BUSINESS STRATEGY: Cleanliness meets timeliness meets cost control.
While other truckers grab a steak or a shower at the Flying J truck stop in Birmingham, Alabama, Doug Brill cranks up his truck's air conditioner, kicks back, and reads ... spreadsheets. Brill's ivory-white Freightliner rig is an office on 18 wheels. Imposingly tall (13 feet) and impressively outfitted (wall-to-wall gray carpeting, CB radio, a monitor hooked into an onboard satellite system), it's where Brill spends 300 days a year hauling dry goods like bedsheets and paper bales. It's also where he calculates how to stay afloat in a pressure cooker of an industry. "I'm looking over my monthly expenses, figuring out where I can cut costs on things like fuel or food," says Brill. "But there's not a lot of places to skimp."
Cost effectiveness is just one factor Brill has to consider as a long-haul truck driver. Like airline pilots, drivers face a panoply of federal regulations that dictate how they work and for how long. Like global corporations, they do business in distant markets, each with its own price system and built-in hazards -- in Brill's case, dangerous gnats called four-wheelers. But above all, Brill's job is about managing time. The 49-year-old lives by the motto of truckers everywhere: "If the wheels ain't turning, you ain't earning."
A resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Brill is the president and sole employee of JSR Trucking, named after his three children. He's what's known as an owner-operator, which means he owns his rig and hauls trailers provided by his contractor, Dart Transit, based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Brill figures there isn't much sense in owning a whole truck. Dart pays him an average rate of 88 cents a mile for the more than 100,000 miles he drives in a typical year. Independents, meanwhile, usually get paid a percentage of their freight's transport fees. "They might earn more on the front end," Brill says, "but they get blindsided when freight prices drop. And because of competition, they're dropping all the time."
When he first started driving ten years ago, Brill worked as a driver-for-hire for the owner of a refrigerator truck, or "reefer." The only way to land work was from brokers on load boards, a system of monitor screens at truck stops that advertise freights in need of drivers.
"There'd be times when I was in California during the nongrowing season, and you'd have to wait six, seven days to get a load," he recalls. "And by that time, guys were so desperate to get home, brokers could pay anything they wanted." Now, soon after Brill makes a drop-off, he receives a pick-up order from a Dart agent through a satellite system in his rig. After he punches a few keys, the screen in his cab tells him where he's headed next.
A former manager for a private education company, Brill is a diligent bear of a man with zero tolerance for sloppiness. Chaotic, overpriced truck stops gnaw at him: "My favorite part is leaving them." The haphazard appearance of fellow drivers is another pet peeve: Where other truckers don cut-off sweats and mustard-stained T-shirts, Brill wears clean jeans and tidy shirts with his well-shined workboots. And he's amazed that some drivers have never figured out how much it costs to operate their trucks. Brill, for his part, can give you an exact figure: 41.6 cents per mile, almost half of his income, which includes truck payments, maintenance, insurance, and about $23,000 of fuel a year. He tracks fuel prices as closely as bankers follow interest rates. "Taxes can make fuel prices vary state to state," he says. "Right now, in Indiana, fuel costs $1.31 a gallon. But 15 miles over the border in Illinois, it goes for $1.42. Usually I monitor where I'm going, and I'll keep just enough fuel until I get to a cheaper state."
The image of truckers driving hell-bent into the night, popping uppers like Tic-Tacs, is a relic of the freewheeling '70s. Nowadays, the Department of Transportation allows truckers to work only 70 hours per eight-day period, which includes driving and loading time. Brill calculates how long a trip will take him, so he won't be forced to pull into a truck stop when his hours are up before his load is delivered; being late with his delivery bothers him even more than grungy drivers do. "All I have to sell in this business is service," he says. "If you don't provide it, you're gonna lose that business."
Soon it's time for Brill to leave Birmingham and drive the two hours to his drop in Pine Hill, Alabama, where he'll get an order to pick up a load of shower curtains bound for a Target in Minnesota. By the time he gets home to Jackson, he'll have been on the road for nearly 30 days. "My wife understands that I've got to keep working," Brill says. "It's hard, but she and my kids have this real bad habit of liking to eat three times a day."
