Market Perspective

Well shucks, you made me blush.

There are a lot of drivers on TTR that could do what I did. Some of it was business experience that I gained over the last 40+ years, but most of it had to do with my location in northern California. I live in wine country, and there is a lot of money in the logistical end of the wine industry. There are hundreds of wineries within a 100 mile radius of my house, and my motivation for wanting to become an O/O was that almost no O/O's could afford to live in such close proximity to all of those wineries like me, so I figured I could create a client list for customers who needed wine moved with extremely short notice. The median price for homes in my area now is 1.25 million, and since I bought my first home here almost 40 years ago when they were much more affordable I simply traded up as the housing market skyrocketed. Since there aren't many truck drivers who could afford to live near me, I thought the competition would be very low, and to a certain extent I was right. After I actually became an O/O, my business model morphed into something completely different and for the better.

The last company job I had before going out on my own was with a medium sized carrier (around 40 trucks) and all they dealt with was wine. I applied for a job with them because that was the part of the industry I wanted to learn. They were based in south/central California and would send trucks up to my area daily to go to wineries to pick up loads, then take them to a warehouse in my area for distribution to other terminals around the western and southern states. When I applied for the job, I told the owner that if he gave me a truck and a reefer to park close to my home, I could save him the fuel costs of driving 4 hours up from their main terminal and pick up 2 full loads in a day from around 20 wineries and have them back to their terminal the same day. That was twice what any driver living outside of the area could do, and they went for it. So basically I started out with them as a local driver doing LTL work. They have a unique rating structure in this industry. A pallet of wine has 56 cases on it. Some wineries I would only pick up a single pallet, and the price for hauling it could vary from a couple dollars per case all the way up to $10 per case depending on how many cases I was hauling for them. Naturally, the more cases or pallets, the less it costs per case. A lot more money could be made hauling a couple pallets for several wineries, than hauling a full truck load for one winery. My dispatcher would do their best to make sure I was sent to these little out of the way wineries to pick up a pallet or two because that's where the real money was being made.

I stayed with that company almost 2 years and learned a lot. I felt I was ready to go out on my own, and about 3 months before that time, I was putting feelers out with wine distributors and asking what kind of loads they needed to be covered that they were having the most trouble with. Several repeated the same problem, and that was there were a ton of popular wineries up in Oregon and Washington that they wanted to get more product from. That was the foot in the door I was looking for. I could stay on the west coast where the weather is usually good and very little snow on I-5 in the winter and run year round. I could arrange my loads so I was only picking up a couple pallets from individual wineries to maximize the rate per case and have very high paying loads in one direction from the PNW back to California. It worked out great, and some of those loads grossed over $10k for driving no more than 600 miles in a lane that was nearly impossible to find good paying freight. As a general rule, freight leaving California pays great, but freight coming into the state pays horrible if you can even find any.

Now I was left with figuring out the best way to find high paying loads to the PNW that delivered around the same time I needed to be up there to pick up wine. I knew from doing a lot of reading on TTR that I didn't want to deal with brokers, and for the most part I never did. I signed up for DAT, Convoy and Uber. DAT was a complete waste of time as was Uber. I know it never worked well for most drivers but loads out of NorCal were frequent and high paying on Convoy. It probably had something to do with the original reason I became an O/O, a shortage of available trucks in my area for short-notice loads. I know a lot of drivers hate hauling beer, but it was my bread and butter heading to the PNW. I live 30 minutes from the Budweiser plant in Fairfield CA, and I'm within an hour of several other smaller breweries in the bay area that frequently needed loads hauled to the PNW on short notice. Many times I would talk to drivers at the Bud plant that booked on DAT a couple days prior for $2.50 a mile, and I was hauling the same load that I booked a couple hours earlier for $6 per mile. The smaller breweries were willing to work with me direct, and I wound up being on-call for them on days they knew I would be heading north. Another great resource for north-bound loads was a frozen food distributor in Reno that sold exclusively to Starbucks. I booked some loads on Convoy through them from Reno to Washington for $10 per mile with one or two pallets in my truck. They would post a load 5 or 6 hours on Convoy before it needed to be picked up, and I could be there in 4 hours.

As I said before, anybody could do this. If you live in a part of the US that doesn't have great freight, it would be worth your while to spend a few weeks at a time building up a customer base on the west coast. The San Francisco bay area doesn't make it easy for truckers, There are literally no truck stops worth mentioning in the bay area. Once you get near the wineries in Sonoma and Napa counties, your best bet is to find a motel with truck parking near by on a street. But the payoff is well worth the trouble if you can find the customers.

I've been out of the game for a little over a year, and I'm sure the rates on some loads have dropped dramatically. But I do know that my old employer in the wine business is very busy and has actually raised rates in the last few months because of inflation and high fuel costs. Wine hauling is kind of a specialized end of the business, and it's best if you have a reefer because especially in the summer months, the wine must be kept at around 55 degrees. They do ship on dry vans as long as the delivery is within 24 hours of the pickup.

That's how I did it guys. It also helped that I was able to buy new equipment with cash and didn't have payments on any of it. The insurance for a new authority was horrible, but I was making more than enough to cover it. I usually worked 4-5 days a week and was home every weekend with no reset every on the road. I also never chained up a single time in my driving career.

Be safe out there.

 

Good post. The work is there if a guy gets out and hustles a little. Niche markets like you had can really pay off but you have to hunt them down.
A friend of mine hauls finished molding from NorCal to L.A. He usually makes two rounds a week. He has a truck and trailer and most of the time he decks the trailer and runs back north empty. The rate is good enough to make that viable. A lot of times it's an LTL going south, two or three picks, but it all drops at the same wholesaler.
He's had that haul for over twenty years, bought a house, put his kids through college, and gets a new pickup every couple of years.
He got that haul by going around and talking to people that the bigger carriers ignored. There's definitely a lesson there.

 

There are some people that just have a natural ability to hustle and make a buck. My dad is one of them. I inherited some of it, but I could never hustle like my dad. I was in the insurance industry for 30 years, but never sold insurance. I always worked the back room and managed employees to keep things running smoothly.

A 28 year old friend of my son's is like that too. Five years ago, he bought an old beat up Peterbilt day cab and a flatbed trailer with two harvesting hoppers on it for the grape harvest each year. After just one season doing that, he made enough to buy a used dry van and he started hauling loads of used line and twine to a recycler in Oregon. Then he started hauling Christmas trees and pumpkins from Oregon to California. He got married last year and after just three years he made enough to buy 10 acres on the county line just south of me with highway frontage that was zoned agricultural so it couldn't be developed. So he got it pretty cheap in one of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet. On that 10 acres, he and his wife opened a huge pumpkin patch, and now a Christmas tree lot. They are absolutely killing it, and both are still under 30.

Some people just have the knack.

 

Admirable that you are helping your elderly parents. In previous posts you stated you worked for your family's insurance business for 30 years and were fortunate to retire from it with financial security. It does make it easier to be an O/O with that type of security and not worrying about market fluctuations, fuel costs, equipment expenses or customer whims.

 

And some people can read something super inspiring and only see the reasons why they can’t do it themselves.

I remember several members on TTR always skeptical and somewhat trash talking Scott that he was full of crap. Clearly the man was telling the truth and I never doubted him once. Well done!

Side note he also figured out who the infamous @PPDCT was haha.

 

I appreciate your feedback. My little dog and pony show is entering its 15th year in 2023 and I've been able to do it all by myself. It appears by the all time you spend on this informative site you must have your expansive business on autopilot. I only wish I had that freedom with mine. Again thank you for your feedback and I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas!