Decisions decisions

You will want to spend maybe three to five years as a company driver to learn our industry. This Nation in trucking is a vast and many thousands of ways to do trucking. It's too many to list here.

The time spent as a company driver is a sort of a training wheels time. You will learn first hand what is good, what is bad and really what is ugly. By the time you finish this amount of years you should have a reasonable amount of savings to where you can possibly buy a big truck outright. Maybe. You might have to eat alot of cheap rice instead of steak dinners to make it happen.

Trucking is also feast and famine. Some miles this week, not so many miles next week and almost zero during the upcoming holidays for some sections of the industry.

You can use this time as a company driver to dive into the company permit book examine everything in it for the truck, ask the permit person how much for this each year, how much for the insurance card? What about he tags, DOT inpsection etc etc etc.

Tracking your own fuel burn and costs, what you incur in new tires and broken shop stuff on that company truck. Gathering information on what it costs to insure freight to say a million dollars. Understanding brokers and what they do and so on. You would be learning so much.

It will be a time of learning. When you learn and process everything with enough thinking and careful examination of your finances you might have a chance. Trucking is the fastest way to spend two million dollars to 20,000 in a year.

I can go on, but I rather not. I want others to hop on and tell you what it is like to buy a truck and own one and learn about insuring the thing plus the freight and so on so forth etc. I owned a tractor at one time, but due to discrimination by a higher manager who had the power to cancel that sale and so it was canceled. However short my time in that tractor I was no longer just a company drivah, I had much bigger problems to solve, such as fuel, payments etc.

I think you will do well, but the first thing is to slog along as a company driver and keep eyes and ears open asking everyone questions as you go. Particularly about what this or that costs.

 

Colonial Freight Systems - don't know for sure, but I think you can drive for an owner-operator.
Student Drivers
Let us Contribute to
your Success

• We accept top graduating students from approved schools

• Our training pay starts at $475 per week

• Our training program is 10 to 12 weeks

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• We provide Dry Van and Refrigerated training

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www.carolinalogistics.net is an owner-operator company.
If I were you though, I'd be a company driver for at least a year, somewhere. Go with a company that runs coast to coast/48 states, so you can gain experience in all weather/all terrain driving. Contract Freighters www.cfidrive.com is one example, but there are more. Reading their thread,CFI Driver's What's Your 20? (2017 edition) those guys are all over the place, all the time.

 

Go as a company driver for a year and then you could move on to drive for an owner operator or a fleet owner leased to Landstar or Mercer.