In this post, we are continuing our series on finding small fleets and owning this capacity. These are the carriers that run in lanes and never need to post on load boards.
If you’ve taken our advice and torn into your TMS list of every carrier you’ve sold loads to over the years, and you’ve pulled out the small fleets hiding in all that clutter, then congratulations: you now have a list of potential partners that can supercharge your business and keep you safe from fraud.
But a list isn’t a network. Today you turn those names into partners.
A Quick Reminder of Why This Matters
Before you roll up your sleeves, it’s worth restating why this exercise is worth the effort in the first place.
These carriers have customer freight, which makes their availability predictable. They aren’t sitting around waiting for whatever pops up. They run repeatable lanes for their own shippers, which means they end up out of position in the same places, again and again, needing a backhaul. Predictability is the whole game.
The capacity volume is in a different universe than owner-operators. Even at just 30% availability for spot shipments, the math on small fleets makes the 1-to-3 truck crowd look like a rounding error. We’ll run those numbers in a second.
It takes a fraction of the time to move freight. No dialing for dollars. No burning an afternoon on the load board to cover one load. You know who runs the lane, and you call them.
And your margins go up exponentially. Less time per load, less risk per load, better carriers per load. That compounds fast.
Let’s Get to Work
Stick with our example. You started with 20,000 carriers in your TMS. After separating them out by size, you’re now looking at roughly 5,000 carriers running somewhere between 10 and 75 trucks each.
Those aren’t arbitrary numbers, by the way. They’re averages pulled from our actual work with customers. This is what the data looks like when you clean out a real brokerage’s database.
Run the Numbers
Here’s what you’re actually sitting on:
Median fleet size: 25 trucks × 5,000 carriers × 30% available for spot = 37,500 pieces of capacity available for broker freight.
Read that again. Thirty-seven thousand five hundred pieces of capacity – already in your database, already having hauled for you at some point, and you’re ignoring nearly all of it while your brokers grind away on a load board full of strangers.
That’s the opportunity cost of a bloated, unmanaged carrier list.
The Development Stage
Now you’ve got a manageable bite of carriers that are perfect to develop into genuine partners. Because they haul their own customer freight, they run in repeatable lanes – lanes you can line up directly against yours. As you work them, a profile emerges for each one: where they run, when they’re empty, what they want, what they’ll commit to.
We use automation and an AI agent to do this work at scale. If you don’t have access to that kind of tooling, then here’s the low-tech answer: pick up the phone.
And if your first reaction is that this sounds like too much work, look at it honestly. You are already on the phone. Your brokers are already burning hours every single day talking to one-and-dones they’ll never speak to again. Spending that same hour talking to someone who could deliver multiples of ten is a damn sight better use of your time.
Here’s what development actually looks like:
Create a profile by lane, matched to yours. Map their regular runs against your freight. Where do they overlap? Where are they empty in a place you need coverage? That intersection is where a relationship gets built.
Discover their priorities and their willingness to haul for you often. What do they actually care about? Consistent volume? Fast pay? Specific lanes? Certain shippers? You can’t build a partnership if you don’t know what the other side wants out of it.
Offer payment terms that create interest. This is the lever most brokers refuse to pull, and it’s one of the cheapest ways to become a carrier’s preferred customer. Terms that respect their cash flow buy you loyalty that rate alone never will.
Create a contract that gains commitment. Turn the handshake into something real. Commitment on both sides is what separates a partner from a phone number.
Now Make Your TMS Actually Work
Here’s the part that pays you back immediately. Most TMS platforms already have the capability to identify the best partner for a load the moment it’s created. You probably don’t use it because every time you tried, the system spat out a wall of one-and-dones you’d found on load boards years ago. The feature looked useless because the underlying data was useless.
Well, you just changed that.
Put a check on the carriers that are useless, so they don’t ocme up in your search. Highlight your developed partners. Suddenly your TMS surfaces the right carrier instead of a random name, and the technology you’re already paying for starts working for you instead of against you.
This isn’t theory. It’s not anything we haven’t already done for our customers, over and over. We know it works because we’ve watched it work.
If you’ve got questions, or if you just want to tell us you think we’re full of it – our number and email is below. We’ll take either one.