Leasing at Prime

Work on your fuel economy. It's your biggest expense, and the easiest place to give yourself a major boost in "available funds."

 

We aren't paid by the mile. It's 72% of the linehaul rate, fuel surcharge and accessorial payments. Since you are getting what amounts to a bucket of money to run each load, what's left over after you pay your costs is yours. The more miles you drive, the higher your costs, and the less you make.

There's quite a bit of information in this thread, so it's best if you go to post no. 1 and start there. As for the rest of it, I run solo reefer, and am just about finished with a 3-year lease. I like Prime... they do things that I don't appreciate (like every other firm in America no matter what they're into,) but they haven't done anything that makes it a deal-killer for me.

 

Other truckers say lots of things. We've got some guy who posts on this forum (who's never run for Prime, or even been within 50 miles of one of our terminals) that everyone tackles new drivers and forces them to sign leases- very not true. The only way you'd get "starved out" is if you PO'd your Fleet Manager to the point he'd be willing to pay the fine for loosing a driver to get rid of you. In other words, he'd be hating you enough to pay to get rid of you. That takes some doing, as most folks are rather fond of their pile of dead presidents!

The fact is that Prime kept us running much better than just about all the other carriers that I can think of in late '08 and early '09. Things slowed down, but we weren't sitting for days in a truckstop waiting for a load assignment. I averaged 2800+ miles over on the company side, and have been doing 2400+ miles on the lease side... year in and year out. There's no point for them to do this since our leases have no cash down.

Don't have the numbers myself, but I can inquire in a couple of weeks...

 

That's just the truck payment... there's more.