Truck Load Rates Halt 8 Week Slide 2.0

I know you posted a sample of the cover letter, you mind sharing it again?

My dad doesn't wanna do flat anymore but I'm probably gonna buy an all steel closed tandem. I'm missing out on quite a bit of local shippers. Probably 10+ within 20 min of the yard

 

1 yea prolly but at the moment i dont recall where?
2 yes you are missing out
Endicott to putnam county can get $1500 lately direct
3 i got a trailer fits that description for you early to mid next year/

 

Since I'm no longer driving, I'll share what I did and why I got into the O/O business in the first place.

I've lived in the Napa wine country of northern California for over 40 years. You can't throw a rock in my area without breaking a few wine bottles. Wineries are everywhere, several hundred within a 50 mile radius of my house. All of these wineries make a lot more wine than they can store on site, so they rely on wine storage companies to store their product in temperature controlled warehouses, and when orders come in, they will arrange shipping the wine around the globe. Before becoming an O/O, my last job as a company driver was for a California based small carrier that specialized in hauling wine. They have around 50 trucks and trailers, and were always looking for drivers because it costs so much to live in this area, there just aren't that many drivers who live here. So for 3 years all I did was haul wine from northern CA up to Oregon/Washington and back. It was a pretty sweet gig for a company job, but the longer I did it, the more opportunities I saw for doing it better. The wine storage companies were always late with loads because there are only a handful of wine carriers in the state that can do LTL as well as FL, and LTL is where the real money is, so that's what I decided to do. You also do not need a reefer to haul west coast loads of wine. Across county you would, but in a dry van the loads stay cool enough for a couple days. Using a reefer just made it easier for me, especially during the really hot weather. Wine generally is shipped at 55 degrees.

Wine haulers don't charge by the load but by the case of wine. A standard 2,000 pound pallet of wine has 56 cases on it. So my maximum load was generally 22 pallets which works out to 1232 cases or 44,000 pounds. I got to know the shipping managers at several wine distributors as a company driver, so I approached them with an offer of one load up and one load back per week. Since their capacity was already strained, several of them took me up on the offer. So I would generally start my week by going to up to 10 small wineries in the Napa area and picking up a couple pallets at each one. Then hauling that load to OR/WA and delivering to one or two distributors up there. Then I would spend a day in OR/WA picking up a couple pallets from wineries in that area, and delivering them to distributors in NorCal. The trick is to keep the orders small from each winery because the more cases you pick up, the lower the shipping price per case, and I found my sweet spot at no more than 4 pallets from each winery which could get me up to $5 per case. If everything fell in place which they frequently did. I would have a full load each way with over 1,200 cases at $5 each which would get me around $6k running each direction on a 600 miles trip. On top of that, it's pretty standard industry practice to charge a per case pickup fee out of your area, so there could be an addition $1.50 per case charge. On top of that, I was charging a 15% fuel surcharge for the last year because diesel prices are so high.

There were a number of weeks when I would only be able to get loads heading south and not north from my area to WA/OR. That's where the spot market came in handy. From day one as an O/O I absolutely hated dealing with brokers and all of their BS. I ended up using Convoy and Uber (mostly Convoy) because there was no dickering for a rate and they paid within a couple days with no quick pay fees which I think is absolutely ridiculous. I realize those apps don't work for everybody, but they worked really well on loads leaving California, but not so much for loads coming into the state, but loads out was all I needed.

Since May of last year, the spot market rates have just been outstanding. In March and April of 2020, I was wondering if this was the end of my business because the pandemic had everything shut down and nobody really knew for how long. But then it flipped and has been great ever since. So with my contract wine freight and Convoy as a backup, anything less than around $10,000 per week was a slow week, and some weeks grossed over $20k. I only ran the west coast and primarily the I-5 because of the weather. I was never interested in chaining up in the snow, and out here I never had to, not one time in my driving career. Yes we get snow, but only over mountain passes, and they get cleared within hours. So all I had to do was watch the weather and choose the best time to start driving to avoid it.

So that's how I did it for 3 years in my little end of the business. Now my equipment is sold, my back and knees are already feeling great, and I'm looking forward to the next chapter.

 

4.07 on all miles the past 2 weeks both trucks.

 

Sweet!

Doing well here with the rates but lost my team (passing in the family messed up their world :\) and also lost another driver to local. Those two trucks plus a new one coming in made me 3 down and a huge revenue loss. Hired someone Thursday so we’ll see. Will still be 2 down. That’s the way it goes though. Times are good, hard to find drivers, times are crap easier to find drivers. It’s always a challenge.

 

That sucks about the passing in the family. Just recently my 2nd cousin got covid and it killed him.

 

Sorry to hear that man.

 

I am officially getting lazy. Current truck sitting in the driveway, new truck is supposed to show up the end of next week or so. I haven’t made my mind up what I’m going to do for sure but right now I’m leaning towards selling the new one and just slowing down more. I ran right at 100k miles this year, was off all of September, November, and I’m not doing anything in December, plus all the long weekends and a few weeks off here and there. I went in for a physical earlier this week and my bloodwork says I’m pretty healthy. I also had an antibody test done and somewhere along the line I’ve had Covid. I suspect it was the first part of November, I had some cold/flu symptoms for a couple days and then I was good to go. Hope everyone else is chugging along and doing well.

 

It's getting insane out there

 

Looks like some O/O's are using this as a way to retire early, or at least try. I planned on retiring before prices went up. Getting more for my used equipment was just icing on the cake. My exit plan was already in place.