hey brokers, has elogs changed business/rates etc?

I know man, I don't get it...

 

Same problem a buddy of mine has with hauling flatbed. He swears that the brokers are required to post the portion paid for tarping and most of them don't.

 

The only way this might come into play is a company with leased operators. They may elect to give their leased operators 100% of the fuel surcharge money a brokerage breaks out on the contract. Most won't give any fuel surcharge at all because what you have then is dishonest owner operators who will get the brokerage to list $999 as the surcharge and $1 as the line haul.

My company gives it's o/o a surcharge on every brokered load on it's own. The brokerage has nothing to do with it. I first agree to a flat rate with a broker but my company breaks out .30 per loaded mile on the run (or however much it is) of the 100% line haul money then they take their percentage from what is left giving me the surcharge money @ 100%. I can tell you having done the math their fuel surcharge is much more realistic and generous than any phony brokerage generated surcharge I saw artificially and uselessly generated on a rate con.

 

This is absolutely no different than a surcharge. Your buddy needs to include taping money in his quote. I'm sure the brokerage figured all of these things into their quotes. Why is this so difficult to grasp? Why do drivers overcomplicate the simple?

 

From my contact there he says probably 95% of the freight CHRW does is contracted freight. Very little of what they do is on a basis where the customer asks them one off to find a truck for a price then they tack on commission. They agree to annual contract freight for an all in price plus fuel. All of the loads a customer has for a long time frame. You can rest assured they are getting a fuel surcharge on their contract freight. They put most of this freight on their reliable core carriers and broker out the rest on the spot market. To them maybe that surcharge means something. To you it is a worthless waste of space on the rate con.

 

Okay, a lot of ground to cover here:

@DUNE-T to answer your question- it really depends on the contract. It's variable from customer to customer. The one I was eyeballing lasy year would've provided my brokerage about a thousand loads a year, and I bid it heavy because of the associated chargebacks on late/delayed freight and the penalties for service failure. Well, I bid it heavy for February of 2017. Now, I would probably be doubled up. But basically it was a three strike system, and there were some pretty steep penalties. I don't have the contract in front of me, but when their transportation guy went left on me for being "substantially too high" on all the lanes, I decided I'd pass on that kind of work. I'd rather work with customers who value service.

@Scooter Jones and @W900AOwner:

Gents, please don't misconstrue this as me lamenting the rate hike. It tends to be immaterial to my operations, except for a few of my customers, where their margins were tight as a result of market forces. Ultimately, I'm glad you guys are doing alright, and are happy with the pay. I'm happy that my customers continue to trust and value my opinion on where the market dynamics are pushing rates.

It's never been my stance to push freight "cheap" freight. I have always shot to base on or around where any particular market is at. This cuts me out of some customers, but honestly, I don't want to work for those guys any way. You can only do so much work in a day, and schlepping freight nobody wants isn't worth my time, or yours. So, that leaves me with a particular type of customer where we deal much like the broker @Ruthless mentioned. I give rates out, but at the same time there's flexibility in that they understand that it's a volatile time in the market. I'm selling service as much as anything.

Which brings me back around to my initial point this morning- the money is coming from their pockets. As I said, I don't lament this fact. The market is what the market is, and nothing changes that. The booming ecomomy, ELD, what have you driving the market right now is all to the good. It's solidified some of my relationships, and you guys are happy.

Moving on to charges such as tarping and FSC: there's no requirement that we break things down for charges related to that. Very seldom do folks ask me for a tarping fee, even though I'm mostly moving open deck freight. Mostly, it breaks down to back and forth in negotiation. As @rollin coal mentioned, we do an all-inclusive rate. If accesorials need to be added, it just goes in to our rate, and we send a revised rate confirmation.

Anyhow, sorry for the wall of text, and any typos. Fat thumbs on the phone, and all...

 

It's all good. These discussions, when civil, are beneficial reading for those interested in how sausage is made in this business. I know I certainly benefit from guys input who have been doing this a heck of a lot longer than me.

 

Yeah this. We definitely didn't have the extra G to start with. Our cuts are going up though... They absolutely have to. It's probably three or four times as much work to find a truck today as it was one year ago.

 

Could be. I know when I first set up my Quickbooks with the assistance of a CPA familiar with trucking, he set it up so that the fuel surcharge was shown as revenue into the account in the same way as a standard line-haul deposit would be made.

In fact, the company I leased onto a few mos before I got my own authority broke down the settlements that way. One portion showed as line-haul and the FSC separately. My accountant insisted I make a separate entry into my account (deposit) journal for each too.

 

The customers only pay what they have to pay. That's just business. By your logic every expense you have that you could technically pay more for you're screwing somebody.

What differentiates customers is how they treat people and how they pay relative to other customers. Nobody is doing anything unethical paying the prevailing rates, whatever those may be.

This is the good part of the cycle. Make sure you're saving your ### off for when the cold comes back. Times like these when the shoe is on the other foot are supposed to pay for the bad times to come. If you don't have enough fat on your bones to hibernate through the next bad period you'll get about as much sympathy from me as you have for the people you haul for.