Fuel for Thought

Tin Can; Research Before The Leap.

Research is the thing to do before committing to a vehicle or carrier. The idea here is that the research should be thorough enough that by the time a prospective driver approaches the recruiter there are very few questions to ask. About all I have left to ask the recruiter is 1) are you currently hiring cargo vans? If not, is there a waiting list? 2) Please send me a copy of the contract I will be signing, or something that summarizes everything in the contract. Everything else I found ahead of time from research. Fortunately, and not by coincidence, ExpeditersOnline has the market cornered on all information related to expediting.

ExpeditersOnline.com. The website is the interactive textbook for this course of study. There are tutorial articles that give an overview of the industry. The forum is the place to find self-help instruction. If comparing all this to “school” and “formal instruction” causes you to freeze up and go rigid, consider the forums as the playground where you’ll find the war stories and exciting stuff.

Expedite Expo and workshops. The same people who run the website also organize workshops throughout the year. The big show is the Expo towards the end of every July in Wilmington, Ohio, and the other dates are smaller venues scattered about at other locations. I don’t think there are any official numbers, but I would guess that the prospective drivers who attend workshops have an astronomical success rate over those who don’t. Some people may even attend the workshops and find that they really shouldn’t be going into expediting. There is a huge value in not pursuing a financial mistake.

Drivers. In my formal truck driver training, the school stance was that a driver learns less than 30% of their driving knowledge from school. The rest comes from following the herd. The nice thing about this website and workshops is that the drivers who congregate around EO tend to be social in nature and have something to contribute.

Signature line. Below are some forum research tips I consolidated into my signature line in the forums. I’ll post it here, since it tends to come and go when I post and some mobile users may miss it entirely. The first link is the kick-starter. I’ve included a couple tips on searching the forums for information. A stab-in-the-dark place to start searching is the combination of words “recruiter questions” without the quotes. I still think that studying the forum, attending workshops, and corresponding with forum members will answer most questions before needing to speak to a recruiter, but study the recruiter material anyway—lots of info there.

Link to the faq  How to Start Using the Forum

the cargo van setup guide

A classic post for vanner wannabes

A couple useful quotes:

If you search for "search illegal" in quotes, it will only look for that exact phrase. It won't find "illegal search" unless you search for that exact phrase, in quotes. If you search for "search" and "illegal", both words, no quotes, it will find all posts with either the word search or illegal in it. 

If you do a search without quotes, "search AND illegal" with the 'AND' in capital letters, it will find all posts that contain both the words search and illegal, just not necessarily that specific phrase. [try search+illegal as an alternative, the AND command doesn't seem to work on this site]

Same thing with 'OR' instead of 'AND' in that it will find all posts that contain either search OR illegal. 

'Illegal NOT search" without quotes will return posts that contain the word "illegal" but do NOT contain the word ""search".

--Turtle

In reference to words too short to search: "Hundreds of searches are performed everyday. It is a drain on our server. Therefore we require a min of 4 letters. So your search could be..."cargo van" or "ford van" or "fuel tax".

--Lawrence

eb