trucking business.

I think if I had Zuckerburgs coding skills and idea in 2005 I'd probably have managed to get bought out by Google. There's zero chance I would have passed on any offer that made me part of the nine zeros club.

 

WT####?????????

 

Might have confused you with someone else lol.

 

Thank God. LOL

 

@jaba23 - it's not that I want to hold you, jaba23 out of the market. We service two entirely different segments and we bring different things to the table. What we're leery of is more that we don't want our information and systems modalities winding up in the hands of our direct competitors. @boredsocial and I likely do things differently, for instance, and we both target different segments of the market within that. What works for him won't necessarily work for me, and vice versa. But say some enterprising mook takes our approaches and stamps it into some cookie cutter approach to make TQL or the like better at getting customers, it reduces our own effectiveness because then the shippers we're trying to get set up with wind up having heard our pitch and our approach before from some pimple-faced kid straight out of college with no life experience. That doesn't help either of us, and we're both pretty small players in the game as it is.

 

I lived for 10 years before going back for a BS in physics/mathematics, so although I'm "fresh out of school," I'm 30 and have lived through some intense, character forging events. I'm currently a broker, and while it's a living hell cold calling, trying to earn trust or respect with customers, it only gets easier with time. Where I work, they throw you into the water to see if you sink or swim. You're almost entirely on your own, minus the corporate infrastructure, but HAD they told me every secret that first week, none of it would have stuck and I'd be just as bad using industry jargon over the phone.

The best advice for a newcomer is to never lose hope and keep grinding, because you become better with every call. Re-evaluate yourself occasionally, but keep working. My best customers have come from the random, daily grind, such as trying to get a previously booked driver out of a city where he delivered my last load. Just doing my thing day to day, trying to move whatever I can effectively manage, staying on the load boards (even though the load boards are for bottom feeders, big dogs do also post there). Get organized, the way you build your spreadsheets will improve every month. I've got about 4 customer spreadsheets at this point because I kept optimizing the layout. Data management, and hard work is crucial at the beginning. Once you have some data to analyze, as in your second or third month, you can start "working smart" instead of "working hard." Those ("working smart") are the secrets people don't want to share, they have found some kind of niche, but know they developed this "smart" niche by busting their #####. Nothing is handed out for free in an industry that's as old as the railroads.

Once you're able to speak the language with confidence, then you can re-evaluate, and perhaps attempt cold calling direct shippers again.

 

This guy gets it. It's not a sprint, it's a slog through the mud.