We stand ready to work any time of the day or night, any day of the week, any time of the year, anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. There are exceptions.
About a year-and-a-half ago, my wife Diane and I discovered expediting. As white-collar professionals with good jobs and a home in the suburbs, we weren’t in a bad way; but once we saw the lifestyle we could enjoy as expediters, we were hooked.
We saw in expediting the opportunity to increase our income, see the county, spend more time together, and simplify our lives. We did our research and jumped in. After a year on the road, we’re glad we did.
Previous truck driving experience is not required for a husband/wife team to enter the business, succeed from the first day, and enjoy life on the road. Good research, a business plan, a positive attitude, and a 100% commitment to the endeavor are.
While trucking experience can be beneficial, it will take care of itself as you log time in the business. Newbies often begin in fleet owner trucks to learn the ropes.
In expediting, as in some other trucking industry sectors, the days of the tough trucker are long gone. Grandmothers drive expediting trucks and do a fine job. Air ride seats, automatic transmissions, air conditioning, cell phones, free long distance, mobile Internet, roadside rescue services, no-touch freight, weather alert radios, national truck stop chains, satellite TV and radio, and more enhance life on the road.
That said, expediting can ruin your life and leave you bankrupt if you fail to identify and respect the demands of the profession, or start without a plan.
Your interests determine the expediting lifestyle you will have. Diane and I are outgoing, thinking people. We appreciate American history and have inquisitive minds. We enjoy meeting others on the road and often strike up conversations with strangers.
When we meet Spanish-speaking people on the loading docks, we become interested in learning their language. When we see a Lewis and Clark exhibit we take it in, and others as we encounter the Lewis and Clark trail in many states.
Other expediter teams earn a good living while spending time alone on the road and minimizing contact with others. They love the quiet time they have between loads, spending much of it reading or watching TV in their sleeper. For them, the sleeper is not a prison, it’s a sanctuary. They have no boss. They’re free of office politics and the requirement to punch a clock. They decide when to drive, when to be home, and when to visit their grandkids.
While the lifestyle I describe is available to non-married teams, married teams generally have more going for them in terms of relationship stability. Relationship stability is vital. Team expediting is a shared project in which two drivers combine their labor with a truck (capital) to produce wealth.
If the relationship is unstable, the team’s income-producing ability will be unstable too. Also, when enjoying the mini-vacations expediting can provide, it’s nice to have your partner along.
Expediter wannabees should note that I’m not kidding when I speak of a 100% commitment to the endeavor. Diane and I did not resist the demands of the trade. We embraced them. We gave up life in the suburbs to take up life on the road.
One of the demands is irregular work hours and sleep. We embraced irregular hours. To do so we did a difficult thing. We changed our minds. We abandoned our long-held opinion that you work days and sleep nights. We developed a new mindset in which night is prime income-producing time. We learned to organize our sleep around the freight.
Think about that for a moment. We organize our sleep around the freight. That’s what I mean when I speak of 100% commitment. When we’re in service, which is most of the time, we make sure at least one of us has had enough sleep to safely drive. If a load is offered for immediate pickup, we can handle it. The rested team member will drive as the other sleeps. That cycle will continue until the load is delivered.
To do that, we both developed the necessary truck-driving and paperwork skills. While one of us sleeps, the other can plan the route, drive, back up to a loading dock, secure or unsecure the freight, and do the paperwork.
We stand ready to work any time of the day or night, any day of the week, any time of the year, anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. There are exceptions. We occasionally go out of service for brief periods for truck maintenance and to sleep if both of us are too tired to drive. If we’re offered a load that is unprofitable, we decline.
After working a year on the road without a vacation, we now plan five weeks per year off for wilderness canoeing and camping, overseas travel, and Christmas. That leaves us in service about 90 percent of the time.
The many tourist attractions, family visits, and social activities we’ve enjoyed on the road have never once come at the expense of a load. They come as we wait for loads or in the free time we may have after a load is dispatched and before we pick it up.
An example is a load dispatched on Friday for a Monday pickup in New Orleans. That kept us in service with a weekend off. We were paid to drive there. Lodging was free in the truck. We spent Saturday exploring the French Quarter. Sunday we attended services at a local church and rested up to drive safely on Monday.
Another demand of expediting is being away from home for long periods of time. We embraced that demand in ways few truckers do. We sold our house, all household goods (except keepsakes), and cars.
Our residence is now maintenance-free, worry-free living space rented from a relative. Instead of complaining about not being home and/or feeling the need to be there to take care of our stuff, we got free of our possessions and made ourselves at home on the road. That was relatively easy for us to do since we have no children.
You certainly don’t have to sell your house and goods to make a go of expediting, but if you do, your cash flow and balance sheet will stronger, and your on-road stress level will likely be lower. You’ll also be in the minority.
Most married expediting teams own homes. They speak of the need to have a place to which they can return and unwind from the pressures of the road. They stay out on the road making money for a while and then go home to unwind and be with family. It’s a proven business model practiced by thousands of truckers.
We took a different approach. We figured we’ve been home for forty years. It was time to get out and see the country while we still could. We’d rather try trucking and fail in our 40’s than look back in our 70’s and regret we never tried.
Several expediter friends of ours cautioned us against selling our house. I caution expediter wannabees against doing the same. We didn’t sell our house until we’d spent a year on the road. That gave us a place to return to if expediting didn’t work out.
We did not use the house-sale money to buy a truck. It’s in the bank. If our friends turn out to be right about needing a house to return to, we can buy one. After giving expediting a trial run of your own, you’ll know if life on the road is for you. You’ll also know what to do with your house.
While our legal residence is rented space in Minnesota, home is wherever we happen to be at the time. As I write this, I’m seated at a picnic table in a rest area on I-85 just north of Atlanta. We delivered nearby early this morning. The sun will set in two or three hours. We might still be dispatched out tonight. If not, we’ll likely get a load out tomorrow. We spent most of the day reading and sleeping in our reclining lawn chairs.
We feel as at-home in this peaceful rest area as we felt on the sun deck of the house we recently sold. Tall Georgia pines shade our picnic table. We picked the highest picnic spot on the hillside to catch the summer breeze. Someone else tends the flowers and lawn here. We’re free of household chores.
Where we go next is of little concern. That we go under load is our wish. We’d like to be rolling right now but there is no freight to haul at the moment, so we pass the time “at home.” In some ways, the expediting life is a couch potato’s dream.
Today, home is a rest area in Georgia. Tomorrow, it could be a fenced-in lot behind a chemical plant, a camp site in a state park, a truck stop off a freeway exit, or a room in a high-rise hotel and casino. Because we’ve changed our lives to make it so, we get to be both on the road and at home 100% of the time.
Some of our friends were shocked by the changes we made wondered why we did. To help them understand, we asked how they’d feel if their income increased and their mortgage payments, utility bills, property tax, car insurance, etc disappeared. That’s our situation now because of the property and lifestyle changes we made.
Our only fixed costs are life and health insurance, and rent for residential space. Last year, we put more money in the bank than any year in our lives. Our variable costs for fuel, supplies, and the like are the same as most expediters incur. We don’t mind paying those since they produce an immediate profit. Our fleet owner picks up all truck ownership and maintenance costs.
With per diem tax deductions, and since we spend nowhere near $40 per day per person on food, we pretty much eat for free. The actual cash value of our per diem deductions exceed our actual cost of food. The truck sleeper provides free lodging most days.
Our finances will improve when our truck arrives and we become owner/operators. We’ll no longer give 40% of our gross revenue to a fleet owner. That money will pay our truck costs and then some. The tax depreciation benefits from the truck will go on our tax form, not our fleet owner’s. Since we’ll have little else to spend our money on, we’ll have a relatively expensive, custom-built truck paid off in a relatively short time.
I don’t care how rich, poor, or in debt you may be today. The lifestyle Diane and I enjoy is available to any able-bodied married couple; if you have a strong work ethic, basic business skills (or the willingness to learn them), and the willingness to embrace the demands of the industry.
If you are deep in debt with bad credit, it may take a few years in a fleet owner’s truck to improve your finances, but improve your finances you can! You can use the money you earn in a fleet owner’s truck to work your way out of debt, establish good credit, develop your business skills, and save money for a truck of your own.
Expediting is a job retired military couples can easily do. So can empty nesters that have 10 to 20 years to go to retirement age. So can able-bodied retirees that want to see the country and make more money than they ever did before.
Young married couples with few financial assets to their name can make a highly-successful career of it too, if they choose to live a child-free life and do their business planning right. Up-front capital is not required. If you begin in a fleet owner’s truck, your business entry costs will be minimal.
I’ve mentioned two of the demands of expediting; irregular hours, and being away from home. There are several others. Space limitations keep me from discussing them here. If you think expediting may be for you, it’s time to start your research in earnest. The place to start is Expediters Online.
Before entering the expediting business, Phil Madsen worked in the securities and financial planning arenas as well as the computer field. Active in politics since 1992, Madsen founded the Independence Party of Minnesota that same year. In 1998 the party won a major victory with the election of Jesse Ventura as Minnesota governor.
In 2003, Madsen and his wife Diane – a former RN and administrative law attorney – entered expediting to, “increase their income, spend more time together, simplify their lives, share a joint business project, and see the country.”
Phil and Diane Madsen can be reached at [email protected]
