Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread

I have faith in you dy. Keep your head up I'm hoping you're successful. I'm sure you will be once we get out of this slow season. After all the fly by nights go out of business you'll be in a good situation to capitalize on a (hopefully) higher demand. Good luck.

 

I'm quoting this because there's a deeper discussion on both of these remarks.

Commodity transport, of which nearly all van or reefer operations are, as well as a big part of open deck, is just that. Price is the value proposition. In other words, if low price is not what you're offering, most shippers do not see adequate value with your offered service. There's no moral high ground to get on. That is just how that (huge) market segment works. Shippers find a value for acceptable losses. Transportation companies figure out just how inefficient they can do the work and still make a profit. Add those two together and you get a mega corp shipping service level agreement.

The second part is germane to the first. On the one hand, it's a numbers game. If Prime has a dozen trucks upside down in a median or with the roof torn off under a low clearance somewhere in a given month, it's probably acceptable, in a grand total kind of way, when measured against thousands of safe, on-time loads completed.

At the other end of the scale, single truck or small fleet service, I've been told by more than one broker friend that on-time service and communication frequency and skill put you in the top 5%. So the other 95% of carriers like you are out there trying to offer what the megas are doing, just without the span and overhead to make it work.

So what're you going to do? You know the triple constraint: price, quality, time. If you want to do anything in a commodity market, you have to find the customer interested in the other two besides cost. In my vast five years moving cold groceries around, that usually will fall under some really narrow circumstances:

1. An unpredictable spot market for unplanned or exceptional load offers.
2. A particularly difficult schedule to serve, either due to route or service failure penalties.
3. Difficult to deal with shippers or consignees, where you are able to make it work, without getting arrested.
4. Hazardous, non-standard, messy, stinky, you get the idea. Stuff other people don't want to haul.

My personal niche is in numbers 2 and 3. The reputation I have on the street is: if you want to book the load and forget it, I'm your guy. I'm a problem solver and I get it done. That said, it's not been a path to $5/mile fairy tale loads. On the other hand, I have brokers coming to me with profitable offers on a regular basis. I can count the number of times I've played dialing for load board dollars in the past year on one hand.

 

I figured that was the answer.......Red

Should't be like that tho,

1.EVERY load should "mean" something to Both the carrier and the shipping party
(When catastrophe happens,accident,damage to cargo,whatever..It should be a "matter")
2.Small carriers and Independents who 'truly pride themselves not only on performance,But integrity,And Get the job done right should have precedence over volume carriers, That's just my opinion

Times change..I get it,

Accidents and catastrophies are like "Ah Well, You'll get another car or truck or whatever" seems to be the motto today

I guess to wrap this up...If you Offer Capacity, You can be the Biggest idiot,Treat Drivers like 3rd world convicts, Deliver late,Hire the Warm alarm clocks, And STILL get Contract freight.

 

This discussion reminds me of another fun story. Once upon a time, I worked for Hewlett Packard. I did not start there. I was originally hired at Digital Equipment, a pioneer in the non-stop computing niche of information services. They got gobbled up by Compaq about a month after I was hired, then later that was gobbled up by HP. About two years after that, the then CEO Carly Fiorina came by our office for a town hall meeting. There was the usual blah blah blah about the "new" HP, what to expect, etc. Mainly featuring the new (at the time) strategy of clusters of commodity (cheap, Intel-based) servers and lights-out data centers.

The part that I'll never forget was the Q&A session at the end. One of the DEC/Alpha "pioneers" stepped up to the mic. For context, there were about a half dozen of these guys still haunting our office. At the time, most of the VAX hardware was getting shrink wrapped on pallets, put on a truck to Andover Mass, to either be recycled into Priuses or become museum displays.

Long story short, he pined about the good old computing days where service and uptime mattered. In other words, he was asking about his future with HP. She was very crisp with her response. For HP's customers, it was more economical to deliver service level using a stack of unremarkable, off-the-shelf servers, than it was to do so with highly specialized equipment that didn't ever need to be serviced much. The fact was, that the uptime demands were now to be met with other strategies (software, server arrays, hot swap, etc) than what worked in earlier decades.

There's a lot of extreme opinion about Ms. Fiorina's tenure at HP. Especially now that she's thrown her hat in the race to be the Republican Presidential nominee. From the brief appearance I got to see, my opinion is that she was doing what needed to get done, and nobody in that role would have done so and remained well liked in any way. HP had enjoyed decades being one of the few grand old big iron computer companies. Ms. Fiorina saw that the long run was reaching an end and was tasked with moving the company into the 21st century. I think her vision at the time was spot on, but she had to break some eggs (or legs LOL) to get it in motion.

 

No offense man but my only response is the same I tell my teenager. There is the way things should be, and there is the way they are. you can spend your whole life beating your head against a wall, or you can see things for what they are, accept them, and figure out a way to be successful with the reality of the world we live in.

That leaves us with two choices, and I don't know about you, but my life has enough headaches that I'm not so thrilled with the idea of smacking my head against that brick wall.

 

Kind of like wrestling a pig. You're gonna get nasty and the pig likes it.

 

Truth be told here, the only reason for all the ever increasing rules and regs on the independents and 'little guys' is because the big megas are pushing for them. It is an illusion that the government is behind all the increased regulatory pressure; the unfortunate fact is that the big corporations literally own the government and big business is operating it's every move. It doesn't matter which party either.

The motive, among other reasons as well, is to eliminate all the "incidental' competition, for example all the remaining smaller trucking carriers by choking them out of the market completely. This strategy has been nearly 100% effective, in one way or another, with all the total domestic markets; remember all those mom and pop stores and other small businesses? That's right, almost totally extinct.

Just like the independent trucking carriers in the near future, I'm sorry to say.

 

I really think that one way or another we will survive. Some will retire, others jump out and seek something else, but some of us will churn away offering that service that few can do. Any breathing room the "big boys" give us, we'll exploit and, while we may not take back the industry, we can surely keep it going. I'll bet it won't be pretty at times, but there are some things that you can get at a premium. Some operations these mega fleets just can't do. Then you have the area where most O/O won't do it because for one reason or another don't want to. So now you specialize and work on that dedicated account.

 

amen brother. us hillbillies get it

 

H

here we go again