A trucking operation that ran for two years, looked profitable on the surface, and fell apart completely. This is what going back through every load, every mile, and every dollar showed.
Nobody tells you before you sign the loan papers on the truck that gross revenue and actual profit are two different numbers, and that a business can grow one while it destroys the other.
Dispatch took 10%. Factoring took 2.85% of every invoice, plus a $40 quick pay fee whenever the money was needed sooner. Then fuel, driver pay, insurance, the truck payment, permits, and maintenance, when it happened at all.
By the time all of that came out, the hot shot load that looked like $1.95 a mile was putting $0.24 in the account. On a good day. Before the deadhead miles to get to the pickup.
When margins are thin, preventive maintenance is the first thing that gets pushed. One more week. One more month. Right up until the $500 oil change you kept skipping becomes the $8,000 engine repair that puts the truck down for three weeks, with payments that don't stop.
I skipped preventive maintenance to save a dollar. Every time I did, I told myself I'd catch up next month. I never did. And it cost me everything in the end.
It didn't fall apart slowly. It fell apart all at once. The bank called. The credit card companies called. The cash advance lenders, the ones who had covered the thin weeks at rates that made everything worse, called every day.
Bankruptcy is not an event. It is the end of a process that started long before, with loads that looked profitable and weren't, maintenance that got skipped one too many times, and numbers nobody could see until there was nothing left to count.
Going back through every load record, maintenance log and bank statement, the problems were all there. They always had been. That is when the idea for Compass Star started.
Two years running a trucking operation. One bankruptcy. Two years going through the data to understand what actually happened. Compass Star is the result, built for the people living this right now who don't yet know what the numbers are trying to tell them.
No operator should have to lose it all to find out what went wrong.
Run the real numbers and see what you actually keep, before you commit to the run. Free, no card.