Ex Haulier:
Not hard to figure how they do it. You stick two of them in the cab and pay them what one british driver would cost. They are happy to be away for 6 or 8 weeks at a time. They can borrow money cheaper than we can, there depot costs are a lot less than ours, road tax, insurance etc, all cheaper. It all adds up. How do you compete, you can’t on general work. If your lucky you may find a little niche job where you can charge enough to make a go of it, but volume work, forget it. The only thing you can do is if you can’t beat them, join them. Set up a company in a low cost country.
There is one more thing I can observe in small vans industry, so I guess it might be true for big lorries as well. This is just some observation, maybe Oritinal Poster finds them useful.
When we do runs to Eastern Europe, on most occasions we don’t have any back loads and we run empty to Germany, Belgium or even England, or we take a long detour to collect in our usual collection place in Austria.
That’s because as far as I am concerned our office is using only some British speditions and Brtitish backloads markets. I had spoken with them about joining some Polish freight market website, but they said it’s not worth it as they pay too small money…
Well, I can’t see how running empty for free is better than carrying a load for small price… Every little helps, isn’t it?
And ignoring low prices won’t make people pay more, the same load will be carried by Eastern Europeans. So I think from the British point of wiev it’s win-win - not only we can earn some pennies on our way back, but also we stop competitors from earning what for them is a reasonable price
The other thing is that they are unable to cooperate with eastern european speditors, as in my company it seems that I am the only guy who speaks any foreign language. Off course most of the people in Poland in this industry will speak some foreign languages, problem is that very often it might be French, Russian, German or other, while my office speaks only English (and some of them use so hard Scottish accent, that I had to translate it once to a French girl in one of the places I was collecting from 
).
When I speak with Polish or other “Osties” on the road, they say they almost never run empty for more than 100 kms…
I even offered my boss that if he sings up and pays for subscription to one Polish load market, I will be organizing my backloads myself by logging to the web from my mobile, but they weren’t interested.
I think this is also way when British hauliers can save money.
There is also one more thing. From my observation over last few years working in that industry in Britain, there is plenty of money wasted just because people do not pay attention to small things.
I’ve been running 18 tonner to deliver 4 boxes to Central London (from Glasgow!), and stories as such are common here on trucknet.
Other example: we try to convict our boss to fit night heater to all our vans, even the ones which do not have sleeping cabs. One night of running engine just to keep driver warm costs more than 10 pounds in fuel. Night heater can be fitted for couple of hundreds… Do the math: 20-30 nights out and you have your costs back… They are not interested. I simply don’t understand that…
So although you can’t do much on the subjects rightly poited by Ex Hauliers, you can save a lot money just to look into your own yard…
Eh exhaulier?
)
