Dispatch services for new trucking companies that have to get it right the first time
A new MC has two jobs at once: get the truck earning, and build the clean record the new entrant audit expects. Most new carriers get told to pick one. Our desk is built so you don't have to: we find and negotiate the loads, set up every broker packet, and plan each day inside your legal hours while your safety record is still a blank page worth protecting. The fee is 7% of gross while your MC is under 6 months, then the 5% standard tier. No setup fee, no contract, and you confirm every load before it's booked.
RATE CON · 07:00
NEW MC · LOAD 001
$1,420
CONFIRMED
- of gross while your MC is under 6 months
- 7%
- automatically from month 6
- 5%
- setup fee, no contract
- $0
- of loads wait for your yes
- 100%
What new-MC loads actually pay
Here is the honest version, because this is where new carriers get lied to the most. We will not print a rate-per-mile number and call it typical: spot rates move weekly, by lane, by equipment and by season, and any site showing you a fixed "new authority average" is showing you a stale screenshot or a sales pitch. Where you can watch real market movement: DAT and Truckstop publish national spot trend data, and FMCSA licensing data shows how many new authorities enter your market each month. Check the date on anything you read, including this page.
What is stable enough to plan around is the structure. New MCs mostly run spot freight, because contract freight wants history you don't have yet. Spot pays a premium in tight markets and punishes everyone in loose ones. Some brokers won't tender to an MC under 90 days or under 6 months, which shrinks your board; the loads you do see skew toward the freight established carriers passed on. That's not a reason to park; it's a reason to negotiate every single load instead of taking the posted number, keep deadhead short, and get paperwork so clean brokers stop seeing "new MC" and start seeing "easy carrier".
That last part is the actual service. A new authority with a dispatcher counters with lane data, has its packet, COI and W-9 ready in minutes, and never fumbles a check call. Those things don't change the market. They change which side of the market's spread you land on.
One more structural truth worth knowing on day one: your hours are part of your rate. A carrier who can legally cover a 06:00 pickup because yesterday was planned around a full 10-hour break gets freight the carrier with a burned-out 14 can't touch. Hours management isn't just compliance for a new MC; it's inventory. Every hour of drive time you protect is an hour you can sell tomorrow, and protecting those hours is the half of dispatching nobody puts on their homepage.
- DAY 1
FIRST LOADS, MORE VERIFYING - DAY 90
MORE BROKERS OPEN - MONTH 6
FEE 7% -> 5%
Three numbers to know before you quote anything
Rates are noise until you know your own floor. Before your first dispatched load we work these out with you, and they live on your profile so every counteroffer is anchored to something real:
Your all-in cost per mile
Truck payment, insurance, fuel at your real burn, maintenance reserve, plates and permits, and your own pay, divided by honest monthly miles. New carriers routinely price below cost because nobody made them do this arithmetic. Our free cost per mile calculator walks the whole thing; it takes about ten minutes and it is the most profitable ten minutes of your first month.
Your floor rate
Cost per mile plus the margin that makes the truck worth owning, adjusted for deadhead. A load that pays above your floor is a candidate; one below it is a no, even on a slow Tuesday, because cheap loads don't just pay badly, they reposition you badly. Your dispatcher holds this line when a broker leans on the phone.
Your weekly fixed-cost nut
The amount the truck owes you before profit exists, whether it moves or not. Knowing it weekly turns 'should I take this Friday load home' from a feeling into arithmetic, and it's the number your weekly earnings report is measured against.
The ready-to-roll log check
Before your first dispatched load, these six things should be true. Tick them off as you go; every line links to the rule it comes from, because 'a guy told me' is not a compliance program. The drug and alcohol item applies to CDL drivers only. A non-CDL 26 ft box truck or non-CDL hotshot is not under Part 382 testing rules, and anyone selling you a consortium slot for a non-CDL operation is selling you something you don't need.
READY-TO-ROLL LOG CHECK · 0/6
A planning checklist, not legal advice. Your authority, your records; verify each item against the cited rule.
Finish the list and you're not just audit-ready, you're broker-ready: most of what a broker's carrier setup asks for is sitting in these same folders. One afternoon of setup buys you months of two-minute paperwork, and it's the difference between a desk that can book you at 10:15 and a deal that dies while you hunt for a COI.
Go deeper: the ELD mandate rules · FMCSA's registered ELD list · what goes in a DQ file · DOT drug testing consortium
The new entrant audit and your logs
- new entrant monitoring period
- 18 mo
- safety audit usually within
- 12 mo
- RODS + supporting docs kept
- 6 mo
- supporting docs max per driver-day (395.11)
- 8
Every new interstate carrier enters FMCSA's New Entrant Safety Assurance Program: an 18-month monitoring period with a safety audit, usually within the first 12 months. The audit is document review, not a roadside stop: FMCSA looks at your drug and alcohol testing program, driver qualification file, hours of service records, vehicle maintenance records and insurance. Hours of service is one of the places new carriers fail: missing records of duty status, logs that don't match supporting documents, or an ELD nobody set up properly.
Failing items on the audit can mean a corrective action plan, and ignoring that can end in revoked registration. The fix is unglamorous: keep every RODS, keep the supporting documents, know your ELD, and never let a load tempt you into hours you don't have.
Where we fit, said plainly: your dispatcher books only loads that fit inside your 11-hour driving limit and 14-hour window, with the 30-minute break and your 60/70-hour cycle already in the math. That means the logs you hand an auditor describe weeks that were planned legal, not patched legal. We'll also nag you, kindly, about the records. But the records are yours: a dispatch service doesn't keep your DQ file or your logs, and you should distrust any that offers to.
SOURCE: FMCSA New Entrant Safety Assurance Program · 49 CFR Part 385 subpart D · checked 2026-10 · DOT hours of service explained
The audit shelf: what to keep, where, for how long
Auditors don't grade effort; they grade retrieval. A new carrier who can produce any requested document in two minutes has a different audit than one digging through a cab. Set up these folders in week one, paper or cloud, and feed them weekly:
RODS + SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS
6 months rolling. Fuel receipts, BOLs, tolls, dispatch records; up to 8 supporting docs per driver per day under 395.11.
DRIVER QUALIFICATION FILE
Life of employment plus 3 years. Application, MVR annually, medical certificate, road test record.
DRUG & ALCOHOL PROGRAM RECORDS
CDL operations: consortium enrollment, pre-employment result, random selections, Clearinghouse queries.
VEHICLE MAINTENANCE FILE
Per unit: inspections, repairs, annual inspection proof; 12 months plus 6 after you sell the truck.
INSURANCE AND AUTHORITY
Current COI, MCS-90 from your insurer, authority letter. Brokers ask for these weekly anyway; keep them one tap away.
None of this is our paperwork to hold, and that's deliberate: a dispatch service holding your compliance records is a dependency you don't want. We remind; you own.
The first 90 days, week by honest week
No revenue promises here; anyone promising a new authority specific money is guessing with your truck. What we can describe is the work, because it's the same work every time:
- 1Setup callday 1
- 2Packets outdays 1-3
- 3First rate conyour yes
- 4Clean loads stack upweeks 1-4
- 5Brokers repeatmonths 2-3
Days 1-3: paperwork once, properly
Setup call, your lane map and floor rate, your hours pattern and home time. We build your carrier packet kit: W-9, COI, authority letter, NOA if you factor. First broker setups go out the same day. You confirm your first rate con, usually within 1 to 3 business days.
Weeks 1-4: volume over vanity
Early weeks are about consistent, clean loads: picked up on time, delivered with a POD the same day, detention documented. Every clean load is a reference. Your dispatcher keeps the truck moving and keeps a list of which brokers tendered easily, because those become your repeat lanes.
Months 2-3: the wall starts cracking
Brokers with 90-day minimums start opening. Repeat freight appears from brokers whose loads you ran clean. Your weekly report now has enough history to show which lanes earn and which just look busy. Around month 6 your fee drops to the 5% standard tier, and some of the 6-month-minimum brokers open too.
That's the whole playbook. It isn't secret; it's just tedious, and tedious is what a desk is for. Your only unskippable contribution is the clean record, which is why the checklist above sits in the middle of this page and not in a footnote. What you'll see from us weekly while it runs: the earnings report, your recap hours trend, deadhead percentage, and which brokers repeated. Four numbers, one page, no dashboard to learn, and every one of them is a number you can use to fire us if we stop earning the fee.
First-year mistakes we see from the desk, and the rule that bites
None of these are character flaws. They're what happens when one person does five jobs at once. Each has a rule or a market mechanic attached, which is why they're worth naming before they're expensive:
EXAMPLE: same day, same load. One slow dock turns the left plan into a violation; the right plan absorbs it.
- Planning the day to a zero-hour finish
- If the plan only works when you arrive with 0:00 left on the 14-hour window, one slow dock makes you choose between a violation and a dead load. The window doesn't pause for dock time (49 CFR 395.3(a)(2)), so every plan we book carries slack. A day that ends with an hour to spare isn't money left on the table; it's the margin that kept your record clean.
- Treating the 30-minute break as an interruption
- After 8 cumulative driving hours you need a 30-minute non-driving break (395.3(a)(3)(ii)). Fight it and it lands at the worst mile of the day. Plan it, and it disappears into a fuel stop or a dock you were sitting at anyway. We place it on the plan before the wheels turn.
- Ignoring the recap until Thursday
- The 60/70-hour cycle (395.3(b)) is a rolling window, not a weekly allowance. Carriers who look at it daily keep Friday profitable; carriers who discover it Thursday afternoon donate their best-paying day to a restart they didn't plan. Your dispatcher reads your recap every morning.
- Taking the rate without pricing the reload
- A strong outbound into a weak freight market is a pay cut wearing a good rate. The reload market on the destination end is part of every load's real price, which is why we quote round-trip math, not single-leg optimism.
- Letting paperwork lag
- Late PODs slow broker payment, stall factoring, and quietly mark you as a carrier who's work to deal with. Same-day paperwork is free reputation. We chase it so you don't have to remember to.
- Saying yes out of fear
- New carriers take bad loads because an empty truck is terrifying. That's exactly the pressure a desk removes: when someone is already shopping the next three loads, a no stops feeling like a risk. And here, a no is always yours to say.
Cash flow for a new authority
New MCs feel the payment gap hardest: the first invoice bills in week one and pays in week six, and diesel doesn't wait. Factoring sells that invoice for same-week cash, and factors generally care about your broker's credit, not your MC's age, which is exactly backward from how everything else treats a new authority. We refer carriers to our factoring partner RTS and may be paid for referrals; the rate quote comes from them, and dispatch works the same whether you factor or not. Factoring for new authorities
Factoring plus dispatch is the common new-authority stack: the desk keeps the truck earning, the factor keeps the earnings liquid, and your weekly report shows both numbers side by side so neither service gets to hide behind the other.
Get a new-MC factoring rateNew MC dispatch questions, answered straight
Day one is the best day to look dispatched
7% under 6 months, then 5%. No contract. You confirm every load.
Start my new authority right