r/FreightBrokers

Does anyone actually pay the ridiculous rates that these pirates ask for?

It’s gotten bad. I highly advise people to get someone stateside the number of cancellations on trucks I had to do because when the truck tracks further away and the or lying about the truck not being empty

Even rolling to the shipper and still too far away. It’s killing your business doing this

What is going on today? Rates are through the roof

The epitome of throwing shit against the wall to see if it sticks. Offering $5mile on 500 miles and being countered with $7/mile? Unbelievable....

That's the post

I’m paying 5$ a mile, I should get to ask miss Stacy from Tennessee where the truck is. Not smelly Michael Jackson from Pakistan.

So my trucking company picked up a load of truck bodies in Rydal, GA for Bridge Logistics on Tuesday. We show up, there aren't holes in the bodies to run chains through, and it takes 4.5 hours to get loaded. All of this is pretty normal, shitty, but normal.

As soon as we started having problems we started sending emails. At the 3.5 hour mark I started making calls both to Bridge and the shipper (who aren't even aware my truck is still there), mostly to make absolutely sure we had it on paper for detention. When I got ahold of Bridge they claimed they weren't receiving my emails. This despite the fact that email was working fine while we were booking the load/getting setup. We transition to texting where they promise that they'll do right by me.

The following day we still haven't gotten a revised rate confirmation but they aren't answering the phone, replying to texts, or replying to emails. After it's delivered they tell me that they'll get with the customer to get detention approved and get it to me by end of day.

Fast forward to this morning and I still haven't gotten a word from them. I send one last text, my time is worth a good amount of money and I've already wasted enough of it at that point.

Then they send me 'detention' for 50 bucks. I tell them that I'd rather write a bunch of nasty reviews than accept that. They tell me I'm threatening them. I tell them I'm telling them what the consequences of screwing me over are. They say 'they are not the one'.

I've noticed a trend where my truck will have a problem and the broker will just vanish like a puff of smoke. I can honestly say that in 12 years of fairly successful freight brokering I've *never* done that. Some of you are not meant for this business and you should pack it in. A good way to test for that is if you've ever had a truck hit a problem at loading and gone incommunicado. That's bad for a multitude of reasons most of which are operational and not ethical/moral. Just a total lack of any sort of common sense or professionalism.

Anyway to any carriers reading this I wouldn't haul for Bridge and I wouldn't do truck bodies out of Rydal, GA. Very clear their business model is to be a condom for shippers who screw over trucks or they're skimming the accessorials incredibly hard. There's really no other explanation. The reason this post got made is that every single step of this rubbed me the wrong way.

Bridge if you're reading this no I *won't* take money to take it down. You were warned there would be reasonable consequences and here they are. This post will rank pretty far up Google anytime anyone searches you from here on out. Be smarter next time. Oh and in 18 months and one day I'll be calling your shipper. You'd better make what you can while you can because I am *much* better at this game than you are.

But hey you saved 125 dollars. Great work. Brian, I hope that extra margin helps you hit quota.

What do you all think, how will market react if the fuel prices keep rising like this? Are we moving towards collapse or even worst recession than 08?

Load was scheduled to deliver on a Monday. After I reached out to ask for their ETA on Monday they replied that they broke down. Said it was a flat tire and would provide the proof. Never delivered Monday. They said they would update me but never did so I contacted them on Tuesday. They said oh sorry we didn’t let you know we’re waiting on a part. Apparently there was more than tire damage, although still have not seen any proof. Bottom line is did not get delivered till Wednesday at 2 PM and my rate confirmation calls for up to a 25% rate deduction for missing appointment day. Carrier says they can’t control waiting on parts and broken trucks. My client says two days late fine them. He also cited the fact that they never reached out to me that I always had to contact them to find out what was going on. What are your thoughts?

I am not a freight broker. I joined this sub because I found it interesting during COVID and I still find it interesting, you guys and gals and your daily travails and DOT week and DAT challenges and Vlads and double brokering and all of it; the closeness of the people here to the USA supply chain, it's an interesting sub and an interesting profession.

Given the above, *if I may*, I'm honestly, truly curious for your insights: with the, ahem, volatility in the energy market, what are your medium-to-long term assessments currently? What's your gut say about the state of things today and where we're going?

I have always used LinkedIn but lately that platform feels more like Facebook. What are ways you have sourced talent? We are not the size of Landstar, LDI, GTZ, etc and do not plan to grow to that size but having 15-20 people with solid books has been our goal! Open to any suggestions!

Does anyone have experience with recruiters?

For me thinking to start the calls for today.

Rate

What is the rate for detention on a dry van?

I'm wondering how you guys are utilizing AI at your companies. I spent Sunday after mother's day brunch using Claude to code an App that can now scrape my outlook emails and enter in orders to our TMS via API. Works perfectly on quite a few of our larger accounts that have predictable templates. I'm training it on all the different customers idiosyncrasies before I roll it out to the rest of the team.

Curious to see what other people might be doing. I've heard good things about OpenClaw and got that set up yesterday. I havent really figured out a use case for it yet though. Thinking maybe the ability to have it respond to customers emails?

Fuel is officially creeping over 1$ a mile for a truck. Many owner operators are parking or winding down until this whole situation stabilizes. This is going to be a long summer

I spent a week sitting with several SMB brokerages and timed every step of every RFQ that came in. 247 RFQs that week. Here's the time breakdown per quote:

• Reading the email and figuring out what they actually want: ~4 minutes
• Looking up the lane in the TMS or rate sheet: ~3 minutes
• Calling 2-3 carriers or posting to a load board: ~12 minutes
• Waiting for carrier callbacks: ~47 minutes (mostly dead time)
• Doing the margin math and writing the response: ~6 minutes
• Sending: ~1 minute

Total active time per quote: about 26 minutes. Total elapsed: 73 minutes.

Out of 247 RFQs, he won 38. Win rate around 15 percent.

Here's the part I didn't expect. The brokers he lost to weren't cheaper. They were faster. RFQs answered in under 10 minutes won 31 percent. RFQs answered over an hour won 4 percent. Same lanes. Same customers. Same rates.

What does your time-to-quote look like? And what's the part of the process you'd hand off if you could?

Hey guys, I know there has been many posts about tql and I’ve read most of them before making this post. I’m 26 and just graduated with a degree in finance, I’ve applied to over 540 jobs and had 7 interviews. I’ve been getting desperate as I would want to break into tech sales. However, it’s been 6 months of apps and nothing , most the interviews I do are just AI too. My question is if I accept this offer to start my sales career at tql, work there 18-24 months and then look for a sales job in tech, is that feasible. Will having this training and experience on my resume help me land a sales job somewhere else. I’m at my wits end as I’ve been a janitor for 7 years and I’m sick of wiping toilets for 8 hours a day.