Have 80K to invest and want to start a trucking company looking for advice

Judging by the quality of your question I think you're on your path to losing your investment.

 

How much time have you spent as an owner-op or driver?

 

Start a moving company with that kind of budget. Much less hassle and overhead to get started. No disrespect at all is intended but chances are your secondhand knowledge via your father being a trucker isn't going to cut it.

 

It's imperative that you have some first hand knowledge as an owner-op before you jump right in. Before you can succeed with a fleet, you'll need to know what it takes to suceed with one truck as well as having first hand experience of what drivers, agents, and shipping/receiving departments face on a daily basis. Do yourself a favor and greatly increase your chances of success by starting with one truck and spending at least a couple years driving yourself.

 

What is "decent general knowledge" when you're asking what segment you should get into?
Again, judging from your posts I stand by my first comment and I'll go further and say that whatever you think you might know you're wrong. You don't have decent general knowledge of trucking business. You're asking very poor quality questions for ready to spend $80k to start a fleet.
I don't feel like writing a book either and I can only judge by what you did write. So I just got straight to the point on my posts in this thread. If you think about it I am helping you. My information, including my phone number, is on my profile. So instead of just being perturbed by my directness take a few moments to really think about our little exchange so far. And even take into consideration the other comments that have been made by others and you should see that I'm not off base, but that you're most likely too unprepared at this point to do what you asked about doing in your original post.

 

I stand by one of my previous posts on this subject