Is Your 1–14 Pallet Freight in the Right Mode?
A 4-minute assessment for brokers, forwarders, and shippers. Answer 20 questions about the freight you actually move and see whether its requirements point toward LTL, dedicated STL, FTL, or a mix.
A few years into running freight, I had a customer with an auto parts shipment. Three pallets. Needed to move fast.
The person handling it told me to just put it on a full truck. His logic made sense on paper: book the whole trailer, nothing else goes on it, it gets there clean and on time.
That’s not what happens.
Carriers open sealed trailers all the time without leaving a mark on the seal. It’s their trailer. They know how. Unless you’re running something like a 300 mile dedicated lane, assume more freight gets added somewhere along the route.
So now you’ve paid full truckload money for three pallets, and that freight gets handled exactly like LTL freight anyway. Extra stops. Extra handling. Real damage risk. All the cost of FTL with none of the protection people assume comes with it.
That shipment is what got me looking seriously at the space between LTL and FTL. Most of the freight world still doesn’t have a name for it. We call it Small Truckload, or STL. Roughly 1 to 14 pallets, running on dedicated equipment sized to the load instead of a full 53 foot trailer or a multi-stop LTL network.
This assessment isn’t a sales pitch. It’s twenty questions to help you figure out, honestly, whether your 1–14 pallet freight is sitting in the wrong mode right now.
The assessment looks at five factors: Shipment Profile · Time Sensitivity · Handling Risk · Visibility & Control · Cost Efficiency
Answer based on the freight you actually move today.
Tell Us About Yourself
Enter your information to start the assessment.
Your Freight Profile
What That Means
Your freight sits between traditional LTL and FTL.
LTL may make sense when cost is the priority, timing is flexible, and additional handling isn’t a concern.
FTL may make sense when your shipment requires the capacity of a full trailer.
Dedicated STL becomes worth considering when the shipment is too important for the compromises of a shared network but doesn’t require the capacity of a full truck.
Want to Take a Closer Look at Your Freight?
Schedule a live session with our team. We’ll look at the freight you actually move and explore where LTL, STL, FTL—or a combination—can work better across your freight mode stack.
LET’S TALK