Director of Drayage

The Director of Drayage is responsible for developing, managing, and scaling the company's drayage business across port, rail, and intermodal markets. This position owns the overall performance of the drayage operation, including carrier strategy, pricing, service quality, capacity, customer relationships, profitability, and operational execution.
The ideal candidate combines deep drayage expertise with strong commercial and leadership capabilities and can build a scalable drayage operation within a 3PL environment.

Key Responsibilities

Drayage Strategy & Business Development
- Develop and execute the company's overall drayage strategy.
- Identify opportunities to expand drayage coverage across ports, rail ramps, and geographic markets.
- Develop relationships with beneficial cargo owners (BCOs), shippers, NVOCCs, freight forwarders, and other logistics providers.
- Partner with sales leadership to identify and win new drayage opportunities.
- Develop pricing strategies that balance competitiveness, service, and margin.
- Identify opportunities to cross-sell drayage into existing 3PL accounts.
Carrier Network & Capacity
- Build and maintain a reliable network of drayage carriers, owner-operators, and intermodal providers.
- Negotiate carrier rates and contractual terms.
- Monitor carrier capacity and market conditions.
- Develop strategies for managing peak seasons, port congestion, chassis shortages, and other capacity constraints.
- Establish carrier scorecards and performance expectations.
- Develop backup capacity for critical lanes and customers.
Operations
- Oversee day-to-day execution of drayage operations.
- Ensure containers are scheduled, picked up, delivered, and returned within required windows.
- Manage appointment scheduling, free time, detention, demurrage, chassis, per diem, and accessorial issues.
- Establish processes to proactively identify potential service failures.
- Work closely with operations teams to resolve exceptions quickly.
- Develop standard operating procedures for drayage execution.
Financial & P&L Management
- Own drayage revenue, gross profit, and operating performance.
- Monitor margin by customer, lane, port, carrier, and shipment.
- Analyze buy/sell spreads and identify margin leakage.
- Develop pricing and profitability targets.
- Monitor detention, demurrage, accessorials, and other revenue opportunities.
- Prepare regular performance reports for executive leadership.
Customer Management
- Serve as an escalation point for strategic drayage customers.
- Participate in customer business reviews.
- Develop service-level expectations and performance metrics.
- Address recurring service issues and implement corrective actions.
- Maintain strong relationships with key customers and transportation partners.
Technology & Process Improvement
- Improve visibility and tracking throughout the drayage lifecycle.
- Utilize TMS, port systems, container tracking, EDI/API integrations, and other technology to improve execution.
- Identify opportunities for automation and process improvement.
- Establish KPIs and dashboards to measure operational performance.