Your Dispatcher Just Quit

You have trucks that need covering tomorrow and the person who covered them is gone. Hiring takes four to eight weeks including notice and ramp-up, and the freight doesn’t wait. Here’s how to triage the next two weeks, and how to think about what replaces them, because the answer isn’t automatically another dispatcher.

The first 48 hours

Not everything a dispatcher did matters equally this week. In rough order:

1. Find out what’s already booked. Loads confirmed but not yet in the TMS are the ones that fall through. Check the departed dispatcher’s email and the load board account before access is cut.
2. Get broker contacts out of their head and into a list. Which brokers they worked, who they called first, any rate agreements not written down. If they’re working notice, this is the single most valuable hour of it.
3. Cover appointments already committed. A missed appointment costs the load and the relationship. Booking new freight can wait a day; showing up can’t.
4. Decide who answers the phone. Brokers calling about existing loads need somebody, and unanswered check calls hurt your tracking compliance scores quickly.

Then the actual decision

You have three options, and the right one depends on fleet size and how much of the work was judgement versus routine.

	Rehire	Dispatch service	Automate
Time to running	4 to 8 weeks	Days	Days
Cost shape	Fixed salary	% of gross	Varies
Scales with trucks	Step function at each hire	Yes	Yes
Keeps broker relationships in-house	Yes	No	Yes
Coverage	Business hours	Business hours	24/7
Exposure to this happening again	Same	Lower	Lower

The last row is worth sitting with. If one person leaving can put your operation in this position, that’s a structural problem, and rehiring recreates it exactly.

Separate the routine from the judgement

Before deciding, split what your dispatcher actually did:

Routine, high volume: searching load boards, first-pass broker calls to check availability, check calls, re-keying rate confirmations, chasing paperwork. This is most of the hours and none of the skill.

Judgement: deciding which loads fit the operation, holding a rate when a broker pushes, managing a breakdown, knowing which brokers to build with.

The routine half is what a replacement hire spends their first three months learning to do quickly. The judgement half is what took your last dispatcher two years to get good at, and it’s the part you can’t buy in a week.

What each option is actually good at

Rehiring makes sense if the role was mostly judgement: direct shipper relationships, complex freight, a book of brokers built over years. Accept the four-to-eight week gap and cover it another way.

A dispatch service gets you covered in days and takes a percentage of gross, typically 5 to 10%. The trade is that the transaction history brokers remember builds in their name rather than yours, which matters if you ever want to bring dispatch back in-house.

Automation takes the routine half and leaves the judgement with whoever’s left, often the owner. It works well where the volume was the problem. It works less well if you have nobody at all to handle exceptions.

Finding the replacement

If you do rehire, start from the brief rather than the job ad. Write down your lanes, your net rate floor, maximum deadhead, the brokers you want kept and the markets to avoid. That document is the job description, and it is also how you judge the hire at thirty days.

Look for experience on your freight type and your lanes before general years in dispatch. Ask candidates to talk through a load they walked away from and why: how someone decides not to book tells you more than how many loads they booked.

Pay is usually a salary, sometimes with a per-load or percentage element, and it varies widely by region and experience. The structure matters more than the number: pay tied only to loads booked rewards volume, not margin. Expect four to eight weeks from posting the job to someone running your trucks on their own.

Where Hey Bubba! fits

Hey Bubba! is an AI back-office automation platform for fleets. It searches load boards continuously, calls and emails brokers to negotiate against a rate floor you set, answers check calls from ELD data, and files the paperwork: the routine half, running from day one rather than after a hiring cycle.

You decide how much it does alone: bring every load for approval, or let it book inside limits you define. It escalates when a rate falls below your minimum, when terms aren’t standard, or when something breaks.

With that volume handled, the replacement hire often becomes optional rather than urgent.

Back-office automation · Hey Bubba! for small fleets

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