New O/O Here - Seeking Accurate Maint. Figures

It is a good rule of thumb that when friends work for friends, they dont stay friends long.

When something ugly happens, and one of you costs the other one a significant chunk of money, it hurts more coming from a friend. Things get said. Sometimes things that are #### difficult to forget or forgive.

 

OP, if you read 5 or 10 of the 100 threads on this exact topic then you would hear lots and lots of people say don't drive for a friend. Farmer Bob summed it up well. You sound young and gung ho so go for it. Don't listen to anyone here. Had you read much already you'd know that Ridgeline knows what he's talking about. There will be more.

Also, you're dreaming of buying and running trucks before you've run one.

Your insurance will be a lot more than $1100/month I suspect. How would you know if you have yet to settle on a truck?

 

I would count on at least 15 cpm for basic maintenance on a recently-retired mega fleet truck with 400-500k miles on it.

I recently bought one myself. So far, I have had several bits of relatively minor service performed, for a cost of roughly 2,000 in about 1.5 months.

I also know that I have two batteries with some bad cells, and the whole bank of batteries are the same age, so I will be doing a replacement on a full set of batteries soon. In addition, I recently asked the Crete shop to look up when valve adjustments were done on the truck. One adjustment at 109k. And never again. The truck now has about 465k miles on it.

So, I will also be on the lookout for somewhere that can do a dyno on the truck and evaluate whether a valve job is required. I might just be proactive and simply get the valve job done, but i would rather know if something else might be required when the grease monkeys are playing in the engine.

I have also noted the return of a minor oil leak on a seal where some sort of pressurized line connects to the side of the block on the passenger side. Above the frame rail, but below the exhaust line. This will be the third time I have seen the exact same problem. The Crete shop worked on it 2x before. Next time, I will have a Freightliner shop look at it, while the engine is still under factory warrantee.

 

Don't spend $60 to $70 K on a first truck that may cost you anywhere from $5k to $40k in the first year in maintenance and repairs, when you can spend $15 to $20K on the same truck within the same mileage paramater's, or it may be slightly older. Go to Truck Paper and spec the truck you want using the filters and you will see what i am talking about.

 

OK here is my comments. take them as you will.

Starting your own trucking company implies you are well funded and willing to scarifice time to deal with crap that pops up.

You have no experience to actually do this right, 1.5 is too little, you should have 4 years in at least to understand the market and get your business sense inline.

OK it will fail.

It will fail because your friend is in the game to make real money and isn't there to support your quest.

using a friend is easy with these schemes and it seems 9 times out of 10, the friendship is ruined because of a dispute or some other crap.

In other words this is a business, needs to be treated as a business and if you don't, you won't last.

Sending you where you want to go is a lofty expectation, you go where the freight takes you, not all the time where you want to be.

Lose the idea of expanding, it takes more than being on the road. hell just finding driver who are willing to work for you will be the biggest issue, you can't just throw anyone into a truck and expect them to make money and BE HAPPY.

Another thing about Friends, if your driver has an issue, and it is about your friend, who do you stand by?

You stand by the driver - he/she is your employee.

I go to bat for my drivers, I have gotten into yelling arguments with upper managers on issues and terminated contracts with a few carriers because of issues that were not my driver's doing. I have also gotten dispatchers fired because of the crap they pulled with my drivers, so if I had to deal with my friends, I would sacrifice them before a driver.

Here is the thing, if you don't have money going into the purchase of the truck with a maintenance fund built up, then you will have issues if you have problems. You should start out with at LEAST $20k in the bank when starting out fresh, it don't matter about the truck, or the miles or year, it can take a huge dump on you and even with a warranty, you need money to keep the business going.

AND that is for EACH truck you have in your fleet, it can't be put into an investment but liquid as possible and don't use credit, it is pretty hard to pay the bills with a maxed out credit card.

For the cost per mile, I would think a diminishing sliding scale starting out would be fine, say 20¢ a mile for the first 6 months and reduce it as the fund is maintained.

Many people do the "go as you drive" with funding and wait till something needs to be repaired. Others Amortization of the common components on the truck and get them "fixed" before they need to be fixed. For some reason out of 8 fleet owners in our little discussion group, three of us use the latter method and our down time is 40% of those who use the former method. I know that goes against the common belief here and in other O/O forums. There is an up front cost increase but the back side is reduced exponentially.

From this I can see you are emotional about the truck, stop that, it is a truck, not a woman.

AND it doesn't matter what truck you buy, they are all the same. It matters what the drive train spec is and what your due diligence finds out about the truck.

I and others keep harping on this point, when you do the Due Diligence, you have a starting point to negotiate the price of the truck, you get it road ready after the purchase, that cost you subtract from the asking price.

 

Bullseye!!! Here here, we’ll put but I also detect a little bit of child psychology major in there !!!
All jokes aside great piece just hope he listens!!!

 

I really wish a lot of people listen to the experienced owners out there, with a 85% chance of failure, they should not treat this as a lemonade stand.