Looking For Guidance In Choosing Company For Team Driving

A friend of mine and I are looking to team up and drive. He has 6 months experience and I have yet to hit the road. We are both currently in the National Guard and are hoping to land with a company that participates in the VA Apprenticeship program. I've gone so far as to create a spreadsheet with pertinent information we need to gather from each company (CSA scores, training time/pay, per diem , APU , etc). We have contacted the following companies:

Schnieder, Roehl, Gordon, Falcon, PMTG, Knight, Crete, Paschall

Any constructive feedback would be more appreciated than you know! I'm not looking for griping about the time a dispatcher left you hanging or about how much you hate XYZ Trucking (I'd be at the Trucker's Report if I wanted that )

I've been reading up on many helpful posts on this site and know I can trust your input! If you have any questions of me or need to know more of what we're looking for, just holler!

Thanks!

CSA:

Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA)

The CSA is a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) initiative to improve large truck and bus safety and ultimately reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities that are related to commercial motor vehicle

Dispatcher:

Dispatcher, Fleet Manager, Driver Manager

The primary person a driver communicates with at his/her company. A dispatcher can play many roles, depending on the company's structure. Dispatchers may assign freight, file requests for home time, relay messages between the driver and management, inform customer service of any delays, change appointment times, and report information to the load planners.

Per Diem:

Getting paid per diem means getting a portion of your salary paid to you without taxes taken out. It's technically classified as a meal and expense reimbursement.

Truck drivers and others who travel for a living get large tax deductions for meal expenses. The Government set up per diem pay as a way to reimburse some of the taxes you pay with each paycheck instead of making you wait until tax filing season.

Getting per diem pay means a driver will get a larger paycheck each week but a smaller tax return at tax time.

We have a ton of information on our wiki page on per diem pay

OWI:

Operating While Intoxicated

APU:

Auxiliary Power Unit

On tractor trailers, and APU is a small diesel engine that powers a heat and air conditioning unit while charging the truck's main batteries at the same time. This allows the driver to remain comfortable in the cab and have access to electric power without running the main truck engine.

Having an APU helps save money in fuel costs and saves wear and tear on the main engine, though they tend to be expensive to install and maintain. Therefore only a very small percentage of the trucks on the road today come equipped with an APU.

Welcome aboard Scotty!

Really, when it comes to running team you can't go wrong in choosing a company. Every company that runs team gives their team trucks top priority in every way. You get the best trucks, you get dispatched before everyone else with the best loads, you get special favors if you need em more often than not - you get priority in every way.

Now me personally - if I was going to run team I would choose a refrigerated carrier for two reasons:

1) They have the greatest quantity of coast to coast freight

2) They stay busier during the slow season (mid-December through early spring) because of the amount of food they haul. They don't get the gigantic ups and downs that dry van tends to get due to the retailers.

But there's no such thing in my book as picking a good company versus a bad one. That's all a bunch of baloney. Every company has plenty of freight for their top drivers. If you're a great driver and you know how to get along well with people you can do well anywhere.

So really it's a matter of picking a company that has the qualities that fit you best - home time, equipment, types of freight, pay, benefits, etc. People's opinions on companies don't mean squat. If you're an awesome driver that gets along well with people you'll do fine anywhere you go. If not, you'll be miserable anywhere you go.

But other than a small preference toward refrigerated carriers I don't really have any preferences for which company you should choose. Simply pick the one that matches what you're looking for the best and go out there and show em you're safe, hard working, reliable, and treat people with kindness and respect. If you do that you'll be happy anywhere you go.

Oh, and by the way - you really don't have to make a long list and call most companies - we've already done that. You can find tons of information on a bunch of companies here:

Company-sponsored programs - these companies have their own schools but also hire students from private schools

Trucking companies that hire inexperienced drivers - this is a partial list of companies you can look into.

Truck driving jobs - This will give you some great ideas for companies that hire from your area.

I have to say, I hadn't considered refrigerated and we'll have to give that a look. I have noticed that most companies offer teams preference as far as equipment and runs. I was just checking CSA scores and wow was that an eye opener for a couple on our short list! My buddy and I are pretty easygoing so we should be able to take the ups and downs of trucking in stride. Thank you for putting this all together so we have somewhere to go for solid information!

Oh, I'm glad you mentioned CSA scores - ignore them completely. CSA scores are supposed to hold companies accountable for the type of drivers they hire. The safer their drivers are, the fewer equipment violations a company gets, the fewer logbook violations a company gets, etc. the better their score will be.

Well any company that hires inexperienced drivers is going to have a lousy score compared with companies that only hire experienced drivers. Some companies will hire people based on lower standards or have more of a tolerance for incidents out on the road so their scores will likely be lower also.

A lot of people think you can tell the quality of a company by their CSA score but that's not true at all. Just ignore that number. Stick with things like home time, equipment, types of freight, regions of the country, opportunities in various divisions, and of course pay & benefits. But CSA score isn't going to really tell you much of anything about the quality of the company itself.

Boy am I glad you cleared that up because a couple of companies were about to get axed from the short list simply because of their CSA scores . Should I at least look at the vehicle maintenance portion of their score or is that figure too driver driven (pun intended) to be useful?

CSA is like a utopian idea the government bean counters have. A company with 5000 tractors, 20000 trailers and 4500 drivers (1000 of them totally inexperienced) is going to have some low CSA scores in some areas. It's just inevitable. Doesn't mean it's a bad company, or a good company.

Enron, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wal-Mart, they're all multi-billion dollar companies but they do some bad things, they also do some good things, and some people love them and some people hate them.

Just do your research. Talk to recruiters... and TALK TO DRIVERS! That will give you a good idea of where you want to go.

Without seeming like a creeper by trolling truck stops and rest areas, what's the best way to get a driver's first hand knowledge of the company they drive for? I'll probably have to convince them that I'm not taping out conversation for some news expose and that I'm not a company spy.

Not true. Just go to truck stops and try to talk to drivers while they are fueling. Approach them like any other human being (which they are) you would in a social context. Wave, say hello, whatever. Then tell them you are a CDL student looking to decide what company to drive for. You'll get a lot of information... drivers LOVE to talk lol.

Not true. Just go to truck stops and try to talk to drivers while they are fueling. Approach them like any other human being (which they are) you would in a social context. Wave, say hello, whatever. Then tell them you are a CDL student looking to decide what company to drive for. You'll get a lot of information... drivers LOVE to talk lol.

Just to add to this.

Drivers sometimes don't talk to a single person all day long. Your conversation and interest in trucking will be welcomed. Don't think you'll be some kind of truck stop troll because that's not true. We drivers get very lonely, it's always awesome to have a stranger come up to us for a much needed chat.

Just make sure you have an escape strategy. Once that conversation starts it could last for hours. You probably don't know what I'm talking about but you'll learn the hard way that truckers never shut up after they start talking. So prepare an excuse on why you have to go

Daniel is correct. Make sure you can get away because the driver will keep talking forever. About anything, everything, politics, trucking, finance, technology, marriage, ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING!

Lol.