My Truck Isn’t Making Money

The truck runs every week, the loads look fine on the board, and the money isn’t there. That’s almost never one big problem; it’s four small ones compounding, and they’re findable in an afternoon. Here’s how to work out which of them is yours.

Start with the number that makes every other decision possible

Most carriers in this position don’t know their cost per mile to within twenty cents. Without it, every load decision is a guess dressed as judgement.

Total your annual costs (fuel, driver pay including your own, maintenance and tyres, insurance, truck payment or depreciation, permits, ELD subscriptions, factoring fees) and divide by the miles you actually ran. Not the miles you planned.

Fixed costs spread across whatever you drove, so an empty week raises your cost per mile on every load in it. Full method.

The four leaks, in the order they usually matter

1. Deadhead you’re not counting

Two loads posted at $2,600 over 1,000 loaded miles are different loads if one picks up 15 miles away and the other picks up 200. After fuel and tolls that’s $1.97 net RPM against $1.58: a 39-cent gap on freight that looked identical.

If you evaluate on gross rate over loaded miles, this leak is invisible and constant. More on deadhead.

2. Rates you didn’t counter

Countering takes ten minutes on a load worth maybe $200 more, while three others go uncovered. Individually rational, and across a year it’s the difference between a good operation and this one.

Check the last twenty loads: how many did you counter? If the answer is under half, that’s the leak. More on rates.

3. Accessorials that never reached an invoice

Detention, layover, tarp pay, lumper reimbursement. Agreed verbally, recorded nowhere, quietly dropped at billing. Each one is small enough to ignore and they don’t stay small in aggregate. More on detention.

4. Days the truck didn’t move

Fixed costs run whether the wheels turn or not. Three empty days a month is roughly 10% of your capacity gone, and it raises the cost per mile on every load you did run.

Find yours this week

1. Calculate cost per mile properly. Annual costs, actual miles. Everything else depends on it.
2. Take your last 20 loads and compute net RPM on each, including origin deadhead, fuel and tolls. Sort worst to best. The pattern will be obvious.
3. Count how many you countered. Not how many you negotiated hard: how many you countered at all.
4. Count unbilled accessorials. How many of those 20 had detention, layover or lumper you didn’t invoice?
5. Count empty days. Multiply by daily fixed cost.

One of those five numbers is worse than the others. That’s where the money is going. Run a load through the calculator.

Why it’s usually a time problem, not a knowledge problem

Almost nobody in this situation is missing the concepts. They know deadhead matters and that countering pays. What they don’t have is the hours to do it on every load while also driving, or dispatching, or both.

That’s worth naming, because it changes the fix. If the problem were knowledge, the answer would be a spreadsheet. It isn’t. The answer is doing the same analysis on every load rather than the ones you had time for.

Where Hey Bubba! fits

Hey Bubba! is an AI back-office automation platform for fleets. It screens every load on net revenue per mile including deadhead before pursuing it, counters against a rate floor you set rather than accepting posted rates, and captures accessorial terms at booking so they reach the invoice.

The analysis above, on every load, without the hours.

See how load screening works

Related

• Is this load worth taking?
• I’m deadheading too many miles
• How to calculate load profitability