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My father is an owner operator of a trucking company. I helped him run his business after I graduated from college. The way we were able to differentiate was by

by pg_bot 5y ago

My father is an owner operator of a trucking company. I helped him run his business after I graduated from college. The way we were able to differentiate was by being extraordinarily reliable with our pickups and deliveries. You can achieve this if you can communicate often with your clientele and have slack with your trailers. You can't have drivers sitting in a loading dock for 2+ hours waiting to load or unload goods without getting paid for that time. So we wrote into our contracts that you get paid overtime for sitting around if we showed up on time and you took too long to load or unload. Anyone who refused got cut, and we still had more than enough people willing to give us business to continually expand. We would also talk to them and work around production schedules by dropping off trailers and have them be loaded when the company had slack in their schedule if they wanted. This allowed us to keep great clients, and have predictable routes for our drivers. You can go even farther if you analyze traffic patterns and attempt to find clients who will minimize your deadhead miles. You can make a lot of money in trucking if you know what you're doing since the bar is so low for competence. Most of the big boys will churn out drivers and treat them like garbage.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
There was a book by I think Steven Covey or his father, a Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) businessman who talked about entrepreneurship in the context of the early nineties. Didn't talk about tech, although that's always a part of the story, now it's tech, centered around AI. But that was always tied to entrepreneurship, it's just back then it was the inventor, not the founder. But it was more focussed on starting up a business by out-executing. He said 90% of businesses were not executing well, just execute well and live by American/Christian/Middle-class values and that's all you need. It seemed widely believed at the time, or he wouldn't address this, that to start a business you needed to hire all these executives at huge salaries, and lease cars for them, and rent office space. He countered no, just do it on your own, just BE PUNCTUAL which is worth gold, and the hack is if you can't be on time call ahead of time expressing sincere interest in respecting people's time. This, so people aren't left doing nothing while waiting for you. He said 90% of the time that solves the problem. It just has to be sincere, which does not mean figure out the magic words to sound sincere, it means express it if you feel it, and if you can't...hit the bricks, accepting you can't be a businessman if you don't have a problem being a burden. You could be a beggar instead. Just that part of being punctual, doing what you said you'd do, or figuring out how to be of help, really own your failures. Another move is talking about it if you have a strong excuse, courts absolutely want to hear mitigating factors, and actually people do too, it actually helps people feel like they weren't betrayed completely, like they do if you say there's no excuse for what you've done. Or say you'll examine the personal and external failures for some time, though for the moment it's on you, and explain in full in a week when cooler heads prevail and you did a true post-mortem, identifying all the lessons that failures are richly laden with. Like how personal and external factors interplayed, so you can do something about it being repeated.[1] I have a relative who was a very successful self-made man and the way you hacked him, was a good short haircut (like a 1940's haircut, this man was buttoned-down) and punctuality, that was literally all it took. [1]: On that note, some people are incapable of being punctual without using controlled substances. Attention Deficit Disorder. It's not something that can be addressed just by visiting a psychiatrist and saying you think you might have it, you might imagine that would be enough like it is with practically anything else. Ideally find a psychiatrist who is also a patient, that's the ideal.
- bkav 5y ago
  Do you remember the name of the book. It sounds interesting. Would love to read that.
  - cafard 5y ago
    The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. For a while there were Covey stores here and there (well, there was one on I think the 1900 block of I St. NW in Washington, DC) where one could pick up the paraphernalia to support one's effectiveness. I will say that I never got very far in the book.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The dominant scary company in any category is likely complacent and letting things like customer service slide, which spells opportunity for the entrepreneuer.
algo_trader 5y ago
> find clients who will minimize your deadhead miles Off-topic: Do you think trucking operators can be incentivized to saturate certain routes/corridor? e.g. To justify infra-structure, I want an operator to do at least 10 trucks/day through a given corridor, and can offer some savings/rebates. Lets say months-long commitments and mostly long haul. Is this doable or completely unrealistic? Edit: to be clear, I am not the customer, the operator to find enough customers to fill the route.
- dtgriscom 5y ago
  I'm not clear: who would be incentivizing and thus benefiting from this?
  - algo_trader 5y ago
    A contrived example: we have excess local diesel, which we are willing to sell at a 20% discount, but only if there is enough traffic
  - deepnotderp 5y ago
    Local road builders perhaps
- pg_bot 5y ago
  If I'm understanding your question correctly, this is a fairly common practice. It's fairly typical within the industry to go to the same two destinations every single day. For example, you go from a potato chip manufacturing plant to a distribution center x number of times every single day. You can contract with either a freight forwarder who will handle booking different operators to actually move the goods or you can deal with a trucking company directly. If you find the right company and the economics make sense, I'm sure you could get a deal done. I would say most drivers would even prefer the same route since you can plan your life better. That being said, it depends on how long the "long haul" is as it will be harder to find someone willing to travel across the entire USA for an extended period of time.

by pg_bot 5y ago

daniel-cussen 5y ago

There was a book by I think Steven Covey or his father, a Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) businessman who talked about entrepreneurship in the context of the early nineties. Didn't talk about tech, although that's always a part of the story, now it's tech, centered around AI. But that was always tied to entrepreneurship, it's just back then it was the inventor, not the founder. But it was more focussed on starting up a business by out-executing. He said 90% of businesses were not executing well, just execute well and live by American/Christian/Middle-class values and that's all you need. It seemed widely believed at the time, or he wouldn't address this, that to start a business you needed to hire all these executives at huge salaries, and lease cars for them, and rent office space. He countered no, just do it on your own, just BE PUNCTUAL which is worth gold, and the hack is if you can't be on time call ahead of time expressing sincere interest in respecting people's time. This, so people aren't left doing nothing while waiting for you. He said 90% of the time that solves the problem. It just has to be sincere, which does not mean figure out the magic words to sound sincere, it means express it if you feel it, and if you can't...hit the bricks, accepting you can't be a businessman if you don't have a problem being a burden. You could be a beggar instead. Just that part of being punctual, doing what you said you'd do, or figuring out how to be of help, really own your failures. Another move is talking about it if you have a strong excuse, courts absolutely want to hear mitigating factors, and actually people do too, it actually helps people feel like they weren't betrayed completely, like they do if you say there's no excuse for what you've done. Or say you'll examine the personal and external failures for some time, though for the moment it's on you, and explain in full in a week when cooler heads prevail and you did a true post-mortem, identifying all the lessons that failures are richly laden with. Like how personal and external factors interplayed, so you can do something about it being repeated.[1] I have a relative who was a very successful self-made man and the way you hacked him, was a good short haircut (like a 1940's haircut, this man was buttoned-down) and punctuality, that was literally all it took. [1]: On that note, some people are incapable of being punctual without using controlled substances. Attention Deficit Disorder. It's not something that can be addressed just by visiting a psychiatrist and saying you think you might have it, you might imagine that would be enough like it is with practically anything else. Ideally find a psychiatrist who is also a patient, that's the ideal.

bkav 5y ago
Do you remember the name of the book. It sounds interesting. Would love to read that.
- cafard 5y ago
  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. For a while there were Covey stores here and there (well, there was one on I think the 1900 block of I St. NW in Washington, DC) where one could pick up the paraphernalia to support one's effectiveness. I will say that I never got very far in the book.
WalterBright 5y ago
The dominant scary company in any category is likely complacent and letting things like customer service slide, which spells opportunity for the entrepreneuer.

algo_trader 5y ago

> find clients who will minimize your deadhead miles Off-topic: Do you think trucking operators can be incentivized to saturate certain routes/corridor? e.g. To justify infra-structure, I want an operator to do at least 10 trucks/day through a given corridor, and can offer some savings/rebates. Lets say months-long commitments and mostly long haul. Is this doable or completely unrealistic? Edit: to be clear, I am not the customer, the operator to find enough customers to fill the route.

dtgriscom 5y ago
I'm not clear: who would be incentivizing and thus benefiting from this?
- algo_trader 5y ago
  A contrived example: we have excess local diesel, which we are willing to sell at a 20% discount, but only if there is enough traffic
- deepnotderp 5y ago
  Local road builders perhaps
pg_bot 5y ago
If I'm understanding your question correctly, this is a fairly common practice. It's fairly typical within the industry to go to the same two destinations every single day. For example, you go from a potato chip manufacturing plant to a distribution center x number of times every single day. You can contract with either a freight forwarder who will handle booking different operators to actually move the goods or you can deal with a trucking company directly. If you find the right company and the economics make sense, I'm sure you could get a deal done. I would say most drivers would even prefer the same route since you can plan your life better. That being said, it depends on how long the "long haul" is as it will be harder to find someone willing to travel across the entire USA for an extended period of time.