Working as a freight broker is not for everyone. Satellite Specialized Transportation, a freight brokering company based in Bend, has gone through about 70 employees in the last 10 years with just eight currently on its staff.

Jeff Lillesve, CEO of Satellite Specialized Transportation, says in this business, you have to expect anything and then manage it. About 90 percent of it is babysitting, he said.

Lillesve and his brother Raef started their company 12 years ago after they both worked for a broker in Medford, Ore., for five and eight years, respectively. The brothers opened a small office on Newport Avenue in 1990.

Since then, the company has added employees, a partner and an office in Medford, Ore. It continues to try to expand its staff in Bend, but it is proving very tough to find the right people to handle the job, Lillesve said.

The job starts at 6 a.m., and something unexpected happens nearly every day. A driver could die en route to a delivery, a truckload could get abandoned in the middle of a desert, a truck could catch on fire or simply roll over.

What does your company do?

We move commodities throughout the country, Canada and Mexico and overseas. We’re primarily in the flatbed and over-dimensional business.

In the trucking industry, 80 percent of fleets are vans, 20 percent are flatbeds, and we work probably 1 percent of the flatbed business.

What types of shipments does Satellite Specialized Transportation handle?

The type of freight we’ve got into is very high-end technical freight. We’re usually moving machines that weigh 100,000 pounds.

We’re very time-oriented. It’s costly movement, and the clientele expect expertise. If you miss an appointment, it costs you $1,000.

What are you moving?

We move large machinery: earth-moving machinery, plastic-injection molding machinery, any kind of machinery. All heavy equipment that’s time sensitive. A lot of times our clients will have a machine break down and we get the phone call. We’ve got to pick up the machine and get it on site.

What is the quickest response time?

Team service. It depends on how many miles. If we have a thousand-mile run, we’ll put a team on there and we’ll be there in one day. And that happens often.

The country pretty much operates on just-in-time service.

So typically, toward the end of the month, we’ll get slammed with phone calls from customers who need machinery moved from Los Angeles to New York over the weekend. One of my clients just booked a chartered flight to go overseas.

Why is it tough to work as a freight broker?

Transportation’s a crazy industry. That’s what drives the salesmen away a lot because they can’t logistically handle all the things that happen. You can’t make each load happen perfectly.

You have to be a politician, is what we like to call it. You’re a middleman.

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You’re handling two sets of clients. You also have to track loads, making sure they get there and on time and it’s okay and we don’t have a claim on it. And make sure we get paid.

What’s a day in the life of a freight broker like?

You come in at 6 in the morning, you have 50 phone messages. By 11 a.m. it calms down a little bit and then they start calling their customers for freight they line up for the next day.

How many calls? How many truckloads shipped on average in a day?

It could be anywhere from 10 to 50 a day. We average about 700 to 800 loads a month.

Can you tell me an interesting or funny story that involved errors, like wrong trucks, wrong destinations?

You can’t believe the stories in trucking. I’ve had drivers pull guns on clients, it’s endless. There’s always a story.

For example, I had a shipment missing for three days, we sent the police out to find the load, and eventually, they tracked him on route, and he was pulled into a truck stop and he was found dead in his truck. He had a heart attack.

How and when do you get paid by customers?

Sixty days to 90. We’ll invoice our customer the day that the bill of lading gets into our office, which is three to seven days after it’s delivered.

Then we pay that carrier within 32 days. We bill our customer the day we pick up but generally speaking, the clients pay fairly slow compared to what we pay the trucks.

I run as a bank. In order for me to stay in business, I need to pay my trucks on schedule because they drive my business. Right now, we have about 5,000 carriers that are on file, that ship with us.

How many truckloads this year? Last year?

We’re down on truck loads but our profitability is higher. The phones are not ringing as much as they did last year but we did better financially.

Transportation is in dire straits. I know of 10,000 trucks from five or six big carriers that went out of business last year because they can’t afford to run the trucks. So there’s more freight then trucks right now by a long shot. We’ve driven up our rates to get the trucks.

Generally, what is the cost per mile for deliveries?

It depends. We can move anything from a $1.05 a mile to $9 a mile. Oversize freight is $6 to $9 a mile.

Which ports do you deal with regularly?

We deal with them all.

Did you see a stronger demand for your business during the longshoremen lockout?

That caused a big log-jam down in California. It used to be you could call anybody to get a truck out of California.

In the last nine months, we can’t get a truck out of California. Usually, more trucks come in with freight to satisfy California’s needs then come out.

So a lot of trucks end up in California with no freight coming out.

Have you found doing business in Central Oregon favorable?

We really don’t do business here. I’ve a few jobs in Bend. I brought some big burners into Lancair from Michigan. They’re basically ovens as big as this building to bake their wings.

We also moved just about all the new Mount Bachelor ski equipment on the mountain from France, Denver, Colorado, and New Jersey. The chairs are French, the towers are from Quebec, the top and bottom operating stations are from Denver.

What trends have you observed in the industry this year? 2001?

The trucking business is going out of business. The reason is because customers are not willing to pay more on the line haul, which is from point A to point B that the truck makes. That has not really gone up for say, the last 20 years.

Insurance is also killing the trucking industry. I’ve always taught my guys to treat the trucks fairly.

As a broker, we have to keep their line hauls up so that we can keep operating. Overall, Satellite Transportation probably pays better than most customers in the nation.

What is the pay scale for your employees?

A guy that starts for me will average $20,000 to $30,000 his first year, up to $60,000. Just depends on what type of salesman he is. What we pay annually is anywhere from $35,000 to $120,000.

Monica Lee can be reached at mlee@bendbulletin.com.