Longtime owner-operator Joe Bielucki was fuming mad when he read the email from his main customer's corporate logistics director. It was an email like thousands of others sent over the last year or so, during the trucking industry's rollercoaster ride from unheard-of pandemic highs to nigh on a "bloodbath," but Bielucki found a novel way to shoot back.
"Late in the summer of '22 our main customer, citing data from the 'market,' i.e. DAT [spot market averages], decided they wanted to lower our rates by seven percent," he said. "I was unloading somewhere and checking my email. I saw the mail from our corporate logistics director and was fuming."
What followed is that old familiar feeling of seeing red. Bielucki has run a trucking business for 36 years, and done so with a nearly spotless record.
Bielucki's wife, Ginny, an accountant and trusted advisor, gave some key advice to help her husband effectively engage with a customer looking to cut rates.
"For years we had a situation where we had house rates," he said. "There was six of us with our own authority, and we all lived in different directions and we all agreed on house rates without worrying what anyone else was doing."
That all changed a few years back when the steel company hired a transportation management service, supposedly to make everything run a lot smoother. The company, TMC, a division of C.H. Robinson, got to work dismantling the system of house rates.
What that meant? "We had to go in every single load line by line and bid the freight," said Bielucki. Essentially, he added, they were pitting each owner-operator against the other, "and in the end you were only awarded so many lanes."
