There Are 292,000 Shippers in America and 9 out of 10 Carriers Have 10 Trucks or Less — The Match Has Been Right in Front of You the Whole Time

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 Economic Census counted just over 8 million employer business establishments across the entire U.S. economy. That is every business with at least one paid employee — every factory, every warehouse, every distributor, every retailer with a storeroom. Not all of those businesses ship meaningful quantities of freight. But a significant portion of them do.

Start with manufacturing. According to U.S. manufacturing statistics, there are approximately 292,825 manufacturing establishments in the United States. These are plants, factories, mills, and industrial operations — businesses that produce physical goods that have to move somewhere. Of those 292,825 factories, the overwhelming majority are small operations: approximately 268,000 have 99 or fewer employees. There are only 846 manufacturing establishments in the entire country with 1,000 or more employees.

That distribution is critical. The 846 large manufacturers — the Procter & Gambles, the General Motors plants, the Amazon fulfillment centers — have procurement teams, preferred carrier lists, and routing guides. They have logistics managers who took four years of supply chain coursework. They are not going to award business to a five-truck operation based on a cold call. That is not your market.

The 268,000 small and mid-sized manufacturers are a completely different situation. Many of them are being served by exactly whoever showed up and asked for the freight, or by a regional broker who happened to call at the right time, or by a carrier they have used for twenty years out of habit. Their logistics operation is often the plant manager, a shipping coordinator who also does accounts receivable, or the owner themselves. They are not running freight optimization software. They need trucks. They need reliability. They need someone who picks up the phone.

Then add wholesale trade. The 2022 Economic Census found that the wholesale trade sector alone had 14,320 establishments with sales of $100 million or more — but that is just the largest tier. The total wholesale trade sector spans hundreds of thousands of distributors, many of whom operate as the middle layer between manufacturers and retail — receiving product by the truckload and shipping it out in smaller quantities across regional and local networks. These operations have docks. They have outbound freight. They need carriers.

Add distribution centers, food and beverage operations, building materials suppliers, agricultural processors, industrial equipment dealers, and regional retail distribution operations, and you are looking at a universe of potential direct shipping customers that numbers in the hundreds of thousands nationwide. Across any given metropolitan area, that likely translates to several hundred, possibly thousands, of businesses that have dock doors and need trucks — most of whom you have never contacted.

The Math on the Carrier Side

Before getting into how to find these shippers, it is worth being honest about who is trying to reach them.

According to ATA’s 2025 American Trucking Trends report, 91.5% of all carriers in the United States — including private fleets — operate 10 or fewer trucks. Among for-hire carriers specifically, the number is even more concentrated: 97% of for-hire carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks, and 70% of all for-hire companies are single-truck operations. There are approximately 580,000 active U.S. motor carriers registered with FMCSA as of mid-2025.

The freight brokerage market, which exists primarily to bridge the gap between shippers and the fragmented carrier base, was valued at $17.5 billion in 2024. That is $17.5 billion per year that flows through intermediaries — money that in many cases is extracting margin from both sides of a transaction that could, in a direct relationship, benefit the carrier and the shipper simultaneously without an intermediary taking a cut.

The reason brokers dominate is not because they provide irreplaceable value in every transaction. In many cases, they dominate because small carriers do not have a systematic approach to finding and approaching shippers directly, and shippers do not know which small carriers operate in their area. Brokers solve both sides of that problem — for a fee. The question every small carrier should be asking is: what would it take to solve that problem myself?

Counting Dock Doors: The Method Most Carriers Ignore

Here is the most actionable approach to finding direct shippers that almost no small carrier is using consistently, and it requires no paid subscription, no database, no marketing budget, and no technology beyond what is already on your phone.

Drive your hometown industrial areas and count the dock doors.

Every commercial and industrial district in your operating area contains businesses with loading docks. A loading dock is a physical declaration that a business ships freight. If a building has dock doors, it either receives inbound trucks, ships outbound freight, or both. The businesses behind those docks are your potential customers. You can identify them by driving the industrial parks, distribution corridors, and commercial zones along your regular routes.

The systematic version looks like this: Pick any industrial park, warehouse district, or commercial corridor within your operating region. Drive through it slowly. Note every building with dock-height doors. For each one, write down or photograph the business name on the sign. When you get back, look up each business. Find out what they make, what they sell, where they ship. Most of this information is available through a basic Google search, a look at their website, or a quick check on LinkedIn. Within an hour of research, you can understand the freight profile of a dozen potential customers you never knew existed.

This is not sophisticated business development strategy. It is observation. You are in a truck. You drive past these facilities every day. The only difference between treating them as background scenery and treating them as a prospect list is a few minutes of deliberate attention and follow-up.

What you are looking for specifically: businesses that ship within your service radius, have freight that matches your equipment (dry van, flatbed, reefer, whatever you run), and appear to be operating without an obvious dedicated carrier relationship. Signs of the last point include: multiple carriers on the dock on any given day, loads leaving via broker trucks with mixed branding, or — most telling — a shipping manager who answers the phone and sounds genuinely uncertain about their carrier situation when you call.

Matching Your Services to the Shipper’s Reality

This is where small carriers consistently fail to communicate their actual value. The pitch “I am a trucking company and I can move your freight” is not differentiated from any other carrier in the market. The pitch that works is specific to what you can actually do that a large carrier cannot.

Small carriers have structural advantages over large carriers in certain freight situations, and those advantages are real and sellable:

Flexibility on pickup and delivery windows. A large carrier running dedicated lanes on a contract may not be able to reroute a truck on two hours’ notice because a customer needs an emergency pickup. A three-truck operation whose dispatcher is the owner can absolutely do that. For a mid-sized manufacturer whose production schedule fluctuates or whose retail customers place irregular orders, that flexibility is worth paying for.

Direct communication with the driver and decision-maker. When a shipment is running late, or when a delivery issue needs to be resolved before the customer calls the shipper, a small carrier can have the owner on the phone with the shipper’s logistics manager in five minutes. A large carrier routes the call through a 1-800 number, a dispatch queue, and a driver manager who may or may not have a relationship with anyone at the account. The difference in service experience is significant.

Consistency of equipment and driver. Large carriers rotate drivers across accounts. A small carrier running a dedicated lane for a regional shipper can put the same driver on the same route week after week. The driver learns the facility — the loading preferences, the lumper situation, the receiving hours quirks, the dock foreman’s name. That consistency reduces claims, reduces delays, and builds the kind of operational relationship that makes shippers reluctant to switch.

Rates that reflect actual cost, not overhead allocation. A large carrier’s cost structure includes national sales staff, corporate headquarters, compliance departments, and the overhead of running thousands of trucks. A small carrier’s cost structure does not. On lanes that are within a small carrier’s operational comfort zone, the rate a small carrier needs to be profitable is often competitive with or better than what a large carrier needs to charge — without the broker margin on top.

The pitch to a direct shipper is not “I am cheaper.” It is “I will be more reliable, more responsive, and more invested in this relationship than any carrier you have worked with who sees your freight as one load among ten thousand.” That is a claim you can actually back up — but only if you make the call.

How to Make the Approach

Cold calling works in trucking. It works because the person who handles shipping at a mid-sized manufacturer is not getting five calls a day from carriers trying to earn their business. They are getting close to zero. The bar for standing out is remarkably low.

The call script does not need to be elaborate. Identify yourself, your company, and your operating region. State specifically what type of freight you haul and what lanes you cover. Ask if they have any outbound freight that fits that profile and who manages their carrier relationships. Ask if you can be put on their list of approved carriers for when their current capacity is stretched or when they need a backup.

That last point matters. You are not asking to replace their entire carrier portfolio in the first call. You are asking for the opportunity to move one load, or to be the carrier they call when their primary carrier cannot cover something. Once you have moved a load for a shipper and performed well, the conversation about volume opens naturally.

Follow up. Follow up consistently. The shipper who says “we are good right now” in January may have a capacity problem in March. The carrier who called back every six weeks is the one who gets the call when that happens. The carrier who called once and never followed up does not exist in that shipper’s memory.

What to Do With This Information

The direct shipper approach is not a replacement for the spot market during a freight recession. When freight is soft and rates are compressed, brokers and load boards are part of the operating reality for most small carriers. But the carriers who come out of a down market in the strongest position are the ones who used the slow period to build direct relationships that do not depend on spot market conditions to generate freight.

Start with what is in front of you. Pick the industrial corridor you drive through most frequently. Spend two hours one afternoon identifying every business with a dock door along that route. Research each one. Make five calls next week. Not to sell — to introduce yourself and understand what their freight situation looks like.

Do that consistently for twelve months, and you will have a portfolio of direct shipper contacts that no rate compression on any load board can take away from you. Those relationships generate freight because the shipper trusts you, not because you were the lowest number on a digital auction. That is a fundamentally different business than running the board — and it is the one that compounds over time.

The shippers are there. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them are small enough to care about the service quality a small carrier delivers, and most of them are underserved by carriers who know their name, know their freight, and show up when they say they will. The only question is whether you are going to go find them.

Commonly Asked Questions

Q: I am a single truck owner-operator. Is this realistic for me, or is direct shipper development only for fleets?

A: It is more realistic for a single truck than for a fleet in some ways, because you are the decision-maker, the sales person, and the driver. You can make a commitment to a shipper and personally deliver on it — which is exactly what a small shipper wants. The challenge for a single truck is capacity: if a shipper needs two or three loads per week and you have one truck, you cannot service the full volume. The solution is to focus on shippers whose freight profile matches your actual capacity — businesses that need one or two loads per week on lanes you already run, not businesses that need a full dedicated program you cannot staff. There are far more of the former than the latter. But it all boils down to your mindset and your ability to sell the service business that you started.

Q: How do I find out if a shipper already has a carrier under contract?

A: Ask them. Some shippers who have a dedicated contract carrier will tell you plainly. What you want to know is not whether they have a carrier — they almost all do — but whether they have capacity gaps, backup needs, or seasonal surges that their current carrier cannot cover. Even a shipper with a strong primary carrier relationship typically needs a qualified backup. Getting on that backup list is the foot in the door.

Q: What if I approach a shipper and they say they only work through brokers?

A: Some do. Usually this is because they have a logistics manager or 3PL that handles all carrier procurement, or because they have not had a positive experience working with carriers directly. Respect that and move on — there are hundreds of thousands of other businesses with dock doors. Do not spend time trying to convert a shipper whose operational structure genuinely requires broker intermediation when the next industrial park over has ten businesses that would happily work with a carrier who shows up prepared and professional.

The load board is not going anywhere. Brokers are not going anywhere. But a small carrier that builds even a handful of direct shipper relationships — five, ten, fifteen accounts that call you first when they have freight — operates from a fundamentally different position than one that starts every week on page one of the spot market. The difference between those two carriers, five years from now, will be significant. Both hauled freight. One built a business. The method is sitting right there along the roads you already drive.