No Lone Rangers Here

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

In the midst of economic downturn, the survival efforts of individuals typically rise to the top of the heap of stories in my mailbox. But increasingly I’m noting a trend that holds the seeds of hope for the entire community of drivers and owner-operators, survival tales not just about one hauler making his way, but about the operators he brings with him.

One such story is that of independent hauler W. Joel Baker, who’s been running on his own authority since 1999, when the local firm he was driving for in Pontiac, Ill., went out of business following a union contract dispute. Baker, presciently predicting the business’s failure, set himself up with a rig and his own authority.

Today he runs a solid one-truck operation out of Clarksville, Tenn., hauling a variety of dry and refrigerated freight with a 53-ft. reefer hooked to a 2006 Peterbilt 379 with “Baker & Sons” lettered on the Unibilt sleeper.

When he started out, on top of the usual difficulties identifying shipper customers and booking freight, one of the biggest hurdles he felt he was jumping was the at-the-time dearth of solid, easy-to-use business management software designed specifically for trucking. “I was really discouraged by how much time the paperwork took,” he said of his new business, “and the software packages I bought — there were three of them — just really didn’t get the job done in a timely manner. Some of them were overkill. There was one that just didn’t work altogether.”

In that first year, Baker spent a whopping $5,500 on software. “It was a lot of money,” he says, “and a lot of the programs out there have a ‘maintenance fee,’ where you have to spend a certain amount to receive” program updates and IFTA rate updates, among other information.

Baker was, even then, an “open source software kind of guy,” he says. And he thought that, with the right partners, he could do a better job at a much lower price point for himself and, eventually, other owner-operators feeling the same pinch.