Truck dispatching
Booking a load is easy. Booking a week that ends with the truck somewhere useful and the driver still legal is the actual job.
The problem
Stated without hedging.
Most dispatch is transactional. A load gets booked, the truck delivers, and the next load is solved from wherever it landed — usually late, usually from a truck stop, usually at whatever the board is paying that hour. That approach guarantees you take the market's worst offers, because you are always negotiating from a position of needing something right now.
The alternative is planning. Knowing on Monday roughly where Thursday ends, and booking toward it. It means occasionally taking a slightly lower rate outbound because the destination market is strong, and it means saying no to a good-looking load into a hole.
It also means knowing your hours. A load that pays well and forces a 34-hour reset in a place with nothing outbound is not a good load, and the rate per mile will not tell you that.
What we do
Specific enough that you can hold us to it.
- We learn your operation before we book anything
- Home time, the lanes you will and will not run, your equipment's real capabilities, whether you take New York City, how you feel about the north-east in February. Dispatching without that is guessing on your behalf.
- We book in pairs where the lane supports it
- Outbound and a realistic reload, planned together. Not every market allows it. Where it does, it is the single biggest lever on a weekly settlement.
- We check hours before we commit you
- Appointment windows get checked against your remaining hours of service before a load is accepted, not after you have signed and discovered the maths does not work.
- You approve every load
- We never book without your yes. You see the rate, the miles, the pickup and delivery, and the terms before anything is signed.
- You keep your authority and your relationships
- We dispatch under your MC. The broker relationships are yours. If you leave, you leave with everything you came with, and there is no contract holding you.
What it costs when nobody does this
Carriers who dispatch reactively typically run more empty miles and accept lower rates, and both compound every week. The gap is not dramatic on any single load. It is very dramatic over a year.
Related
Where this connects to the rest of the operation.
Dry van dispatch
Dry van is the deepest freight market in the country and the most crowded. The rate is rarely where a dry van week is won or lost — the accessorials are.
Flatbed dispatch
Flatbed pays for labor as much as miles. If your dispatcher is not billing for the tarp, they are giving away the part of the job that hurts.
Power only dispatch
Power only trades trailer ownership for someone else's terms. Whether that is a good trade is arithmetic, and it is worth actually doing.
Rate negotiation
Brokers open low because opening low works. We negotiate against market data, in writing, on every load.
Invoicing and collections
The load is not finished when it delivers. It is finished when the money arrives, and someone has to chase it.
Cutting deadhead without taking bad loads
Empty miles cost fuel and hours and earn nothing. But chasing zero deadhead makes carriers accept cheap freight. Here is how to think about the trade properly.
Load boards or direct shippers: an honest comparison
Direct freight is the goal everyone talks about and few carriers reach. What each channel gives you, what it costs, and how to move between them.