DON’T LEASE

Did you lease your truck from company you haul for? Or in outside company and then leased that truck onto a company, or going out and finding your own loads?

 

I can answer as I dealt with the same people. @markealy got his truck from TEL (Transport Enterprise Leasing). He works for USA Truck which is a company that they deal with. @markealy has a great post about them you should check out. I had a good experience with TEL too despite what the reviews say about them. Trust when I say they will work with you and you can have the truck almost anywhere. I won't speak for him, but if you want my side of it, feel free to ask.

 

To the lovely poster above, I happily oblige. I too leased a truck with TEL which was a 2020 Freightliner Cascadia Evolution. I started my leasing adventure back in 2019 at SRT. I was on a dedicated contract for DOW/XPO and did pretty good believe it or believe it not. I was paid $1.02 plus FSC with $0.05 for hazmat hauling involved (yeah, laugh) with guaranteed mileage pay thrown in. I would easily pull 3200 miles a week thanks to my lovely XPO team and had had consistent checks of $3200 or more at times after deductions and expenses. Alas, the relationship wouldn't flourish as David "I Have A Mangina" Parker decided to ax SRT in May of 2020. With that I lost all of the above and ended up at STAR Transportation first and then LandAir at $1.05 plus FSC later that year. To say that it was a living hell is the understatement of the century. I went from making $3200 a week after everything to sometimes $900 a week if I was lucky. It also didn't help that the driver managers and brokers were abusive as well. I was put on the ECHO Global Logistics account where I was still expected to haul hazmat, yet I wasn't paid extra to do it. I couldn't take the truck and leave as the lease wasn't walk away and it was $10,000 to move the truck plus a month of truck rent to do. You still had to wait two weeks for the approval process to take effect.

By March of last year, I'd had all that I could stand. No matter how much I budgeted, crunched numbers and starved, I just couldn't get ahead. Home time was near non-existent as the managers and broker would make sure that I was at least six or more hours away from my house with a load on the DAY I was to be home. This was also counted as your day off no matter if you had to drive home. They also tried to push the policy that you would only receive four days off despite being out 2+ months. None of this sat well with me. I nearly died a few times from all of this and was utterly miserable despite them telling me that it would get better. It didn't and I had to use my car as collateral just to pay rent and lived off of peanut butter and tuna just to pay my rent and other things.

My first driver manager there had the biggest attitude and we came to a verbal altercation in the summer of 2020 where he spent the day threatening my paycheck over a load that I had submitted and was paid for weeks prior. I told him that he would not talk to me that way as I wasn't going to have it. When I called him to alleviate the situation, this ####er called me everything but a child of God and hung up in my face. I called the supervisor of the dispatch and let him know that I was on my way to Nashville and that I was going to beat that dispatcher to death with my 1 3/4 socket wrench. He asked me not to come and told me he'd move me to another. Now the broker was a different story. My medical card came due in March of that year and I was in Texas and asked him to send me home to renew. Instead, he gets the bright idea to send me to Little Rock, AR with a load. Good thing that there was a clinic next door, so that solved that problem. If anyone is familiar with CMS on a truck aka, Bendix, you know that it is a pain in the ###. I had a car cut me off and it caused a hard brake, which shifted the load. I was made aware of this after the receiver refused the load and showed me. It wasn't wrapped right and the hard brake proved to be the breaking point for the load. When I called the broker about it, he assumed that I was calling about home time and proceeded to run me down. I sent the ####### the pictures with a scathing message after which I called LandAir and told them that I quit the account. He called me later and tried to run me down again to which I stopped him and after a flurry of f-bombs and name calling, told him that I wasn't afraid of any earthly ####er on this plain of existence. Then I told him I had his name, ### and address and had no problem with him not seeing his kids grow up. This was the final straw.

In April of that same year, a friend of mine whom left when SRT folded gave me a call. He gave me the number to recruiting for A&A Express and told me to give them a call. When I did, they told me that they couldn't bring me on with the Cascadia as TEL had burned them in the past with leases. They did however tell me that if I was willing to part with it, they'd put me into a truck under a new lease. I agreed and called TEL to tell them that I was quitting. They were highly disappointed but gave me instructions on what to do with the truck. So I returned to Corpus Christi and cleaned it out for the return trip to Chattanooga. After that I was flown to Brandon, SD and put up in a hotel by A&A Express for their three day orientation. Afterwards, I was put into a 2018 Volvo 760 and couldn't be happier. I am now paid percentage and have only had one bad month and it's been almost a year since I joined the A&A Express family. That would take a post in itself and I would be happy to write about it if anyone is interested. @markealy you didn't ask, but I thought that you would find it interesting since I mentioned it on your USA Truck post.

 

I for one would love to hear more.

 

You punched forward got through adversity iam happy for you .you are now at a better spot ....thank you for the mention.....

 

About A&A Express?

 

Absolutely would like to here more especially if they are doing it right

 

About anything you would want to share. Company info is great also.

 

6235 for a week? Yuck.

 

6k aweek is good for me iam definitely better then a prime lease or a kllm lease or a hirsbalch lease but show your data