Should we become Owner Op team?

My mistake in forgetting you take off 10 weeks a year in my calculation.

A team provides a premium service; with few exceptions, only dedicated customers want to pay for and make use of a team service.

No! The megas are all on E-logs already and have been for years. The only companies in the market for teams with pending the E-log switch are smaller operations with office staff too incompetent to plan freight without the option of having a team with an clear and open dance card. Those companies don't have a lot of dedicated freight and don't want to pay a premium for O/O or team.

The freight market is much more elastic then any dispatcher will say.

No need to apologize; we all learn something from our discussion and misunderstandings.

Wow, is that a can of worms. This is what is discussed here every day. Is Landstar, Mercer, F2F a bad thing depends on your perspective. Is everybody making money at those places? Some are, but some are not even close.

What you should be concerned about is weather those leasing firms have enough dedicated freight to provide more income then what you are making now and provide enough funds for you folks to maintain and purchase a new truck every 4 years or so. That, I highly doubt.

If you are honest with me, and I believe you are, you are now doing pretty good right now. A lot better then a lot of O/Os.

When looking at a truck for a business, you have to consider it nothing more then a tool. A tool that gets expended and worn out through the course of the work day. Teams wear that truck out so much quicker that few (if any) companies are willing to pay your a premium for using your tool vs theirs.

A company with dedicated well paying team freight, has enough assets and clout, that it can purchase/lease trucks and maintenance at a rate that a single O/O cannot compete.

 

Double post.

 

You should be able to make $80,000 apiece teaming in a truck somebody else owns. No reason to go by a truck and make.company driver pay. Plus you'll pay more taxes being self employed.

If you have no experience running spot market freight as a solo, you'll have a hard time. You have to learn the markets first. If you screw up as a solo driver and go to a bad area for a bad rate, that only gets exacerbated when you're doing that with twice the miles. And no, these $3500 team loads to Phoenix won't work. Those will put you out of business faster than a solo driver doing those runs on 2 paper logs.

My price for a team Chicago to Phoenix would have to be $7000. Nobody pays that. Nobody pays $7000 anywhere to anywhere. Except once this year I got a $7500, 8,000 lb solo run AL to Seattle and that's a once a year you get lucky type deal. Good luck running team spot market.

 

And btw if you're running 7300 miles per week and only making 70-75k a.piece before taxes, that's a bit underpaid. Teams should be getting 60 cpm to the truck. If you're paid by mile.

 

And if you think running team O/O for a mega company is gonna be good, do the numbers.

My truck if I kept it for 6 years and sold it for $30,000 would cost me about $22,500/year.

For a team it would costs twice that because it would only last 3 years before I sold it for pennies.

Do your numbers. $45,000 plus $105,000 fuel if you ran 250,000 miles, $20,000 year oil changes, tires, plates,.IFTA, etc. etc.

$170,000 year cost before you make a dime.

$1.25/mi? X 250,000 miles. Company driver pay.


If they can offer you $1.60mi to the truck for OO team, you could do well. Out for 3 weeks, run
20,000 miles, home for a week. Wouldn't work for me, might be worth it to husband and wife. Maybe $1.75 I'd do it. But booking my own freight, if I were to hire a team, I'd need to gross $600,000 in 40 weeks on it and I'm not entirely sure that's doable on load boards.

 

What would worry or concern me is this new equipment, EGR/DPF/SCR. It will bankrupt you quicker than a crappy dispatcher if you do not know what you are doing.

 

That's a lot of miles. And if the 140-150k figure is gross pay to the house, before payroll deductions, then you're not being paid what you're worth. ODFL now pays .74cpm team - so on those miles, with 10 weeks off a year, you'd be on $225,000 gross as a team there.

Here is the most important thing. Not a lot of folks can work this hard. I quit recommending ODFL to drivers because I saw so many flake and quit - too much like hard work. 2nd - if you're familiar with running a small business, you'll be streets ahead.

Not necessarily. See below - Why run dedicated all week for $X when you could knock it out in a day . . .

The man that runs my trailer just ran a legal flat load (solo) from Saturday night through Monday morning - 650 miles that paid $7,000.

As I said above - not knocking your work ethic, but you're worth more than that.


So far the responses have been rather negative, Nelly. Yes, we all hate to see anybody dive in and sink until the bubbles stop, but I see . . .

a) Work ethic
b) Ability to work a Casio
c) An open mind.

@SianP - start knocking together a business plan. Lots of planning and savings to be done. 7300 miles a week driving gives a lot of time to mentally plot.

Personally - I'm not a fan of a truck post 2003. I'm just not. Not the issues, tow bills, downtime, truck payment, nope, nah. Nothing wrong with a well maintained older truck.
The one I bought would be perfect for you - 120" ICT bunk, 95 Pete for less than 50k - remanned engine and trans, inframes cost less than $15,000 . . . the team I bought it off were with LS running AA&E and easily achieving your desired figure running a lot less miles.

Go forth.

 

The key to running spot market teams is to only take freight that has open deliveries and good unloads. You start prioritizing that and taking market rates and you basically just have a truck that runs almost 24/7. Much more doable with a flatbed than with van. Impossible with reefer IMO.

A team can be used to run 2000 mile runs... Or it can be used to keep making a 200 mile regional cycle almost continuously. It's about taking the downtime out of the equipment. Obviously you need the loads to turn quickly to make this work.

 

What area of the country are you located in? Based on what you stated I would stay where you are at. Like the other responses it's going to be a very costly learning curve on the spot market. Anyone that offers dedicated team to O/O is usually at a very low rate. We run regional teams in the Northeast we have a few owner operators in that division that does very well (mainly drop and hook operation) but things have to go EXTREMELY perfect which we all know isn't the case in this business.