Who's The Best Middleman: Freight Broker Speaks

Being the person in the middleThere is a mindset that comes with this job, and it takes new brokers a year or two to grow into it.You are not on the shipper's side. You are not on the carrier's side. You are the party responsible for the transaction existing at all, which means your loyalty is to the movement of the freight and to the long-term health of both relationships.That sounds like a compromise position. It is actually the strongest position on the board. In any negotiation, the party who can walk away has leverage, and the broker can always walk away from any single load because there is another load. Neither the shipper with a plant to feed nor the carrier with a payment due on Friday enjoys that freedom to the same degree.But leverage without integrity burns out fast in this business, and I want to be blunt with the new brokers reading this. Freight is a small industry that looks enormous. Dispatchers talk. Carriers keep lists. Shippers change procurement managers and those managers take their memories with them to the next company. The broker who squeezes a carrier for two hundred dollars on a Tuesday will find nobody answering his calls in a hot market on Thursday, and hot markets always come.The best middleman is not the one who extracts the most from a single transaction. The best middleman is the one both sides call first.