The empty return · Metro Manila ⇄ Provinces
Twenty trucks haul Jollibee supplies to the provinces. Jollibee pays for the trip out — the trip back earns nothing. But the truck is coming home anyway.
That return leg is a sunk cost. Anything you load on it is almost pure margin. Here are two ways to cash it in.
The whole trick in one line: the fuel and driver for the return trip are already paid by the outbound job. So the only new cost of a backhaul is a bit of extra fuel for the weight, some handling, and a short detour. Everything above that is margin — which is why you can price under any dedicated carrier and still win.
Rough per-trip margin model
Defaults are a Manila ⇄ North Luzon round trip on a ~8-ton load. Numbers are illustrative — tune them to your real lanes.
Scale it to the fleet
Same margins, multiplied across the fleet's return trips. This is money that's currently evaporating on the highway.
Option 1 is free money and you can start Monday — you stay a trucker, you just stop running empty. Low margin per trip, zero inventory, almost no risk. This is how you validate which lanes actually have return cargo.
Option 2 makes an order of magnitude more, but you stop being a trucker and become an agri-trader: you front the cash for every load, and you eat the loss if produce spoils or the Balintawak price drops before you sell. The truck is basically free freight — the risk is the goods.
Smart sequence: run Option 1 first to learn the routes and buyers, then layer Option 2 only on the SKUs and lanes you trust. The software you'd build is the dispatch brain that decides which truck takes which load — an internal edge, not the product.