The Peak Season Checklist for Smarter Brokers
Peak season isn’t just busy, it’s brutal. Routing guides collapse, bids pile up, carriers vanish, and every decision feels like a gamble. This year adds new pressure: theft rings targeting high-value freight, surprise cross-border demands, and margins getting squeezed by unpredictable swings in cost.
The brokers who win aren’t the ones who hustle harder; they’re the ones who prepare smarter. Below is a field-tested checklist to help you stay sharp this season, with a look at where Transfix can give you the edge.
✅ 1. Know Your Risk Before You Bid
Not every lane behaves the same during peak season. Some are predictable, others are volatile.
Audit your highest-volume and most volatile lanes. Where have you seen fall-offs or last-minute spot dependence in past years? Build backup coverage plans now.
How Transfix helps: With Risk Scores built into our Spot Rates, Contract Rates, and RFP Workflow tools, you can see how predictable or volatile a lane really is. That clarity helps you decide where to play aggressively and where to protect the margin.
✅ 2. Speed Up RFP Turnarounds
Peak season means RFPs land fast, often late, and with little room for error. A clunky process can cost you lanes before you even hit send.
Standardize your RFP workflow. Decide who owns what, build templates, track changes, and eliminate manual steps that slow you down.
How Transfix helps: Smart Uploads instantly convert shipper spreadsheets into clean data, and Bulk Actions let you update or remove dozens of lanes in a few clicks. That means your team spends less time wrangling files and more time sharpening bids.
✅ 3. Keep Mini-Bids & One-Off Quotes Organized
Mini-bids and one-off quotes can make or break peak, but they’re easy to lose in the shuffle.
Create one central place for all quotes, not just big RFPs.
How Transfix helps: With the Quotes tool, you can log spot and contract quotes in one place. That keeps your pipeline clean, your audit trail intact, and your revenue opportunities on the board.
✅ 4. Stress-Test Your Routing Guide
A routing guide is only as good as the carriers behind it. When volumes spike, weak links get exposed fast.
Audit your carrier network. Who’s your backup if a core carrier falls off? Which cross-border lanes need special handling?
How Transfix helps: Our Routing Guide lets you organize carriers by performance and prioritize preferred partners, so you can automatically send out load offers to your trusted carriers.
✅ 5. Automate Where You Can
Every hour spent on manual quoting is an hour not spent serving customers.
Identify repetitive workflows (rate generation, autobidding, updating statuses) that slow your team down.
How Transfix helps: Our custom autobidder tool prices freight automatically using your rules or our predictive models (your choice), while in-app notifications keep teams aligned on assignments and deadlines. Less firefighting, more strategic freight coverage.
✅ 6. Build a Real-Time Feedback Loop
Peak season moves fast, and your reporting should too.
Monitor buying performance against the market weekly. Identify your best- and worst-performing lanes and adjust pricing or coverage mid-season when gaps appear.
How Transfix helps: Our reporting module allows you to see quoting trends, lane performance, and cost model errors as they happen. This allows you to course-correct while freight is still moving.
✅ 7. Protect Your Team
Peak is a marathon disguised as a sprint. Burnout leads to mistakes, and mistakes cost business. Just ask the guy who’s locked himself in a conference room for eight straight hours to price freight on tribal knowledge.
Balance workloads, automate busywork, and keep communication lines open.
How Transfix helps: By reducing manual effort through tools like Smart Uploads, Custom Autobidder, and Routing Guide, you give your team hours back so they can spend more time strategizing with customers instead of chasing spreadsheets.
Final Word: Brokers Who Prepare, Win
Peak season magnifies everything: your strengths, your gaps, and your ability to adapt under pressure. This checklist gives you the foundation. And with Transfix solutions built by brokers for brokers, you can move faster, price smarter, and protect your margins when it matters most.
Want to see how top brokerages are preparing this year? Schedule time with our team.
