I recently bought a straight truck with a sleeper and I was going to hire on with a small company but felt the $1500 hold back and the 30% of the load was a little high on top of me paying for all the insurance and tags.
If you understood the industry well enough to buy a straight truck, then you would have understood, utterly, why the need for the $1500 hold back and that a 30% fee for finding the load, dealing with the brokers and getting paid for the loads, the hassles of insurance and the DOT, etc., isn't too much.
Now I've taken the plunge and filed all the paper work for my own authority and I'm not sure I've made a wise choice.
I am.
Do any of the salty drivers have any advice for a bone head like me???
Before you decide to swim the English Channel, learn to swim.
You've got your own authority, but you don't know how to get freight. You wont' find expedited freight on truck stop bid boards. Most expedited freight are on close bid boards, with most of it anymore being done with targeted e-mail offers and bidding, or direct phone calls. Even those with their own authority who know how to get freight, often spend every waking moment in which they are not driving, looking for freight or trying to get paid for freight they've already delivered (or they have someone back at the house doing it for them, in lieu of a regular full-time job). Most who have their own authority and are successful were leased on to a carrier for years before making the jump.
I live just outside of Chicago and wouldn't mind being gone for a couple of weeks like the big boys want, but I would rather have weekend home. Is there a happy place out there for me in the trucking world?
In the trucking world? Yes. In expediting? Probably not. If you like burning up the Illinois Toll Roads between O'Hare all points within a 50 miles radius, you're golden. Shippers will love you. Not enough to pay you anything worthwhile, but they'll love you just the same. Expediting can and will take you everywhere, anywhere in the lower 48 at any given time. You get a load offer from Detroit to San Diego, or Laredo, or Atlanta, and it's Wednesday afternoon, you gonna give that up to be home on the weekend? Not if you have a truck payment that needs to be made.
Like Dennis said, those who go home a lot on the weekends miss out on a lot of revenue potential. When you go home on a Friday, you miss out on countless load opportunities for Friday afternoon, evening and on Saturday. You also miss the first loads out on Monday, so it could be Tuesday before you get your first load. You end up working about 3 days a week, and that's if you are actually loaded all three of those days. In order to make it work in expediting, most people will need to be out for three weeks at a time, minimum. There are exceptions, of course, but not many. Most will simply stay out until they happen to get a load that takes them close to home, and then will stay there for a week or so. Those who plan, and execute the plan, to be home every weekend, seem to last a few months at most. Then they wonder why they can't make enough money to stay in business. Others only make actual plans to be home for very specific things, like Christmas, or a dentist or doctor appointment, and everything else is played by ear.
One thing out here that will kill you sure as dead is chronic unpaid headhead, like the kind you do to go home from more than about 150 miles away, just to gome home for the sake of going home. If you need,
really need, to be home more than a couple of days a month, then you're better off doing local courier work, which pays even less than expediting does if you go home alot.
If you've bought that truck, and don't already know
for sure how you're going to be regularly loaded, then you're best bet by far is to lease your truck onto a carrier, and then go where the freight takes you, getting home when you can.
