In terms of a new job, opportunities or career paths, the freight broker option in the logistics industry has been growing tremendously, but one of the key factors is choosing the right environment to start in before making a big leap. Freight brokers don’t appear out of thin air; they are developed over time through training and direct application to real world logistics challenges.
Freight Is Not a Classroom-Learned Skill
Unlike other industries, how to become a freight broker really depends on exposure to the industry with the guidance of someone who is actually in the business and is working with the ordering for logistics challenges every day. It’s not the kind of field that one is going to pick up automatically from a YouTube video, a textbook or a generic class.
However, unlike other fields, being a freight broker allows leverage of experience and, as that experience is built up, one’s ability to grow their market reach becomes bigger and bigger. Because freight brokers depend so much on networking and matching resources to clients that need shipping services, there is a tremendous reach that doesn’t have any type of ceiling or limitation. Many freight brokers are not contained to just their particular region. They’re able to take work nationally, locally, as well as in multi-state grids. It all depends on what they’re capable of providing to their clients successfully and consistently.
People Skills are Gold in This Business
There’s no question that a successful freighter does need to have certain personal skills. One of those is persistence and self-drive. Having the ability to keep working through problems and finding solutions is critical. Because so much of what a freight broker does is addressing challenges that don’t have a specific detailed path for a solution, the work takes a lot of creativity in resource-matching.
People who excel dealing with the unknown frequently find freight brokering to be exciting, engaging and a new challenge daily. Of course, the opposite is true for those who want work to be the same; this is not a field for predictable work assignments.
Lots of Self-Promotion Opportunity for Agents
Freight agents who want to make the big leap to the next level of what they do and already have a significant amount of experience working for a broker can transition to their own freight brokerage easily. It makes a lot of sense to leverage the experience that people have already developed in the industry working for another brokerage in related logistics. The jump to one’s own broker allows an agent to continue growing with their own business as well as their own market. Many times, what new freight brokers find is that they end up developing additional partnerships, with many of the brokers and clients that they had worked with before bolstering their new broker network.
No Room for the Shy Type
The industry is a people-oriented business, and successful freight brokers excel in sales. They have no issue with cold-calling. They’re able to create new networks where they didn’t exist before, and good brokers are effective at closing deals. It is a selling business, it’s connecting one service to another in terms of needs, and it is selling the ability to provide efficient, effective logistics when and how much clients need them. Brokering is also selling client demand to shippers who rely on the connection for their business opportunities by resource, equipment type and schedule.
If you believe it’s time to make that leap from freight agent to becoming a freight broker, or you’re looking for an opportunity where to establish a business that just continues to keep growing as much as you want to be able to handle, then being a freight broker is your next stop in career success.
