Lease to a Carrier Vs. Authority

Who says you have to get your own authority?

There is a company near me that's a pretty good-sized company I'm going to say they had at least 7 to 10 tractors plus a bunch of trailers. They ran their own authority for many years and then they leased onto someone.

All of these responsibilities that you were talking about will cost you money time and headaches. If you are profitable why would you leave that?

 

Finding insurance to cover three trucks on a new authority and sticker shock may change your mind. You may have to run one truck under the new authority for a year and then add the others.

 

Best bet is to price around insurance. Also keep in mind you probably won't get as good fuel discounts. I'm leased to a carrier because insurance is way to high and I don't wanna lose my .50 cents off lol

 

I guess I.. I. That area we have nine trucks I do have a nastc account and real work comp ....we are leased on to a couple different carriers but I am considering putting one truck under my own authority just to get the insurance click started and to have another backup plan. But I haven't pulled the trigger just because the cost is so much more.....

 

There's a few options out there for one man dog & pony shows to get that kind of fuel discount.

 

Please share. The best I have found is maybe .10 as a single O/O

 

Nastc

 

RTS Titan card gets me about .40 off.

@jsutiger43 You'll never know until you try. I would price the insurance first and remember to ask them about an upfront discount. I paid nearly $2k less this year by paying mine up front. Second, dispatching 3 trucks may be a few hours of each day but it might be the only few hours you work a day and depending on length of run you may work less. I like dispatching my single truck. I make calls while driving on the interstate. It's safe enough and passes the time to boot.

IFTA for 3 trucks would take you half a day every 3 months.

If you'll be more profitable then why not try it? You can always go back. Oh, and you will be more profitable if you've read the numbers from O/O's here and it's better.

 

XPO has a decent fuel card. Believe it or not, I fuel a lot at an independent station on my lane in Oregon. That guy gives me .08 cash back after a thousand gallons and I get an additional .06 back on my Exxon/Mobil Card, he's franchised by them.

So, even though that's only 0.14 discount, his starting cash base price is lower than the big guys.

For instance, this is my current discount with the XPO EFS card:


However, the Halsey Exxon/Mobil posted cash price is $1.899. With the 0.14 discount I receive there that puts me at $1.76 a gallon. Of course it's important to note that in Oregon we don't have a fuel tax included in our commercial fuel, we get stiffed with a road mileage tax. Which is a whole other deal. However, since I pretty much stay in Oregon, that's the way it goes.

I know that Landstar has pretty good fuel discounts as well. I used to run a load or 2 for them every month so I could take advantage of their discount program, as they put your settlement on the COMDATA card and you're able to use that revenue for fuel in their discount program.

As such, I just looked at XPO EFS prices in CA on their program and there were several discounted (TA) rates of 0.44 off.