Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/630225
Lesson Learned 20 www.studentdriverplacement.com February '16 By Todd Dills W orking the spot market via load boards, it's likely you'll never lay eyes on the face of the freight broker. You may never speak to him again, even if the load goes well. By contrast, going after direct shipper contracts is largely an exercise in relation- ship building. The NASSTRAC shipper organiza- tion's Gail Rutkowski stresses the personal nature of trucker-shipper re- lationships throughout the business. Even in Web software-enabled RFP (Request for Proposal)-type contract bidding situations, in which "smaller fl eets tend to be at a disad- vantage," Rutkowski says, winning contracts is most often predicated on more face-to-face relationships. Most come down to "looking each other in the eye and agreeing to do business with each other. All the technology in the world never replaces that rela- tionship." As owner-operator Zach Beadle puts it, selling by example is any owner-operator's best weapon: "If a man's not honest and is not hard- working and willing to do the extra thing, it's going to be tough to make it." Beadle's current half-dozen cus- tomers are a result of "culling a bunch that I won't work for." Speaking of the livestock portion of his busi- ness, it didn't take Beadle long in the early 1990s to identify the shippers who "will try to squeeze 10 loads on eight trucks" to pad their bottom lines with no regard for legal weights. "I started learning who to weed out and who not to work for. They just want to increase their bottom line and don't care about you." About half of owner-operators run- ning with their own authority count direct-shipper freight as a source of at least a portion of their freight business, according to results of the following fall 2015 polling of readers Work the relationship for the long term