Load boards, for brokers, are often a simple, quick tool to find a handful of business when times are tight.
And unfortunately, it seems like times are tighter and tighter these days.
The life of a broker is a life lived in the margins, at least in the beginning, and running out of loads or carriers at a critical moment can be the difference between surviving for another day…
Or crumbling.
Profits are slim, especially nowadays. New technologies, especially those related to self-driving trucks, loom just over the horizon, possibly threatening to turn the entire industry upside down.
Now, let’s not get it twisted — load boards exist, they grow and thrive, and they continue to draw interest, clients, and turn a profit for a reason. Load boards aren’t just for brokers or for truckers who are down on their luck.
They’re for everyone.
No System is Perfect
It’s often very difficult to keep loads lined up and moving 24/7. Too much idle time is death to an owner-operator, and if a regular customer suddenly goes dry, a load board can serve in a pinch to help a trucker fill their truck.
By the same token, load boards, for brokers especially, are critical tools when gaps appear.
Like I said above: Brokers live life in the margins. Commissions can be razor thin, depending on the state of the market, and they run even thinner on load boards.
That’s why a powerful, simple, efficient TMS is so mind-blowingly critical for brokers who make extensive use of load boards. It makes your load board use infinitely more efficient.
The reason? A robust TMS is going to integrate with load boards and let you compare prices and loads across all the major load boards, all within one window on your computer, and all at once.
Can your TMS do that?
Load boards, for brokers most of all but for truckers too, need to be utilized as efficiently as possible — a powerful TMS like BrokerWare™ does just that
Although we talk all day about the amazing features of our product or how it’s going to benefit you or change your life, all TMSs, at their core, have a single purpose:
To make you more efficient.
The more efficient you are, the more money you make. While this may seem like an obvious point, I think it deserves restating, especially in this industry.
Because there are more than a few industries that can get away with waste and still be ok.
Restaurants throw away untold amounts of food each day, and yet they can still easily turn a profit.
One can only imagine the amount of time, energy, and craziness that goes into managing a large concert series for a famous singer.
This generates an incredible amount of waste, and yet they can turn a huge profit and not worry about having to buy a few thousand extra cups, throwing away hundreds of pounds of food, or even having unsold tickets.
They still profit.
And yet, when it comes to being a broker, if you have even a hint of waste, or a small series of transactions where you’re not turning a profit, you can easily slide into the red.
Load boards need to be used efficiently — if you or your employees spend too much time trying to search for the perfect load, not only might you miss some better opportunities, but the time itself spent looking is wasted.
A powerful TMS gets you past all this.
Sure, you can sign up for a premium account at Internet TruckStop, and you can spend your time hopping from Internet TruckStop to DAT 360 to 123Loadboard to GetLoaded, and you can try to find the best opportunities among all these different load boards by comparing 5 or 10 open windows on your computer.
You might turn a profit.
Or you might not.
A solid TMS helps you get around this issue.
A really robust TMS is going to let you compare all the load boards at once, allow you to find the best deal by looking at a single window on your computer, and will do the comparing for you.
You save time, which means you save money, AND you get to walk away knowing you found the best opportunity available. You don’t have to sit and wonder a week later, when payroll is due and funds are low, if you made the right decision the week before.
And there’s something to be said about peace of mind.
Get some of that peace of mind for yourself – talk to us about BrokerWare by entering your information below: