Planning a year of freight

Freight is not evenly distributed through the year, and neither is your capacity to absorb a bad stretch. A fleet that treats every week as equivalent gets surprised twice: once by the slow period, and again by having spent the strong one as though it would continue.

You do not need a market forecast for this. You need your own last twelve months, which is more relevant than any national average because it describes the freight you actually haul.

1. 1Plot revenue per week for the last year. Not per month — monthly totals average away the pattern you are looking for.
2. 2Mark the weeks where you had to take something below target to keep moving.
3. 3Mark the weeks you turned freight down.
4. 4Look at what repeats. Holiday weeks, month-end pushes and the quiet stretch after a strong season are the places to look first; your own weeks will say which of them apply to your freight.

One year gives you a hypothesis. Two gives you a pattern. Either is better than reacting each time as though it were new.

• Maintenance: schedule the shop time you control into the weeks that are reliably slow, rather than losing a strong week to it.
• Cash: know which stretch runs thin and carry into it deliberately instead of discovering it.
• Time off: the predictable quiet weeks are the cheapest ones to take, and taking none at all has its own cost.
• Rate discipline: knowing a soft stretch is temporary makes it easier to hold a floor rather than chase volume into unprofitable loads.

Repairs pick their own week. The annual inspection does not: each vehicle — the tractor and the trailer separately — has to have passed a periodic inspection at least once in the preceding twelve months, with proof of it carried on the vehicle (§ 396.17). The deadline is fixed; the week you do it is yours.

Done in a slow week, it costs shop time in a week the truck was not going to earn much in. Left until it expires, it lands wherever the date happens to fall, including the middle of your strongest stretch. Moving it earlier only resets the next due date to the new inspection, so set it once where your records say the quiet weeks are and it stays there.

The reserve is simple arithmetic once your records name the slow weeks. Take your weekly fixed costs — the truck payment, insurance and everything else that bills whether the truck moves — and decide how much of them the slow weeks' own revenue will not cover.

Carried into the slow stretch on purpose, that is a plan. Discovered in the middle of it, the same shortfall becomes the squeeze in the piece on being profitable on paper and empty in the bank, linked below.

Seasonality is a tendency, not a schedule. A pattern tells you which weeks deserve more caution; it does not tell you what next week pays.

Use it to decide when to spend, when to service the truck and when to hold your rate. Do not use it to predict a specific number, and do not let last year's shape override what the board is telling you today.