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In one of the toughest markets in recent memory, small carriers are going out of business at record rates. But Jayme Anderson of Daystar Transport is still standing—and still profitable. In this episode of This Week in Trucking, Jayme shares the hard-earned lessons that helped him and his partner survive the freight downturn, run lean with just two reefer units, and still pull rates over $3 a mile.

If you’re an owner-operator or small fleet trying to stay afloat in 2025, this is the real talk you need.

Episode Highlights

How They Rebuilt From Zero After a Breakdown

Daystar Transport wasn’t built overnight. Jayme and his business partner started over more than once. After a blown engine, lapsed insurance, and a full reset, they rebuilt the business from the ground up. Today, they both drive their own trucks, manage their own dispatch, and run entirely in-house.

“If you’re still in business right now, you’re doing something right. We’ve watched 240,000 carriers go under since 2021.”


Real Numbers From a Two-Truck Reefer Operation

Jayme breaks down what it really takes to run two trucks hauling refrigerated freight:

  • Weekly Gross: $6,000–$7,000
  • Weekly Miles: 1,500–1,800
  • Truck/Trailer Payments: ~$500/week
  • Insurance: $1,450/month per truck
  • Fuel: $1,800–$2,600/week for both trucks
  • Maintenance Savings: 15–20% of gross
  • Driver Pay: 25% of gross (paid to themselves)
  • ELD: $140/month
  • Tolls: <$100/month

“We only move when the rates make sense. No $2 a mile runs just to keep wheels turning.”


Their Strategy: High Rate, Short Run Freight

Rather than chasing miles, Daystar focuses on 3 to 500-mile loads that pay $3–$5 per mile. Their philosophy is simple: turn fewer miles, burn less fuel, and stay closer to home while maintaining profitability.

  • Focused lanes: Texas to the Southeast
  • Prioritize freight early in the week
  • Take advantage of “hot” last-minute loads
  • Say no to cheap freight—even if it means sitting a day

“Most people don’t realize how much more profitable short freight can be. You just have to be patient and know your worth.”


How They Book Loads Without a Dispatcher

Jayme dispatches his own truck, and his partner does the same. They use no outside dispatcher and negotiate directly with brokers.

  • Somedays even 40–60 calls a day
  • Watch the timing of load board spikes
  • Use urgent loads to negotiate higher rates
  • Track all their numbers in spreadsheets (no guessing)

“You’ve got to know what your truck needs to make per hour, not just per mile.”


Advice for Surviving in 2025

Jayme’s take is clear: don’t start a new trucking company unless you have cash on hand and a clear strategy. Wait for the next boom, buy cheap equipment now, and get ready to launch when the market turns.

“The carriers who survive are the ones who run smart and stay lean.”


Final Thoughts

Daystar Transport proves that with grit, discipline, and mechanical know-how, you can still make money in trucking—even during the worst of times. From in-house maintenance to refusing low rates, Jayme’s strategy is a blueprint for small carriers who want to stay profitable and in control.

Power your business with same-day or next-day funding! At Bobtail, our hassle-free factoring service includes free credit checks on brokers, so you can make sure you’re doing business with people who are going to pay on time! Contact us to learn more.

Full Transcript

Jayme Anderson capcut 1

Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to this Weekend Trucking, today I’m talking to Jamie Anderson to talk about his OTR Trucking Business, Daystar Transport. Thanks for joining us, Jamie.

Jayme: Yes, ma’am. Thank you for having me.

Caroline: So tell me a little bit about your business. What kind of operation are you running, how many trucks you have, drivers, and what kind of freight do you haul?

Jayme: Yeah. We’re a, right now we’re running reefer. We have experience under just about every capacity out here.

Jayme: It’s under the refrigerated side. When COVID hit, of course at that point I was running, we was running open deck, but the bottom fell out of the market, so we went to where we can make a living and we’ve been under refrigerated ever since. And to me it seems like it’s probably one of the most stable freight as far as general freight capacities out here.

Jayme: So we stuck with it. We’re looking at, we just signed up our first direct ship customer, so we may be jumping back under a flat here in a couple months. But that’s where we’re at. Been in business. We’ve been in business for I think, four years, maybe five altogether. We did have a at one point we had one truck and it went down, blew the motor, and we ended up letting our insurance go for a month and had to [00:01:00] start over.

Jayme: And I think that’s been around three, three and a half years ago. This is quintessential small mom and pop. Carrier. It’s me and my business partner, which is like family to me. We grew up together. I used to be Mar married to his cousin. I got four kids by his cousin. We worked at a different company.

Jayme: I was managing the company for some years, and they decided they was gonna. Retire and we bought their equipment and started our own company. And this is where we’re at. We both own and operate our own rigs. We don’t have any company drivers. It’s hard to find dependable drivers. It’s, we’ve tried it a couple times and.

Jayme: It never ends up good. I mean it, and then that’s paying good money. We’re paying 25% to the driver of gross, not of gross. Every dime the truck makes it the driver gets 25%, but nobody’s going to take care of your equipment or take care of your business like you are. So we pretty much stick to operating our own trucks.

Caroline: Yeah, understood. So on this show, we like to get into the weeds about the numbers of what it actually takes to run a trucking operation and. Now 2025. We’ve been doing it for a year now. Do you mind if I ask you [00:02:00] some questions about how much it takes to run your business?

Jayme: Yes, ma’am. Go ahead.

Caroline: All right, so we’re gonna get a, I use this this, have you ever heard of Trucker calculator?

Jayme: Yeah, I have.

Caroline: Yeah. It’s a free tool. It’s pretty simple, just like a spreadsheet.

Jayme: We have our spreadsheet. We have our own spreadsheets. We run that. We built ourselves, yeah. To track. And we know what we’ve done last year over year. We know where we’re at and it’s not good.

Jayme: We’re able to take our driver pay out, of course, driving the trucks, but, everybody knows that trucking’s been really bad the last, three and a half years, it’s been hard to survive out here in general freight. So if you’re one of the carriers that have survived the last three and a half years, when 240,000 carriers have been gone out of business, then you can Yeah.

Jayme: Brutal. Pretty much. You can pretty much say that, you’re doing something right if you can survive and turn any profit. ‘ cause there’s a lot of companies not turning profits. We’re encouraged, we think things are changing and we’re looking. For the markets to shift. We know that the pain ain’t over yet.

Jayme: That, we still got a ways to go with the terrace, but, it’s something that we have to endure to get to the other side. But I think we’re coming up on the other side of the bus [00:03:00] cycle.

Caroline: Nice. Yeah. Hopefully from your lips to God’s ears. So we like to take a look at per truck. So that we can start with the good news.

Caroline: How much do you gross on a single truck in a. We can go by a week or months.

Jayme: It depends it depends on how much we’re run. Now we’re running probably 15 to 1800 miles a week. So when the market busted, we had to go back and re-explore our business model and pull off a long haul because there’s no way we can run it $2 a mile and maintain our business.

Jayme: So we pulled off and started going with the shorter runs, three to 500 miles. We keep our rates up to three to four, $5 a mile, and running shorter miles. You can run the longer miles at $2 a mile and break even, but what’s gonna happen the first time you break down, you’re gonna be out of business.

Jayme: We re-explored, so we’re running about 15 to 1800 miles a week, maybe 2000 under reefer unit, and we’re running six to $7,000 a week, somewhere around there, 55 to six. 7,000. I think our best week in the last six months is one week. I think I hit 93.

Caroline: [00:04:00] 6,250. That’s the kind of the right in the middle of your range that you gave there.

Caroline: Yeah. And then

Jayme: that’d be about right.

Caroline: 1,750 miles. Again, in the middle of the range that you’re giving. Just as an estimate, how many working days is that in a week? Is

Jayme: that working? It depends. Five. Some days we may work four days a week. Some days we may work seven days a week. It just depends on how it shakes out and when we can get back in.

Jayme: We generally try to stay within 500 miles of a radius of our house and. Okay. You know what we’ve seen in the markets is during the early in the week, freight’s good. Toward the end of the week, freight starts tapering off ’cause we’ve been in a freight recession sometimes on Friday or Saturday. If you get unloaded, you can’t get anything.

Jayme: So we’ll just about the bullet come onto the house.

Caroline: Sure is six days. Would you say that’s average? I would say five. If you had to average out, I would say five.

Jayme: We’re usually home a couple days a week.

Caroline: Okay. And for your, you have two reefer

Jayme: units? Yeah, we have two reefers.

Caroline: Do you own those outright or are you financing them?

Jayme: We own our trucks and [00:05:00] trailers.

Caroline: Nice. So that’s gotta be a huge advantage in this market to not be paying a truck payment.

Jayme: Yeah. We still have truck payments, but the guy we bought our equipment from is lifelong friends. We pay what we can when we can, and we’ve almost got ’em all paid off.

Jayme: But we’ve been fortunate to be in a situation where, if we don’t have the money to reach in and grab the truck payment then we don’t have to make it that weekend and we can push it. We usually pay. A couple grand a month at least.

Caroline: Okay. So $2,000 in a month would be like $500 in a week.

Jayme: That’s truck trailer that’s on? That’s on, yeah, that’s on four units. So you got two reefers and two trucks.

Caroline: I see. I see. So it’s actually half of that for one truck. What about insurance Talk. Talk to me about insurance.

Jayme: Our insurance runs about 14 to 1450 a month per truck.

Caroline: Okay. And

Jayme: that’s with $250,000 worth of cargo.

Jayme: We don’t have the bare minimum insurance. We’ve got a better insurance and we got tows if we need them and things like that. We opted for the better insurance. About 1450 per,

Caroline: yeah, so about three 50 a week. And then is there anything [00:06:00] additional for trailer insurance or your whole

Jayme: Yeah.

Jayme: Reefer fuel, of course that goes in, but we we figure it with our fuel on our truck, which is about, sure, 1800 to 22, maybe some weeks, $2,600 for both trucks. We run our business a hundred percent. We do it all in house. I dispatch my truck and my partner dispatches his,

Caroline: have you ever worked with a dispatcher?

Jayme: A couple here and there and I, what I found was, they was calling on the same loads. I’d already called on and they was sowing rates at me and hell, I was getting higher rates than they was getting, and I was gonna have to pay them. So it didn’t make sense for me to use a dispatch and I’ll never use dispatch.

Jayme: Sure.

Caroline: Do you ever use a factoring service?

Jayme: Yeah, we do factor at 2%.

Caroline: So when you’re running your business do you have a certain amount every month that you pay yourself as a driver?

Jayme: Take out driver pay 25%. In other words, we pay ourselves the same thing where we pay a company driver.

Caroline: Let’s talk about fuel.

Jayme: Usually anywhere from 1800. To 22 some weeks depending on how many days we stay out. It may be 25 to 26. Depends on if we stay out seven [00:07:00] days. And that’s reefer ranch truck, right?

Caroline: Do you know what’s the fuel mileage on my partner’s truck?

Jayme: He’s got an older truck. He’s got a T 600 with a cat and he gets about four and a half.

Jayme: I get like right around 5.5 to six in mine.

Caroline: Okay. So then that means. Let’s see. If we’re doing 2000 on average, then that’s about 365 gallons.

Jayme: We get a pretty good we get a pretty good discount. You gotta take that into consideration. Sure. We get what kind? 50, 60, 70%, 70 cents off a gallon, usually at TA and Petro for our fuel.

Caroline: Nice. What about tolls? You’re out in Texas, so I don’t know if there’s a lot of tolls out there or in the states where you run.

Caroline: We don’t.

Jayme: We don’t generally run toll roads. We avoid them as a rule. We do have a toll tag for Texas. Every once in a blue moon, we might hit one if we’re really tight on the delivery or it’s going to. There’s a problem on the road. We do run ’em in Oklahoma regularly. It’s not cost effective to try to avoid tolls in Oklahoma.

Jayme: The tolls there are cheap and usually you pay there or by [00:08:00] mail. Yeah. Say you’re running, I’d say it’s less than a hundred dollars a month that we run on tolls. Okay. That’s just off the top of my head maybe.

Caroline: So maybe 20 bucks a week? Yeah.

Jayme: Yeah. It’s we don’t run eligible. Yeah, we don’t run toes much, so we usually avoid toes.

Jayme: We run pretty much in the, we run pretty much in the same lane, so we run Laredo. Down south and then back up to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama every once in a while. O over into Georgia. Louisiana. And then we try to get back down south as, as quickly as PO possible. And that also what it does is where we’re based out of.

Jayme: It runs us back and forth by the house a couple times a week.

Caroline: I see. What about maintenance? How old are your trucks? You said your partner has a little bit of an older truck. Yeah, so maintenance is ma,

Jayme: maintenance is our Achilles heel, I’m telling you right now.

Caroline: Yikes. Yeah.

Jayme: Mine’s a 13 for freight liner Cascadia and it’s got 1.2 million miles on it.

Jayme: I’ve been in it for the last 600,000 miles. Luckily we’re both mechanics and we do most of our own work. Nice. That’s the only, that’s the only [00:09:00] reason we’re still in business. If we had to pay a mechanic and take the downtime to get into a mechanic shop every time we had a problem, we would be we would be gone with the rest of ’em.

Jayme: We would be gone with the wind. Fortunately, we can usually keep ’em rolling and get ’em somewhere and get ’em in and. Us fixing ’em ourselves. That’s usually the routine. I got right now, my reefer is down. I got, I went and got parts yesterday for it. That’s one of the reasons why I’m at home.

Jayme: Plus, I had a doctor’s visit today. I got the parts out there in the back of the car. So this evening, or in the morning, probably this evening, I’ll go up there and change out the parts and get my reefer up and go out tomorrow.

Caroline: Do you have a certain amount that you set aside for maintenance? Just for buying parts And

Jayme: we set everything we can aside.

Jayme: You know what I mean? Every penny that we can set aside, we set aside. That’s what you have to do to stay in business right now. I ain’t gonna lie, there’s some weeks when we’ve been negative to where it’s come out of our own pockets. Wow. You gotta do what you gotta do to keep rolling and keep the, to keep the doors open in hopes of better days.

Jayme: That’s where we’re at right now. With president Trump coming out yesterday, issuing the executive order, [00:10:00] reestablish, establishing English proficiency. We look for that to have any impact. Terrace right now are wreaking havoc. Our freight is usually not a bunch of imported freight. We don’t run the port, we do run Laredo, but I don’t think it’s gonna affect us. In that sense, but how many of the trucks that’s running intermodal and running the porch is gonna jump out of that and jump into general freight? So we look forward to be really rough for the next two or three months until things get straightened out.

Jayme: But then the backlog and the shortages is going to cause should create a boom, COVID. Got

Caroline: it. So for maintenance, if you had to decide like a percentage. You of gross that you would set aside for maintenance? What would you I say

Jayme: 15 to 20%.

Caroline: Okay.

Caroline: So even with doing the work yourself you still wanna set that aside?

Jayme: Yeah. Parts are expensive.

Caroline: Sure.

Jayme: Everything is skyrocketed. Go ahead. Everything. The price of parts, availability.

Caroline: Are you concerned at all about the tariffs impacting parts?

Jayme: Yeah, it’s going to, there’s no doubt. And it’s a bad time because really, honestly, it’s time for both of us to in frame our trucks, and [00:11:00] that’s 15,000 in two weeks to do wow. We’re apprehensive about that, but we take pretty good care of our equipment, like I said, being mechanics, we’re pretty much anal about our equipment and keeping the oil changed and obviously because it, I got a ISX with 1.2 million miles on it. If you don’t take care of an ISX, they don’t last that kind of mileage.

Jayme: It’s very rare.

Caroline: How about ELD? Do you have what does that run you?

Jayme: Yeah, we do have ELD I think it’s about 140 a month, if I’m not mistaken, about 146 a month.

Caroline: Okay.

Jayme: As far as the, that side of it, I don’t deal with all that much. I’m more of the operations side. My partner deals with most of that, but I know where the money goes, so

Caroline: Sure. Sure. What about ifda? I, it sounds like OTR you’re running in multiple states, assuming you have

Jayme: yeah. If, does you know Ifda license? Do you know how

Caroline: much that costs you?

Jayme: IFTAs always negligible. It’s what about a penny? One and a half cents per mile. So it’s negligible.

Caroline: Okay.

Caroline: We’ll just put a penny per mile.

Caroline: And any other fixed or other costs that you [00:12:00] would point out that we haven’t looked at yet?

Jayme: We got insurance, we got fuel trucks. That’s pretty much all of our fixed costs. You’re always gonna have variables. Sure. You know what I mean? But that’s about it.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jayme: I can tell you another million things that cost us every time we turn around, but it’s negligible, so Yeah.

Jayme: Yeah, those couldn’t

Caroline: add up though, right?

Jayme: Yeah the, just the chargebacks a loan on from our factoring of broker, short paying or taking out money for having to issue a com check issuing a fuel advance, which we don’t get very often. We probably 15, $1,500, 2000 in on short pay.

Caroline: Wow. Those are

Jayme: that’s over a year. Those wouldn’t

Caroline: be like a weekly cost, right? No, that’s over. That’s over. That’s over a year. That’s over a whole year.

Jayme: They want nickel and dime you $15 short pay $20 short pay, $50 short pay. Hoping that you won’t, knowing that you won’t come out come after it.

Jayme: Because what are you gonna do? You gonna spend money go to court over them short, paying you 20 bucks? That’s the reason why they do it and there really ain’t nothing we can do about it.

Caroline: Yeah, so I, I have the kind of final numbers here. If we go by the [00:13:00] low end we did conservative estimates of what you’d gross in a week and how many miles you’d run, and it looks like you’re getting over three 50 a mile on average.

Caroline: Is that, and I think a lot of people would say wow, that’s pretty amazing.

Jayme: We have run about three, do over $3 a mile all through the downturn. We’re very selective in what we book. Many of our loads pay three, four, $5 a mile, and we’re able to average it in and out and keep it around $3 a mile or $3 plus a mile.

Caroline: What do you attribute that to? Is it. Just negotiating with brokers or is it the relationships that you’ve built over while having your company?

Jayme: Yeah. It’s a combination. I do have brokers in my network that I’ve been working with years, and they know when they put me on the job that I’m gonna get it done.

Jayme: It’s gonna be done properly. It’s gonna be communicated all the way through, and they pay better. Yeah they pay for what they know they got coming, they pay for the service. The good service also negotiate and we negotiate hard, literally I’m not afraid to set a day.

Jayme: If I can’t [00:14:00] find something that fits in where I need to, I’m not gonna jump on that $2 a mile load, right? We’re not here’s a problem we have in trucking. Many company drivers jumped into the owner operator rolls or started their own authority when during the boom of COD and don’t realize what’s in these loads.

Jayme: Also they can’t get it out of their head. The mentality that I’ve gotta keep my wheels turning and I gotta turn 3,500 to 4,000 miles a week. If you’re turning 3,500 miles to 4,000 miles a week at $2 a mile. You’re not making any money. So if I’m turning 1500, 1800 miles a week at the same money you’re making at 35 to 4,000, which is more so we’re really selective about our loads.

Jayme: I had that pull I submitted all my rate cons of that for a couple months and they done their own review of what we’re doing and they said themselves that I run. 10 to 15% above market average on a regular. It, it just, you gotta have a thick skin. You gotta say, no, I’m not doing it.

Jayme: This is what I need to haul it for. That’s where I need to be. And if you can’t do [00:15:00] that maybe next time and go to the next one. I might make 60, 80 calls a day. I might get 40, 50 calls a day. But that’s what it takes to keep your truck moving profitably.

Caroline: And I will point out here, this is a little bit different than some of the other people that I’ve talked to.

Caroline: ’cause a, because some people don’t put aside something to pay themselves. They just take whatever is after all of the. After all of the other expenses.

Jayme: I don’t see how you can do that. That, it don’t make no sense. You gotta, you’ve gotta set up your business to be okay. Your business is your business, your company, and if you’re running the truck, then you’re the employee.

Jayme: So you’ve got to pay the employee. And then what’s left is at the company. I think we run at a company level last year on our taxes, I think we run a three to 4% pro net profit over the year. It’s not much, but the drivers got paid. You see what I’m saying?

Caroline: And that’s what is showing here.

Caroline: It looks like a 10% margin on a, on this particular week, on an average week. But again, we’re setting aside 25 percent’s for driver and 25% for maintenance.

Jayme: That’s also where you come into the maintenance. Some weeks it may be more [00:16:00] and it’s that money’s gotta come out. So when you average it out, some weeks we may make 15% profit, but then right the next week we may go negative.

Jayme: So we average it out just like the brokers average. Average it out. You gotta look at the long. The big picture. You can’t look at it day by day or week by week. Another thing that helps us is when I’m booking my truck, man, I don’t pay no attention to rate per mile. The rate per mile is the last thing I’m concerned about.

Jayme: I’m concerned about how long it’s gonna occupy my truck, how many hours it’s gonna be on my truck, how many hours it’s gonna take me driving to get the load done and get it off. How much is gonna burn off my clock? I need to be at about a. $200 an hour for every hour I burn off my 70. And as long as you keep it there, right around there and say, a hundred is the minimum, that’s the bottom of the floor, you’ll remain profitable.

Jayme: So we’re doing, we, yeah that’s interesting. I

Caroline: don’t think I’ve heard someone talk about that before. Usually people do just go fire rate per mile.

Jayme: No. So we’re looking at, okay when the bottom fell out and you had thousand, 2000 mile runs at $4,000 to [00:17:00] $3,000, okay I’m getting 18.

Jayme: Anywhere from 12 to $2,100 on a three to 500 mile run. Which one’s more profitable? But you gotta be patient, you gotta be willing to say no. Okay I’m, I might not move today, but you know what? Early in the morning when the freight’s hot. The way the freight rolls, it rolls in cycles. So at late in the evening, you’re gonna see ’em posting loads and you’re gonna see ’em raising rates.

Jayme: That’s the load that’s gotta go the next morning. Okay, so when you’re dispatching, we hit the load board at 6:00 AM in the morning. We’re looking for that load that we’re close to that has to pick by eight or 9:00 AM you’ll see the rates come up. That’s when you start making call. Call, just because it’s so

Caroline: last minute.

Jayme: Yeah. They gotta get a truck in there. That’s when you have the negotiating power, so you start making the calls. Okay. So at about 9:00 AM it’ll start to drop off, and then right before lunch. Spam, it’ll pick back up again because that’s the ones they gotta load by. 2:00 PM they gotta have a truck in there.

Jayme: So you’re watching for movement in the rates. If the rate ain’t moving and you look at the load board and it’s posted days out, you might as well not call on that load [00:18:00] unless you’re willing to take it for the posted rate. So we work our niche. It’s not an niche, it’s general freight, but our niche is working hot spot freight.

Jayme: Freight that has to go expedited. It’s got to go right now. Bam. I can get a truck there. I can get it loaded. This is a rate I need. Let’s go. And that’s how we make our money.

Caroline: Yeah, that’s, it’s so cool to hear somebody explain how that works in, I. In real time. I don’t know that I’ve heard that before.

Caroline: Can you talk about a little bit about your history in trucking and what made you wanna run your own business? You said you talked a little bit about it that you bought a company or bought equipment out from somebody who was retiring. I. I’ve only been in, but you always wanted to do this.

Jayme: I’ve only been in trucking eight years. I got my CDL eight years ago. Okay. I got to a driving school drove, I went, I got in trucking because it’s a time hot shot with booming, and my intent was to run hot shot, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t close doors. So instead of just jumping in a hotshot rig, I went out and got my.

Jayme: First seat OTR and got my OTR experience I needed and then I jumped over the hot shot, the bottom [00:19:00] fell out a hot shot. And I didn’t plan on being a trucker. My health got started getting bad. I ended up with some medical problems that pretty much I had to look for a new profession. Before that, I was a supervisor to water company.

Jayme: It’d been a big water company, a surface water treatment plant. I was licensed by the state. But as things progressed, I had to look for something I could do, and unfortunately, driving was something I could do. Ended up in the truck took out my OTR, went, jumped around a hot shot, went back into a semi when the hot shot, the bottom fell out of it.

Jayme: Went to work for a company that was a good friend of mine who was like my second father owned. Basically they give me a truck and trailer and said here, go to work. I did have a dispatcher. We didn’t agree on a lot of things and within a year I ended up dispatching myself and learning to dispatch and.

Jayme: Figured out I was really good at it. Ended up managing the company, ended up bringing them into the 21st century. ’cause that’s when the ELD mandate come in. And then COVID hit. So rates is really good. And, we was running a lot of exempt loads because we was running distribution centers for restocking.

Jayme: Basically get under it and [00:20:00] go made really good money. Got really good at managing and set by, set up our ELDs and admin, our ELDs and safety and compliance and everything. There wasn’t nothing I didn’t do. And then when it fell off. My buddy. He’s always done it the same way.

Jayme: When a Republican took office, he would crank up his trucking company and his com company had been in business 30, 30 years, 25 years. When a Republicans come in, he would crank up and he would build, and he would buy trucks. But as soon as the Democrats got in power, I. He’d shut it down and then crank up again with Republicans.

Jayme: So when Trump got in, he cranked. That’s when he cranked it up, and I got in with him when Trump lost to Biden he’s shut it down. And we bought the equipment and done our own thing. So I went from management in a company and that’s where I learned that was my learning ground.

Jayme: And like I said, it wasn’t, let me teach you this, it was here. Do it. So I had to get in the books and figure out what I needed to do to be legal and what we needed to be profitable, and that’s what we’ve done and we’ve built from there.

Caroline: That’s awesome. What advice would you have for someone who wants to start [00:21:00] their own trucking business in 2025?

Caroline: I.

Jayme: I don’t, not anytime soon. Anyways it’s a good time to buy equipment. If you’ve got seed money and you’ve got money to go buy equipment, it’s an excellent time to buy equipment. Okay? Equipment’s cheap, but I, until we get, until we hit that, until we see. What we know is the beginning of the next boom cycle.

Jayme: I wouldn’t say go ahead and crank it up. I would say you buy your equipment, get everything ready, and then when it cranks up, bam. Jump in then the road. Yeah. ’cause we’re gonna need drivers with Trump putting that executive o order in 240,000 small trucking companies that want out of business since one one of 2021.

Jayme: When the foreign drivers are taken out and because that’s the one that’s come in and filled them roles of American companies lost. So when they’re taken out of the mix, it’s gonna create a capacity crunch and we’re gonna need truckers. We’re gonna need people in trucks.

Caroline: Alright. Anything else that you would share for people trying to dispatch their own loads and get the kinds of rates that you’re getting or at least closer to it?

Jayme: Be patient. Say, no. Get a thick skin. Don’t never get un [00:22:00] be unprofessional. If you can’t agree on a load, do not get outta line with the broker.

Jayme: If you have problems with one broker at a brokerage, that don’t mean the whole brokerage is bad. Take no of that broker and don’t work for that broker. But don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. TQL there’s bad brokers there. Every broker, every brokerages have bad brokers, just like every carrier or mo.

Jayme: A lot of carriers have bad drivers. It’s the same, right? Be patient, be understanding, be professional, number one, be on time. Communicate well. You should be in front of your broker. Your broker shouldn’t have to be hounding you for updates. You should update him multiple times a day. If there’s a change, he’s the first one that should know about it.

Jayme: That builds trust. Once that trust is built and they see that you are that carrier, that you’re that trucker that is about their business in your professional. They will pay you to run their freight.

Jayme: Never compromise your rates. If you ever compromise your rates one time, these brokers keep notes on their computers.

Jayme: When they, you give ’em your MC number, they pull up your mc and they see if you’ll cut your rate. If you [00:23:00] cut your rate one time, you’ll never get a good right outta that broker again.

Caroline: Yeah, good advice. Thank you so much, Jamie for joining us on Yes, on this Weekend Trucking. It was a pleasure. So people, if you’re watching, put your questions in the comments below and we’ll send ’em over to Jamie to see what it is that we can get more information about your business or more advice about what people wanna hear about.

Caroline: So thanks so much, Jamie.

Jayme: Yep. Thank you ma’am. Y’all have a good one.

Caroline: You too. Drive safe everybody.

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