The aly wheels thing is neither here or there ,my lorry came with aly wheels 18 yrs ago ,the odd polish now and again is better than to keep painting them ,if I bought new I’d definatly order aly wheels .
Do you have a burning desire to be an O/D? If not, then I would say no. It’s a lot of aggro for little reward, unless you have some highly paid work.
If you’re in it for the money, which you should be, then you want the cheapest no frills lorry you can get, so no supermegatopspacetrotterXXL with all the bling, nothing exciting about that, if you want a fancy lorry, the extra cost over a fleet spec lorry is going to have to come from your pocket, with the rates you’ll get on traction or containers etc, that won’t leave you much to live on.
I’ve owned lorries, with a little break, since 1993, I’m glad I did it and I’ve made a reasonable living out of it, I’ve also got my dream lorry with all the bling on it now, but the bling came as standard and the purchase was a business decision and will make more money for the business long term.
Would I do it again today? No. There’s not enough money in it. If I had 45k burning a hole in my pocket and didn’t need to pay off a mortgage or get a new car, I would buy a lorry, but not to work, I’d get an old F88 or similar and do it up, take it to shows etc. It would still be a load of hassle, but in a worst case scenario, at least it would only cost 45k if it all went ■■■■ up.
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albion:
I don’t think that everything has to be based on a spreadsheet (really nsmith), if it was I’d have taken the other career option and married a rich bloke.
Awwww, but I’ve got a shiny new spreadsheet now albion. Its got conditional formatting and everything!
As for the OP’s question, as others have said, it’s not a business choice per se, its a lifestyle choice. Making it pay with one is ballbusting work. I’ve done something lorry related every day now for over a year and a half, I was even doing admin on Christmas Day! Running one you can break even, and even make a bit more for yourself if you get lucky. I’m at the end of year 1 now, (yes, time really does fly doesn’t it?) and I’ve earned myself a salary of about £17500. If it wasn’t for the BWD Bust-up and the damage bills I’ve had, I would also have a nice £8k ish in the bank which I could take as a dividend. Of course I could have had more but as I’ve practically lived on wheels for the past year, I wanted something comfortable so went new on lease rather than buying something a bit older. As it is I’ve paid out for £4k in damage, hit and run accidents and vandalism over the past year and the money has only recently started to flow on a regular basis again after coming of 7 days End of Week so I’m losing a fair bit of sleep at the moment.
I’ve got the plans in place though and am now in a position to expand, (again, its going to be tight for a couple of months but hey, I didn’t do this to get rich this year but in about 10 years when I flog it all to Turners or someone for a number with many zeros.) and I’ve figured out that I can earn a semi-decent salary, plus a bit extra for covering holidays by running a couple of artics and a couple of vans with employed drivers. Thats the way I’m going for a comfortable living and continued growth. But you are never going to make a bunch of cash off of one vehicle, you need economies of scale to get the costs down.
And right there is the reason why haulage rates are on their arse because you’ve got ODs quite happy to drag pallets around the country for buttons. Not bothered about actually making any money, just so long as it brings in enough for a bit of bingo money for the wife to keep her off my back. 
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Not really Rob. I ran my own truck for five years and made more than enough to make it worth my while.
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How do you substantiate it being “worth my while” when in another thread you said :
Harry Monk:
Did I make a lot of money running a truck? No, not really, more like a wage I suppose.
You went through all the hassle of setting up a business, applying for an O-licence, securing the funding (granted, you already had it from your divorce - few have that “luxury”), searching for and sourcing a vehicle of questionable reliability, operating centre, work, then all the paperwork and red tape setting up insurances, breakdown cover, 6 weekly inspections and all the driver and vehicle compliance BS you have to do for VOSA and at the end of it all you cross fingers that the company pays you in 30 to 90 days time and doesn’t do a moonlight flit in interim and also hope you don’t get a blow-out or the engine go pop which would wipe out any profit you’d made. All this for a PAYE driver wage? So what’s that then - £500-650 on a good week after everything paid and deductions? 
How is that in any way, shape or form “worth my while” when you can set up as s/e or go on the agency and earn that in 3 days without any of the hassle? Walk in, pick up keys and paperwork, do delivery, ring in, pick up collection, drive back, drop trailer, hand in keys, get time sheet signed, go home, go to pub and have money in your bank account the following Friday. No hassles - as soon as you walk out of the t/o you switch off from ‘work’ mode and don’t return to it until you walk back in the next time you work. As an OD when you get home you fire up your computer and add your figures to your spreadsheets, do some invoicing, spend a bunch of time opening the stack of business related mail and then when you’re done you start worrying about that odd noise the truck was making earlier in the day and whether you should get it looked at before it strands you on the hard shoulder of the M1 throws up a £5k repair bill, £1k for the wrecker and £5k bill for the carriageway clean up and resurfacing after the truck dumps the contents of its engine across 3 lanes. And then the wife returns home empty handed having blown all the bingo money you gave her.
In your opinion that is “worth my while”? No, no it really is not and anyone that has even an ounce of sense can immediately see that. The ones that can’t see it are the ones wearing the blinkers that only see their name on their door and entire contents of the Kelsa and Alcoa showrooms rolling around in their eyelids because they’ve always wanted the glory of having their own truck since they were 5 years old. That counts for around 98% of ODs on the roads today.
When you can do a grand a week as a s/e driver with ease (more if you don’t mind doing weekends) without any hassles then to make being an OD worth your while you’d need to be doing minimum £1500 a week net for all the hassle, time and headaches that you have to deal with. How many of you ODs are doing £1500+ net week in week out? I’ll bet they can be counted on one hand.
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I’ve never claimed to have earned a fortune. To boil it down to numbers I probably made around £100 a week more than I would have done in an employed job in the area in which I was living. So over five years, that makes a return of £25,000 on an investment of £40,000, plus Working Tax Credits of around £10,000, as my accountant told me I wasn’t earning very much. 
Do you know a bank or building society which pays a return on a five-year bond like that?
I also came out of it with an Operator’s CPC, a driver’s CPC, thousands of pounds worth of tools and equipment which now live happily on my narrowboat, it paid many of the bills at home, many of the costs of running my car, but most importantly of all I enjoyed the experience and lived a happy and equitable life. It was the right thing to do at the time, and then it wasn’t so I went off to do something else instead.
To me, what is sad is that you constantly pop up to pour cold water on other people’s ambitions without ever once having had an ambition of your own greater than being a steering wheel monkey. Now, why don’t you just jog off back to the Euro drivers forum to let everybody know how superior you are because you’ve never been outside Yorkshire?
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If the system lets you claim tax credits fair enough but realistically I think an owner driver should pull a grand a week wages to justify it however I bet many don’t with most stuff on offer
nsmith1180:
albion:
I don’t think that everything has to be based on a spreadsheet (really nsmithAwwww, but I’ve got a shiny new spreadsheet now albion. Its got conditional formatting and everything!
As for the OP’s question, as others have said, it’s not a business choice per se, its a lifestyle choice. Making it pay with one is ballbusting work. I’ve done something lorry related every day now for over a year and a half, I was even doing admin on Christmas Day! Running one you can break even, and even make a bit more for yourself if you get lucky. I’m at the end of year 1 now, (yes, time really does fly doesn’t it?) and I’ve earned myself a salary of about £17500. If it wasn’t for the BWD Bust-up and the damage bills I’ve had, I would also have a nice £8k ish in the bank which I could take as a dividend. Of course I could have had more but as I’ve practically lived on wheels for the past year, I wanted something comfortable so went new on lease rather than buying something a bit older. As it is I’ve paid out for £4k in damage, hit and run accidents and vandalism over the past year and the money has only recently started to flow on a regular basis again after coming of 7 days End of Week so I’m losing a fair bit of sleep at the moment.
I’ve got the plans in place though and am now in a position to expand, (again, its going to be tight for a couple of months but hey, I didn’t do this to get rich this year but in about 10 years when I flog it all to Turners or someone for a number with many zeros.) and I’ve figured out that I can earn a semi-decent salary, plus a bit extra for covering holidays by running a couple of artics and a couple of vans with employed drivers. Thats the way I’m going for a comfortable living and continued growth. But you are never going to make a bunch of cash off of one vehicle, you need economies of scale to get the costs down.
Great. Conditional Formatting…wish I had that zzzzzzzzz
Expanding when you only have one/a few vehicles is always tight, in fact it’s much like starting out again.
I agree about economies of scale, unfortunately you have to be a big firm to benefit; my little firm of 25 people will not see many more benefits than yours. It will benefit by length of time in business, making opening accounts easier and getting insurance deals.
The only thing in my opinion that gets you a bunch of cash is a decent rate from a good customer and that usually means specialisation.
As for earnings, I’m well under a grand a week. On the other hand I have enough within the company that I don’t have to work anymore.
I would buy a tractor with £45k.
There’s a “long-nose” County 1474 would have cost £20k new in 1980 just sold used@ auction last week for £90k!!!
Basically, there are three ways running a truck can go.
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You can lose the lot and end up having your house repossessed.
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You can tick over for a while being satisfied with your lot but then decide to go off and do something else (this is the category I would consider myself to be in).
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You can be running 2,000 trucks in 30 years time.
It depends on two things, hard work and luck. But to ask “Can I be successful putting a truck on the road?” is a bit like asking “Can I be successful opening a shop?”
It depends.
Did you mr smith factor in the lost revenue and damage for your first year of trading? In my experience you can do your sums whatever way you want but there will always be an added expense somewhere along the line , damage theft tyres hold ups non paying customers etc etc , As a young company you are considering Irish work , ferry delays missed ferries ferry damage regular occurrence , me personally I’d have subbed the loads out and kept my lorry on my regular work instead of adding the complications of hire / buying another lorry adding another driver and leaving him to your bread and butter work,
Each to there own,
but I can’t help thinking slowly slowly catch the monkey, in my first years trading I looked at long distance work as an option , I quickly realised that a lorry up the road was limited to 1 shift whereas a lorry can be double shifted on local work , this was the way to make it work , some owner drivers with the Kelsa pack dont seem to think of the lorry as a working tool , the more it does the more you make . When my fist lorry was running between 10-12 shifts a week then I decided we need another one ,
At the end of the day general haulage is rock bottom rates , it’s what you can save that makes you the money ,i.e. 1 road tax 1 insurance 1 ■■■■■■■■■■■■ etc , double shift if possible,maximise earnings and it can work .
I started in 1978.
I’ve never had my name on the door. Never had alloys. Never had Kelsa bars. Never had a new truck.
If I’ve had success, it’s been by tackling the difficult and dirty or smelly jobs that the shiny boys turn their noses up at. If you’re prepared to do the unpopular jobs you quite soon become the go to guy and the customers come to trust you, and often don’t even ask how much the job will cost. Providing you don’t rip the p- -s out of them, they are grateful for what you do, and your phone keeps ringing. I think this is the only viable road for an owner driver to go down, as simple sub contracting for big operators seldom , but not always, ends well. In short, if you can’t identify a niche which you can cater for, then it’s going to be difficult.
This week, I did 1087 miles and grossed £3730 net of vat. I’m quite happy with that.
Old John:
I started in 1978.
I’ve never had my name on the door. Never had alloys. Never had Kelsa bars. Never had a new truck.
If I’ve had success, it’s been by tackling the difficult and dirty or smelly jobs that the shiny boys turn their noses up at. If you’re prepared to do the unpopular jobs you quite soon become the go to guy and the customers come to trust you, and often don’t even ask how much the job will cost. Providing you don’t rip the p- -s out of them, they are grateful for what you do, and your phone keeps ringing. I think this is the only viable road for an owner driver to go down, as simple sub contracting for big operators seldom , but not always, ends well. In short, if you can’t identify a niche which you can cater for, then it’s going to be difficult.
This week, I did 1087 miles and grossed £3730 net of vat. I’m quite happy with that.
That’s a good business model and an excellent way to get your foot in the door, ask potential customers what their most problematic job is, the one nobody wants to do, offer to take it on and before you know it, you get some cream to go along with it.
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Big Truck:
I would buy a tractor with £45k.There’s a “long-nose” County 1474 would have cost £20k new in 1980 just sold used@ auction last week for £90k!!!
A contractor local to me had 3 of these when I was a young buck fresh out of school and started farm work,I had a Massey 165 and was desperate for a job there but no chance! I would have worked for half the wages at the time! Lol. Which brings us back on topic.
RobK has his particular axe to grid re-owner drivers,maybe he never had the balls to try it, maybe he tried and failed, who knows? I was an OD for 7years (name on headboard, frilly curtains but no alcoas or Kelsa) and enjoyed every minute of it. Started with a 4yr old Volvo bought of a mate which was paid off in 2yrs and traded against a brand new 500xl Volvo FH. Paid this off in 3yrs and ran it another 2.
Subby’d for a local company who treated their OD’s the same as their own motors (they still do- I know cos I now work in their traffic office!)At the time I was covering one particular contract for them doing 5 Scotland-Central London round trips a fortnght but LEZ changes meant I was going to have to change a perfectly good trouble free truck, couple that with a mate offering me a good price for it and us being mortgage free 10 yrs earlier than expected (thanks to owner driving) I decide to take a break and try something else, within a day of me selling up I had full orders as a s/e driver which I did for various firms around here up until a couple of years ago.
The best thing I got from owner driving was the fact that my kids saw that if you get off your ■■■■ and put a shift in, you CAN get on in this world, something that I’m proud to see them doing
The thing with threads like these is that there are so many variations of so called owner drivers although most amount to the same thing ,I prefer the phrase owner operator ,I own the lorry ,the yard ,do all my own repairs ect ,have a garage full of kit ,various size fork lifts ,do mostly direct work other than sub con jobs that fill in or suit me from others that I share work with ,I’ve also done storage,I don’t do any work where the customer tells me the rate it’s either i send the bill they pay or a mutual rate agreed after the jobs been done ,may be I fall in to Robk’s 2% catorgory ? So my point of view on these subjects dosent always match that of the man who leases a lorry and parks it in another’s yard and subs solely to another transport firm for pittance per mile .
Punchy Dan:
The thing with threads like these is that there are so many variations of so called owner drivers although most amount to the same thing ,I prefer the phrase owner operator ,I own the lorry ,the yard ,do all my own repairs ect ,have a garage full of kit ,various size fork lifts ,do mostly direct work other than sub con jobs that fill in or suit me from others that I share work with ,I’ve also done storage,I don’t do any work where the customer tells me the rate it’s either i send the bill they pay or a mutual rate agreed after the jobs been done ,may be I fall in to Robk’s 2% catorgory ? So my point of view on these subjects dosent always match that of the man who leases a lorry and parks it in another’s yard and subs solely to another transport firm for pittance per mile .
Much like mine apart from we do no repairs, have a garage.
Punchy Dan:
The thing with threads like these is that there are so many variations of so called owner drivers although most amount to the same thing ,I prefer the phrase owner operator ,I own the lorry ,the yard ,do all my own repairs ect ,have a garage full of kit ,various size fork lifts ,do mostly direct work other than sub con jobs that fill in or suit me from others that I share work with ,I’ve also done storage,I don’t do any work where the customer tells me the rate it’s either i send the bill they pay or a mutual rate agreed after the jobs been done ,may be I fall in to Robk’s 2% catorgory ? So my point of view on these subjects dosent always match that of the man who leases a lorry and parks it in another’s yard and subs solely to another transport firm for pittance per mile .
You’ve answered your own question Dan. Did you start your business by first measuring up what size light bars and what length curtains you’d need for your truck, followed by asking questions on the internet such as “I’ve just bought a brand new FH, does anyone know of any good paying work? Is Maritime/Tarmac/Hanson/Rosewood any good?”, or did you first start with the ‘Old John’ method of finding a niche of work that no-one was doing in your area, bought yourself a cheap reliable truck and built up the foundations of a new business from there, charging a fair price for the service provided?
The latter is absolutely fine and you won’t see me knocking any person that goes down that route, but how often do you see a new thread posted here by someone of that mindset? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in 15 years. It’s always the “I’ve always wanted to own my own truck since I was 5 so I’m going to become an OD. Does anyone know any good paying work?” type, who inevitably end up dragging shipping containers or blocks & blocks around the country for a quid a mile serving no purpose other than to hold haulage rates at a rock-bottom level and make the shipping/aggregate company CEOs very rich. The shipping and aggregate companies have got it down to a tee, knowing that all they have to offer the OD is just enough to leave him with around £500 a week as a “wage” and the ODs will lap it up because they’re able to swan around with their name on the door and twiddle their curtain tassles. They also know that they’re all debted up to the eyeballs and need the work 6 days a week to pay the bills hence why they give you a good weeks work every so often to keep the carrot dangling in front of you so you don’t go elsewhere. Maritime are masters of it.
Whilst there’s an oversupply of ODs queued up outside haulage yards all around the country willing to do traction for a quid a mile the rates will never improve and that obviously impacts of driver’s wages as well as the two are interlinked. Sure you could argue that the Stobrats and Wincantons of the world have a bigger impact with their constant race to the bottom on rates for blue chip contracts, but ODs play just as big a role when they’re happy to do London to Scotland for £400 at 44 tonne.
Rob K:
but ODs play just as big a role when they’re happy to do London to Scotland for £400 at 44 tonne.
The thing is Rob most of the people you are arguing with here dont work for that sort of money
Harry Monk:
Basically, there are three ways running a truck can go.
- You can tick over being satisfied with your lot
Is there any rule which says you can’t have that and keep it going and without the need to re mortgage the house given enough spare cash to start up with and a cheap and reliable truck,and luck ?.Although admittedly probably a lot easier in the days when a cheap Merc SK would be the wagon of choice in that regard instead of shipping them all off to the Africans to make money with instead.While we’re mostly left with worthless money pits with no useful working life left in them after a few years and out of warranty.How convenient for the big fleet players.
chaversdad:
Rob K:
but ODs play just as big a role when they’re happy to do London to Scotland for £400 at 44 tonne.The thing is Rob most of the people you are arguing with here dont work for that sort of money
There are some people working for rates like that but you won’t find them on here, they’ll be on a Bulgarian/Romanian/Latvian etc speaking site. We do a bit of storage and a customer was sending pallets from West Thurrock into our yard, they asked if we wanted to cover some loads so we gave them a rate and they laughed us off the phone. Their English office is using the above nationalities to deliver in to us- motors are hanging,drivers hardly speak a word of English, this is the future folks if we don’t get a proper Brexit
I was always told If you want to end up with 1 million pounds by owning trucks . You start by having 5 Million pounds.
Trucky Mc truckface:
I was always told If you want to end up with 1 million pounds by owning trucks . You start by having 5 Million pounds.
Obviously by someone who owned either boats or aircraft 
To reply to adycross who posted this quiz, first point, as you will be aware £45k today is not a great deal of money.
Second point,are you totally debt free if not pay off your debts.Still got your £45k…Premium Bonds your money’s safe but not very productive,
I or we/she have £100k in bonds and the last two years they have returned 1.1% or £1,100 per annum. Rental property, well the problem is the
people who rent,two I had in,new cars,the latest techno for the kids,exotic holidays,they didn’t work and didn’t pay the rent.
So still fancy being an OD well you can have my place, retired recently and for the last 37 years was an OD,made money,went everywhere and had fun
but since I retired the phone hasn’t stopped ringing,everyone seems to be desperate for drivers,just shop around till you find the job that ticks ALL
the boxes and save your £45k for a rainy day.And if you find the money burning a hole in your pocket,my richer friends are into classic cars big time
seems to be where the money is.