Merrick, I am glad u took my comments as intended. Honestly, I dont see the sense in investing in something for my business that is not gonna produce income for me. Peoplenet, IMO may be a valuable tool that gives you piece of mind, but I dont see you recovering the initial and monthly costs of operating with it. I think you have good business sense in general, but I do not think you realize the thin profit margins in which your truck is operating in. How much are u predicting to profit yearly on this one truck operation? How many years will it take u to recover your initial upstart costs of this operation? I'm pulling for ya man, but i think you are way too optimistic in this venture. I have been around trucks way too long to have as much confidence as you do in this. I do wish you luck though.

 

Does the driver you have mind staying out a long time? If he doesn't mind you'll do ok. It's the guys that don't mind going all over and waiting every now and then that will make you money. Some will have a concept of what you are trying to do and others could give a hoot. Hopefully you've got yourself a good driver. Only time will tell.

I meet a fellow the other day who has a couple of trucks, and he rents them out. One is rented to his brother-in-law who pays him rent on the tractor and trailer. Then he finds his brother-in-law loads and skims off them.

I drove him to pick up a trailer from TRL in PA as they have almost sold off all of their trailers & trucks. They were a 400 truck plus company and sold their building to Prime, and liquidated all their assets.
He was buying 4 more trailers to rent them out to other drivers.

I'm rambling, I don't stay up late. Time for me to go to bed. My wife had one of those Jewlery partys. Bunch of laughing noisey women in the house. :shock: Did I spell that stuff right? zzzzz......

 

Well I will be drawing some heat on this I'm sure but to be honest I don't have a specific number I plan on making. You know a lot of this is just putting one step forward and moving on.

Recently, I don't know if I mentioned it already, when I was talking with the guy from the brokerage who has been wildy successful in life, he even mentioned that if someone needs something their rule is to say yes and then figure out how to get it done. He mentioned a lot of it is just moving forward.

While I think it would be a lot smarter if I could answer my profit projections, I think if everyone did that a lot of people wouldn't be doing what they are doing. I think when all is said and done, when a lot of people (and I don't mean this in trucking, but just in general) look back at what they've done they probably think, "man that was crazy, I can't believe I did that". Either you will be successful and you will be glad you did, or you wail fail and then pick up and move on.

As to how long til I recover my initial investment, to be honest I have put very little money into this. Almost everything I have done is borrowing other people's money (credit cards) at 0% interest. Then I just pay back it all with the money from the truck. Even the People Net, I just got a bunch more credit so this stuff cost me 0 of my own money. I am responsible of paying it back, but like I said I try and do that with the truck.

Thanks again for your comments though, and I appreciatae your goodwill.

Sideman, definitely staying out is one thing I have been putting emphasis on, if they say they need to be home every couple of weeks, then I just tell them that I won't be able to do that. The guy I am going to finally put in my truck, just got divorced and has no place of his own.

Interesting about that TRL thing, I mean 400 trucks and they were out. I looked it up real quick and it looks like they sold their building for 6 million.

I'll say one thing, even just from looing into my friends stuff, if you use the business as a personal ATM you will be ill prepared for the bad times like we are seeing now. The same silly parable we heard as kids about the squirrel who saves for winter and the other that doesn't is just as true today has it always has been and always will be.

 

Day one in the brokerage. My head was spinning. I spent the day in the intermodal division. Man you can haul stuff cheap on a train. They were sending stuff from New York to Miami for like $1.35 a mile. From Ohio to Miami was like $1.65 or less I think.

They have loads right now from Minnesota that need to go to Miami but I guess sometimes there are problems with getting the rail cars, but it's only $2000 on train and the trucks want are quoting $4,000 or so so they are waiting on a train.

I use to wonder where all those trucks pulling containers out of the port were going. I guess CSX offers Door to Door service. They pick it up, put it on a train and then deliver it to final. If you hold up the draytruck for more than an hour I think it was, CSX charges the broker $80.00 per hour.

People would call up for rates and they would just post the load and then when a truck would call they would then go back to the customer with that rate. I should note I was with one woman only, I don't know if they all do that. I was thinking that if a truck quotes too low they are only screwing themself.

Their goal is to make 15% at the end of the day. I saw some of the rates. They have a load they are trying to push to New Jersey from Ohio for like a little more than $2.00 a mile. But they were only making like $100 on that. I could see the customer rates and then what they were trying to get a carrier to move it for. Like I said was mostly on intermodal today, but it didn't seem like they were trying to make an insane profit on each load. I will maybe be in the truckload division tomorrow.

It was wierd looking at things from that end. The next couple of months are supposed to be good in Florida but for them the next couple of months is "bad". Kind of like learning "debit" and "credit" from an accounting point of view which is backwards from us.

As for stuff coming out of Florida, someone made a comment that fuel could go to $50 and they still will only be paying $1.00 a mile there. Apparently they have the freight cars that go back to Chicago for like $600. They will send them back empty if they have to, they never have enough cars in Chicago.

The lady I was with was calling and calling all day and nobody "bit". Seems like a lot to try and get someone to let you quote them. Then you have to have them fill out a credit application. You think they want to be filling out those things? All I can say is seems like a lot to get a new account.

Giving a quote on a intermodal load is pretty painless. You just email the rail yards for their rate and within a few minutes you have a quote. Then add your percentage and there you go.

I noticed that a lot of brokers offer up their loads so they end up being double brokered. The girl was telling me that they have too much to handle so broker them out. She didn't even bother with those; said they were too cheap.

Well that sums that up for now.

 

Didn't get so much info the second day at that place. It was an office environment which means it was just a job to most. I guess that's how offices are, people do what they are expected to do, no more no less. I don't look at any of this as a job.

Seems like a lot of these brokerages pay salary, which surprises me. You would think people would be more motivated if they were strictly commission. I don't know, but for me an office environment is stiffling. It just saps out any enthusiasm I might have. Probably a lot of us here and that's why we are in this industry.

I'll say one thing, I appreciate this dispatching a bit more now. I don't see how I did it while I was driving. While that truck is moving it takes a while to find a good load. I had it posted the other day, and the phone was blasting off the hook, also I was helping find loads for my friend and I was working on the factoring. I was missing the tranquility of the truck I have to say.

This factoring is a huge business; I had no idea. And I'm not talking just in trucking. I am trying to arrange one deal, and it's a bit confusing. This company in South America handles the logistics of exporting flowers. They only handle the logistics part, so they wouldn't be factoring the flowers just the logistics part. All I had to do was set up the interest than hand it over to the sales people. So I still don't know how it went.

But especially for people in countries where it's not so easy to get money from banks, this factoring is not too bad a deal. Especially since they do the credit checks and collecting for you.

As we are coming into season, I thought maybe I'll just rent a truck for a couple of months and take advantage of the season. I called Penske and based on 3,000 miles a week, they want about $900 a week. Not worth it.

I was actually thinking about getting another truck but since I paid for my insurance outright, I guess I couldn't get another one without paying outright too and and I can't just do a partial term. In June my year is up and then I should get much better rates.

Next week I should know if I will be an agent for this company to start brokering.

Today I went down into Miami and drove around the cargo section of the airport. I don't know, we take one load to the next, but there is so much going on. I saw a lot of those Foward Air trucks, Werner, a Covenant, plenty of flower distributors, freight forwarders, consolidators, warehousing. I wish I could understand everything that was going on.

Here was one place I saw www.kwe.com/ . Never saw them on the load boards I drive myself crazy trying to figure out everything. I don't know if I mentioned it previously, but one time my wife and I were walking in the Everglades and I was standing there and I realized that there were probably hundreds of different things around me, trees, plants, grasses, and I couldn't name one. So much around us goes on that we have no clue.

Anyway, my truck is heading back east. This guy is not bad, seems happy out there and he seems to know what he is doing. He likes the hand holding though; I told him I'm spoiling him cause when he gets back he's going with my friend and he'll be one of 15 instead of one of one.

Later I will put the numbers for his first week, exact mileage and fuel, and pay. So far it seems ok.

 

I always like reading this thread....Bump

 

Wow! Great story. Took me a few days to read it all but great insight.

 

Where is that Merrick, iced coffee drinker, short & sneaker wearing guy??

 

Still drinking iced coffee, still wearing shorts and sneakers, but actually had to dress up the other day as we went to a conference.

Still in trucking. Have 4 trucks now and am about to buy my fifth probably this week. Thank goodness all is well and really if I could, I'd buy another 4 trucks but it's hard to get the financing now.

I believe I have a pretty good system in place and could really run a lot of trucks.

I'll say one thing though, as anybody who has read through all of this knows that I'm nothing but honest, I really hate this business. Let me clarify, I like seeking out new work, I like dealing with the people on the phones; I like buisiness development but all our hard work is in the hands of the drivers. Well the drivers are the ones doing the actual work ,but I mean if they decide to stop the truck and deviate from the route or go 100 miles out of the way all the work of getting new customers goes out the window

Thankfully I don't really have any horror stories and I stay on top of everthing, but I have no problem firing people.

Really one could lose their a** real quick in this business if you don't stay on top of things. I have no idea how anybody has trucks and drivers and no GPS system in place to track the trucks.

Also I was bending over backwards with these drivers trying to make them happy; people take advantage of that and a lot of what I was doing I have now stopped.

Don't get me wrong, I have some really good drivers and I appreciate them and they all seem real pleased. But they know I am watching.

I now have my wife helping with the paperwork which I was real bad at. The paperwork in this business just doesn't stop.

But all in all, I must say I'm excited about the future and really think I can do well in this business.

 

I am glad to hear that you are still doing well, merrick. You are right about drivers. They can make or break your business. I could tell you some real horror stories.