I hate my job. Won’t go into it here, but looking for something else–horses seem to make me happy. 
I don’t ride well enough to be pro. Too old to groom or braid professionally. Maybe barn management would work, but I want to go to shows–I ride as an amateur. I’ve thousands of miles of hauling experience from my young ammy/barn manager days. Can you talk me into, or out of doing some pro horse hauling? Thinking of local to my state and region. Can I do with a four horse trailer? I am not looking to compete with the big haulers. Just mid range horse show runs for barns who need a few extras hauled, or mid week “oops, we need to get one to a show quick” type of thing. Do I have to have DOT approval, and how do I apply? If you are hauler, what are the pitfalls or pluses? I imagine I will have to double the sit ups and core exercise to keep my mid section!! lol. Thanks for all feedback. Cross-posted, but didn’t see a category specific to this subject.
You will need a commercial license and whatever the new American regulations for hours and monitoring are. Contact your state motor vehicle branch for details.
You will also need to crunch numbers on your gas and operating costs to see if you can get yourself a reasonable hourly wage out of what the local market will bear.
There have been previous discussions on the economics of this. I know that for me to go pick up my truck and trailer on my friends’ farm, come back to my stable, drive to a trail system one hour away, and then back again, cost me $60 just in gasoline last summer, and this summer it will be more. That’s four hours driving and let’s say 20 minutes to load and unload. If you want to take gas, pro-rated repairs or truck payments, and a living wage of $20 an hour, you’d need to charge close to $200 for a short local haul. That is indeed what the local haulers charge. Basically you couldn’t pay me to do it.
Really you need to find out what the going rate is for local short hauls, and then crunch the numbers on your own situation to see if you can make a decent hourly wage, cover your truck and business expenses, and get enough work to cover your own living expenses.
I doubt you are going to get 40 hours a week of hauling year around. Depending on your climate, it is very seasonal.
Plus you are going to hauling folks to their shows every weekend and not to your own shows!
I also have never figured out what haulers do all day once they drop someone off at a show at 7 am and have to be back at 4 pm. If you stay at the show you aren’t earning income. If you go home that is more gas and time.
I would suggest getting the drivers license and business license, doing up some business plan spread sheets, and then trying this as a part time job for a few months to see if you like it.
Also in addition to your driving skills, the thing that really sets apart local haulers IME is their ability to load problem horses, and problem humans :).
Consider interstate vs intrastate. Once you cross a state border, Fed regulations apply.
Also check the cost of commercial insurance for your business.
Also consider how good you are at handling difficult horses, e.g., horses that refuse to load, refuse to unload, fly off the trailer, etc.
Summer can be very busy in the mid Atlantic area wrt horse racing. Most trainers are based at one track or training center, but will race at multiple tracks. I think rates start at about $250 to haul a horse to a track within an hour for the race and bring him back when it’s over. I’ve seen as high as $650 if the drive is 3-4 hours, I think.
The one and only time I ever used a commercial shipper was when I was a young adult and the only one in my barn showing that weekend. My trainer’s truck broke down and she got a shipper for me. He took me to a show 30 miles away, dropped me off, and picked me up at end of the day and took me back to the barn. It was about $275 iirc.
I’m going to talk you out of it. First of all, as Scribbler points out, it’s very hard to charge enough to make it worth your while. People are out of touch with what it really costs to own, maintain, and fuel a truck/trailer. Local would-be customers will be expecting bargain rates from someone who isn’t one of the big companies. Even if you can charge those higher rates, you are going to be in competition with the major companies, against whom you will be at a disadvantage. Even at higher rates, you will often make hauls that will be a loss for you. For example, all it takes is one unruly horse to cause a significant amount of damage. Also, as a pro hauler you will be expected to deal with a lot of really unreasonable horses. Horses that have never loaded before. Yearlings. Kickers. Horses prone to panic. Loading and unloading a smorgasbord of unfamiliar horses can be very dangerous. One trip to the ER is $$. Aside from the risk to you, hauling horses is a high liability business. Injury to the horses, injury to bystanders, you could even be responsible for injury to the owners if they get hurt trying to help load or unload the horse.
FWIW, I have a truck and trailer, am insured to haul, and charge my clients close to what the pro companies charge, and I still greatly prefer for the pro companies to do it. I typically only haul client horses when I’m going somewhere anyway, or when a pro company is not available.
I was doing the math on this in my head. Just going with recreational insurance, on truck and trailer thats about $2000 a year. If I charged $200 a haul, and took out $60 for gas, $80 for my hourly wage, it would take me 33 hauls to pay off my insurance.
I bought my rig for cash, but let’s say I put $2000 worth of maintenance into the truck over the winter. That’s another 33 hauls.
In other words 66 trips to just break even on owning the rig, and earn $5280 in hourly wages, before tax.
I know folks do this professionally but I don’t know how they make it work.
Or conversely you could say that at $200 a haul, it would take 14 trips to pay off the insurance and another 14 to pay off the maintenance. That would be 28 trips to cover the cost of owning the rig after which you could then pocket $140 a trip.
Would your “recreational” insurance cover your hauling horses for hire?
There are a lot of factors that affect the cost of insurance policies. My husband and I just bought a 6-horse van, and are toying with the idea of hauling professionally. Commercial insurance policy with a large national company was $800 for the year. And we would have had to carry commercial insurance on the rig anyway, based on it’s weight.
Not at all. I expect commercial vehicle insurance would be a lot more expensive and maybe require that I upgrade my driver’s license as well.
Then there would be liability business insurance on top of that.
Was just using my own figures to show how long it would take to break even.
Well, where I live it’s about $1500 for a private vehicle and trailer carries another insurance.
It’s Canada everything is more expensive so I’m sure there are American states or agencies with much lower rates.
That’s something OP needs to research locally.
$800 means it would take 8 trips to pay off the insurance using my figures.
I suppose if the rig is already maintained for private use you might say you’d have it insured anyways. But my point to the OP was really to fully understand all your costs and make sure you aren’t losing money on the venture.
They apply either way. Intrastate drivers have similar DOT requirements, including a physical exam, they just have a different card.
No one has mentioned yet that there is a market out there of people who will pay a smaller hauler to haul their own horse/s exclusive of any other horses being aboard, and willing to pay more money for it too. I guess it depends upon where the OP is and where they would want their routes to be.
I think OP was proposing just local day trips.
I wonder if the money is really made on long distance and overnight?
You really couldn’t pay me enough to do it professionally. To me there are too many out of pocket expenses, too much liability, and just hard to make a viable business model out of it.
Recently I have paid:
$1100 wisconsin to MA
$2300 South Dakota to MA
both horses in box stalls. The first trip was straight through, 19hrs. The second had two layovers (included in that price at $50/nt). These rates are much less than what an Equine Express/Bob Hubbard/etc get. The first trip had a 7h slant and the second I believe uses a 6h head to head. The larger the stalls, the fewer the horses who can go on the trips.
While I think you must be able to make money at it, it’s a hard life being on the road all the time to get the $$$ trips. And customers are picky when not using one of the tractor trailer companies - I expect to see a late model truck in very good cosmetic condition, and a very clean trailer with happy horses on it when it arrives for pickup. The first guy had a nearly brand new trailer and a diesel dually - probably all in $125,000 of equipment easy. That’s a lot to cover with $1100 trips.
