One-way rates do not a trucking company make. Your shipper may be happy to pay a high one-way rate, but if you are deadheading back, your one-way rate is (for all practical purposes) cut in half. Your one-way rate has to cover expenses both ways. Back-hauling will never be your main bread and butter, but getting a little income for heading home can make that one-way rate look mighty good.
Changing Lanes
In a perfect world, every load ends at a destination that provides a profitable load back home. Despite technological innovations and powerful computer programs that can calculate optimal dispatches, the real world does not revolve around your cab and trailer. You seldom find perfect round trips. Solution? Make them yourself.
Flexible access to fast-moving lanes (van loads north, flatbed loads south) can help you tap into paying backhauls. Your main shipper sending resins out of Houston may not have work for you from Pittsburgh down to Miami, but another shipper could pay you a back-haul rate to get steel down to Atlanta.
Changing Views
Rather than think of a back-haul as the lower-paying return on a one-way load, think of the two legs as pairs and average your costs and profits from both the main shipment and the back-haul. Remember your back-hauls need not take you home necessarily. Be open to new ways to complete the round trip:
- Say you're based in Springfield, Missouri and take a main shipment to Atlanta. You take a back-haul-rated load to Miami, where you pick up a main shipper’s load to Cleveland. From Cleveland you find a back-haul to Springfield. That gives you two main shipments and two back-haul rates in one larger round trip.
- Your Houston outbound load gets you to Cleveland, where you put together a series of smaller loads on your curtainside trailer from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Richmond, where you pick up a full dry van load to Charlotte.
By taking full advantage of the flexible loading and unloading of a curtainside flatbed trailer, you can view every load not just as part of a back-haul, but as contributing to your overall efficiency and profit.
