Tim B.’s Post

There’s no excuse to not understand your capacity around the Holidays. That said, I asked Santa for 50 refrigerated trucks and drivers for Christmas this year 🤣 Our teams are already keeping a pulse on our core carriers’ plans for running over the Holidays. And typically, we see about 30% of our network sit out Christmas through the first week of January. Produce volumes have been down some this year which will help, but the holidays and the observance of Russian new year for a lot of the PNW carriers puts a serious strain on capacity for produce and food heavy brokerages like us. We have to become more nimble and proactive in our carrier sourcing and try as best as we can to book trucks early, and spread out scheduling with any flexibility we may have. We may have to reach further into routing guides or go to spot markets more than we typically would like. And at the end of the day, we put our customers over our profits. There have been many times over a Holiday where our profits on a load are slim to none, but it’s never worth risking service failures and straining relationships for a few days out of the year. And on that note, it's also about empowering our operations teams to do the right thing. If profits were known to be the driving force of the organization then our people would sooner fail a load than breakeven, then what a terrible environment that would create for them, and that would likely not allow us to enjoy the long term relationships we have with our shipper partners or carrier partners. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you hear of brokers giving back freight around Holidays same day or with short notice citing capacity issues. You had weeks to prepare for that, it was no surprise. What they mean is, "we could not cover at profit so we now don't want to take it" This is a year round partnership, freight does not stop for Holidays and neither should strong partnerships. If you genuinely will be running at reduced capacity, start communicating that early so your shippers' can make alternative arrangements. Happy Holidays! Happy capacity hunting! #logistics #supplychain #trucking #freight