Five Years on the Flatbed: Why Dan Stays at Laufer

Dan has been driving trucks for six years. Five of those have been at Laufer, initially running regional and transitioning to local flatbed recently, now on lanes between southeast Wisconsin, the Chicagoland corridor, and northern Illinois. He is home every night. The freight on his deck is rarely ordinary.

Why Flatbed

"Flatbed's a little more involved," Dan says. "The pay is a little better, which is nice, but it's a little more skill involved and a little more prestige than just pulling a van. You kind of get to see cooler things."

That mix is what tends to draw drivers to flatbed work in the first place, and what tends to keep them there. A flatbed driver is the one chaining down the load. The freight is not behind a door; it is on an open deck, and how it is secured is on the driver. "Flatbed is definitely more physically involved than just doing van work," Dan says.

Flatbed drivers have added responsibility which comes with unique challenges. Those challenges can be appealing to some drivers.

A Typical Day

Dan's days run out of Hartford and back. "A lot of material coming out of Chicago that we're going to run down into Illinois to deliver, and then we'll usually pick up steel that comes back," he says. "So that we can deliver and be home and work about 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours a day."

Home daily, 10 to 12 hours on duty, steel inbound, manufactured goods outbound. The kind of pattern that lets a driver keep a little bit more normal life off the road.

On the Loads

What he hauls varies by the day. "We haul a lot of crates, a lot of steel coils and steel sheets," Dan says. "We also do some CNC machinery and equipment, like boom lifts and forklifts. Just kind of everything on the flatbeds."

The CNC machines are the loads that stand out. "Each one's unique in how you have to secure it," Dan says. "They're pretty high value. Some of them are hundreds of thousands, even a million dollars that we're responsible for moving safely."

Hauling freight worth that much is not something Laufer's customers hand over lightly. The fact that they do, repeatedly, across the same lanes week after week, is the reason Dan is on those loads in the first place. Laufer's flatbed customers trust the company with freight where one slipped chain is a six-figure problem, and Laufer trusts its drivers to make sure that does not happen. The two-way trust is what makes the work work.

What Keeps Dan at Laufer

For Dan, that trust is also the answer to why he has stayed five years. "I like the fact that Laufer trusts me to do my job, and they're not looking over my shoulder all day to tell me where I need to go," he says. "They know I'm gonna get there, and I'm gonna do the job correctly."

That is what a working day looks like at Laufer when a driver has earned it. No one in the office trying to drive the truck from a screen. A well maintained truck and trailer, specialized freight, two full-time mechanics keeping the equipment ready, and dispatchers who know the driver knows the job.

Laufer hires local and regional flatbed drivers out of Hartford, Wisconsin. The local work is home daily on intrastate Wisconsin and Chicagoland lanes, hauling steel and high-value manufacturing freight for customers who pay for it to arrive in the same condition it left in. If that sounds like the work you want to do, call (262) 673-6810 or learn more about driving flatbed at Laufer.