Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/741858
Bad Customers Yes, there is a such thing as a bad customer. is one I learned a long time ago. We had a customer in the lawn care industry who shipped peat moss locally in Florida. at was before I systematically ran a credit check on every single customer with whom we did business. It was not a big company, so initially we put the customer on a short credit cycle of 15 days, and we limited how much overall credit we offered. e customer paid his bills for a few months and we put him on our regular 30-day schedule with open credit. Before we realized it, he transacted about $30,000 of invoices in a three-week period. en the checks stopped coming in. We tried everything to collect but aer involving lawyers and collection agencies, it became clear that this was not his first rodeo. e thing I found out about the legal system is that if you really don't care about your credit reputation, you can simply refuse to pay and nothing will really happen when it is a business-to-business transaction. I used to think that a court win would fix everything. It does not work when you are dealing with an intentional crook. Lessons Learned: Do a credit check and track payment patterns. Act as soon as you see a customer falling behind for no reason. And always remember a customer who does not pay his bills is not a customer. Bad Carriers Sadly, there are bad carriers out there and several variations on the bad carrier scenario, but one is particularly grinding: e fuel advance scam. is one usually comes from a fake carrier, but I have seen it done by a legitimate one who just does not care about its reputation. e scam goes about like this. Broker posts a load and carrier calls in. Carrier accepts the load and provides all the documents required. When you think about it, carriers and brokers send their information to so many people over the course of a year, it is so easy for them to fall in the hands of a bad apple. So carrier gets load, provides a driver phone number which is oen just another phone in the office. At about the time the truck is supposed to be loaded, the driver calls and asks for a fuel advance. If the dispatcher does not verify that the load has been picked up and issues the check, that money is gone. We have not fallen for that one because of our procedures, but we did get caught once where carrier actually picked up the load, got the advance, cashed it then returned the load to the shipper under some claim of mechanical breakdown. Lesson learned: Confirm carrier info through a third party make sure that they are who they say they are before giving them the load in the first place. COO, ONE HORN TRANSPORTATION BY LOUIS BIRON W ay back when I was a teenager a good friend of mine transferred to my school for his last year of high school. As was the custom, at the end of the year he posted a thought in our Yearbook: "If experience is the sum of your mistakes, then my year here has been a tremendous experience." At the time I thought it was funny, but when I look back at my 20 years of experience in the transportation industry, a lot of mistakes/ bad situations come easily to mind. So here is my share of some of my learning from these experiences. Learning by Experience 20 IT MAGAZINE Vo l . 1 0 , N o . 6