Looking at Expediting as a Career Change

Welcome to our blog!

We're Judy and Jim. We live in Ohio and are looking at changing careers. We both currently work in education at a small public charter school. We have reached a point in our lives where we are ready for new challenges and adventures. Our three wonderful children are young adults now, and off living their own lives. We are also Christians, and have felt for sometime that we need to get out and get in touch with and help others. We think this new direction will allow us to do so.

In short, it's simply time for a change!

So what are we looking at doing? And why?

We are looking at becoming Team Straight Truck Expediters for FedEx Custom Critical. What's that you ask?

Well, expediting is a segment of the trucking industry that specializes in delivering "emergency" or "dedicated use" freight. If someone forgot to order enough widgets and a production line was in danger of shutting down, the company would call on an expediter to save the day. The driver(s) would pick up the freight from the supplier and deliver it directly to wherever it was needed. A lot of the freight expediters haul is the result of someone, somewhere making a mistake in not ordering enough of something or ordering the wrong item. Expediters save the day!

Another type of freight is dedicated use. In this case, a customer buys the "use" of an expediter's truck to transport something from point "A" to point "B". They buy the use of the entire truck, and their freight is the only thing on the expediters truck. It could be a valuable work of are, in important piece of machinery or even a part for the space shuttle! The entire run is dedicated to the one customer.

We are going to be driving a straight truck, not a semi. A straight truck has the cargo box directly attached to the frame of the truck. There is no trailer, although the front, straights trucks look just like (and actually are) the same as semis.

Some very good additional information on Expediting can be found here: Successful Expediters. This is a daily blog written by Phil Madsen. Phil and his wife, Diane have been expediters for several years now. We first became interested in expediting by reading and following his blog. Another great source of information is Expediters Online, or EO for short. EO has many articles on the expediting industry as well as an open forum where there is a wealth of information for those wanting to look into expediting as a possible career.

We hope to be driving for FedEx Custom Critical. They are a division of FedEx that specializes in expedited freight. We would be driving someone else's (called an owner) truck to start out, and hopefully maybe buying our own truck in two or three years.

We'll be documenting some of the steps we are taking along the way. Hopefully some of you will find this interesting!

Thanks again for stopping by!