A new bid to bring together independent owner-operators and other carriers with authority -- a bid to build business with shippers, bypassing freight middlemen -- is in its early stages out of Canton, Michigan, where small fleet owner Leander Richmond is headquartered. Regular readers will probably recall Richmond -- he's contributed directly to this publication more than once, and has long been a source for a variety of reporting questioning broker practices and plenty other areas of trucking with authority.
He's been a passionate defender of his company's drivers, too, that's sure, whether on the wrong end of a parking-lot-trap tow by an unscrupulous towing company or a simply erroneous "false logs" violation.
His new venture, Carriers United, might strike a chord with any motor carrier who is, shall we say, fed up with contractual games in broker-carrier agreements, with having to pay to park the truck where you parked without any fee last week, with "fines" for early arrival at the shipper deducted from payments agreed to on a rate confirmation. ...
With deductions from payments for load tracking that stopped before your arrival at the receiver because the broker himself set it up that way. "I'm dealing with one of those right now," Richmond noted when I spoke to him about Carriers United last week. The broker in that case shorted his small fleet $100 for its own tracking error. The broker "sees nothing wrong with them attempting to keep our money." In his view, "it’s stealing," garden-variety theft. "This is an indication of a massive problem. It's things like this that have just gotten under my skin" through the years.
He's spent the last six years taking notes, thinking, investing in technology toward an end goal of an end run around what feels too often like a necessity for small trucking companies, working with dime-a-dozen brokers on the load boards of the world. Fundamentally, "I know that the shippers need the trucks. They don’t need the brokers," he said -- his own experience with no small number of shippers informs that point of view. Thinking back to the very origins of the current effort, he added, "I starting thinking, what if we all stick together as an industry, and we simply say, 'There’s no reason for us to haul for brokers anymore. We are united.'"
Do that and you might just as well park your truck outside a shippers' facility and wait for the loads to come, as Richmond has it. Carriers shouldn't "have to compete with the brokers," he said. Carriers are the trucking industry in his view. "If we take our capacity and lump it all together and decide who we’re hauling for," then "we only have to compete with ourselves."
Carriers competing with other carriers -- isn't that what a healthy free market for freight movement ought to be? Richmond asks.
Today, too often carriers compete with "layer upon layer upon layer of brokerage," Richmond contends, whether double- or triple-brokered loads from one broker entity to the next, and the next, before it gets to an unsuspecting carrier. Likewise so-called "dispatch service" providers, too many operating like brokers themselves. While his own small fleet has never wittingly taken a load from a dispatch service, he noted being involved in one that a dispatch provider gave to a broker, not a carrier, and that then ended up behind one of his trucks.
Getting paid for that load he describes simply as "a big mess. We're lucky we got paid" at all, ultimately, he said. Yet it's exposure to multiple freight-handling entities, too often viewed amongst all of them as outright acceptable practice, that "I believe -- 100% -- is the reason that load thieves don't have to go up and steal trucks by force anymore. They simply pick up the phone, pretend to be someone else, and they pick up the load and voila!"
[Related: Cargo theft is skyrocketing, and double brokering is partly to blame]
That's to say nothing of the impact of "brokers undercutting each other left and right regardless of the cost of trucking," he said, putting the entire industry at risk in so many ways. Richmond bows to reality, in due course, acknowledging that some freight brokers will inevitably persist, but he hopes to eradicate rebrokering entirely. A prime objective: thin the herd among freight scammers among middlemen, holding what he refers to as "actual," in-real-life brokers to a much higher standard.
Ironically, as has been the case for others who've tried something similar in the past, and though Richmond spent a couple years trying to figure out a way around it ... yeah, he's now officially a broker himself -- the Owner Operator Direct Carrier Company, authorized as of August, and housed under the Carriers United banner at this website currently. He's invested in Transportation Management System software that will allow for a load board-like portal for carriers who get involved in the effort to access shippers' freight. And the operation will differ from a typical broker other ways:
Richmond's "dream," he said, is to charge contracting carriers no more than $150 for any load booked with a shipper via the platform. No back solicitation prohibition in contracts, either, he said, no liability waivers, and a payment standard of three days. And should the effort get to the point of significant volume, he wants the money made put straight back into building out parking capacity -- not paid parking, mind you.
"We want to put money back in the pockets of the carriers," he said. And give drivers "a safe place to park. ... A driver shouldn’t have to make a choice between risking a $1,500 boot or paying to park and not sending that money home to his wife and kids. We need a better industry. We need a better way."
Dare to dream? Dare to act on a dream better describes what Richmond proposes here. There's not a lot to get directly out of the Carriers United effort at this very moment but to be in the "notification cycle" of what he calls "the movement" -- Richmond says owner-operators and small fleets who signal their interest in being on board currently will get monthly email-newsletter updates on his progress toward standing up the effort.
Yet with time, he hopes to be able to build what he calls an "army of carriers" to deliver on goals. Read more about the effort at this link.
[Related: How owner-operators can beat brokers at their own game and win direct freight]
