New On The Road
by
Phil Madsen, Expediter
(Written September 12, 2003. Edited March 18, 2007 for publication on SuccessfulExpediters.com.)
Brand new to trucking, my wife Diane and I have been on the road for a couple weeks now as expedited freight drivers. Very busy. Expediting is falling into place mostly as our research led us to expect. There have been some surprises; some good, some bad.
One surprise is the lack of free time. We have been doing little more than driving and sleeping since we started. Where is the waiting that expedited freight hauling is known for? Half the time we have another load booked before we deliver our current load. Other times the load offers come shortly after the current load is delivered.
There has been no time to write at length about our experiences and observations. I have been keeping notes for later writing. Others we have met on the road say this is the busy season. Work comes first, play second. We are looking forward to some of that waiting expediters say will come.
Our runs so far are shown below. All deadhead miles over the first 100 were paid by our carrier. It is not a high amount, just enough to pay for fuel, more or less.
We do not view deadhead as a bad thing. If a run is for 1,000 miles and there is 100 deadhead miles to pick up the load, we consider it a 1,100 mile trip that pays X amount of money. Or if a run is just 10 miles long but pays a good amount of money, we will gladly deadhead many miles to make that run our own.
You can calculate your earnings per mile, per loaded mile, per load, per day, per pound, per anything. We have avoided the trap of over-analyzing our loads.
We have met several other full-time teams on the road who are making a ton of money as expediters. They attribute their success to their practice of accepting every load (with rare exceptions) and staying out for months at a time. That is a practice we are now making our own. To date, we have accepted every load offered to us.
Once in a while, you might get burned by a so-called "bad load." But you never know what it might lead to. For example, we recently took a "bad load" that was a short run from Baltimore to New York City. It meant tough driving for little money. But once that load was delivered, we found ourselves positioned for a load to Chicago and another load that took us right back to the East Coast.
The East Coast load offer came in before I even closed the doors on the truck after delivering the Chicago load. Had we not taken the "bad load," we almost certainly would have lost the two long runs that immediately followed.
That is the way it has been....busy, busy, busy. More than once, we have walked away from a much-desired shower to roll on the next load offer. Once, we were approaching the shower attendant with our shower tickets in hand when the phone rang. We turned around, rushed across the lot to the truck and rolled on the load.
Did it suck to miss a shower? Sure, but attitude is everything. We focused instead on the good fortune that the load offer did not come in a few minutes later when we would have had to cut a shower short midstream, and on the fact that we got another load.
While there has been little time for much of anything beyond driving and sleeping, we have found expediting to be quite lucrative. We could take time off anytime we wish, but choose instead to make hay while the sun shines.
Since starting, we have only gone out of service twice. Once because we were too tired to drive safely. We went out of service for several hours to sleep. The second was to visit a relative who lived near one of our delivery sites. Other than that, it has been pretty much drive and sleep.
Runs:
Begin in Orlando to wait for our first load. We spend our first-ever night in a truck stop there. It went fine. We had no trouble sleeping in the truck or using the truck stop facilities.
Deadhead to Tampa to pick up a load for West Palm Beach.
Deadhead to Miami to pick up load at the airport and shuttle it to a downtown location.
Repeat above run with a second truck load.
Later that night, return that freight to airport. That run was completed at 3:00 a.m. We were paid extra money for loading and unloading the truck.
We had a brief tourism opportunity between loads. While waiting in Miami to return the freight to the airport, we spent some time walking around South Bay.
Deadhead to Tampa. Spent a night at a rest stop in Everglades on the way. Our time in and drive through the Everglades was another tourist opportunity, since neither of us had seen the Everglades before.
We could have stopped at an Everglades museum along the way, or stopped to take an air boat ride. But being this new to the work, we chose instead to keep our nose to the grindstone. The Everglades will be there later. Work is our first priority now.
Deadhead to Orlando to pick up a load to New York City (Queens).
Deadhead to Newark. We spent a night at a truck stop there (Bordentown).
Deadhead to Baltimore to pick up load for New York City (Brooklyn)
Deadhead to JFK Airport to pick up a load for Chicago.
Deadhead to Indiana to pick up a load for New Jersey.
Deadhead to Brooklyn to pick up load for Manhattan. We spent the night in the truck on a Manhattan street, waiting to deliver the load in the morning.
Deadhead to the Catskills in upstate New York to pick up a load for Wheeling, West Virginia.
Deadhead to Ohio to pick up a load for Ontario, Canada.
Deadhead to Montreal, Quebec to wait for load.
Deadhead to New Hampshire to pick up load for Texas.
Deadhead unpaid to a relative's home in Texas to rest for a couple days. That was not really time off. Much of our time out of service was spent organizing the truck. We have had little time to get "moved in" to our new home (the truck). We used much of the "off time" to organize the cab, sleeper, and box for maximum efficiency and comfort.
We also used the time to get more familiar with the truck itself and the equipment that came with it; such as the ratchet straps, load bars, two-wheelers, and a variety of other items used to secure the freight.
Deadhead from the relative's home to Houston to pick up load for Louisiana.
Deadhead from northern Louisiana to Baton Rouge to do a short but financially worthwhile shuttle there.
We are driving a 2000 Freightliner Century Class straight truck equipped with a , reefer, lift gate, and 72" sleeper. That is a bit shy of the dream truck we have in mind for ourselves. But the support we get from our fleet owners and the run offers this reefer and lift gate equipped truck attract more than justify the Spartan existence this truck limits us to.
The day will come when we have a better truck. But for now, we're running the wheels off the truck we have, and are grateful for the opportunity to do so.
This is an amazing business. With virtually no training other than what is required to get a CDL, an able-bodied and willing worker can easily find a fleet owner that will put him or her in a $150,000 truck. With no financial outlay of your own, you can gain access to a $150,000 asset that you can then use to generate a great income and future for yourself.
That's it for now. Back to work.