… What They Don’t Tell You

Date: February 15, 2023

Time: 10:10 PM

I could have SCREAMED!

Top of the week, Monday morning at 3:00 am, I get a call that the truck is leaking coolant. My driver is about 73 miles south from our yard. I could call roadside assistance, wait at least 90 minutes and pay $400-$600 for them just to come out and probably tell me that they can’t fix the problem on the side of the road OR I could wait for the local mechanic shop to open at 8:00 am and have a mechanic to go down the road for half the price and fix the problem on the side of the road. An even better outcome, my business partner went down and was able to fix the problem. THANK GOD!

Just as fast as Driver A gets up and running, I get a call from Driver B that his truck is leaking air and the pressure won’t build up. He’s about 136 miles north of our yard. So yup, as my business partner is heading back, he stops and grabs the mechanic and continues north. A bad valve. They find a dealership to pick up the part and when they get back to the truck, it's hooked up to a tow truck. The New Jersey police called a tow truck to get it towed off of the New Jersey turnpike. As my business partner was conversing with the tow man to put the truck down, that was all the time the mechanic needed to fix the part. We ended up having to pay the tow truck driver $300 just so that he would unhook from the truck! SMH! My driver gets back up and running and is headed back to the yard.

Literally, 30 minutes to an hour after that truck gets fixed, Driver C calls me. “The truck keeps cutting off”. Now this is a new driver to our company, so I’m learning him and he’s learning us, but as a driver myself, if my truck keeps cutting off, I’m going to read codes, check temperatures and look under the hood. The first thing that I do when I get calls about breakdowns from my drivers is look at the ELD diagnostics. What do I see: Coolant Level Low; High Temperature. I tell him to go check the coolant level in the reservoir. Yup, it’s empty and he sees where it's leaking out. We do keep extra coolant in the trucks and he was only about 15 miles away from the mechanic shop, so his duty was to make it there because I was not calling roadside.

Remember the last journal entry where I explained that we grossed almost half a mil in 8 months? Well guess what, that next year, we were in the red due to maintenance, parts & then fuel prices had skyrocketed.

I will never forget that summer, I had a driver in Massachusetts and he had a breakdown. First, he was on a turnpike, so you know what that meant, the police called a tow truck before roadside could get there. The truck had to be towed literally 1 mile to the next exit and it was $600. Yup! Then, once roadside arrived, he figured out what it was, but he said that he would have to fix the problem in the actual shop and a part was needed, but the dealership was closed. So, I had to pay him for his lack of services. He also gave us another roadside that could come out and assist. Once he got to the truck, he said that he could fix it on the side of the road and he would actually have to take the part off and work on the inside of it to rebuild it so that we wouldn’t have to buy a brand new part. Sounds good right! Well, he got my driver up and running, but the bill was outrageous due to the fact that he had to “build” a part and the mileage and time that he had to use to get to my driver, go get parts, etc. My driver got about 30 miles away and what happened, broke down again, same issue. Guess what, now my driver was outside of his radius. At this very moment, I knew I would be pulling all of my trucks off of OTR to local routes. This one truck being over the road costs me $10K that week.

At the time, even in the midst of the rates declining and the fuel being high, I still guaranteed my driver’s at least $1,500/week if they were OTR for 5 days, until I couldn’t anymore. I had been thinking of ways to cut costs and I knew that payroll would have to be touched, but I just wanted to keep my drivers happy as long as I could. $1,500/week even when shipping and receiving would take too long and make us miss a load. $1,500/week even when we had a breakdown and the truck was down a day or two. $1,500/week even when we booked a load and the broker canceled it at the last minute. $1,500/week even when the rates dropped from around $3.10/mile to $2.30/mile. STILL $1,500/week. I remember paying the difference of about $500-$600 every week to each driver when their pay didn’t equate to $1,500 based on the completed loads.

One evening, I sat at the bar during happy hour and I literally sat beside a gentleman that worked for Schneider. Of course, we began talking about trucking and the industry. He then explained to me how Schneider had cut their driver’s pay rates. I almost made the Scooby Doo sound at the bar!

At that moment I said to myself, you are a new small carrier trying to compete with Mega Carriers.

If Schneider is cutting their driver’s pay, you BETTER! That night, I went home and created a Memo to send out to all of my drivers about the new pay scale.

Maintenance killed us that year and honestly, still is. I literally sat in my office and cried one day. To see my account go from six figures to basically trying to pay the bills in a matter of months made me sick to my stomach. Trucking is definitely not for the weak. There are too many moving parts. I had to call my Entrepreneur Rock (My Sister/Friend) for a pep talk… Get your sh*t together, stay consistent and keep going. This is business. “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it!”

Signing Off,