Man in the Middle

Former broker launches online marketplace connecting carriers with shippers

Valerie Hemmings is married to an owner-operator running under his own authority. She recently wrote to me with a plea for owner-operators to stand together for better rates, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the middleman in the carrier-shipper transaction. “Owner-operators,” she says, particularly since but also before the big downturn in 2008, have been “gasping for financial air because of the middlemen like brokers, agents and double-brokerage side-line agents” taking ever-larger cuts in freight transactions.

Truckers News Senior Editor Todd Dills is the author of a novel, Sons of the Rapture, and blogs daily at www.overdriveonline.com/channel19. Write him at tdills@rrpub.com or http://twitter.com/channel19todd.

 While the greed of some freight middlemen is noted by veteran haulers, the advantages of reliable, honest brokerages are also well-known. Many an owner-operator sticks with just a broker or two they trust as an outside sales agent for their business, taking some of the burden of finding freight. All the same, if former broker Dave Fussi is correct, his company’s new No Broker Freight load board service (http://www.nobrokerfreight.com) stands to provide respite from big-percentage broker cuts into freight rates for independents in the spot freight market.

Recently launched, the load board contains only shipper-direct loads, Fussi says, catering exclusively to carriers in the 1-to-50-truck range.

“You’ve got these owner-operators out there who can’t get their own freight” direct from the shipper, Fussi says. “What they need is a marketplace to the shippers, and that’s what we are. We’re a virtual window where shippers and carriers can meet.

“Our system’s pretty cool,” he goes on, offering pinpoint searching and sorting by height, weight, location and other variables. “What it does is end up saving the carriers time” on phone calls, particularly LTL haulers, Fussi notes.