Texas-based owner-operator Rob Goodwin met Riteload founder Matthew Kane in 2012 at a truck stop in Spokane, Wash., during Kane’s early runs around the nation in attempts to talk up what was then, and remains today, a fairly novel idea — a tech platform that connects shippers, not brokers, directly to carriers who want to move their loads. As Kane’s platform has gotten off the ground and (after a Riteload reboot or two I’ve written about before) started to really offer some utility to owner-operators and other carriers, owner-operator Goodwin is about to haul his fourth load of this year booked with a shipper in the system, hauling out of Yorktown, Indiana, to a Florida destination.
“Last year,” he says, “I moved 15 or 20 or so loads booked there,” each costing him a transparent, single fee of $27 dollars, a fee that’s universal for truckers on the platform. (It’s free to sign up.)
One particular run that worked well with his reefer last year was farm-to-farm direct on the lane between Maine and Florida, hauling potato seeds southbound and potatoes back north — “I did that all winter long, and every bit of it was through Riteload.”
It wasn’t this pathetic $1.12-a-mile stuff you might see offered to load a reefer coming out of Florida with a broker, either; it was well above $2 both ways, the southbound haul the slightly higher of the two most times, naturally. “I’m probably 60% brokered freight today” otherwise, says Goodwin, dispatching himself leased under the authority of Joey Terra’s Terra Trucking after Goodwin closed his own authority some years back. The other 40% of his freight is either through a direct account or booked through shippers utilizing Riteload.
“I just love everything Riteload stands for,” Goodwin says. “It’s always good to be able to cut somebody’s hand out of your portion of the pie – that’s more money in the bank” for him.
That’s been Kane’s goal from the beginning, amid skepticism that he’d see any kind of success. Clearly, he’s doing something right. “We’re two and a half weeks away from moving furniture into” the 33,000-square-foot facility Riteload purchased just outside of Philadelphia as a new office, he says. “We’re remodeling about 11,000 square feet of space there after gutting it entirely.”
“It’s important that people understand that we’re here to stay,” Kane says, addressing some skepticism he continues to see from parts of the owner-operator community and from freight middlemen out there, including those who feel that what they’re doing actually constitutes brokering freight itself. Yet “we did get a letter from the FMCSA stating that we’re not a broker” after laying out the business model.
