Plus what I earned for what I delivered went down. For having 3 drivers, I made actually a little less than $100 a week per driver, but worked an extra 12+ hours a week, and gave up a lot of the hours I was driving. Since I was spending more time managing, I couldn't drive as much, so lost income that way. Put it this way- I netted about $40k+ taxable when I was driving my one route, but only made about $50k net with 3 routes, while actually putting in more total hours. My income from driving was thus down. I know my income per hour spent on the job went DOWN. I took enough work daily to keep my drivers at 8 hours a day. If I had been required at the time to pay them as employees instead of subcontractors, I wouldn't have made a dime unless I cut the pay to about $9 an hour. The terminal I was in was mismanaged, always ran late, and was the worst run place I ever worked. My drivers could never leave before 9 am. Before I had drivers, I could come in at 8:30 am and be done at about 7 pm. After, I had to come in by seven AM, gas up vehicles, safety check, re-sort packages since the mgmt couldn't figure out how to divide 30 hours of driving(10 hours per route) into three 7 hour routes plus what I was going to take myself. Which still left me with 8+ hours of delivery myself Plus not getting home any earlier most days, plus the extra time spent on days off rotating tires, oil changes, etc. So I was working most days as a kind of 'supplemental' with no extra income for the stops I delivered. Plus HD had no loaders, so I had to pay drivers for the load time. Granted, on light days, I might be done by noon, which was impossible with just the one route. But that happened maybe once a month. And then at peak, I had even more time invested. Really, 4 trucks to deliver 3 routes without any compensation for the fourth truck wasn't worth it.