Fuel for Thought

Happy Anniversary to Me

I am not going to use my anniversary with Load One as a time to review or critique the company. Instead I want to point out two concepts of running in the expedite business that the past year has driven home. These are concepts that anyone can measure and analyze regardless of where they get their freight.

Missing miles.  Some companies still use zip code to zip code to calculate loaded miles. Some companies use mapping programs to calculate a more accurate number for loaded miles. Regardless of the method used it is a good idea that the driver understands the impact on their bottom line. Early on in my expedite career (pre-Load One), I knew that my loaded miles weren’t quite keeping up with the actual work that my van had to do to do its job, but I didn’t calculate the impact and chalked it up to the cost of doing business. As rates dropped, I had to pay closer attention to my costs to operate. I started tracking the difference between the carrier’s loaded miles and my own calculations. Using a year’s worth of load information I figured that on average I was losing over $10 on every load. Using this information, I raised the floor for my least acceptable rates. Moving to Load One I found my miles matched very closely to the loaded miles that they calculated, so if all else was equal I was still getting a $10+ per load increase.

Is it really slow? Does it really matter? October 2011 at the time I was emerging from Load One orientation the bottom dropped out on all expedited freight. Van freight seemed to have the hardest recovery over the winter. If anyone asked me how it was going all I could do was shrug. My pay seemed okay to so-so, but the pace was excruciatingly slow. Two months were essentially one load weeks. There were some extra loads during that time, but most of the pay was coming from a fair load during each week. In July I finally found some time  to sit down and do a thorough numbers crunch. It turned out that my gross income was very similar to years past. The real story was in my expenditures. The odometer miles on my van dropped a full 3000 miles a month. I went from running over 10,000 miles a month to barely making it to 7000 miles, if that. I’ll let others calculate how much not driving 3000 miles is worth.

Moral of the story. It’s not about how busy and productive I feel. It’s about what the numbers say at the end of the page. Even a $10 increase means little if all the many parts aren’t accounted for over the long term. Now if the long term view doesn’t add up then there really is a problem, but in my case things are adding up the way they should, and I feel fortunate where I am.

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