Un desired loads

Hahaha pickup at 7pm. Rollincoal so predatory.

Back in 2015 I had a customer tell me that he could pay me 500 dollars for a Reefer that could pick up my load and deliver it 35 miles away.. 2 days later. He thought he could find a Reefer that was cheaper than a cold storage in FL in May. That sure was a fun call. I really enjoyed telling him that I had in fact found a truck... for 2,000 dollars.

 

Thats a golden nugget right there...Thank you.

@rollin coal ...I know Im getting REAL STREET KNOWLEDGE when your "Thank-you" count is greater than your post count...

 

@boredsocial that's living on the edge. It can be fun and not so fun lol. Remember I pointed out in a post you made a few weeks ago where for your freight you commented that you typically have carriers in the bag on those given loads. If you're calling seeking out a carrier you're behind the eight ball.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean you're always going to pay someone $2,000 on 37 loaded miles but you are in a bind and anything could happen. You do not want to find yourself in that scenario. That's what newbies need to understand. Incoming calls good. Crickets chirping or making calls, bad. And the reverse is true for carriers. Calling soliciting loads from brokers automatically the ball is in the broker's court. Simple.

 

My biggest customer on bad brokers "I honestly think they think they are still going to cover the load up until the second it's really too late. And then they call me and tell me there's a problem. Or they let me call them and pretend like it's a surprise to them that their truck isn't going to be showing up. Delusional all of them. They have some imaginary amount of money they are already making in their heads off of a piece of freight they haven't even covered yet."

A lot of freight brokers say things like "I never give back freight". I give back freight all the time. I want as little exposure to uncovered freight as possible. Uncovered freight is risk and part of my job is literally to take risk as close to 0 as it can get. Customers rarely get angry when you give back freight that they have enough time to cover. Timing is everything in this business.

Deliver my customer into the loving embrace of Rolling Coal and she won't forgive you for a while.

EDIT: God Rollin Coal's posts always get my juices flowing so well that I nearly give away trade secrets lol. I just started to write and then deleted a post that would have made it possible to extrapolate WAY too much about how I run my business lol. This dude is going to ruin my life when 10-15 kids from T-Q-L read some post of mine and use it to copy what I'm doing.

 

Aaaaahhh...HAHAHAHA.....

@boredsocial, Please, do share....via PM....I wanna be like you when I grow up

 

For some reason PM's aren't working for me at the moment. I can say this much:

When you take a piece of freight you should have a reasonably good idea what you're going to do with it. You should have a plan. Your plan should have a plan B baked into it. Plan B should either be pushing the rate up to where it will DEFINITELY cover or it should be giving it back to the customer and whining about the spot market that day and about how you just had a fallout.

The better you know the market the better the plans will be and the more often they'll go as expected. When you land a new customer and don't know what to expect, expect some lumps. Watch how the customer handles everything very carefully. People reveal themselves in all sorts of tiny ways. The biggest warning sign I've seen customers who demand all sorts of guarantees and make all sorts of threats about what they will do to you if you have a fallout. These customers are often running a newbie freight broker trap where they let them commit themselves to loads with very low rates a couple of days in advance. Then when the trucks fallout the newbie broker is on the hook for finding a market rate truck and loses a couple hundred bucks. The newbies fall for it hook line and sinker because they are under huge pressure from management to find new customers.

 

Interesting.

I've been getting the weekly USDA spot rates for about 3 months now....studying it, etc

How much deviation do you see the "tuesday" prices to the final offering numbers? Is it a reliable gauge?

 

Unfortunately the USDA spot rates have absolutely zero correlation with reality. For proof look at last weeks FL outbound rates and then pull up DAT/IT and look at what actually exists on the load boards. Every single data source out there is seriously contaminated. I have yet to find a single rating tool that comes within high single digits of the actual rates in the market with any regularity.

For better or worse skill at rating freight is probably the single most important thing for people covering trucks or loads right now. To be a successful trucking company owner or freight broker it is absolutely mandatory that you be getting paid the right rates (and in the case of brokers not be overpaying either). It's the single biggest reason why some guys become millionaires in transportation and some guys go broke. If you run a sub optimal organization that doesn't extract its share of the revenue from the market you'll either have to pay yourself significantly less than people who do your job usually make (not a good time) or you'll go out of business the next time the market takes a downturn. When things are good there are lots of people who claim that they are making money. We find out how many of them were for real when the tide goes out.

I know I'm for real because I made more money in 2016 than I did in 2015. Granted I moved almost double the loads that I did in 2015 and I had my wife quit her nursing job to help me but let's not split hairs lol. 2016 was a VERY bad year for freight brokerages in general and I made more money than I did the previous year. I'm for real.

 

There's not really a debate going on. We're all just chatting. Actually this thread doesn't have much disagreement at all lol. Rollin Coal made the point that you want to sell the truck for the mileage rate or the daily rate whichever is more. Do not let anyone convince you to take a great mileage rate that is a crappy daily rate. That's not actually a good load.

Then I made fun of him for being a spot market predator. I'm not going to talk about his business model anymore than that, but let's just say I'm very familiar with it and do everything in my power to never have to interact with him at work.