Knight Or Swift?

Pete,

I'm in Southwest Florida and the only two companies I found that offer company sponsored training and hire from this area are Knight and CRST. I am scheduled to go to Olive Branch 2/3/14. CRST is a team company if that is something you're interested in. Knight was in the top 3 on my list even before I found out how difficult it is getting hired from this area. Once I found that out, made my decision pretty much a no brainer lol. I will be working out of Lakeland also provided everything goes well.

Check out Sandman's training diary from Olive Branch. Lots of good information and he is a great guy. I sent him a pm here asking if I could contact him with some questions and he was happy to answer them. He has been pretty busy and not around here much but if you contact him through pm I'm sure he would be happy to respond when he has a chance.

Sandman's Training Diary

Before you go jumping into trucking atime workoing after a 7/7 type a fleet you might want to realize What that means. Its basically part time work. 7 on and 7 off means you work two weeks a month. That equals to working only 6 months a year. And depending on your miles I don't think I would like to try and live on 15k to 18k a year.

Better off working at a fast food restraunt and sleeping in your own bed at night instead of being gone a week at a time and making the same money as a 15 year old at Micky D's.

Maybe that amount is all you need to live on a d I will be the first to tell ya that trucking is not about money. But if you want to live the lifestyle and make decent money at the same time then you will need to stay out 30 to 45 days at a time.(4 to 6 weeks).

Pete,

I run for Knight out of Lakeland and went through their school in Olive Branch. The school was awesome and so far i have no complaints. If you decide to come to Knight and run out of Lakeland i will try to answer any questions that you have.

Tom

Would liked to have replied sooner but I've been in the truck since last Saturday. Well I did spend a few hours at home Wednesday because our route was close to my house, but didnt have time to do much.

I didn't get to Florida, I got stuck in St. Louis with the snow storm. Here is a tip, if your concerned about being able to pick up a load call them yourself and don't rely on weekend dispatch to do it for you when you ask them to. We had some delays before leaving Saturday (bad steer tire) so my trainer asked them to call and make sure we could still pick up. They assured him we could load until 9pm. We got there at about 5 and they were closed. Found out later that they close at 2 pm on Saturdays. We didnt even leave the yard till 1:30. S long story short we got hammered by the snow storm since we could not load til Monday.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. If your concerned about Knights physical getting a DOT physical done prior will do nothing for you. The Knight physical is much more involved. I was concerned about it but made it through without a problem and I am not the most fit person in the world. You will be lifting some crates with weights in them, carrying them about ten yards and setting them down. Lift rinse repeat about 5 times. You will do some knee bends a few times, not all the way down just to where your thighs are about level with the ground and your arms out in front of you. You step on and off a step for bout a minute and they let you rest to make sure your rate comes back down. You pull some weights in a crate towards you by pulling a towel they have them set on. You also pick up a crate and set it on a 4' table. And step up and down 10 times on a high step to simulate getting in and out of a truck.

It is much more than a regular DOT physical, a lot of companies are heading this direction from what I hear. But it's still nothing to get worked up over. Maybe a short female would have trouble with the setting it up on a bench, but most people are not going to have a problem. Only people that were delayed were because of blood pressure, my self included which was really strange. But I was really stressed about the test from stories I had heard. Believe me there were some guys in my class that lets just say hadn't seen there feet by looking down in years but they made it through.

If your really concerned just do some stretching and light workouts, even just walking will help, for a couple weeks before you go and you will be fine. T be honest with you the physical just made me want to start working out again, I felt great when it was over lol.

If all goes well I will be testing out this Monday and getting my own truck!

And for the poster that asked, yes they have a 7/7. They also have a 14/7 which is what I was originally wanted. I'm going to try it in my own truck first before I make that move. Those programs require slip seating, and unfortunately not all drivers are the cleanest of creatures lol.

Woody

Personally, I think you dodged a bullet with Swift not hiring from Florida. I honestly wouldn't recommend Swift to anyone unless it's their only way to get into trucking. But I know from what I've read on here before that people on this site are big fans of Swift, so I won't talk about what I've seen at the company.

Brett does not mind people talking about what they have personally seen or experienced at swift or any other company. That's why we are all here, we want to know the truth. He just doesn't want second hand half hearted stories like you get at most sites. You know the ones where xyz company is the worst and let me go for no reason, then you find out the driver was always late and damaged three trucks during their one month experience

Yes as long as you have personally experienced things or saw something with your own eyes then its fine as long as you remember to be some what objective. What one or two individuals have done does not represent a whole company.

No, it's plenty of pretty objective stuff, not the typical whiny "This company is evil and was mean to me because (insert obviously only half of the story here)" kind of stuff I've seen on a lot of sites. It's things that happen consistently no matter what region I'm in or who I'm dealing with. It's from talking to a lot of drivers at the company and a lot of drivers who used to work at Swift and are now at other companies (I. E. Not people who couldn't hack trucking but found they were a lot happier at other companies.) It's time after time after time from my first conversation with a recruiter to over a year later of being told/promised something and then finding out it isn't really the way it was explained to me. It's not getting enough miles to live on for over a year now, hearing that as a constant complaint from other drivers and seeing the drivers lounges at the terminals full of people waiting for loads and then looking outside and seeing more new drivers always being trained. It's all the hours I waste sitting around at customers exchanging messages and making phone calls trying to get things fixed because well over half my loads end up screwed up in one way or another.

I know what the first question is going to be that pops up, so let me allay those concerns now. I was not wronged by some one event in particular and am now resentful for it. I've stayed with this for over a year now and I've been trying and am still trying to make this work. I run as many miles as I can get, I've never called off sick. I've had 100% on time delivery from day one. I've taken just about every load they've given me that I can do legally. I don't ask for special treatment or try to take off more time than I've earned. I get along fine with my driver leader and fleet manager. My DL has said on 2 or 3 occasions that she wishes she had a board full of drivers like me. She doesn't have to babysit me or handhold me and I don't bother her unless there's a legitimate problem. I went on leave for a couple of months to have a big tumor removed from my sinuses and when I came back she pulled strings to get me into the newest truck they had there. When I came back in from checking it out the terminal manager even asked me what I thought of the truck. When I first went solo they told me 2 days off every two weeks meant 2 consecutive 24 hour periods. Then I earned enough respect to be able to say I want 2 full days off and I got it. Now when my home time comes up they ask me what day I'm coming back on. My point in saying this is that I'm not one of those people who got into trucking thinking they should roll out the red carpet for me and got mad when it didn't happen. And I've heard a lot on here that getting along with your dispatchers and such is what makes all the difference. But I work really hard for this company, I've proven myself to be dependable and that I'll put up with a lot and I get along with the people I work with and the rewards just aren't there. I don't think this is a good company and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else because of the way it's run and the policies they have. And bottom line, we don't work as many hours as we do away from home and family just to not make enough miles to live on. Swift doesn't pressure anyone at all to lease trucks, but consistently the only people I've talked to who are getting good miles are the O/Os. Anyway, I could give a lot of examples of things that just aren't right about this company and they are things that happen to every driver and happen consistently.

For over a year now I've been telling myself hang in there, it'll get better. The driving part and basically doing the job have gotten better, but company related stuff hasn't. I stuck it out for a year because you guys harp on staying at your first company a full year. Now I'm sticking with it a while longer because I want to pay off their schooling before I leave and I want to try everything I possibly can to be successful here before I give up. But I'm running out of things to try.

Seems like the main issue is miles. What kind of miles are you getting?

Seems like the main issue is miles. What kind of miles are you getting?

Yeah, you could say it eventually does all come back to miles. Because mostly the other things that are so frustrating lead to wasted time and no miles. There are also issues of them trying to avoid paying detention pay and breakdown pay and the like even when their policies clearly state you should be getting them. Or being asked to spend 3 hours doing a local delivery or some sort of trailer move and getting paid 31 cents for your time because you didn't leave what they consider to be the geographical area, so they pay you 1 mile and conveniently forget the local pay. And they do it every single time.

For most of last year I averaged around 1700 miles a week. Then during the last quarter, the busiest time of year for freight, it (I know you're expecting me to say "went up") actually went down. And yet, I am constantly doing 34s because I'm out of hours. Now, add " 1700 miles a week" to "constantly out of hours" and stir in "almost never get delivery or detention pay" and I think you can see that something is definitely wrong here. And I must be doing something right because the number I always hear other people complaining about is 1500 miles a week. Another thing that is suspicious is that everyone is complaining about getting the same amount of miles.

Another thing that's really frustrating is that they have a ranking system. Bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond. You startat bronze. As you rank up you get a better per mile quarterly bonus. Supposedly you get better loads, too. My understanding is that at gold level you get sent 3 loads at a time and you pick what you want and I've heard that platinum and above you get to pick from whatever loads are available. The rankings are based on preventable accidents (1 allowed per year for silver or gold, none in last 12 months for platinum or diamond), on time percentage (97 for silver, 98 for gold, not sure about the others), and average miles per week for the past 12 weeks. So for the things I can control, I qualify for gold level (don't have enough time with the company for Plat or diamond), but I can't rank up because of miles, which I can't control. And I could theoretically get better loads and more miles if I were higher rank, so it's a catch-22. I can only recall talking to one driver so far who was above bronze and O/Os don't get ranked as far as I know, because they don't get bonuses and such. So I've busted my butt to meet all of the requirements, but still can't rank up. And it's not just me. And I can't see this as a case where I ticked off the load planners because every region has their own planners. I've been Otr for a year and been in every region, and it's the same all over. I'd have to have done something to tick off all the planners everywhere. And as many times as I've been asked by planners to do them favors and bail them out on loads I doubt they'd be mad at me for it.