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You are not wrong, if the only thing you are looking at is availability of trucks. Load acceptance must also be considered. If a carrier has 100 loads to dispatch and 150 available trucks, the carrier will have no need to add trucks. That's the not wrong part. But if the trucks need say $1.00...

At last night's expediter dinner one of the owner-operators spoke of a carrier that had failed to pay several thousand dollars of money the O/O earned. The carrier has so far been unresponsive to the demand to be paid. The O/O has since changed carriers but could really use the money owed by the...

This is too cool! As I write this, one of the people from last night's meal is out knocking on doors now, rounding people up for breakfast. Not that I need to eat a full meal again, but it's off to breakfast I go! :)

Spontaneous events like these are easy to organize, especially at the Bordentown Petro where a private room is available and a number of expediters are usually hanging out. "Organize" overstates the effort. All you have to do is tell other expediters that you and maybe other expediters will be...

With freight slowing, rates declining and no sign of turnaround in sight, it's more somber out there and dampened spirits tend to linger ... at least until you put some expediters in a room and start swapping stories and talking shop. At the Bordentown Petro today a number of expediters were...

While a number of expediters are holding their own and some are even doing well in the midst of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, I don't know of any who are doing as well as they were before the recession took hold. It's rough out there, even for the people who are...

Like DaveKC, I'm not clear on what you are saying either. I only respond here because you reference predictions I made. Not quite sure what you mean. Your words, "Only the services you provide to the customer and your company will allow you to survive in this business, no matter what you hear...

It would be a mistake for anyone to confuse my belief and confidence in the professionals at FedEx Custom Critical with religious conviction. Diane and I cast our business lot with them because they passed the test and proved to us that they are the competent business professionals we seek to...

I have seen different figures quoted by different sources, some of them line-haul carriers. Depending on the source, it costs somewhere between $3,000 to $7,000 to recruit a new truck into a fleet. So the cost of increasing the fleet size by 10 trucks would be $30,000 to $70,000. Adding 100...

To a point, you are correct but our way of entry into the expeditie business was very common and it remains commonly available. Then owning a house, cars and a house full of stuff, we made arrangements to have the house cared for while we were gone and moved into a fleet owner's truck to begin...

I use "property-free" in a casual sense to mean that we own and are tied to few goods. Until you mentioned it, I never made the connection between the land we own and "property." In my mind, the land is an investment just as stocks, bonds, gold, or whatever are investments. I do not consider...

Actually, we do. Some of our expediting profits have been used to buy vacant land. Our plan is to sell most of it when our health fails us to the point we can no longer live and work on the road. The proceeds will be used to pay cash to build a house on one of the plots we own. If that were to...

Not to be disrepsectful, but yes. If you want me to understand the point (which I do not now get) you need to explain. I am not as dialed into our carrier's back-office operations as some others are. Maybe they can jump in to add more items to the list. Things that come to mind regarding our...

It is not impossible at all if you track every penny you take in and spend. You are right to draw the distinction between fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs are easy. You know what they will be each month (at least until a price increase on something like Qualcomm fees or insurance is...

Texpress offers a summary. In matters like this I suggest that there will always be more thinking to do once you get to the point where a summary is possible. Expediting is an open-ended business where yesterday's events, decisions and results may be a good guide for today's, and or may or may...

No problems here. The pay is as quick and reliable as ever.

TeamCaffee's point about fleet coverage raises an interesting question regarding the ability to broker outside loads. A carrier that allows its trucks to broker outside loads will, at any given moment, have a number of trucks on outside loads, and thus unavailable to cover carrier-dispatched...

Thank you for your informative reply, and especially for acknowledging that there is more than one way to approach the business.

We negotiated under the old dispatch system and new, and in "exactly" the same way. If a load is offered to us at a price below which we are willing to run, we immediately decline the load so dispatch will know we are serious about refusing the low price. The immediate decline also frees...

I would like to know why, yes. Was the money good enough to make it worth it to do for the money alone? Was it to keep a fleet driver from quitting because he or she could not stand sitting? Was it to relocate a truck to a better area? For those of us considering the ability to broker your own...