Trucker transition to a Freight broker in CA with no experience

Honestly? Do some research, find a decent small to mid-sized brokerage, and apply. Judging from your grasp of English and grammar, plus the fact that you do have industry experience, you should do fine in an interview. I came into the brokerage side with less experience than you did- life experience helped a lot, though. Being personable, and having the ability to just talk to folks helps. Sales is a totally different beast. You'll deal with a lot of rejection, especially if you're hammering the phones like you should be. IF you can put up with that, and you have a decent personality, you should do fine, once you get your foot in the door.

 

Yeah, you should probably be looking for brokerages that don't operate their own trucks. The thing is, you're more valuable to those companies (and faster) as a driver that they can put on dedicated accounts. If you enable that company to keep a larger percentage of their profit on a load, it's to their advantage to try and use you to do so.

 

The sales aspect is what I've seen most people fail at in this business. I came into this with zero experience in freight or logistics but I can sell. Within a year I had over 30 accounts and was doing almost $10k per week in gross margin. During that year I've seen dozens of reps come in and get Zero accounts and fail miserably. I've seen people who knew everything there is to know about freight and warehousing and trucking but they couldn't pick up the phone all day and get freight.

Hopefully the people you sign on with are great at selling and can teach you. Another important thing is that you have to be very very coachable when it comes to sales.

 

+1 to it being at least 50% sales. I sincerely wish I was half as good at getting new accounts as I am at working the ones I have. The good news is that if you're great at logistics sales becomes significantly less important once you have a book of business... but you have to get the initial accounts and that's a pretty big hurdle for a non sales person.

 

I am the opposite. I can get the new business and develope the business all day long but I struggle with managing the loads/carriers/tracking etc.

The way my company is set up now makes it very difficult to bring on people to help manage the freight because the commission has to be split and the commission levels are low to begin with and it makes is very difficult to make good money.

 

And I fall somewhere in the middle. I can bring in the new accounts, it's slower, and I don't really have any issues servicing the ones I have, provided I'm staying on top of the rate trends. That makes a big difference, I find.

 

If you have a customer base you should jump ship. Like immediately. The industry standard split is 60%. Either sit out your noncompete or hide/fight and violate. I'd probably pay 15% to someone who could just feed me reasonable freight without them having to do anything other than call the customer and take the load.

It's not just truck drivers who get absolutely HOSED at their first job. Try to remember that when all of you guys are dealing with baby brokers at the mega brokerages... They are young and have a pretty horrible life/job. Yes misery loves company and they cause all kinds of problems... But know that karma is already getting even with them without you making it ever so slightly worse.

EDIT: And to everyone who is wondering why I'm suddenly willing to help another broker out... It benefits me enormously to have other successful brokers keep twice as much money as they were before. They immediately work less. They also immediately help spread the market out even further. I think decentralization is something all of us smaller independents should prefer.