- So now if you've been
on my channel before, you've heard me talk a lot about cost. And why it's so important that we control costs in our business is for the obvious reason, that
when you first get started, you're not making a whole
lot of money just yet. You don't have momentum. You don't have that traction
that you're looking for. And you don't need to pull a whole lot of unnecessary weight,
unnecessary cost behind you because it's gonna slow your progress. So what we do is we
streamline our business, and we cut the costs
that are not necessary. Now, with that said, a load board is a cost
that we are very okay with, because it's gonna provide some things that was gonna help us to
move our business forward. But now there are some gadgets
that load boards offers that we don't need when
we first get started. So what we're gonna do today, is I'm gonna take you inside
my load board of preference. I'm gonna show you why I've decided to use that load board. And I'm also gonna show you
exactly how I use my load board. I'm gonna show you three ways that you can use a load board, how it can be beneficial
to you and your business. So let's get to the business. (gentle music) All right, so as you can see, I've logged into the load board, so we're getting ready to
get started here shortly, but I need your help before we do. I'm gonna make sure
that you're squared away on the load board and you know
how to use the load board. I need you to make sure that
I'm squared away on likes. Make sure you hit that like button. Make the like button turn blue. It helps me out a whole lot, help my channel to get viewed
by a larger viewing audience. I certainly would appreciate that. Thank you so much in advance. And if you like these types of videos and you want more videos like this, my videos are centered around
the freight broker business and small business ownership. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and also hit that notification bell, and you'll be notified every
time I release these videos. So now, as it pertains to load board, we have some different
options available to you. You have some paid
options for load boards, and then you have some boards that you don't have to pay for. I like two boards. I like the DAT board and I
also like the Truckstop board. Now, I've settled on the
Truckstop load board. I've had this load board since 2015 and I had DAT and
Truckstop at the same time and decided I was gonna
use Truckstop exclusively. The reason why I did that is because, when I first got started in the business, and I was using both boards, I wanted to get in contact
with owner operators. The reason why I wanted to get in contact with owner operators more
so than large carriers, is because at that time, owner operators were more
willing to work with me than large carriers were. So I wanted to get in contact with as many owner operators as possible. So when I would post loads
to both of these boards, most of my calls would
come from Truckstop. So I chose Truckstop to
work exclusively with. Now, you can use either board, whether that's Truckstop
or whether that's DAT, or then you might say, "Hey, I don't wanna pay for a load board. I wanna use a load board that's free." Now, of course, that might be a case of what you get, what you pay for. I've never used free load boards. These are the two that I've used and I've settled upon Truckstop for the reason I just shared with you. So now, when you start
working with shippers, shippers are gonna request rates from you in specific lanes. They're gonna say, "Hey, Brandon, we need you to give us
a rate within a lane that's moving from North
Carolina going to Wisconsin." You're gonna dial in on that, get all of the particulars, the zip codes and all of that good stuff, but you're gonna need a place to go to where you can start to
establish that rate. That is the purpose of a load board, at least that's one purpose,
one of the main purposes of it. Another reason why we use load boards is because we use 'em to search for trucks in specific lanes. For example, if you've posted
a load on a load board, and let's say you've posted that load from Green Bay, Wisconsin to
Marshville, North Carolina. Well, now you need to
find out how many trucks are in that specific lane. So you would do a truck
search on that specific lane and it'll show you exactly how
many trucks are in that lane. And then you'll be able to
reach out to those trucks and negotiate that
particular load movement. So that's another reason that we use it, is to search for trucks. Another reason why we use the load board is to not only search for trucks, but to go in and post our loads once we receive those loads from the ship. For example, the shipper has
given me a load and said, "Hey, Brandon, this is your load. We need you to move this load. We agree with the price
that you've given us." Now, what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna take that to my load board and I'm
gonna post it on my load board so the trucking community can see that. And now they can start to
give me a call on those loads so that we can get that load moved. So those are the three reasons
that you need a load board. Number one, you wanna be
able to search for trucks in specific lanes. Number two, you wanna be
able to go and post the loads that you've gotten from your shippers. And number three, you
want a rate sourcing tool, so you'll be able to use
that rate sourcing tool to go and in your load board and find out the historical rates in a specific lane from the last seven days all the way up to the last 12 months. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna go in and show you exactly how the load board works. I just wanted to give you an explanation, to give you a brief description
of how each section works, how posting loads work, searching for trucks and
a rate sourcing tool. Now I'm gonna go in and
let you see how it works. We're gonna start off today and we're gonna be talking about using it for searching for trucks. Now, why would you
wanna search for trucks? Well, if you were getting
a rate for a shipper, you wanna take a look inside that lane and see how many trucks are
gonna be available to you. That way, you know, if
it's tight capacity, then your lane is gonna
be a little bit steeper. It's gonna cost you
more to move that lane. If there is a whole lot
of trucks in that lane, then you're gonna have
more negotiating power. Maybe you won't have to pay
as much for it in that lane, but it's important to know
how many trucks are in a lane. So how do we do that? We go into our load board
and we hit search for trucks. We hit this searching board
or this searching label there, and you'll see trucks lanes,
truck beds, auto match, and now trucks come up, and we
would just hit trucks there. And it's gonna take us to the truck searching
part of our load board. Now, when it does that, I've already put in Marshville,
North Carolina to Green Bay. It's gonna come up and show us the number of trucks that are
available within that lane. It's gonna give us the name of the truck, the phone number, tell us
the date that it's available. It's also gonna show us the age, how long it's been available. And it's gonna show us
the origination city, Florence, South Carolina, in this case. And it'll say the distance
from your originating point. Now, your originating point
is Marshville, North Carolina. So if you see here in
distance, it says 64. That means that it's 64 miles from Marshville, North Carolina. So it's within 100 miles. So anytime you have
trucks within 100 miles, they would be willing
to go and get your rate, or go and get your load. If it's more than that, then they're not so willing to do that. But here it is, everybody is
within 100 miles, 100 miles. Okay? So it shows us that we have
about 10 trucks in this lane. So this is gonna give us a good feel for the number of trucks
that we have in this lane. And we know by looking at this, we're gonna probably have
some challenges in this lane. So when we start to give pricing, we're gonna give pricing
based on tight capacity, but you wouldn't know that if
you didn't have a load board where you could go in and search for the number of
trucks in a specific lane. So that's the purpose of being
able to use this load board to go in and find out exactly how many trucks are in the lane. Now, I wanna talk to you another
part about the load board, and that is the low port posting option. Now you would be posting your load after you have received
it from the shipper. The shipper says, "Hey, you're
authorized to move the load. We're okay with the price
that you've given us." Now, you gotta take that
load to a load board so the trucking community
can start bidding on it. So we're gonna take that
load to the load board here. And we're just gonna go to posting loads. And you see up the top here, we have home, searching and posting. We'll click on posting, and we'll be able to click on loads there. And now we can go and post
that load on our load board. And we'll just go
through the process here, putting in this information. If you see across the
top here, it has origin. We'll put Marshville,
North Carolina in there, and then we'll put NC
there for North Carolina, choose our reefer there for our trailer. And then we're gonna
choose a destination there. We said that we were gonna be
going to Green Bay, Wisconsin. So we'll put Green Bay there. You'll see state here, and
we'll put WI for Wisconsin. Now, you'll also see here
that there's a rate there. We can go in and post. Let's say we wanted to
put $2,800 on that lane. We can go in and post $2,800 in there. And when we post that, it's gonna post it out to the load board and show that Alliance Logistics has a load moving from
Marshville, North Carolina to Green Bay. That's how we post a load and then the trucking
community can see that load and they can start calling us to negotiate the movement of that load. So that's two things that we use it for. The rate searching and posting our loads. The next thing that we're gonna talk about is the rate sourcing
tool, called Rate Mate. Very, very good tool to
have for your business. So now we're gonna take a
look at the rate sourcing tool I was telling you about
earlier called Rate Mate. When you get a load board, usually you're gonna have the
ability to search for trucks and the ability to post your loads. And you have to have an
additional tool called Rate Mate if you have Truckstop,
in order to source rates. Now, DAT has a tool called DAT Express, and they have a rate sourcing
tool in that package. Now, if you pay more money, you can get more precise rates. And that's the same way with Truckstop. So the more money you spend, the more precise rates
that you're gonna get. At least that's how it's advertised. Now with that said, this
tool is called Rate Mate. And I think that it's a great tool. I've used it since I had it. It has worked with well for me, but I don't depend on it
to give me exact rates. I just depend on it to
give me a starting place for me to establish my rate in that lane. Because what you have to
understand with rates, especially these rates
that are on this load board is they are average rates. So that means that so many lanes cost more than this particular average and so many cost less than that. So you have to establish a point where you can get the load
moved as a freight broker. Now, so here it goes here. We're gonna go through the Rate Mate page and it starts off just
like all the rest of 'em. At the top here, we have some tabs. Searching, posting, load manager, decision tools, my products. We click on my products and we come to the Rate Mate tool here. That's the rate sourcing tool
that we were talking about. So we've already clicked that. And we're gonna start out here with Marshville, North
Carolina and Green Bay being our pickup and drop off points. So we've already put that in. And then we clicked on find rates. And when we click find rates, it's gonna come up and
populate and show us what the rates have been in this lane for the last seven days all the way out to the last 12 months. So now if you take a look at this, you'll see that it says
posted rate averages here. Then it'll say pay rate averages
here and pay shipper rates. Now, what we wanna take a look here is at the pay shipper rates. Over the last 30 days,
there have been four reports at $3,574 average total rate, and the average miles is 1,408 miles. And then the average rate, the truck is $2.54 a mile. And if you look here, it's showing $2.64 a mile, and that's the average rate to shipper under our pay rate averages. And you'll notice that
this number will change. Our average rate to shipper will change because that number is what
we're going to the shipper with, based on how much money we
wanna make as a freight broker, because here it says, please enter your desired
gross margin percentage. This will be used to calculate the average rate to shipper column. So if we see the average
rate to shipper column it's $2.64 per mile. If we change this to 20% or to 15%, it'll recalculate that
and it'll drop it down and it'll say, now it'll say $2.48 a mile. So this changes based
on how much commission you are gonna want to make. Standard margin is about 15%. Sometimes you're gonna
make more than that. Sometimes you're gonna
make less than that, but this is the Rate Mate tool and how you use that
tool as a starting place to establish your rate. You'll also notice on the side over here, there's some rate index,
rate trending, fuel cost, trucks, past watch and get rate analysis, which we don't have access to there. So we're gonna go into rate trending here, and it's gonna give us a breakdown of what the rates are in this lane, all the way out from October
back to November, 2019. And it give us the average
miles, average rate per mile, average fuel cost per mile. Also, if you go over here
and you go into fuel costs, if you wanted to see what
the fuel would cost you to move from Marshville, North Carolina to Green Bay, Wisconsin, you'll just hit fuel costs here. It fill the load up for us and it'll show us what the fuel costs are. There we go. As a matter of fact,
it's not giving us that for some reason right now. Okay. If you click on trucks, we can click trucks
there and it'll show us what kind of activity we
got going on in this lane. Let's big it up there
so we can see it there. It'll show us the truck supply and demand. Marshville, North Carolina,
loads picking up, 288, 411 here. Then if you see it comes down here, gives us a broker negotiation strength. Neutral, not so bad, not so good. And then over here on the Green Bay side, if you're coming out of
Green Bay, it's very bad. So that means that it's
not a lot of trucks coming out of Green Bay. So that tells you that
it's a seasonal thing. Whether it's bad in Green Bay right now. So it's gonna be hard to
get trucks out of there, which automatically mean the lane is gonna cost you
a little bit more money or maybe a lot more. Just depends. So now this is our Rate Mate tool. Wanna give you an idea of how it works. Always remember that this
is just a starting place for your rate. Some people use this as exact. I don't suggest that you do that. Just use this as a starting place, and then dig down to establish your rate. What you can get the load moved at. Because what it boils down to is, you're negotiating with a truck driver and what that number is gonna be. Your way of negotiating may be different from my way of negotiating. So I may get numbers different
numbers than you get. So the whole idea here is to figure out what number you're gonna
go to your shipper at, and to be able to make money when you sell that load to a carrier. Bottom line. So now, here's a quick summary of what we just talked
about in this video. We talked about Truckstop and why we use Truckstop as a load board. We told you that when we first
got started in this business, we were using Truckstop and DAT, and we decided to use
Truckstop exclusively, because what we found is that
when we were posting our loads on both of those boards, we were getting more calls from Truckstop from owner operators, and that's
who we wanted to work with. So we decided to go with Truckstop. And that's not to say that DAT
is not a great board as well, because it is, just depends
on what your preference is. Our preference was Truckstop. Now, the next thing that we talked about was how we used our load board. And we talked about three reasons why you need to use load boards. And those are, posting
loads, searching for trucks, and of course, for a rate sourcing tool. And then we went into our board and showed you how we post loads, how we search for trucks and how we use the rate sourcing tool. All right, so thank you so much for spending some of
your time with me today. I hope you found this information helpful. Please don't forget to
hit that like button. Thank you so much in advance. Also, I'm gonna leave a
link somewhere on this video to my video call. What do I say to shippers? This video is gonna help you
kind of shape the conversation, help you get started in the conversation that you're gonna have with your shippers. Thank me later. So until the next time, see you at the top because the
bottom is much too crowded. (gentle music)
