One Phone Number for Flatbed, Truckload, and Reefer Freight

You know the drill. You have a load of steel going out flatbed, a couple of temperature-controlled pallets that have to hold their range, and a dry van truckload that needs to be on a dock two states over by Thursday. So you open three email threads, call three different reps, and re-explain your business to each one. Then something changes, because something always changes, and now you are chasing three people to fix it.

That is not a shipping problem. That is a phone-tag problem, and it eats your day.

The hidden cost of spreading freight across carriers

Most shippers do not set out to use a different carrier for every mode. It happens by accident. You find someone decent for flatbed, so open-deck goes there. A van carrier gives you a fair rate, so truckload goes there. Reefer is its own animal, so that lands somewhere else. Before long you are managing a rolodex instead of managing freight.

Each relationship carries its own tax:

You repeat yourself. Every new rep needs your addresses, your hours, your dock quirks, and your product all over again.
Nobody sees the whole picture. The flatbed rep does not know your van is late, and the van rep does not know your reefer got rescheduled.
Accountability gets slippery. When a handoff goes wrong between two carriers, both point at the other, and you are the one holding the delivery date.
You lose buying power. Freight scattered across vendors is freight nobody is looking at as a whole.

None of that shows up on an invoice. It shows up in your hours.

What single-source actually means

Single-source does not mean one truck does everything. No truck does. It means one team, one point of contact, and one set of people who already know your freight, whatever shape it takes.

Comet National has run freight since 1995, and we cover the full menu from metro Atlanta to all 48 states and Canada:

Flatbed and open-deck, standard, oversized, and permitted specialty loads that big networks bounce.
Full truckload and partial dry van, traditional moves anywhere in the U.S. and Canada.
Dry and refrigerated freight, LTL or truckload, frozen or temperature-controlled.
Partial flatbed, when you only have a pallet or a few. If that is most of what you ship, our sister brand FlatbedLTL (flatbed.delcoe.com) is built around it.
Transload and cross-docking out of our Atlanta facility, plus freight recovery and regional distribution.

One number reaches all of it. That is the point.

Why it saves you real time

When the same team handles your open-deck, your van, and your reefer, a few things get easier fast.

The rep who books your flatbed already knows your loading dock closes at three. When your reefer load needs to move up a day, the person who answers already has your account in front of them. When a container hits the port and has to become an over-the-road truckload, we can transload it and keep it moving without you brokering the handoff yourself.

And when something breaks, because freight breaks, you call one person who owns the problem instead of refereeing between two carriers who do not.

The right mode beats the biggest network

Here is the position we will defend: the cheapest quote is not the cheapest shipment, and the biggest carrier is not the one that solves your oddest load. A 14-foot piece that no LTL network will touch does not need a bigger truck. It needs someone who knows how to strap it, tarp it, permit it, and route it. A batch of small open-deck pallets does not need a full trailer. It needs shared deck space priced honestly.

Single-source works because someone is looking at all your freight and putting each load on the mode that actually fits it. That is also the foundation of freight-spend consulting: we can look at how you are spending across modes and tell you where money is leaking, instead of just selling you another truck.

When it matters most

Single-source earns its keep when your freight is mixed and your calendar is tight:

You ship more than one mode in a normal month.
You have oversized or open-deck loads other carriers keep rejecting.
You run temperature-controlled freight alongside dry.
You have containers or rail freight that need to change modes in Atlanta.
You are tired of being a tracking number to a big network.

If that sounds like your operation, you do not need three vendors. You need one team that picks up the phone.

Call Comet National about the loads that have been giving you trouble, or ask us to take a look at your freight spend across modes. One number, and someone who owns the answer.