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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ridgeline, post: 12374347, member: 77050&quot;]FIRST ----&gt;&gt;&gt; your driver will fail you, 2 years experience isn&#039;t enough for a start up, try someone with 7 to 10 years who has been working in different lanes and knows what good freight is and what is bad freight. Having a dispatch service as a start up is stupid, you need to know what they are handing you so to manage the truck, having it just just take loads leads to a failure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Second don&#039;t just buy a truck, do your due diligence by having the truck throughly checked - Dyno with blowby (which isn&#039;t watching the vent tube), having a complete ECM dump, having an independent mechanic go through the truck and check everything which is used as part of the negotiation. Trucks are niot cars, they are tools that are considered very high performance which can lead to catastrophic failure rate with high repair cost and long down time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Third hope you are well funded. you can&#039;t run without paying the bills. Driver retention is the most important thing, you HAVE TO PAY YOUR DRIVER BEFORE YOU PAY YOURSELF. AND if your truck craps out on you, shop time is getting longer because of a lack of mechanics who want to work on trucks, so the truck is down, the driver is idle and he isn&#039;t being paid so what happens?</p><p><br /></p><p>He leaves, you&#039;re screwed.</p><p><br /></p><p>YOU NEED AT LEAST 5 to 6 MONTHS OF WORKING CAPITAL TO RUN THE BUSINESS AND SUSTAIN IT THROUGH HARD TIMES.</p><p><br /></p><p>To go along with this, the trucking industry has the highest business failure rates, it is normally 85% first year failure which now is close to 93%, and with the entrance of people trying to be armchair steering wheel holders (that is a new guy with no experience buying a truck and hiring a driver to make the big bucks), it will increase as it did in the past.</p><p><br /></p><p>Fourth we are going into or already in a recession (depending on which talking head you listent to) and this industry have 27% overcapacity, entering it on a down trend in revenue and an up trend in capacity, plus we have a large number of new entry (0-3 years) drivers who can not drive which insurance is responding to them.</p><p><br /></p><p>I can go on but it is tiring to hear all these people thinking they can become fleet owners and hiring (most of the time) crap drivers which hurts the industry in the long run. It drives down the rates because many of these marginal owners are getting desperate not to fail and they take what ever they can to just barely pay the bills.</p><p><br /></p><p>EDIT - by the way you are not a new Owner Operator, you are a fleet owner.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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