Commercial auto insurance — playbook

For the agency, MGA or wholesaler writing primary liability and physical damage. Winning looks like eleven bound accounts a month, most of them found before the incumbent's renewal letter went out.

Offer id insurance. Weights and formulas quoted here are read directly from src/30-engine.js. Counts are from the live federal file on 14 August 2026 unless marked otherwise.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying a calendar, not a list. A commercial trucking policy runs twelve months, so a carrier is purchasable on roughly one day a year plus any mid-term blow-up. Everything you pay for in this product is an attempt to know which day that is, and to be standing there first. Nobody else in the nine offers works this way. A factor can call a carrier any Tuesday. You get one shot a year and it closes in sixty days.

That is why your queue is built out of insurance events almost exclusively, and why the four highest weights in your profile are all insurance filings: a suspension notice at +100, a lapse at +88, a renewal at +68, a new authority at +64. Nothing else in the system comes close. A safety score over an intervention threshold is worth +34 to you — it is a pricing input, not a reason to dial. The same score is worth +90 to a compliance consultant and −70 to a broker. Same number, three different meanings, and yours is the mildest of the three.

The second thing you are buying is a disqualifier that no list vendor will sell you. Your profile is the only one of the nine that scores INS_REPLACED at all, and it scores it at −34. Future-dated rows in the federal insurance file exist — 661 of them on 14 August 2026 — and 659 of those are TERM/REPL, meaning the carrier already bought a new policy from somebody else. Every vendor selling "advance cancellation alerts" off that file is selling you carriers who just re-insured. Read that again. The most commonly sold product in your segment is an inverted signal. HAULVANE takes points off for it.

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Your signal map

Every signal carrying a non-zero weight in the insurance profile. Weights are exact, from OFFERS[insurance].w.

The one thing that is not in the table. Your hard filter is status !== 'ACTIVE' — anything not active is removed before scoring. Your fit band is fleet size 2 → 8–30 → 90. Below two trucks your fit contribution is zero. A one-truck new authority, interstate, no inspection history, 100 days into its window scores 36 — COLD. That is deliberate and it is correct.

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The three plays

Counts marked [ESTIMATE] show their basis. The exact count for any filter set is printed live next to each signal checkbox in the Prospector filter panel and in the Results header — read it, do not guess.

Play 1 — The thirty-day clock

Filter. Offer: Commercial auto insurance. Minimum priority score: 85. Active signals: Shutdown notice served + Insurance lapsed. Fleet size: 2 to 90. States: yours.

How many. 1,632 involuntary suspension notices were live nationally with a future effective date on 14 August 2026. Because the notice life is exactly 30 days, the standing pool equals the monthly flow: about 1,632 fresh notices a month nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: 1,632 live pool ÷ a fixed 30-day life]. Your share is your states' share of the carrier base. About 16 a month per 1% of the national base [ESTIMATE — same basis, divided by share]. The lapsed pool cannot be counted honestly yet: 14,561 of the 18,252 CANCEL rows were backfilled on a single day during FMCSA's registration-system migration, so aggregates off that file are not usable. Individual rows are.

One quirk to know. When the suspension effective date is more than about 17 days out, the headline chip reads Insurance lapsed, not Shutdown notice served. That is the decay math: AUTH_SUSPEND is decayed by days-to-deadline and INS_LAPSED is not, so 100 × e^(−d/130) drops below 88 at d ≈ 17. Same carrier, same emergency. Do not filter on the chip alone — check both signals.

Opening line. "FMCSA served you a suspension notice on the 4th. Your authority goes down on the 3rd of September unless a new BMC-91X is on file before then — that's 20 days. I can have a quote in front of you this afternoon."

Good looks like. Every one in your states contacted the same day it appears. 15% bind rate [ESTIMATE — basis: published exclusive-web lead close rates are 5–12%; raised because there is a filed federal deadline and the alternative is parking the fleet]. A 10-truck interstate carrier under a live notice scores 97.

Play 2 — Sixty days out, not six

Filter. Minimum priority score: 65. Active signals: Renewal coming up. Fleet size: 8 to 30 — the plateau of your fit band, where every truck is worth full points. States: yours. Then click the Call by column header twice to sort descending.

That sort is the whole play. HAULVANE's priority score decays INS_RENEWAL by days-to-anniversary, so a renewal 5 days out scores 68 × 0.96 = 65 and one 55 days out scores 68 × 0.65 = 44. The score pushes late renewals to the top. The money is at the other end. At 55 days you are ahead of the incumbent's renewal letter. At 5 days you are the fourth person to call that week and the carrier has already had a number put in front of them. Sort against the score here. It is the one place in this playbook where you should.

How many. If policies run twelve months and anniversaries are evenly spread, the 60-day window holds 16.4% of your insured universe at any moment (60 ÷ 365). Roughly a third of the 2,236,411 active census records hold an authority docket, so call it ~745,000 insured carriers nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,236,411 active × the ~one-third docket-holding share], of which ~122,000 are inside a renewal window today [ESTIMATE — same basis × 16.4%]. Apply your states' share, then the 8–30 truck band, and it gets workable fast.

Opening line. "Looks like your policy with Canal comes up around the 12th of October. Most carriers your size don't start looking until two weeks out and end up renewing at whatever number lands in front of them. Can I put a number next to your current one before then?"

Note the hedge. Looks like. Around. The date is estimated, the export column is literally named renewal_estimated, and if you assert it and you are three weeks wrong you have told the carrier you do not know what you are talking about.

Good looks like. 30 dials a day into this block. 30% of conversations reach a quote, 7% of worked carriers bind [ESTIMATE — basis: published exclusive-web close 5–12%, taken at the low-middle because the incumbent also gets a look].

Play 3 — The second policy

Filter. Minimum priority score: 60. Active signals: Renewal coming up. Fleet size: 1 to 8. States: yours. Cross-check authority age in the dossier — you want carriers 10 to 14 months into their authority.

Why this beats chasing new authorities. First-year carriers pay 40–100% more than established operators. Their first policy was bought in a panic, in week one, from whoever called first out of the forty-eight. Twelve months later they have a clean or nearly clean year of operating history and they are about to be quoted a number that no longer reflects who they are. That is the easiest re-shop in commercial trucking, and almost nobody works it, because everybody is still fighting over the day-three phone call. HAULVANE scores that day-three carrier at 36 — COLD for you, and it is right.

How many. 2,997 operating authorities were granted in July 2026. Twelve months later that same cohort produces roughly 3,000 first renewals a month nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: July 2026 grant count, assumed flat, offset twelve months]. Ignore the 15,354 new USDOT registrations in the same month. That is a 5.1x gap and most of those companies are private fleets hauling their own goods who will never buy a trucking policy.

Opening line. "You've had the authority about a year now. Your first policy was priced like a first-year carrier, which means you paid somewhere between forty and a hundred percent over what an established operator pays. You've got twelve months of history now. Want me to see what that's worth before you renew?"

Good looks like. 5% bind [ESTIMATE — basis: published exclusive-web low end, discounted for a saturated channel]. But these are the accounts that stay: retention runs 84–85% industry-wide and 93–95% at the top agencies, and trucking commission is level on renewal rather than stepping down.

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Your week

Roughly 150 distinct carriers a month. About eight new dossiers a day plus follow-ups. That is a real producer's load, not a dialer's.

Monday, first thing. Signal desk, Forced tab, before you open email. Every AUTH_SUSPEND and INS_LAPSED in your states. There will not be many — that scarcity is the point. Open each dossier, read the Why now sentence, and call. Every one of these before 10am. If you have twelve of them and you get through six, you have wasted the best six leads you will see this week.

Monday, rest of the day. Renewal calendar, third icon down the left rail. Look at the next 26 weeks and the Inside 30 days table at the bottom. Build your Tuesday-to-Thursday block from the 40-to-60-day band, not the inside-30 one.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The renewal block. 30 dials a day. Sort Call by descending so the furthest-out renewals come first. Open the dossier before you dial — the Insured by column tells you which incumbent you are displacing, and that changes the call. Log the quotes.

Thursday afternoon. Fleet growth. FLEET_GROWTH carries no countdown, so it will sit in your queue forever and it will never become urgent by itself. Give it a fixed slot or it never gets called. Mid-term endorsement first, re-market conversation second.

Friday morning. Quotes out. Anything you promised Monday to Thursday goes out Friday or it does not go out.

Friday afternoon. Hygiene. Export CSV, push to CRM, map why_now to notes and act_by to the follow-up date. Then do the thing nobody does: filter for Just switched insurer, take every INS_REPLACED row, and diary each one for month ten with the incumbent's name and the replacement date attached. That file is worth more next year than this week's queue is worth today. Fifteen minutes a week.

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What NOT to chase

Anything a vendor calls a "future-dated cancellation." There is no such thing. Of 18,252 CANCEL rows in the federal insurance file, zero carry a future effective date — the most recent was seven days in the past. The 661 future-dated rows are 659 TERM/REPL and they mean the carrier is already re-insured. If a competitor's demo shows you forward-dated insurance events, they are showing you their own product's biggest defect and calling it a feature.

The three-day-old authority. Carriers report 48 calls in the first two days and 20 calls a day after that. TruckersReport threads have owner-operators buying burner phones specifically to defeat your channel. Being faster is not a strategy when the target has turned the phone off. Work the back half of the 210-day window and the twelve-month renewal instead.

New USDOT registrations. 15,354 in July 2026 against 2,997 authority grants. A vendor advertising "15,000+ new carrier leads a month" is counting registrations, and most of those are private fleets who need a number, not a policy.

One-truck owner-operators, as a queue. Your fit band floors at two trucks. A one-truck carrier contributes zero fit, which caps their total in the thirties. Write them if they call you. Do not build a week around them. The commission on a single truck at HAULVANE's own model is $1,620.

Anything over 90 trucks. Your fit band ceilings at 90 and hits zero above it. Fleets that size run brokered programs through Amwins-class transportation MGAs with an incumbent relationship measured in decades. You are not displacing that with a phone call about a derived anniversary date.

Dormant carriers. −60 on the signal and −0.45 on viability. Zero inspections in 24 months on an authority older than 400 days. They will not answer, and if they answer they are not running trucks.

RATING_COND carriers, unless you have the market. +20 is a real weight and a Conditional rating genuinely makes a carrier shop. But if you cannot place it, you have spent a week producing a quote nobody will write. Know your markets before you filter on this.

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The money

HAULVANE's formula, exactly as it runs:

value = min(power_units, 120) × $13,500 × 0.12

valueNote: "yr-1 commission @ 12% of ~$13.5k/unit premium"

Three assumptions in that line, all of them arguable:

1. $13,500 annual premium per power unit. Defensible for your band. Non-fleet operators running 2 to 9 trucks pay $550–$1,500 per unit per month, which is $6,600–$18,000 per unit per year. A 20-truck fleet at midpoint rates costs about $252,000 a year, or $12,600 per unit. So $13,500 sits in the upper half for small fleets and slightly high for 20-plus.
2. 12% new-business commission. This is the top of the range. The true agency range is 8–12%; the commonly published figure is 8–10%; MGAs take 12–15%; a producer on a split may see 4–5%.
3. Capped at 120 units. Above that the model stops counting, which is fine because your fit band already died at 90.

What the Worth column pays out, before correction:

Multiply the Worth column by 0.75 if you are an agency at 9%, by 0.375 if you are a producer on a 4–5% split, by 1.08 if you are an MGA at 13%. Do this once and write the number on your monitor. The published research bracket for a 20-truck fleet is $20,160–$25,200 a year at 8–10%, which matches the 9% column above and not the Worth column.

A month of working this queue.

150 distinct carriers worked [ESTIMATE — basis: eight new dossiers a day over 20 working days plus follow-ups]:

Average worked fleet: 8 trucks [ESTIMATE — basis: HAULVANE's fit plateau starts at 8, and 91.5% of US carriers run 10 or fewer].

• At HAULVANE's 12%: 11 × $12,960 = $142,560 year-one commission
• At an agency 9%: 11 × $9,720 = $106,920
• At a producer 4.5%: 11 × $4,860 = $53,460

Then it recurs. Trucking commission is generally level at 8–10% on renewal rather than stepping down, which is why book retention drives agency valuation more than new-business volume. At 84–85% retention the expected account life is about 6.7 years. An 8-truck account at 9% is roughly $65,000 of lifetime commission. The published benchmark for a 20-truck account is $22,000 a year and about $145,000 lifetime.

What this costs you today. Agents currently buy exclusive web leads at $110, live transfers at $225, appointments at $325–$425. The published break-even on that: 50 exclusive leads at $110 is $5,500, an 8% close is 4 binds, $1,400 average commission is $5,600 — a 1.02x first-year return. At market lead prices agents break even in year one and make all their profit on renewals. Eleven binds a month against any software subscription is not a close call.

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Objections you will hear

"I just renewed." Then your anniversary is on a different day than we estimated, which happens — that date is calculated, not filed. What month does it actually come up? (Write it down. That correction is worth more than the call.)

"My agent handles all that." I'm not asking you to fire anyone. I'm asking to put one number next to theirs sixty days before it's due, so you're comparing instead of accepting.

"How did you get my number?" Your USDOT registration and your insurance filings are federal public records. The phone number is on your MCS-150. Everyone who calls you got it the same way — the difference is that I read the filing before I dialed.

"I get twenty of these calls a day." You do, and most of them don't know your policy comes up in October or who writes it now. I do. If that's not worth four minutes, I'll go away.

"My safety scores are fine." Most carriers don't have scores. A BASIC only gets a percentile after enough inspections with violations, so most of the industry shows insufficient data in most categories. Unrated isn't the same as clean, and an underwriter knows the difference.

"Insurance goes up every year no matter what I do." It's up about 43% per mile since 2019, and 2024 was the worst single year at 12.1%. But the gap between the best and worst pricing outcomes is widening, which means the same risk gets materially different quotes now. That's the argument for shopping, not against it.

"I already sent it to my agent" (on a suspension notice) The federal record still shows nothing filed. Until the BMC-91X is accepted the effective date stands, and that date is in the notice they served you. If it's genuinely in flight, great — call me on the 2nd if it isn't there.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Header, top right — I sell. Select Commercial auto insurance. Everything downstream re-ranks: the desk, the Prospector, the Renewal calendar, the Territory map, the Playbook screen.
2. Left rail, first icon — Signal desk. Click the Forced tab. This is your Monday morning, and it is the shortest list on the screen.
3. Left rail, second icon — Prospector. The filter panel is on the left: - Fleet size — trucks: two sliders, 1 to 200. Set 2 and 90 to match your fit band. The max slider reads "200+" at the top. - Minimum priority score: slider, 0 to 95 in steps of 5, defaults to 55. Use 85 for forced-buy, 65 for renewals, 60 for the second-policy play. - Active signals: checkboxes with a live count printed beside each label. Use that count instead of estimating. - States: checkboxes, also counted. - Cargo: filter only if you have a market appetite reason to.
4. Sort. Click Priority for the default. Click Call by twice for descending — that is how you get the furthest-out renewals first, which is play 2.
5. The column that is yours. For the insurance offer the sixth column is Insured by — the incumbent you are displacing. No other offer gets that column. Read it before you dial.
6. Save & monitor, top right of the Results panel. Save three searches on day one: - Forced buy, my states — signals Shutdown notice served + Insurance lapsed, score 85, no state cap on urgency. - Renewals 40–60 days, 8–30 trucks — signal Renewal coming up, score 65. - Just switched — diary — signal Just switched insurer, score floor 0. You have to drag the slider down to see them, because they score negative. That is the point.
7. Export CSV, top right. File lands as haulvane-insurance-<date>.csv, up to 5,000 rows, 24 columns.

Columns that matter for you, in order of how often you will use them:

insurer — who you are displacing. renewal_estimated — the estimated renewal date. Named that way on purpose. Do not paste it into a customer-facing document as a fact. suspension_effective — the only filed forward date in the file. Sort by it. insurance_lapsed_on — how many days they have been uninsured. act_by — map this to your CRM's follow-up date field. why_now — the full sentence with the dates in it. Map to notes. Your callers should never need to open HAULVANE to know why they are dialing. dot — the permanent federal ID. If you carry one field into your CRM, carry this one. power_units — check it against the fit band before you spend an hour. est_value_usd — remember to apply your commission correction factor.

Ignore cargo and drivers unless you have a specific appetite question. They are stale — carriers only refile the MCS-150 every 24 months and 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date at all.

Freight factoring — playbook

For the factor buying invoices from small carriers. Winning looks like six or seven funded clients a month, every one of them signed before their first invoice went out the door.

Offer id factoring. Weights and formulas quoted here are read directly from src/30-engine.js. Counts are from the live federal file on 14 August 2026 unless marked otherwise.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying week one. A carrier who has just been granted operating authority has bought trucks, bought insurance, and has not been paid by anybody yet. Their first load delivers in a fortnight and the broker pays in 30 to 45 days after that. Somewhere in between, they run out of money. That gap is your entire product, and it exists for a period of about eight weeks in the life of each carrier. Miss it and they either signed with somebody else or they figured out how to survive without you, and neither of those reverses easily.

This is why your profile looks nothing like an insurance agent's. NEW_AUTH is +100 — the highest weight you have, and the only signal in your book that matters more than everything else combined. Fleet growth is +62 because a carrier going from four trucks to seven has just tripled the size of its receivables gap without tripling its bank balance. High mileage is +40 because a truck running 140,000 miles a year has more money tied up in unpaid invoices than one running 80,000. That is the whole positive side of your queue: new, growing, running hard.

Then there is the part that separates you from every other seller in this product. A carrier under a federal suspension notice is worth −35 to you. An insurance agent sees the highest-value lead in the entire system, +100, the most buyable carrier in the file. You see a company whose trucks stop moving in under 30 days and whose invoices will therefore stop existing. Same federal event. Same day. Opposite sign. INS_LAPSED is −25 to you and +88 to the agent. When somebody asks what the offer layer in this product is actually for, this is the answer: it is for the fact that the agent should call that carrier this afternoon and you should not call them at all.

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Your signal map

Every signal carrying a non-zero weight in the factoring profile. Weights are exact, from OFFERS[factoring].w.

Your hard filter is stricter than most. kill removes any carrier that is not ACTIVE or that runs more than 60 power units. Above 60 trucks a carrier has a bank line of credit, an asset-based lender, or a treasury function, and you are not competing for that with a 2.4% discount rate. Your fit band is 1 → 1–8 → 25, so a single-truck owner-operator gets full fit credit — the only offer of the three where that is true. Authority age under 900 days adds 0.30 to fit; over that it adds 0.05.

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The three plays

Counts marked [ESTIMATE] show their basis. The exact count for any filter set is printed live next to each signal checkbox in the Prospector filter panel and in the Results header.

Play 1 — Week one

Filter. Offer: Freight factoring. Minimum priority score: 55. Active signals: Brand new carrier. Fleet size: 1 to 8. States: yours. Sort by Priority, descending, which is the default.

The decay basis, because it is the whole play. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. The freshest carrier therefore carries the largest multiplier:

Worked all the way through: a 15-day-old, one-truck, interstate authority scores 85 — HOT. The same carrier at 150 days and three trucks scores 59 — WATCH. Across the whole file the pattern holds: carriers granted authority in the last 25 days average 87 on this offer, against 59 for those granted 180 to 205 days ago. The freshest lead is the best lead and it is also the top row, so set the floor at 55, filter to Brand new carrier, sort by Priority and work down. If you want a tighter window than 55 gives you, raise the floor rather than re-sorting — 75 leaves a list whose median authority is about a month old, 80 about three weeks.

How many. 2,997 operating authorities were granted in July 2026. Over the 210-day window that is roughly 20,700 carriers in the NEW_AUTH pool at any moment nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,997 grants/month × 210 ÷ 30.4, assuming a flat grant rate]. The fresh slice you actually want — the first 30 days — is about 3,000 a month nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: the July 2026 grant count directly]. Phone numbers are on 99.4% of active records and email on 76.0%, so contactability is not your constraint. Attention is.

Opening line. "Saw your authority came through on the 3rd of June — congratulations, that's the hard part done. Have you got your factoring sorted yet, or are you still waiting 45 days to get paid?"

Good looks like. Every new grant in your states contacted inside 14 days. 3% funded [ESTIMATE — basis: below the published 5–12% exclusive-web insurance band, because this channel is saturated to the point of hostility and funding requires a credit and UCC review rather than a signature].

Play 2 — The growth squeeze

Filter. Minimum priority score: 65. Active signals: Adding trucks. Fleet size: 3 to 25. States: yours.

Why it works. FLEET_GROWTH carries no countdown, so nothing in the app will tell you it is urgent — but it does decay, on recency, running down from the MCS-150 filing date. It is worth the full 62 the week the filing lands, about 31 at 90 days, and the 15.5 floor past six months. On a 7-truck carrier a 65 floor is roughly the first two months of that. So it will not chase you, and it does go stale. A carrier that filed an MCS-150 taking them from four trucks to seven has 75% more freight in transit and the same advance limit from whoever funds them today. That is the conversation: not "do you factor" but "what is your facility capped at, and when did you last renegotiate it."

This is your displacement play. New authorities are a land grab. Growing carriers are already somebody's client and are the only realistic way to take business off a competitor.

How many. No verified national count exists for MCS-150 growth events, and I will not invent one — the Active signals checkbox in the filter panel prints the live count for your filter set, and FMCSA suspended biennial-update enforcement on 25 June 2026, which makes any forward projection off this field unreliable. Read the number on screen.

Opening line. "Your last MCS-150 took you from four trucks to seven. Whoever's funding you set your advance limit when you had four. What's it capped at now, and how often are you hitting the ceiling?"

Good looks like. 4% funded [ESTIMATE — basis: the play-1 rate, raised because the carrier has an existing factoring relationship and therefore already understands the product]. Larger average client: the fit plateau runs to 8 trucks and the band to 25.

Play 3 — High miles, small fleet

Filter. Minimum priority score: 60. Active signals: Running high miles. Fleet size: 1 to 8. States: yours.

Why it works. MILEAGE_HIGH fires above 134,000 miles per truck per year, top decile utilization. Your fee is a percentage of factored volume, and factored volume tracks miles, not trucks. A two-truck carrier running 150,000 miles per truck is worth more to you than a five-truck carrier running 70,000. HAULVANE's value formula does not know this — it multiplies by power units, not miles — so the Worth column will systematically understate these carriers. Trust the mileage, not the Worth column, on this list.

How many. Read it off the signal checkbox. Same caveat as play 2: mileage comes from mcs150_mileage, carriers only refile every 24 months, 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date at all, and enforcement of the biennial update was suspended in June 2026. Treat the number as a floor.

Opening line. "You're running about 148,000 miles a truck — that's top ten percent. At that pace you've got somewhere north of thirty grand sitting in unpaid invoices at any one time. What's your average days-to-pay right now?"

Good looks like. 3% funded, but a higher average factored volume per client [ESTIMATE — basis: same funded rate as play 1; volume uplift follows directly from the >134,000 mile threshold against an assumed industry average nearer 100,000].

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Your week

Higher volume than insurance, lower value per deal, and a credit review sitting between you and revenue. Plan for about 220 distinct carriers a month — eleven a day over 20 working days.

Monday, first thing. Prospector, saved search New authority — freshest, sorted by Priority. Take the top 40. These are the carriers granted in the last two to three weeks — the sort puts them there without any help from you. Nothing else you do this week matters as much. If you get through 25 of them, that is a good Monday.

Monday afternoon. Hand off Friday's signed clients to credit. Do not let underwriting queue up over a weekend — a carrier who signed on Thursday and has not been funded by the following Wednesday will take a call from your competitor.

Tuesday and Wednesday. Keep grinding the new-authority list, 60 to 80 dials a day. This is a numbers business at the top of the funnel and there is no clever way around that. Second and third attempts matter: carriers screen aggressively in week one and answer in week three.

Thursday. Switch queues. Morning on Adding trucks, afternoon on Running high miles. These are longer conversations with better-informed buyers, and they do not survive being squeezed between cold dials. Twenty to twenty-five calls, not eighty.

Friday morning. Close. Everything that got to a rate conversation this week gets a decision or a dead-file this morning.

Friday afternoon. Hygiene, and one specific job: run the Prospector with the score floor dragged to 0 and Shutdown notice served, Insurance lapsed and Poor safety rating checked. Cross-reference against your existing book. Any current client on that list is a collections conversation, not a sales one, and you want to have it before their trucks stop. Fifteen minutes, and it is the highest-return fifteen minutes in your week.

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What NOT to chase

Carriers under a suspension notice. −35, and it is the most important negative in this document. 1,632 of them were live nationally on 14 August 2026 with a filed future effective date. Every insurance vendor in the market will sell you that list as premium data, and it is — to an insurance agent. To you it is a list of companies that stop hauling freight within 30 days. You cannot buy an invoice from a truck that is parked.

Carriers with lapsed coverage. −25, and additionally −0.20 on viability. Brokers who check filings stop tendering the moment it shows. The receivable stream dries up before the authority does.

Conditional and Unsatisfactory ratings. −40, the largest negative signal weight in your book after dormancy. Your credit exposure is on the debtor, not the carrier, and factors sometimes talk themselves into these deals on that basis. The reason not to fund is simpler: brokers will not tender to them, so there is no volume. Fund the deal and you have bought a facility that never draws.

New USDOT registrations. 15,354 in July 2026 against 2,997 authority grants — a 5.1x gap. Any vendor advertising "15,000 new carriers a month" is counting registrations, which include private fleets hauling their own goods. Those companies have no third-party receivables at all. There is nothing to factor. This is the single most expensive mistake available in your segment because the list looks five times better than it is.

Anything over 60 trucks. Your hard filter removes them and it is right to. That carrier has a bank facility at prime-plus, not a 2.4% discount rate.

Dormant carriers. −70 and −0.45 viability. Zero inspections in 24 months. An active registration is not evidence of an active business.

The back half of the 210-day window. A carrier 200 days into their authority has been paid a dozen times, has a working arrangement with somebody, and has stopped answering unknown numbers. The model agrees with you: by then NEW_AUTH is sitting on the 0.25 decay floor, worth 25 of its 100 points, and those rows land near the bottom of the queue around 56. You do not have to work around the ranking to avoid them — just do not go digging past it.

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The money

HAULVANE's formula, exactly as it runs:

value = min(power_units, 40) × $185,000 × 0.024

valueNote: "annual fee @ 2.4% of ~$185k/unit factored volume"

Three assumptions, and one of them needs defending against a widely quoted industry number:

1. $185,000 of factored volume per truck per year. This is roughly one truck's annual line-haul gross, all of it factored.
2. 2.4% blended discount rate. The published average freight factoring rate in Q2 2026 is 2.8%. New owner-operators and small fleets pay 3–5%; growing fleets with steady volume pay 1.5–3%; carriers factoring over $100,000 a month often get sub-2%. HAULVANE's 2.4% is a blended midpoint and is conservative for a new-authority book, which is mostly 3–5% business.
3. Capped at 40 units, which is inside your 60-truck hard filter.

What the Worth column pays out:

The number you will be quoted and should not repeat. The widely published figure is $10,900–$14,500 a year per single-truck client, built as 15–20 invoices a month at Triumph's Q2 2026 average invoice of $2,160, times 2.8%. Do the arithmetic backwards: 15 to 20 invoices a month at $2,160 is $389,000 to $518,000 of factored volume for one truck in one year. One truck does not gross half a million dollars. That figure is a two-or-three-truck client wearing a one-truck label. HAULVANE's $185,000 is the honest number, and if you quote $12,000 per truck to your own management you are building a plan on a number that will not arrive.

Not in the formula. Credit checks run $10–$50 per customer and setup fees $100–$500. Add roughly $300–$800 per client per year of ancillary revenue [ESTIMATE — basis: the published credit-check and setup ranges, at typical broker-count and one setup per client].

A month of working this queue.

220 distinct carriers worked [ESTIMATE — basis: eleven a day over 20 working days]:

Average client: 2 trucks [ESTIMATE — basis: the fit plateau runs 1–8, 91.5% of US carriers run 10 or fewer, and new authorities usually start at one or two].

• 7 clients × (2 × $185,000 × 0.024) = 7 × $8,880 = $62,160 of annual fee added, per month of work
• Plus ancillary at $500 each = $3,500
• Recurring, and it bills weekly rather than annually. This is the structural advantage over insurance: a factoring client pays you 52 times a year, an insurance account pays once.

The ramp is the part people forget. Nothing bills at signature. A 2-truck client at $8,880 a year is about $740 a month once running, and takes four to eight weeks to get there while their first invoices work through [ESTIMATE — basis: 30–45 day broker payment terms plus onboarding]. A month of selling produces its full run-rate two months later. Plan cash accordingly and do not let a slow quarter panic you into funding a Conditional carrier.

If you are on the buy side of this instead. The published referral bounties in your segment, which is the only segment in trucking that publishes them: Porter Freight Funding $300 after first funding; Express Freight Finance $200 on first invoice; UC Factors $250–$1,000, or 10% of earnings for the life of the account; FactorLoads 7% of profit for three years or a one-time $250; Summar Financial 10% monthly for as long as the referral is active; FTM 10–25%. Note the shape of that: on an $8,880-a-year client, 10% for life is $888 a year forever and beats every flat bounty by the middle of year two. Never take the flat fee on a client you expect to keep.

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Objections you will hear

"Your rate is too high — I've been quoted 1.5%." 1.5 to 3 percent is what a carrier with steady volume and established broker credit gets. A new authority is 3 to 5 percent everywhere, including wherever quoted you that. Ask what's included — credit checks run $10 to $50 each and setup runs $100 to $500 at most shops.

"I'll just wait for the broker to pay me." That's 30 to 45 days on your first load. Your truck payment isn't on 45-day terms and neither is fuel. The question isn't whether the money arrives, it's what you do for six weeks while it doesn't.

"I've heard the contracts are a trap." Some are. Cancellation fees in this industry run $500 to $5,000 and up, and that's real. Here is our termination clause in writing before you sign anything.

"What happens if the broker doesn't pay?" That depends on recourse. With non-recourse, the credit risk on an approved debtor sits with us, which is why we check the broker's credit before we buy the invoice rather than after. With recourse, it comes back to you. Know which one you're buying.

"I already have a factor." Fine — most carriers your size do. What's your all-in rate once you add credit checks, same-day funding fees and the monthly minimum? And what's your advance capped at? That last one is usually the answer.

"Twenty of you called me today." I believe you. I'm the one who knows your authority was granted on the 3rd and that your first invoice is about ten days out. If that's wrong, tell me and I'll leave you alone.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Header, top right — I sell. Select Freight factoring. The whole application re-ranks. Same federal record, completely different order — an insurance agent's top row becomes a −35 for you.
2. Left rail, second icon — Prospector. Filter panel on the left: - Fleet size — trucks: sliders. Set 1 and 8 for the new-authority play, 3 and 25 for growth. Your hard filter kills anything over 60 regardless. - Minimum priority score: slider, 0 to 95 in steps of 5, defaults to 55. 55 is fine for play 1. Raising it now tightens the age window instead of throwing away the leads you want — 75 leaves a list whose median authority is about a month old, 80 about three weeks. - Active signals: checkboxes with a live count printed beside each. Use the count. - States: checkboxes, counted.
3. Sort. Priority, descending, which is the default. NEW_AUTH decays on recency, so on a Brand new carrier filter the top of the list is the newest authority. There is no reason to work this queue any other way.
4. The column that is yours. For the factoring offer the sixth column is Authority age, in years to one decimal. No other offer gets it. On play 1 you want everything under 0.1. On play 2 you do not care.
5. Save & monitor, top right of the Results panel. Three searches on day one: - New authority — freshest — signal Brand new carrier, fleet 1–8, score 55, your states. This one alerts you when a grant lands, which is the entire value of the product to you. - Growth — displacement — signal Adding trucks, fleet 3–25, score 65. - Book risk — signals Shutdown notice served + Insurance lapsed + Poor safety rating, score floor 0. You have to drag the slider down to see these because they score negative. Run it against your existing clients every Friday.
6. Export CSV, top right. Lands as haulvane-factoring-<date>.csv, up to 5,000 rows, 24 columns.

Columns that matter for you:

authority_granted — the filed grant date. This is your single most important field. Sort your CRM on it. dot — permanent federal ID, never reused. Carry this one field if you carry nothing else. phone — present on 99.4% of active records. email — present on 76.0%, so a quarter of your list is phone-only. Build the sequence accordingly. power_units — check against the 60-truck ceiling and the 1–8 plateau. act_by — a date, not a count, and it is the soonest deadline across all of your positively-weighted signals. On a pure NEW_AUTH row that is today plus the days left in the 210-day window, so a later date means a fresher carrier — backwards from every other offer's deadline. If a renewal also falls inside 60 days, that nearer date wins instead. Do not map this to a CRM "due date" field without accounting for both. The score already ranks these the right way round; this column does not. why_now — the full sentence with the grant date in it. Map to notes. suspension_effective and insurance_lapsed_on — populated means do not fund. Use them as an exclusion, not a target. est_value_usd — annual fee at 2.4% of $185k per unit. Remember it undercounts high-mileage carriers, because it multiplies by trucks and not by miles.

ELD & telematics — playbook

For the ELD, dashcam or fleet-telematics vendor and their resellers. Winning looks like six signed fleets a month averaging twelve trucks, found by watching who is growing and who is about to be audited.

Offer id eld. Weights and formulas quoted here are read directly from src/30-engine.js. Counts are from the live federal file on 14 August 2026 unless marked otherwise.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying a per-seat count that is about to change. Everything you sell is priced per power unit on a multi-year term, so the moment a carrier's truck count moves, their contract is wrong. That is why FLEET_GROWTH is +100 in your profile — the only offer of these three where a growth event outranks everything else. An insurance agent scores the same signal at +46 and a factor at +62. For them it is a reason to re-quote. For you it is the deal.

The second thing you are buying is a compliance problem you can fix in a week. AUDIT_DUE is +62 and BASIC_ALERT is +58, and you are one of only two offers in the system that value the audit at all. A new entrant facing a safety audit is going to be asked for hours-of-service records, and roughly one in six of them fails first time. An ELD produces exactly that record. This is the rare case where the product genuinely is the answer to the question the carrier is being asked, which is why the audit call closes better than the growth call even though the growth call is worth more points.

Third, and this is where your reading of the shared signal set diverges hardest from everyone else's: a safety score over an intervention threshold is a buying signal to you. BASIC_ALERT at +58, OOS_SPIKE at +30, RATING_COND at +26 — all positive. A freight broker scores those at −70, −40 and −100 and will not put that carrier on their network. An insurance agent scores them +34, +14 and +20 and treats them as pricing inputs. You score them positive because an HOS Compliance BASIC over the 65th percentile is a problem your box solves directly and measurably, and the carrier already knows they have it. The broker sees a liability. You see a customer who has already been told what is wrong with them by the federal government.

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Your signal map

Every signal carrying a non-zero weight in the eld profile. Weights are exact, from OFFERS[eld].w.

What is conspicuously absent. Your profile scores no insurance signal at all — not the suspension notice, not the lapse, not the renewal, not the replacement. No weight, positive or negative. The forced-buy events that dominate an insurance agent's entire queue contribute nothing to your score, although a served suspension or a lapsed policy still raises a red flag on the row, because it decides whether the carrier will be trading long enough to install anything. That the score ignores them is correct: a carrier's coverage status does not change whether they need a logging device. It also means your queue has no forced-buy class in it, and therefore no genuinely non-negotiable deadline. AUDIT_DUE is the closest thing you have to one, and it is derived, not filed. Plan your week around that reality instead of pretending you have an emergency.

Your hard filter is status !== 'ACTIVE' only. Your fit band is fleet size 3 → 6–60 → 250, the widest of the three offers here. Below three trucks your fit contribution is zero. Above 250 it is zero again. Interstate operation adds 0.25, intrastate only 0.05. More than three inspections in 24 months adds 0.15.

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The three plays

Counts marked [ESTIMATE] show their basis. The exact count for any filter set is printed live next to each signal checkbox in the Prospector filter panel and in the Results header.

Play 1 — The growth window

Filter. Offer: ELD & telematics. Minimum priority score: 75. Active signals: Adding trucks. Fleet size: 6 to 60 — the plateau of your fit band, where every truck is worth full points. States: yours.

Why it scores so hard. FLEET_GROWTH has no countdown, which is not the same thing as never decaying — it decays on recency, running down from the date of the MCS-150 filing. A filing three days old enters the trigger at essentially its full 100; at 30 days it is worth 79, at 90 days 50, and it reaches the 0.25 floor at 25 points around six months out. On a 12-truck interstate carrier with an inspection history — fit 1.0, viability 1.0 — that is 93, HOT on a three-day-old filing, 85 at 30 days, 77 at 60 and 71 at 90. Almost nothing else in your book reaches the nineties on one signal. When you see a cluster of 90-plus scores in your queue, they are growth filings from the last fortnight.

The consequence you have to plan around: nothing marks these leads urgent — the Call by column is blank, because there is no deadline — but the score quietly drains out of them anyway. A 75 floor on this play is roughly the first two months after the filing. Give them a fixed calendar slot, because a lead you leave until March will have dropped out of your own filter by then.

How many. No verified national count of MCS-150 growth events exists, and I will not manufacture one. The Active signals checkbox prints the live count for your filter set. Two things suppress it: carriers only refile every 24 months, and FMCSA suspended biennial-update enforcement on 25 June 2026. Treat whatever the counter says as a floor, not a ceiling.

Opening line. "Your last MCS-150 took you from nine trucks to fourteen. Whatever you're running for logs was sized at nine — what are you paying per unit, and when does that term end?"

Good looks like. 6% close [ESTIMATE — basis: published trucking-tech close rates do not exist; taken at the middle of the published insurance exclusive-web band of 5–12%, because the buying trigger is concrete and the buyer is an owner rather than a committee]. Average deal 12 trucks.

Play 2 — The audit clock

Filter. Minimum priority score: 65. Active signals: Safety audit due. Fleet size: 3 to 60. States: yours. Sort by Call by ascending — you want the ones closest to the date.

Why this is your best-converting call. The audit checks whether the carrier actually has the things they claimed: a drug and alcohol testing program, driver qualification files, hours-of-service records, vehicle maintenance records. Most owner-operators do not know what a driver qualification file is until somebody asks to see one. Roughly one in six new entrants fails first time, and failing without correcting it ends the registration. You sell the thing that produces the HOS record. There is no ROI argument to construct — the carrier is being asked for the output of your product by the federal government.

Two honest constraints. The date is DERIVED — registration date plus 12 months. There is no per-carrier audit-due field anywhere in FMCSA's public data. Hedge it on the phone. And audit outcomes are not published, so you will never know who failed. You are selling in front of the event, always.

How many. The signal window runs 120 days before to 60 days after the estimated date — a 180-day band. Against 2,997 operating authority grants in July 2026, that band holds roughly 17,700 carriers nationally at any moment [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,997 grants/month × 180 ÷ 30.4, assuming a flat grant rate]. Note that HAULVANE derives the audit date from the census registration date rather than the grant date, and new USDOT registrations ran 15,354 in July against 2,997 grants — so the raw signal count will be larger than the authority-holding slice you actually want. Filter on fleet size and score to cut it down.

Opening line. "Your new-entrant safety audit looks like it lands around the 14th of November. The auditor is going to ask for hours-of-service records first, and about one in six carriers fails that audit the first time. What are you running for logs right now?"

Good looks like. 5% close [ESTIMATE — basis: the play-1 rate, adjusted down slightly because the carrier is smaller and cash-constrained, and up for urgency; net roughly level]. Smaller average deal — these are new entrants, so 3 to 8 trucks.

Play 3 — The score fix

Filter. Minimum priority score: 65. Active signals: Safety score over limit + Failing inspections. Fleet size: 6 to 60. States: yours. Then read the Safety column, which is the sixth column when your offer is selected and reads Poor / Watch / Good / No data.

The qualification step nobody does. Open the dossier and look at which BASIC is over. The safety panel shows all seven, including the empty ones, so you can tell the difference between good and unmeasured. Then:

• HOS Compliance over 65 — your product is the direct fix. Call today.
• Driver Fitness over 80 — partially. Driver files and medical cards; depends what your platform covers.
• Unsafe Driving over 65 — a dashcam and coaching story, not a logging story.
• Vehicle Maintenance over 80 — this is the most common BASIC to be over, and an ELD does not fix it. Sell inspection workflow if you have it. Otherwise be honest and move on. Promising that a logging device will fix a brake violation problem is how a rep gets a fleet manager to stop taking their calls permanently.

How many. No verified national count. Read the checkbox counter. Understand why it will look small: a BASIC only gets a percentile once the carrier has had enough of the right kind of inspection, so most carriers in America show insufficient data in most BASICs. That is data sufficiency, not clean driving, and knowing the difference is most of what makes you sound competent on this call.

Opening line. "Your HOS Compliance BASIC is at the 71st percentile, over the 65 percent intervention threshold. That puts you in the pool for warning letters and targeted inspections, and it's the one number an underwriter looks at before they quote you. Want me to show you which violations are driving it?"

Good looks like. 3% close [ESTIMATE — basis: below plays 1 and 2 because there is no date attached and the carrier may be defensive about the subject].

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Your week

Lower dial volume than insurance or factoring, longer cycle, more email and demos. Plan for about 120 distinct carriers a month — six a day over 20 working days. Samsara's own CAC payback runs 24.4 months, which tells you plainly that this is not a same-day close.

Monday, first thing. Prospector, saved search Growth — 6 to 60 trucks, sorted by Priority. Take the 90-plus scores. These are single-signal FLEET_GROWTH carriers and they are the best leads you will see all week. Twenty calls, no more, because each one is a real conversation about per-unit pricing and contract end dates.

Monday afternoon. Demos booked from last week. Protect this block.

Tuesday. Audit clock. Saved search Audit due, sorted Call by ascending. Twenty-five calls. Shorter conversations than Monday, higher connect rate because new entrants still answer the phone, and a faster close. Hedge the date every time.

Wednesday. Split. Morning on demos and follow-ups from Monday and Tuesday. Afternoon on the score-fix list, and spend real time in the dossiers first — you should know which BASIC is over before you dial, every single time.

Thursday. New authority. Fifteen to twenty calls, worked top down — the freshest grants are the top rows now. Check the Trucks column before each one; see the note below.

Friday morning. Proposals out. Anything demoed this week gets a written number today.

Friday afternoon. Hygiene, and one specific job: drag the score floor to 0, check Losing trucks, and run it against your existing customer list. Any current account on that list is a renewal risk on a per-unit contract and you would rather know in month 14 than in month 33.

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What NOT to chase

One and two-truck operators. Your fit band floors at three trucks. A one-truck new authority — interstate, no inspection history, 110 days in — scores 40, COLD, and the product is right. A single owner-operator buys a $20-a-month phone app to satisfy the mandate. They do not buy a platform, they will not sign 34 months, and the support cost eats the contract. HAULVANE's own value formula puts a one-truck deal at $1,292 of total contract value. Do not build a queue out of them.

The week-old one-truck authority. NEW_AUTH decays on recency, so the freshest grants are the ones your queue puts first: 91 of the 92 points on day one, 82 at fifteen days, 46 at ninety, and the 0.25 floor at 23 past six months. For a factor that ordering is the entire product. For you it is only half right, because a carrier granted authority yesterday may not have bought the trucks yet and there is no fleet to fit. Your fit band does the rest of the work — a one-truck new authority scores 63 on day one and 40 by day 110, so it never leads your queue no matter how fresh it is. Read the Trucks column before you dial and let the small ones go.

Fleets over 250 trucks. Your fit band hits zero at 250, and 99.3% of US carriers run fewer than 100 power units anyway. A 300-truck fleet has an incumbent platform, a procurement process and an IT function. That is an enterprise motion with a nine-month cycle, not a HAULVANE lead.

Shrinking fleets. −20 on the signal and −0.12 on viability. You sell a 34-month per-unit contract. They are down 25% or more in the last 400 days. Do that arithmetic once and you will not do the deal.

Dormant carriers. −70 and −0.45 viability. Zero inspections in 24 months. Note the asymmetry in the viability model: being inspected raises a carrier's score even when the results were bad, because inspections are proof that trucks are moving. A carrier with no inspections at all is the problem, not a carrier with poor ones.

Vehicle Maintenance BASIC carriers, if you only sell HOS. It is the most commonly breached BASIC and an ELD does not fix brakes, lights or tires. Selling into it anyway is the fastest way to lose a fleet manager permanently.

New USDOT registrations sold as new carriers. 15,354 in July 2026 against 2,997 authority grants, a 5.1x gap. Most of the difference is private fleets hauling their own goods. Some of them do need an ELD, which makes this trap slightly less lethal for you than for a factor — but you are still paying five times over for the same list.

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The money

HAULVANE's formula, exactly as it runs:

value = power_units × $38 × 34

valueNote: "contract value @ $38/unit/mo over a 34-month life"

Three assumptions:

1. $38 per unit per month. Sits between the two published benchmarks: Motive at $25–$35 per vehicle per month and Samsara at $33–$45 with a three-year minimum. Reasonable.
2. 34-month average contract life. Consistent with Samsara's three-year minimum term.
3. No cap on power units. Unlike insurance (capped at 120) and factoring (capped at 40), this formula runs unbounded. A 200-truck carrier shows $258,400. Your fit band already zeroes out at 250, but be aware the Worth column will show very large numbers for fleets you should not be selling to.

What the Worth column pays out:

Check that against the published bracket: a 20-truck deal is $20,000–$27,000 TCV in the market, and HAULVANE says $25,840. That is a good match — the closest of the three offers documented here.

Not in the formula. Hardware. Motive runs about $150 per device; Samsara $99–$148 per vehicle upfront. That is a cost to you unless you resell it at margin, and it is why a 3-truck deal at $3,876 TCV is thinner than it looks.

Which side of the table are you on? This changes the number by 28x.

Take the same 12-truck deal:

• You carry the contract: $15,504 TCV, $5,472 ACV.
• You are a referral partner on Motive's published terms — "a $150 flat fee or 10% commission on the annual contract value for every paying customer you refer" — the same deal pays you $547. Motive's own worked example: a 20-truck fleet at $30 per truck per month is 10% of ACV = $720.

Do not set a target until you know which of those two you are. Note also that Samsara's partner rates are gated and unpublished — do not assume Samsara matches Motive's 10%.

A month of working this queue.

120 distinct carriers worked [ESTIMATE — basis: six a day over 20 working days; this is a demo cycle, not a phone close]:

Average deal: 12 trucks [ESTIMATE — basis: the fit plateau runs 6–60; growth carriers skew to the upper half of it and audit-due carriers to the lower].

• Carrying the contract: 6 × $15,504 = $93,024 of TCV booked per month, which is $32,832 of ACV added.
• As a referral partner at 10% of ACV: 6 × $547 = $3,282 per month.

That gap is the single most important number in this document. Everything else here is tactics.

One benchmark to keep you honest. Samsara's CAC payback ran 24.4 months in Q1 CY2026, against a SaaS median near 21.5. If a class-leading vendor takes two years to earn back the cost of acquiring a customer, a 6% close rate on a triggered list is a good outcome and a 20% forecast is a fantasy.

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Objections you will hear

"We already have an ELD." Most fleets your size do — the mandate saw to that. Two questions: when does the term end, and is your HOS Compliance BASIC where you want it? If the box is only satisfying the mandate and not moving the number, you are paying for half a product.

"It's a mandate box. I'll take the cheapest one." For logs alone, fair enough. But your Vehicle Maintenance BASIC is at the 84th percentile, over the 80 percent threshold, and that number is what your next insurance renewal gets priced off. The cheapest box does not touch that.

"My drivers won't accept cameras." That is the real objection and it is worth answering properly. Write down when footage gets pulled and who sees it, and give it to the drivers before the hardware arrives. The argument that lands is exoneration — in a DOT-recordable crash, the footage is the only thing that speaks for the driver.

"Three years is too long." Samsara requires three years as a minimum. If the term is the blocker, say what you can actually do about it rather than talking around it. And if their fleet is growing, match the term to the growth rather than the current count.

"We're only running four trucks." Then you are right at the edge, and I would rather tell you that than sell you something oversized. Under three trucks I would honestly point you at a mandate-only app.

"I've got an audit coming, I don't have time for this." That is exactly why I called. The auditor asks for hours-of-service records first, and that is the fastest part of the whole file to fix. About one in six carriers fails first time, mostly on paperwork.

"How did you get my safety scores?" FMCSA publishes them. Anyone can look up your BASICs — that includes every broker deciding whether to tender you a load and every underwriter pricing your renewal. That is the point I am making.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Header, top right — I sell. Select ELD & telematics. The whole application re-ranks. Note what disappears: every insurance signal drops out of your queue entirely, because your profile assigns them no weight in either direction.
2. Left rail, second icon — Prospector. Filter panel on the left: - Fleet size — trucks: sliders, 1 to 200 (the top of the max slider reads "200+", which covers the upper end of your 250 fit ceiling). Set 6 and 60 for the growth play, 3 and 60 for audit due. - Minimum priority score: slider, 0 to 95 in steps of 5, defaults to 55. Use 75 for growth, 65 for the other two. - Active signals: checkboxes with a live count printed beside each. Use the count rather than estimating. - States: checkboxes, counted.
3. Sort. Priority for the growth play — FLEET_GROWTH decays on recency, so the newest filings come out on top by themselves. Call by ascending for the audit play, so the nearest estimated audit dates come first.
4. The column that is yours. For the ELD offer the sixth column is Safety — a plain-language read of the CSA record: Poor, Watch, Good, or No data. That last value is the one to understand. It does not mean clean. It means too few inspections for FMCSA to score them, which describes most of the industry.
5. Open the dossier before you dial, every time. The safety panel lists all seven BASICs including the empty ones. Know which one is over the threshold before the call. This is the single habit that separates a competent ELD rep from a spammer, and it takes forty seconds.
6. Save & monitor, top right of the Results panel. Three searches on day one: - Growth — 6 to 60 trucks — signal Adding trucks, score 75, your states. The alert on this one is the product working: a carrier files an MCS-150 with more trucks on it and you hear about it. - Audit due — signal Safety audit due, fleet 3–60, score 65. - Contract risk — signal Losing trucks, score floor 0. Drag the slider down to see it, because it scores negative. Run it against your installed base monthly.
7. Export CSV, top right. Lands as haulvane-eld-<date>.csv, up to 5,000 rows, 24 columns.

Columns that matter for you:

power_units — the number you price on. Everything starts here. Remember it comes off the MCS-150, which carriers only refile every 24 months, and that 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date on file at all. Verify it on the call. dot — permanent federal ID. Carry it into your CRM. lead_signal and all_signals — for you the stack matters more than the headline, because FLEET_GROWTH plus BASIC_ALERT is a materially better lead than either alone. act_by — populated only for AUDIT_DUE and NEW_AUTH. Blank for the growth and safety plays, and that is correct, not a bug — those signals carry no deadline. why_now — the full sentence with the dates and percentiles in it. Map to notes. est_value_usd — TCV at $38 per unit over 34 months. Multiply by roughly 0.035 if you are a referral partner on 10-percent-of-ACV terms. phone — on 99.4% of active records. email on 76.0%, which matters more here than in the other two segments because your motion is demo-led and email-heavy. A quarter of your list cannot be sequenced by email at all.

Ignore insurer, renewal_estimated, insurance_lapsed_on and suspension_effective. They are in the export for every offer, and your profile scores none of them.

DOT compliance & permits — playbook

For consultants, permit services, process agents and drug & alcohol consortia. Winning looks like a steady book of dated federal deadlines you reached before the carrier panicked.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying the one queue in HAULVANE where a carrier's worst federal day is your best commercial day. Every other seller in this product reads the safety file defensively. A freight broker scores a poor safety rating at −100 and will not put that carrier on their network. An equipment finance broker scores it at −45 because the collateral is going to a company that may not be trading in two years. A factor scores it at −40. You score it at +94, and it is the second-highest weight in your entire profile.

That is not a quirk of the model. It is the shape of your business. Everyone else is deciding whether to take a risk on this carrier. You are the person who fixes the reason they are a risk. The same row in the same federal file is a rejection letter to four sellers and an inbound lead to you. Nobody else in the nine offers can say that about the risk signals, and it is the single reason your queue is worth working when theirs is empty.

The second thing you are buying is the calendar. Four of your positively-weighted signals carry a countdown — safety audit due, federal filing overdue, shutdown notice served, brand new carrier. That is more dated positive signals than any other offer in the system, including insurance. Most of your competitors in this segment buy a new-authority list and dial it until it is dead. A new-authority list is one signal. You have four clocks, and three of them fire on carriers who are eighteen months to three years old — carriers who have already been called by everybody, been sold nothing, and are now sitting on a real problem with a real date on it.

The third thing, and the one that decides whether you make money: your hard filter is the loosest in the product. Every other offer requires an active operating authority. Yours only removes carriers already marked inactive. In practice the Prospector's status filter is fixed to active carriers, so the queue you actually work looks like everyone else's — but the offer rule is honest about why it is written that way. A carrier who is parked, revoked-adjacent, or halfway through a reinstatement still owes the federal government paperwork. That is also why Looks dormant costs you −40 and costs an equipment lender −80. A dormant carrier cannot service a lease. They can still pay for a BOC-3.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the compliance profile, straight from src/30-engine.js.

Two mechanics that will change how you read the queue

Federal filing overdue has no clock, so the queue will not sort itself. MCS150_DUE is a standing condition and the engine never decays it. A carrier five days past the two-year line and a carrier three years past it both enter the trigger at the full 86, and on identical firmographics they land on the same score. Nationally, 1,211,721 of 2,113,851 active carriers measured had an MCS-150 older than two years, and another 256,822 have no MCS-150 date at all. That is not a queue, it is a phone book, and the score will not thin it for you. One thing will: the signal only produces a Call by date for about 14 days after the line is crossed. Sort by Call by ascending — the freshly-crossed carry a date, which reads TODAY because the line is already behind them, and everything else reads no deadline. Work the ones with a date and leave the rest sitting.

Brand new carrier scores highest on day one. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. A carrier granted authority yesterday keeps essentially the whole 66 points; at fifteen days it is 59, at ninety 33, and past about 190 days it sits on the 0.25 decay floor at 16.5. On a three-truck new entrant that is 71 fresh and 49 by day 190. So the freshest grants are the top rows and the default Priority sort is the right one — no export, no second sort. It matters less to you than to a factor, because your money is in the audit twelve months later rather than the BOC-3 in week one, but when you do want the fresh grants they are already where you would look for them.

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The three plays

Play 1 — The rated list

The best list in this product that nobody works, because for eight of the nine offers it is a disqualifier.

• Offer: DOT compliance & permits
• Minimum score: 55
• Signals: Poor safety rating
• Fleet size: 2 to 60
• States: yours

How many to expect. 11,467 active carriers carry a Conditional rating and 779 carry Unsatisfactory — 12,246 nationally, against 2,182,454 active carriers with no rating at all (97.6%). Averaged across 50 states that is about 245 per state [ESTIMATE — basis: 12,246 ÷ 50; real distribution follows carrier population, so Texas and California carry far more].

Opening line. "You're carrying a Conditional rating from your last compliance review. That closes doors with brokers and insurers before anybody reads the rest of your file, and it's upgradeable. Flat fee, and you'll know inside an hour what it would take."

What good looks like. A rated carrier list does not go stale — it is a stock. Working 245 names properly over a quarter and converting 6% is 15 engagements [ESTIMATE — basis: no published close rate exists for this segment; 6% sits between the 2.12% cited for cold insurance calls and the 10–20% cited for calls inside a hard federal window]. At the model's value for a 10-truck carrier, $4,800, that is $72,000 of engagement fees from one saved search.

Play 2 — The audit calendar

• Offer: DOT compliance & permits
• Minimum score: 65
• Signals: Safety audit due
• Fleet size: 1 to 20
• States: yours

Why 65 and not 70 here. AUDIT_DUE decays on its deadline: the weight climbs as the date closes. That means the floor you set decides how far ahead you see, and 70 is too high for the window this play works. Measured against the model, a three-truck new entrant with nothing else on file scores 67 at 90 days out, 70 at 75 days, 73 at 60. Set the floor at 70 and the earliest you can call is 75 days — you never see the front of your own window. One-truck carriers score lower still and do not clear 70 until about 30 days out, which is late for a mock audit. 65 opens the list at roughly 100 days and lets you work down the calendar.

How many to expect. The signal fires across a 180-day span of carrier age. FMCSA granted 2,997 operating authorities in July 2026, so roughly 18,000 for-hire carriers sit inside that span at any time [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,997 × 6 months, July held flat]. If you also serve private fleets, the pool is far larger: 15,354 new USDOT registrations in the same month gives roughly 92,000 [ESTIMATE — same method]. The audit clock runs off the DOT registration date, not the authority grant, so it fires later than you expect — often after the Brand new carrier signal has already expired.

Opening line. "Your new-entrant safety audit is due around the 14th of November. Roughly one in six carriers fails it the first time, and failing it ends the authority. Want me to run a mock audit so you know in an hour whether you'd pass?"

Say "around." The audit date is estimated — registration date plus twelve months — and there is no per-carrier audit-due field anywhere in FMCSA's public data. If you assert it as a federal date and you are three weeks out, you have told the carrier you do not know the business.

What good looks like. 40 dials a day into a 60-to-90-day audit window (which is why the floor is 65 — see above). At a 25% connect rate [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate for this channel; measure your own in week one] that is 10 conversations a day. Ten mock audits booked a month is a good month.

Play 3 — The 30-day cure

• Offer: DOT compliance & permits
• Minimum score: 70
• Signals: Shutdown notice served
• Fleet size: leave wide, 1 to 200+
• States: yours

How many to expect. 1,632 notices were live nationally with a future effective date on 14 August 2026, running at roughly 40 to 125 notices per business day. Averaged across 50 states, about 33 live at a time per state [ESTIMATE — basis: 1,632 ÷ 50].

This is the only genuinely forward-dated event in the federal motor-carrier record. FMCSA serves the notice and the effective date is exactly 30 days later — sampled across 400 recent notices, the gap was 30 days on every one.

Opening line. "FMCSA served you a suspension notice on the 4th. Your authority goes down on the 3rd of September — that's 20 days. Your agent will handle the new BMC-91X. I handle everything that has to be right before FMCSA will actually turn you back on. Who's doing that side?"

What good looks like. You are second in line here, behind the insurance agent, for whom this signal is worth +100. Second is fine. Nobody who is 20 days from parking their trucks is shopping for value. A 20% conversion on a live suspension list would be strong [ESTIMATE — basis: research puts calls inside a hard 30-day federal window at or above the 10–20% live-transfer close rate].

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Your week

Monday, 60 minutes, about 20 dials. Signal desk, Forced tab first — suspension notices and lapses. There will not be many, which is the point. Call every one in your states before you do anything else. Then open the Renewal calendar and look at the next four weeks; for your offer that calendar is driven by audit dates and suspension dates, not insurance anniversaries.

Tuesday and Wednesday, 60 dials a day. Prospector, sorted by Call by, soonest first. This is the audit window and the freshly-overdue MCS-150s. These are pleasant calls — the carrier has a problem, it is fixable, and it is cheap.

Thursday, the rated list, 40 dials. Signal filter set to Poor safety rating, sorted by Priority. No deadlines here, so work it by score and by size. These calls are longer and worth more.

Friday, 20 dials and two jobs. Check your saved searches — new members are carriers who crossed a threshold this week and are the freshest thing in the system. Then open the Territory screen and compare the rate column across your states. A state with a high rate you have not worked is next week's plan.

Across a full week that is roughly 200 dials, about 50 conversations at a 25% connect rate [ESTIMATE], and 3 to 5 engagements signed. Phone numbers are present on 99.4% of active carriers, email on 76.0%, so the phone is your channel and email is your follow-up. Dial manually, one at a time.

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What NOT to chase

The MCS-150 overdue pile. All 1.2 million of them. It is the biggest number in this product and the least valuable. Worse: on 25 June 2026 FMCSA announced a suspension of the biennial registration update requirement for entities that missed deadlines since 1 June, with no end date. If you open a call with "your USDOT number is deactivation-eligible," a carrier who reads the trade press can correct you. And the score will not thin the pile for you — the signal has no clock, so a filing three years overdue is worth the same 86 as one that crossed the line last week. Work only the freshly-crossed ones, which means working off the Call by column, and lead with "your file is two years out of date and your truck count is wrong," which is true regardless of enforcement posture.

Dormant carriers. −40 for you and −0.45 on viability. Yes, they still owe filings. No, they will not pay you. The signal exists to stop you spending a morning.

Carriers with no BASIC scores, sold to as if they had good ones. Percentiles do not appear in any bulk federal file, and only 716,198 of 2,236,411 active carriers — 32% — have computed SMS measures at all. Most small carriers have never had enough of the right inspections to be scored. "Unmeasured" is not "clean." Telling a one-truck carrier their CSA scores look good when they do not have any is the fastest way to sound like a list vendor.

Brand-new authorities on day three. Carriers report 48 solicitation calls in the first two days, the first inside 30 seconds of the DOT number posting, and moderators on their own forums tell them to buy a burner phone. Being first is not a strategy anybody in this market still owns. Your advantage is the audit date twelve months later, when everybody else has gone quiet.

Large fleets. Your fit band runs 1 → 2–40 → 150 power units, so a 90-truck fleet is already scoring below plateau and a 160-truck fleet scores zero on the size component. They also have a full-time safety director, which is the actual reason.

Anything you have to argue about. The MCS-150 due date HAULVANE shows you is a staleness measure, not the letter of 49 CFR 390.19, which sets the due month from the digits of the USDOT number. If a carrier argues the date, they may be technically right. Do not fight them. The point stands either way.

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The money

The model. value = 2400 + min(power_units, 60) × 240.

Its assumptions, stated plainly. A $2,400 base engagement plus $240 per truck. That models a bundled relationship — authority package, BOC-3, process agent, consortium enrollment, UCR, audit preparation and some ongoing retainer — not a single transaction.

The reality check you need before you forecast anything. Published prices in this segment are much smaller. A flagship authority package runs $499 including the $300 FMCSA fee; Authority Plus $861; DIY audit assistance $99; BOC-3 processing $59–$70; consortium membership generally under $100 for the first driver and around $25 per added driver per year. The segment's realistic ACV is $100–$900 one-time.

So: if you sell single services, divide HAULVANE's Worth column by roughly 5 [ESTIMATE — basis: $499 flagship package against the model's $2,400 base]. If you sell bundled engagements with a retainer, the model is roughly right. Know which one you are before you put a number in a forecast.

A month, worked out.

• 200 dials a week × 4 weeks = 800 dials
• × 25% connect [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate for this channel] = 200 conversations
• × 8% close [ESTIMATE — basis: 2.12% cited for cold insurance calls, 10–20% for calls inside a hard federal window; compliance sells a cheaper, faster decision so 8% sits mid-range] = 16 engagements

At the bundled model, 16 × $3,600 (5-truck average) = $57,600. At single-service reality, 16 × $499 = $7,984. The truth for most shops is between the two, and it moves entirely on whether you attach the consortium and the retainer at the point of sale.

Why this segment still works at $499. You close fast — the owner is the buyer and decides in a week — and your queue is the one nobody else can use. You are a volume business with an unusually cheap source of qualified volume.

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Objections you will hear

"I already have a compliance guy." Good — then you know what a driver qualification file is. Ask them what your Vehicle Maintenance percentile is. If they cannot tell you, they are doing your filings, not your safety program. Those are different jobs.

"My scores are fine." You may not have scores at all. A BASIC only gets a percentile once you have had enough of the right inspections. Most carriers your size have none, and unrated is not the same as good — it means nobody has measured you yet, and the first bad inspection moves you a long way.

"The audit isn't for months." That is the reason to do it now. About one in six carriers fails first time, and what fails you is missing paperwork you cannot create retroactively — drug testing enrollment dates, driver files, maintenance records. Fixing it in month nine is cheap. Fixing it during the audit is not possible.

"How much is this going to cost me?" Less than the audit failing. Give the number on the call. This segment closes because the price is small and the decision-maker is on the phone. Hesitating on price is how you turn a $499 sale into a follow-up.

"How did you get my number?" It is on your MCS-150, which is public. So is your safety rating, your inspection history and your registration date. I am reading your federal file, and I am telling you what is in it that will cost you money.

"Everybody calls me." They do — 48 calls in two days when your DOT number posted. I am not calling about your authority. I am calling because your safety audit lands around November and that is a different problem from the one those people were selling.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set your offer. Top right, I sell, choose DOT compliance & permits. Everything re-ranks.

2. Read the Playbook screen (fifth icon down) once. It shows your eleven weights and your one disqualifier as a bar chart. Ten minutes, once, and you will never wonder why a row is where it is.

3. Open the Prospector (second icon down). Your Active signals filter list shows only the signals with a positive weight for your offer, sorted by weight. For compliance you get ten checkboxes, in this order:

Safety audit due · Poor safety rating · Safety score over limit · Federal filing overdue · Shutdown notice served · Brand new carrier · Recent crash · Failing inspections · Insurance lapsed · Hauls hazmat

The number beside each one is the count across the whole dataset, not the count in your filtered queue.

4. Know that the signal filter is an OR. Ticking Safety audit due and Poor safety rating gives you carriers with either one, not both. It widens the list. To get an AND, tick one signal, export, and filter the all_signals column in your spreadsheet.

5. Set the filters. Fleet size uses two sliders, 1 to 200 (200 means 200 and above). Minimum score is a slider in steps of 5 — 55 is the default, 70 is the right floor for a dated play. States and cargo are checkbox lists.

6. Save three searches. Click Save & monitor top right of the Prospector after setting each one.

• Rated carriers, my states — signal Poor safety rating, fleet 2–60, score 55.
• Audits landing, my states — signal Safety audit due, fleet 1–20, score 65.
• Forced buys, my states — signals Shutdown notice served and Insurance lapsed, score 70, fleet wide.

Saved searches are the highest-value habit in this product. The desk shows you today. A saved search tells you when a carrier crosses a threshold next Thursday.

7. Export. Export CSV, top right. You get up to 5,000 rows in the sort order on screen. The columns that matter for you:

8. Use Watch this carrier from inside any dossier for the accounts you quoted and lost. It alerts on any change to their federal record — including the compliance review that turns an unrated carrier into a Conditional one.

Fuel card & discount network — playbook

For fuel card issuers and discount-network resellers. Winning looks like annualized margin added every month, on carriers who actually pump the gallons they said they would.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying gallons. Not deadlines, not distress, not paperwork — gallons. That makes your queue the strangest one in this product, because it is the only offer whose profile is almost entirely silent on the federal record's drama. Of the seven risk and forced-buy signals HAULVANE detects, your profile touches three — Looks dormant at −70, Conditional rating at −10 and Fleet shrinking at −30 — and every one of them is a penalty. Not a single piece of federal distress can put a carrier INTO your queue; distress can only take one out.

The clearest case is the shutdown clock. A carrier 20 days from a federal suspension is worth +100 to an insurance agent, +76 to a compliance consultant, −40 to an equipment lender and −100 to a freight broker. To you it is worth exactly nothing: AUTH_SUSPEND does not appear in your profile at all, so it neither raises nor lowers the score. That is correct — a carrier about to be parked still buys diesel this week — but it means the app flags it separately, as a risk chip on the row, rather than through your score. Read those chips. They are the one part of the queue your own weights will never tell you about.

What you buy instead is the one number in the federal census that nobody else weights properly: annual mileage. Running high miles is worth +76 to you. It is worth 62 to equipment finance, 40 to a factor, 40 to a recruiter, 34 to an ELD vendor and 24 to a dispatch service. That is the highest weight on that signal anywhere in the system, and it is the closest thing the public record has to a fuel-spend field. A carrier reporting 148,000 miles per truck per year is telling you, in a federal filing, roughly how much diesel they burn. Nobody else reads the MCS-150 that way, because for everybody else mileage is a qualifier and for you it is the product.

Be honest about the other half of your queue. Adding trucks is worth +100 to you — and also 100 to ELD, 100 to equipment finance, 94 to recruiting, 74 to broker capacity, 62 to factoring, 52 to dispatch and 46 to insurance. Fleet growth is the most contested signal in the entire product. When you call a carrier who just went from 9 trucks to 14, you are the eighth person that week with the same reason for calling. Your differentiation is not the trigger. It is the arithmetic you can do on the call that the other seven cannot: gallons, cents, and a number.

And know the shape of the queue before you plan your week. Only one of your four positive signals carries a countdown. For most of your list, the Call by column will read no deadline — and that is correct, not broken. You do not work a calendar. You work a ranked list, sorted by money.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the fuel profile, straight from src/30-engine.js. It is a short list. That is the point.

Three mechanics you need to know

Your fit score caps mileage lower than your signal fires. The fit function gives you min(1, miles ÷ power_units ÷ 120,000) × 0.35. It maxes out at 120,000 miles per truck. But the Running high miles signal only fires above 134,000. So there is a band — carriers between about 120,000 and 134,000 miles per truck — who score full marks on fit and get no signal at all. They are excellent accounts hiding at a middling score. Find them by sorting the export on est_value_usd rather than filtering on the signal.

Your fleet band is the widest in the product after driver recruiting. 2 → 4–80 → 300 power units. You get full fit credit from 4 trucks all the way to 80, and partial credit to 300. Nobody else has that reach. A 60-truck fleet is off the plateau for factoring, dispatch and insurance and dead center for you.

Brand new carrier scores highest on day one, and Play 3 deliberately runs against that. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. A grant from yesterday keeps essentially all of its 88 points; at fifteen days it is 78, at ninety days 44, and past about 190 days it sits on the 0.25 decay floor at 22. On a five-truck interstate carrier that is 82 fresh and 54 by day 190. The ordering is correct, and for most sellers of most things the freshest authority genuinely is the best lead. It is not the one you want, for the reasons in Play 3 — which makes that play the one place in this playbook where you knowingly work the bottom of a correctly-sorted list.

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The three plays

Play 1 — The step-up

Your highest-weighted signal, worked properly.

• Offer: Fuel card & discount network
• Minimum score: 75
• Signals: Adding trucks
• Fleet size: 4 to 80
• States: yours, or leave clear — fuel networks are national

How many to expect. HAULVANE does not publish a national count for this and no measured fleet-size or growth distribution exists in the federal files. What is measurable is the ceiling: roughly 500,771 MCS-150 filings among currently active carriers carry a 2025 date, so about 385,000 filings land inside the signal's 280-day window at any time [ESTIMATE — basis: 500,771 × 280/365]. What share of those show 20%+ growth is not measured anywhere, and inventing that number is the exact thing this product exists to stop. **Read the count off the badge beside Adding trucks in the filter panel.** That number is live against your dataset.

Opening line. "Your last MCS-150 took you from 9 trucks to 14. Everything you priced at nine trucks is under-sized now, including your fuel program. At the miles you're reporting that's about another 87,000 gallons a year going through a card that was set up for a smaller company. Can I run last quarter through our network and show you the delta?"

What good looks like. Stacking Adding trucks with Running high miles is what produces a HOT score in this profile — 100 plus 76 pushes the trigger to its ceiling while the filing is fresh, and because the mileage half has no clock the row stays in the high eighties long after the growth half has decayed away. A row above 85 with both signals showing in all_signals is your best call of the day, every day. Ten of those a week is a good week.

Play 2 — The burn list

No deadline, no drama, pure volume, ranked by dollars.

• Offer: Fuel card & discount network
• Minimum score: 55
• Signals: Running high miles
• Fleet size: 10 to 80
• States: leave clear

Then click the Worth column header to sort by value, not by score. This is the one play in the product where the money column is a better sort than the priority column, because there is no clock to respect.

How many to expect. Not measured. Read the badge. What you can size in advance is the money: at 10 trucks and 134,000 miles each, the model puts the account at $9,726 a year of retained margin, and the top of the band at 80 trucks is roughly $77,800.

Opening line. "You're running about 148,000 miles a truck a year — that's top-decile utilization. At 6.2 miles a gallon that's roughly 24,000 gallons per truck, and across your fleet it's about 240,000 gallons. What are you paying at the pump today?"

What good looks like. This is a list you work for months, not days. Nothing expires. 200 dials a week into it, a 25% connect rate [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate exists for this channel; measure your own in week one] and 50 conversations. If the conversation does not get to a cents-per-gallon number in ninety seconds, you are having the wrong conversation.

Play 3 — The late-window new authority

Everybody else calls a new authority on the day it posts. Do the opposite.

• Offer: Fuel card & discount network
• Minimum score: 45
• Signals: Brand new carrier
• Fleet size: 2 to 20
• States: yours

Then sort by Call by ascending and work the rows where it is inside 60 days — meaning the carrier is 150 to 210 days into their authority.

Drop the floor, and know why you are dropping it. These carriers are at the far end of a signal that decays on recency, so a late-window authority with nothing else on it now scores in the low fifties. That is the model working, not a weak lead. At the default 55 you lose about 43% of the late-window rows and at 60 you lose 58% of them; at 45 you keep roughly four in five. This is the only play in this playbook that needs the floor pulled down.

How many to expect. Roughly 21,000 carriers sit inside the 210-day window nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,997 operating authorities granted in July 2026 × 7 months, held flat]. About a third of those are in the last 60 days of it [ESTIMATE — basis: 60/210 of the window].

Do not confuse this with new registrations. July 2026 produced 15,354 new USDOT registrations against 2,997 authority grants — a 5.1x gap. The extra four-fifths are private fleets and dormant registrations who will never buy a for-hire fuel program.

Why late and not early. Two reasons, and both are checkable. First, carriers report 48 solicitation calls in the first two days of holding a DOT number, the first inside 30 seconds of it posting, and their own forums tell them to buy a burner phone and turn it off. You cannot win that race and you should not enter it. Second, a carrier on day three has no fuel history, no lane pattern and no gallons. A carrier on day 170 has six months of receipts and knows exactly what retail diesel is costing them. That is the first day the arithmetic works.

Opening line. "Your authority came through in February, so you've got about six months of fuel receipts now. Most carriers at this point are still paying cash price at whatever truck stop the driver picked. Do you want me to run those six months through our network and tell you what you left on the table?"

What good looks like. These are small accounts — a 3-truck carrier at 100,000 miles each is $2,177 a year of margin in the model. You are buying them for the growth, not the gallons. Volume matters more than close rate here.

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Your week

Your week does not look like the compliance or insurance week, because you have almost no deadlines. Sort by Priority and by Worth, not by Call by.

Monday, 45 minutes. Signal desk, Growth tab. That tab is your entire business — Adding trucks, Running high miles, Short of drivers. Skim the top 24 cards, open the ones over 85, and build the week's A-list. Then check saved searches: any carrier who filed an MCS-150 last week showing growth is new inventory and the freshest thing you will touch.

Tuesday through Thursday, 70 dials a day. Prospector, sorted by Priority. Work the Adding trucks rows first, then the stacked growth-plus-mileage rows, then the burn list. Have the gallon arithmetic ready before you dial — miles ÷ 6.2 is the only mental math you need and it should take you two seconds.

Friday, 30 dials and two jobs. Re-sort the burn list by Worth and call the top thirty regardless of score — these are the 120,000-to-134,000-mile carriers who never fire a signal. Then open the Territory screen and compare the rate column across states. Fuel networks are national, so unlike an insurance agent you are not stuck in a license footprint. Go where the rate is high.

Across a week that is roughly 240 dials, about 60 conversations at a 25% connect rate [ESTIMATE], and 2 to 4 activations. Phone is present on 99.4% of active carriers and email on 76.0%. Dial manually, one at a time.

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What NOT to chase

A carrier 20 days from a federal shutdown. Still the most important line in this playbook, but the product now meets you halfway. Your profile is silent on AUTH_SUSPEND and INS_LAPSED — they carry no weight for you at all, positive or negative, so a carrier with a served suspension notice, a growing fleet and high miles still scores excellently. What stops you is not the score, it is the flag: AUTH_SUSPEND, INS_LAPSED, REVOKED and DORMANT raise a red chip under the carrier's name on any row, under any offer that does not already score them positively — which for fuel is all four. A carrier running uninsured shows INSURANCE LAPSED in red no matter how you sorted the list. Only the first applicable flag renders, so a suspension chip may be sitting on top of a lapse. On screen, that is your warning. In a CSV it is not exported, so if you work from the file rather than the app you are back to two columns: suspension_effective and insurance_lapsed_on. If either is populated, do not issue the card. Their trucks stop, your line does not get paid, and you have written a bad debt against a $871-a-truck margin. Build the filter into your spreadsheet on day one.

Intrastate one-truck operators. Interstate operation is worth 0.15 of your fit score and only about 703,612 of 2,236,411 active carriers are interstate. A local carrier running 40,000 miles a year is 6,450 gallons — $290 of margin against the same onboarding cost as a $27,000 account.

Fleets over 80 trucks, mostly. You keep partial fit credit to 300 power units, so they will show up. But at that size the carrier already has a negotiated program, a fuel desk, and possibly a bulk tank. Your cents-per-gallon story is not new to them. If you chase them, chase them on the network map, not the discount.

Shrinking fleets. −30, plus a −0.12 viability penalty. The card gets used harder as the business gets worse, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a receivable.

Any lead sold to you as "15,000 new carriers a month." That is registrations. 2,997 got operating authority. The other 12,357 are mostly private fleets hauling their own freight, and a large share will never buy a for-hire fuel program.

Chasing the discount number instead of the gallons. The advertised numbers in this segment run wild — 10 to 30 cents typical, one network advertising an average of 45 cents, another advertising $0.42 to $2.00 a gallon. You are not going to win a shouting match on cents. You win by knowing their gallons before they do.

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The money

The model. value = (annual_miles ÷ 6.2) × 0.045. That is total fleet miles from the MCS-150, converted to gallons at 6.2 miles per gallon, multiplied by 4.5 cents of retained margin per gallon.

Its assumptions, stated plainly. 6.2 mpg fleet-wide, which is a fair blended number for Class 8 highway work. 4.5 cents a gallon retained by you — not the discount the carrier sees. And it uses the carrier's self-reported MCS-150 mileage, which is only refiled every 24 months and is stale for roughly 57% of active carriers.

Per truck, at the model's numbers:

Whole accounts:

Sanity checks against the market. The model puts a truck at roughly $726 to $1,089 a year, which lands inside the segment benchmark of a few hundred to low thousands per truck per year. At 19,355 gallons and a 30-cent discount, the carrier saves $5,806 per truck — inside the $3,600 to $18,000 of annual savings this segment typically claims. And 19,355 gallons against the $50,000–$70,000 annual diesel spend cited for an owner-operator implies $2.58 to $3.62 a gallon, which is a believable diesel price. The model holds up.

A month, worked out.

• 240 dials a week × 4 = 960 dials
• × 25% connect [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate for this channel] = 240 conversations
• × 10% activation [ESTIMATE — no published close rate or referral bounty exists anywhere in this segment; this is a working figure to replace with your own] = 24 accounts
• Average account: 10 trucks × 125,000 miles = 1,250,000 miles = 201,613 gallons = $9,073 a year
• ≈ $217,000 of annualized margin added in one month

Three warnings on that number.

1. It is annualized run-rate, not cash in the month. You add it and then you keep it.
2. Cards issued is not gallons pumped. Share of wallet is the whole game and the model assumes 100% of the carrier's fuel comes through your network. Halve it for a realistic first year [ESTIMATE — basis: no share-of-wallet data exists in any source available here].
3. There is no published churn figure for this segment anywhere in the research. If you have your own, use it. If you do not, do not put a lifetime number in a forecast.

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Objections you will hear

"I already have a card." Almost everybody does. I am not asking you to cancel it. I am asking what you paid per gallon last month, because most carriers cannot answer that and the ones who can are usually surprised. Run one week through both and keep whichever wins.

"What's the discount?" Depends on the lane, and anybody who gives you one number before seeing your fuel stops is guessing. Send me last month's receipts and I will give you a real figure by tomorrow. That answer wins against a bigger number that turns out to be conditional.

"Is there a credit check?" Yes, and there should be — this is a line of credit, not a loyalty card. If you would rather start on a prepaid or secured basis, we can, and it converts once there is history.

"My drivers just stop wherever they want." That is the real cost, and it is bigger than the discount. Network coverage is the part of this that matters at your mileage. Here is the map for the lanes you actually run.

"How did you get my number?" It is on your MCS-150, which is a public federal filing. So is your truck count and your annual mileage — which is how I know roughly what you burn before I called.

"I'm too small for this to matter." At three trucks and 100,000 miles each you burn about 48,000 gallons a year. A ten-cent difference is $4,800. That is not a rounding error at your size — it is a truck payment.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set your offer. Top right, I sell, choose Fuel card & discount network.

2. Read the Playbook screen (fifth icon down) once. Four positive weights and three penalties. Seven in total, which ties with recruiting for the shortest profile in the product — the next shortest is dispatch at eight, and insurance carries thirteen. That is worth seeing as a picture: it tells you exactly how narrow your reason to call is.

3. Open the Prospector (second icon down). Your Active signals filter shows only signals with a positive weight for your offer, sorted by weight. For fuel that is four checkboxes:

Adding trucks · Brand new carrier · Running high miles · Short of drivers

You will notice what is missing. There is no Losing trucks box, no Looks dormant box, no Shutdown notice served box. You cannot filter on your own penalties, and you cannot filter on the events that should stop you underwriting an account. On screen the red risk chip covers you anyway. In an export it does not travel, which is why the columns in step 7 matter more for you than for any other offer.

4. The signal filter is an OR. Ticking Adding trucks and Running high miles gives you carriers with either, not both. It widens the list. To get the stacked carriers — the ones that actually score HOT — tick both, export, and filter the all_signals column in your spreadsheet for rows containing both labels.

5. Set the filters. Fleet size is two sliders, 1 to 200 (200 means 200 and above). Minimum score moves in steps of 5. States and cargo are checkbox lists. Leave states clear unless your network has real coverage gaps.

6. Save three searches with Save & monitor, top right.

• Stepping up — signal Adding trucks, fleet 4–80, score 75.
• Burn list — signal Running high miles, fleet 10–80, score 55.
• Six months in — signal Brand new carrier, fleet 2–20, score 45.

The first one is the one that pays. A carrier who files a growth MCS-150 next Tuesday becomes a member of that search automatically, and that is the day to call.

7. Export. Export CSV, top right, up to 5,000 rows in the on-screen sort order. The columns that matter for you:

8. Build one spreadsheet rule before you make a single call. Delete every row where suspension_effective or insurance_lapsed_on is populated. The app already flags these in red on the row, so this is belt and braces — but it takes thirty seconds and the flag does not survive the export.

Equipment finance & truck sales — playbook

For dealers, lessors and equipment-finance brokers. Winning looks like a small number of funded deals a month on carriers who will still be running when the paper matures.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying the exact opposite of what the compliance consultant buys, off the exact same file. Their top two signals are Poor safety rating at +94 and Safety score over limit at +90. Those same two rows score −45 and −22 in your profile. A served federal shutdown notice is worth +76 to them and −40 to you. They are looking for a carrier whose federal record has gone wrong, because fixing it is their product. You are looking for a carrier whose federal record is boring, because you are lending against sixty months of it.

That is not a difference of opinion. It is a difference of exposure. The consultant gets paid in thirty days and never sees the carrier again if they do not want to. You get paid on funding and then you carry the risk for five years. So your profile is built like an underwriter's, not a salesperson's. Five of your ten weighted signals are penalties, totaling 242 points of absolute weight — more than any offer in the product except broker capacity sourcing. You are the second most suspicious buyer in the system.

Look at the fit function and it becomes obvious. Everybody else's fit score is mostly fleet size plus whether the carrier runs interstate. Yours is fleet size at 0.6, plus 0.2 for having more than 4 roadside inspections in 24 months, plus 0.2 for having zero crashes. Forty percent of your fit score is a credit box: proof the trucks are actually moving, and proof nothing has hit anybody. No other offer weights a clean crash record that heavily except a freight broker deciding whether to trust a carrier with a load. Yours is the only profile in HAULVANE where being inspected — a thing every other seller treats as neutral or mildly negative — is worth as much as a clean loss history.

What you buy, then, is a short list: growing, high-mileage, well-inspected, crash-free carriers between roughly 5 and 60 trucks. There are not many of them. That is fine. At a modeled $5,400 a funded unit, three deals a month is a real month.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the equipment profile, straight from src/30-engine.js.

Two mechanics that will mislead you if you do not know them

Your "Call by" date is never an equipment deadline. Only two of your positive signals carry a countdown: Brand new carrier and Renewal coming up. So every date in that column is either days left in a 210-day authority window or an estimated insurance anniversary — derived from the filing effective date plus twelve months, because there is no policy expiration field anywhere in the federal insurance data. Neither is a reason a carrier must buy a truck by Tuesday. Treat the column as context. Sort by Priority or by Worth instead.

Brand new carrier scores highest on day one, which is the opposite of the order you underwrite in. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. A grant from yesterday keeps essentially the whole 54 points; at fifteen days it is 48, at ninety 27, and past about 190 days it sits on the 0.25 decay floor at 13.5. On an eight-truck carrier with a clean inspection record that is 70 fresh and 52 by day 190. The ordering is right about urgency and unhelpful about credit: the freshest carrier is the one buying everything at once, and also the one with no operating history to look at. At 54 points a new authority on its own tops out around 70 however clean the file is, so it will never reach the 80 floor you use for Play 1 — which is the model agreeing with your credit department. Read authority_granted before you spend a call on one.

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The three plays

Play 1 — Bought trucks, needs more

• Offer: Equipment finance & truck sales
• Minimum score: 80
• Signals: Adding trucks
• Fleet size: 5 to 60
• States: yours, or clear

Score 80 is a deliberately high floor. At that level the fit component is doing real work, which means you are looking at carriers with 5+ inspections and no crashes — the ones who will actually get through credit. It also caps the age of the filing: because Adding trucks decays on recency, an 80 floor on a clean 14-truck carrier is roughly the first seven weeks after the MCS-150 lands. That is the right window anyway — it is while the purchase decision is still warm.

How many to expect. HAULVANE publishes no national count for this, and no measured fleet-size or growth distribution exists in the federal record. The measurable ceiling: roughly 500,771 MCS-150 filings among currently active carriers carry a 2025 date, so about 385,000 land inside the signal's 280-day window at any time [ESTIMATE — basis: 500,771 × 280/365]. What share show 20%+ growth is not measured, and guessing it would be exactly the kind of invented statistic this product exists to replace. **Read the live count off the badge beside Adding trucks in the filter panel.**

Opening line. "Your last MCS-150 took you from 9 trucks to 14. I'm not calling about the five you just bought — I'm calling about how you paid for them, because whoever wrote that paper set your rate on a 9-truck company and you're a 14-truck company now. What did you end up at?"

What good looks like. These calls should produce a rate, a term and a lender name inside two minutes. If they do not, you are talking to somebody who does not sign. Twenty of these conversations a month should produce 3 to 5 applications [ESTIMATE — no published close rate exists for this segment; payment in this business is on funding, not introduction, so measure applications and fundings separately from week one].

Play 2 — Parked iron

The play most people in your segment get wrong.

• Offer: Equipment finance & truck sales
• Minimum score: 60
• Signals: Short of drivers
• Fleet size: 5 to 60
• States: yours

How many to expect. Not measured — read the badge. What you can check per row is the power_units and drivers columns in the export, which is where the gap comes from.

Why this is not a new-truck call. A carrier with 11 trucks and 8 drivers does not need a twelfth truck. Pitching them one marks you as somebody who bought a list. What they have is three units generating no revenue and still generating payments, insurance and depreciation. There are two real transactions in that:

1. Restructure. Extend or re-term the paper on the parked units so the payment matches the revenue they are actually producing.
2. Take the units. A sale-leaseback on the running trucks, or buying the parked ones outright if you are a dealer. Used Class 8 gross per unit has been improving — one large public dealer group reported a $1,886 per-unit increase in average used commercial truck gross profit year-over-year, attributed to reduced market capacity increasing demand for used trucks.

Opening line. "You're showing 11 power units against 8 drivers. I'm not calling to sell you a twelfth truck. Three of yours aren't earning and they're still costing you a payment — do you want to restructure those, or do you want me to make you a number on them?"

What good looks like. Lower volume, higher trust, and it is the conversation that gets you the next new-iron deal when they do fill the seats. One restructure or acquisition a month out of this play is a good result.

Play 3 — The high-burn trade cycle

• Offer: Equipment finance & truck sales
• Minimum score: 60
• Signals: Running high miles
• Fleet size: 10 to 80
• States: clear

Then sort by the Worth column, not by score.

Why it works. HAULVANE's value model assumes one unit of demand per 8 trucks per year — a flat replacement cycle that does not flex with mileage. It should. A carrier running 148,000 miles a truck puts on 41% more miles a year than one running 105,000, which means it reaches any given trade-in odometer in about seven-tenths of the time — roughly 29% sooner. That is arithmetic on two numbers in the same federal filing, and it means the model understates your high-mileage rows. They are worth more than their Worth column says.

Opening line. "You're running about 148,000 miles a truck a year. That's 41% more than a fleet at 105,000, so whatever odometer you trade at, you get there about a third quicker — your replacement cycle is shorter than your paper is. When does the first one come off?"

What good looks like. This is a calendar you build yourself out of a condition, not a signal you react to. Ask when the oldest unit was bought, write it in your CRM, and call ninety days before. Nothing in the federal record tells you that date — the carrier does.

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Your week

Your week has fewer calls and longer ones than anybody else's in this product. Deals are low-frequency and high-value, and payment comes on funding, so the job is qualification, not volume.

Monday, 45 minutes. Signal desk, Growth tab. That is your business — Adding trucks, Running high miles, Short of drivers. Ignore the Risk tab entirely; for your offer everything on it is a penalty. Build a list of 40 to 50 names for the week, not 200.

Tuesday and Wednesday, 40 dials a day. Prospector sorted by Priority, working the Adding trucks rows over 80 first. Before each call, look at two things in the dossier: the roadside inspection count and the crash record. They are 40% of your fit score and they are the two questions credit will ask you first.

Thursday, the parked-iron list. Signal Short of drivers, 35 dials, longer conversations. These are consultative and they do not close on the first call.

Friday, three jobs. Check your saved searches — a carrier who filed a growth MCS-150 this week is fresh inventory. Then run your funding pipeline: because payment is on funding rather than introduction, the deals paying you this month were sourced 60 to 90 days ago [ESTIMATE — basis: this segment pays on funding, not introduction; substitute your own cycle time once you have measured it], and the only way to see a problem early is to look at applications and fundings as separate numbers. Then re-sort the mileage list by Worth and add ten names to the CRM with a trade-cycle callback date.

Across a week that is roughly 115 dials, about 29 conversations at a 25% connect rate [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate for this channel], and 2 applications. That is a normal week in this business. Do not measure yourself against a fuel card rep.

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What NOT to chase

The compliance consultant's queue. Rated carriers and carriers over a BASIC threshold. They score +94 and +90 for him and −45 and −22 for you, and the reason is the whole point of this playbook: he gets paid in thirty days, you get paid over sixty months. A Conditional-rated carrier loses broker access, loses revenue and misses payments in that order. There are only 12,246 rated carriers nationally — 11,467 Conditional and 779 Unsatisfactory — so this is not a large exclusion. Make it anyway.

A carrier running uninsured. This is still the most important line here. INS_LAPSED carries no weight in your profile at all. A carrier whose coverage terminated with nothing replacing it takes only a 0.20 hit to viability, and because viability is 18% of the total, that is 3.6 points off their score — they can still rank well, while your collateral sits uninsured on a public road. What tells you is the flag rather than the score. AUTH_SUSPEND, INS_LAPSED, REVOKED and DORMANT raise a red chip under the carrier's name on any row, under any offer that does not already score them positively, and your profile scores none of the four positively, so all four show for you. An uninsured carrier carries an INSURANCE LAPSED chip however the list is sorted. Only the first applicable flag renders, so a suspension chip can be sitting on top of a lapse. The chip does not survive an export and the all_signals column will not carry it either, because that column only lists signals with a positive weight for your offer — so working from the CSV, insurance_lapsed_on is what you filter on, before anything else.

Suspension notices. −40, and correctly so. 1,632 were live nationally with a future effective date. Every one of them is a carrier who may not be able to haul freight in under 30 days. They also carry the red flag described above, so you will see them even when the −40 has not been enough to push them out of sight. Let the insurance agent and the compliance shop have them.

New authorities as a volume play. 54 points, the second-lowest weight that signal carries in the whole system. Roughly 21,000 carriers sit inside the 210-day window nationally [ESTIMATE — basis: 2,997 operating authorities granted in July 2026 × 7 months]. Most of them cannot be approved and calling them all is how a good week becomes a bad month. Also note: 15,354 new USDOT registrations were recorded in the same month against those 2,997 grants — a 5.1x gap — so any list sold to you as "15,000 new carriers" is mostly private fleets who will never be your customer.

One-truck owner-operators. Your fit band starts at 2 power units, so a single-truck carrier scores zero on the size component regardless of everything else. That is the model telling you what your credit department already knows.

Fleets over 60 trucks, mostly. You keep partial fit credit to 250 units, so they appear. At that size they usually have a bank line, a captive finance relationship, or both, and you are competing on rate against somebody with a cheaper cost of funds.

Any fleet-size number you have not checked the date on. Power-unit counts come from the MCS-150, which is refiled every 24 months at best. Roughly 57% of active carriers are more than two years out of date, and 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date at all. There is also a documented anomaly of carriers reporting a single power unit while accumulating hundreds of inspections across dozens of VINs. Open the dossier, read the MCS-150 date, and if it is old, treat the truck count as old.

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The money

The model. value = 135,000 × 0.04 × max(1, round(power_units ÷ 8)).

Its assumptions, stated plainly. A $135,000 tractor. A 4% commission. And — the assumption nobody notices — one unit of demand per 8 trucks per year, which is an 8-year replacement cycle applied flat to every carrier regardless of mileage.

The reality check before you forecast anything. Published economics in this segment are lower. A 3% broker commission on a $120,000 used Class 8 is about $3,600 per funded deal. Brokers earn 1–5% of the loan amount, with some referral programs paying up to 10%. Origination-fee splits run 10–30% at one specialty lender and up to 50% at another. On the dealer side, used-truck gross runs in the low thousands per unit.

So: if you place used iron at 3%, multiply HAULVANE's Worth column by 0.67. If you write new tractors at 4%, the model is about right. If you are a dealer earning gross rather than commission, ignore the model's basis entirely and substitute your own per-unit gross.

Where the model is wrong in your favor. The flat 8-year cycle understates high-mileage carriers by roughly the ratio of their mileage. A 148,000-mile-per-truck carrier covers 41% more ground a year than a 105,000-mile one and reaches any given trade odometer about 29% sooner. The model gives them the same demand. Your queue therefore has a systematic bargain in it: high-mileage rows are underpriced by the Worth column. That is Play 3.

A month, worked out.

• 115 dials a week × 4 = 460 dials
• × 25% connect [ESTIMATE — no published connect rate for this channel] = 115 conversations
• × 8% to application [ESTIMATE — no published close rate for this segment; measure your own] = 9 applications
• × 60% funded [ESTIMATE — no funding-rate source exists in the research available here; this is a placeholder to replace with your own credit department's number] = 5 funded deals
• 5 × $5,400 = $27,000 at the model's basis
• 5 × $3,600 = $18,000 at the used-iron basis

Two warnings on that number. First, payment is on funding, not introduction, so a month's revenue was sourced 60 to 90 days earlier — a bad prospecting month shows up in your commission statement a quarter later, which is how people in this segment get surprised. Second, the funding rate is the number that actually decides your income and it is the one number here with no source at all. Measure it before you plan around it.

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Objections you will hear

"My bank already handles this." Then you are getting a good rate and a slow answer. That works until you find a truck on a Thursday. What I do is decide fast on carrier paper specifically — I am not asking you to move the bank relationship, just to have a second number when timing matters.

"Rates are too high right now." They are higher than 2021 and they are not the whole payment. Term and structure move the monthly more than a point of rate does at this size. Tell me what payment works against what that truck earns you and I will tell you honestly whether it can be built.

"I just bought." Good — that is why I called. What rate and term did you end up at, and who wrote it? If it is a fair deal I will tell you so, and I will call you before the next one instead of after it.

"I've only had my authority a year, nobody will approve me." That is often true and I would rather tell you now than after a credit pull. What gets a one-year carrier approved is operating history you can document, a clean inspection record, and money down. You have got the first two on file already — I can see them. Let us talk about the third.

"How did you get my number?" It is on your MCS-150, which is a public federal filing. So is your truck count, your driver count and your annual mileage. That filing is also how I knew you went from 9 trucks to 14.

"I need drivers, not trucks." Then we should be talking about the three you already own that nobody is driving, not a fourth. Those units are still costing you a payment every month. There are two ways to fix that and neither of them involves buying anything.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set your offer. Top right, I sell, choose Equipment finance & truck sales.

2. Read the Playbook screen (fifth icon down) once. Five positive weights and five penalties, drawn as a bar chart. Yours is the profile where the negative bars are the interesting half — look at them before you look at the positives.

3. Open the Prospector (second icon down). Your Active signals filter shows only signals with a positive weight for your offer, sorted by weight. For equipment that is five checkboxes:

Adding trucks · Running high miles · Brand new carrier · Short of drivers · Renewal coming up

Note what you cannot filter on: your five penalties. There is no Poor safety rating box and no Looks dormant box to exclude. The scoring already demotes them; the filter panel simply will not let you isolate them. If you want to see who got demoted and why, open the dossier — the Signals on file panel lists every signal with its weight for your offer, including the negative ones.

4. The signal filter is an OR. Ticking Adding trucks and Running high miles returns carriers with either one, not both. It widens the list. To find the carriers carrying both — the ones that score in the nineties — tick both, export, and filter the all_signals column in your spreadsheet.

5. Set the filters. Fleet size is two sliders, 1 to 200 (200 means 200 and above); set 5 and 60. Minimum score moves in steps of 5; use 80 for Play 1 and 60 for the others. States and cargo are checkbox lists.

6. Save three searches with Save & monitor, top right.

• Growth, credit-clean — signal Adding trucks, fleet 5–60, score 80.
• Parked iron — signal Short of drivers, fleet 5–60, score 60.
• High burn — signal Running high miles, fleet 10–80, score 60.

The first one is the one that pays, because it alerts you the week a carrier files a growth MCS-150 — which is usually within a month or two of the purchase decision they will make next.

7. Export. Export CSV, top right, up to 5,000 rows in the on-screen sort order. The columns that matter for you:

8. Use Watch this carrier from inside the dossier on every account you have funded. It alerts on any change to their federal record — a crash, a rating downgrade, a suspension notice, a fleet contraction. For a lender that is portfolio monitoring, and it is the same data you used to originate.

Dispatch & back office — playbook

For dispatch services, trucking bookkeepers and IFTA shops. Winning looks like a one-to-six truck carrier who signs you in their first ninety days and is still paying you in month fourteen.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying the first ninety days of a company's life. That is the whole thesis of this queue. A carrier who has held authority for three years already has a dispatcher, a bookkeeper, or a spouse doing both. A carrier who got their authority six weeks ago has none of those things, has never filed an IFTA return, and does not yet know that they are about to owe one. NEW_AUTH is weighted +100 for you — the highest weight in your profile, tied with what a factor pays it and what a freight broker pays it. The three of you are calling the same list on the same morning for three completely different reasons.

The second thing you are buying is administrative debt. MCS150_DUE is worth +44 to you and +86 to a compliance consultant, and it is worth zero to every other one of the nine offers in this product. Nobody else in the market prices a stale federal filing, because nobody else sells paperwork. You do. An overdue MCS-150 is a ten-minute fix, and a carrier who has not filed one in three years also has not reconciled a fuel receipt in three years. The filing is not the sale. The filing is the reason they let you look at their books.

The third thing worth understanding is what your profile refuses to score. You have no weight at all on AUTH_SUSPEND, INS_LAPSED, INS_RENEWAL, AUDIT_DUE, RATING_COND, CRASH_RECENT or OOS_SPIKE. Every insurance seller in America is working those signals, and the carriers they generate are worthless to you. A carrier thirty days from losing their operating authority is not going to sign a percentage-of-gross agreement — there is not going to be any gross. Your entire distress-signal exposure is BASIC_ALERT at +20 and two penalties. That is deliberate. You sell to carriers who are running, not to carriers who are drowning.

Segment reality, so you price yourself honestly: dispatch runs about $12,600 a year per truck at the standard 7% of roughly $180,000 of gross. Bookkeeping runs $1,800–$5,400 a year per client. Those are real recurring numbers on micro-businesses with high churn and very little cash. The good news is that the owner is the buyer and the decision happens in about a week. The bad news is that this segment has essentially no lead-buying infrastructure — nobody has ever sold you a list, so nobody in your competition is working a trigger. That is your edge for about eighteen months.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the dispatch profile. Weights are exact, from src/30-engine.js.

Signals your profile ignores completely

AUTH_SUSPEND, INS_LAPSED, INS_RENEWAL, INS_REPLACED, AUDIT_DUE, OOS_SPIKE, CRASH_RECENT, RATING_COND, HAZMAT. Zero weight, all of them.

This matters because a carrier whose only signal is one of those will not appear in your queue at all — the engine drops any carrier with no weighted signal. If somebody hands you a "hot trucking lead" and the reason is a lapsed insurance filing, they have handed you an insurance agent's lead. It is not yours.

Two mechanical notes that will save you an hour a week

Your Call by column is nearly always empty. Only NEW_AUTH produces a live deadline for you. MCS150_DUE technically carries a countdown, but it only fires once the filing is already more than 730 days stale, so the countdown is negative from the moment it appears — and HAULVANE drops any deadline more than 14 days past. In practice you will see it as a Call by date for about a two-week sliver and never again. Sort by Priority, not by Call by.

Your best-scoring new authorities are the newest ones, and the default sort already knows it. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. A carrier 5 days into their authority carries about 96 of the signal's 100 points; by day 190 the signal is sitting on the 0.25 decay floor at 25. Worked from the published formula in SIGNALS.md, a perfect-fit brand-new authority lands at 88 and leads your queue, and the same carrier at day 190 drops to 55 — the default score floor, which is exactly where a carrier who has already picked a dispatcher belongs.

The model and your business agree: the first sixty days are the sale, and the engine puts them on top. Sort by Priority, leave the floor at the default 55, and work down. The 0–60 day cohort is not something you have to dig for any more — it is the top of the list.

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The three plays

Play 1 — The first ninety days

The core play. Everything else is a supplement to this.

How many to expect. FMCSA granted 2,997 operating authorities in July 2026. The NEW_AUTH window is 210 days, so roughly 21,000 carriers carry this signal nationally at any moment [ESTIMATE — 2,997 × 7 months of window; grant volume moves month to month and this is one verified month]. Divided evenly that is about 420 per state, but grants concentrate hard in TX, CA, FL, IL and GA, so a three-state territory in the Southeast or the Texas triangle runs 1,000–2,500 [ESTIMATE, basis: national pool split by known concentration, not measured per state]. Your fleet-size filter of 1–6 barely cuts it: 91.5% of US motor carriers run 10 or fewer trucks.

The opening line.

"Your authority came through on the 3rd of June. Congratulations — that was the hard part. Quick question: who's filing your IFTA return at the end of this quarter?"

Most of them will pause. That pause is the sale. They have not thought about it, the deadline is real, and you have just become the person who knew about it first.

What good looks like. Out of 100 dials in this cohort, expect to reach about 55 [ESTIMATE, basis: phone is on 99.4% of active census records, so coverage is not the constraint — pickup is]. Of those, 8 to 12 will be genuinely un-serviced and interested [ESTIMATE, basis: no published dispatch conversion rate exists; this brackets the published insurance cold-call rate of 2.12% upward because the owner is the buyer and the call is triggered rather than cold]. Two to four sign. At 7% of $185,000 on one truck, four signings is $51,800 of annual run-rate from 100 dials.

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Play 2 — The overdue filing

The bookkeeping wedge. Different pitch, different close, larger lifetime value than a one-truck dispatch account.

How many to expect. This is the deepest pool in the product and you must filter it hard or you will drown. Only about 40% of active carriers have updated their MCS-150 within roughly 18 months, and 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date on file at all. Run it one state at a time with a tight fleet band, or you will export 5,000 rows (the export cap) and work none of them.

The opening line.

"Your MCS-150 hasn't been updated since March 2023. That makes your USDOT number deactivation-eligible, which is a bad surprise to get at a scale house. It's a ten-minute fix and I'll just do it. While I'm in there — who's doing your quarterly IFTA?"

Two things about that script. First, do the filing for free and actually do it. Second, if the carrier argues the due date with you, drop it. HAULVANE measures staleness at 730 days; the actual federal rule sets each carrier's due month from the digits of their USDOT number. They may be technically right about the date. They are not right that the filing is current.

What good looks like. This is a slower, warmer play. Expect 1 in 4 to accept the free filing [ESTIMATE, basis: it costs them nothing and solves a named problem]. Of those, 1 in 3 converts to a paid bookkeeping engagement inside 60 days [ESTIMATE, basis: no published rate for this segment; assumes the filing gives you access to their records]. At $150–$450 a month, twenty free filings a month should produce five to seven paying bookkeeping clients a quarter, worth $1,800–$5,400 each per year.

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Play 3 — The truck they cannot cover

Your highest-Worth rows, and the one place your queue overlaps a recruiter's.

How many to expect. Small. FLEET_GROWTH requires a 20%+ jump on an MCS-150 filed inside 280 days, and you are intersecting it with a driver gap. In a three-state territory expect 40 to 150 rows [ESTIMATE, basis: growth requires a recent filing, and only ~40% of carriers have filed inside 18 months]. Treat this as a named-account list, not a call block.

The opening line.

"Your last filing took you from 6 trucks to 9, and you're carrying 9 trucks against 7 drivers. Who's booking freight for the three new ones — you, at eleven at night?"

The overlap, and why it matters. A driver-recruiting agency is looking at this exact row and scoring it at 100 + 94. They are going to sell the carrier a body. You are selling something different and better-timed: the trucks that are staffed need to run tighter while the seats are empty. Do not pitch against the recruiter. Pitch alongside them. Same federal event, two different sales, and the carrier can buy both. That is the whole idea behind this product — see recruiting.md for what the other side of the phone call sounds like.

What good looks like. Three to five trucks each, so Worth per row runs $38,850 to $64,750. Close two of these a quarter and you have beaten a whole month of Play 1.

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Your week

Volume assumes one full-time rep. Dispatch calls are short — the owner is the decision maker and the call is three to five minutes.

Monday — build, don't dial. 90 minutes. Open the Prospector, run Play 1 for your states, export. The default Priority sort already leads with the freshest grants — draw the line at 60 days on authority_granted and take everything above it. That is this week's A list — aim for 120 to 180 names. Check your saved searches; every new member is a carrier who got their authority since Friday. Then run Play 2 on one state and pull 40 overdue-filing names for the B list. Afternoon: 40 dials into the A list.

Tuesday to Thursday — 60 to 70 dials a day. A list first, top to bottom, no cherry-picking. When you reach voicemail, do not leave the pitch; leave the date. "Calling about your authority grant on the 3rd of June and your first IFTA quarter." Email second — email is on 76.0% of active records and it is the safest channel by a wide margin. Read the calling and texting rules in FAQ.md before you dial at volume; about 43% of these numbers are the owner's personal cell and the federal rule on cell phones has no business-to-business exemption.

Friday — filings and follow-up. Morning: actually do the free MCS-150 filings you promised on Tuesday and Wednesday. This is the day that converts Play 2. Afternoon: 30 follow-up dials, update the CRM, and add any carrier you spoke to but did not close to a Watch this carrier in their dossier so you hear about it when their fleet moves.

Weekly totals. Roughly 250–300 dials, 130–170 conversations, 20–30 real opportunities, 3 to 6 signings [ESTIMATE, basis: the per-play conversion brackets above, which are themselves estimates].

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What NOT to chase

Do not sort your queue by Worth. This is the trap built into your own numbers. Worth is min(trucks, 20) × $185,000 × 7%, so it climbs to $259,000 at 20 trucks and stops. But your fit model's fleet band runs 1 → 1–6 → 18, which means fleet fit hits zero at 18 trucks and above. Your eligibility rule does not cut you off until 30. So carriers between 19 and 30 trucks show the biggest Worth numbers in the file and can never score well — a 20-truck carrier tops out around 80 even with a perfect trigger. Sorting by Worth surfaces exactly the accounts the model is telling you not to work. Sort by Priority.

Carriers with 19 to 30 trucks. Same point from the other direction, and it is also true in the real world. A 25-truck fleet has a dispatcher on payroll, and probably an office manager. You are not displacing salaried staff with a 7% fee.

Anyone with a suspension notice or a lapsed insurance filing. You will not see them in your queue — you score both at zero — but you will meet them if you search a USDOT number directly, and a broker or an agent may hand you one. Do not sign them. FMCSA's suspension effective date is exactly 30 days after the serve date and it is a filed federal date, not a guess. A percentage-of-gross agreement signed with a carrier who stops hauling in three weeks is a bad debt with paperwork attached.

Brand-new authorities that have not moved a load yet. Some of the 2,997 monthly grants never haul anything. You cannot see this on day 10 — there is no signal for it, because zero inspections is normal for a truly new carrier and DORMANT will not fire for over 400 days. Qualify on the call: ask what they hauled last week. If the answer is "we're still looking at trucks," put them in a 45-day follow-up, not a contract.

Shrinking fleets, even when they look busy. FLEET_SHRINK costs you 20 points and a further 0.12 of viability, and the model will still show some of them as WATCH. The math is doing its job; you should finish it. A carrier who went from 8 trucks to 5 is not a five-truck prospect. They are an eight-truck problem.

The safety-score lead. BASIC_ALERT is worth 20 to you. It is worth 90 to a compliance consultant and −70 to a freight broker. At 20 points it will essentially never lead one of your rows, and it should not. You are not a compliance shop. If you find yourself pitching CSA remediation, you are about to give away hours you cannot bill.

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The money

The formula, exactly

The dispatch profile computes Worth as:

value = min(power_units, 20) × $185,000 × 0.07

Its assumptions, stated plainly: $185,000 of gross line-haul revenue per truck per year, a 7% fee on that gross, and a cap at 20 trucks. It annualizes, and it assumes the account survives a year.

How that compares to what your segment actually charges

The market number for a single-truck owner-operator is 7% of roughly $180,000 gross, about $12,600 a year — so HAULVANE's model runs $350 a year high on one truck. Close enough to work with.

But if you bill a flat weekly fee, the Worth column understates you by about half. Flat dispatch rates run $400–$700 per truck per week (the broader market range is $250–$650). At $500 a week that is $26,000 a year on one truck against the model's $12,950. Hybrid pricing — roughly 5% plus a $300–$500 monthly base — lands in between. Reefer runs 6–8% and flatbed or specialized runs 7–10%, so your cargo filter changes your realized rate. If you sell flat weekly, double the Worth column in your head [arithmetic on published rate ranges, not a HAULVANE output].

Bookkeeping and IFTA are a separate line the model does not compute at all: $150–$450 a month for trucking bookkeeping and $30–$100 per quarter for single-truck IFTA. Annual client value $1,800–$5,400.

A month of working this queue

Assume one rep, the week above, four weeks.

• 1,000–1,200 dials
• 3 to 6 signings a week → 12 to 24 new dispatch accounts a month [ESTIMATE, basis compounded from the per-play brackets above]
• Average 2 trucks per account [ESTIMATE, basis: 91.5% of carriers run 10 or fewer trucks and your fit plateau is 1–6]
• 12 accounts × 2 trucks × $12,950 = $310,800 of annual run-rate booked
• Plus 5–7 bookkeeping conversions a quarter from Play 2, at ~$3,600 a year each = $18,000–$25,200 annual

The number that decides whether this is a business: churn. This segment is micro-businesses with little cash. Assume 30–40% annual churn [ESTIMATE — no published churn figure exists for dispatch services; this is the honest range for sub-$500/month SMB services and you should replace it with your own number as soon as you have twelve months of data]. At 35% churn, $310,800 booked in month one is worth roughly $202,000 twelve months later. Book accordingly, and do not put the Worth column in a forecast.

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Objections you will hear

"I dispatch myself. I don't need to pay somebody 7%." You are not paying 7% for someone to book loads. You are paying it to stop booking loads at eleven at night after a fourteen-hour day. If you are getting the same rates I am, fire me in thirty days and keep the difference.

"I already have a dispatcher." Fine — what percentage, and how many trucks do they run besides yours? Most single dispatchers carry twenty to forty trucks. Ask them how many. If the answer is over thirty, you are somebody's spare capacity on a Friday afternoon.

"How did you get my number?" It is public. FMCSA publishes the carrier census every day and your authority grant is in it. Phone is on 99.4% of active records — that is not because anyone sold your data, it is because you filed it. If you would rather I email, I will email.

"I can't afford it, I just started." That is exactly the problem. You are paying $300 for an authority, $176 for UCR, plates, and insurance, and you have not booked a load yet. My fee comes out of revenue that does not exist unless I create it. If I book nothing, you pay nothing.

"I'll do my own IFTA." You might. Most people mean it in January and stop in April. The filing is quarterly and the penalty is not. Let me do this quarter free and you decide in July.

"The last dispatcher I used booked me garbage freight." Almost certainly true — most dispatch services are paid on gross, which pays them to book anything. Ask me for my average rate per mile on your lanes before you sign, and put a floor in the agreement. If I book below it, I don't get paid on it.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set the offer. Top right of the header, I sell → Dispatch & back office. Everything re-ranks: the Signal desk, the Prospector, the Territory map and the Playbook screen. Your eligibility rule is now active authority and 30 trucks or fewer — larger carriers are removed before scoring and you will never see them.

2. Open the Prospector (second icon down the left rail).

3. Set the filters, left panel, top to bottom.

• Fleet size — trucks: min 1, max 6 for Play 1. Max 18 for Play 2 and 3.
• Minimum priority score: leave it at the default 55 for Play 1. Recency decay means the fresh grants you want clear it comfortably, and the stale back half of the window does not. If you want a younger list, raise the floor rather than re-sorting — it tightens the age window instead of throwing away leads.
• Active signals: tick Brand new carrier. For Play 2, untick it and tick Federal filing overdue instead. For Play 3, tick Adding trucks and Short of drivers.
• States: tick your territory. Run Play 2 one state at a time.
• Cargo: leave it alone unless you specialize. If you dispatch reefer or flatbed only, tick Refrigerated Food or the specialized classes — your realized percentage is 1–3 points higher on those.

4. Save it. Save & monitor, top right. Save two: "New authority, 1–6 trucks, my states" and "MCS-150 overdue, 2–18 trucks, [one state]". The first one is the one that matters — every new member is a carrier who got their authority since you last looked.

5. Read the table before you export. Your sixth column is Hauls — the primary cargo class from the MCS-150. It changes by offer; an insurance seller sees "Insured by" in that slot and a broker sees "Safety". Yours is cargo because it is the field that decides your rate.

6. Export CSV, top right. Up to 5,000 rows, named haulvane-dispatch-<date>.csv, 24 columns.

The columns that matter for you, in order:

Ignore insurer, renewal_estimated, insurance_lapsed_on and suspension_effective entirely. They carry zero weight in your profile. They are the insurance agent's four columns, and they are the reason the same export means something completely different to them than it does to you.

Driver recruiting & CDL supply — playbook

For driver-recruiting agencies, CDL schools and job boards. Winning looks like a fleet between 8 and 120 trucks that pays you per seat, and calls you again the next time somebody quits.

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What you are actually buying

You are buying a parked truck. Not a distress event, not a deadline, not a filing — a piece of equipment sitting in a yard with nobody licensed to drive it. DRIVER_GAP is weighted +100 in your profile, the highest weight you have and the only signal in the entire product that any offer scores at 100 purely on a standing condition rather than an event. Everybody else's top signal is something that happened on a date. Yours is something that is simply true this morning and was also true last month.

That changes how you work. You have almost no calendar. DRIVER_GAP, FLEET_GROWTH and MILEAGE_HIGH carry no countdown at all, so your Call by column will read no deadline on nearly every row you ever see, and the Renewal calendar screen is close to useless for you. An insurance agent works a queue of appointments. You work a queue of conditions. Your discipline is cadence and being first, not urgency — and the condition can sit for a year, which means somebody else has probably called them too.

The second thing you are buying is the leading indicator. FLEET_GROWTH at +94 is nearly as valuable to you as the gap itself, and it is worth more to you than to anybody except an ELD vendor, a fuel card and an equipment lender. The reason is sequence: carriers buy trucks first and hire second. A fleet that filed an MCS-150 showing 20% more power units inside the last 280 days has already committed the capital and has not yet solved the staffing. When FLEET_GROWTH and DRIVER_GAP appear on the same row, the engine's trigger score pins at 1.0 — the maximum — and the carrier scores in the high 90s. Those rows are the best leads in this product for anybody, and they are pointed at you.

The third thing is a hard structural limit you need to accept on day one. Your addressable universe is roughly a tenth the size of a dispatch service's. 91.5% of US motor carriers run 10 or fewer trucks, and 99.3% run fewer than 100. Your eligibility rule removes anything under 3 trucks outright, and your fleet-fit band does not reach full strength until 8 trucks. So the pool you are fishing in is roughly the top 8.5% of the market by fleet size [ESTIMATE, basis: the 91.5% figure above; the exact count of carriers in the 8–120 band is not published]. That is fine — it is also where all the money is — but it means you cannot win this on volume. You win it on coverage of a small named universe.

Your buyer's economics: cost per hire averages about $4,000, in-house DIY runs $8,500 per hire, CDL listings cost $2 to $15+ per click, and carriers routinely spend $5,000 to $10,000 a month on Indeed advertising alone. Meanwhile an empty truck costs them roughly $3,000 to $5,000 a week in lost revenue. That last number is your entire pitch and you should be able to say it in your sleep.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the recruiting profile. Weights are exact, from src/30-engine.js.

Signals your profile ignores completely

AUTH_SUSPEND, INS_LAPSED, INS_RENEWAL, INS_REPLACED, AUDIT_DUE, MCS150_DUE, BASIC_ALERT, OOS_SPIKE, CRASH_RECENT, HAZMAT. Zero weight, all of them.

Two of those absences are worth arguing about with yourself.

BASIC_ALERT is zero for you and −70 for a freight broker. A carrier with an Unsafe Driving or HOS percentile over threshold is a carrier whose drivers are getting written up. That is a retention problem and arguably a placement risk. The model says it is not your business, and the model is defensible — you are paid to fill a seat, not to fix why it emptied. But if you are paid on a 90-day guarantee, check the safety panel in the dossier before you place anybody.

AUTH_SUSPEND is zero for you. An insurance agent scores that at +100 and drops everything to call it. You will never see the carrier. Correct: a company thirty days from losing its authority is not hiring drivers.

The mechanical note that matters most

Your signal filter cannot exclude anything. The Active signals checkboxes in the Prospector are an OR: tick two and you get carriers with either. There is no "not this signal" control. Since FLEET_SHRINK is your worst false positive and it rides on your best signal, the only way to remove it is in the export — filter on the all_signals column and drop every row that contains FLEET_SHRINK. Build that into your list-prep habit. It takes ten seconds in a spreadsheet and it is the highest-value ten seconds in this playbook.

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The three plays

Play 1 — Seats on the ground

Your bread and butter. Everything else is timing on top of this.

How many to expect. No public count exists for how many carriers report fewer drivers than trucks, and I am not going to invent one. Read it off the screen instead: the Active signals list in the Prospector filter panel shows a live count next to every signal name, recalculated against your current filters. That number is the real answer for your territory today. Whatever it says, expect the 8-to-40-truck band with a score of 70+ to be a named-account list in the low hundreds for a three-state territory, not a call block of thousands [ESTIMATE, basis: fewer than 8.5% of carriers run more than 10 trucks].

Then clean it. Export, drop every row whose all_signals contains FLEET_SHRINK, and drop every row whose power_units and drivers come from an MCS-150 older than about 18 months if you can see the date in the dossier. What is left is your list.

The opening line.

"You're carrying 11 power units against 8 drivers. A parked truck costs three to five thousand a week in revenue you're not billing. We fill seats pay-per-placement, no retainer. How many are you actually short right now?"

Ask the number. Do not assert it. The filing may be from 2023.

What good looks like. Of 100 clean rows, expect to reach a decision maker on 30 to 40 [ESTIMATE, basis: these are 8–40 truck fleets, so you are through a dispatcher or office manager rather than straight to the owner]. Of those, 10 to 15 confirm a real open seat. Three to five give you a req. At $2,200 a seat and an average of 3 seats per account, five accounts is $33,000.

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Play 2 — They bought the trucks first

The highest-scoring rows in this product, for anyone. Small list. Work every single one.

How many to expect. Very few. FLEET_GROWTH requires a 20%+ jump on an MCS-150 filed inside 280 days, and only about 40% of active carriers have updated that filing within roughly 18 months. Intersecting it with a driver gap leaves a short list — expect tens, not hundreds, in a three-state territory [ESTIMATE, basis: the growth signal's own firing rules plus the filing-staleness figure]. This is the one play where you should consider dropping the state filter entirely and working nationally.

Why they score so high. When both signals are present, the trigger formula — (best + 0.28 × everything else) ÷ 112 — produces a value above 1.0 and clamps at the maximum. A 20-truck fleet with a growth event, a driver gap and a normal operating history scores in the mid-90s, which is HOT with room to spare. There is no better-qualified row in this system.

The opening line.

"Your last MCS-150 took you from 14 trucks to 19, and you're showing 19 trucks against 15 drivers. You've already paid for the equipment. What's the plan for the other four seats?"

That call is a pleasant one. Nobody is in trouble. They spent money and they are proud of it. Let them tell you the story before you pitch.

What good looks like. These convert at roughly twice the rate of Play 1 [ESTIMATE, basis: the growth event confirms both budget and intent, which Play 1 does not]. Expect 4 to 6 open seats per account rather than 3. One closed account here is worth two from Play 1.

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Play 3 — The high-mileage churn account

The retainer play. You are not selling a placement, you are selling a standing pipeline.

How many to expect. MILEAGE_HIGH fires above 134,000 miles per truck per year, which is roughly the top 10% for utilization. Intersect that with a driver gap and a 20+ truck fleet and you have a very short national list — read the live signal count in the filter panel. Treat this as fifteen to forty named accounts you work for a year, not a queue.

Why these are different. A fleet running 134,000+ miles per truck is running long-haul, probably team or tightly dispatched, and it is grinding through drivers. Turnover in that profile is structural. That means the carrier does not need one driver — they need six a year, forever. This is where retainers, volume rates and CDL-school partnerships live.

The opening line.

"You're running about 148,000 miles a truck a year. That's the top decile, and it's also the profile that churns drivers hardest. I'd rather not sell you one hire. I'd rather price you a standing pipeline so you stop paying Indeed five grand a month for the same problem."

What good looks like. One signed volume agreement per quarter [ESTIMATE, basis: these are longer, multi-stakeholder sales into fleets with an existing recruiting function]. At 6 placements a year and $2,200 each, a single account is $13,200 a year of predictable revenue — and it does not require you to prospect for it again.

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Your week

Volume assumes one full-time rep. Your calls are longer than a dispatch rep's and your list is shorter. Do not try to out-dial the dispatch playbook; you will run out of names by Wednesday.

Monday — build and clean. Two hours. Run Play 1 for your states, export, drop FLEET_SHRINK rows, drop RATING_COND rows, check the signal counts in the filter panel against last Monday's. Then run Play 2 nationally — it takes five minutes and it is where your best two calls of the week are. Target list: 60 to 90 names. Afternoon: 25 dials.

Tuesday to Thursday — 30 to 40 dials a day, email first. These are 8-to-120-truck fleets, which means a gatekeeper. Email before you dial; email is on 76.0% of active census records and it survives a switchboard. Your subject line is the fact: "19 trucks, 15 drivers." Then call. When you get the safety director or the fleet manager, ask the seat count before you say your price.

Wednesday — Play 2 and Play 3 accounts only. Block the morning. These are the calls that need you unhurried and they are too few to fit around the Play 1 grind.

Friday — cadence, not prospecting. Your signals do not expire, which means your leads do not go cold — they go stale in a different way, by somebody else getting there first. Friday is for the 30-day and 60-day touches on everyone who said "not right now." Add every one of them to a Watch this carrier in their dossier. When their fleet grows or their driver count moves, you will hear about it before your competitor does.

Weekly totals. Roughly 120–160 dials, 45–60 conversations, 12–20 confirmed open seats, 3 to 6 reqs [ESTIMATE, basis: the per-play brackets above, which are themselves estimates].

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What NOT to chase

A shrinking fleet with a driver gap. This is the one that will cost you a month.

Run the model's own arithmetic. A 20-truck carrier with a driver gap and a FLEET_SHRINK event scores like this: the trigger becomes (100 + 0.28 × −60) ÷ 112 = 0.743, fleet fit is a perfect 1.0, and viability lands around 0.93 after the shrink penalty. Total: 85. HOT. Call today.

It is not a lead. That carrier parked five trucks and let the drivers go. The gap on their filing is a record of the layoff, not a vacancy. The −60 penalty is real and it is doing something — without it that row would score 94 — but 0.28 of it reaches the score, so it removes about nine points from a signal worth a hundred. The model flags the problem. It does not solve it. You have to. Filter all_signals on export, every single time.

Carriers under 8 trucks. Your eligibility rule lets in anything at 3 or above, but the fleet-fit band starts at 4 and does not plateau until 8. A 4-truck carrier with one open seat is worth $2,200, is going to negotiate you down, and will ask you to also find them a dispatcher. The economics of a per-placement fee do not survive that conversation. Set your fleet minimum to 8 and stop apologizing for it.

Carriers over 120 trucks. Fit ramps down from 120 and hits zero at 400. That is the model telling you the truth: a 200-truck fleet has an in-house recruiting department, an applicant tracking system, a media budget and a dedicated ad agency. They are not buying per-placement. If you want that account, sell them a different product — sourcing, a school partnership, an overflow contract — and understand that HAULVANE is not going to score it for you.

Do not sort by Worth. Worth is (power_units − drivers) × $2,200 with no cap. A 300-truck fleet with 40 open seats shows $88,000 and has a fleet fit of about 0.55. Sorting by Worth puts the accounts you cannot win at the top of the page. Sort by Priority; the fit component is already doing the work.

Any Conditional or Unsatisfactory rating. The model prices this at only −15 and that is the softest weight in your profile. In the real world a Conditional rating is a wall. Drivers look it up, the good ones pass, and the ones who do not pass are the ones you will be replacing again in ninety days. A compliance consultant is calling that same carrier today with a +94 signal and a real solution. Let them fix it first.

And the honest one: your defining signal sits on the stalest field in the file. DRIVER_GAP is computed entirely from drivers against power_units on the MCS-150. About 57% of active carriers have not updated that filing in over two years. Only about 40% have updated inside roughly 18 months, and 256,822 active carriers have no MCS-150 date on file at all. FMCSA suspended biennial-update enforcement on 25 June 2026, so it is getting worse, not better. There is also a documented anomaly of carriers reporting a single power unit while accumulating hundreds of inspections across dozens of vehicles.

What that means on the phone: never quote a seat count. Ask for it. "You're showing 19 against 15 — how many are you actually short?" gets you the truth and makes you sound like you did your homework. "You have four open seats" gets you corrected, and you lose the call.

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The money

The formula, exactly

The recruiting profile computes Worth as:

value = max(1, power_units − drivers) × $2,200

Its assumptions, stated plainly: a flat $2,200 placement fee per seat, no cap, no discount for volume, and — critically — that every unfilled seat on the filing is a live vacancy you will be paid to fill. That last assumption is the shakiest number in your queue, for the staleness reasons above.

Why $2,200 is the right price to quote

Your buyer's blended cost per hire averages about $4,000. Doing it themselves in-house runs $8,500 per hire once you count advertising, recruiter time, screening, interviews and onboarding. Job board advertising alone runs $3,000 to $8,000, CDL clicks cost $2 to $15+, and carriers routinely spend $5,000 to $10,000 a month on Indeed.

So $2,200 is roughly 55% of what a hire already costs them, and it converts a fixed monthly media spend into a variable per-result fee. That is the argument. Make it with their numbers, not yours.

One documented campaign for context: $13,252.76 of spend produced 3,119 leads at $4.09 per lead and 27 hires — about $491 per hire on media alone, before a single hour of recruiter time. If a prospect quotes you a number like that, they are quoting media cost, not cost per hire. Ask them what they pay the person who screened 3,119 applications.

The number that beats every other number

An empty truck costs $3,000 to $5,000 a week in lost revenue.

A seat open for six weeks costs the carrier $18,000 to $30,000. Your fee is $2,200. Every objection about price dies on that arithmetic, and it is their number, not yours.

A month of working this queue

One rep, the week above, four weeks:

• 480–640 dials, 180–240 conversations
• 12 to 24 reqs [ESTIMATE, basis: 3–6 reqs a week from the per-play brackets]
• Average 3.5 seats per req [ESTIMATE, basis: the fleet band you are working and typical gap sizes in it]
• Fill rate 60% inside 60 days [ESTIMATE — no published fill-rate benchmark exists for CDL agency placement; replace this with your own number as soon as you have one]
• 16 reqs × 3.5 seats × 60% × $2,200 = $73,920 of placement fees per month

For CDL schools and job boards, the formula does not model you at all. A school monetizes tuition and carrier sponsorship; a board monetizes listings or clicks. The same query is still the right query — the 8-to-120-truck fleets with a driver gap are your sponsorship pipeline and your paying advertisers — but ignore the Worth column entirely and substitute your own unit. For a school, the useful frame is: each of these carriers is a placement partner worth a standing intake of graduates. For a board, each one is a listings account currently spending $5,000–$10,000 a month somewhere else.

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Objections you will hear

"I don't pay recruiters. I use Indeed." So does everybody, at two to fifteen dollars a click and five to ten thousand a month. That is a fixed cost whether it produces a hire or not. I am a variable cost that only exists when a driver is in the seat.

"$2,200 a head is too much." Your blended cost per hire is around four thousand and in-house runs eight and a half. And the truck sitting in your yard is costing you three to five thousand a week regardless. I am the cheapest line in that paragraph.

"That filing is old. I'm not short." Good — then I have the wrong number and I would rather know now. How many are you actually short? (This is the single most common objection you will get and it is frequently true. Take it gracefully; it opens the real conversation.)

"The last agency sent me people who quit in three weeks." Then you paid for a submission, not a placement. My fee is contingent on the driver being in the seat, and I will put a replacement guarantee in writing. Ask the last agency to do the same.

"My insurance won't take a driver with under two years' experience." Most won't. That is why I ask for your driver qualification criteria before I source, not after. Give me the underwriting restrictions and I will not send you anybody you cannot legally seat.

"We only run owner-operators." Then you are recruiting business owners rather than employees, which is a different search and a different fee — but the truck is still empty and the math on an empty truck does not change. Tell me what you pay per mile and what you require, and I will tell you honestly whether I can fill it.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set the offer. Top right of the header, I sell → Driver recruiting & CDL supply. Everything re-ranks. Your eligibility rule is now active authority and 3 or more trucks — one and two truck operations are removed before scoring and you will never see them.

2. Open the Prospector (second icon down the left rail).

3. Set the filters, left panel, top to bottom.

• Fleet size — trucks: min 8, max 40 for Play 1. Max 120 for Plays 2 and 3. Never below 8 unless you have a specific reason.
• Minimum priority score: 70 for Plays 1 and 3, 80 for Play 2. Unlike most offers you do not need to drop the floor — your top signal carries no countdown, so it is never decayed, and real leads score high naturally.
• Active signals: tick Short of drivers. Add Adding trucks for Play 2, Running high miles for Play 3. Remember these combine as OR, not AND — you are widening the net, then narrowing it in the export.
• States: your territory for Play 1. Consider clearing it entirely for Plays 2 and 3; those lists are small enough to work nationally.
• Read the count next to each signal name. It updates against your current filters. That number is the true size of your territory's opportunity — use it instead of any estimate in this document.

4. Save it. Save & monitor, top right. Save two: "Driver gap, 8–40 trucks, my states" and "Growth + gap, 8–120, national". The second one alerts you the moment a fleet files an MCS-150 showing new trucks. That alert is worth more than the rest of the product to you.

5. Read the table. Your sixth column is Hauls — the primary cargo class from the MCS-150. It matters because it sets the endorsement you are recruiting for. Reefer, tanker and flatbed each narrow the candidate pool and should raise your fee. A broker sees "Safety" in that same slot; an insurance agent sees "Insured by". Same table, different column, because you are looking for different things.

6. Export CSV, top right. Up to 5,000 rows, named haulvane-recruiting-<date>.csv, 24 columns.

The columns that matter for you, in order:

Ignore insurer, renewal_estimated, insurance_lapsed_on and suspension_effective. All four carry zero weight for you. They belong to the insurance seller working the same file, and the fact that the same export is worthless to them in the columns you use and worthless to you in the columns they use is the point of the whole product.

Broker capacity sourcing — playbook

For freight brokers and 3PLs recruiting carriers onto the network. Winning looks like an onboarding slot filled by a carrier who is still hauling for you in twelve months, and an empty slot where a bad one would have been.

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What you are actually buying

Read the weights before you read anything else. Eight of the twelve signals in your profile are negative. Three of them are at −100. Your top positive weight is +100 and your fourth positive weight is +6. No other offer in this product looks like this.

That is not an accident and it is not a defect. Every other seller in this system is looking for a carrier in trouble, because trouble is when people buy. An insurance agent scores a served suspension notice at +100 — the single highest weight anywhere in HAULVANE. A compliance consultant scores it at +76. You score it at −100 and the carrier is removed from your queue outright. Same federal record, same day, same company. For the agent it is the best phone call of their week. For you it is a truck that stops being legal to haul your freight on a date the government has already published.

This is the clearest proof of the idea the whole product is built on: the same federal event means completely different money to different sellers. Everyone else in this set of playbooks is reading the file for a reason to call. You are reading it for a reason not to.

Which makes your job structurally different. You are not buying leads. You are buying onboarding slots. Your cost of a wrong decision is not a lost commission — it is a carrier packet, an insurance verification, staff time, a monitoring subscription running $2 to $10 per carrier per month for as long as they sit on your network, and in the bad case a $50,000 load on an uninsured truck. A broker's economics do not reward volume of carriers. They reward the ratio of carriers who haul to carriers you onboarded.

The market you sit in reflects that. There are roughly 30,000 active freight brokerages registered with FMCSA (28,351 active property brokers in 2023 plus 1,078 household-goods brokers), and the top 3% generate 80% of gross revenue. The vetting tools built for the top of that market are priced accordingly — MyCarrierPortal publishes $515 a month with unlimited users, Highway serves 1,050+ brokers including 70 of the top 100, and monitoring runs $2–$10 per carrier per month on top of $50–$500 per seat per month. Roughly 29,000 small brokerages cannot justify any of that. If you are one of them, this queue is the version of that capability that arrives sorted by who to call rather than by who to worry about.

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Your signal map

Every signal with a non-zero weight in the broker profile. Weights are exact, from src/30-engine.js. The negatives are the point of this table — read them first.

The four positives

The eight negatives — the useful half

Signals your profile ignores completely

INS_REPLACED, AUDIT_DUE, MCS150_DUE, DRIVER_GAP, HAZMAT. Zero weight.

Two of those absences deserve an argument.

INS_REPLACED should probably be a small positive and it is zero. A TERM/REPL row means an insurer just underwrote this carrier and put a fresh filing on record — that is reassuring information. It is worth −34 to an insurance agent, because the carrier just bought and will not buy again for a year. Here is why you should care about the difference: 659 of the 661 future-dated rows in the federal insurance file are TERM/REPL. Any vendor selling you "future-dated insurance cancellations" as a risk feed is selling you a list of carriers who just re-insured — some of the safest carriers in the file. The federal insurance file contains no advance warning of a cancellation whatsoever. Rows are written at or after the lapse. If a competitor's product claims otherwise, that is the question to ask them.

DRIVER_GAP is zero for you and +100 for a driver-recruiting agency. Correct. Whether a carrier has trucks parked for lack of drivers is somebody else's business. You care whether the trucks that do roll are safe and legal. See recruiting.md for what the same row is worth to the person selling them a body.

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The three mechanical facts that decide how you use this

1. The score demotes. It does not delete. Only two things remove a carrier from your queue: an inactive operating authority, and a lapsed insurance filing. Everything else is arithmetic. A carrier with a Conditional rating and a fresh authority still scores around 74 — WARM once the −100 is discounted by the engine's 0.28 multiplier on non-leading signals. A BASIC_ALERT costs about nine points. All three risk signals together cost about twenty-nine. The model pushes bad carriers down the page. It does not take them off it. If you work by score alone, you will eventually onboard one.

2. So use the Safety column, not the score, as your gate. When your offer is set to Broker capacity sourcing, the sixth column of the Prospector changes to Safety and shows one of four words: Good, Watch, Poor, No data. That column is a plain-English read on the CSA record — Poor means at least one BASIC is over threshold or a Conditional/Unsatisfactory rating is on file. It is the single most useful field on the screen for you and it exists in that slot specifically because your offer is selected. An insurance agent sees "Insured by" there. A dispatcher sees "Hauls". You see the answer to your actual question.

"No data" is not a warning. It means FMCSA has not had enough of the right inspections to give the carrier a percentile — a BASIC needs at least three inspections with a violation over 24 months before it is scored at all. Most carriers in America show insufficient data in most BASICs, and a brand-new authority essentially always does. Do not confuse "No data" with "Good", and do not confuse it with "Poor" either.

3. The most important date in your business will never appear in your Call by column. HAULVANE's rule is that a deadline attached to a signal with a negative weight is not an appointment — and AUTH_SUSPEND is −100 for you. So the suspension effective date, the one genuinely forward-dated fact in the entire federal motor-carrier corpus, is deliberately withheld from your deadline column.

It is still there. It is in the dossier, and it is in the export as suspension_effective. Map that column into your TMS. It is the field that tells you a carrier on your network stops being legal on a specific date, and it is the only one of its kind.

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The three plays

Play 1 — Clean new authority

Get to them before the load boards do.

Why the default floor works here. NEW_AUTH decays on recency — days since the grant, not days left in the window. A carrier five days into their authority carries about 96 of the signal's 100 points; by day 190 it is sitting on the 0.25 decay floor at 25. Worked from the published formula, a five-truck interstate carrier with a clean crash record scores about 87 on day five and 55 on day 190. The default floor of 55 and the default Priority sort therefore hand you the first half of the window — the carriers nobody else has onboarded yet — with the stale back half already demoted for you. No re-sort needed.

If you move intrastate freight, drop the floor to 40 permanently. Your fit formula awards 0.25 for interstate operation and nothing for intrastate, so a regional carrier loses a quarter of their fit before anything else is considered. They will not clear 55 easily.

How many to expect. FMCSA granted 2,997 operating authorities in July 2026, so roughly 21,000 carriers carry this signal nationally at any moment [ESTIMATE — 2,997 × the 7-month window; one verified month, and grant volume moves]. Read the live count next to Brand new carrier in the filter panel for your actual territory.

The number that should change how you buy lists. In that same month there were 15,354 new USDOT registrations against those 2,997 authority grants — a 5.1x gap. A USDOT number means somebody got a federal ID; operating authority means FMCSA authorized them to haul other people's freight for money. Four out of five companies on a generic "new carrier" list cannot legally take your load. HAULVANE counts grants. Most vendors count registrations.

The opening line.

"Your authority came through on the 3rd of June. I run [lane] freight out of [city] and I'd rather set you up now than call you on a Friday afternoon when I'm desperate. Fifteen minutes to get your packet done?"

What good looks like. Of 100 carriers, 40 to 55 will pick up [ESTIMATE, basis: phone is on 99.4% of active census records; pickup, not coverage, is the constraint]. Twenty to thirty will complete a packet [ESTIMATE, basis: a new authority has no committed capacity and low switching cost]. The number that actually matters is how many of those haul a load within 60 days. Track it. If it is under 40%, your onboarding is cheaper than your carrier sales, and you are collecting paperwork rather than capacity.

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Play 2 — The growth fleet

Small list, best conversations, highest Worth per row.

How many to expect. Few. FLEET_GROWTH requires a 20%+ jump on an MCS-150 filed inside 280 days, and only about 40% of active carriers have updated that filing within roughly 18 months. Expect tens to low hundreds in a multi-state footprint [ESTIMATE, basis: the signal's firing rules against the filing-staleness figure]. Read the live count in the filter panel.

Why the timing is good. They committed capital to equipment and the equipment has to earn. A carrier who went from 9 trucks to 14 has five units of capacity that are not yet committed to anyone's contract freight, and payments starting immediately. That is the best negotiating position you will ever have with a carrier, and it lasts about a quarter.

The opening line.

"Your last filing took you from 9 trucks to 14. I've got consistent [lane] volume and I'd rather commit it to somebody who needs the miles than fight for it on the spot market every Tuesday. What are the new trucks running now?"

What good looks like. These convert to committed lane capacity rather than one-off spot coverage. One in five of these conversations should produce a carrier who takes repeat freight [ESTIMATE, basis: they have uncommitted capacity and a payment schedule; no published broker onboarding conversion benchmark exists]. At 20 trucks the Worth column reads $285,200 of modeled annual gross margin. Even at a fraction of that, two of these a quarter beat a hundred spot relationships.

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Play 3 — The purge

Not a prospecting play. The one that proves the thesis.

What it produces. Every carrier in your lanes carrying at least one of your four risk signals. Cross it against your approved carrier list. What matches is your removal list.

Why the score floor must be 0. A carrier whose only weighted signals are negative gets a trigger score of exactly zero — the formula clamps there. Their total ends up around 20 to 48, well below the default floor of 55. The carriers you most need to see are the ones the default filter hides, because the default filter is built for people who are hunting rather than screening.

And here is the whole idea in one screen. That saved search — Poor safety rating, safety score over limit, recent crash, failing inspections — is identical to the highest-priority prospect list a DOT compliance consultant builds. They weight those four signals at +94, +90, +58 and +52. You weight them at −100, −70, −50 and −40. Same four checkboxes, same rows, same day. They call it their pipeline. You call it your exclusion list. Neither of you is wrong.

The other half of this play: watch your existing network. Your eligibility rule protects your prospecting queue from lapsed carriers by removing them. It does nothing for the carrier you onboarded eight months ago — when their coverage lapses they simply stop appearing, silently. Open the dossier for every carrier on your approved list and click Watch this carrier. It alerts on any change to their federal record. For a broker this is not a nice-to-have; it is the highest-value habit in the product, and it is the thing the $515-a-month monitoring platforms are actually selling.

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Your week

Your day belongs to covering loads. HAULVANE time has to be bounded or it will not happen at all.

Monday — 60 minutes, sourcing. Run Play 1 for your lane origins. Export — the default Priority sort already leads with the freshest grants — and cut the list at 90 days on authority_granted. Filter the Safety column: Good and No data only. Target 60 to 100 names. Then run Play 2 — it takes five minutes and produces your best two calls of the week. Check your saved searches; new members of the Play 1 search are carriers who got authority since last Monday.

Tuesday to Thursday — 45 minutes a day, 20 to 30 dials. Do it before the board gets busy, not after. Carrier sales calls are short. Your goal on the first call is a completed packet, not a load. Email works here too — email is on 76.0% of active records, and a new authority checks their email because they are waiting on filings.

Wednesday — onboarding cleanup. Chase the packets from Monday and Tuesday. Half of them stall on a certificate of insurance. A packet that sits for a week is a packet that never completes.

Friday — 30 minutes, the purge. Run Play 3. Cross the output against your approved list. Pull anybody who has picked up a Conditional rating, a BASIC over threshold, or a recent crash since you onboarded them. Check suspension_effective on every row in your export that has one. Then re-check that every carrier you added this week has a Watch this carrier on them.

Weekly totals. Roughly 60–90 dials, 25–40 conversations, 12–20 packets started, 6 to 12 completed, and — the only number that counts — 3 to 6 carriers who actually haul something within 60 days [ESTIMATE, basis: the per-play brackets above].

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What NOT to chase

High-mileage carriers, if you are expecting capacity. MILEAGE_HIGH is +40 in your profile and it is a quality signal, not an availability signal. A fleet running 134,000+ miles per truck per year is in the top decile for utilization, which is another way of saying every one of their trucks is already committed to somebody. You are calling the busiest carrier in the file to ask if they have a spare truck.

Say this part out loud, because no vendor will: nothing in the FMCSA record tells you whether a carrier has an empty truck next Tuesday. Not this product, not any of them. The federal file tells you who is real, who is safe, who is growing and who is legal. Availability is a phone call. Anyone selling you "available capacity" derived from federal data is selling you an inference dressed as a fact.

Anything showing Poor in the Safety column, no matter what the score says. A Conditional-rated carrier with a fresh authority scores around 74 — WARM, "call this week." Do not. The score is doing prioritization; you are doing eligibility. Those are different jobs and the score is not built to do yours.

The carrier who was served a suspension notice and then re-filed. This is the one your eligibility rule cannot catch, and it is why the AUTH_SUSPEND weight exists at −100 even though lapsed carriers are already removed. The sequence: coverage lapses, FMCSA serves the notice, the carrier scrambles and gets a new BMC-91X on file. The lapse clears. The served notice and its published effective date sit on the record until FMCSA processes the cure. On your screen that carrier now looks insured. The tell is in the dossier and in suspension_effective. Check it on every carrier before a first tender.

Any carrier with zero roadside inspections in 24 months and an authority older than 400 days. −80, plus 0.45 off viability, which between them effectively deletes the row. Leave it deleted. A real interstate carrier gets inspected. This is the profile that the fraud and identity products in your market exist to catch, and it costs you nothing to simply not call it.

One crash five years ago will make a carrier look worse than they are — and your model does that on purpose. Your fit formula awards 0.25 for a completely clean crash record and nothing otherwise, and unlike the CRASH_RECENT signal it does not decay. A single crash in 2019 permanently costs that carrier about 7.5 points of score. That is stricter than the signal layer and it is a deliberate conservatism. Know that it is happening, so that when you find a good carrier scoring in the high 70s instead of the high 80s, you can check whether one old tow-away is the reason and make your own call.

Do not sort by Worth. Worth caps at 60 trucks while your fit band keeps declining out to 150. Sorting by Worth gives you a wall of large fleets with flat Worth numbers and steadily worse fit — and large fleets have contract freight, dedicated lanes and a bid process. They are not a phone call.

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The money

The formula, exactly

The broker profile computes Worth as:

value = min(power_units, 60) × 46 × $310

Its assumptions, stated plainly: 46 loads per truck per year, $310 of gross margin per load, and a cap at 60 trucks. It assumes you get all of the carrier's capacity, which you will not.

Now correct it, because gross margin is not what you keep

Published broker gross margin on a full truckload runs $200 to $500, or 12–20% of the carrier rate. Operating cost per load runs $120 to $160. Contribution after that is $140 to $300.

The model's $310 sits in the upper middle of the gross-margin band. Your contribution on the same load is roughly $170 at the midpoint of the cost range. So:

Multiply the Worth column by about 0.55 to get contribution. [Arithmetic: ($310 − $140) ÷ $310.]

A 10-truck carrier's $142,600 becomes roughly $78,000 of contribution — if you got every load, which you will not. Assume you get 20–30% of a carrier's capacity in the first year [ESTIMATE — no published figure for share-of-carrier-capacity exists; this is a working assumption and you should replace it with your own from your TMS]. That puts a real 10-truck relationship at $16,000 to $23,000 of first-year contribution.

What that has to cover

• A carrier sales rep averages $76,681 a year (25th to 75th percentile $53,500–$93,000; 90th percentile $112,500), typically $40,000–$60,000 base plus 10–20% commission.
• At $170 of contribution per load, one rep needs roughly 450 loads a year just to cover themselves [arithmetic: $76,681 ÷ $170].
• Monitoring costs $2–$10 per carrier per month — $24 to $120 a year for every carrier sitting on your approved list, whether they haul or not.

This is the entire reason your weights are negative. A dispatch service that signs a bad customer loses a month of fees. You lose an onboarding slot, a year of monitoring subscription, and — in the case the whole broker-side vetting industry exists to prevent — a load. The vetting market prices itself against the alternative of losing a $50,000 shipment, which is why a monitoring seat costs $515 a month and a lead record costs a fraction of a cent. You are on the expensive side of that line whether you like it or not.

A month of working this queue

One rep, the week above, four weeks:

• 240–360 dials, 100–160 conversations
• 24–48 packets completed
• 12 to 24 carriers hauling within 60 days [ESTIMATE, basis: the per-play brackets]
• Average 6 trucks each [ESTIMATE, basis: your fit plateau is 3–40 and 91.5% of carriers run 10 or fewer trucks]
• 18 carriers × 6 trucks × 46 loads × $310 × 0.55 contribution × 25% capacity share = ≈ $212,000 of annual contribution added, built in one month of forty-five-minute mornings

And the number nobody puts in a business case: the bad carriers you did not onboard. If Play 3 keeps two Conditional-rated carriers and one dormant shell off your network in a year, the arithmetic on that is one avoided claim against zero avoided claims, and you will never be able to prove it. Do it anyway.

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Objections you will hear

"I'm already on twelve load boards. I don't need another broker." You are on twelve boards because you are covering gaps. I am not calling about a gap — I have consistent freight on [lane] and I would rather commit it to one carrier than re-post it every week. Look at the lane before you decide.

"How did you get my number? I got my authority last week." It is public. FMCSA publishes the grant and the census carries your phone — that is why your phone has not stopped ringing since Tuesday. Most of those calls are insurance and factoring. I am the one with freight.

"What do you pay?" Here is the lane, the miles, the commodity and the rate. If it does not work, tell me what does and I will tell you honestly whether I can get there. I would rather you say no on the first call than take a load you lose money on and stop answering.

"That's a lot of paperwork for one load." It is, and it is the same paperwork every legitimate broker will ask for — authority, W-9, certificate of insurance naming us, a signed agreement. You do it once. The alternative is a broker who does not ask, and you do not want to haul for that broker.

"Do you double-broker?" No, and you should ask everyone that. Here is our MC number, our surety bond, and the name of the person who will be on the phone if a load goes sideways. If a broker will not give you all three, do not take the load.

"Why are you asking about my CSA score? I've never had a violation." You may not have a score at all — FMCSA needs at least three inspections with a violation in a category over two years before it publishes a percentile, and most carriers your size have nothing. That is not a mark against you. I ask because my shipper's contract asks me, and I would rather find out now than after your truck is loaded.

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Getting it out of HAULVANE

1. Set the offer. Top right of the header, I sell → Broker capacity sourcing. Two things change immediately. Every risk signal flips negative. And your eligibility rule becomes active operating authority AND insurance currently on file — the only offer in the product with an insurance requirement. Carriers with a lapse are removed before they are ever scored.

2. Open the Prospector (second icon down the left rail).

3. Set the filters, left panel, top to bottom.

• Fleet size — trucks: 3 to 40 for Play 1, 5 to 40 for Play 2, 1 to 200 for Play 3.
• Minimum priority score: 55 for Play 1 — the default. Drop it to 40 only if you move intrastate freight: the fit formula's interstate award means regional carriers rarely clear 55. 70 for Play 2. 0 for Play 3 — non-negotiable, since risk-only carriers score in the 20s and 40s.
• Active signals: Brand new carrier for Play 1. Adding trucks for Play 2. For Play 3, tick all four of Poor safety rating, Safety score over limit, Recent crash, Failing inspections — the boxes combine as OR, which is exactly what you want for a screen.
• States: your lane origins for Plays 1 and 2. Every state you tender into for Play 3.
• Cargo: tick your commodity classes if you run specialized. Reefer and tanker narrow the carrier pool sharply.

4. Save three searches. Save & monitor, top right.

• "New authority, 3–40 trucks, my lanes" — your sourcing feed.
• "Growth fleets, 5–40, my lanes" — your best calls.
• "Risk signals, all my states, score 0" — your exclusion feed. This is the one.

5. Read the Safety column before the score column. With this offer selected, the sixth column shows Good / Watch / Poor / No data. Hover it for the reason. This is the field the product puts in that slot specifically because you are a broker — and it is your gate, not your tiebreaker.

6. Watch every carrier you onboard. Open the dossier, click Watch this carrier. Do it as the last step of every onboarding, without exception.

7. Export CSV, top right. Up to 5,000 rows, named haulvane-broker-<date>.csv, 24 columns.

The columns that matter for you, in order:

Ignore renewal_estimated. It is the derived insurance anniversary, worth +6 to you, and it is the softest date in the entire product — estimated from a filing effective date, not published anywhere by anybody. It exists in your profile so that a carrier with no other weighted signal does not fall out of the file entirely. It is a diary note. It is not a reason to do anything.