Hi guys,
I am thinking of starting up my own haulage firm but i was just woundering whether or not you guys could tell me the vital information on how to do things the right way and if i need any qualifications to start up and so on so if you could give me any info that would be grat and what trucks are the cheapest to run but are very good quality
thank you
Jordan Lloyd
Hello Jordy,
I’m just starting up myself, so there are others further down the road than I am, but I’ll give what advice I can. Most people’s advice will be “Don’t do it”.
The very very first step is to have work in place on which you can make a reasonable return on your time and money, for a person or company which is financially sound and which pays on time.
You will either need a Certificate of Professional Competence in Road Haulage, or to employ somebody who has one. You will need a place to operate from, a maintenance contract, sufficient funds to satisfy the Traffic Commissioner etc etc etc.
If it helps, here’s the current status of my own application, showing the actions needed to be taken before a licence is granted. Ignore the arrow, that’s something I drew on their for someone else.
Thank you mate for this peice of advice and the best of luck to you and your company 
Hi Harry, just a question for you really, how do you manage to have work in the pipeline over 6 months in advance? Is the work you are doing now part of the future contract, or do you know someone who has work lined up for you in September?
cheers
I am going to start off sub-contracting until I can get my own work in place, the firm I am going to sub-contract to is one I have worked with for many years as an employee of a company I worked for for nearly a decade, and I have been in regular contact with them since before I took the first step, booking the CPC, last November. As soon as I get a vehicle on the road, they are ready to give me as much work as I want.
I do have a back-up in place for another large and long-established firm, again through personal contacts, and again they have said that they would take me on at any point I wanted work. For that though I will need to upgrade my O licence from National to International, which I will be doing as soon as my National Licence is granted, but which will take 8-9 weeks to be upgraded.
I couldn’t apply for an International licence from the start because I failed the International module in December 2012, and by the time I received confirmation that I passed the re-sit in March, my application was already quite advanced and it would have delayed granting of the National licence, which is all I need in the beginning anyway.
To my mind, personal contacts are a far better way of finding reasonable work than adverts in Truck & Driver.
Although September is listed as VOSA’s target date, they say that applications are currently taking an average of nine weeks, and it is nine weeks to the day since they received the application, so I’m hoping it will be here in the next week or two.
Harry Monk:
Although September is listed as VOSA’s target date, they say that applications are currently taking an average of nine weeks, and it is nine weeks to the day since they received the application, so I’m hoping it will be here in the next week or two.
Have you tried leaning on your caseworker for an interim? We got one pretty quickly after everything was showing as done on that application tracking thing, but I think we had to make it so that the caseworker found it easier to expedite the interim licence than it was to keep answering the phone to us.
No, when I took my CPC, the trainer told us that interim licences are really a “thing of the past”, and that they don’t issue them in the way they used to. In any event an interim licence doesn’t guarantee that an O licence will be granted and I wouldn’t want to commit myself financially on the strength of one.
I’m quite happy to have another lazy week or two at home before the non-stop graft begins!