Success or failure

Driving it yourself, 1.80 provides a good living. Add in an employee and all the fists associated with it, well you won't go broke, but there isn't enough profit to live on either. Not with one truck doing that. Get about 15 of them and its a different story. 15 trucks at a buck eighty will provide a real living income. Gotta understand, having employees in this country is extremely expensive. Especially so in this industry. You want good drivers right? Then you gotta offer a pay package that competes with the good companies. I can get a job driving for ups, walmart, pepsi, fritolay, old dominion, publix, etc etc that will pay 75k a year, plus have great health and dental insurance AND give me 2 weeks of paid vacation. That's your benchmark. You gotta match that or exceed it to have any hope of getting a good driver. If you can't, you will get guys that you can't rely on on to take care of your customers and present your company professionally and on top of that they will trash your equipment, won't do pretrips, and sugar the tanks if you don't kiss their ### when they throw a tantrum.

 

Well it shouldn't wear out the calculator, this is easy stuff. What he takes is subject to what your situation is and how you account for everything.

AND to be honest, if you don't mind, you will fail at this for a bunch of reasons. One is you need to get out there and drive to see what's what.

 

There is waaay, waaaay too much that you don't know, for you to even consider getting into this business right now. An Internet forum is not the place to learn how to succeed in a business, especially when you do not know even the most basic things that this business involves.
Try getting a job driving someone else's truck for awhile, and pay close attention to fuel costs, repairs, equipment requirements, freight regularity, etc. Look at your pay "stub" and see how much of your gross pay has been withheld, double that figure, and then you will just barely be scratching the surface regarding what you need to know to even THINK about this (or any other business)
Good luck

 

A good place to start is to go visit with a CPA and a loan officer, and ask them about what they have seen in regards to their O/O clientele

 

This....

Fyi, for future reference (write this in your notes), you can go to any bottom feeder mega, run a POS truck set up for a moron to drive, full of tattletales and cattleprods, and make more money than these fools that run for $.90/mile. They are the biggest fools in all of transportationdom.

 

Business won't change, maybe some things but the same business model I use has been around for decades.

 

This is so not true. This is exactly WHY he should be conversing with owner operators. Every person starts out not knowing anything, how do you expect him to learn anything if he doesn't ask questions? Man, what a horrible reply.