Knight Trucking?

Hey guys, Started putting out applications today and already got a call from knight transportation!! But they use a sliding scale for pay. Would someone explain the good versus the bad benefits of this system?

Hey Mike, I drive for Knight, but I am not familiar with their sliding scale pay system. I am in a very small specialized division of flat-bed trucks dedicated to one customer (SAPA Aluminum Extrusions). Everything is different for us than it is within most of the company, so I'm sorry about not knowing much about that sliding scale pay.

I did work at a company with a sliding pay scale (Western Express) and I can give you a general idea of how that worked. The whole idea behind it is to protect the driver from having a bunch of short runs eat up his possibilities of making a decent pay check. Let me explain... with a speculated scenario. If you are making .30 cents per mile and you get a lot of short runs, the time it takes you to get loaded and unloaded on those short runs generally will cut into your drive time (HOS) considerably which means if you get two or three short runs in the week and it takes you the better part of a day to get each of them done then you may have only gotten, let's say, 350 miles in three days. Now, do the math - you just made about a hundred dollars in three days - not acceptable by most folks standards. So the idea is to pay the driver more cents per mile on shorter runs so that he doesn't take the beating if he ends up with a week full of short hops here and there. I hope that at least helps you understand the reasoning behind it.

Now, onto a more general understanding of why Knight may be doing this. Knight is a publicly traded company, and if you dig into their financials you will find that they are pretty well managed from a financial point of view. For a trucking company, they have a pretty solid history of making decent profits. Short haul work is considered by some to be the most profitable part of OTR trucking, and if you can get a good mix of it in with your other types of work it will really help your bottom line. I recently saw an interview with the company's founder and they asked him a question about if he had plans to grow the fleet in the coming year, and his response was that he had plans to focus on profitability, and that providing logistics services was where they were making the most money. So his plans were to increase their logistics services, and only to increase the fleet as it was necessary to support the logistics portion of the company. Personally I think these guys are pretty smart.

They do a very broad variety of trucking jobs, and with you being so close to the Dallas, TX terminal you would have a lot of opportunities to be able to move around into some of their different fields. They have a strong inter-modal program, and several other programs in that area that don't necessarily keep you away from home for lengthy periods of time. I do OTR work for them, but it still has sort of a regional feel to it - I don't ever go out west. If you drew a line down from the Dakotas to Texas, I pretty much work from that area on over to the East Coast. But on my first day with them at the Gulfport, Mississippi terminal they asked me to run a few local loads for them before I shipped off to my dedicated account. They told me they had this customer that they were doing short hauls for and what they did is pay you something like $85 bucks a load to pull a loaded trailer from a manufacturer there over to the port - it was easy stuff - I didn't even know what I was doing and was totally unfamiliar with the area and I still managed to do three loads that day! Mostly guys who live right there are doing that account, and they go home every night - that was a gravy job in my opinion.

I've rambled on way too much here, but don't be afraid of a sliding scale - when I was at Western Express I very seldom did anything that put me down into the higher pay ranges. They kept me moving across the country which is the way I liked it.

I'm very happy at Knight, but like I said, I'm kind of in a unique situation here.

Thanks!!