While many trucking companies bother with choosing the best ways to find orders, those who have found them have other problems, such as managing them, setting priorities, assigning specific tasks to drivers, and planning routes. Below, we will explain how to find truck loads to haul and streamline your business processes in general.
Find Orders on Load Boards
The most useful tool for searching for orders is loadboards – online platforms that are a kind of intermediary between carriers and shippers. Here, cargo owners post available orders, indicating the date and time of shipment, destination, as well as specific requirements for delivery conditions.
As for the most popular solutions for finding loads for truck drivers, they include Central Dispatch, which is much more convenient than standard Google search due to its direct focus on cargo transportation.
Collaborate with a Freight Broker
Freight brokers are something like an intermediate link between carriers and cargo owners. They coordinate these two parties with each other and select orders in such a way that the second can fulfill them in accordance with available resources.
At the same time, not every freight broker is able to ensure maximum profit: while there are those who provide single orders to carriers, you can also find more advanced services that help you complete a truck and choose the best (the shortest) route for this. Thanks to this, you get the opportunity to achieve maximum earnings for each mile traveled and eliminate downtime.
Communicate with Shippers
When you communicate directly with shippers to find shipments to haul, you have the opportunity to set your own ratings and not pay a fee to intermediaries. You can also increase your income by transporting especially valuable cargo, for example, luxury cars. However, to do this, it is important to have an established network of contacts with companies/suppliers of cargo of such type. Therefore, you will probably have to regularly attend thematic events or find other ways to directly communicate with them (for example, through email newsletters, hot calls, etc.).
Another challenge for you may be high competition with other cargo carriers who have decided to follow the same strategy. This is why you should be able to create personalized offers that would help you stand out from your competitors.
Become a Government Contractor
State-owned enterprises should not be discounted as well – they also quite often need cargo transportation due to the lack of internal resources for this. This applies to both government organizations and regional ones. This is why if you are considering this option to find loads for pickup trucks, you will have to register as a government contractor. This, in turn, will require you to complete several bureaucratic procedures.
At the same time, you can avoid this unnecessary fuss with registering your business as a government contractor by concluding a deal with an organization that has already independently issued a relevant contract for the transportation of its goods.
Organize Your Orders with Haulk TMS
Once you have decided how to find freight loads (you can choose either a single option from the above or plan the work schedules of your drivers in such a way as to cooperate with shippers both through intermediaries and without them), you will most likely need an effective a tool for organizing them. Actually, the Haulk TMS can help you with this.
It is a comprehensive software for managing cargo transportation, the capabilities of which go far beyond the scope of standard transport management systems.
In addition to standard features for prioritizing, assigning orders to specific drivers, and tracking deliveries, with Haulk TMS, you also get advanced tools for cargo inspection (particularly vehicles), calculating driver salaries, digitizing paper documentation, and much more.
Take advantage of the opportunity to check all the functionality of this excellent TMS absolutely free for one month by registering on our website and downloading its trial version right now.
