Carriers' mentality on late deliveries

This in one. For every @Ruthless @rollin coal @nikmirbre or @Long FLD you have (Y'all nerds are the ones I just saw first, but you're cool), there's a dozen, a hundred, or maybe even a thousand dudes who're just scraping by trying to figure out how to make it in this business without a plan beyond, "get up, get freight."

The other thing to figure on your load out, and this is something to consider on these going forward - guess who's paying the carrier the lion share of their income during that period? I'll give you a hint... It's not you. And there's a million and one ways it could go wrong for them and delay the final delivery of your product.

At the end of the day, I know it's maddening that you're getting heat from your customer about the issue, and that the service failure sucks. But, there's a time to be realistic about what you're doing. It's like when I had a Chicago customer years back - I knew if I was awarded the load in the morning for an afternoon pick up, there was a 75% chance that I would be recovering the freight 2-4 times before the actual pickup window. Nature of the business, and nature of the game in that particular place on that particular freight.

 

We are about to see a world record in here folks- somebody that’s gonna learn from talking.

 

Sounds like a lot of broker loads I deal with as a company driver. If you can even get someone on the phone, good luck getting any correct info from then. Then it’s 100 an hour late fee, show up on time and you set half a day because they scheduled 4 trucks to show up at the same time for one crane.

I thought that was broker 101?

 

You might want to read some of your reviews on the various freight boards or Google. You might not do things like this, but it sound like others at your company do.

You are also approaching this like binary situation- you and the carrier. It is not.

From your perspective you have relationships with the carrier, your company, and the customer. At various points you have/will value the relationship with one more than the other.

The carrier has a relationship with you, his driver, other brokers, and most importantly with his bankers.

Let's assume he has a fixed cost of $150 a day, not counting wages/fuel/etc. Just to have the truck sit still for a day will cost him $150. In this scenario he is facing a choice - eat $300 and run no freight or run freight and eat at least $200 in fines. If he sits the truck, he has to compensate the driver or he risks losing the driver. With whom is the carrier more "ethically/morally bound" to keep faith with? On the financial side, which is going to hurt him more - losing a driver or losing your business?

You mentioned getting a bad reputation or negative remarks on Freight Guard. Which is the greater risk to him - a negative mark on Trucking Yelp or a missed payment on the truck? Or not making his insurance payment? Or his fuel bill? Or any of the other expenses that are tied to keeping a truck running? A bad Trucking Yelp score isn't going to matter one iota if he no longer has the truck.

This is something that a lot of carriers are facing - the truck keeps moving or the truck gets repo'd. This type of carrier is also the type that is going to accept a deal like this.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul is no way to run a business, but neither is expecting table cloths and real cutlery at Arby's prices.

 

Well, we think it's bottom of the barrel freight because it is, in the same way that sticks and bricks often are, or other commoditized, low-margin freight is. You're paying someone basically pennies on the dollar for someone to move a trailer, with the expectation that you're not getting exclusive use of their power unit. Things are going to happen. Stuff's going to get squirrelly. I think what you need to do is re-read what we, variously and collectively, have said: what you say is what "should" happen. As a rule, the folks on these boards tend to be "I say what I mean and do what I say," types. What we haven't said: "don't worry about it, nobody cares." What we have said: "Hey, you're running freight, that whether or not it pays well compared to others in its class, does not pay all that well and consequently, you're going to get carriers who do not believe as you/we do."

What it feels like more than anything is that you're looking for validation and support for your position, rather than the hard-won advice and experienced that has been offered by a variety of industry veterans here.

By all means, take pride in what you do, but please understand that what we're telling you is from simple market economics and has nothing to do with our perception of you or how the industry should be handled.

 

@PPNLE Nailed it (per usual).

At the end of the day, I think we'd all like to work with people in this space that do what they say they are going to do, even if something has changed on their end and from a short term perspective it would be easier / more profitable to do something different. And I think most of the folks here do their best to honor their word and be good business partners (especially to the carriers/brokers/shippers that reciprocate).

I think what you believe is people pushing back on you OP, is actually just a bunch of us saying, "This loadout isn't exactly the golden opportunity you think it is to your average carrier, and it isn't really shocking that some carrier you've never worked with before didn't break their back to make sure it was executed flawlessly".

 

It goes both ways. You have plenty of brokers on the spot freight market, let's call them 'TQLs of this world', that will break the ethics code of the most honest and reliable owner operators and smaller carriers, turning them from angels to devils, by their deceptive and unscrupulous tactics. And the examples of which, in my humble estimate, far exceed those of yours.

 

The way I see it, you're a broker. That's the customer that you have and that's what your customer wants to do. So as their broker you do that. That's how you make money.

Bottom of the barrel top of the barrel.. probably lower part of the barrel but a different segment. I suppose you could look at that and say that segment could be more unreliable than others because some don't have a trailer. But it's still a segment and there's still the trucks out there to haul it and people that want to hire them to do it.

I don't know how anyone else does it, but I would explain it to the customer. You're moving the trailer cheaply. It's going to happen that some guys take off or they don't come in time whatever. It's just part of what it is and they need to realize it.

Or they can approach it a different way.

I would just deduct the money and brainstorm with the customer to see if there's any other ways you can prevent whatever problems that you can.

Other than that, forget about it and when it happens again expect it as a normal course of business and deduct the money again and move on.

Some segments might be worse than others, but people in general are just unreliable.