Prime Trucking?

When you have just gotten your cdl and are a company driver struggling financially because it doesn't pay enough, the lease sounds pretty good. You don't really see the debt that comes with the truck. You see "freedom" and "lots of money". They don't promote it as a lease. They promote it as o/o.

I learned my hard lesson at swift. They hype it up so much. Every terminal, especially phoenix, you're being told how wonderful it is. I bought into it. After 2 or 3 weeks I realized what I had done. Took a bit to find an exit, but once I did I never went back.

 

Yep, if you can’t pack your stuff and take your truck somewhere else, you were never a o/o.

 

Never met a driver whom at 3am at 80mph...wasn’t a rock star

 

I think for certain people it can work out fine. Im sure Prime will give you all the “tools” to make it work. What you cant do is try and do it your way.

Problems will always come up when you get a rookie to sign a lease when they are grasping at straws. If you have a year or two experience, know what trucking is like, and can commit to working your but off for I think 4 years, you will own your own truck at the end of the lease.

I dont know all the details, which are very important, but you can look at owning a 4 year old truck with about 400K miles on it like a $60K-80K bonus after the 4 years.

There are other ways. You can buy/lease a truck yourself and go with Landstar/Mercer etc. and you will be running your business your way with little input from the company but both have their own customers and their own freight.

The biggest issue is probably that folks who were never going to stay in trucking in the first place then lease a truck thinking its going to be rainbows and unicorns and find out its still a trucking job but now you also are responsible for running the business side as well. It’s a lot of extra work.

 

Prime has A LOT of YouTubers who unintentionally help “sell” the dream. I imagine this pushes a lot of people that direction.