In the winter of , a clockmaker named Jean-Laurent worked in a drafty atelier in the Jura Mountains, painstakingly assembling a movement for a local merchant. The merchant, a man of significant influence but dwindling liquid capital, offered Jean-Laurent a price that was exactly 12% below the market rate.
Jean-Laurent accepted, not because he was a poor businessman, but because he was a new one. He needed the name. He needed the “win” to anchor his ledger. For the next , Jean-Laurent became the most sought-after clockmaker in the district, yet he died in poverty.
Every new client he took on was told the price the merchant paid, and Jean-Laurent, paralyzed by the fear of being called a fraud or an opportunist, never found the courage to tell the merchant that the price of brass had tripled since the first carriage clock was delivered. He had built a reputation that served as his own gallows.
It is Sunday night, and Goran is sitting at a kitchen table that smells faintly of Murphy Oil Soap and strong espresso. There is no blue light or blinking cursor to speak of-just the dull, flat reality of an Excel spreadsheet that feels more like a confession than a financial tool. He is staring at the rate field for his oldest customer, a man named Miller who gave him three loads a week when Goran only had one beat-up truck and a prayer.
The psychological gap between commercial survival and historical loyalty.
Goran has run the numbers three times this month. He knows the cost of diesel. He knows the cost of insurance premiums that seem to inflate every time he draws a breath. He knows exactly what the figure should be to maintain a healthy margin: $2.95 per mile. He stares at the field. He types $2.15.
He has typed that same number every week since a specific Thursday in his second year of operation. On that day, Miller had called him when the market was soft and everyone else was cutting Goran’s throat. Miller had stayed loyal. Miller had been the “good guy.”
Now, years later, that loyalty has become a structural deficit. Goran feels that to raise the rate now would be an admission that the original rate-the one that saved him-was a lie, or worse, that he is no longer the “good guy” himself.
To the customer, it is an expense line. To the owner, it is the foundation of his commercial identity. He conflates his value as a human being with the “fairness” of a rate that was set in a moment of desperation.
I recently found myself laughing at a funeral, which is exactly as horrifying as it sounds. It was a distant uncle’s service, quiet and somber, until my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a message from Avery G.H., a specialist in emoji localization who spends her days debating whether a “folded hands” emoji reads as “prayer” or “high-five” in different latitudes.
She had sent a 🫠(melting face) in response to a pricing disaster I had described to her earlier that morning.
– Avery G.H., Emoji Localization Specialist
In that silent, grieving room, the absurdity of a yellow pixelated face melting into a puddle was so incongruous with the gravity of death that I let out a sharp, involuntary bark of a laugh. The looks I received were earned. But as I sat there, burning with shame, I realized that business is often just as absurd.
We treat these “legacy rates” with the same reverence we accord to ancestral traditions. We act as if changing a number on an invoice is an act of desecration against the people who “helped us get our start.”
The Growth Tax of Gratitude
Gratitude is the strongest adhesive in existence, but it is a terrible fuel for a growing fleet. The arrangements people find hardest to renegotiate are rarely the exploitative ones. You can fight an exploiter; you can’t easily fight a benefactor. This is why loyalty and lock-in are indistinguishable when you are looking at them from the inside of a cab.
When a carrier begins to scale, moving from five power units toward a serious operation, they hit a wall that has nothing to do with freight volume. It is the “Growth Tax” of the legacy customer. Every truck you add requires more maintenance, more compliance oversight, and better equipment.
If you are still running that fleet on the rates you agreed to when you were just a guy with a cell phone and a dream, you aren’t growing; you are just subsidizing your customers’ profits with your own exhaustion.
Confronting Asset Reality
This is where the scale of a partner like Super Ego Holding changes the conversation. When you move into a professional leasing environment with a fleet of over 8,000 units, you are forced to confront the reality of the asset.
A truck doesn’t care about the favor Miller did for you in . The tires don’t wear down more slowly because you have a “handshake deal.” The equipment demands a market reality that your sentimentality is trying to ignore.
The most successful operators I have seen-the ones who successfully bridged the gap from one truck to a fleet of fifty-are those who learned to treat their business as a separate entity from their biography. They understood that the $2.15 rate wasn’t a “fair” price; it was a “startup” price. It was a loan that they have been paying back with 100% interest for five years.
10% Under Market = 1 Month Free per Year
Over a decade, you have worked for them for an entire year for zero dollars.
Statistically, the cost of “loyalty” in a commodity market is staggering. If we reframe it: for every year you maintain a legacy rate that is even 10% below market, you are essentially giving that customer one free month of hauling every single year. That isn’t a partnership; it’s a slow-motion liquidation of your future.
The US logistics market is a brutal machine that rewards efficiency and punishes hesitation. For many carriers, especially those with Eastern European or Balkan roots who value the “word” and the “handshake” above the contract, this transition is painful.
There is a cultural pride in being the “reliable guy” who doesn’t change his price. But reliability without profitability is just a very long, very tired way to go out of business.
Super Ego has spent more than a decade inside the American logistics market, navigating the same shifts in capacity and regulation that Goran is facing at his kitchen table. They know that the only way to stay in the game is to ensure the equipment earns its keep. The asset is a cold, hard fact. It doesn’t have memories. It only has an odometer.
Goran finally closes the laptop. He didn’t change the number. Not tonight. He told himself he’ll do it next month, after the insurance renewal comes through, so he has a “valid excuse” to give Miller.
He is waiting for the math to give him permission to do what he already knows he must. He is waiting for the arithmetic to solve a problem that is actually located in his chest. But the math never gives permission. It only provides the evidence of the crime.
Breaking the First Floor
We often think that the “ceiling” in our business is the competition, or the economy, or the broker who won’t budge. But the ceiling is almost always the very first floor we built. We become so comfortable walking on it that we forget we can’t grow unless we move to a different level.
The gratitude that got you your first truck is the same weight that keeps you from buying your tenth. If you find yourself staring at an invoice tonight, wondering why you are working harder than ever for less than you deserve, ask yourself: Who are you really paying?
Are you paying for the diesel, or are you still trying to pay back a “favor” from a decade ago that should have been settled in ninety days?
💡
Loyalty is a virtue in a person, but it can be a vice in a price list. The most honest thing you can do for a customer who helped you start is to stay in business long enough to keep serving them-and you can’t do that if you’re charging prices in a world.
Goran’s espresso is cold now. He stands up, stretches, and looks out the window at his truck parked in the driveway. It looks sturdy, capable, and expensive. It is a tool for making money, not a monument to the past.
He decides that tomorrow, he won’t wait for the insurance bill. He’ll make the call. Not because he isn’t grateful, but because he finally realizes that you can’t drive a truck toward the future while staring exclusively into the rearview mirror.