Freight 360

Dispatcher Pay, New Broker Tips, & Produce Claims | Final Mile 80

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Nate Cross & Ben Kowalski answer your freight brokering questions and discuss:

  • 💰 Dispatcher Fees – How much should you pay per load or per week for tracking and tracing?
  • 🎯 Lessons for New Brokers – The one piece of advice industry veterans wish they had when starting.
  • 🚛 Broker vs. Carrier Load Dumping – Why brokers sometimes tell carriers to dump late-arriving produce and what to do about it.
  • 📑 Customer Onboarding Timeline – How long should contracts, credit checks, and insurance verification take?

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back. It's the final mile. We're going to answer your questions. We got a pulled some interesting ones for this week. We had a little bit from YouTube, comments, facebook group, linkedin and I might have one from Reddit today too. Might have just diversified our our questions, but we'll get right into it. First, please take a moment to share with your friends in the industry, like comment, check out all of our other content Freight360.net, including the Freight Broker Basics course, and check out our sponsors in the description box to help support the channel. And thank you, sponsors, for sponsoring us.

Speaker 1:

All right, our first question how much should I pay per load or per week to a dispatcher to track and trace my loads? We don't have nearly enough time to do a deep dive on compensation packages, so Beth Carroll's book, the Compensation Beast, or whatever it's called, check it out. We've both read it. We had her on the show. She does a great job at different compensation ideas for freight brokerage companies. But all right, let's, let's.

Speaker 1:

Let's take a generalized example here. Right, track and trace. It's a very common place for someone to start in brokerage, so it's entry level, right. What are they going to be doing is it could be a mix of things. It could be literally calling drivers twice a day or whatever period you give them. It could just be sending out a tracking link. It could be. There's a lot of these different tools out there, like quick scope, for example sponsor the show. I use it myself. Our company does it multiple times a day on a lot of our loads. It could be sending out that quick scope link to a driver to verify their identity and location at the pickup, to release the pickup information at the delivery. One or the other, both. You know it could be multiple, multi stop.

Speaker 1:

So you have to determine, you know, is this a full time job, is it part time? Are they doing anything else? But I would think I'm going to give a rough range here. And then I'm curious on your thoughts. So, entry level in the brokerage track and trace. A lot of the folks I know that hire people that do this. They're getting somewhere like in the 15 to 20 bucks an hour range currently. And again, I think a lot of payroll has gone up in the last few years just based off of inflation and cost of labor. This is also a task that is sometimes farmed out to a staffing company or a nearshore firm that may have contract work or whatnot, but I think, yeah, yeah, I think you're paying on the low end of entry level. Um, it probably also depends on your area where you live and whatnot, but what's your take? I might be taking a shot in the dark on this one and I'll give you my price per load too.

Speaker 1:

Before that, this is I, and I know this from a guy that that I used to work with that did this for his team um, he did a flat rate per load. This is the person had to book the truck and then had to track and trace it. Okay, and he so he had them on a um, I think it was like 500 bucks a week like a base pay, and he gave him like a 20 per load, uh, spiff, to book it at a minimum margin that he had determined and track and trace it all way through. So I think there's there's kind of different ways you can look at this. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2:

yes, so in larger brokerages this is usually training, so the person that is doing this is doing it temporarily until they move to the next, which is either load coverage or typically sales right, and in those they're going to pay like their entry-level salary, but you're only going to do this job and this job alone, for like a few months and then they're quickly going to move you into a higher value creation job, because this one is pretty task oriented. Now to your point. Most, a lot of brokerages, I think, are outsourcing if they just have a sole track and trace person, because you can get somebody to make phone calls and to do this at a much lower rate if you do it outsourced overseas. So again, $15 to $20, probably on the high end. And then the other really important thing is like are they covering the load? Important thing is like are they covering the load? Covering the load is a value add task that is far more skilled and nuanced and can be improved on and add more dollars to the company. And then are they booking it and then track and tracing? Okay, that is a different role. And again, if they are also scheduling, it is different. Are they calling the shipper and the receiver, arranging the appointments, rearranging the appointments if that track and trace isn't tracking correctly, right, that is again a different role and probably is a little higher to the twenty dollars an hour if that role just exists by itself. I've seen, far, I think, more benefits to companies that have the person booking the load be the person tracking it and tracing it to destination, because they talked to the dispatcher, negotiated the rate, they heard where the dispatcher said the driver was going to be empty and where. So when they speak to the driver, they know whether or not that lines up with what the person they just talked to said.

Speaker 2:

Because where this is, a really important role for a company is preventing a problem, meaning, like the guy said he's going to be empty and whatever in Tennessee and he's 200 miles away from Memphis where he's got to pick up in five hours or six hours, right, being able to look at the math and then figure out when he's got to be rolling and empty to make the pickup, and then thinking again hey, I got to call this driver and make sure he's empty and rolling Because, like I've seen people running issues where their track and trace was outsourced to someone in the Philippines and there's like, yeah, a guy said he was empty, logged it in and the guy was empty. But he had to wait an hour and a half for paperwork at Coca-Cola because they're getting his papers and he didn't make it to pickup. And then, guess what? Nobody looked at it again. Then the shipper calls the broker and goes where's my truck? Then the broker looks at the truck and goes oh my god, the guy that was supposed to be there's never going to be there. I don't have another truck and looks incompetent. So it is an important task.

Speaker 2:

But I think the last thing I would add is there are a lot of automations that can help with this. Now, like levity just released a phone call and an email check call, so, like you can automate the emails going to the drivers for check calls and then have its phone system also follow up with a phone call to confirm these things. I know Happy Robot's doing that on the voice side. A lot more companies are leveraging technology and again I think Happy Robot, 25 to 30 cents a minute is probably what they charge per call. It's not on a per load basis. Some of the other companies charge per email. But there are a lot of tools and I still think you would want a person behind it as the way I look at it, I'll give you a story of a track and trace ops person gone bad.

Speaker 1:

So had someone that hired a person to do this, paying them 800 bucks a week 40 hours, that's 20 bucks an hour and he what she found out is this guy that she's paying ended up costing her more money than she was paying him. So you would think that by hiring someone, they should be able to increase your profits by an exponential amount of what you're paying them, and whether it's redelivery fees or reduction in pay for whatever toe news, hiring a bad truck and then having to book a new one at an increased rate, like her profits went down. So these are things that you can't just be like. All right, here's your job, go do it. You have to very diligently like, train and monitor the performance of somebody in that role.

Speaker 2:

That's the thing too Right. And the other things I've seen go very much wrong are when somebody just pushes a button, automates it and goes. We have macro point, for example, so all the drivers have to accept it, right, and then people rely on it without paying attention to it, and then they just get turned off, hit a dead zone. Gps is off, nobody resend it and then nobody looked at the load and then the guy again was three hours late and then your customer canceled the load and the next five loads and put you on hold for two weeks until they work with you again and then you just lost how many thousand dollars, whatever, just because of that one mistake. And the thing I've seen go wrong on the outsourcing pieces we've had lots of clients that have outsourced this to people overseas. It is, I think, a steeper learning curve to teach somebody how to do this via video from far away to get them to realize how important it is. A video from far away to get them to realize how important it is. Because the other thing is like a broker learns how important this is, like in cradle to the grave, because if that truck didn't get there when it was supposed to your customer that you just told you were sending a truck to was calling you and yelling you and holding you accountable, going. What are you doing? Do you not know where your trucks are? So you feel that pain and the next time you don't ever do it again.

Speaker 2:

When you have somebody that just calls the trucks, they're usually separate from the person yelling or complaining or being upset or the money of the mistake. And when they're separate they just kind of execute it like a task and it's good. Well, I called the guy. I didn't answer. I went to the next load. Well, if he didn't answer, did you call the dispatcher? Did you look at his tracking? Did you see where he was? Where the last note was? Did you problem solve to think about what would happen next if this was happening? And it's really hard to get somebody to see those things.

Speaker 1:

That's right and I'll just wrap this up here. But having a good written whether it's a job manual, standard, sop, like checklist having it so you can literally take somebody, remove them, put somebody else in and they can follow the detailed steps of how to troubleshoot a situation. The same way like if you call in to a tech support and you know they're looking on, you know through a manual of here's the yeah, here's the uh issue.

Speaker 2:

Here's possible solutions. Right, did you restart your computer? Yeah, they just go step by step, right right, all right.

Speaker 1:

Next question what is one piece of advice you wish someone had told you when you started? This actually was from LinkedIn. So what I had stated I gave two answers and I'm curious what your thoughts were were. So the first one was understanding how the market shifts, or how the market operates based off of the region, the time of year, et cetera, so you can understand why a rate is what it is at a certain time. So, like I and I did, I did learn this somewhat early on, but I think earlier would have been better.

Speaker 1:

I came from the LTL world where rates were contracted, and then going to 3PL, where it's literally just like a free-for-all. It was very, very different and I ended up like literally just got a map and I look at it. I'm like, all right, florida, florida, one way in, one way out. Right, florida ships a lot this time of year, doesn't ship much the rest of the year. Boston, massachusetts consumes a lot, doesn't produce a lot. Um, uh, atlanta, chicago, denver, uh, nashville, big arteries right, a lot of freight moving in, out and through the like. So just basically understanding how the market works on a high level, I think is a really good tip for someone that's new. Um, and then the second part was on sales. Right, like, make the calls, don't take them personally. If you get hung up on sworn, sworn at you know someone tells you to stop calling them like it's not personal. Those would be my two tips for somebody new, one sales related, one operations related. What do you got?

Speaker 2:

What I would say is I was fortunate enough to get this advice early on, which was trust the process, keep making the calls. You'll get there if you put the effort in right. When I did, it worked and I stopped overthinking it. My biggest issue was overthinking it and trying to find some easier way to get a shipper and the perfect phone call to make before you made it right. Huge waste of four or five weeks doing that at first, and when I finally just trusted the process of putting the effort in and making the calls every day, all of a sudden within five, six weeks I had customers.

Speaker 2:

And I would say the other thing is like the temporary nature of most of it. Anytime even you land a huge customer, you feel like it's going to last for like five to 10 years, and the reality of just business is those companies probably aren't even going to exist in three to five years. They'll get bought up by somebody. That employee goes somewhere else, the transportation department gets sucked up into something else Like. So the value of continuing to prospect even when you're winning is, I think, one of the harder lessons for people to learn and the biggest reason why people end up leaving the industry early, because they just let that go.

Speaker 1:

And they just I mean, I told you about this recently we had someone in at Pierce that with us for a long time and like a chunk of their business just overnight gone because they got underbid by a big, a big box brokerage. That the kid might have priced it wrong and is going to regret it, but the agent lost a big chunk of their business because the competition so yeah, that's a good one, all right. Next question this one's interesting why would a broker advise a carrier to dump a load of produce? The shipment was going to arrive late and the receiver said they don't want it anymore. All right, let's unpack this a little bit. So in the world of produce, if you have spoilage so this one specifically my guess is that I don't know what the commodity is, but by the time it was going to arrive it would not meet the standard that the receiver required and therefore there would be, you know, claimed or whatever. So in some instances what you'll see happen is and again you'll I'm not going to go down the road of the USDA inspection, but you should have an inspection done by a third party that can verify the quality of it. Is it only a portion of it that's not good, is all of it not good, et cetera. But the receiver can.

Speaker 1:

Then there's a couple of things that might happen. One might be hey, um, because it's not the first time it's gonna happen, not the last time it's gonna happen, they have a process in place. They might be, hey, go dispose of it, um, because it's it's no good for anybody. It might be, hey, there's a donation place, you know, around the corner. They'll take it, and it's like a food bank type thing, right, right. Or they might say, hey, we're going to take this portion that meets the standard and these parts here that maybe they got frozen because the reefer was off its setting and we'll dispose of that portion.

Speaker 1:

Either way, you need to have that all documented because there will be a claim on this and if you don't have paperwork and you just go dump it and you try to file a claim, your insurance company is not going to pay that claim out. They won't because you just dumped it without documentation, without anything on paper. So, but to answer the question, why would they do that? Sometimes a product is literally not consumable and it has to be disposed of, but it's not the carrier or the broker's decision to make that call. That is going to be on whoever has possession of the freight, which is likely the receiver. So what you have anything to add in on this one?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's a few other ones that I've seen. So like I saw one recently is a client of ours. They shipped a load of canned goods somewhere and when the canned goods arrived they technically weren't expired. Okay, but the receiver said the expiration date isn't long enough, meaning like they're, like we only want product that has two years of shelf life when we put it on ourselves, because that's what our customers expect. So they said they rejected it. Right, it wasn't delivered late, it was rejected. The shipper who sold those the canned goods said listen, sometimes they'll take them. I thought I got a good discount on the product and I thought maybe they would still want to buy them because they were cheaper. And then the person receiving it said no, I, and just basically didn't agree with, probably, the purchasing department. It said I'm not accepting them because I don't want to put them on the shelves. So then they had to go get dumped.

Speaker 2:

There are scenarios like I think about this at Costco a lot because, like I buy a lot of broccoli and there's dates on the broccoli and broccoli, if you know, like if it expires in like a day or two, it smells terrible and you can't eat it, right? So like the one Costco we go to. There's always a week of when I buy it to when what is sitting on the shelf has the expiration date at the other Costco date. At the other Costco it's like two to three days. Well, okay, if you ship something across the country and you're landing on the expiration date, they might say, especially if it was delivered the next day, they might be like I can't even sell this for today because it literally expires tomorrow, so we don't want it. Go dump it. Right?

Speaker 2:

There are places that will sell produce at a discount because it has a shorter shelf life. There are companies that will sell produce with longer shelf lives for more money, just like anything else. So there's value in how long you can take produce home before it is garbage that you'll pay for it. If you can eat broccoli over a week, you'll pay differently than if they sell you a discount broccoli and say look, it's only good today. They do that with meat in grocery stores. Hey, this is going to expire tomorrow. There's a discount on it. Buy these steaks, they're cheaper than the ones that expire in three or four days, right? So it's really the timing aspect, if you think about it, simply of likely why these things occur.

Speaker 1:

I mean is where I've seen most of them. Yeah, you made a good point, because the shipper might be the one you have to then work it out with, like hey, what do you want us to do? Do you want us to return it to like the can go into?

Speaker 2:

you, and they might not have anyone else to sell it to. That might have been their last shot to be able to get the product sold and they thought maybe they could skip one past and if it's going to return, to the shipper, um you know it could be the wrong thing, like customer x and y is what got shipped, the.

Speaker 1:

The receiver rejects it and now the customer likely will have to pay for either that truck or another truck to return it back to somewhere because they made an error. And this is where it just depends on the situation. All right, last one how long should it take to onboard a new customer, including the contract, credit check and providing a certificate of insurance? And providing a certificate of insurance? It depends. But I'll give you the example. I got Pierce for Y Logistics. Here's how we do it Broker submits, customer setup. We've got a little form on a website that submits it over instantly, copies the broker on it Within five minutes. We're typically we've run a credit check on it and Sonya CreditSafe Bluebook, whatever the appropriate source is for that one. If they need a COI pretty quick, we can order those instantly. The contract is where you might get slowed down. If there's not a contract, usually we're getting the credit customer sign, customer set up, credit approved, like we're talking within an hour 30 minutes within 10 minutes.

Speaker 2:

Like yeah.

Speaker 1:

And if we got to go back?

Speaker 2:

and ask for like.

Speaker 1:

Hey, we're missing a billing person on here, or hey, the address actually shows this online, but pretty quick. And we have redundancy in our credit team. There's multiple people, so if someone's busy or on lunch or out sick, whatever, there is a backup and there's a backup to the backup contract. This is where things get slowed up. Potentially is we have one person who will sign contracts All right. We have multiple people that can review them and look like, highlight problematic areas or suggest changes or red lines, but we don't just give signing authority to like anybody in the company. So this might take a couple hours, you know, it might take a day if it's on a weekend or something like that.

Speaker 1:

I find contracts to be less and less likely or less and less common, especially for, like, small to medium sized companies. We don't even do credit applications because I think I feel like that slows down the process to onboard a customer, and I don't care. You know what your credit app says. If a customer doesn't have the cash flow to pay you, they're not going to pay you like it would have to, regardless of what your terms say that they signed off on. So you got anything to add in here pay you like it would have to, regardless of what your terms say, that they signed off on. So, um, you got anything to add in here? I think that the person that brought this up said they're waiting three weeks. Um, I have seen contracts that go through back and forth for weeks though I've had, so that is not like unheard of.

Speaker 2:

I've had contracts yeah, contract negotiations, I've had one that has taken four, five, six months, probably the longest one I've worked through back and forth, redlining and trying to get to some agreement. I mean those are definitely very isolated incidents. The only caveat or thing I would add is if you have a factoring company that has to approve their credit line, a lot of them want 24 hours expecting a return, but they'll usually get back to you within a few hours, like even the major factoring companies that I've worked with. Like usually they'll tell you hey, get us the credit app within 24 hours, we'll approve you or, you know, decline and give you the credit line.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, got my dog over here, All right, good questions, good questions. I hope people could hear the old bark from my dog Walker in there too. Nice little icing on the cake. Keep sending them our way. We will continue to answer them. And final thoughts.

Speaker 2:

Mr Kowalski, whether you believe you can or believe you can't. You're right.

Speaker 1:

Andowalski, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right, no-transcript.

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Benjamin Kowalski

Co-host
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Nate Cross

Co-host