Is anybody really making enough profit?

Hi I'm still here. Our trucking business is now at 15K a month instead of 10K a month as in Feb 08. 10K still not bad for only 3rd month in trucking business as an owner operator. After fuel, we make about 10K a month since we get really good fuel mileage. I've now got the IFTA worked out too. We switched from Inc. to sole proprietor to avoid multi-state corporate taxes. What a difference an extra 5K makes! We have never hauled less than our min. rate of $1.87 which pays us $500 a day on top of operating costs. (Thank you to the person who gave the advice about finding our minimum rate. Landline magazine mentions this too). Our average haul is for about $2.40 per mile. We also learned what parts of the country to avoid to get good paying loads. What had us bogged down prior was unanticipated bizarre functional problems with a barely tested used truck. The truck is great overall, it just had odd problems that needed fixing. Got those taken care of and now we're rolling.

We bumped into a broker trying to take $3,000.... of a load paying about $6,000 by the shipper...he got exposed when another broker was offering the same load for about $3,000 more! DISGUSTING. Yes there are some (many I think) corrupt brokers but they have no power if we keep our standards high.

We're working on cutting out the broker by doing our own brokering at this point. That will take some time to develop. Knowing what many brokers do to the actual rate the shipper is paying is just too insulting. When we start brokering we will never take more than 10%. Truckers have the burden and truckers should always get the bulk of the profits.

 

thank you...we're happy with the results we're getting now. Getting 8 MPG even when fully loaded and through mountains now!

as for the cheap freight... well you may already know this, but for flatbedders...the far northwest is terrible. Nothing but cheap $1.10 a mile lumber leaving there. I have no idea who would haul for $1.10, but they sure must be going out of business fast. The mountains in the northwest eat up gas MPG which also doesn't help. Avoid CA like the plague, nothing leaving there decent for flatbed. so we never take a load to a dead zone with cheap freight. The southwest is just as bad. Florida is bad. We plan ahead so that we deliver to a city with the best freight rates and then just keep that ball rolling. We like to run the northeast mostly bouncing back north out of Texas or some of the midwest states.

 

That's pretty good. We were in CA, OR, WA in Dec./Jan. when everything was slow. Maybe it left us with a false impression of the area. We've only been doing it 7 months now but it seems like the best paying freight for flatbed is the east side of the US (machinery).