Share what you know about dealing with brokers

I have 4 brokers i have used for over 20 yrs and i also Trip lease... I find that if nothing is available i then will call the companies i trip lease with and see if they have something in the area... I try to keep my arse covered...

 

I now remember why I don't come to houston much anymore.
They want you to pay themto haul their freight?
At less than a dollar a mile it seems that way.
I can see bouncing in my plan for today.

 

Dang people still trip lease. I thought that was a thing of the past. It must be much easier now though with fax's and all the good stuff. Not running all over the place like back in the day.

 

Someone is hauling all this less than 1.25 mile freight out of houston??
I have watched it disappear all day off the boards.
Screw this I'm bouncing east fick houston!!
134.00 going a 132 miles ?? It's worth 100.00 to pick up and drop off.
Lady said it was "extra" money Not for ME.

 

Surely! No one hauled it! ID say the rate went to atlest $2.50...
NO ONES THAT DUMB!

 

You know how they do it. High dollar outbound direct and whatever it takes to get back to that freight. Profit on every mile round trip. Many carriers do it this way. The carrier I used to be leased to had their business model based on this. High dollar outbound loads from TN then loads right back to TN so they could service their core customers. It does work. I can't stomach a rate like that and it's not how my truck rolls but many do. And that's an oversimplification of what they did but they would on rare occasions haul broker loads for very cheap to reposistion a unit and still make profit. A one truck show can't do this. A 50 or 150 truck operation with solid contract freight can and will do this from time to time without skipping a beat. It is what it is. They only care about keeping profitable customers happy and the overall average. Nothing will ever change that.

 

What do you consider a good profit margin for your operation?

10% over your Cost Per Mile? 20%? 30%? Etc...

 

I haven't even though of it that way, as a percentage, not how I look at it. Anything over $1.60 a mile is profit for me. I am below that on this quarter so far. My goal is $2 on every mile the odometer turns. To me that is a good profit but when fuel shoots to $5+ a gallon that all goes out the window. That is how I look at it in the now and present.

 

I'm looking to profit as much as I can. I'm not really in this job to 'settle' for a particular margin rate. Because that's also adjusted to how many miles you can move depending on the area and what you're hauling.

Last week I made $2,100 profit after setting aside for repairs, fees, permits, tires, etc on 2,400 miles running a reefer. This week, I'm off to a bad start. Will probably get about $1500 at best thanks to a little delay this morning that caused me to lose two high price short loads that would've profited me about $400 for 8 hours of work. So, instead I'm sitting with no load looking for a 'same day' broker. Which the price will be crap.

But, that's the biz.

 

Had a good one today broker called about a posted truck I had offering $1.80 a mile going into very poor paying frieght area. I told him what my rate would be (about $4.00 per mile) he was ranting and raving aoubt how he used to run his own truck and he could make plenty of profit at $1.80 per mile. He ended up calling back about four times going up on his rate. After the fourth call he was up to about $3.50 per mile and told me that was all he had in the load and the customer told him they were going to drop him if he did not get it covered. I stuck to my rate and told him to either lose money or his customer he said "f*** you"