Landstar's system is very different from the rest of them. They give you the opportunity to make your own decisions, it is up to you what you do with them. The key to their system is developing good relationships with the Agents/Brokers, and where the agents pull freight out of. All this takes time to learn and develop. The only agents that are supposed to work on a first in first out basis, are the ones in your local area, the rest of them work off their own board and/or the Highway Master.
The expenses as I remember them were; $25.50 a week for the Highway Master, $20.00 for each driver for the Insurance, I don't remember if it is required, but you need a Pager and Cell Phone (99% of your load offers will be by the pager or cell phone, so get good ones), the installation charge for Signs and Highway Master was a little over $300 back then. They did have an escrow account also, I think that was $1000 and they took it out weekly.
We spent to different periods with them, the first one we started in Nov and ended in June. We never did get into the system enough to avoid financial ruin. Our second time with them we started the end of Jan and ended in June again when the Owner we were driving for had the truck repoed. This second time the owner had a business/office manager who worked full time at developing these relationships, and tracking who was getting the freight and from where. It started out slow, but when we left he had it down and we were doing very well, the owner just couldn't recover from the $5,000 and $6,000 months when we started. As you can see, both times we started were at this time of the year, and it seems that LEA's freight drops off more than the other companies in the first quarter. We also noticed a drop in the avg per mile pay for loads between the first and second stints with them.
If we were going to get back into expediting would we go back to LEA, if we got the help of that same business/office manager, YES, if not we would probably try to get back on Weave's team. Hope this helps you in some way, with your decision. Just remember the key to their system is who you know, what they know, and how much of that you can get out of them. Plan on spending a LOT of time on the phone, and visiting the Agent's when you are near them.
I'm not sure how they are doing as a company, with the events of Sept 11th and the economic problems this country is facing. One last thought, the Agents are more likely to remember you, if you have something out of the ordinary to offer them. The one thing I always wished we had was the ability to haul more weight. This will also help you with getting sister company loads for the slow/dead areas.
