When determining whether freight transportation might be a profitable business, the first thing you must do is take a look around your residence. Look at your office, bedroom or garage and determine which items didn`t get transported as freight. Chances are, almost every item you posses was somehow transported by either rail, boat or a truck over the course of its journey to arrive in your possession.
Once you come to grips with the fact that transportation services may be the most expansive industry you can think of, it`s best to decide if you want to begin the process of starting your own freight transportation firm.
Because the industry is so immense, there is vast amounts of opportunities for even a small startup to build business and make a hefty profit. The decision you must make is which sector of the industry would be most beneficial to you. Since the early part of the 20th century, there was a demand to manage and organize the shipments of goods from point A to point B in a more economical way. After the integration of the airline and trucking industry into what was a long standing job of the railroad empire, a more advanced formulation needed to occur to get the cargo from manufacturer to marketplace. This new method was called intermodal transportation.
Regulatory limitations on who could mastermind shipments and which manner of transportation they could be shipped on changed dramatically during the 1970s. This gave way to an explosion in the growth of organizing the shipments via intermodal transportation. Tertiary logistical organization of freight forwarding is important to the life and further development of the transportation services sector.
Being as the sector is so huge, there is a wide range of various businesses that all benefit and have a part in the intermodal transportation services industry. The important player in every shipment having to do with freight transportation is a freight broker. This individual or firm acts as a middle man to connect shippers with freight carriers. They organize the process and determine how the items will get form one point to another. The person who sends the freight is the shipper. He operates with a broker to get the cargo picked up and on their way.
A motor carrier is the business that provides trucking transportation. The freight forwarder is a person that accepts delivery of various types of items, consolidates the smaller shipments and organizes larger intermodal transportation such as rail, sea or air. An import export broker facilitates the dealings between U.S. Customs and other government organizations as well as international organizations. These individual positions open up a plethora of different opportunities that by all odds enable the freight transportation industry to be profitable business venture.
The only thing to understand about the intermodal freight transportation services industry is that it is a constantly changing enterprise. While the various types of business sometimes seem unconnected, every step of shipment overlaps. Thereby different entities may operate in many of these positions.
