Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/741858
Bad Drivers Having experience as both a carrier and a broker, I have two stories for you here. My worst story with a driver working for me was about 10 years ago. I gave a load of salt to the driver. He had my tractor and trailer, so between the equipment and the load, he was holding about $150,000 of my assets. Until that fateful day he was a reasonable driver and somewhat reliable. But one day he got into a fight with his girlfriend and decided to go to his parents' house. Up to that point, we can all say, "It happens." But instead of parking the truck in our yard and letting me know that he needed time off, he parked the rig in a shopping mall parking lot and disappeared. I called his phone many times, but he would not answer. I was pretty sure that my calls were going through but he was just ignoring them. Finally I went to the police. It turned out that when the police leave a voicemail, it has more impact than when I do. He finally told them where he had le the equipment and luckily we were able to recover everything. Lesson learned: at was a tough one. Aer that I started paying much more attention to subtle comments or changes in behavior that would presage a bad situation. Bad Drivers Cont. A second story is a much more recent one. We were not the direct victim but were involved nonetheless. Some large carriers hire owner-operators to work under their authority but let them book their own freight with brokers. We had one of these owner-operators take a load from us. Everything went fine, the load was delivered, we paid the carrier and collected from the customer. A couple months later the driver (most likely) Photoshopped our paperwork, invented a non-existent broker, modified the original POD and submitted it to his carrier to get paid and they did pay him. e carrier sent the bill to the fake broker, who of course did not pay since it did not exist. e carrier's collection people eventually reached out to us because the load and paperwork were similar to ours. We figured out that it was a fake and had to relay the bad news to the carrier. My guess is that the owner-operator had long ago le the carrier, and now the carrier would be le holding the bag. Lesson learned: In this case, it was the carrier who did not verify the validity of the broker paperwork who is le holding the bag. I would recommend a cross check procedure. Bad Brokers Although we are a broker now, this one goes way back when we used to be regional flatbed carrier in the northeast. I was new to the concept of brokers when we acquired One Horn and was not on my guard as much as I should have been. In those days you could make quite a good living having brokers as a significant portion of your customer base. We worked with several brokers and things were good. One in particular, Joe, was pretty good to us. But one day he was working on a major project and had dozens of loads going from the port in New Jersey to New England. e rate was good so we started moving loads. e work became hectic, and I had a lot of my drivers on the project. en Joe called me to give me more loads, but he was too busy to give me a rate confirmation for each. It turns out that once the job was done, he decided that the loads we did without a rate confirmation were at much lower rate that we never would have accepted. On top of that he argued that some loads were duplicates and so he was not going to pay for them. Lesson learned: Never do a load without a rate confirmation, even with your "business friends." is is an absolute rule in our brokerage no freight gets moved without a signed rate confirmation, it protects everyone. Louis Biron is CEO of Stratebo Technologies. He earned his B.Eng. at McGill University, his MS in computer design at the University of Montreal and his MBA at HEC in France. ese are but a few of the less than positive experiences I had in the transportation industry. e overall lesson learned here is to create and follow your procedures and whenever something happens like what happened to us, revise them so that you don't get fooled twice. Vo l . 1 0 , N o . 6 TRUCKSTOP.COM 21