I do not belive in luck, and suggest that expediters that do degrade the quality of their business decision making, and thereby reduce their opportunities for success.
Long post follows. Skip if you don't like long posts.
At the moment, we are sitting in Spokane, WA waiting for freight. We just delivered and have zero dwell time. We are on the Reno board, which covers a huge geographical area, including multiple northwestern states.
So, what do we do? Try our luck? In this situation, if luck is a real force (which it is not), how do we rely on luck to position ourselves for our next load?
Do we stay put? Maybe Lady Luck will smile on us and a lucrative load will rise out of Spokane in the next few minutes and take us to Chicago or New Jersey or some other great express center.
Or, maybe Lady Luck will frown on us and we will sit here for a week with no offers. After all, if you believe in luck, bad luck is just as likely as good luck, is it not?
So, given the possibility of good or bad luck, how do we play it?
Maybe we could move to Portland. It could be said that Portland is luckier than other cities in this area for finding loads out.
While it could be said, it would be more accurate to say that the probability of freight coming out of Portland is higher than the other cities because more expedited freight customers are located there. Thus, moving to Portland would not change our luck, it would reduce the distance between us and those customers and increase the probability of a load.
Of course, if we drove to Portland, a load may be offered that picks up in Montana. Would it then be our bad luck to have driven the wrong direction? Some would say so.
(For that matter, would it not be our bad luck that we were not born into wealthy families with good looks, good health and good reputations? Would it not be our bad luck that we have not won the lottery or yet been discovered by Hollywood producers that will make movies about us and make us rich? Would it not be our bad luck that we were not born with olympic superstar athletic abilities? I dabble in writing. Is it my bad luck that I did not set out to write children's stories and someone else beat me to writing Harry Potter?)
Not believing in luck, I would not say it was our bad luck to deadhead in the wrong direction for freight. I would instead say that customers are thinly scattered across the western states. The fact that one of them rose with freight to ship has nothing to do with luck but with the customer's need to ship expedited freight.
In the deadhead to Portland before picking up Montana freight scenerio, wherein does the bad luck lie? Is it that we drove in the wrong direction? Or was it that the lucky load that picks up in Spokane and requires zero deadhead did not rise at all?
See, luck can be used to support any opinion you wish form. That is true of opinions you form about yourself or your circumstances. It is true of opinions you form about others and their circumstances.
I could say we are having bad luck because we were not predispatched on a load before we delivered in Spokane. I could say we had bad luck because we got a load offer to Spokane (a slow freight city) in the first place. I could say we were really lucky to get the Spokane load because the slow freight area gives us a day to get hair cuts, catch up on our mail, etc. I could say we were unlucky to get the Spokane load in the first place since we had to deadhead 900 miles to pick it up in Texas. I could say the Spokane load was lucky because it moved us pofitably out of a slow freight area (New Mexico).
In other words, when using luck to explain any aspect about the Spokane run and any runs thereafter, I can use luck to create any "truth" I wish. To put it differently, I could use luck as a lazy way to analyze anything, stop thinking about it, justify my present circumstances, and explain why other peoples' circumstances are different than my own.
Gambling and luck are often associated with each other. I find it interesting that people who take gambling seriously do not regard luck as real or count on it to influence their results.
CardsharkOnline.com says:
"luck - An imaginary substance used as a substitution for skill by numerous players who unwillingly finance the expansion of casino industry around the world." (
http://cardshark.us/home.html
Note the use of the word "IMAGINARY."
You may have heard about the "luck of the Irish." But when you survey the population of Ireland, you find the same mix of good and bad fortune as you do any other European country or island.
The Wikipedia web site presents a discussion of luck (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck). The more thoroughly one thinks through the different aspects of luck, the more one will come to realize that luck is not real and should not be counted on as a business resource.
Using luck to explain your circumstances or the circumstances of others is an exercise in self-delusion. Instead of thinking about luck, think about what you can do to best position yourself for your next load and your business for success. Doing that will affect your profits far more than rubbing your lucky rabbit's foot or sending in Qualcomm messages at 7 minute points (a lucky number) and avoiding 13 minute points (unlucky number).
So, back to Spokane. Since Diane and I do not believe in, count on, or use luck to think about our next load offer, what will we do instead?
We will use our spreadsheet and run journal information to determine where the next load is most likely to come from. The liklihood will determined not be based on luck, but based on past history. (For newbies, if you have no past history of your own, talk to experienced drivers that do).
In addition to considering customer location, we consider timing. Today is Wednesday. We know that more loads are dispatched on weekdays than weekends. We also know that while customers are more concentrated in Portland, a larger number of customers are scattered through the Northwest.
While it is possible that no Portland customers will have expedited freight to ship today or tomorrow, it is likely that one or more custmoers somewhere in the Northwest will.
Not knowing which customers those will be, we do not know what direction to go. Thus, we will do what we usually do. We will sit in Spokane for 24 hours to see what freight bubbles up. If the freight does not come to us, we will move to Portland where customers are more concentrated and the probablity of pre-weekend freight is greater.
The 24 hour wait is to protect ourselves from deadheading in the wrong direction. If no offers come to us in 24 hours, it is an indication that freight in this region is slow, or the area is saturated with competing trucks. The thing to do then is to move where more customers are located and wait our turn.
At least that is how we do it. There are other strategies to be sure. If there is one better than the one described above, I'd love to hear about it.
