The expedited industry is like a model of this country! The "upper echelon", the well off get richer, and say I do this, or I do that! While the middle and lower drivers get the leftovers, scrimp and save and still go broke.
Ah, what a wonderful country!!!!
I don't think the expedite industry is different than any other in that regard, or different than the whole country for that matter.
It has been stated in different ways as the 20/80 rule, or 10/90, or even 2/98, depending on who is talking. The notion is that 20% of the people control 80% of the wealth (or 10/90 or 2/98). It can be put in another way to say 20% of the people enjoy 80% of the success. People often invoke such statistics to make the case that some people have an unfair advantage over others or that the little guy is always cheated, or whatever.
I have never been one to buy into that kind of thinking. If by some pass of a magic wand you were able to instantly allocate all the wealth in America to each citizen in equal measure, how long do you think it would be before 80% of the money found its way back to 20% of the people?
The masses would give, gamble or spend their money away and in short order the money-skilled would have it in their hands again.
That not due to a lack of fairness and opportunity, I believe. It is due to the financial illiteracy of the masses and people's failure to take it upon themselves to learn even a little bit about what money actually is and how it works. We live in a nation where the majority of people spend more time formulating lottery fantasies than basic financial goals. If they can borrow money to buy a new toy or one-up their neighbor, they will do so without a second thought.
We see the same thing in expediting. There are those who enter the industry well prepared with solid research and strong financial reserves, or at least with a notion to build their reserves once they get started. And there are those who get themselves into a truck loan and jump in almost on a whim and with nothing more than the hope for good luck to keep them going. It is no surprise that the failure rate is higher among the latter group, just as it is no surprise in the country that the people who know how to manage money tend to end up with more than those who do not.
Who are the money-skilled? In my mind they include most any citizen who knows how to save more money than he or she spends. Doing that alone over the years puts people on stable financial ground that those without money come to envy. Beyond that, the money-skilled includes people who have earned money in business, some in huge ways.
As an expediter, or anything else, I have the ability to save more money than I spend. As an owner-operator I have the same opportunity seek profit in my industry of choice as anyone else. How well I do with that opportunity is not a function of fairness. It is a function of the research I do and the decisions I make. The fact that there are other people out there doing better than me has nothing to do with it.
There are teams out there making a lot more money than Diane and me. It is not because they have some special advantage we do not have. It is because, for reasons of our own, we have not made the decisions and taken the actions they have.
It's simple. We don't want to do what they are doing, so we don't. If we had a burning desire to make the big, big money other teams make, we would change our thinking and change our ways to do so. If they were making better money because they knew something and/or someone we don't, we would make it a goal to find out what that something or someone is, and learn what we do not now know.
Again, it's not about fairness or some social deck that is stacked against us. It is about the decisions we make and the actions we take.
For people who are able-bodied, have a clean record, and can read, write and do math at the seventh-grade level, success in expediting is within reach. Just figure out what kind of success you want in the industry, figure out what you must learn and what actions you must take to achieve it, and get to it.
