The Case For Renting The Box And Buying The Truck

For a small carrier, the choice of whether to own a trailer, finance one, run power only, or rent by the day looks like a simple equipment question, but it is really a business decision with a cost structure attached to every option, and getting that math wrong is one of the quietest and most expensive mistakes a growing fleet can make, which is the thread that ran through a recent Long Haul conversation recorded at F3 in Chattanooga with Matt Harb, Vice President of Product and Operations at the trailer-sharing marketplace Repowr.

Harb spends his days on the phone with owner-operators and small fleets, and he said the point of those calls is to understand what is actually weighing on them, from fuel costs to how they are landing and keeping customers. What he keeps hearing underneath all of it is that the trailer, the so-called dumb box behind the truck, quietly dictates which loads a carrier can and cannot take. That is the problem Repowr is built to solve, and the way Harb talks about it reframes the trailer from a thing you buy into a lever you pull only when the business case is there.

This story was originally published by FreightWaves. Read the full story at FreightWaves →