Competing For Freight With Company Drivers

I'm impressed with company I'm an owner operator at. Their company drivers I know get sent home to sit when things are a little slower more than I do.
Dispatch seems to give out loads based on a person's willingness to work and/or how much of a hard time you give them about certain shippers or receivers.
It's kind of like Karma.

 

It provides a ready over flow capacity at almost no cost to the company.
Say company has 10 company drivers and 1 o/o (just to make the example simple) and enough work to keep 9 of the trucks running at 95% and the last truck at 80%. That o/o can therefore pick up loads that otherwise the company would have to keep another driver around to pickup. Opportunity cost is a real thing.

That of course is a super simple example, but I hope the concept came through.

 

I'm sure there are plenty who put more profitable freight on their company trucks but most that i know try and decide which the best fit is. And use the crap load on a company because the O/O won't take it.

 

Leasing on to a company that has company driver's is one of the biggest mistakes you'll ever make in your trucking career.

 

Depends on the company.

 

I think there are 7 or 8 company trucks where I’m at. They get used to cover the loads with long unload times and if something falls through and there’s going to be a long bounce it falls on the company guys. He uses them to basically keep all of the owner ops happy.

 

How many owner ops are there at your company?

 

Right now I’d guess 25 or so without looking at the phone list.

 

In my case it definitely wasn’t a mistake, In fact it was one of the best decisions of my 30 something years in trucking. Car-hauling is different in many ways than other forms of freight. The carrier I lease to has roughly 1000 rigs with 1/3 being owner ops. There are many reasons a carrier chooses to have both company rigs and owner ops. The damage frequency ratio could be one reason to have owner op carhaulers as we sometimes have lower numbers, thus helping the carriers retain business and help to be awarded new business. I realize all carriers don’t work the same, but we pick what loads are available at the time when we dispatch as a first in first out dispatch. It may be a bad idea to compete with company trucks in some companies, but not all are bad.