The L.D. Sewell Podcast

I used to have a drawing of a frog that was halfway down a cranes throat - the only thing sticking out of his beak were the frog's legs and his two skinny arms and hands which he had tightly wrapped around the crane's throat preventing the crane from swallowing him. The look of shock and distress in the eyes of the crane was priceless and underneath the caption read; "Never EVER Give Up!" Those are words to live by. If you have carefully chosen a course in life and are sure you want to proceed that way and you have done your homework and know it is a viable path - then you do it. You keep doing it when you fall and are bloody and exhausted you keep slugging it out. Even if you get knocked down or knocked out - that's just an opportunity to rest, regroup and attack again. Decide what you want and go after it with everything you have to give and more. If you do you will accomplish more than you can even dream of. Know this too - this is not the way or the majority. They quickly and change direction like the wind does. Become your own best friend and ally and work toward your goals. Find others who can and will help you get there. Take classes and learn. Research and learn. Read and learn. Hire a coach or consultant. Find or start a mastermind group. Never let anyone tell you" your place" or your limits. Decide for yourself and take action and recruit other like-minded people who can and will help you get where you are going. Help them do the same in return and flourish together by doing so.

When I first started out learning about the trucking industry one of the early lessons I learned was cost containment and maximization of resources to maximize profit. At first glance its easy to see how a driver or even an owner operator might be tempted to write this off in whole or in part - and many do. That's a tragic mistake that costs them big time regardless of whether they ever fully even realize it or not. For a fleet it has even more dire implications - and the bigger the fleet, the bigger they are. Learn how to manage available time and assets effectively, manage fuel burn and make sure you have excellent systems in place to handle fuel surcharges - including extreme and sudden spikes. Invest in consulting, coaching and training for your company and all key personnel and then make sure EVERY PERSON from the owner to the janitor and everyone in between is trained properly and then is continuous given continuing education periodically on an ongoing never ending basis. Be sure to incentivize those who can be incentivized - and that definitely includes drivers, recruiters, sales staff and dispatchers for certain. Always be learning and refining and always be looking at reports of all available management data. Comparatively, analyze EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and set benchmarks and hard stops. A benchmark - as I am using it here - is a specific target level of performance and a hard stop is the lowest threshold of that tolerance and one that triggers mandatory attention and corrective action. Want to learn more or get my help? Visit our Additional Resources page.

Consider becoming a truck driver first. Drive for a year or two before you launch your main trucking business. Doing this will give you insights and experiences that will help you deal with customers and drivers much better and it will provide you with information and skills that will help you manage your company better from day one. Granted - this is not a route that everyone is going to take, and you may choose to become a fleet owner or freight broker or start some other trucking-related business without ever having sat in the drivers seat of a single tractor trailer. But if you do choose to speed at least a little time in a truck - you will have information and experience that will help give you a few steps of a head start on your competition. You can also decide to go out on the road for a few days or weeks with other drivers. That will still help you gain some information simply not available to others who choose not to do so. We are continuing to build our organization and are adding additional resources for you every day now. In the near future, we will welcome our very first team members aboard who will be focusing on helping you choose the right membership options and courses for you. Keep an eye out on our membership page and on all our pages for a link to Meet Our Team. Select the person you want to talk to and get in touch and they will be more than happy to help you get started. Additionally, we will be adding some very in-depth trucking related courses inside our own Training Center in the coming months as well, so be sure to keep an eye on that and better yet - go ahead and become a member soon so you will be able to get all the help and ongoing live support you need.

It is important to carefully consider what exactly it is you are building. Are you creating a self-employment situation where you must do all the work or most of it personally? If so that business type is severely limited because you are limited in how much you can personally produce in a given day, week or month. If anything happens and you cant work for a while - or just don't want to - then your income stops as soon as you stop working. On the other hand, if you are using other people to help you build and grow your business by building a team of quality people and managing and leading them properly you can scale that as big as your abilities and ambitions can take you. You can even build a combination where much of the work is handled by others as employees, independent contractors or affiliates - while still retaining some of the key things that are profitable and that you enjoy doing personally, so long as you have the time and energy you will need to lead and manage your organization. Figure out your systems and put them in place by design. The core principles and systems can be applied to almost any kind of business in any industry. There are many benefits. The first is that it can be scaled. You can grow it as big as you like. The second is that you are the one at the helm instead of the one in the bilges. Your job is to be the visionary and to lead - others will happily do the work - for fair compensation. They don't want to lead. This world is made up of and needs both types of people. But for you - as the business owner, it is critical that you intentionally and systematically build your business to an intentional design instead of haphazardly as many are built. Just a few things to think about. As another quick update, we are working on our free reports and guides to go on our free resources page and we are making good progress. So check back there often as we begin to upload them sequentially over the coming days.

One of the many things you are going to have to become knowledgeable of and set up and maintain is a compliant DOT drug and alcohol testing program. It is not a simple thing to understand or do and far too many companies and people screw it up. It is one of the areas that carries some of the highest fines and most severe penalties too. If you own or manage a trucking business you need to become educated on drug and alcohol testing requirements - and you absolutely need to know the difference between DOT and Work Place programs. There are many business consultants and service providers who do not have a clue. Not when it comes to DOT testing and all the regulations that go with it. They know business in general and they are experts or authorities on workplace testing, yet remain oblivious to the fact that trucking is one of the heaviest regulated industries in the country - and it has it own unique and SEPERATE regulations. So following the incompetent advice from a general business consultant or third party can destroy your company and put you out of business. Even if it isn't that bad - it will still cost you thousands in fines and possibly you all kinds of additional problems. Your customers may drop you as a carrier, your insurance may be increased and other unpleasant things may occur. Some companies develop a false sense of security when they have been doing such things wrong for many years - yet have never had anything bad happen - yet. That's because they simply haven't been caught. Sooner or later though the chances are good they will be and it will be painful and unpleasant when it does happen. My advice is don't do that. If you don't know the regulations or have systems in place to protect you and your company don't stick your head in the sand and pretend everything is fine. Instead get some training and learn what you need to know. then decide if you want to handle most of it in-house or if you want to outsource much of your program to a third party that specializes in trucking and knows what they are doing.

We are reworking our Free Resources pages and Additional Resources pages along with the blog and some other parts of our site. We are also updating and changing some of the information on other pages. So if you visit over the next few days please keep all that in mind and be patient. You will find links that do not work and possibly even the site itself down momentarily - just know we are working on it with wrenches in hand day and night now until we get it in shipshape. Though the major structure is all in place (whew...) we are still moving provisions aboard and arranging the furniture - so to speak. in other news, we are also starting to look for our first Independent Sales Associate Membership Recruiters who will be authorities in their own core areas and will help us build and support this community as they also continue to build their own completely separate but allied businesses too. This is a very exciting phase of our business and we are looking for the best people, not the most people. We are also only going to have 24 filling these positions and they will be personally hand picked by me and recruited by me personally. Then they will be trained and supported by me also as it relates to what they will be doing within our membership. They are already authorities in their own right on their core topics, but in recruiting, coaching and mentoring our members - they will get all the information, training tools and support they need - and the compensation they need to do an outstanding job. So if I call you or message YOU be sure it is not random and you have been carefully selected. If you don't want to miss out on this opportunity of a lifetime then be sure to accept my offer quickly, otherwise, you may miss out on something awesome that will never come your way in your life again. For everyone else who wants an opportunity to build your own business - do not worry. As soon as we get the membership up and running YOU will have your opportunity to get the training and information you need and become an affiliate if you like and build your own independent business successfully right along beside us. Thanks for listening and I will talk to you again soon!

Freight brokerage offers you an unusual opportunity to start a business capable of producing six figures - or even seven - if you can do the job, learn the business and become very proficient at it. It can do all that and more and you can get started with very little money comparatively speaking if you know what you are doing. You need a surety bond and that will be your biggest startup cost most likely, and beyond that chances are you already have most of what you need to start your business. You need a quiet place to work. Spare bedroom converted garage, basement, attic etc. You need a decent computer and a high-speed reliable internet connection, printer, basic office stuff - desk, chair, file cabinet and a few other things you can easily get from Amazon or any big box store. You will need some specialized information and training too - and that you can get from a number of different online courses and books - including my own course and soon to be courses and a future book. If you are interested in taking my Freight Brokerage course visit our Courses page and take a look at what we currently have to offer.

Technolgy brings us new opportunities. One such opportunity that is truly exceptional is the ability to teach courses and workshops online with little more than a laptop, camera, decent microphone and some specialized knowledge. You don't need a license. You don't need a degree, certification or any other thing other than a strong desire to teach and something to teach that others want to learn. Add in some serious determination, some hard work, and a little patience and soon you will have your first student. Then before you know it your second, then third - and soon enough your student numbers will begin to grow with each new course you add. Some instructors earn incredible amounts of money on an ongoing basis, with many being multiple six-figure earners - and a few even beyond that. Personally, I'm not anywhere near that - yet. But my student numbers are slowly but consistently increasing across all platforms that I teach on and I am taking a long game approach and methodically building up a relatively large library of courses covering multiple topics on multiple platforms. From what I can see from my own research into online teaching as a business that is a solid path - though not the quickest. For those looking for get rich quick schemes - this isn't the way - instead, it will take time and a lot of work to build a profitable online teaching business. But isn't that pretty much true with any real business opportunity? You can get started by researching some of the top instructors and learning from them. Learn what they did, and what they are doing - then model that. It will help you potentially accomplish more faster than otherwise would be possible, all because of the work others have already done ahead of you - and that they are willing to share with you for a small price. Just the tuition for a couple of their course and a book or two in some cases - and completely free in others. Many have Youtube channels and multiple videos where they tell you most of what you need to know to start, build and grow your own online teaching business. Then as you begin to get some results and earn a little money, then more money - don't go piss it away and spend it on junk. Reinvest it back into your business. Take some courses yourself and learn more, get some better equipment, set up a dedicated recording space - your own little studio so to speak. While that isn't necessary - it sure is nice. It is great to have a nice camera, lights, backgrounds, editing software and not to have to set everything up and take it all back down every day. Instead, you just enter your space and get to work recording your next lecture. Then the next. Before you know it the course is finished, uploaded and live. Then you head on to begin your next course and you keep doing that until you have taught everything you have to teach and have built an extensive library of courses. Even then you are never really done until you decide you are. As you build your business and teach more and more courses you are continuing to learn new things - things you can then also teach. Even your existing areas of specialty will require updates and changes, and as you go further than beginner classes you will learn more yourself with each new course. So it is infinitely expandable. Maybe you have never considered teaching an online course before. Maybe it's time you should.

There are some things you need to know if you intend to build your own trucking business successfully. Our new course is now live on Udemy and it will walk you through the key things you need to be aware of before you launch your own business. The course is called; Trucking - How to Become an Independent Owner Operator It is now live and available on Udemy and you can find it there or through our Courses page on www.ldsewell.com along with an overview of the course too. One of the big considerations when thinking about starting your own trucking company is whether to lease on to another motor carrier and run under their authority (and to a large part their control too) or whether to go the independent route and get your own authority and operate as a motor carrier. The independent Owner Operator route offers you by far the most freedom, control, and opportunity. But along with all that is good about it also comes all of the responsibility too. There is no company staff with multiple departments, divisions, and numerous personnel to handle all the behind the scenes stuff for you anymore - that is all on you and is your responsibility to either do it all yourself or hire your own people to do it for you. Either as staff or more likely as independent service providers, especially when you are just starting out. If you have any interest in starting your own trucking company with your own truck and trailer from the ground up then this is the course for you! We are still adding more and more resources to our site. At the moment there are a few pages that are not fully connected to their links - but we are working on it. So it won't be much longer and the site should be in pretty good shape. As far as an update goes, we did finally launch our own Training Center using Teachable as our platform and that is available from our Courses page under the Classes link and it is available from our additional resources page too. We are working on numerous courses for the Training Center that will be going live over the coming months on all of our core topics. So a lot is still going on. We have not started actively recruiting members for our membership yet, though we do have several facebook groups that are slowly but consistently growing. Soon we will begin looking for a few Independent Sales Associate Membership Recruiters ( they may have that or a different title but the mission will be to recruit members and build the membership as well as sell other select courses and products) which will be a one of a kind opportunity for a fortunate few. Anyway, that about does it for this one - talk to you again soon!

What you do to earn a living is so important and takes up so much of your life it should at the very least be something you enjoy too. It should bring you a certain satisfaction and fulfillment too at the same time. Here is the deal - whatever you do is a matter of choice. I know you know that deep down. But sometimes people forget that they can change jobs, businesses, and careers anytime they want to. So consider this a gentle reminder. You can change your life and what you do for a living anytime you decide to do it. Even if you are content with what you do now - you might want to get in the habit of learning some new skills NOW just in case. Today's world is not so stable as it may have once been, at least in terms of the speed of changes which is becoming ever faster. So think of what interests you and go take some classes and learn some new skills. As far as the site and our business update goes - we are so close to having this massive project finished! At least as much as such a thing can ever be finished anyway. I think of it like a very large boat or a ship, even when it is finished being built it will always be undergoing upgrades, additions, improvements, and maintenance as long as it is afloat - and this is no different. The ship is almost built, but it still has to be loaded out, stores and supplies moved aboard, and the rest of the crew has to be recruited and trained. So kind of like that - and that's where we are at, but it is exciting. Soon our emphasis can shift from all the site design and build stuff to producing more courses and content. We did launch our YouTube channel, for now just our intro - but hey its a start! We also did the same with Vimeo, and hopefully will have our GoToStage channel up and working with its intro in a few days. We have several courses we are trying to get published too on different platforms between all the other stuff - and build out our new Free Resources page and Additional Resources pages on our site. Some of these things have taken a little longer than we planned, but we are still making progress, step by step by step... Thanks for listening and reading and I will talk to you again soon.