For a big truck fleet, the difference between running in the black or not at all comes down to utilization–getting the maximum return on the potential work a truck and driver can perform. The truck is in a revenue-producing position as often as possible, with few idle moments.

The same reasoning should apply to owner-operators, but foregoing a trip because it isn’t profitable often isn’t as simple as you think, with forced dispatch and other counter-productive schemes owner-ops sometimes choose to work under.

Ranting and raving that you’re losing money isn’t enough. If you can show, in dollars and cents, what it costs to do the job, you’ll be in a better position to do something about it–one way or the other.

This is critical if you’re running in the United States, where new hours-of-service rules may be limiting the number of miles you can run.

Let’s look at a trip originating in Moncton, delivering to Boston, reloading from New Haven, Conn., and returning to Moncton. ProMiles “truck-practical” mileage says the Moncton-Boston leg is 494 miles, with an estimated travel time of nine hours, 35 minutes. Earning $1.10 per mile, you’d gross $543.40.

If you picked up the load at the Moncton terminal, and then dropped and hooked to another load in Boston, that’s not too bad–especially under the old rules, when you could manage 10 hours of driving regardless of how many hours you spend sitting.

That’s not the case anymore. Now, every minute you’re unable to drive is terribly expensive.

Let’s look at that trip again. In fact, your pick-up is 20 miles from the Moncton terminal. It takes three hours to load, another two hours to clear customs, and two more to unload in Boston. Under the HOS rules that took effect in January, the first leg of the trip will take more time than you have in a single shift. Five hours spent loading and clearing customs leaves you with only nine available driving hours out of 14. So instead of making Boston you’re forced to hole-up in Portsmouth, N.H., for the night. The next day, you drive an hour to your destination, spend two hours unloading, and then head for New Haven, two hours and 45 minutes south. You’re early for the appointment, so you sit for three hours, and then spend two hours loading and faxing your paperwork north. When you finally set sail for Moncton, you’re 10.75 hours into your second shift, with only 3.25 hours left to drive out of a possible 11. Once again, you’re spending the night in Portsmouth.

On the third day, you run from Portsmouth to Moncton, with an hour at customs, an hour delivering, and a 10-mile jaunt back to the terminal from the customer. So for your three days’ work, you log 1,303 miles and burn through 36.5 hours. Total mileage pay is $1433.30. Hardly what you’d call maximizing your earnings.

It could have been worse. You might have loaded in Moncton late in the afternoon, which would have put you into Boston late the following afternoon, with nothing but time until reloading on the morning of the third day.

Scheduling is a serious issue under the new HOS rules. So is determining a reasonable rate to compensate for the loss of earning potential due to bad scheduling. You, the service provider, can’t be expected to absorb all the inefficiency in the system.

The one advantage to sitting is that you’re not burning through fuel, brakes, and tires. The downside is that waiting produces little or no revenue.

That simply has to change. What’s your time worth? If you calculate what the truck could earn in a normal week of driving, you’ve got a starting point. Let’s use $3,000 as your normal gross weekly earnings. Since you earned that over 60 hours of driving, the hourly rate would be $50. Knock off the running cost of the truck (say, 40 cents a mile or $24 an hour) and you have an idea of what to compensate the truck for the time it’s not running ($50 gross minus $24 running costs is $26 an hour). Add 12 bucks an hour or so for your time and you’ve got a number: $38 an hour. Your own numbers will vary, but in this example that’s the minimum you should charge a customer when you have to sit for an hour.

So, factoring in paid waiting time, let’s look at our Moncton-Boston-Moncton trip again. Most carriers give at least the first hour free, which still leaves an opportunity to bill to your customer for 8.5 hours at $38 an hour, or $323. Now add that recovered time to the mileage pay and you’ve got something worth getting out of bed for: $1,433.30 plus $323.00 equals $1,756.30, or $1.35 per mile over the trip. If you manage another 1,000 miles over the rest of the week at a similar rate, you’ll earn about three grand on a 2,400-mile week with pay for the time you sit. Not bad for not having to work yourself into the ground.

When you’re analyzing your operation, you have to consider all the costs, including the cost of not turning miles because of delays. Considering the scheduling as a cost is important, too, because what suits the shipper or the carrier may not be good for you. It remains up to you to convince them that if they want it a certain way badly enough, they’ll have to pay for it. They don’t get up every morning just to lose money, so why should you?

With the dawning of the new American HOS rules, analyzing your traffic patterns and schedules for potential problems is essential to your survival. Depending on the particular trip or operation, owner-ops could see reductions in earning potential of 20 per cent or more in the worst cases.

Why take a wait-and-see position?