This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of Traffic Services of Cinti, Inc. I had been working for my dad's business, Jayanel Associates (a name referencing my parents' initials "J" and "L" for Jerry & Loretta) and it became clear that the business could not sustain the staff he had. I took over the freight bill auditing and transportation consulting portion of the business. I was renting a three bedroom house across from my present home and had two spare bedrooms; my first offices!
Besides the freight bill audit accounts, I had several companies I did consulting for, mostly printing companies that need to be able to get rate quotations and freight costs before motor carriers rate clerks came to work in the afternoon. They would call me to get the freight charges so they could set up their billing or their sales department would call to add freight costs into their estimates. This was a year before the first foray into the deregulation of the trucking industry with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 (which, if I remember correctly, took effect exactly one year later on July 1, 1980). All carriers rates were essentially the same and we subscribed to the many different volumes of the carrier rate bureaus. We had scores of tariffs shelved in the one room and each day we'd receive more supplements to those tariffs.
It's been a long time since I've written a blog entry and I'll add more as the anniversary date approaches. It will be interesting to write about all the changes that have occurred in the trucking business and the freight auditing business over the last thirty years.
