>Surely, there must be some expediters who have had a decent
>year financially.
Diane and I are among them. Half way through 2007, we saw that the ambitious financial goal we set for the year would likely be met, so we bumped it up a bit. By November 30, we met the new full-year goal and decided at that point to take December off.
We hate debt. In 2007, we poured a bunch of money into accelerated truck payments. Before the snow melts in 2008, we will own the truck free and clear, and be back to living debt-free lives.
>I am curious what you "successful"
>expediters have done to ensure that you got your "cheese"?
I have read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" and know of what you speak. Our methods for getting our cheese are already familiar to regular readers of the Open Forum. In a nutshell, we (1) set specific financial goals, (2) were highly motivated (as in money motivated) to achieve them, and (3) identified and eliminated from our lives the thoughts, people and things that got in the way of achieving said goals.
Some of those "outside of the box" items included changing our minds about night and day. When we entered the business, we believed that the day was for working and the night was for sleeping. Now we believe in working when the work is available, night or day. We used to believe that home was a house filled with posessions located at a fixed address. Now we maintain a mostly property-free lifestyle (except the truck, of course), and belive that the truck is our home and the nation is our back yard. It is a belief that frees us to be more productive than our old belief about home allowed us to be.
Other "outside of the box" thinking included rejecting the conventional wisdom, frequently heard in the industry, that the more general your truck can be, the more opportunities you will have. Conventional wisdom held that we should buy a generic truck that can be put to good use by numerous carriers. Instead, we bought a highly specialized truck that was designed specifically for one carrier, and one market served by that carrier (FedEx Custom Critical White Glove Services, reefer-equipped).
It was a wise choice. At the end of this slow-freight year, there is a waiting list of people wanting to get into White Glove work. (Newbies reading this should be careful to note that there is more to getting into White Glove than building a WG truck. Don't commit to a WG career track without fully researching it first.)
The hero mice in the "Who Moved My Cheese" book owed much of their success to the fact that they didn't know any better than to scurry about day after day searching for the cheese. Because they scurried (instead of forming opinions about what they were entitled to or how aweful it was that the cheese was not where it used to be), they stumbled onto techniques that worked more often than others that did not scurry. In other words, they found the cheese when others did not.
Our personal inclination to scurry is powered by our desire for money. While we have several personal and lifestyle goals as expediters, we are first and foremost money motivated. We are in this business for the money. We are motivated by money. As expediters, the money is our cheese and we scurry after it every day (at least until we reach the money goals we set). If money was not found in expediting, we would find other career fields in which to scurry.
Allow me to add that we are not motivated by money as an end in itself. We want money not for the money, but for the things money can provide, like financial freedom. The desire to be financially secure runs strong in us. The sooner we are wealthy enough to not have to work, the better. That is why we scurry. That is why we are focused on the money.
That does not mean we will stop working when we have enough money to do so, but until we reach that point, financial freedom will continue to be a burning desire that motivates us to scurry.
>Folks interested in entering our industry would be
>interested in your responses.
I think so too. So my response is offered here. I hope others also share.
>Tell us what you have done different this year that you
>would not have done in years past.
In 2007, we were owner-operators for the full year. That is new. From August, 2003 to June 2006, we drove fleet owner trucks. Buying our own truck was a wise choice. Money that used to pay for fleet owner trucks now pays for our truck. The profits fleet owners used to make off the 40% of the gross they kept now go to us. While there are well documented benefits to starting out in a fleet owner's truck, as we did, the value of those benefits diminish as you learn the business and build your business skills. We were more than ready to become owner-operators when we did.
Looking ahead, and having found our cheese, we plan to operate the same in 2008 as we did in 2007. It does not matter if the 2008 cheese will be found in the same place or be moved. We expect to succeed; not because we are smart, not because we are entitled, not because the economy will be strong or weak, but because we know what we want and are willing to scurry after it.
