Respect the truck

About a year into doing my dad's billing, I started booking his loads. I worked the load boards first, then built relationships with brokers directly so we were not living and dying by the board. That meant talking to the same brokers several times a day.

Somewhere in those calls I noticed something. Many of the people I was dealing with had never driven a truck. Plenty had never been inside one. They were sharp, they were fast, and they were good at their jobs. But the truck was an abstraction to them: a line on a screen, a rate and two dates.

On our side, the truck was everything. Drivers who needed to get home. Breakdowns that ate a week. Safety scores. ELDs counting down the hours a driver could legally keep going. A dock that held a trailer all afternoon and called it normal. The hard, physical work of moving freight was happening on our end of the call, and the person on the other end often could not picture it.

This is not a post about villains

I want to be careful here, because brokers do real work. Finding freight is hard. Keeping a shipper happy is hard. Covering a load at the last minute, when the first truck fell through and the dock closes in two hours, is very hard. I respected the brokers I worked with, and I became one on purpose. Running a trucking company was never going to be my path. I loved working behind the screen, reaching out to people and finding leads. That is where I belong.

What I noticed was a gap, not a bad guy. The person holding the load and the person hauling it were looking at two different pictures of the same job. Everything that goes wrong in freight lives in that gap.

What knowing the truck side changes

It changes how you quote. You know what a lane really costs when you count fuel, deadhead and the time the driver will lose at the receiver, so your rates make sense to the people who have to run them.

It changes how you write a rate confirmation. You put the real weight on it. You put the real appointment times on it. You note the lumper. You do not bury the detention terms, because you know the driver will need them.

It changes how you talk. When a driver says the clock is a problem, you do not ask them to just wait another hour. You know what that hour costs and you go fix it with the receiver instead.

It changes who answers you. Carriers remember the brokers who ask about the truck: what equipment they run, where their drivers live, what would make a load easier. Those are the brokers who get the call back.

Respect the truck

None of this requires driving one. It requires caring enough to learn what happens on the other end of the load you just booked, and then letting that knowledge show up in your paperwork and your tone.

Respect the truck. It makes you a better broker and a better partner, and the people who haul your freight can tell within one conversation whether you do.

Thanks for reading. Sunny